A first-person reflection on what we have corrected, what remains measurable, and why environmental questions deserve more precision than politics usually permits
By Joe Cozart
I have become increasingly interested in separating what we know about global warming from what we have been taught to say about global warming. Those are not necessarily opposing categories, but neither are they identical. The atmosphere is a physical system, not a political party, and carbon dioxide has no particular interest in whether I am liberal, conservative, alarmed, skeptical, or simply tired of being lectured. The molecules will behave according to physics regardless of which bumper sticker happens to be on the automobile producing them.
The first distinction I would make is between ozone depletion, conventional air pollution, and global warming. We have spent decades casually folding these subjects into one great environmental morality play, when scientifically they are different problems. The ozone layer was damaged principally by chlorofluorocarbons and related chemicals. Those remarkably useful compounds eventually reached the stratosphere, where ultraviolet radiation liberated chlorine and bromine capable of destroying ozone. Once we understood the mechanism, nations phased out most of the offending chemicals through the Montreal Protocol, and the ozone layer began the extraordinarily slow process of recovery. That is not environmental mythology. It is one of the better examples of science identifying a specific problem, government establishing a reasonably coherent response, industry adapting, and nature responding approximately as the chemistry suggested it should.
Air pollution presents another story. Anyone who remembers American cities and automobiles half a century ago should recognize how much has changed. We removed lead from gasoline. We sharply reduced sulfur in fuels. Catalytic converters became commonplace. Engines became vastly more efficient. Diesel emissions were subjected to increasingly sophisticated controls. Power plants became cleaner. Carbon monoxide, lead, sulfur dioxide, particulates and many of the compounds responsible for the spectacular urban smog of the twentieth century were attacked through engineering and regulation. We did not abolish pollution, but pretending that nothing improved would require ignoring one of the great technological transformations of modern industrial society.
Global warming is different again.
The underlying greenhouse effect is not particularly controversial physics. Carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor and several other gases interact with infrared radiation and influence the Earth’s energy balance. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased substantially since industrialization, and global average surface temperature has risen substantially since the late nineteenth century. Multiple independent observations tell us that the planet has warmed. I therefore see little intellectual value in pretending that warming itself must be either believed or disbelieved. Temperature is measured, not voted upon.
Where the conversation becomes considerably more interesting is after that sentence.
Carbon dioxide is not quite analogous to the pollutants we learned to remove from automobile exhaust. If I remove sulfur from fuel, I can dramatically reduce sulfur emissions. If I improve combustion and install sophisticated emissions controls, I can dramatically reduce carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides and particulate pollution. But if I burn a hydrocarbon, I am combining carbon with oxygen. Carbon dioxide is therefore not merely an unfortunate impurity lurking inside gasoline that an ingenious refinery can remove before I fill the tank. It is an inherent product of releasing energy from carbon through combustion.
That distinction matters enormously.
We have, in fact, made fuel and combustion systems much cleaner. We have also made engines more efficient, which means we can produce less carbon dioxide per mile traveled when less fuel is consumed. We can substitute natural gas for coal in some applications and reduce carbon emissions per unit of energy. We can generate electricity through nuclear fission, hydroelectric power, wind and solar without continuously burning carbon at the point of generation. We can electrify vehicles and industrial processes, although the environmental arithmetic then properly includes where the electricity comes from, how infrastructure is constructed and what the complete system requires. We can investigate carbon capture, synthetic fuels and closed-carbon-cycle approaches. What we cannot do is repeal chemistry because the political vocabulary has become inconvenient.
This is why I resist the habit of using “pollution” and “carbon dioxide” as though they were interchangeable terms. Carbon dioxide can affect climate without behaving like lead, soot or carbon monoxide. At ordinary atmospheric concentrations it is not the poisonous haze that twentieth-century environmental regulation was designed to eliminate. Its significance lies principally in its radiative properties and its accumulation in the atmosphere. One can therefore acknowledge the greenhouse effect without pretending that a molecule of CO₂ should be understood in precisely the same way as a particle of soot entering a child’s lungs.
Nor does acknowledging observed warming require me to accept every prediction, every attribution, every proposed economic remedy or every apocalyptic headline attached to the subject. Those are separate intellectual questions. How much warming has occurred is one question. What caused various portions of it is another. How sensitive the climate will be to additional greenhouse gases is another. What regional consequences will follow is another. How accurately models represent those consequences is another. And whether a particular tax, subsidy, mandate, prohibition or trillion-dollar industrial policy constitutes the most intelligent response is yet another.
