Earlier this month, 47 senators — every Republican and six Democrats — voted for Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) resolution to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific global warming endangerment finding, finalized after years of delay in following a Supreme Court mandate to obey the language of the Clean Air Act.

Twenty of Murkowski’s supporters claimed they voted to reject science in order to preserve the “balance of power” between the legislative and executive branch. They said that they had to overturn the EPA’s scientific finding because setting pollution limits should instead be the job of the elected members of Congress. Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) even said he voted for Murkowski to “ensure that Congress keeps its responsibility to establish our nation’s environmental regulations.

Like “deficit peacocks” who pretend to be hawkish on budgets but refuse any real solution, these “climate peacocks” claim to care about science, energy reform, and the environment, but have yet to find solutions to the threat of climate change. Reid is now calling the bluff of these twenty “responsible” senators, who will be proven to be fossil-fueled hypocrites if they fail to support policies that bring the swift reduction of carbon pollution that science demands.

Johnson pulled together statements from 20 such peacocks — a lot of noisy squawking about how the EPA is usurping the prerogatives of Congress. Here’s a sample (but they all sound exactly like this):

Lamar Alexander (R-TN): It’s Congress’ job — not a bureaucrat’s or agency’s — to take action on carbon in a way that preserves jobs.

Scott Brown (R-MA): We cannot allow these decisions to be made by an unelected bureaucracy; this is an issue that deserves a full debate in Congress.

Susan Collins (R-ME): I also have serious concerns about unelected government officials at the EPA taking on this complicated issue instead of Congress. It is Congress that should establish the framework for regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

Bob Corker (R-TN): I don’t believe it’s appropriate for the EPA to mandate large-scale carbon emissions reductions through administrative regulations. If there is any action taken in this regard, it should be done through Congress.

Mike Crapo (R-ID): Such an important debate as climate change, and the potential to drive up costs on consumers and small businesses, should not be left in the hands of Washington, D.C., bureaucrats.

Mike Enzi (R-WY): I rise in support of Senator Murkowski’s resolution that would ensure that Congress keeps its responsibility to establish our nation’s environmental regulations.

It’s refreshing to see so many Congress members asserting their authority over something, after being phobically reluctant to use it on Wall Street, predatory bankers, or BP. But the argument they’re making is one that goes to the very heart of American governance, and deserves to be questioned straight up.

The question is: Isn’t this precisely the kind of wonky, technical thing we want bureaucrats handling?

The conservatives have spent 40 years trying to convince Americans that bureaucrats were agents of the Devil, power-hungry know-nothings who suck down our tax money and give nothing in return, and the best argument going against the evil of unions. This anti-bureaucrat smear job has been so effective that the very word “bureaucrat” creates a sort of reflexive surge of gut acid in most Americans — even some of us on the left.

Amid all the acrimony, though, we’ve largely forgotten what bureaucrats are good for, and why we hire them in the first place. And this peacock parade is as good a moment as any to start to reclaim the B-word. Let’s start with the basics, since so few of us seem to remember what they are:

Bureaucrats are government employees. In agencies like the EPA, they’re very often degreed, certified professionals in a specific field of expertise — hydrology, or wildlife biology, or range management, or soils geology. In short: they’re trained experts who are far more entitled than most of us to have an informed opinion in their area of competence. And that education, expertise, and insight is precisely what we pay them for.

It’s true that they enjoy a level of job security that few people in the public sector can even imagine these days. It’s not uncommon for a government professional to work at the same agency for 30 or even 40 years, rise through the ranks of middle management, and retire with a good pension. But it’s also arguable that that long constancy gives them an equally long perspective about where the public interest lies, and how to make the best policy around it. Over time, they see political factions and theories come and go; they see what works and what doesn’t. That long, deep knowledge of the field can make the difference between success and failure, miracles and boondoggles — if we let them bring it to bear.

