Click the link for a transcript of “Taking the Temperature on Climate Change."

Climate Policy in the United States

Changes in climate are going to affect most, if not all, of us in the U.S. And public opinion has certainly changed on this in the last 10 years. Many more Americans are on board that the climate is changing and that we should do something about it. There's much more support for climate legislation across the board from Democrats and increasingly from Republicans.

Anyone who works on climate was really excited to see the platform Biden ran on, because it was really the first mainstream presidential campaign where climate had played a fundamental role. There's been a lot of discussion aboutthe importance of climate, the damages from climate that are already happening, and what we need to do is take aggressive action in the future to deal with the problem.

But there are specific industries who are going to be harmed by this legislation, and they are quite organized in fighting this legislation, and in funding politicians who fight it, and in funding organizations, either transparently or not, that are fighting climate legislation.

We are closer than we’ve ever been to really meaningful legislation on climate change. The optimistic view is that we’re on the right trajectory and that we’re going to get some part of this done eventually. But we’re not there yet.
 

COP26: Climate Change on the Global Stage

A “COP” is a “Conference of the Parties,” which is an annual meeting of the signatories of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The main focus of Glasgow was to get countries to be very transparent about how they are going to achieve the ambitions for combating climate change that they articulated at the last major COP summit in Paris.

Was it a success? A lot of countries did come to the table in Glasgow and made commitments in ways that they hadn't done before. There were also new, important agreements on certain greenhouse gasses that we've learned recently are pretty damaging, like methane.

Where we failed to make progress was on something that's called “loss and damage.” Many developing countries argue that they are suffering the damages from climate change even though it is a problem that they have not caused, and they are seeking compensation from developed countries who have been the drivers of climate change. That issue was on the table in Glasgow, but it got put off until next year in Egypt.

The Forecast for the Future

Progress is being made. Emissions are falling in the U.S. They're falling in California. They're falling in the EU. They're pretty flat around the world. And these are not just the per capita emissions, but overall emissions are now going down in many parts of the world, which is a huge success.

Where has that progress come from? In part from government policies that have been successful in mitigation. But the driving factor has really been longer decadal investments by both the public sector and the private sector in technologies that allow us to produce energy in a clean way. It’s a combination of long-term public support through taxes and subsidies for the development of these technologies alongside private sector deployment of these technologies at huge scale.
 

It’s important for people to know about these successes. But it’s also important for us to realize what we don’t know. Emissions in different parts of the world are falling, and that’s fantastic. But it’s also true that people are already getting sick, being harmed, and dying because of the changes we’re already experiencing.  We’re poorly adapted to the climate we live in now, much less the climate of a two-degree warmer or three-degree warmer future, and the science on that needs to be much more widely understood.

I think a huge role for us as academics is not only to do the research to understand those questions, but to get that information out into the world. The great thing about the Freeman Spolgi Institute and institutions like FSI is that it's part of our mandate to translate this research out into the broader world. The translation of what we already know is important, as is the imperitive to drill down on and study the things that we don't.

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) is a regional economic forum with 21 member economies, including the US, China, and Russia, headquartered in Singapore. As a summer graduate intern at APEC, I worked closely with APEC’s policy unit that oversees and conducts policy research and analysis for publications and reports, which are used as key discussion agendas in ministerial level discussions and conferences. The Policy Support Unit (PSU)’s core areas of work are 1) trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, 2) structural reform, 3) connectivity including supply chain connectivity and global supply chains, 4) economic and financial analysis, and 5) sustainable economic development. During my summer internship, I was able to gain direct experience with almost all of these core areas through conducting quantitative and qualitative research.

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The PSU has been working on a publication that analyzed the impacts of travel restrictions during the pandemic. The report provided evidence and policy recommendations for APEC economies to resume cross-border travel in a safe and equitable way. I was tasked to draft two sections of the report, including a literature review of various multilateral organizations’ initiatives on safe re-opening, and an analysis of the disproportionate impacts of travel restrictions on vulnerable population, especially women. Women were not only experiencing economic impacts from border closures, such as loss of jobs and business closures, but women seeking abortion procedures in countries with restrictive regulations faced significant challenges when cross-border travel was limited to “essential workers.” Such challenges were even more pronounced for lower-income women or women with disabilities who may not be able to access services through other means domestically. 