Somewhere along the way, public discourse became remarkably impatient with those distinctions.
I find that unfortunate because the ozone story demonstrates exactly how environmental science ought to earn public confidence. Identify the mechanism. Measure the phenomenon. Establish causation as rigorously as possible. Develop an intervention proportional to the evidence. Measure what happens afterward. Revise when the evidence requires revision. That method is considerably less exciting than announcing the end of civilization every Thursday afternoon, but civilization has historically benefited from occasionally allowing engineers into the room.
The same discipline should apply to climate.
I can accept that the Earth has warmed without surrendering my obligation to ask how much, why, compared with what baseline, with what confidence, producing which consequences, over what period, and at what cost to remedy. Skepticism properly understood is not denial. It is one of the instruments by which science distinguishes knowledge from enthusiasm. Conversely, skepticism cannot become an excuse for rejecting measurements merely because their implications are politically inconvenient. Intellectual independence cuts in both directions or it isn’t independence at all.
What interests me most is how much of the environmental conversation remains framed as though humanity possesses only two choices: continue exactly as before until catastrophe arrives, or dismantle industrial civilization in an act of ecological penance. I find neither proposition particularly imaginative.
Human beings are technological creatures. We became prosperous largely because we learned to extract extraordinary quantities of useful energy from nature. The next achievement should not be learning to live with dramatically less capability merely so that we may congratulate ourselves on our restraint. It should be learning to produce dramatically more capability with fewer undesirable consequences.
That means better nuclear power. Better grids. Better storage where storage makes engineering sense. Better combustion where combustion remains necessary. Better synthetic fuels. Better carbon management. Better materials. Better industrial processes. Better use of waste streams. Better measurement. And eventually technologies we have not yet invented.
The ozone layer offers an encouraging precedent precisely because humanity did not solve the problem by abandoning refrigeration and returning to the icebox. We changed the chemistry.
That distinction contains almost the entire philosophy I would bring to global warming.
I do not think serious environmentalism requires fear of modernity. I think it requires improving modernity.
The twentieth century taught us how to produce enormous amounts of energy, mobility, food and material prosperity while inadvertently creating consequences we did not initially understand. The twenty-first century has the opportunity to retain the prosperity while engineering away more of those consequences. That is a far more difficult assignment than writing slogans, but it is also a considerably more interesting one.
So when I consider global warming, I neither dismiss the measurements nor genuflect before the rhetoric. I begin with what can be observed. I distinguish warming from pollution, pollution from ozone depletion, observation from projection, projection from policy, and policy from politics. Then I ask the question that interests me far more than who was right in the last argument:
What can we build that is better?
The atmosphere will not care who wins the debate.
History, however, may care enormously about who solves the problem.
There is another reason I find the ozone comparison useful, and it has less to do with chemistry than with intellectual temperament. The ozone problem was ultimately manageable because it became specific. We were not told merely that mankind was harming nature in some generalized metaphysical sense. Scientists identified particular molecules, described the chemical reactions involved, measured the atmospheric consequences, predicted what would happen if emissions continued, and eventually gave industry a sufficiently defined engineering problem to solve. Once the problem became specific, civilization could act upon it.
Global warming has suffered, in public discussion at least, from becoming almost infinitely expansive. A hurricane arrives and climate enters the conversation. A drought occurs and climate enters the conversation. A flood occurs and climate enters the conversation. A warm winter becomes evidence, an unusually cold winter becomes weather, and before long the ordinary citizen begins to suspect that he has wandered into an argument whose vocabulary changes according to the requirements of the afternoon.
This does not mean climate change is imaginary. It means that a scientific proposition becomes weaker in public understanding when every undesirable meteorological event is recruited as its witness.
Climate is statistical by its nature. Weather is episodic. The difference is elementary and nevertheless routinely abused by advocates on both sides. One hot afternoon does not establish global warming, just as one blizzard does not disprove it. What matters are long-duration measurements, geographic distribution, ocean heat content, atmospheric composition, ice mass, sea level, radiative forcing and the enormous collection of observations from which climate science attempts to reconstruct a planetary system of almost ridiculous complexity.
And complexity ought to produce humility.
The Earth is not a laboratory flask. It contains oceans, clouds, vegetation, ice, soil, aerosols, volcanic activity, solar variation, biological systems, atmospheric circulation and feedback mechanisms operating across radically different timescales. Carbon dioxide is an important variable within that system, but the existence of an important variable does not magically transform an extraordinarily complicated system into a simple one.
