Wedgies

People get their knickers in a twist over an old paper

Pacala & Socolow (2004) is back in the news. Maddie Stone and other journalists at ProPublica have “discovered” (by reading the acknowledgements) that the paper was funded by British Petroleum and Ford; and that the BP account manager provided feedback on a draft version of the paper.

The paper makes two simple points. Stabilization of carbon dioxide emissions (a first step to halting anthropogenic climate change) between 2010 and 2060 requires an emission reduction (from what was then a reasonable scenario) of some 7 billion tonnes of CO2. It identifies 15 then-proven technologies that could each be scaled up to avoid 1 billion tonnes.

That’s it. There is no assessment of costs and benefits, let alone trade-offs or portfolio selection. There is no discussion of policies to get from here to there. Just back-of-the-envelope calculations. People who had published more sophisticated work in less prestigious journals began referring to “wedgies”.

The journalists make much of Pacala and Socolow underestimating the prospects of renewables and overestimating those of carbon capture and storage. Stone detects the malign influence of BP in this, overlooking that this was the majority view at the time — and that BP was investing in both technologies.

George Monbiot thinks that Pacala and Socolow did much to block climate policy. While Maddie Stone is too young to recall the climate debate around 2004, Monbiot is not. The wedgies, in fact, reassured many people that emission reduction is feasible — as Andy Revkin reminds us.

Monbiot and Revkin both wonder about corporate funding of research. I think that an engineering school should collaborate with companies that are prospective employers of its students. Technocratic companies like BP and Ford have an interest in objective research, at least in private. There is nothing suspicious here, and anyone who knows Steve and Rob knows they cannot be bought.

Pielke Jr has the opposite take. Where Monbiot sees a pillar of climate denial exposed, Pielke sees a pillar of climate advocacy collapsed. He even calls for the paper to be retracted, claiming it was ghost-written.

Pielke revisits an old debate: Do we have the technology to solve the climate problem or do we need more research? I never understood this. Technical solutions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to zero have long existed. More research is needed to make these technologies more attractive. That was true in 2004 and it is true today.

Disclosure: I was to spend a sabbatical at Princeton with David Bradford. I ended up spending time with Steve Pacala and Rob Socolow.