I also worked on drafting APEC’s flagship publication, APEC in Charts 2021, which resides within APEC’s fourth core area of work, economic and financial analysis. APEC in Charts is an annual publication that provides a visual overview of the region’s economic, trade and investment performance. Using data from international organizations like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations, I calculated aggregate statistics for the APEC region on the following indicators: trend in trade, tariff liberalization indicators such as free trade agreements, trend in FDI inflows and outflows, COVID-19 vaccination status, and various sustainability indicators such as household food waste and greenhouse gas emissions trends.

Since APEC includes Taiwan and Hong Kong, both of which did not have disaggregated data, the most challenging part of this task was to locate and calculate the information using limited data. While data disaggregation was challenging, I was thankful for all those nights that I stayed up in the first quarter to complete data aggregation for economic analysis assignments for the Global Economy course, INTLPOL 302, which built a foundation for key skills required at APEC.

I also immersed myself in the topic of climate change over the summer. Policy actions on climate change became one of the center of APEC’s agendas to build economic resilience post-COVID. I drafted a section on climate change in APEC’s Regional Trends Analysis (ARTA) report by conducting quantitative and qualitative research on green indicators. Calculating carbon emissions was one challenge, but comparing how much each economy had pledged to reduce emissions and what it would actually take to keep global warming below 2°C was another challenge. 

Climate change was not a topic I was very familiar with from a research standpoint, but I took the opportunity to self-educate through reading various literature, including the most recent publication from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It was striking that more than 60% of global greenhouse gases were generated by APEC economies. Unless APEC as a region curbs cumulative emissions, the expected repercussions are disastrous. Again, the most vulnerable – including women and girls, migrants, those in poverty, mountain communities and people in urban slums – will experience more severe consequences, and the repercussions are even more pronounced for those in developing nations.

This 11-week internship experience at APEC over the summer was a rewarding one that helped me understand the way multilateral organizations work. I was motivated by working with an organization responsible for shaping economic policies through cooperation to build resilience in the post-COVID world. Plus, I was able to tone up key techniques learned from MIP’s core courses such as STATA and advanced excel skills. Although it was a remote internship, I benefited from learning from my fellow interns and co-researchers on their broad range of expertise and experience. I strongly recommend future MIP students work with APEC over the summer as policy interns!

As a leading climate scientist, Paola Arias doesn’t need to look far to see the world changing. Shifting rain patterns threaten water supplies in her home city of Medellín, Colombia, while rising sea levels endanger the country’s coastline. She isn’t confident that international leaders will slow global warming or that her own government can handle the expected fallout, such as mass migrations and civil unrest over rising inequality. With such an uncertain future, she thought hard several years ago about whether to have children.

Read the rest at Nature

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably familiar with the Sixth Assessment Report released by the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) in August 2021. According to the IPCC itself, the report addresses “the most up-to-date physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science, and combining multiple lines of evidence from paleoclimate, observations, process understanding, and global and regional climate simulations.”

Read the rest at Strelka Magazine

Were you surprised by the results you saw?

Fishkin: I was gratified to see so many significant changes of opinion, mostly in the direction of people arriving at shared solutions once they discussed the issues and became more informed.

Diamond: I was surprised at the extent of movement among Republicans in two directions: toward greater recognition that climate change is an urgent and transcendent problem, and toward support for policies to accelerate the transition to renewable energy sources. I was also intrigued to find so much support, and then increased support, for a new generation of nuclear power plants. I don’t think we can get off our addiction to fossil fuels rapidly enough without nuclear power in the mix, and I was surprised that so many Democrats and in the end Republicans, too, understood that.

Siu: Indeed, there were some quite dramatic shifts in opinions. On top of the changes in survey results, the small group discussions themselves were extremely rich, with many people learning from those very different from themselves. Many participants came out of the event understanding that listening to each other is necessary to make any changes happen.

What is the path forward? How can this information be used at a policymaking level to create actionable change?

Fishkin: As in other Deliberative Polls around the world, these results need to be shared in detail with policy makers and with the media. They provide a route to responsible advocacy. They represent the considered judgments of the public once they really discuss and get their questions answered. In a democracy that helps contribute to the “will of the people.”

