The Democrats have released their much-anticipated 2024 election autopsy report. It is deservedly getting harsh criticism for dodging many of the obvious factors contributing to the Democrats’ election loss—Biden’s cognitive state and late withdrawal, Harris’ weaknesses as a candidate, and the party’s unpopular positions on immigration and cultural issues, for example.

All the report had to say about climate change was: “Climate change and green energy transition messaging created anxiety among workers in traditional industries worried about job losses.” This is probably accurate, as stated.

However, I want to push back on parts of the broader “Why did the Democrats lose in 2024?” discourse which frame climate change as a losing issue for them overall. Kate Yoder wrote a good piece for Grist with a summary and links to recent contributions to this debate.

The “climate is the problem” discourse usually starts from one or more of the following observations:

• Many Americans find climate activists annoying (and ineffective), especially the ones who use extreme tactics like vandalizing art and harassing commuters.

• There is cross-pollination between progressive climate activism and other types of progressive activism (e.g., on immigration, cultural issues, and Palestine) that many Americans find annoying.

  • Greta Thunberg and the Sunrise Movement are Exhibits A and B here.

• Most Americans prioritize affordability and other kitchen-table issues over climate change.

My issue is not with these observations, which are backed by empirical evidence. (See links above for non-exhaustive examples.)

My issue is with drawing the conclusion that climate change is therefore a losing issue for Democrats in elections. That’s also an empirical claim, and all the evidence I am aware of suggests that the truth is closer to the opposite1.

Americans prefer Democrats to Republicans on climate change.

I won’t belabor this point too much since I wrote a previous post summarizing this evidence for the 2024 election (link below), and my research group published a report estimating the effect of climate change on the 2020 and 2016 elections. (tl;dr: The magnitude of the climate change effect is impossible to estimate precisely, but the issue unambiguously helped the Democrats in both elections, likely more in 2020 than in 2016.)

When you ask voters which party they trust more on specific issues, many polls find climate change to have the single-largest difference, favoring the Democrats. (See the graph below for an example from a 2023 poll. Here is a 2024 poll with similar findings.)

When you ask voters what their most important issues are, climate change doesn’t come out on top, but it usually doesn’t come out on the bottom either. (The graph below shows this in a 2024 election exit poll, for example.)

If the Presidential election were run on the question of “Should the President do more to address global warming?”, the “yes” side would have won in a landslide in 2023 (at the height of the Biden administration’s climate policy, and before inflation had come all the way down); see the graph below. This landslide would be considerably larger today (see the graph at the very top of this post), suggesting that voters do not prefer the Trump administration’s approach.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—President Biden’s signature climate law—was not unpopular.

Again, I have a previous post on this.

To summarize some key points:

• Polls focused on the IRA tended to find majorities or pluralities supporting it.

• Most of the economic benefits of the IRA went to Republican-leaning regions of the country, which is probably why many Republican politicians quietly supported aspects of the IRA and quietly worked to limit the scope of its 2025 repeal.

• Republicans have passed policies with qualitatively similar provisions as some of those in the IRA at the state level.

• The IRA was not one of the key Biden administration policies that contributed to (unpopular) post-COVID inflation. The American Rescue Plan was probably the main inflation-causing policy.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all Democratic climate policies are or would be popular. For example, most Americans do not want to ban fracking (which Kamala Harris publicly supported during the 2020 primary, but backed off from in 2024) or phase out gas-powered cars (which some Biden administration regulations seemed to intend). (See below.)

Most Americans want their government to address climate change, while also prioritizing kitchen-table issues.

Climate politics discourse too often gets caught between extremes, whereas American voters are consistent and clear about wanting a balanced approach—one that is serious about climate change and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but also serious about affordability and energy security.

Roger Pielke Jr. and Ruy Teixeira conducted a detailed 2025 poll that illustrates these points nicely (and consistently with other polling on these issues). Some of their key figures and tables are shown below.

What advice would I give the parties?

Given all of the facts above, how would I advise the two parties on climate change? Here is what I wrote in my post from last year on the repeal of the IRA. My advice today would be the same.

Advice for Democrats:

1) Stick with the subsidy and industrial policy approach, but be more efficient and targeted with it, given the country’s debt challenges. Alex Trembath and Ted Nordhaus had a good suggestion for how to do this. In short, they suggest shifting subsidies away from solar, wind, and electric vehicles (EVs)—since these are now mature, market-competitive technologies—and focusing subsidies on batteries, charging stations, transmission, nuclear, and geothermal, which are more immature technologies and more important bottlenecks in clean energy expansion. Permitting reform also seems like a good idea that is ripe for bipartisanship. (My colleagues and I discussed some of the IRA’s transmission and regulatory challenges here.)

2) Get climate change as far away from the culture wars as you can. This means distance Democratic climate change policymaking and platform-making from the strands of climate activism that are anti-American, anti-growth, woke, etc. The culture wars were a big part of Trump’s election win, and there have been studies (from my research group and others) showing that injecting identity politics reduces voter and legislative support for climate change policies.

So, no one has to “climate hush”. Just don’t talk about it in a way that makes you sound like extremists with contempt for average Americans and their other concerns.

Advice for Republicans:

1) Keep focusing on national security, fiscal responsibility (moreso than OBBB does), and making energy cheap, but consider the fact that solar, batteries, and to some extent wind, are big parts of these equations now. As Noah Smith put it recently, regarding the OBBB: “Would you rather have cheap energy, or stupid culture wars?” Of course, Smith’s advice applies to the Democrats, too, as I noted above.

2) Don’t forget that a huge majority of Americans do care about climate change, want something done about it, and they support an all-of-the-above approach to energy that supports solar and wind, even if they dislike it when Democratic climate policies raise their energy costs, or they find histrionic and woke climate activism annoying.

3) Don’t decimate publicly funded climate science, nor science in general. Publicly funded climate science produces extremely valuable public goods that far exceed its costs. Publicly funded science has support from large majorities of the public. Publicly funded hard sciences (including climate science) are not the primary sources of the climate alarmism and wokeness that the Trump administration is concerned about. More on this here and here.

4) Don’t forget—when considering whether or not to go along with unpopular hard-line anti-renewable policies—that the President doesn’t have to run for re-election in 2026 and 2028, but many of you do.

For even more information, here is my hour-length talk on where common ground on climate change seems to be in the U.S.:

The journal Science published an editorial this week called “Another red alert for American science”, drawing attention to a new proposed Office of Management and Budget (OMB) rule. The new OMB rule would seemingly subject all new research grants to ‘merit’ review by political appointees (see Section 200.205), among other provisions purportedly aimed at ensuring transparency and compliance with federal laws, including discrimination laws, among grantees.

I’m all for carefully crafted measures to address politicization and federal-law-breaking among academic and scientific institutions. I also think Science needs to take a hard look in the mirror regarding the role its editorials have played in politicizing American science over the past few years.

That said, Science is right to be concerned about this new OMB rule, especially the part subjecting grants to political review. In fact, I think all Americans—including conservatives who might agree with the rule’s general intent—should be concerned. Here are a few (non-exhaustive) reasons why:

• Subjecting all grants to political review will strain political appointees’ bandwidth, and delay the release of Congressionally appropriated research funds. This has already happened this year and last year.

• Subjecting grants to political review creates opportunities for capricious and non-transparent grant denials. Any partisan who thinks this is ok when their team is in power should ask themselves if they would want the other team to have the same power. No party will be in power forever. So, conservatives: would you want a Newsom or AOC administration to politically review all grant proposals for alignment with “administration priorities”? If not, maybe don’t open Pandora’s box here.

• Creating a situation where researchers are afraid to upset the Presidential administration of the day is bad for the country, including the administration of the day. You need reliable, unbiased advice to make good decisions. Sycophantic advisors cause governments to underestimate risks and sometimes make catastrophic self-defeating decisions, as dictators regularly discover the hard way. Vladimir Putin’s advisors telling him the Ukraine war could be won in a week is a poignant recent example. We don’t want to create a system like that here—a system where, for example, researchers might be afraid to study the economic costs of global tariffs when the Republicans are in power, or the benefits of policing to public safety when the Democrats are in power. (Researchers are unfortunately not known for our courage.) Making scientific research free from political interference is a bedrock of modern western democracies for a reason. (The same goes for the judiciary system and central bank, by the way.) Even if it’s true that scientific institutions have been too corrupted recently by leftist politics, two wrongs don’t make a right.

• This new OMB rule would create another layer of volatility and uncertainty to scientific grant-making. Uncertainty reduces incentives to invest, especially for the most talented scientists with the most outside opportunities. I know lots of people—including some whose research the Trump administration might like—who have hesitated to invest in writing grant proposals recently because of all the uncertainty.

• Relatedly, some of the most important science (think medical research) is planned and carried out over long time horizons. Once disrupted, it can’t be easily restarted. We don’t want scientists to think of the U.S. as a place where science funding is too volatile to do ambitious long-term research.

As I write this, I notice Roger Pielke Jr. has just posted a more detailed critique of the new OMB rule, which I encourage you to check out. He calls for the OMB to withdraw or substantially revise the proposed rule, for scientific leaders to oppose the rule while also working to depoliticize their own institutions, and for Congress to step in and exercise its oversight power over the purse, which should be its purview. I agree.

The Honest Broker

Partisan Politics Trumps Peer Review

On May 29, the Office of Management and Budget published a proposed rule that would fundamentally reshape how the federal government funds scientific research. The rule covers dozens of agencies — NSF, NIH, NASA, DOE, USDA, and more — in 412 pages of proposed revisions to 2 CFR Part 200, the government-wide grants management framewor…

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17 days ago · 28 likes · 2 comments · Roger Pielke Jr.

Energy security is one of the vital issues in the news lately, with the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz restricting energy supplies and driving up prices. Today’s episode aims to demystify what the war is doing to energy markets, and what the future might look like if the war drags on.

Our guest is Harold “Skip” York. Skip York is a Nonresident Fellow in Energy and Global Oil at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, and he is chief energy strategist at Turner Mason & Company, an energy consulting and advisory firm. Dr. York was formerly head of Commodity Strategy for Petroleum at BHP, and he has experience working with ExxonMobil, McKinsey & Company, Charles River Associates, and Wood Mackenzie. Dr. York received his undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Wyoming, and he holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia.

Our conversation was recorded live at the University of Wyoming on May 4, 2026. Here is the video recording:

Don’t miss our next episode!

Make sure to subscribe, and stay tuned for our next episode, Episode 18, with Scott Beaulier. Scott Beaulier is the H.A. (Dave) True Family Dean of Business at the University of Wyoming. He was previously Dean of Business at North Dakota State University, and he was the youngest business dean in the country at the time. He has written about higher-education reform, and he writes The Arena Substack about “institutions that shape economic and public life”. We discuss the challenges facing business schools and higher education in general, his approach to leadership, and marathon running—he just ran Boston for the fifth time.

For example, climate scientists are right to note that RCP8.5 being retired is an example of science updating as it should. But critics are also right to note that retreating from RCP8.5 took too long; there were too many false claims made about it along the way (e.g. mislabeling it “business as usual”); and there has been too much revisionist history after the fact (e.g., the narrative that climate policy is the main reason it’s implausible). For a nuanced discussion, check out the recording below of Andy Revkin’s podcast with Zeke Hausfather, Roger Pielke Jr, Richard Tol, and myself.

Sustain What

Burgess, Hausfather, Pielke and Tol on the overdue end to the worst-case RCP8.5 climate scenario

I hope you’ll watch and share this illuminating and constructive face-to-face discussion with four key analysts of the scenarios for emissions of planet-heating gases that indirectly have shaped, and sometimes misshaped, climate policy discourse and decisions (and media coverage…

Listen now

a month ago · 20 likes · 1 comment · Andy Revkin

The most important false dichotomy to reject is this one:

• RCP8.5 being retired changes nothing about what you’ve heard on the news for the past 15 years about climate change impacts.

vs.

• RCP8.5 being retired changes everything and climate change is actually no problem anymore.

Both of these claims are false.

To crudely illustrate this, I asked Claude Opus to help me compare projected impacts between RCP8.5 and a more plausible scenario, RCP4.5. As the figure below (which GCR readers have seen before) roughly shows, headline findings from climate impact studies are often produced by RCP8.5 (or SSP5-8.5) projections, whereas RCP4.5 (or SSP2-4.5, for emissions at least) is a more realistic “business as usual” scenario.

I asked Claude to calculate elasticities of various climate change impacts to temperature increase:

I specifically asked Claude to calculate the elasticities to temperature increase of climate change impacts discussed in the latest IPCC Working Group II report (AR6). For example, an elasticity of 2 (0.5) would imply that a 1% increase in the global average surface temperature (above pre-industrial temperatures) results in a 2% (0.5%) increase in the climate change impact. An elasticity of 1 would imply a linear relationship between temperature and the impact.

RCP/SSP2-4.5 projects roughly 40% less warming than RCP/SSP5-8.5 in 2100 (with uncertainty bounds around both scenarios). The difference is smaller (~20%) in 2050. See the top-left panel in the figure below from the latest IPCC Working Group I report (AR6). So, an impact with an elasticity of 1 would be roughly 40% less severe in RCP/SSP2-4.5, compared to RCP/SSP5-8.5, in 2100, and 20% less severe in 2050. With an elasticity of 2, the impact would be ~64% less severe in 2100 and ~36% less severe in 2050. With an elasticity of 0.5, it would be ~23% less severe in 2100 and ~10% less severe in 2050. With an elasticity of 1.5, it would be ~54% less severe in 2100 and ~28% less severe in 2050. (See footnote1 for details.)

