Daniel Sarewitz, a friend and a collaborator, is really smart. NPR has figured this out and interviewed him about climate change and energy policy. The story and link to the audio interview is here. Here is an excerpt:

And even if the public became passionate about climate change, Sarewitz says, it’s hard to imagine how they would warm to the idea of making carbon-emitting fuels prohibitively expensive. Just try to imagine how much that would cost.

“The economic dislocation that would be created by getting to that sort of level would absolutely be immense,” he says. “And it’s easy to be casual about that or it’s easy to pin that kind of argument on conservative Republicans or on the executives of oil corporations, but nevertheless it is absolutely true you would be talking about something that would be destabilizing to global economies.”

History Lessons

Despite this gloomy perspective, Sarewitz isn’t a naysayer or a cynic. But he has been trying to think of another way to deal with climate change. To do that, he’s looked back in history to see how we managed other major transformations. One example is how America transformed agriculture over the past century. The United States government created a highly successful, century-long effort to make food more abundant and affordable.

“And it didn’t do so by setting any particular target or timetable. It did so by investing in research and development — and very importantly, in institutions,” Sarewitz says.

For example, agricultural extension programs brought together researchers to tackle the big problems, and farmers to put the solutions to work quickly. The key to it all was speeding up innovation. And the good news is none of this required an ugly political or public debate. That’s the model Sarewitz would like to use for climate change.

“The idea really is to take the political heat off of climate change and instead move this into the realm of policy wonkdom,” he says, “where many many small decisions made across many agencies, many types of policies, many domains, set the conditions for moving in the right direction without demanding that people accept that this is the most important problem in the world.”

Sarewitz is now hard at work trying to identify what institutions we need to drive that transformation in the coming decades. The ultimate goal is to make renewable energy about as cheap as fossil fuels. Otherwise, there’s little hope that the nations of the world will agree to tackle climate change. Sarewitz says he knows the Obama administration won’t abandon its current path to craft climate laws and a treaty.

“But there’s no reason they can’t at the same time… understand that the real action is going to be on the innovation front,” Sarewitz says.