This is where I become uncomfortable with certainty masquerading as sophistication.
There is a peculiar modern tendency to believe that once science establishes the existence of a phenomenon, science has therefore established the wisdom of a particular political response. It has done no such thing. Science can help tell me what increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide is likely to do. It cannot, by itself, tell me whether I should build a nuclear reactor, impose a carbon tax, subsidize an electric automobile, prohibit a gas stove, construct a transmission line, develop synthetic aviation fuel, capture carbon underground, or spend several trillion dollars reorganizing an economy.
Those are questions of engineering, economics, probability, geography, national security, political philosophy and opportunity cost.
The scientist deserves a seat at that table.
He does not automatically own the table.
This distinction becomes particularly important when energy enters the discussion, because energy is not merely another consumer product. Energy is the foundation beneath almost everything modern civilization does. Agriculture is energy. Transportation is energy. Manufacturing is energy. Computing is energy. Artificial intelligence is increasingly energy. Water treatment is energy. Hospitals are energy. Refrigeration is energy. National defense is energy. Even the fashionable discussion about electrifying everything eventually encounters the wonderfully unfashionable question of where all that electricity will come from.
I therefore find the phrase “energy transition” slightly misleading. Civilization has rarely transitioned neatly from one source of energy to another. We tend instead to accumulate energy systems. Wood did not disappear when coal arrived. Coal did not disappear when petroleum arrived. Petroleum did not disappear when nuclear power arrived. Natural gas did not eliminate coal everywhere, and renewable generation has not eliminated natural gas. What generally happens is that civilization discovers another way to obtain useful energy and adds it to an increasingly complicated portfolio.
That history should make us cautious about designing the future through prohibition.
The more interesting objective is abundance with progressively lower consequences.
If nuclear power can generate enormous quantities of electricity with extremely low operational carbon emissions, then it belongs in any serious climate discussion regardless of whether it satisfies someone’s aesthetic conception of environmentalism. If natural gas can replace substantially more carbon-intensive coal generation while maintaining reliability, that transition deserves to be evaluated honestly rather than dismissed because it remains a hydrocarbon. If renewable generation can economically supply electricity under appropriate conditions, build it. If storage can solve a particular intermittency problem, deploy it. If carbon capture works economically in a particular industrial process, use it. If synthetic fuels can eventually recycle carbon rather than continuously introducing geologic carbon into the active atmosphere, develop them.
And if some technology fails the arithmetic, we should be sufficiently grown-up to say so.
There should be no sacred technologies.
That may be the most important principle of all.
I am not interested in defending petroleum because petroleum built the twentieth century. Nor am I interested in defending solar panels because someone has decided they symbolize the twenty-first. Technologies are tools. They should be judged according to what they accomplish, what they cost, what resources they require, how reliably they operate, what externalities they create, and whether something better exists.
The atmosphere is indifferent to branding.
This becomes particularly important when discussing carbon dioxide because the objective, if one accepts the premise of reducing anthropogenic climate forcing, should be actual atmospheric results rather than symbolic virtue. A policy that produces impressive political theater while merely relocating emissions somewhere else has accomplished very little. Closing an industrial facility in one country and importing the same product from a less efficient facility halfway around the world may improve a national emissions inventory while accomplishing considerably less for the atmosphere.
Carbon accounting can therefore become one of those wonderfully modern exercises in which everybody improves his spreadsheet while the physical system remains stubbornly unimpressed.
The same scrutiny should be applied to electric vehicles. They eliminate tailpipe emissions, which can provide substantial urban air-quality benefits, and they can reduce lifecycle greenhouse-gas emissions, particularly as electricity generation becomes less carbon intensive. But they are not metaphysical objects arriving from an emissions-free dimension. Batteries require mining, refining, manufacturing and transportation. Electricity requires generation and transmission. Infrastructure requires steel, concrete, copper and enormous capital investment.
None of that constitutes an argument against electric vehicles.
It constitutes an argument for arithmetic.
I want the arithmetic.
I want to know how much carbon a system actually prevents over its useful life. I want to know the energy required to manufacture it. I want to know what happens to the materials afterward. I want to know whether the electrical grid can support it. I want to know the opportunity cost of the subsidy. I want to know whether spending the same dollar somewhere else would remove twice as much carbon.
Those questions should not be considered hostile to environmentalism.
They are environmentalism after adolescence.