The point being: the higher the elasticity, the greater the difference between RCP/SSP5-8.5 and RCP/SSP2-4.5 impacts, and the more we should be revising down our expectations of these impacts today, compared to the RCP/SSP5-8.5-dominated narrative of the recent past. The converse also applies. The lower the elasticity, the less we should revise down our understanding of the likely 21st-century impacts. (And the world also doesn’t end in 2100, so we also keep warming if we haven’t gotten to net-zero emissions by then.)

Claude’s estimate of the elasticities:

While Claude’s numbers look at least in the right ballpark for the areas I know well, I encourage interested readers to check these numbers yourself. Here is what Claude came up with:

Here is Claude’s qualitative summary:

“If you want a single answer: the empirical economic literature centers on elasticity ~1 (linear); the theoretical-IAM literature centers on elasticity ~2 (quadratic); the physical impact literature centers on 0.5–1.5 depending on the metric and time horizon.

The honest answer is that “typical elasticity” depends critically on what you’re computing damages over. For end-of-century snapshot impacts on most metrics, an elasticity of 1.0–1.5 is reasonable. For integrated lifetime damages, multi-century outcomes, or anything involving the upper tails of climate sensitivity, the implicit elasticity is much higher — 2 to 3 — because both the cumulative time spent at high temperatures and the share of tail risks that materialize scale super-linearly with the scenario.”

What does this mean?

Assuming these numbers are approximately right, here are my takeaways:

• This doesn’t much change our understanding of what impacts we can expect from now until 2050. (Unfortunately, we also don’t have much control over these near-to-medium-term impacts at this point, so we need to pay more attention to adaptation.)

• Our expectations of a few other severe longer-term impacts may be similar, too. For example, coral reefs may be broadly in trouble above 2C, which includes both 4.5 and 8.5 scenarios. (I believe there is some debate about this in the more recent literature, but the previous sentence represents my understanding of the consensus as of the latest IPCC report.)

• In areas with lower elasticities (e.g., 0.5 or lower), scenario revisions shouldn’t change our understanding of the projected impacts much, but climate change also may not be the main driver of these impacts (which contributes to the low elasticity). For example, an elasticity of 0.4 for species extinction means that lowering the 2100 temperature projection by ~40% (from RCP/SSP5-8.5 to RCP/SSP2-4.5) should reduce our projection of extinctions by ~19%. However, habitat loss—not climate change—is the main driver of global extinction risk. Similarly, human factors (fuel, buildings in the wildland-urban interface, forest management, etc.) affect wildfire risk (0.2 elasticity for wildfire area) more than climate change, and managing these better can offset RCP/SSP2-4.5 risk increases in many (if not most) places.

• In areas with higher elasticities (e.g., 1.5 or greater), we should be revising down our understandings of projected impacts substantially, at least for the end of the century. For example, with an elasticity of 2 (as some economic models assume), the 2100 impacts would be ~64% smaller under RCP/SSP2-4.5 compared to RCP/SSP5-8.5. Impacts would be ~54% smaller with a 1.5 elasticity (e.g., for cropland suitability). These are pretty big differences.

It’s very important to remember that the specific numbers above come with large error bars—in some cases much larger than we might think from reading one or two studies. Finbar Curtin and I have recently shown how this applies to economic damage estimates.

It’s also important to remember that many impact studies whose headline findings are based on RCP8.5 could easily produce—or already did produce—projections with RCP4.5. For example, if someone makes a model of how fish move in response to temperature and projects their model forward with RCP8.5, their model is still useful. They can easily (and should, if they haven’t already) re-run it with RCP4.5.

So, we shouldn’t throw out—or cast a pall over—all climate impact studies that use RCP8.5. Major assessments (and journalism) should summarize them more carefully going forward, though.

All things considered, the retirement of RCP8.5 is a major event in climate change science and it does substantially revise down our projections of some impacts. But it does not change the fact that climate change is real and comes with worrying impacts that we should want to work to avoid and adapt to, as necessary. (It also doesn’t change the fact that renewables and batteries are cheap and getting cheaper.)

We have a new paper out in Environmental Research Communications called “U.S. television news coverage of climate change policy is aggregately balanced but polarized”, led by my former CU Boulder postdoc (now at Stanford), Kath Landgren, with other coauthors including my former CU colleagues Jeremiah Osborne-Gowey and Max Boykoff, and Joshua Garland of Arizona State University.

Here is the abstract. I summarize some key takeaways below.

Key takeaways

• News segments on climate policy aggregately represent positive and negative views of climate policy in roughly similar proportions as public opinion.

• However, individual outlets pretty much give either all positive (e.g. CNN) or all negative (Fox News) coverage. See the figure above.

• As a result, individual viewers often get very unbalanced coverage (mostly positive or mostly negative). We analyzed this by comparing outlets’ coverage to survey data on individuals’ media diets. See the figure below.

• Most news segments covering climate change did not cover policy at all. There are a couple of different ways to interpret that (and there is a diversity of views on our author team about which interpretation holds most weight). One interpretation is that many news segments are sticking to the facts and letting their audiences decide what to make of them. For example, we don’t know whether coverage of other issues like crime or poverty mentions policy more (or less) frequently than climate coverage. Another interpretation is that audiences are being given lots of information about the problem of climate change, and relatively little information about what to do about it.

  My big takeaway overall is that news outlets are creating echo chambers for their audiences, and, as a result, Americans with different media diets are inhabiting different realities. This is likely magnifying polarization of the climate change issue.

  Thanks for reading Guided Civic Revival! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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In early April, the team of scientists who are curating scenarios for the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report published a paper revealing that RCP8.5-like scenarios are being discontinued, in favor of high-emissions scenarios that have much lower emissions trajectories. In other words, RCP8.5 is officially dead. This is a big deal.

This development has attracted a lot of attention from the climate blogosphere, and some attention from the mainstream press (which I suspect will soon grow). Andy Revkin’s post below links to several other key posts on the subject.

Sustain What

The Old Worst-Case CO₂ Emissions Track Has Long Been History; Now RCP8.5 is Officially R.I.P.

The energy analyst Michael Liebreich has written a helpful deep dive on the demise of the zombie high-end greenhouse-gas emissions path, RCP8.5, that is vital reading. This is particularly true if you want to discern what’s worth worrying about as you sift through the stream of climate studies that keep relying on this doomsday scenario that has nothing to do with the r…

Read more

2 months ago · 31 likes · Andy Revkin

The RCP8.5 debate (and its seeming conclusion), which once largely existed within the bowels of climate academia, has now caught the attention of the White House (with characteristic nuance and tact…).

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time President Trump’s White House has explicitly referenced RCP8.5 and its overuse. They also referenced it in their “Restoring Gold Standard Science” Executive Order from last year.

I offered the following response to the President and White House on X. I add links to relevant sources—along with a couple of annotations (the sub-bullets)—below.

My response

• RCP8.5 is indeed dead and that’s a good thing for climate science.

  • See links above.

• Technological improvements—and to some extent climate policies—have made RCP8.5 even less plausible, but it was always implausible, for reasons we knew (thanks to Justin Ritchie) for a decade and have been widely known since 2020.

  • The fact that it was always implausible—e.g., because it required assumptions about coal consumption that strain physical credulity, among other things—is important. Climate scientists should not pretend that it was just technological improvements and climate policies that got us off the RCP8.5 path in order to save face, even though those things did contribute. Scientists should also not pretend that RCP8.5 being retired doesn’t matter because “impacts are the same in lower-emissions scenarios”—something I’ve seen several argue on social media. This is simply false. It also contradicts the “every tenth of a degree matters” mantra that some of the same people have echoed in the past. It is true that lower-emissions scenarios have some worrying impacts, but that is not an argument for keeping RCP8.5 as a key scenario in research and policy, nor is it an argument against revising previous literature and policy advice based on RCP8.5.

• Climate impacts research continued to rely heavily on RCP8.5 for years after we knew better, and there are still too many papers making it into top journals with headline findings based on RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5 (or, worse, SSP3-8.5). Reviewers and editors are not pushing back hard enough.

  • I think quite a bit of this is innocent. It can take a while for new information to find its way to the rank and file, and impacts researchers are often pulling scenarios off the shelf without realizing what assumptions are under the hood. They shouldn’t do that, to be clear, but it’s an innocent and common mistake. For example, every time I have talked to fisheries audiences about my work on scenarios, the response has been in the vein of: “Oh gosh! We didn’t realize. We’ll use scenarios better in the future.” (And my anecdotal impression is that scenario use has much improved in big fisheries journals over the past two years.) There may be a few ideologues who continue to use RCP8.5—despite knowing it’s implausible—to scare people. There are definitely a few who refuse to admit RCP8.5 is implausible or overused, because they don’t want to give “ammo” to the Trump administration and their other ideological enemies. (I’ve seen this sentiment expressed explicitly on social media.) There are also people who feel they have too much past work or effort invested in RCP8.5 to give it up. But I don’t think any of these reactions represents most people in the scientific community.

• Many journalists and policymakers continue to have their heads stuck in the sand about RCP8.5. But there have also been some notable exceptions. For example, David Wallace-Wells was one of the first to cover the changing scenario understanding, something I’ve always admired him for.

• The scientific community is gradually correcting course, as evidenced by RCP8.5 being discontinued for AR7 (IPCC’s 7th Assessment Report), and by all the papers and other materials that led them to that decision.

  • Again, see links above.

• Climate change is real and IPCC’s Working Group I reports (The Physical Science Basis) are solid. Their conclusions have high overlap with the DOE Climate Working Group report, as Roger Pielke Jr. has noted.

• Large majorities of Americans want the President and Congress to do more to address global warming, according to consistent polling for the past two election cycles at least.

  

  

• There are some bastions of alarmism/bias within climate change academia, but they are largely not in the federal civil service. In my experience, most federal climate scientists are hard-working, rigorous (mostly physical) scientists who take their Hatch Act responsibilities for non-partisanship seriously. Gutting NOAA and other federal science is bad for the country (as Ryan Maue and others have argued) and won’t save us from alarmism.

• A great way to get to the bottom of how deep the RCP8.5 effect on climate impact science goes, and to create a more balanced picture, would be to convene a new National Climate Assessment, with a broad and viewpoint-diverse author team.

  
  Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Last summer, I started what I thought would be a quick three-part series on the future of higher education, amidst declining trust. Part 1 argued that universities have both enormous value to society and enormous festering problems, and any serious approach to reform must take both of these facts seriously. I criticized the then-current approaches of both most universities and the Trump administration. Modifying my original plan slightly, part 2, below, outlines how I think universities should meet the moment, focusing on internal accountability mechanisms. Part 3 will briefly outline what role governments should play, updating a piece I wrote after the 2024 election. Part 4 will explain why viewpoint diversity is a harder problem to solve than most people think, and offer some suggestions, drawing on parts 2 and 3.

Shared governance is the idea that academic institutions should be allowed to govern ourselves with minimal outside interference, with trustees, administrators and faculty each having distinct and complementary roles.

Many academics are complaining about governments and political appointees encroaching on shared governance. Reform-minded politicians and pundits (along with a few academics) are wondering how we can possibly trust academics to solve the problems that have eroded our public trust, when we created most of them. (Brandon Warmke articulates this view cogently in a recent talk here; key slide below.)

In other words, academics are saying: “let us govern ourselves”, and our critics are saying: “we don’t trust you to govern yourselves because you’re not doing it”.

So, academics can best defend shared governance by showing that we can actually govern ourselves.

Does that require agreeing with every charge the Trump administration and others have leveled against us? No. But it does require—at a minimum—enforcing the rules and standards that we already claim to be enforcing. Here are some specific suggestions.

Enforce university policies and federal laws.

Protect student and faculty rights to engage in protected speech, research or teaching on controversial topics, even if it’s unpopular. But if students vandalize buildings, assault people, or disrupt other students’ events, punish them. Expel them, if the violations are sufficiently severe or persistent. If a professor violates policies or neglects their duties—for example, by canceling class to attend a protest, or giving students different exams based on race (real examples I’ve heard of)—sanction or (if the infraction is sufficiently severe or pervasive) fire them. If an academic unit engages in hiring practices that violate federal civil rights laws, sanction search committee members, deny the unit future faculty lines, or—if it’s a persistent problem—put the unit in receivership. If a dean or provost mandates or encourages such practices, remove them from their posts. If a chair or institute director fails to protect their members’ academic freedom—for example, by canceling scheduled events, or disciplining faculty for innocuous teaching practices, out of fear of controversy—remove and replace them.

If we can’t be trustworthy stewards of federal laws and our own contracts (via our written policies), we shouldn’t be surprised if that eventually costs us our autonomy and public funding.

Enforce academic standards.

There is truth to the idea that members of each discipline are the experts who should decide what the standards of rigor and merit are in their discipline. But only up to a point. Disciplines should still be able to explain and defend their work and standards outside the discipline.

Faculties in natural and social science disciplines should be able to defend their work against objective standards of evidence aimed at truth seeking. Sociologists should be able to defend the robustness, replicability, and reproducibility of their research to economists, and vice-versa, for example. Faculties of arts and humanities disciplines focused on the “good” and the “beautiful” should be able to explain and defend how their work advances these values, to the public and to members of other disciplines. Professional faculties should be able to explain and defend how their research and pedagogy make the professions they serve—medicine, law, and education, for example—more effective at achieving their missions.

When an academic unit is clearly failing to produce high-quality research and teaching by these standards, there should be consequences. Deans should tell the unit to get their house in order. In more severe cases, they should bring in an external chair. In the most extreme cases, they should stop giving the unit new faculty lines. If the unit’s discipline is essential to the university’s mission, despite the current unit’s dysfunction, the administration should build a new unit in that discipline and allow the older, dysfunctional one to die on the vine. This may sound extreme, but there are successful real-world examples of this such as Notre Dame’s economics department and University of Copenhagen’s sociology department.