Bureaucrats are, by law, apolitical. They’re a permanent part of the government, serving Congress and the White House through conservative and liberal administrations. They’re not allowed to participate in political campaigns, or make public statements for or against candidates. They can’t speak as private citizens on issues, either. Like everybody else, they’ve got their personal biases and interests, and those occasionally leak through into their decisions — but unlike most of us, they’ve also got serious legal incentives to keep those biases out of their work.

The bigger danger is that they’re very susceptible to being leaned on by the White House or Congress if some powerful donor doesn’t like what they’re up to. In the land of bureaucrats, being tagged as “not a team player” by resisting a Congress member’s demands will put a quick end to a career. In better days, when government had a stronger role, this kind of intimidation was considered unethical, and legislators who tried it opened themselves to the risk of being investigated and sanctioned. The fact that it’s a problem now has less to do with individual bureaucrats than it does with the level of corruption in the system. If we don’t like this, blaming the victims won’t fix it. But. despite all of this, it’s still true that bureaucrats have several more layers of insulation keeping them out of the heavy winds of politics that buffet Congress constantly.

So, back to the question. Do we want important technical decisions about pollution limits made by people with actual technical expertise — people who’ve spent their entire careers dealing with both the science and the politics of this issue inside and out? Or do we want them being made by Congress members for whom this is one issue among a thousand; who may not have had more than one or two undergraduate science courses; and who are usually relying on a too-brief assessment by some junior environmental affairs staffer who possibly has his or her own agenda, and may not be an expert either?

Furthermore: do we want these decisions made by people who are at least somewhat insulated by the bureaucracy from the interests of big donors, and are thus more able to fairly, equitably assess what’s really in America’s long-term best interest? Or do we think it’s better to leave them in the hands of people whose jobs are utterly dependent on the largesse of powerful donors, and who (as we already know, all too well) must consistently put the wishes of their clients ahead of the interests of the American people?

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last ten years, it’s that Congress is structurally incapable of doing what’s right for the average American if some rich donor has other ideas. This is, in fact, why conservatives delegitimized bureaucrats in the first place: they couldn’t stand having well-trained experts challenging their plans on behalf of the public interest. They could buy off Congress, but they couldn’t buy off our scientists. As I’ve written before (here and here), this war on planning was part of the larger war on science; and we are now paying the delayed costs of this war almost everywhere we turn.

If we’re going to change that trend — if we want to restore evidence-based policy and reassert the primacy of science in public decision-making — the first thing we need to do is reclaim the dignity and reassert the authority of the government bureaucrat. These people are our designated experts. We hired them to defend our interests and make policy without political interference. They don’t always get it right — no system run by human beings ever does — but they’re considerably more trustworthy and knowledgeable than Congress is.

It’s the height of arrogance for these squaking peacocks in Congress to think that they’re smarter than the EPA’s bureaucrats, and can do everything real scientists can do. They can’t. And their contempt for “the bureaucracy” also reveals their contempt for the benefits of higher education; for scientific expertise; for government based in calm disinterested reason; and for the Enlightenment values this country was founded on.

Bring on the bureaucrats. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they’re almost always smarter than Congress — and that’s why the peacocks need to shut up and listen to the people who actually know what they’re doing.

Crossposted from ourfuture.org

It’s this: There are, in the end, only four possible futures here.

Future 1: Continuation

More business as usual. The people favoring this approach aren’t just the deniers; they’re also the people who intellectually understand and accept the reality of global heating, but are so locked into the status quo and its systems that they’re either unable to imagine or impotent to instigate the kind of responses required to meet it.

(A rather sobering example: a friend told me earlier this week about a meeting with a Congressional staffer who proffered the opinion that 350 ppm of atmospheric carbon — the absolute target set by the IPCC as necessary to avoid catastrophic warming — wasn’t possible, but a target of 450 ppm could probably be sold on the Hill. The guy honestly thought you could negotiate with physics the same way you negotiate state school lunch funding — that Mother Nature is a bureaucrat who can be counted on to pad her budget request forms, expecting Congress to dock them. That’s classic Continuation thinking.)

