The Bush team’s 10-year climate change research plan as discussed in the September 2003 issue of Physics Today (page 34) bears an eerie resemblance to the 10-year acid rain research plan instituted by an earlier administration. That plan was also funded by the government, undertaken by numerous laboratories, and continued for the designated decade. However, in the acid rain case, the US Congress surprised many by passing effective legislation to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions, and did so some time before the 10 years had passed and before the research leaders had submitted any report.
Interviews with various participants indicated that the government had set experts to work on the wrong question. Many members of Congress had long known that sulfur in the air was not a good thing, but they did not know how to outmaneuver the politically powerful representatives from large, coal-producing states that strongly opposed paying the perceived high price for limiting acid rain. Other members, though, had objected to the claim of the coal-producing states that the costs of reducing emissions should be spread to all states in proportion to their use of coal, mostly to generate electricity. Meanwhile, estimates of the total cost of solving the acid rain problem varied from high to very high.
The impasse was broken by an environmental group that proposed a plan for a “cap and trade” system; through that system, the federal government would issue permits to all emitters for the amount they had emitted the previous year. Then, the permitted amounts would be decreased annually until total emissions reached a level adequate to prevent future harm. Moreover, permits could be bought and sold: Emitters with simple means of decreasing emissions could sell their permits to companies that have difficulty making cuts. Thus the marketplace, and not Congress, would decide both who would pay the costs and how much those costs would be. Relieved of the problem, Congress soon passed the legislation, and President George H. W. Bush soon signed it into law.
The plan got Congress off the hook and put most of the reductions in the hands of those who could make them least expensively. So the total cost turned out to be far below earlier estimates, and the reductions occurred faster than anticipated.
The current Bush administration apparently ignored those lessons as it set out to spend lots of taxpayer money to answer climate questions that have been studied for almost 200 years. Certainly there is much to learn as climate research continues worldwide. But it appears that, again, no one asked the right question: What is holding up political progress toward reducing the annual increase in climate change? Instead, policymakers sought to address imagined deficiencies in the basic science.