This type of intervention should be especially urgent in professional fields training students in important professions. There have been several recent news stories about medical schools, schools of education, psychotherapy and social work programs, and law schools that, if true, should motivate immediate leadership changes at a minimum, and in some cases larger re-evaluations of the curriculum and/or admissions practices. Are these programs being optimized towards measurably improving how we heal the sick, teach kids reading and math, train competent lawyers, and improve emotional well-being? If the answer is anything but a clear ‘yes’, trustees, accreditors, professional guilds, and—yes—governments (when federal funding and/or violations of federal laws are involved) have every right to step in.

Don’t protect units from the financial consequences of their bad decisions.

Some fields will typically have units that run at a loss and need to be subsidized. Schools of music, for example, have high capital costs and typically small majors. They can and should pursue strategies like putting on concerts to try to support themselves, but that may not be a large enough revenue source everywhere (e.g., in small towns). Nonetheless, I wouldn’t call for closing schools of music that run at a loss. Same goes for engineering departments in smaller universities (again: high capital costs).

However, universities should adopt budget models whose default posture is to allocate resources to units bringing them in, and to ask questions before subsidizing units running persistent losses. They should not automatically or blindly grandfather in historical resource allocations. Many universities are already moving in this “eat what you kill” direction.

In the music and engineering examples above, there are good answers to the questions that would be asked about persistent losses. In other units, there may not be. For instance, if a social science or humanities department—whose capital costs are low—is not attracting enough students and research dollars to support themselves, administrations should be asking themselves (and the unit) why that is. Is the unit engaging in high-quality teaching and research? Are their students doing well after graduation? Or are they hyper-focusing on niche areas that lack demand? Or is the unit actively trying to dismantle their own discipline in pursuit of a fringe political project (e.g. as some American studies and classics scholars seem to be pursuing)?

If a unit is producing high-quality scholarship and education, but losing money because of a structural challenge, fine. Education and research are public goods that require and deserve subsidies (up to a point). But if a unit is running a persistent loss because they are providing a low-quality product, let them suffer the consequences (including closure, if it comes to that) rather than externalizing their losses.

Invest in areas that are missing.

The same argument also applies in reverse. If a unit is growing its student population and research funding year over year, universities should have enough flexibility in their budget model to reward that unit. Similarly, universities should preserve the financial flexibility to build new units in emerging, high-demand areas. To the extent that some potentially fruitful areas are missing because of the lack of viewpoint diversity in the academy (e.g., western civilization, military history), investing in these areas can improve viewpoint diversity on campus without engaging in sordid and often-illegal viewpoint discrimination (i.e. “affirmative action for conservatives”), which I personally do not support. (More on viewpoint diversity in part 4.) In many cases, though, the emerging high-priority areas may have little to do with partisan politics (e.g., artificial intelligence, quantum computing).

A common objection to “eat what you kill” budget models in academia—especially from disciplines and scholars skeptical of capitalism—is that they degrade and ‘commodify’ the value of research and teaching by reducing everything to dollars. Again: I strongly believe that universities provide public goods deserving of subsidy. I’m not calling for public defunding of academia.

However, the fact remains that, if an academic unit needs subsidies to survive, someone has to pay those subsidies. If it’s another unit, then it’s implicitly that unit’s students or grant funders paying the subsidy. If it’s the government, then it’s implicitly the taxpayers paying, many of whom don’t have college degrees and don’t benefit from the college-graduate salary premium. So, there need to be good reasons for why persistent subsidies are justified. They can’t just be “stop asking questions because shared governance”, and “what we’re doing (in the money-losing unit) obviously has unquantifiably large value because trust us, we’re the experts.”

Get things done.

Academics love to romanticize the idea of shared governance, but on a day-to-day basis, shared governance involves a lot of thankless work. You get promotions, merit raises, and endowed chairs for publishing papers and books, not for being on the university curriculum committee. You make friends by saying that your colleagues are all wonderful and deserve whatever they are asking for, not by suggesting or making hard decisions. When administrations or governments force hard choices to be made, it’s often easier to lash out (in media, email listservs, etc.) at the administration or government as a bad actor that doesn’t respect shared governance than it is to be a constructive partner in making the hard choices in a better way, even if some of your colleagues might not like the outcome.

In my experience, you too-often see universities’ best faculty—the high-performing, conscientious and discerning ones that you would most want on important committees—avoid service as much as they can get away with; and then you too-often see important committees (especially on faculty senates) filled with blowhards who want to hear themselves talk, push their personal ideological agendas, protect their internal fiefdoms, inflate their egos, and/or obtain a microphone for their endless and nebulous complaints (about the administration, their colleagues, western civilization, etc.)—anything but engage in actual shared governance.

There are, of course, exceptions to these patterns. I have been lucky enough to have colleagues with excellent, high-powered research programs who also volunteered for and excelled at service and institution building. I have also been lucky enough to have discerning and conscientious colleagues who leaned into and excelled at service (including faculty senates)—probably to the detriment of their research programs and personal material rewards—because they loved it and/or recognized its importance. These folks are the glue that holds academic institutions together, and, in my opinion, there should be more avenues for such individuals to be promoted and financially rewarded for their work.

But the bottom line is: if faculty are going to be making noise on campus and in public about how important our shared governance rights are, we need to be just as diligent about doing the work of governing. And that means serving on the time-consuming-but-important committees, stepping up to run for department chair or faculty senator when no one else wants the job or when the incumbents are not doing the job well, and doing what we can to have constructive working relationships with the administration, even if we disagree with them and/or need to hold them accountable on key issues. If we don’t act like shared governance is important when the cameras are off, no one will believe us when we say it’s important when the cameras are on.

Say what needs to be said.

One of the great ironies of academia is that our jobs (especially with tenure) are designed to give us maximal freedom to be intellectual mavericks and say unpopular things, but academia disproportionately attracts risk-averse (and censorious) conformists. A secure job for life (tenure) with relatively low pay variance attracts risk-averse people to its ranks. Peer-evaluation systems, combined with the fact that you work closely with the same colleagues for decades, create incentives for social conformism and going along to get along rather than rocking the boat, even though academia often needs—and tenure was designed for—the opposite instincts.

I have written and spoken about this before, and sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has a great talk on this, embedded below:

The non-profit Build Canada argued that Canadian culture has similar problems stifling good governance in a recent viral essay called “Say It”. The essay’s key messages are screenshotted below.

Many of these ideas resonate in the context of academia. We shouldn’t mistake polite silence or reflexive conflict avoidance for leadership. Every academic I know has been in a room “where people knew what was broken but would not name it”. (There’s a whole Substack for these people to share their stories now, called Faculty Leaks.) Many academics I know have privately shared stories in which they or a colleague pulled punches in their research or public speaking to avoid antagonizing or embarrassing a respected colleague with whom they disagreed. Every academic and academic unit could benefit from the three habits of “say it”, “say it now”, and “say it about the thing, not the person”.

Shared governance requires a mission and vision, not just accountability.

My post here focuses on ideas and processes related to accountability, but mission and vision are equally important to shared governance, if not more. I focus on accountability—especially internal mechanisms of accountability—because I haven’t seen as much written about it.

For good pieces on how academic institutions can re-focus their missions and visions to meet the moment, see, for example these, by Kevin Bryan, Heterodox Academy, a panel of Yale professors, Daniel Diermeier and Andrew Martin, Sian Beilock, Steven Pinker, Roger Pielke Jr., and Scott Beaulier. (I’m sure there are many other good ones I’ve missed. Please drop links to them in the comments!)

Common themes include calling for greater emphasis on affordability, scholarly excellence and producing and disseminating knowledge as primary objectives of the university (de-emphasizing/minimizing political activism), institutional neutrality, viewpoint diversity, reproducibility, transparency and other means to avoid research fraud and questionable research practices; and taking steps to get ahead of AI-driven disruptions to the classroom and labor market, and to generally provide more job-market value to students.

Chains of command are part of shared governance.

Academics like to see shared governance as the opposite of a chain of command, and there is some truth to this notion. Faculty are supposed to have input into important high-level university decisions, for example. However, when things go wrong, there is a clear chain of accountability that follows the chain of command, which academics should be mindful of, if we want to protect and strengthen shared governance.

If we faculty don’t govern ourselves, it’s the Dean’s job to step in. If the Deans don’t hold us accountable, it’s the upper administration’s job to step in. If the upper administration doesn’t hold us and the deans accountable, it’s the trustees’ jobs to step in. And, at public schools and publicly funded schools (which includes most schools), it is the government’s job as steward of public funds to hold us accountable (and they, of course, should follow proper due process and not be capricious in doing so).

So, if academics continue to gather ourselves in rooms “where people knew what was broken but would not name it”, we shouldn’t be surprised, and we have no right to be outraged, when someone up the chain of command names it, and then steps in to fix it, for us.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) presciently laid this out in their 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure:

“If this profession should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of the incompetent and the unworthy, or to prevent the freedom which it claims in the name of science from being used as a shelter for inefficiency, for superficiality, or for uncritical and intemperate partisanship, it is certain that the task will be performed by others—by others who lack certain essential qualifications for performing it, and whose action is sure to breed suspicions and recurrent controversies deeply injurious to the internal order and the public standing of universities.”

Today’s guest is Renae Marshall. Renae Marshall is a Ph.D. candidate at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California Santa Barbara. She studies environmental politics, with a focus on understanding bipartisanship. As part of her research, she has read every state-level climate-change bill from the past decade, and we discuss what she’s learned about what works and doesn’t work for bridging partisan divides. We also talk about caucuses in Congress, and the important role they play in helping members find common ground and get things done.

Don’t miss our next episode!

Make sure to subscribe, and stay tuned for our next episode, Episode 17, with Skip York. Our conversation will focus on the war in the Middle East and what it means for energy security globally and in the U.S. The episode will be live-taped next Monday, May 4, at the University of Wyoming College of Business.

Skip York is a Nonresident Fellow in Energy and Global Oil at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, and he is chief energy strategist at Turner Mason & Company, an energy consulting and advisory firm. Dr. York was formerly head of Commodity Strategy for Petroleum at BHP, and he has experience working with ExxonMobil, McKinsey & Company, Charles River Associates, and Wood Mackenzie. Dr. York received his undergraduate degree in economics from UW, and he holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia.

Some previous Guided Civic Revival coverage of climate change politics:

If you’re interested in this topic, we have covered it quite a lot here at Guided Civic Revival and Grounded, Not Divided. Here are some examples:

On Monday, my Ph.D. student Finbar Curtin and I released a new working paper called “The empirically inscrutable climate economy relationship”.

Here is the abstract (i.e., summary), which I think explains our main argument pretty clearly. For more details, here are summary threads Finbar and I wrote on X. For even more details, read the paper.

The paper has generated quite a lot of discussion, most of it supportive of our thesis (so far). For example, here are posts or articles by Tyler Cowen, Roger Pielke Jr., Noah Kaufman, and Vincent Geloso, with discussions and comment threads below each.

The Honest Broker

The Paper That Breaks Climate Economics

Note: The annual subscription for THB increases to $100 on June 1. Lock in your support at a lower level…

Read more

2 months ago · 187 likes · 46 comments · Roger Pielke Jr.

Another group published a review paper the same day, which advances a qualitatively similar thesis as ours using a different theoretical approach. (We cite and discuss their earlier working paper in ours.)

We welcome critical feedback, of course, and I’m sure we’ll get some, once people wade through our 96 pages of text and replication package (linked on the cover page).

We sent an earlier version of the paper six weeks ago to the authors of the three papers we replicated (Burke et al., 2015 Nature, Kahn et al., 2021 Energy Economics, Bilal and Kanzig 2026 QJE), and we got detailed feedback (some of it critical) from some of them, which greatly improved the paper. We thank them for this feedback, and for making their replication packages publicly available.

We’re sure our argument could still be sharper, and we also want to hear if we got anything wrong. In fact, we are planning to take this paper on the road and conference circuit for a while before submitting to a journal, so we can get knocked around a bit and update and/or strengthen anything we missed. We want to get it right.

That said, there are a couple of points that have come up already—both from folks who agreed with us and folks who disagreed with us—that I want to briefly clarify. Others are welcome to their own interpretations of our findings, of course, and they don’t have to agree with ours/mine.

There is lots of evidence that climate change has negative effects on society. Our results don’t suggest otherwise.

We address this in literally the first paragraph of the paper (and also in the abstract, discussion, and elsewhere).

Our paper simply argues that we can’t reliably or precisely estimate the magnitude of the aggregate economic effect of climate or climate change from time-series data. We do not claim anything more than that.

For example, we don’t doubt that climate change stresses agriculture in many regions and this can be measured both physiologically and probably econometrically, or that expanding tropical climates expands tropical disease risk, or that increasing heat and water stress physically affects people (and thereby affects their productivity and health). There are many other examples. If people want to claim that our paper proves we don’t know whether climate change causes these harms, they aren’t getting that from us.

Deep uncertainty means it could be better than we think. It could also be worse than we think.

Our main point is that everyone—whatever your prior beliefs about the economic effects of climate change are—should be more circumspect and more cognizant of uncertainty. However, as Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh astutely (and hilariously) pointed out, our findings could in practice serve as a Rorschach test for people already invested in one answer or another:

Anticipating this, some commenters also worried aloud about our findings giving ammo to ‘the other side’. For example, after first stating that he agreed with our main conclusion, one LinkedIn commenter then said our paper was “in the vein of climate change denial” (he has since deleted this comment). A few others pushed back on the idea that uncertainty means we know there’s no problem, as if we had made that argument. We did not. I have been consistent on this for a long time. For example, here is what I told Politico last summer when they asked me to comment on the Department of Energy Climate Working Group report:

That said, I don’t care whose ‘side’ is served by any particular finding. I care about trying to find the truth. Academics have spent far too much time trying to be politicians over the past decade or so. It’s not our job and we’re not very good at it either.