The same principle applies to renewable energy. Wind and solar have achieved remarkable technological and economic progress, and in appropriate locations they can produce large quantities of electricity. But intermittency is a physical characteristic, not a political criticism. The sun sets. Wind varies. Demand does not necessarily coordinate itself with either. A grid therefore requires some combination of dispatchable generation, geographic diversity, transmission, storage, demand management and overbuilding to maintain reliability.
Again, this does not make renewable energy bad.
It makes electrical engineering necessary.
I find myself returning repeatedly to that distinction because our environmental conversation has become strangely moralized. We assign virtue to certain technologies and guilt to others. We speak of “clean” and “dirty” as though power plants were characters in a Victorian novel. Yet every energy technology consumes materials, occupies land, requires infrastructure and produces consequences. The relevant question is not whether consequences exist. The relevant question is which combination of consequences produces the greatest human benefit at the lowest total cost.
And human benefit belongs in the calculation.
That sometimes seems almost impolite to say.
Cheap, reliable energy has been one of the greatest instruments of human liberation ever invented. It freed enormous populations from agricultural drudgery. It illuminated homes. It refrigerated food. It purified water. It heated northern cities and cooled southern ones. It powered hospitals, factories, laboratories, universities and the digital infrastructure through which these arguments now occur.
Billions of people outside wealthy countries understandably want more of it.
Any climate strategy that implicitly requires the developing world to remain poor so that the developed world may feel environmentally virtuous is unlikely to survive contact with either politics or human aspiration.
The real challenge is therefore much larger than reducing emissions in wealthy countries.
We need technologies capable of supporting a vastly more prosperous global civilization without proportionately increasing environmental consequences.
That is an engineering challenge worthy of civilization.
And perhaps this is where I differ most sharply from the culture of catastrophe that has grown around climate change. Catastrophe may mobilize attention, but it is a poor long-term operating system. A civilization cannot spend generations frightened of its own existence. Eventually people either become numb to the warnings or begin distrusting those delivering them.
Hope without engineering is sentimentality.
Fear without engineering is propaganda.
Engineering is what eventually matters.
The ozone layer recovered not because humanity became morally pure but because scientists identified a chemical mechanism, policymakers created incentives and prohibitions, chemists developed alternatives, manufacturers redesigned products, consumers continued living their lives, and the concentration of destructive compounds began declining.
The refrigerator survived.
Civilization survived.
And the ozone layer began recovering.
That is an extraordinarily important precedent because it suggests that environmental progress does not necessarily require choosing between prosperity and responsibility. Sometimes the correct answer is technological substitution.
Sometimes we simply invent something better.
That, to me, is the most compelling way to think about global warming. Not as an invitation to deny measurable change, and certainly not as an invitation to panic, but as another stage in the continuing technological maturation of civilization.
We discovered fire and eventually learned that smoke was dangerous indoors.
We built cities and eventually learned that sewage should not run through the streets.
We built factories and eventually learned that rivers should not serve indefinitely as industrial drains.
We built automobiles and eventually removed lead from gasoline, improved combustion, installed catalytic converters and dramatically reduced conventional emissions.
We developed refrigeration and eventually discovered that some refrigerants were damaging the stratosphere, so we replaced them.
At virtually every stage, civilization created capabilities before fully understanding their consequences.
Then, imperfectly and usually much later than we should have, we learned.
That pattern gives me considerably more confidence in the future than another prediction of catastrophe ever could.
The great environmental achievement of the twenty-first century will not be teaching humanity to apologize for having become technologically powerful.
It will be learning how to become more powerful with greater intelligence.
And if we manage that, perhaps our descendants will look back upon the climate argument much as we are beginning to look back upon the ozone hole—not as the moment civilization discovered that progress was a mistake, but as the moment progress became sophisticated enough to begin correcting its own mistakes.
That is a future I find considerably more plausible, and infinitely more interesting, than either denial or despair.
——— GMJoe™ ———
Clarity. Strategy. Sovereignty.
Books by Joe Cozart are available at: amazon.com/author/joecozart
GMJoe.org
Joe Cozart is an author and founder of GMJoe™ Consulting, where he works with companies, institutions, and emerging technologies confronting complex problems that resist conventional solutions. His work focuses on the architecture surrounding a problem—technology, capital, infrastructure, institutions, incentives, geography, communication, and deployment—and on identifying the distinctions and dependencies that determine whether those elements can function as a coherent system. Through systems analysis, pattern recognition, strategic framing, and his Clarity Algorithm, Cozart works upstream of traditional consulting to clarify the problem itself before organizations commit resources to solving it. His broader writing explores sovereignty, institutional systems, industrial civilization, emerging technology, and the architecture of power.