From time to time in the national conversation, we hear references to “cognitive dissonance.” It’s the discomfort we feel when our actions and beliefs conflict with reality. The results include anxiety, guilt and efforts to downplay the conflict.
The consequences are much more severe when the conflict involves a life-threatening situation. Americans have been locked in cognitive dissonance about climate change for more than 30 years. The result is growing financial and emotional stress as climate-related disasters destroy homes, threaten industries, and increase both federal spending and consumer prices.
The federal government’s official goal is to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030, just five years from now, on the way to decarbonizing the economy by 2050. Yet the government still encourages fossil-fuel production with public subsidies and favors, including tax breaks, research grants and access to public lands.
According to the International Monetary Fund, American society’s direct and indirect support for fossil fuels totaled a staggering $757 billion, or $2,243 per person, in 2022, the most recent year the fund analyzed. That’s more than twice the $370 billion investment the Inflation Reduction Act allocates for clean energy over the next 10 years.
So 80 percent of America’s energy still comes from fossil fuels, the U.S. is the world’s second-biggest source of carbon emissions, and we produce more oil and gas than any other country.
To put it plainly, the federal government is engaged in a carbon cartel with the fossil energy sector. Oil companies and their investors are reaping unprecedented profits by feeding the world’s oil addiction, along with the inequities and misery it causes. Our national energy policy is self-defeating, causing climate change while trying to end it. And for all their importance, the clean energy investments in the IRA greenwash our much more significant support for fossil fuels.
To end cognitive dissonance, the United States must begin with three immediate steps.
First, we must end the subsidies, something 61 percent of Americans support doing. Current government policies turn the “polluter pays” principle on its head. Instead of requiring Big Oil to pay for the damages of global warming, the government pays it to produce the fuels responsible for the damage. Rather than invest record profits in their transition to zero-carbon energy, oil companies have raised executive pay, increased shareholder profits, and made investments to secure production into the 2030s.
The industry is now trying to give us another reason. Foreseeing an eventual drawdown of fossil-fuel consumption, big oil companies like ExxonMobil and Shell are turning to more production of plastics — another ubiquitous product made from petroleum, with wastes so severe that the United Nations has set the end of this year as a deadline for a “legally binding instrument” to end plastics pollution.
Second, we must take the advice of economists and put a price on carbon, which they describe as the single most effective policy to confront climate change. New research confirms it: A study in the journal Nature analyzed the impact of 1,500 climate policies in 41 countries and found that most make little difference in stopping climate change. The most effective single policy is a carbon price, a measure the U.S. House approved in 2009 but the Senate failed to take up because Republicans threatened a filibuster. Congress has not considered carbon pricing since.
Thirteen states have already implemented carbon pricing; it should be nationwide.
Third, we must create and implement a national energy transition plan. Uncoordinated voluntary efforts to reduce carbon pollution have proven insufficient. To put the nation back on track to halve emissions by 2030, we need a detailed national plan that includes firm goals, carbon pricing, a defined exit strategy for fossil fuels, and sticks as well as carrots.
What’s the proof that volunteerism doesn’t work? The Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 spawned voluntary carbon-cutting plans from the world’s nations, along with scores of business and government coalitions. However, Bloomberg reports that companies are responding to pressure from conservatives by quietly pulling back from their climate and other green goals.
A year ago, the World Resources Institute assessed 93 intergovernmental initiatives for climate action and found an “urgent need for greater cooperation among governments on policy, finance, technology and other areas.” The same is true domestically.
McKinsey & Company finds that although we’ve made significant progress employing clean energy technologies over the nine years since the Paris Accord, “the at-scale deployment of all these technologies is not happening as fast as needed to reach 2030 targets.” A Global Progress Report identifies the many areas in which nations are moving too slowly or failing. McKinsey says the barriers in the U.S. include permitting delays, uncertain economic returns, hesitation in capital markets, and the fact that too many announced projects have not been “greenlit” for final approval.
There is precedent for national energy planning. In 1977, after the U.S. survived the Arab oil embargo, Congress created the Energy Department and directed presidents to submit “national energy policy plans” every two years. The law required the federal government to develop the plan in collaboration with state and local governments, the private sector and the public. The last plan was produced by the Clinton administration in 1999.
By 2012, the Bipartisan Policy Center pointed out that U.S. energy policy was again “lacking long-term vision, being captured by special interests, being poorly implemented and coordinated, and at times, being internally inconsistent.”
There also is a great deal of work to draw on. Last fall, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued a comprehensive plan for the U.S. to achieve a “fair and equitable transition” to net-zero-carbon by mid-century. Many public and private organizations have created transition roadmaps on topics ranging from buildings and transportation to nature-based carbon sequestration. The Presidential Climate Action Project has posed several roadmaps on its website. The McKinsey & Company assessment also includes recommendations.
However, America’s most troubling cognitive dissonance is that only 31 percent of Americans think democracy is working well — and in many areas, including climate change, the fault lies in our failure to use it. More than 80 percent of Americans acknowledge that climate change is happening, yet 123 members of the current Congress and the Republican Party’s presidential candidate still deny it.
The November election is a chance for voters to bring national energy policy back in line with reality. We’ll see if they do.
William S. Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy.