My prior belief—if you asked me to bet on it—is that the past global economic effects of climate change have been on the lower end of empirical estimates. For example, some higher-end estimates, when hindcasted, imply that Canada (where I grew up) owes ~30% of its present-day affluence to post-1960 climate change. That seems implausible. There is also some evidence (and obvious career incentives, especially over the past decade) for publication bias towards more alarming numbers. In our analysis, the sensitivity tests made the effects smaller more often than they made the effects bigger.

However, I also know that estimates of past damage don’t and can’t account for potential future non-linearities and tipping points that could make things worse (e.g., meters of sea-level rise, collapsing Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)). Even though known tipping points would take decades to centuries to manifest and many are not expected to be crossed anytime soon, they could definitely make impacts worse and we definitely don’t have these impacts in our econometric models (because they haven’t happened yet).

The point is: I don’t know how much economic damage climate change will do, and (we claim) neither does anyone else. So, let’s keep working on how to make policy that is robust to large, irreducible uncertainty. (Lemoine et al., linked above, reach a similar conclusion.)

We found specification sensitivities and identification challenges in the damage estimates we replicated. We do not think these papers are especially flawed, and we are not calling for any papers to be retracted.

Again, we explain this clearly in the paper:

We picked on the three papers we did because they were: (a) famous, and (b) very different from each other, in both their methods and conclusions. That’s it. We don’t have a particular bone to pick with any of these papers or their authors. (In fact, the lead author of one of them—Matt Kahn—is my collaborator on a different working paper.) Not only that, the authors of these papers are, without exception, superstars in our field. They are all people we respect and admire. (And we trust them to keep us honest if we’ve gotten anything wrong.)

I don’t think anyone has directly called for any of these papers to be retracted over our findings, to be clear. But some have compared the specification sensitivities we found to those other researchers found in the Kotz et al. Nature paper, which was retracted last summer. However, that paper was retracted over a data error, which is qualitatively different from specification sensitivities or assumptions that could be debated. If we retracted every paper that had specification sensitivities or assumptions that could be disputed, we would have to retract most of econometrics (and other empirical social science).

Moreover, each of the papers we replicate and review made an important contribution to the methods of the field and to our understanding of the problem. Each one addressed an empirical shortcoming of ones that came before it. Now, we are challenging the feasibility of the project as a whole. Even if we are right, nothing especially nefarious has transpired here. This is how science works.

That said, I agree with the general point that the Kotz et al. retraction carries broader lessons for the field, some of which I wrote about at the time, and we discussed in our paper.

There is also a reasonable debate to be had about how concerned we should be about the specific sensitivities we found in the papers we replicated. One of the authors, whom we sent the paper to in advance, raised this point, as did an attendee of a seminar we gave on this and another scholar we sent the paper to for friendly review. The point they raised is basically that econometric specifications have this type of sensitivity all the time, and in empirical micro (where a lot of environmental economics comes from) or medicine we also don’t worry about heterogeneity as much if we are measuring “average treatment effects”.

We don’t think this argument holds up in macro for a couple of different reasons (one summarized below, the other more technical one made in our Appendix C), but we’re happy to have the argument, and we’re open to being wrong.

We do think the field needs to make a pivot

While we are not trying to cast aspersions on previous papers (or authors), we are trying to raise a major question about what the priorities of the field are and should be going forward. Here’s how we describe these points in the discussion and conclusion sections.

Thanks again to all those who have commented so far, and keep the feedback—positive or negative—coming!

I had a great time discussing free speech with Nadine Strossen at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization recently. She has been a tireless and fearless leader on this issue for decades, with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU, where she was President from 1991 to 2008), the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and in private practice and academia.

It was an honor to share the stage with her, and it was also humbling. I have been actively engaged in free-speech and academic freedom issues for a decade, and talking to Nadine made me realize that I still have a lot to learn.

Here is the full recording, and I list some highlights below.

Some highlights:

Words are not violence. This is literally true, obviously. But Nadine also described how there’s no evidence that suppressing offensive speech prevents violence (contrary to common arguments from would-be censors).

Censorship does not help the marginalized. In short, you need power to suppress speech, so arguments that ‘progressive’ censorship can somehow balance the scales of power in favor of marginalized groups are illogical, in addition to being ahistorical. In contrast, Nadine described several instances where free speech was a critical tool used to advance civil rights.

Nadine pushed back on government efforts to age-restrict (or otherwise censor) social media. This is one I admittedly struggle with a bit, because I find Jonathan Haidt’s work on the harms of social media to teens compelling, and I am also concerned by the influence of hostile foreign powers on platforms like TikTok. But Nadine argued that parents and schools—not the government—should lead on protecting teens from the harms of social media; and legislation regulating social media companies to protect national security (and privacy) should be narrowly tailored, viewpoint neutral, and focus on increasing transparency (in algorithms, etc.), rather than censorship.

The Citizens United (CU) decision did not rule that money is speech, nor that corporations are people. I learned something here, as I had heard these common misconceptions about the CU decision many times. What the Supreme Court actually held, Nadine explained, was that limiting spending on political speech necessarily limits the quantity of speech one can engage in, and corporations are made up of people, who have a right to freedom of association. Therefore spending limits must be scrutinized under the First Amendment. She argued for robust public funding of every ballot-qualified candidate, and strong transparency and disclosure requirements, as a pro-speech alternative to spending limits.

Campus deplatformings have increased in their success rate recently. In other words, if someone tries to deplatform a speaker, they are increasingly likely to succeed. She was referring to data from a recent FIRE report.

We discussed several other hot-button free-speech issues, including academic freedom, non-citizens' free speech rights, book bans, conversion therapy, and Nadine had great insights to share on each.

I’d be curious to hear others’ thoughts on the social media question, or any other issue we discussed, in the comment section!

Today’s guest is Ian Burgess. Besides being my identical twin brother, Ian is founder and President of Ascendance Foundry, co-founder and former President of Validere, former Senior Venture Partner at the Pioneer Fund, board member of NEXTCanada and Cquesta, and the world’s sixth-ranked amateur long driver. We discuss his experience and philosophy on entrepreneurship, where he thinks AI will create new job opportunities, and he offers his advice for young people on how they can seize these opportunities. Preparing young people for the AI workforce of tomorrow is the focus of Ascendance Foundry.

Don’t miss our next episode!

Make sure to subscribe, and stay tuned for our next episode, Episode 16, with Renae Marshall. Renae Marshall is a Ph.D. candidate at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California Santa Barbara. She studies environmental politics, with a focus on understanding bipartisanship. As part of her research, she has read every state-level climate-change bill from the past decade, and we discuss what she’s learned about what works and doesn’t work for bridging partisan divides.

This post has been in development for a while, so I apologize if any of it is inadvertently out of date. It is also a bit of a long post, so here is a tl;dr summary:

The weight of evidence suggests that climate change negatively affects human health. However, the near-term domestic impacts of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions on Americans’ health are negligible unless the GHG reductions are massive. This means that any U.S. GHG regulation either has negligible impacts on the health of Americans alive today or has massive economic and political significance.

Taken together, these facts support the Endangerment Finding in spirit and as a matter of science. But they undermine tort-like claims against President Trump’s executive orders on climate and energy (the subject of Lighthiser v. Trump), and they support arguments that the Major Questions legal doctrine should impose strict limits on the scope of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations on GHGs without new laws from Congress. However, polls suggest that most Americans do want Congress to do more about climate change.

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and the courts are probably right that the Department of Energy (DOE)’s Climate Working Group (CWG) was a de-facto federal advisory body, and therefore it should have been more transparent, open, and balanced in its viewpoints, as required by the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). The EPA was right to exclude the CWG report from its final rule on the Endangerment Finding.

Climate alarmism (i.e. apocalyptic messaging that goes far beyond available evidence) is likely having much larger impacts on youth mental health than climate change impacts themselves are, especially in rich countries like the U.S.. Civic leaders (philanthropists, non-profits, teachers, professors, etc.) should stop emotionally manipulating kids to fight their climate policy battles for them. Lighthiser v. Trump should not succeed, and, if it does, it could create a tangled forest of unintended precedents. But that doesn’t mean Trump’s executive orders are good policy, and voters who don’t like them should feel free to punish the GOP for them at the ballot box.

In sum: the courts should intervene when clear procedures and laws are not being followed (as in the case of the CWG and FACA). I have not had a chance to dig into the new University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) lawsuit over the planned dismantling of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), but if the plaintiffs can prove that this is indeed illegal retaliation against the state of Colorado for not pardoning Tina Peters, that seems like a strong case too. However, the courts should not get into the business of making sweeping national climate and energy policy. That’s Congress’ job.

The Major Questions Doctrine, in law and in spirit

The Major Questions Doctrine in U.S. law, affirmed by West Virginia v. EPA (2021), holds that Congress is responsible for making decisions of “vast economic and political significance” and for considering “the basic and consequential tradeoffs involved”. Major questions of this sort cannot be delegated to agency regulations from vague Congressional mandates, the doctrine holds.

I’m not a lawyer, so the point of this post isn’t to debate the finer legal points. Instead, my argument is simply that the general spirit of the Major Questions Doctrine, stated above, is both common sense and seems to clearly apply to most areas of climate change policy. As a result, I believe that climate policy should be litigated at the ballot box and in the halls of Congress, not in the courts, with rare exceptions.

Climate policies without “vast economic and political significance” and/or “consequential tradeoffs” cannot mathematically have meaningful effects on the health and well-being of Americans alive today.

Consider the fact that the global temperature anomaly above pre-industrial temperatures (the main index measuring climate change) is approximately proportional to global cumulative greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Global annual GHG emissions are roughly 2% of cumulative emissions, and U.S. annual emissions are roughly 13% of global annual emissions, making them roughly 0.26% of global cumulative emissions. The annual emissions of a single U.S. state or city would be one-to-several orders of magnitude smaller than that. A policy that only marginally reduces GHG emissions in one sector (e.g., automobiles) would have a similarly tiny effect (See our recent working paper for sources.)

Climate change is also only one of several factors affecting most climate sensitive outcomes. For example, forest management makes a bigger difference to near-term forest fire risk than climate change does. Economic development has 5-10+ times larger effects on most climate-sensitive outcomes than climate change does. (See the post linked below and the paper linked above.)

The U.S., like many other countries, is experiencing a large and economically unstoppable boom in renewable electricity generation and battery storage. A similar boom in electric vehicles (EVs) is likely here to stay as well, despite some volatility over the past year. However, the vast majority of U.S. energy still comes from fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are likely to remain an important part of the U.S. economy for several decades at least, especially outside of the electricity sector.

Putting these facts together leads you, arithmetically, to the following conclusion: Any unilateral reduction in U.S. GHG emissions short of drastic would have negligible effects on climate-sensitive outcomes over the lifetimes of Americans alive today. (In fact, even many drastic emissions cuts could have negligible short-term impacts.) Therefore, U.S. climate policies cannot have legally meaningful effects on well-being outcomes (via GHG emissions) without also classifying themselves as major questions.

This is not an argument against climate policy. But it is an argument that Congress should not abdicate its responsibility to make such policy. Voters who want Congress to make more climate policy (which is most voters, actually; see the post below) should use the ballot box to make their voices heard.

My argument here applies specifically to GHG emissions, not all types of air pollution that come from similar sources. So, for example, there are lots of way for the EPA to justify regulations on pollution from power plants and gas-powered cars under the Clean Air Act (passed by Congress), based on particulate matter, sulfur, and other local pollutants. Most of the these regulations would have the side effect of reducing GHG emissions, since EVs and renewables contribute less to air pollution than fossil-powered plants and gas-powered cars do. But GHG emissions themselves, and their near-term and local effects on air pollution and other outcomes via climate change, add negligibly to the regulatory argument. (On the other hand, the Supreme Court did hold, in 2007 under Massachusetts v. EPA, that GHGs are pollutants under the Clean Air Act. More on this below.)

With this general thesis in mind, here are some brief thoughts on some specific issues currently in the news.

The Endangerment Finding and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) v. Wright

During the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a 2009 “Endangerment Finding”, with an accompanying Technical Support Document summarizing the scientific argument. The EPA summarized the Endangerment Finding and its scientific basis as follows:

Earlier this year, the Trump administration rescinded the Endangerment finding.

The original proposed rule, announced last summer, relied on both the Major Questions Doctrine and on the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Climate Working Group (CWG) report, which questioned some of the scientific evidence used in the 2009 Endangerment Finding. (The DOE CWG report was covered several times on GCR last summer. See below.)

The Trump administration’s final rule excluded the DOE CWG report from consideration, likely because it was subject legal challenges based on two somewhat related issues. The main issue—the subject of Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) v. Wright—is that (according to EDF and their allies) the CWG violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). FACA broadly requires federal advisory committees to be transparent, open, and fairly balanced in their viewpoints. Agree or not with the CWG conclusions, its composition and process were clearly none of these things. The second issue related to an administrative mistake in establishing the CWG, which prevents it from being considered an “internal” report within DOE, thus making it more easily classified as a “federal advisory committee” and open to FACA-related challenge. (Again, I’m not a lawyer but I think that’s right. See reporting from Andy Revkin for more information here).

In my view, the EPA was right to exclude the DOE report from its justification, and the Massachusetts District Court seems to have been right in determining that the DOE CWG report violates FACA. Technicalities aside, the CWG was clearly intended as a policy advisory committee, and it clearly was not open, transparent, or balanced in its viewpoints.

