Over at the GristMill blog, Dave Roberts continues our exchange on the notion of a “third way” perspective on climate change. Dave is typically thoughtful in his comments in which he is having none of the third way business, arguing:

It’s possible, and frequently true, that one side’s right and the other is wrong, even if many of the correct people argue poorly or are otherwise annoying. (emphasis in original)

However, I’m not at all sure what he is referring to in terms of “right” and “wrong” because he does not say. He writes,

It is conventional wisdom now that every issue is defined by two shrill, partisan camps, and that it is a mark of intellectual integrity to choose a path between them.

As a heuristic, this may have once had some value, but today it’s become a fetish. A tic.

Let’s be clear: There is no empirical significance in falling between, or even just outside, two opposing positions. A position’s truth value has nothing to do with its number of adherents, or its adherents’ rhetorical acumen. The desire not to be a “joiner,” not to belong to a “tribe,” is a matter of temperament, not empiricism. (emphasis in original)

Let me offer several other criteria – other than “truth value” (which I honestly do not understand what Dave means by – what does it mean to ask “Is a policy option “true”?”) — through which we might evaluate competing policy arguments: realism (is it possible?), practicality (is it doable?), and worth (is it desirable?). From an empirical perspective I am confident that the current approaches to climate policy advocated by both the climate skeptics and alarmists fail according to all three criteria. (To be glib, for “current approaches” simply assume (a) “do nothing” for the skeptics and (b) the approach favored by the FCCC for the alarmists.) I don’t know if the proposals that are frequently advocated here at Prometheus are “in between” or “outside” the current debate and I’m not sure that I care or that such partisan-relative-geography even matters. What matters is that there are basically two approaches to climate policy that take up all the air in the debate under a shared assumption that arguing about science is the appropriate battle ground for the debate. In my view significant progress on climate mitigation or adaptation won’t be made until new options are considered beyond those at the focus of the skeptic-alarmist debate. If that view makes me a temperamental third wayer, then I am guilty as charged.

Given that policy debates almost always boil down to two options – a dynamic recognized long ago by Walter Lippmann – the importance of “third way” thinking should be a function of whether the two options at the center of debate are up to the task of dealing with the problem motivating the policy in the first place. Dave Roberts may deplore third way thinking in general, but there are situations when both of the dominant poles of policy debates are similarly misguided.

Thus far, for all of its bluster the climate debate has been characterized by a paucity of realistic, practical, and worthwhile policy options. I’m all for empiricism, so if Dave wants to engage in an exchange focused on a substantive evaluation of actual climate policy options, I’d be happy to participate.