Under this assumption, American life will go on in this century more or less as it did in the last, perhaps with some adaptations here and there.

Future 2: Collapse

The end of the world as we know it. This is the Jared Diamond/James Howard Kunstler/Limits to Growth scenario, where civilization’s immensely complex and brittle systems break down, and life winds down to something more simple and local. This isn’t necessarily a “worst case” scenario — a lot of us wouldn’t mind returning to a less complex existence — but it’s radically different from the modern world we know now.

Future 3: Discipline

We acknowledge and accept the magnitude of the problem, make a serious plan to deal with it, and commit to following through. There will be sacrifice. There will be change. But because the transition is thought through and undertaken in an orderly way, much of what we value can be salvaged; and new (perhaps more authentically human) values can be brought to the fore as well. This is the path advocated by most environmentalists and climate activists — not to mention a growing number of businesses who are seeking coherent guidance as they invest their capital in new green initiatives.

Future 4: Technology and Innovation

We put our confidence in our own ability to create technological solutions like geoengineering and carbon-free energy sources that will solve the problem. This is the future where science fiction meets future fact. Perhaps it’s time for humans to consider moving to other planets, or creating artificial environments here that will sustain us when the natural environment turns hostile. Whatever the vision, it’s taken for granted that humans are very smart monkeys who can invent our way out of anything if we simply decide to think big enough.

***

The truth of the matter is that no matter what kind of fate-of-the-world conversation you find yourself in, when you get right down to it, these are the only four futures actually on the table. But they also work at a smaller scale: they’re also often the four most plausible futures when you’re discussing the fate of nations, organizations, families, and individuals as well. (As a thought experiment, map them onto economic reform, health care reform, immigration reform — see? They’re good tools.) That’s why, within the futures trade, they’re known as the “four generic futures.”

The four generic futures were first described back in the 1970s by Dr. Jim Dator, founder of the futures program at the University of Hawaii. Over a number of years, Dator and his students collected literally millions of images of the future from all kinds of sources — corporate and public strategic plans, statements by politicians, policies and laws, science fiction books and magazines, movies, photos and drawings, and so on. He finally realized that every one of the images they’d collected could readily be grouped into just four piles — these four alternative visions of the future. Dator writes:

These four futures are “generic” in the sense that varieties of specific images characteristic of them all share common theoretical, methodological and data bases which distinguish them from the bases of the other three futures, and yet each generic form has a myriad of specific variations reflective of their common basis.

Also each of the alternatives has “good” and “bad” features. None should be considered as either a bad or a good future per se. There is no such thing as either a “best case scenario” or a “worse case scenario”. Also, there is no such thing as a “most likely scenario”. In the long run, all four generic forms have equal probabilities of happening, and thus all need to be considered in equal measure and sincerity. This last point is very important.

Dator also points out that “these four futures are always before us — though some loom larger in our consciousness at some times than at other times.” Furthermore, he says, the Official Future of all modern societies is Continuation: “All education and governance is towards creating and maintaining such a society.”

And that, in a nutshell, explains a lot of the disconnect that’s infuriating those of us who are exasperated at Washington’s apparent inability to get a grip on climate change. A huge government system that’s set up explicitly to perpetuate the Continuation future can’t help but greet the other three futures with varying degrees of incomprehension and resistance.

The policy folk in D.C. are generally open to technology and innovation solutions, because history has proven their ability to drive economic growth. That’s why we’re still seriously discussing “drill here, drill now,” even while an open gusher explodes on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. It’s also why clean coal and more nukes continue to hog center stage in policy discussions like attention-starved five-year-olds. Washington likes technological fixes — especially when we’re talking about known technologies that entail known risks (however absurdly high). As the crisis escalates, we can expect bold geoengineering schemes to capture their imaginations as well, especially if there are strong economic upsides to be had for their clients.