This is a good example of when courts should intervene in climate policy—not to make new climate policy but to ensure that proper legally mandated procedures are followed. (The remaining legal question is whether or not the DOE report can remain in the federal public record. I am personally agnostic to this, as the report and its contents will obviously remain searchable and discussed on the web, and will continue to be discussed by scientists and policymakers, regardless.)

Beyond the CWG and FACA, the main real-world impact of the Endangerment Finding and its recision seems to be motor-vehicle regulations. Both the 2009 (Obama) and 2026 (Trump) rules make it clear that these are the main targets. The Biden administration passed EPA regulations (under the Endangerment Finding) whose explicit intention was to rapidly phase out new cars gas-powered cars. The Trump administration didn’t like that, and rescinding the Endangerment Finding removes the mandate for such regulations. Whether or not gas-powered vehicles should be rapidly phased out, and whether or not the government should force that to happen, clearly seems to be a major question, in my view, at least in the spirit of the law.

Beyond motor vehicles, Alex Trembath has a good post arguing that the Endangerment Finding’s repeal will not make a big difference to the trajectory of U.S. GHG emissions on the ground. The main drivers of U.S. GHG emissions are outside the executive branch, as I have argued before (see below).

The other more symbolically important issue with the Endangerment Finding is whether human-caused climate change generally poses threats to human health. The weight of evidence clearly suggests that it does. See the IPCC’s Working Group II report for a summary of this evidence, for example. That doesn’t mean (legally or ethically) that U.S. regulations have to consider climate-policy tradeoffs in a particular way, of course. But it’s worth keeping in mind, regardless of where the chips fall on the Endangerment Finding in the courts.

Moreover, as legal scholar Cass Sunstein pointed out, the 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court decision ruled that the EPA has a mandate to regulate GHGs under the Clean Air Act, despite the Major Questions Doctrine. This precedent has not been overturned. I encourage you to read Sunstein’s full post for more of the legal nuances. For other more detailed analyses of the Endangerment Finding and its recision, see posts by Carbon Brief and Roger Pielke Jr.

Lighthiser v. Trump

In Lighthiser v. Trump, a group of children and young adults are suing the Trump administration to block three of his executive orders (EOs): “Unleashing American Energy”, “Declaring a National Energy Emergency”, and “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry and Amending Executive Order 14241”, and to scrutinize every U.S. agency action related to climate change and GHG emissions since President Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. The lawsuit is being funded by a non-profit called Our Children’s Trust (who backed a broader, unsuccessful case called Juliana v. United States from 2015-2021). Their donors are unclear (to me at least), but they are clearly well financed. Lighthiser et al. have also received a whole bunch of amicus briefs from a who’s who of famous climate scientists, economists, trade and non-profit groups.

Lighthiser et al. argue that Trump’s EOs exceed the President’s constitutional authority, and they give the government the ability to violate the plaintiffs’ rights to life and liberty without due process (as required by the Fifth Amendment). The plaintiffs’ allege that climate change is harming their health through wildfires, floods, impacts on outdoor recreation, and feelings of anxiety about their futures. The plaintiffs allege the EOs are harming them, via climate change, by promoting expanded fossil-fuel production, preventing expansions of renewables and other mitigation technologies, and by hindering and dismantling institutions of U.S. climate change science.

The District Court of Montana ruled in October (2025) that the plaintiffs had sufficiently demonstrated their claims of injury and causality (by the EOs), but dismissed the case because the court did not have sufficient constitutional powers to provide redress. Similarly to Juliana v. United States—which was dismissed because the courts did not believe they had jurisdiction to require the government to rapidly phase out fossil fuels (requiring enormous oversight of a wide range of policies)—the court ruled that it did not have sufficient power to effectively scrutinize and oversee all of Trump’s climate and energy policies since inauguration (far beyond the three EOs). Lighthiser et al.’s appeal is currently being considered by the Ninth Circuit, with oral arguments expected in April (2026).

I am not a lawyer, and I have great respect for these children and young adults for standing up for what they believe in. (I was more like them, at their ages, than they might think.) But I think the courts (in this case and in Juliana v. United States) were clearly right to rule against them. In fact, the courts probably should have gone further and denied their legal injury claims.

My reasons for thinking so are analogous to my Major Questions Doctrine argument above. If the courts narrowly rule to rescind just the three EOs in question, they will have negligible impacts on the health and well-being of the plaintiffs. If the courts decide to take more drastic action and effectively take over U.S. climate and energy policy (e.g., by agreeing to scrutinize all policies since inauguration), they not only create a dangerous precedent for the U.S. system of checks and balances, they also run the risk of violating other Americans’ Fifth Amendment rights via any unintended consequences of their intervention on the economy and well-being outcomes downstream of it. Moreover, given that climate change is one of several causes of floods, fires, challenges to outdoor recreation, and youth climate anxiety, Lighthiser et al. succeeding would open the door to an untold number of other lawsuits in other policy areas.

To illustrate this argument, I will briefly address three climate change impacts mentioned by Lighthiser et al.: damages to the economy, increases in the frequency and severity of natural disasters (wildfires, hurricanes, floods), and mental health impacts via climate anxiety.

Economic damages

Some of the amicus briefs supporting Lighthiser et al. made economic arguments which can be paraphrased as: “We can measure the economic cost of carbon pollution (a.k.a. the social cost of carbon, SCC). It’s at least hundreds of dollars per tonne of CO2 emitted, and possibly over $1,000/t. Therefore, burning fossil fuels causes more economic harm than benefit, and pro-fossil-fuel policies are hurting the economy.”

There are three problems with this argument: a medium-sized one, a big one and a bigger one.

The medium-sized problem is that the SCC is axiomatically impossible to measure with any precision. It can vary by 10x-100x by varying the subjective discount rate parameter, in addition to having large sensitivities to other assumptions. Estimates in the literature vary by several orders of magnitude, and there is some evidence of publication bias towards larger values.

The big problem is that the SCC tries to measure global damages from carbon pollution, which is the sum of damages to the U.S. and damages to all other countries. So, if the courts rule that the U.S. government is bound by the global SCC in its cost-benefit analysis, they would be effectively saying that the U.S. must, constitutionally, be willing to hurt its own economy, if necessary, to spare other countries from climate damages. Noble intent maybe, but sure seems like a major question that belongs in Congress.

The bigger problem is that the SCC only measures one side of the ledger in any climate-economy tradeoff. To see this, consider what a carbon tax equivalent to the SCC would mean for coal and oil prices, using various SCC estimates (I show the slide below sometimes in talks; sources cited here; example talk below).

So, if the courts effectively rule that U.S. climate policy must use these SCC numbers and weigh them only against immediate private revenues or profits from burning fossil fuels, are the courts also willing to extend that argument to say that we need to have (literally or effectively) a carbon price causing a $140-$600+/barrel oil price? Such an oil price would almost certainly cause a recession. So, does the Fifth Amendment require recession-causing policies? If economic harms caused by government policies violate the Fifth Amendment, could someone hurt by a recession then sue to stop the climate policies, citing their own Fifth Amendment rights? Could anyone sue over any policy they didn’t like, if they could make an economic argument against it? The rabbit hole here seems deep. Do we really want to go down it? I don’t think we do.

The problem is: cheap energy (and food and other commodities) are important to well being and create positive externalities, just as carbon pollution creates negative externalities. Until we find enough cost-competitive substitutes to fully decarbonize our energy systems, food systems, etc., then some carbon-emitting activities will create positive externalities that we have to weigh against the negative externalities of carbon pollution. (Sidebar: R&D is what helps us reduce these tradeoffs, so we should all support public spending on R&D and science.) How to weigh these tradeoffs is clearly a major question that belongs in Congress.

To be clear: there are many win-wins for the economy and reducing GHG emissions (they just can’t get us all the way to net zero yet)—energy efficiency, precision agriculture, deploying cheap renewables, to name a few—and any policy that makes these things harder is bad policy. But the place to litigate that is Congress and the ballot box, not the courts.

For more on these economic issues, see these previous posts and this working paper.

One other wrinkle: I’m not sure that Trump’s policies are even increasing GHG emissions, all things considered. For example, global tariffs and the Iran war alone are probably slowing down the economy and trade enough to reduce emissions far more than his energy EOs are increasing emissions.

So, if the EOs are creating a large enough climate tort to require a Fifth Amendment intervention, does that mean implicitly that we have Fifth Amendment rights to war and tariffs too, because of their indirect effects on climate change? The main thing pushing up U.S. emissions over the past year is base-load electricity demand from AI data centers, not Trump’s EOs. Do we have a Fifth Amendment requirement to lose the global AI race? (I’m being somewhat facetious with these examples, but my broader point about the practical absurdity of having the courts micromanage U.S. GHG emissions—given their complex drivers and tradeoffs—is serious.)

Natural disasters

Climate change undoubtedly increases the frequency and severity of some types of natural disasters, including western wildfires (mentioned in Lighthiser et al.’s complaint). But, again, the causes of these disasters are also complex, and—on policy-relevant timescales—climate change is not the most important driver of these disaster risks (even though it is a driver). So, do we have a Fifth Amendment right to better forest management? Can we sue the insurance industry or state government if mispricing risk or misguided regulations cause insurance companies to leave an area and put homeowners in the lurch? I know Americans love suing each other, but where do we stop? (Again, somewhat facetious delivery, but serious point.)

Mental health impacts

I have to admit: this is the one I get a bit worked up about. The youth mental health crisis is real. Climate anxiety is real. For example, one survey found 40% of young people were afraid to have children because of climate change, and 45% reported climate anxiety affecting their daily lives and functioning. We can quibble about this specific survey’s methods, but I believe that the numbers are big. I’ve seen climate anxiety up close in the environmental studies students I taught for years when I was at CU Boulder. Friends of mine tell me about seeing it in their teenage kids and their kids’ friends. So, when Lighthiser et al. report this as a serious issue—and potentially even a serious tort—I believe them.

The problem is that—by the numbers—I can’t logically square the very-real rates of youth climate anxiety—especially in rich, temperate countries like the U.S.—with the impacts of climate change, especially compared to other issues. For example, consider the comparisons below of death rates from natural disasters vs. other causes (the slides are from a talk I gave in Boise recently; recording below as well).

Our youth are far, far more likely to be hurt or die from car accidents and violence than they are from climate change, for example. So, why are kids not suffering from crippling “car accident anxiety”? The answer probably lies in what behavioral economists call the “availability heuristic”. People have a mental shortcut, where they estimate the likelihood of something by how easy it is for them to think of an example of it. This is why, for example, people tend to wrongly think that flying is more dangerous than driving. Driving is actually much more dangerous, but every plane crash makes national news and thus looms large in our minds.

Climate change anxiety likely has a similar origin in media and educational narratives that kids increasingly grow up with. Author and data scientist Hannah Ritchie describes this dynamic in her book Not the End of the World, and in this Wired article, which went viral at the time.

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi recently described some of the emerging evidence (which I find compelling) that apocalyptic, grievance-oriented and externalizing narratives (about many issues, including climate change), embraced by parts of the political left (especially the extremely-online left) over the past decade, have contributed to growing mental health gaps between conservatives and liberals—and alarming rates of mental illness among young, politically liberal women and girls.

So, if climate anxiety—which, again, is very real and serious—represents a Fifth-Amendment violation, then my question is: who should be the defendant—the Trump administration, or media members, teachers and professors spreading alarm beyond the facts on the ground? Are there any adults involved in or backing Our Children’s Trust who are intentionally feeding the anxieties of Lighthiser et al., in order to advance their political agenda? If so, have they violated these kids’ Fifth Amendment rights? To be clear, I’m not actually suggesting anyone else should be sued here. My points are simply: 1) that it is not at all straightforward to claim that Trump’s EOs constitute a mental-health tort via climate change; and 2) adults (media members, teachers, professors, activists, etc.): please, please, please stop manipulating our children’s emotional well-being for political purposes.

You don’t have to like Trump’s climate policies

To be clear, my argument that Lighthiser et al. should not succeed in court isn’t an endorsement of these EOs or any other of Trump’s climate and energy policies. For what it’s worth: I broadly support an all-of-the-above energy policy, smart policies protecting clean air and water, and strong federal support for science and R&D. So, I like some of what the administration is doing on permitting reform and nuclear energy, for example, and I dislike much of what they are doing to federal climate science, and blocking solar and wind projects (though some of the anti-solar posturing has quietly abated recently, partly thanks to Katie Miller, interestingly). More on some of these views below.

The point is: if you don’t like the President’s climate policies, and you think climate is an important issue, then vote for someone else in the next election. Write your member of Congress. Post about it on social media (or Substack). History suggests that climate change tends to be a net-positive issue for the Democrats, and my guess is that will continue to be the case until the Republicans can wholeheartedly adopt a big-tent policy and posture (i.e., climate change is real and is an important problem, all-of-the-above energy including renewables, support science and R&D, etc.). Democracy may be slow or chaotic at times, but it’s a lot better than national-energy-policy-by-teen-and-young-adult-plaintiffs-and-their-unnamed-donors, in my view.

Conclusion

In sum, the courts are the appropriate place to hold the administration’s feet to the fire on procedure and separation of powers. The courts are not the appropriate place to make national climate and energy policy, circumventing Congress (regardless of what the National Academy of Sciences manual says). It’s encouraging that the courts seem to be getting both of these points right, so far at least. I suspect the reason they are getting it right is that courts still have a strong culture of careful, sober, neutral deliberation, and contestation of opposing viewpoints. Academia could learn some lessons there.

