Climate Change, Blackadder, and Percentages of Mystery

The battle over climate change has been joined in the Senate, and judging from the first day, it's not only going to be as heated as health care, it's also going to be just as obscure.

The first news stories, for example, tell us that the Senate version of a global warming bill introduced this week wants to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent from 2005 levels, compared with 17 percent in the House bill.

This puts us in mind of a scene from the old British TV comedy Blackadder, a must-see for lovers of truly fine sarcasm. One of the characters confidently tells Blackadder that a princess' eyes are said to be even more blue than the "famous Stone of Galveston." "So what you're telling me, Percy," Blackadder says witheringly, "is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue than something else you have never seen."

Don't worry; it's not just Congress. The international climate conference in Copenhagen is already shaping up as an argument between those who think we should cut greenhouse emissions 17 percent to 23 percent, versus those who think we need to cut them up to 40 percent (from 1990 levels).

These are perfectly valid, even vital targets for scientists and political leaders to argue about. But this is policymaking for elites, not the public. As far as most people are concerned, these dueling percentages don't mean much; you might as well be asking about the relative blueness of the stone of Galveston.

The problem is, of course, that the average person has no particular stake in the stone of Galveston, but they do have a huge stake in where their energy comes from. People need electricity. They need transportation. And right now they get most of that energy from fossil fuels, which are both in limited supply and linked to global warming.

What people need to grapple with this problem isn't a debate over percentages; they need basic facts, like what our energy needs are likely to be. And we’re talking fundamentals here: Coal contributes to global warming (at least the way we use it now) but nuclear, solar, wind, and geothermal don’t. Our surveys show that substantial numbers of Americans don’t have even this minimal level of knowledge under their belts. They also need choices about what to do next. They need to be able to weigh alternatives realistically. What would it actually take to switch away from fossil fuels? How long would it take? How much would it cost?

These are the questions that will help the public, and the answers are critical to how they will respond to any proposal. Energy is a problem with multiple dimensions: how much it costs, whether our sources are secure, and what it does to the environment. Our Energy Learning Curve™ shows that the public's worried about all these issues, and price and security are even bigger concerns than global warming.

You're not going to ease those concerns with percentages. You're going to ease them by laying out what's reasonable and what's not, and what the tradeoffs might be. Unless we start talking about the problem in those terms, we might end up with percentages that don’t mean anything, not merely because they're confusing but because the public won't be willing to do what's needed to make them real.