But these folks are loath to embrace solutions rooted in Discipline — or even worse, Collapse — because both of these alternatives are implicit admissions of failure. They’re there to keep the system running. If we have to re-trench our economy in a whole new set of values — or if things fall apart altogether — then they flat out haven’t done their jobs. For the people who run this country, these aren’t plausible alternatives at all. They’re the stuff of their worst nightmares, the kinds of events that discredit everything they’ve done in their lives. And, of course, that makes these alternatives painfully hard to even contemplate, no matter how patently necessary the discipline or how looming the collapse might be.

Of course, the odds are good that wherever we end up, it will be due to all four of these forces coming together in some combination — a combination that cannot be known by anyone at present. Odds are that one or two will come to dominate — a handful of surprisingly good technological breakthroughs make Continuation more plausible; or a lack of Discipline accelerates the descent into Collapse — and the shape of the future will be determined largely by these. But the other two will be in the mix somehow, too.

Since we don’t know how these four futures are going to interact, the most sensible strategy is to plan for all four of them, in the hope of gaining some understanding and building some tools we can use to steer on all four fronts through in the decades ahead.

Ironically, if Continuation is the goal — that is, we want to retain as many comforts of this modern life as possible in a more constrained world — then ignoring the problem by assuming that Continuation is also the most likely future is the very worst thing we can do. Climate change is real, and happening all around us right now. (Don’t think it’s happening in your town? Go ask a local farmer, gardener, ranger, or biologist. They’ll very likely beg to differ, and be glad to show you the places it’s already affecting your neighborhood.) Every day our policy makers fail to confront that truth is another opportunity lost to protect the very systems of money and power they’re so committed to preserving. The longer they delay, the worse the catastrophe will be when it comes, and the more unprepared they’ll be to deal with it. (That movie was called “Katrina,” and we’ve already seen how it ends.)

At this point, the preponderance of evidence suggests that Continuation is not our most likely future.

Our best hope, then, is to formulate a detailed plan (Discipline) that makes a serious investment in moving us quickly, calmly, and in a fiercely committed way toward a new energy paradigm. We need to re-tool our economy and government to perpetuate this new system, one that acknowledges the boundaries of this planet and emphasizes more humane values. We need to face our new limits, and find creative, joyful ways to live within them. As part of that discipline, we should also be openly talking about our fears (and hopes) for what Collapse might look like, and figure out how we still might survive and make satisfying lives in even drastically reduced circumstances. The more familiar and comfortable we are with the full range of possible trade-offs we’re facing — including the most extreme ones — the more likely we are to be able to make whatever choices become necessary with intelligence and grace.

And that plan should, absolutely, include bold investments in innovative technologies that create alternatives to carbon-based fuels, promote energy conservation, and remove carbon from the atmosphere. Discipline partisans tend to denigrate technology solutions (in no small part because if we can solve the whole problem with technology alone, the economic, cultural and spiritual realignments implicit in Discipline won’t be necessary); but there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit out there, just waiting to be picked, and we’d be irresponsible not to set our inventors and scientists to the task of harvesting it. It’s probably true that our first, best, and fastest carbon-abatement solutions will come from this quarter.

Seen this way, the really important questions we need to be asking are the ones that look like this:

• Can Technology make big enough breakthroughs fast enough to ensure full (or near-full) Continuation? And is that even desirable?
• Are Americans capable of enough Discipline to act quickly enough, with enough focus, to save their economy and restore their fading technological dominance?
• Are our cities and towns resilient enough to cope with whatever degree of Collapse may come? If they’re not, how do we begin to plan for that?
• Will the forces of Continuation evade their duty to seriously engage the other three alternatives so long that the whole conversation eventually becomes moot?

Every discussion about climate change is implicitly rooted in these four visions of the future. And arguments over which of these futures we should be assuming or prioritizing or planning for are, at heart, pointless. When you lay all four of them out this way, it’s easy to see that the most sensible strategy is to plan equally for all four. It’s not either/or. It’s and-and-and-and.