Today’s guest is Sharon Friedman. Dr. Friedman worked at the U.S. Forest Service for over 30 years in areas including planning, regulation, litigation, and research. In 2022, she received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Yale School of the Environment. In her retirement, she founded and has run The Smokey Wire, a popular news and discussion forum for forest and federal lands issues. We discuss what federal scientists do, recent controversies surrounding federal science and scientists, federal lands issues in the news including permitting and wildfire prevention, and how to find common ground.

Don’t miss our next episode!

Make sure to subscribe, and stay tuned for our next episode, Episode 15, with Ian Burgess (we’re twins, in case anyone is wondering), founder and President of Ascendance Foundry, co-founder and former President of Validere, former Senior Venture Partner at the Pioneer Fund, board member of NEXTCanada and Cquesta, and the world’s sixth-ranked amateur long driver. We will discuss entrepreneurship, and how young people can prepare themselves for the AI-powered workforce of tomorrow (the focus of Ascendance Foundry).

The views expressed below are my own, offered under the First Amendment, and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

Members of the Wyoming Joint Appropriations Committee (JAC) have motivated a proposed 11% cut to the University of Wyoming (UW)’s budget with objectives of fiscal responsibility and a need to better align the university with the needs of the state. This includes reining in what they see as ideological instruction, as Representative Bear explained in the Cowboy State Daily.

These are reasonable objectives, but a large, across-the-board budget cut is the wrong way to achieve them. It ignores the fact that UW is already one of the best universities in the country for both fiscal responsibility and promoting ideological pluralism. It misses opportunities to build on those successes, and it risks sending Wyoming’s students to out-of-state universities with bigger problems. It folds a winning hand.

As President Seidel explained, UW runs a very lean budget. Our budget has increased more slowly than inflation since before the pandemic, and the block grant is smaller now than it was in 2013, even without accounting for inflation. Many UW departments pay their faculty and staff substantially below the national market rate—especially at the more senior levels—which leads some of our best (and least ideological) performers to the exit each year. UW also has some of the lowest tuition rates in the country.

Whatever its merits, UW’s gender studies program—singled out as the prime example of fat—accounts for orders of magnitude less than 11% of our budget, and educates a literal handful of our roughly ten-thousand students. In my view, these students should be free to study what they like, even if I disagree with some of what they’re taught. But, regardless, a large cut aimed at gender studies will inevitably fall on business, engineering, law, STEM, and athletics, even if that wasn’t the intent.

That said, I share our legislators’ deep concerns about the broader national issues in higher education, including ideological homogeneity, activist instruction, toxic identity politics, and hostile climates for right-leaning and moderate faculty and students. As Guided Civic Revival readers know, I have written and spoken about these issues publicly on numerous occasions over the past several years, without the protections of tenure. Like all of our peer institutions, parts of UW may still have some of these problems, as one of our student leaders alleges, for example.

But what sets UW apart from other universities nationally is that our administration takes these issues incredibly seriously. In fact, UW has taken more tangible steps toward reform than any other university in the country, in my estimation.

UW has adopted gold-standard free expression, institutional neutrality, and merit-based hiring policies. UW has a Free Expression Initiative working to embed free expression principles and constructive dialogue practices throughout the university, which are being envied and emulated by other universities. While other universities nationally are just re-discovering the importance of civics, UW has required all of our students to take a civics course for a century. I am currently developing a civics course for next year called “American Economic Success”, with enthusiastic support from my college (Business) and department (Economics).

UW is beginning to be recognized nationally for our reform efforts. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) recently gave UW the highest campus free expression rating it has ever given—higher than universities in Florida and Texas. Heterodox Academy (HxA) has appointed UW staff and faculty (including myself) to co-chair its mountain west regional community, and chose UW to host HxA’s regional conference in June. UW’s chapter of the BridgeUSA student organization (BridgeUWYO) has been recognized one of the largest and best in the country. Leaders of our major political student groups (TPUSA, College Democrats, Young Americans for Liberty) are friendly with each other and regularly collaborate on constructive dialogue events. This is incredibly rare nationally, as sad as that is to say.

UW’s positive climate for politically diverse faculty and students—and the national uniqueness of that—is palpable to me. I have worked and studied at many other schools, and I have seen many instances of faculty and students being discriminated against, harassed, or ostracized for academic and political expressions. As I mentioned in a public comment to the UW Trustees last fall, this is the only university I have ever worked at where being a faculty member, who sometimes openly challenges progressive orthodoxies in research and public speech, does not feel professionally risky or unwelcome. (For example, I could not imagine publishing this op-ed with my dean at most other universities.) UW has one of the most politically diverse faculty-and-staff compositions in the country—close to 50-50 Democrat-to-Republican. UW’s climate for pluralism and free expression is one of the reasons I chose to move my faculty position here from another university in 2024.

Nationally, students are making similar moves—away from politically charged private universities in the northeast and towards flagship public universities in the south, for example. Wouldn’t it be great for UW to similarly become a national beacon for politically diverse students who want to get a high-quality, affordable education, and experience vigorous debate rather than indoctrination? Isn’t it great that Wyoming students can already get this education—practically for free?

In other words, we are holding a winning hand on higher education in Wyoming.

We have a chance to build it up and make it even better—including reforming areas that still need reform, as UW’s administration has repeatedly shown willingness to do, including in recent JAC hearings.

Building up UW—recognizing and reinforcing its national leadership in higher-education reform—would follow Governor Ron DeSantis’ example in Florida. He made big investments in the University of Florida as part of his reform agenda, including their Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. These investments have catalyzed a fundraising boom for their campus and a large influx of politically diverse faculty and students.

Or, we could tear it all down. In doing so, we would send the messages of “don’t come here” to our Wyoming high-school students, and “don’t stay here” to our best faculty and staff, as Senator Driskill warned in the JAC hearing. We would also send the message nationally that we are giving up on UW, at the very moment when we are becoming a nationally recognized leader in pluralism and free expression.

It’s worth asking: where would Wyoming students go instead, if not UW? I suspect many would go to universities in Colorado, whose practices and curriculum would be more objectionable to some of our representatives than what they see here. (I would know.) How would UW continue to fund its humanities programs if not with help from the state? They might have to turn to major private foundations with histories of pressuring universities to double down on identity politics, discriminatory hiring, and left-wing activist scholarship.

So, as the full legislative session approaches, I humbly ask our representatives: please don’t fold a winning hand on higher education. UW is great, and many of us are trying hard to make it even greater. Please work with us to help us achieve that.

The world needs more cowboys, not fewer.

For example, the sensitivity of Brazilian soy and maize yields had actually gone up, by their estimate, meaning that a 1-degree increase in temperature was corresponding to a greater yield loss in recent years than it did 50 years ago. From these types of results (see below), they concluded (in their abstract) “the net effects of existing actions have largely not been successful in meaningfully reducing climate impacts in aggregate”.

However, if you zoom out and just look at the overall time trends in the climate-sensitive outcomes Burke et al. examined—crop yields, economic output, violence and mortality—the trends are broadly and unmistakably improving almost everywhere (the 2022 EU heat wave notwithstanding) over the past several decades (see below). Brazilian cereal yields, for example? They have more than tripled over the past 50 years, despite their potentially worsening sensitivity to climate. Several books have been written about how the world is broadly getting better by measures that matter to human well-being, climate-sensitive and not.

So, are we adapting or not?

How do we wrap our heads around these apparently contradictory patterns? My colleagues—Patrick Brown, Matt Kahn and Roger Pielke Jr.—and I took on this question in a new working paper that we just released.

Our answer: if you decompose time trends in a climate-sensitive outcome in terms of the climate effect (sensitivity to climate x rate of climate change), the development effect (sensitivity to affluence x per capita economic growth rate), and everything else, you tend to find that the development effect dominates—often by an order of magnitude or more. We illustrated this numerically for global cereal crop yields, based on an excellent earlier analysis by Lauren Teixeira of the Breakthrough Institute and a widely discussed Nature paper by Andrew Hultgren et al. (see below).

In other words, even if an outcome’s (e.g., of crop yields’) climate sensitivity is worsening or not improving, increasing affluence is improving the outcome itself faster.

This suggests that development (and development-driven adaptation) are very important to improving climate-sensitive outcomes in the face of climate change. Research and policy discussions of adaptation often overlook the indirect benefits of development and focus on the (often much smaller) direct effects of intentional adaptation efforts (which are important too).

As we discuss in the paper, adaptation of all kinds is often an afterthought in climate change research, policy and public discourse. This needs to change.

Some implications of development driving the bus on climate-sensitive societal outcomes

The fact that economic development is often the dominant proximate driver of climate-sensitive outcomes, on policy-relevant timescales, has several important implications:

• Economically harmful climate policies could have negative effects on climate-sensitive outcomes, not just the economy. For example, if your crop yields are being harmed by climate change, and you screw up your economy trying to drastically reduce your emissions, you might find your crop yields going down, not up. (The government of Sri Lanka ran an unfortunate experiment not too different from this a few years ago and the results were disastrous.)

• We need to be cautious about how we interpret the social cost of carbon (SCC) in policy. The SCC measures the negative externality from carbon emissions via climate change. If there were no other externalities from carbon-emitting activities, then it would be societally optimal to have a carbon tax equal to the SCC, and to use the SCC in cost-benefit analyses (as the Obama, Biden, and Trump 45 administrations did). But most carbon emissions come from resource uses that are the base of the economy—things like energy and food—and cheap energy and food very likely has large positive externalities. So, blindly applying the SCC as a carbon tax could be devastating. For example, the Biden administration’s 190 USD/t SCC, as a carbon tax (which the Biden administration didn’t impose, to be clear), would more than double the price of oil and more than quadruple the price of coal. Would drastically hiking global energy prices—which would almost certainly cause a major economic disruption, disproportionately affecting the poor—really improve human well-being? If you think the answer might be ‘no’ (as I do), then you should interpret the SCC cautiously in policymaking.

• No-climate counterfactuals in climate impacts research don’t make sense. It’s common for studies to estimate the effects of climate change on an outcome like crop yields, and then project that outcome forward with and without climate change—all else equal (implicitly or explicitly including economic development)—and express the difference as the projected effect of climate change on the outcome. But, if economic development is a key driver of both crop yields and climate change (via GHG emissions), how does it make sense to hold development equal, while varying climate change? Journalists need to be more cautious about how they interpret and report on this type of study. (E.g., no, climate change is not going to take away your breakfast.)

• Economic development is a climate justice imperative, not a hindrance to climate justice, as a few scholars have sometimes argued. This was one of the central points of Bill Gates’ fall climate change memo that was maligned by many climate scientists and advocates. As our analysis shows, he was basically right.

Commons problems vs. races to the top

Economic development and adaptation have the sociopolitical advantages of having costs and benefits roughly matched in space and time. Economically beneficial GHG emissions reduction (mitigation) efforts, such as deploying cheap renewables and increasing efficiency, have similar advantages. In fact, because we can export new technologies to other countries, countries should have incentives to ‘race to the top’, chasing leadership in innovation and turning the commons problem on its head.

In contrast, economically costly mitigation efforts (even if they might be beneficial in the long run) face the classic commons problem, whereby their costs are local in space and time, and their benefits are diffuse.

Perhaps for this reason, we see adaptation and economically beneficial mitigation often beating expectations, and the opposite for meeting emissions targets and bending the overall carbon intensity curve (see examples below).

Mitigation and adaptation both matter, but they protect us on different space and time scales.

Does this all mean mitigation doesn't matter? No. Emissions matter. The Earth keeps getting warmer until society reaches net zero GHG emissions, and the world should continue to work together to reduce them.

Governments are right to be cautious about climate policies that could be economically damaging, we argue, but they should be full-steam ahead on developing and deploying economically beneficial mitigation solutions (cheap renewables, efficiency improvements, EVs, etc.). They should also make big R&D investments to find more beneficial solutions. Otherwise, they risk allowing their countries to fall behind in the global clean tech race, not to mention leaving near-term economic benefits on the table.

But our analysis does imply that mitigation and adaptation/development protect us from climate change on different time and space scales. Adaptation doesn't reduce our chance of hitting a climate tipping point this century. Reducing emissions in Texas or California does approximately nothing for the climate—and therefore the floods, storms, fires, etc.—that we have to face next year.

In fact, if you consider that the range of plausible emissions scenarios is narrowing, emissions uncertainty might now account for less than half of temperature uncertainty for the rest of this century, we argue.

Our climates are also going to be warmer for the rest of the century than they are today, even under the most ambitious mitigation scenarios (see panel c above). So there is no good reason to put off adapting, regardless of what our preferred mitigation approach is.

The ‘stopping smoking cures cancer’ fallacy

One of the things that inspired us to write this paper was statements from advocates, public intellectuals (like Bill Nye last summer), and occasionally even climate scientists, that sound like: "if we don't want more fires/floods, we need to get off of fossil fuels". These types of statements are unhelpful and misleading. They commit what I call the "stopping smoking cures cancer" fallacy.

Emissions via climate change affect risks of some extreme events (just like smoking causes cancer), but stopping emissions (especially locally) does not protect you from tomorrow’s extreme events (just like you need cancer treatment if you have cancer).

If we want less impact from floods, fires, storms, etc., next year (or even over the coming decades) we need to build better infrastructure, warning systems, etc. Growing our economies will naturally help with some of these things. Mitigation ultimately matters too, but it operates at much larger space and time scales.

For example, we show in the paper that Louisiana could have eliminated their GHG emissions after Hurricane Katrina (which would have devastated their economy) and done virtually nothing to reduce their near-term hurricane risk. In contrast, they were able to improve their resilience from improving their levies and warning systems, which lessened the impact of Hurricane Ida in 2021.

In sum, our paper argues that we need to pay a lot more attention to adaptation and development in efforts to address climate change. But mitigation still matters, and the world should keep working towards bending the curve, especially in areas (which are plentiful) that have immediate economic co-benefits.