Diamond: Yes, I agree with Jim. It is vital that the results get publicized and considered in the policy debate. This is the only indication we have of what the American public as a whole would favor doing to combat climate change and transform our energy mix if everyone had access to objective and balanced information and the chance to weigh it together with one another.

Siu: In a webinar last week, Senators Lindsey Graham and Jeanne Shaheen spoke about the importance of this Deliberative Polling event and shared some ideas for paths forward to have actionable change. With everyone’s help, we can further amplify the results from this event and make it known that Americans believe that change can happen.

The COP26 climate change summit is currently underway in Glasgow, Scotland. Are policymakers and the public reaching a tipping point where we might see more substantive support for actions on climate change at the international level?

Diamond: Unfortunately, I don’t see signs of the necessary resolve to act with the urgency that is imperative.  We are moving in the right direction, toward publics around the world understanding that climate change is a threat to the well-being of all societies, and to the survival of some countries, and toward understanding that we must transition away from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy, while also ending other practices that contribute to the problem, such as deforestation.  But we aren’t moving nearly fast enough. I am not a climate scientist, but I feel like we are at least ten years behind where we need to be, and a decade of difference in meeting goals could well be the difference between effective adaptation and calamity.  The one truly hopeful sign is that a growing number of conservatives in the U.S. are beginning to publicly acknowledge the magnitude of the danger and the urgent need for an energy transition. I hope they can mobilize their Congressional colleagues around an ambitious policy agenda, because we are running out of time to avert a global catastrophe, and the U.S. won’t get to where we need to be without a bipartisan approach.

Can the model of deliberative polling exercises be scaled to enable similar conversations with broader audiences?

Fishkin: These deliberations were conducted with the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform—a joint effort of the Crowdsourced Democracy Team here at Stanford (led by Professor Ashish Goel in Management Science and Engineering) and the Center for Deliberative Democracy (CDD). In theory, any number of these small groups can be convened, and we hope to use it for deliberative scaling to much larger numbers just as we have used it for Deliberative Polling with scientific samples. So, the answer is yes, and that is a direction we want to move in.

Diamond: I agree with Jim.  There are very exciting frontiers ahead for this. I also think there is room to implement deliberation in person in the schools and between schools in different neighborhoods. The lesson we are finding over and over is that there is great value for democracy, societal health, and policy effectiveness when people of diverse backgrounds engage one another in thoughtful, moderated, mutually respectful conversations. And we have growing evidence that the automated moderator—developed through this amazing partnership of engineers and social scientists at Stanford—can effectively moderate a small group discussion, even on very polarized issues.

Siu: Yes, absolutely. Our platform is designed with this in mind. We want to scale deliberation to the masses, so that anyone who wants to can experience deliberation for themselves. When people engage in deliberations with diverse others, they understand in a firsthand way that being in a democracy means listening to each other.

“I’m a believer in the virtues of public service and what it means to our country,” Burns told the audience.

He recognized that this moment in American policy at home and around the world is one of transition and uncertainty and that the current climate of distrust between the American public and government has had a tremendous impact on domestic politics. Abroad, the rise of China cuts across all sectors of U.S. geopolitics, while even larger, non-state challenges such as climate change, global health insecurity, and the rapid advancement of technology pose even greater existential challenges.

Still, Burns has faith in the unique relationship that the United States has to its public service institutions.

“It’s my obligation as a leader, and your opportunity [as potential future public servants] to demonstrate that we can produce institutions in this country that are professional, apolitical, and devoted to the national interest and doing things in accordance with American values,” he emphasized.

In his jurisdiction over the C.I.A, Burns has already set benchmarks to ensure the agency remains competitive and serves its purpose of providing policymakers with high-quality, timely intelligence which supports their decision-making process. He is committed to streamlining the hiring process at the C.I.A. and making it more attractive to top talent, as well as diversifying the workforce and drawing on expertise from across all types of professional backgrounds and abilities. “We’re not going to be an effective intelligence organization if everyone at the C.I.A. looks like me,” he quipped.

Keeping the bigger picture in mind, Director Burns reiterated one of the underlying principles that has guided his approach to public service. “Both [diplomacy and intelligence] require a sense of humility. There are perspectives in the world that are not identical to ours. You don’t have to accept or indulge those perspectives, but understanding them is the starting point of effective intelligence work and effective diplomacy.”