Look for ways to preserve the best of the life we have, to whatever extent we can. Do this by also preparing solid plans that route us away from assumptions and systems that are no longer workable, and find acceptable substitutes. Prepare for the worst. Invent and invest for the best. And if we do all this, in the end we’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever future we arrive at will, at least, be the one we had the strongest possible hand in choosing for ourselves.

Written, with fondness, for Ian Welsh

Copenhagen’s still three weeks away, but climate activists are already voicing their enormous disappointment about everything that’s not going to get done there. The heat is rising, and we’re all feeling the overwhelming urgency to get a strong global agreement that will get the laggards off their butts and launch the structural reformations most of us know we need to fix the problem. A lot of us, it seems, loaded all our highest hopes onto this one conference, wanting desperately to believe that this would finally be the moment the long-awaited Grand Transformation would occur.

But the hard truth of the matter is this: change of this magnitude never happens with a single conference, a single treaty, or even a single disaster. The structural changes required to get us off carbon and onto a truly sustainable footing challenge the economic assumptions that humans have lived by for 2500 years. Change that wide and deep will be the work of an entire century, maybe two. (If we’re smart and lucky, our grandchildren may live to see it mostly done.) All of us are well aware of the precarious time crunch we’re under here; but humans change only as fast as they change, and forcing the issue isn’t likely to help. And it may even hurt us in the long run.

We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and we’re not going to get out of it in one dazzling planetary stroke of universal enlightenment, either.

The good news: big, deep changes like this one tend to proceed in a fairly predictable order. If we understand the whole arc of that process, we can have a little more patience with where we are, and think a little more strategically about what comes next. Various theorists on the subject of change disagree on the number of stages in the process — I could bore you with theories that posit anywhere between four and 17 — but they all describe more or less the same progression. For our purposes, we can think of it in six stages:

Stage One begins when a small subgroup of people realizes that there’s a problem, and then figures out just what that problem is. In this case, it was the climate scientists who noticed the first hints of a problem over a century ago, and spent the next several decades accumulating overwhelming evidence that it was a monster threat that couldn’t be ignored.

Stage Two is in many ways the very hardest one: getting everybody else in the group to see the problem, admit it’s a problem, and agree that it needs to be fixed.  Note that there are no solutions proffered at this stage; right now, you’re just getting people to crack their minds open wide enough to accept the present truth and future implications of the matter.

This battle for hearts and minds is never a small victory — and those of us in the fight for climate change have already substantially won it. The deniers keep trying to take it away from us; but like the tobacco companies in the 1960s, they’re on the defensive and in the minority now, and they’re well aware that time is not on their side. Creating a broad global consensus around the basic idea that climate disruption is happening and needs to be addressed was one of the longest, hardest, most important battles of the whole revolution, and it’s very nearly over. Just getting to this point has been an enormous global victory for the movement, and we deserve to let ourselves claim it and savor it.

From here, it’s on to Stage Three, in which the group tries to see if tweaks to the existing system will fix the problem. This is where we are now: what’s coming out of Copenhagen will probably be, in essence, a laundry list of tweaks.

This isn’t an irrational step. After all, as we go through life solving problems, tweaking something does in fact fix things better than 90 percent of the time. It’s very natural for people — especially people who are more change-averse than your average climate activist, which is about 90 percent of everybody — to comfort themselves with the belief that we just need to do a little of this, a little of that, and it’ll all be better.

We are now at Stage Three not just with climate change, but the economy and health care, too. Everybody knows we need change; not everybody understands yet just how thorough the overhaul is going to have to be. And large-scale change won’t happen until they figure it out themselves, on their own time, in their own way.

There is no avoiding this stage of the process. It’s frustrating for the foresighted people who’ve already figured out that mere tweaks aren’t going to do it this time; but the bitter truth is that there’s no way through this stage but through it. You cannot skip steps, and you cannot rush people through their process. Everybody’s got to go through all of them, on their own schedule.