At large space and time scales, though, economic development has followed some highly regular patterns for over half a century. These patterns have major, underappreciated implications for a whole bunch of issues of public concern related to our economies, inequality, democracy, geopolitics, debates about trade, population growth, and climate change (to name a few) that we don’t think about enough.

I am not arguing that these economic development patterns can’t or won’t ever change. But, in some areas, as I show below, major institutions are barely even considering what happens if they stay the same.

Regular economic development patterns

GDP per capita growth has followed a very stable, humped-shape pattern across GDP per capita levels since the 1960s at least, as my colleagues and I described in this 2023 paper. The pattern has some heterogeneity at the level of countries (especially small ones), but it is strikingly clear when one aggregates to income groups of countries.

The reasons for this pattern are well-known by economists. Here’s how we summarize them in our paper:

In other words, very poor countries tend to have too little capital (including human capital) and consumer spending power, too much uncertainty and instability, and too-unattractive investment climates, to power high economic growth rates. Very rich countries have slow growth because of their aging populations and service-oriented economies. Middle-income countries grow the fastest because they are rich enough to have manufacturing capital and an emerging middle class, and poor enough to still have cheap labor and lots of room to improve their productivity. The graphs below show how fertility rates, and employment in industry and services—key drivers of this pattern—vary with GDP per capita.

To illustrate just how stable these development patterns have been, we showed in our paper that you could have fit a simple, three-parameter model to the GDP per capita data above, in the 1980s (i.e. not using any data newer than that), and you would have done a substantially better job forecasting income-group GDP per capita growth in the 2000s and 2010s than the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s short-term forecasts from the 2000s and 2010s. (We called our simple model a differential-equation model, or DEM, for short.)

What happens if these development patterns persist?

If the development patterns described above continue to hold in the future, here is a short (non-exhaustive) list of major implications, some of which are still on the fringes of the discourse in research, policy and the public square.

“Worst-case” long-run economic outlooks—with respect to growth and inequality—might actually be best-case outlooks.

The graph below compares economic outlooks following historical development trends (our DEM, in purple, and a much more complicated model, called International Futures, or IFs, from our colleagues at the University of Denver, in pink) to outlooks from Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios used in climate change research, which roughly span the range of major expert and agency macroeconomic forecasts to 2100.

Our DEM and IFs models disagree with each other on the outlook for the high-income group (both models have growth slowing compared to today, but IFs is relatively more optimistic, in line with mid-range SSP scenarios). For the other groups (low- and middle-income), our models are both in line with the worst-case SSP scenarios. However, the graph above shows that our models would have been too optimistic in the past when forecasting GDP per capita growth in low-income countries. If that bias continues forward, then the economic outlook for today’s low-income countries could be worse than all SSP scenarios and major agency outlooks.

In other words, many of our major agencies (including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC) may not even be considering the most likely scenarios for future economic development.

To give some more concrete perspective: average GDP per capita in the Middle East and Africa is roughly $5,000 (in 2005 USD) today, and in 2100 it reaches ~$120,000 in SSP5 (the fastest-growth SSP scenario), ~$50,000 in SSP2 (“middle of the road”, according to the SSPs), and ~$15,000 in SSP3 and SSP4 (the slow-growth scenarios). So, major development agencies are imagining a middle-of-the-road world in 2100 where today’s poor regions are roughly ten times as rich as they are today, similarly rich as today’s rich countries are today. They should probably be planning more seriously for worlds where today’s poor regions are much poorer than that (though still probably richer than they are today). They should probably also prepare for a world in 2100 with higher global income inequality than exists today, and all of the challenges that brings, including, for example, increased migration flows.

To get the world economy back to the “middle-of-the-road” SSP2 scenario, we wouldn’t just have to depart dramatically from the past half-century’s development trends described above (see panel a in the graph immediately above), we would have to do so almost immediately, because of how economic growth compounds over time. For example, we showed that the world would need to double current GDP per capita growth rates (compared to their levels, in line with SSP5) by 2030 to make SSP2’s 2100 GDP per capita projections achievable (see the graphs below and above). The later the development trends change, the less different their outcomes can look in 2100 from the continuation of past trends (see below).

The U.S. would have to become very poor to bring back its manufacturing golden age and rival China’s manufacturing dominance.

Last April—as the debate surrounding President Trump’s global tariff policies was heating up—The Economist plotted industry employment as a share of total employment for several major countries, going back to 1801, illustrating the pattern I highlighted above.

If this pattern continues to hold, it suggests that economies reach their manufacturing peaks (compared to the total economy) at roughly one-fourth the level of affluence that the United States has today.

Many arguments for U.S. protectionism have narrower goals than restoring peak manufacturing—wanting to protect key strategic industries like steel, for example. However, I have also heard some conservatives—especially young conservatives—articulate a desire to use protectionism to take America back to its manufacturing golden age. And, to their credit, when I press them in private on the tradeoffs, I often find that they are logically consistent enough to admit willingness to pursue protectionism even if it makes the country as a whole poorer, because it would (in their view) revive communities in places like the rust belt that have been left behind over the past two decades. But are they willing to make the country 75% poorer, if that’s what it would take to bring back the so-called golden age? I suspect not.

(Of course, there are also other practical challenges to the protectionist project. For example, global supply-chain integration means that U.S. tariffs hurt U.S. manufacturers through their input costs. Partly for this reason, manufacturing employment has decreased over the past year, as I mentioned in a previous post.)

Human population growth will be slower (and declines will be faster) than most people think.

On this topic, I highly recommend following the work of Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, the world’s leading thinker on global population economics, in my estimation. He has shown how the United Nations (UN) projects population growth forward assuming that rapid, global declining fertility trends will suddenly stabilize or reverse. However, even if the declining fertility trends did reverse, but they first persisted for a few years to decades, global population in 2100 could be 1-2 billion less than the UN’s current baseline (medium) projection (see the graph below, from The Economist, based on Fernández-Villaverde’s work).

In other words, similarly to the GDP per capita growth trends I described above, past trends in fertility would need to change substantially and immediately for the long-run population outlook to not be substantially lower than the UN currently expects.

Some of the declining fertility trends are more recent than the 1960s, so the population story is not entirely related to the economic story described above. However, as Fernández-Villaverde and others have discussed, economic and population trends strongly affect each other. So, slower-than-expected GDP per capita growth and slower-than-expected population growth could feed off of each other, especially if the economic stresses of aging populations continue to fall disproportionately on young adults. John Burn-Murdoch and Russ Greene discussed this reality in recent viral articles.

We know more about who the major world powers will be in 2100 than we think.

Discussions of 21st-century geopolitics sometimes muse about the fall of U.S. dominance, the rise of China, or even the rise of other countries, like India and Nigeria. Indeed, if we consider the full range of economic and population forecasts considered plausible by the UN, IPCC, and other major agencies, it is possible to get all kinds of 2100 geopolitical scenarios. For example, in a 2024 paper, Jonathan Moyer sketched out “capabilities” (measured by GDP x GDP per capita, which roughly approximates geopolitical power) in different SSP scenarios, finding that Nigeria and India become dominant superpowers by 2100 in scenarios with fast economic growth like SSP5 (see below).

However, if we consider my argument above that slow-growth scenarios like SSP3 and SSP4 (or worse) are much more plausible, we see U.S.-China geopolitical dominance as much more likely to persist. In fact, slower-than-expected population growth might even stall the rise of China. Current fertility trends project China losing more than half of its current population this century.

In other words, if you think that we will see the U.S. lose its global geopolitical dominance this century, you might be surprised. If you expect to see India and Nigeria become dominant players this century, you will almost certainly be surprised.

Democracies will need to adapt to uncharted slow-growth conditions.

As my colleagues and I showed in a 2021 paper, the rise of global democracy closely tracked the rise of global GDP per capita growth since the 1800s (see below). As growth has slowed over the past several decades in rich countries, democracy has broadly come under strain. John Burn-Murdoch discussed this challenge in his viral article this past week.

As the graphs above show, all but the most optimistic economic outlooks for rich countries have per-capita growth continuing to gradually slow in the coming decades due to aging, shifts to services, and other long-standing trends. Permanent disruptions to global trade and geopolitical stability, and/or worsening fertility declines, could further slow growth.

Slow and slowing per-capita economic growth poses a number of major fiscal and social challenges to democracies, as my colleagues and I review in our paper, and Burn-Murdoch discusses, too. Among other things, it strains public finances, makes our society more seemingly zero-sum and competitive, and creates gaps between young people’s expectations and reality that can fuel unrest and populism.

It’s possible that artificial intelligence (AI) could buffer economic growth against these historical trends of secular stagnation. However, many economists, such as Tyler Cowen and Daron Acemoglu, do not expect AI to make a big enough difference to deviate qualitatively from historic trends in the medium term. Even if AI did save our economies from secular stagnation, it would likely bring other problems with it, like mass automation of jobs and increases in inequality.

There will be less climate change than people think, but adaptation to it may be harder.

It is sometimes helpful to decompose greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (which cause climate change) according to the IPAT equation (impact = population x affluence x technology):

GHG emissions = population x GDP per capita x GHG emissions/GDP

The last term (GHG emissions/GDP) represents how GHG-efficient our economy is. If we hold this efficiency constant, then reducing projected population and GDP per capita, compared to what the UN assumes, means we would also project less GHG emissions and less climate change.

Roger Pielke Jr. explored this idea in an excellent 2024 post on The Honest Broker. He showed that, all else equal, assuming slower GDP per capita and population growth, more consistent with historical trends, brought the UN’s projection of global warming under current policies down from nearly 3 degrees C to just over 2 degrees C (by 2100, above pre-industrial temperatures). In other words, slowing economic and population growth might get us close to the 2-degree Paris Agreement goal under current climate policies.

This may seem like good news, but it probably isn’t. A country’s affluence is strongly correlated with its ability to adapt to climate and climate change, along with a host of other measures of societal well-being. A world with a bit less affluence and climate change is probably worse off than a world with a bit more affluence and climate change, at least up to a certain point. This is one of several reasons why I think adaptation and economic development are vastly underappreciated in climate change research, policy, and public discourse. (I will have a lot more to say on this in the next few days, when my colleagues and I release a new working paper. See my remarks in the video below for a preview of our argument.)

Conclusion

In summary, global economic development has followed several broad patterns quite consistently for over half a century. These patterns simply continuing to hold over the coming decades would in some cases constitute a large departure from development trends that researchers and major international agencies are forecasting and planning around. These development patterns may change, of course, but society should spend more time and attention considering and planning for them to continue. Anything less would be irresponsible, in my view.

Today’s guest is Brian Kisida. Brian Kisida is an Associate Professor in the Truman School of Government & Public Affairs at the University of Missouri, Co-Director of the Arts, Humanities, & Civic Engagement Lab, and Director of the Open Minds Initiative. We discuss his recent research on K-12 education, which cuts through the political noise on what is and is not being taught in high schools about race and critical race theory. We also discuss his work on promoting viewpoint diversity in the classroom, and his perspective on broader national debates about higher education reform. We compare notes from our positive experiences at flagship public universities, in contrast to some of the news stories out of elite universities.

Don’t miss our next episode!

Make sure to subscribe, and stay tuned for our next episode, Episode 14, with Sharon Friedman, on finding common ground in public lands. Dr. Friedman worked at the U.S. Forest Service for over 30 years in areas including planning, regulation, litigation, and research. In her retirement, she founded and has run The Smokey Wire, a popular news and discussion forum for forest and federal lands issues.

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson was one of the most influential books of last year. It argued that liberals should embrace a politics focused on building—more houses, more energy, more infrastructure, more scientific capacity. It critiqued current liberal politics that focus too much on stopping bad things rather than building good things.

Liberal politics of stopping bad things tend to hyper-focus on process and risk aversion in ways that create what Francis Fukuyama famously called “vetocracy”—a situation where nothing gets done because too many people effectively have a veto. A society where more things get built would not just be richer, it would also be more just, Klein and Thompson argue. Scarcity makes things expensive—housing and energy for example—and the burden of those costs is greatest on the poor. Abundance does the opposite, to the benefit of all, including the poor. (Economists have been saying this for decades; see below.)

Abundance needs conservative ideas

Although Abundance was written by and for liberals, many people have pointed out that there is lots for conservatives to like in the abundance agenda, too. Rolling back burdensome and counterproductive regulations to unleash American innovation? Making America richer and the necessities of life cheaper? Embracing “can-do” over “can’t-do” attitudes in politics and culture? What’s not to like?

However, American Conservation Coalition President Chris Barnard offered an interesting conservative critique of the abundance agenda in American Affairs. What good is more stuff, Barnard argued, if we neglect permanent non-material goods and institutions that provide structure and purpose to society? A conservative abundance movement should therefore center family, public virtue, stewardship and national dynamism. This focus would ensure that we create an abundance of the right things (i.e., things that promote human flourishing). “Even if they live in affordable apartments cooled by cheap clean energy, a sterile, chatbot-dependent, and space drug-addicted people would be far from the flourishing future a pro-human abundance could deliver,” Barnard said.

I would take Barnard’s argument further. He’s right that we wouldn’t want abundance without family, public virtue, stewardship, and national dynamism. But, more importantly, we can’t have abundance without family, public virtue, stewardship and national dynamism. A sterile, chatbot-dependent, and space-drug addicted people would not be able to build a world with affordable apartments and abundant cheap energy.