In fact, trying to rush people through this phase tends to create more problems than it solves. Change agents have two clear choices here: enter the discussion, engage the crowd, and position themselves as clear, calm, credible leaders on the issue; or get out too far ahead of the laggards and snark and whine at them to catch up. The latter strategy pretty much guarantees that they’ll only resent you — and later on, when they get finally serious about change, your name won’t be on the list of credible people who are qualified to make the really transformative decisions. No matter how much you know about the subject, you won’t be at the table when the ultimate choices finally get made — which leaves those choices in the hands of people who want to shape the future for their own ends. Over the long haul, failure to exercise a little restraint and gentle patience while people are catching up almost always carries potentially fatal credibility costs on the back end.

As we approach the end of Stage Three, the process begins to accelerate rapidly, as people’s heightened awareness of the problem makes them more willing to connect external events to the climate change issue.

Stage Four will be a reckoning, still to come (but almost certainly closer than anyone currently expects) that proves beyond arguable doubt that those hoped-for small tweaks have not been enough, and that the only remaining option is an immediate and thorough overhaul of the whole system. This is the tipping-point event that moves the whole population through several stages in the space of a few days or weeks, catching everybody up (or at least a critical mass of everybody — you need at least 70 percent of the population really on board by this point) and leveling the field for change.

The good news is that by the time you get this far along, everybody who matters really understands the issues at stake, accepts that tweaks won’t do it, and can visualize the kind of structural change that’s needed. The earlier stages have mentally and emotionally prepared them to drop their last remaining resistance, and move ahead with solutions that are truly revolutionary. And those experts who haven’t squandered their authority by whining and bitching their way through Stage Three emerge here as the natural leaders of that revolution.

In Stage Five, the changes happen — a process that almost always also changes you forever. We may be the foresighted ones, and the natural leaders; but there’s a lot that happens at this stage that can’t possibly be foreseen. We must be prepared to have a lot of our cherished beliefs and core assumptions melted away in the heat of the transformation. Some of our dreams will be incinerated, too. But others will come true beyond anything we could have imagined, due to opportunities we never could have anticipated. Such is the nature of the process.

Stage Six is the wrap-up phase. The revolution is over, the change is mostly accomplished (though the little tweaks and upgrades will go on for a long while), the newly rebuilt systems are coming online, and the new regime becomes the new normal.  If it’s done well, people feel good about what happened — or, at least, are fairly well convinced that they’re better off than they would have been without the change.

Given the current climate, it’s tempting to deride this perspective as “incrementalism,” which has become the epithet du jour. But everything we know about change says that the deep civilizational shifts we’re looking for will not happen any other way.

There are other forces at work, too. Climate change (like gay rights) has turned into a generational issue that pits older people, who are deeply economically and emotionally invested in the status quo, against younger generations who are convinced that the status quo is untenable and that their own futures depend on creating something new. With every passing year, the power and influence of those younger generations grows, increasing the momentum behind the push for change.

At the same time, if we’re right about this thing, climate-related events are going to increase; and as the change cycle spins forward, people are going to become more willing to identify them as such.

We have to trust the process, and understand where we are in it. The forces are gathering, and the process is accelerating — it’s just not easy to see the deep currents yet, because they’re still well below the surface. While it’s tempting to see Copenhagen as some kind of Last Best Chance, it’s probably more accurate to view it as the first of a series of efforts that are going to come faster and thicker now as that generational momentum and general understanding of the issues continue to build.

Copenhagen, for better or worse, is still the next step forward, and we’ll accept it with greater equanimity if we accept that the resulting tweaks are a natural and necessary phase the world’s more conventional thinkers have to work their way past before they’ll accept the need for a more wholesale transformation. If we’re serious about leading on this issue, we need to take the long view — which means respectfully meeting people where they are, and then gently bringing them along through the next stage, then the next, then the next. That’s what real leaders do.