Families quite literally create and power the next generation, which is vital to strong economies and thriving societies. Having the nuclear family as the base unit of social organization is probably key to the historical origins and continued thriving of the (small-l) liberal institutions that power western prosperity, as Joseph Henrich outlines in The WERIDest People in the World. Nuclear-family-based societies promote voluntary associations, markets and merit-based hierarchies, as opposed to the nepotism that is common in clan- or extended-kin-based societies. Monogamy also reduces the numbers of aimless young men in society, who tend to cause social problems. Intact, two-parent families are also vital to children’s success, especially those having disadvantaged backgrounds, decades of research shows.

A society needs a strong shared identity and sense of purpose to provide the public goods that underpin for abundance, again as decades of research has shown. (My colleagues and I review some of this research here.) In America, we are lucky to be able to draw our shared identity and sense of purpose from a creed—a set of ideals and institutions that have produced the most successful society in world history, by many measures—rather than an ethnic or racial identity. (Conservatives would be wise to not lose sight of this, as Vivek Ramaswamy argued recently in the New York Times.) A sense of dynamism is a key part of this successful American creed. We need a sense of stewardship to respect and maintain this creed and these institutions. Public safety is essential to rule of law and civic trust, both of which are preconditions for the investments needed for abundance. Personal responsibility and accountability are essential to raising and educating children.

In other words, we need conservative values and ideas to build things liberals want. If this is too abstract, consider the following specific examples:

Which states build the most housing (per capita), have the most affordable housing, and have the fastest-falling homeless populations? Red states, who build new houses at a faster per-capita pace, even as they face increasing demand from people disproportionately wanting to move there (disproportionately from blue states).

Where is upward economic mobility the highest? Utah, which also has the highest rate of family stability.

Which states are rising fastest in the rankings for K-12 test scores? Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama, who are focusing on evidence-based curriculum reforms, extensive teacher training, and high expectations (i.e. personal responsibility) for students and teachers.

Where are the next generation of college students flocking to? Increasingly, red states in the south, whose schools they view as less overrun by radical politics.

Which state is building the most carbon-free energy? Texas, which has a strong pro-business, pro-growth political climate, despite having less of a pro-renewable political climate.

Who has the highest marriage and fertility rates, and the best mental health—all needed for abundance? Conservatives.

Everyday Americans have started to notice these patterns, as the poll below illustrates.

Abundance also needs liberal ideas

Before conservatives get too smug, here are some reasons that abundance also needs liberals and their ideas:

Being an innovator and a scientist both strongly correlate with the Big-Five personality trait openness (to new ideas and experiences). People high in openness (and scientists and innovators) are disproportionately liberal. (There is some evidence that scientific institutions have discriminated against conservatives, and made hostile climates for them, recently, but that does not explain the whole disparity. Scientists and academics have skewed liberal as long as we’ve been collecting data.)

Today, we think of more liberal cities as fading and more conservative ones as booming, but twenty years ago Richard Florida wrote a whole book about the opposite pattern occurring at the time. Places like Silicon Valley, Boston, Washington, D.C. and Austin were becoming world-leading innovation hubs—leaving other, redder, parts of the country behind—partly due to cultures welcoming of diversity, skilled immigration and the LGBT community. Cities tend to be more liberal-leaning (and more innovative) in general, regardless of whether they are in red or blue states.

Beyond cities, abundance also thrives on a stable rules-based international order, international trade, strong support for science and R&D, and an ability to attract the best and brightest from all over the world. This does not mean we need open borders, nor that the H-1B system is above scrutiny (more on my views on immigration here), nor that we can’t be strategic about industrial policy and protecting key industries against China-led de-industrialization. But it does mean that across-the-board “liberation-day”-style protectionism (the largest tax hike on Americans in recent history), blanket $100k fees for new H-1B visas for skilled immigrants (which will effectively end skilled immigration in some sectors like academia), volatile and sometimes-unconstitutional international student policies, indiscriminate DOGE-ing of the civil service (which is only about 4% of federal spending, and not where most of the waste, fraud and abuse is), drastic cuts to science (which the Congressional GOP, thankfully, seems to be undoing), and cavalier attitudes towards alliances like NATO, are bad for American business and prosperity. The recent job-growth and manufacturing numbers are a case in point.

Beyond these specific anti-abundance policies, conspiratorial, white-nationalist “groyperism”, and goop-y RFK-Jr.-inspired anti-vax ideologies are also cancers on the conservative movement that make us sicker (figuratively and literally) (though RFK Jr. has a point about unhealthy American diets). Groyperism is the mirror-image of the woke-left’s anti-merit identitarianism—as many others have pointed out—and any movement that is anti-merit is anti-abundance.

The point is: while the American left may have made some big anti-abundance mistakes over the past decade, the American right would be wise to not replicate them, or worse.

Vivek Ramaswamy laid this out recently at AmFest, in a speech that’s worth watching in full:

Most Americans are abundance-aligned

One of the things that makes America great—objectively the most successful country in world history, by many measures—is that an overwhelming majority of its citizens believe in the importance of family, public virtue, stewardship, freedom and national dynamism. They believe in patriotism and colorblind equal opportunity. They tend to overwhelmingly support abundance-enabling policies like investing in infrastructure and R&D, skilled legal immigration, and all-of-the-above energy. And many are willing to vote with their feet, as migrations to and from cities like San Francisco over the past two decades illustrate.

If any country can figure out abundance, it is the United States of America, especially if conservatives and liberals are willing to work together.

Your integrity is your most precious asset, and no one controls it but you.

Speak up for what’s right, especially when it takes courage. Check your assumptions. Don’t be a bully; don’t pile on or kick someone who’s down. My parents instilled these principles in me throughout my childhood, and they have guided me throughout my life.

The first real test of these principles came when I was in high school in Quebec. An alumna spoke to our class about child labor in sweat shops overseas, and about how she and others were working to stop it through the organization Free the Children (FTC). Horrified and inspired, my friends and I immediately started an FTC chapter in our high school. We organized fundraisers and attended rallies about that issue and others.

Through FTC, I got invited to a national conference for Canadian youth social justice activists. Parts of the conference were inspiring, deepening my resolve to pursue a career that could make the world a better place. But parts also disillusioned me with some of the dominant ways of thinking in youth advocacy.

We were some of the country’s most ambitious youth, who were about to spend tens of thousands of dollars to go to college, presumably to learn something. Yet, we acted like we already knew everything. Naturally, we didn’t see the contradiction.

We talked about older generations with contempt, like they had wrecked the world by not caring, by not paying attention, or both. “If only more people listened to children” was the vibe—one I recognize in some of today’s climate change activism. But did we really think that little of our parents and our grandparents? Did we really think that little of our country’s leaders? I knew deep down I didn’t.

Many of our grandparents (including mine) had risked their lives fighting Nazism in their youth. Our parents’ and grandparents’ generations created the wealth and built the post-war institutions that have made the world a much more prosperous, safer and more peaceful place. They led movements for civil rights, women’s rights and environmental protection.

When I would press older members of my family on why the world wasn’t more socialist (as I thought it should be at the time), their response was never “because we don’t care about the poor.” Instead, they often asked good questions, like:

“How is the government going to pay for these things? How else, but with markets, do we maintain incentives for people to create the businesses and innovations that power prosperity? Why is it that communism has such a deadly track record?”

In other words, if you want to make the world a better place, check your assumptions. The world has serious problems. Take them seriously. Put in the work to understand them. Study what’s been tried in the past. If someone offers you an easy solution, ask yourself if they’re really just offering you a way to feel better about yourself.

Fast-forward to graduate school. By then, I was already more of a moderate than a social democrat, but I still shared many of the preoccupations of the left. The 2008 recession was a travesty, caused in large part by unchecked greed and hubris. The war in Iraq was a disaster. Climate change denial was harmful, funded by dark money, and getting in the way of common-sense solutions to the problem. Same-sex marriage rights were long overdue, and they were finally starting to feel winnable.

In academia, some degree of affirmative action for women and minorities was noticeable, but so was racism, sexism and sexual harassment. In the early days of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), it felt like we were genuinely trying to level the playing field, and we were trying to stop judging people by their immutable characteristics.

Then, during my postdoc years, as the Great Awokening got into full swing, things noticeably changed. The focus of DEI gradually seemed less about opposing stereotyping and reducing the importance of race and gender in who gets ahead and more about introducing new stereotypes, and increasing the importance of race and gender in who gets ahead.

Important efforts to crack down on workplace sexual harassment and hold serial sexual predators like Harvey Weinstein accountable gradually morphed into efforts to ruin careers over “microaggressions,” wrong-think or politically incorrect research. Social media pile-ons became common, sometimes with real-world consequences.

Careers, built over decades, are expensive and precious. Combating sexual harassment and racial discrimination honors that. But cancel culture doesn’t. It treats careers as cheap. It makes us more racist and sexist, not less. It also makes us hypocrites.

This hypocrisy extends to the principles of science. The tools of science—responsible for huge global advances in prosperity and health—are universal and belong to everyone. Diversity is good for science because people who think differently make each other smarter. If we exclude people from science because of characteristics unrelated to their merit, we might miss out on future Einsteins. Facts, like global warming, don’t care about your politics. These things are obviously true.

Yet, cancel culture, political monocultures enforced by litmus tests, and ever-expanding identity-based reward systems undermine these ideas. So, too, do notions that certain groups need to have their own “ways of knowing,” seemingly implying that the tools of science don’t, in fact, belong to everyone.

Hypocrisy also extends to the mantra that impact matters more than intent. If that is true, why did we seem more concerned with microaggressions in 2020 than we were with the thousands of deaths caused by post-George-Floyd police pullback? Why were we so uncurious about the devastating and unequal effects of long-term lockdowns and campaigns against school discipline and standards on K-12 school performance?

Were we really checking our assumptions? Were we really doing what was right and acting with integrity? Were we really showing courage? Were we really opposing bullying? Did we not see how devastating these trends in academia could be to our public trust, reputation and funding in the long term? We are now finding out the hard way how much this loss of trust and reputation can cost.

When I raised these issues at the time with senior, tenured colleagues—those with the most job security, academic freedom and power—the gist of the response was often: “I agree with you, but I can’t say that in public because I don’t want to get canceled.” If we couldn’t have the courage to govern ourselves, how could we expect the public to respect the principles of shared governance? Again, we’re now finding out the hard way the cost of these shortcomings.

When I became a professor, I promised myself that I would do things differently. I would “live not by lies.” I would treat my students of all backgrounds as full human beings, not symbolic avatars for their groups, or worse, totems for my or someone else’s politics. I would prioritize my integrity over professional incentives. I would trust that I had the skills to make a living regardless of any short-term professional consequences.

Following these ideals meant not only challenging some progressive orthodoxies, but also not adopting the right’s reactionary mirror-images. I have publicly called balls and strikes on both sides of the political spectrum, and I will continue to do so.

This approach has ended up being more professionally rewarding than I had initially hoped. It has led me to some of the most impactful research projects of my career. It has led me to rewarding professional relationships, including with people who have made me smarter by challenging my thinking in ways I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise.

I have taken occasional public barbs from both sides of the political spectrum, but far more often I have been treated with respect. Overall, I’d say that my refusal to self-censor has made me a better researcher and a better steward of my responsibilities as an academic.

It has also been personally fulfilling. I don’t enjoy conflict, but I hate compromising my principles or ceding my integrity to bullies even more. The experience of taking barbs has made each one sting less over time. Being open about my principles has led me to new colleagues who share these principles. It has cost me a couple of friendships—which in hindsight I don’t miss—and it has gained me many more.

Tenure-track professors in the United States might have the greatest free speech rights in world history, and we have a moral and professional responsibility to use them.

In case you missed it, here is my “Your speech is freer than you think” talk at last January’s Censorship in the Sciences Conference (starts at 3:58:00):

December 4, 8am MT: “Are emissions on track to avoid catastrophic impacts?” with Simon Evans, David Keith, and Pete Irvine

This one is happening tomorrow—you can tune in live here—with Simon Evans (Deputy Editor and Senior Policy Editor of Carbon Brief) and David Keith (University of Chicago Professor, Faculty Director of the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative, and an expert on geoengineering), moderated by Pete Irvine (Editorial Director and co-founder of SRM360, and another expert on geoengineering). We’re going to discuss climate and emissions scenarios, where we’re headed, how much effect climate policy has had (or not had) on global emissions, and the debate surrounding what role geoengineering might (or might not) play in our climate future.

[12/4 update: here is the recording:]

November 19 at University of Wyoming: “Cutting through the noise on climate and energy: a conversation with Roger Pielke Jr.”

I hosted Roger Pielke Jr. (AEI Senior Fellow, Emeritus Professor at University of Colorado Boulder, author of The Honest Broker Substack, and longtime collaborator) here at University of Wyoming’s College of Business in November. In the fireside chat below, I asked him about the basics of climate change, the Paris Agreement, the endangerment finding (i.e. whether or not the U.S. government should consider CO2 a pollutant), extreme weather, and the politics of science.

October 13 at Indiana University Bloomington: “Energy and the Environment: What’s the future?” A Heterodox Conversation with Andrew Dessler

IU Bloomington’s Heterodox Academy Campus Community and their BridgeUSA student chapter (BridgeIU) hosted a “Heterodox Conversation” between Andrew Dessler (Texas A&M University Professor, Director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather, and co-author of the Climate Brink Substack) and me, on current issues in climate and energy. We ended up focusing on adaptation and mitigation (which should we prioritize, do they trade off or not, etc.), clean energy technologies, and issues in U.S. policy. I made a bullish argument on adaptation and development as under-appreciated climate solutions, previewing a working paper that my coauthors and I will be releasing very soon. I’ll do a post on it here when it’s out!

The premise of the event was that we were two scholars who might disagree on some issues related to the topic, but, as you will see, we ended up agreeing on a lot, too, and it was a very rich and stimulating discussion.