Harm reduction for the planet

What the war on drugs can teach us about fighting climate change

Pablo Escobar pumping gas, as imagined by ImageFX

The War on Drugs was always doomed to fail, because it was a supply-side solution to a demand-side problem. Enough people in the rich countries love cocaine and opiates that there’s always going to be strong demand for hard drugs. Trying to address this issue by cracking down on the people supplying the drugs —growers in the developing world, traffickers in Mexico, peddlers on first world streets— is self-defeating in the most literal way possible: the more you “succeed” at busting traffickers, the scarcer drugs become on the street. If demand holds steady while supply contracts, scarcity just means higher prices, and even bigger profits on offer to traffickers. The more you succeed in cracking down on some dealers, the bigger the profits on offer for everyone else on the supply-side. It’s a strategy that can’t work.

And, behold, it doesn’t work!

If you have any seat-of-the-pants feel for supply-and-demand dynamics, you’ll find all this unexceptionable. It’s the reason a Very Respectable (TM) publication like The Economist called on Joe Biden to legalize cocaine. You can go to any polite cocktail party in Georgetown or London or Madrid and make that argument with little fear of social reprisal. It doesn’t count as edgy or controversial or particularly original, it’s fodder for super-boring economics journals. And it’s the reason almost every Western country has tended to lean more and more on harm reduction strategies and less and less on interdiction.

You know what will get you in trouble, though? Transferring those same insights to the climate sphere.

And yet, the dynamic is pretty much the same.

Enough people in the rich countries love flying and cranking their ACs (to say nothing of living in concrete structures and eating meat) that there’s always going to be strong demand for things that emit greenhouse gases. Trying to address this issue by cracking down on fossil fuel companies is self-defeating in the most literal way possible: the more you “succeed” at depriving some producers of capital, the less oil and gas is produced. If demand holds steady as supply contracts, scarcity just means higher prices, and even bigger profits on offer to the fossil fuel companies. Disinvesting in some oil companies just means bigger the profits on offer for everyone else on the supply-side. It’s a strategy that can’t work.

And, behold, it doesn’t work!

In both cases, reducing demand is really the only longer term strategy that will work. Alas, reducing demand is hard. A lot of effort has gone into it, with results that have mostly disappointed. The drivers of demand for hard drugs —poverty, despair, anomie— lie mostly outside policy-makers’ control. Which means governments can pull every lever they have to prevent demand from drugs from rising…and it can still rise.

When it comes to demand for things that generate greenhouse gases, a similar dynamic is in place. A bit of progress has been made in the developed countries, which are reducing emissions, albeit slowly. But for each particle of carbon dioxide developed countries have stopped emitting this century, developing countries have added five. With carbon, as with drugs, the underlying drivers of demand are largely outside the reach of policy. That’s an unfortunate fact, yes. But it’s a fact.

With drugs, we’ve gradually come around to the unwelcome realization that if fighting supply won’t work, and the drivers of demand are largely outside policy-makers’ control, we’re going to have to fall back on some sort of harm reduction approach. Maybe it’s safe injection sites, maybe it’s subsidized drug rehab, maybe it’s making sure first responders always have Naloxone on them. These aren’t policies anyone is going to love, they’re second-best kludges we put in place because the alternatives are so much worse.

When it comes to carbon, though, this shift towards harm reduction thinking has been much slower. Bring up calls to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or to cool the planet directly through enhanced albedo, and the climate establishment blanches. “That’s just giving polluters carte blanche to pollute!” they’ll say, and consider the argument settled. “Moral hazard” is the beginning and the end of that discussion: reduce the harms that come from pollution, and you create incentives for more pollution.

The climate space is where the drugs space was 50 years ago. Once upon a time, harm reduction approaches to drug addiction were fringe politics: roundly dismissed with the same kind of moral hazard reasoning. I’m old enough to remember when conservatives argued vehemently that if you shield drug addicts from the consequences of their choices, you’ll end up with more drug addicts. That reducing harm means reducing stigma, and reduced stigma will mean more drug abuse.

I think most people, left and right, left that mode of thinking behind some time ago. Even if harm reduction is hard to get right in practice, policy-makers these days accept that too many of the harms of drug abuse fall on people who don’t abuse drugs. The people addicts steal from to pay for a fix, for one thing. But, especially, the addict’s children, serially abused and neglected. And so policy-makers try, as best they can, to try to reduce the harm from drug abuse, because the alternative is just horrific. That doesn’t mean they love harm reduction. Who could? But they hate it less than they hate the consequences of doing nothing.

But then, the people who’ll suffer the most from climate change are also not the heavy emitters. The Wall Street financier jetsetting in his Gulfstream from one junket to the next is comprehensibly shielded from the harms he does to the planet. The people who will suffer the most are invariably those with the least power — subsistence farmers in Africa and South Asia already on the edge of ecological viability, first of all. But also our great-great grandchildren, the generation due to be born in the first quarter of the 22nd century, right around the time when the really hairy harms we’re teeing up now are going to be at their harshest.

Our focus ought to be to reduce the harms to them.

They are the addicts’ kids in this story: blameless, powerless, extraordinarily vulnerable, and first in line for our compassion. When it comes to the war on drugs, we understand there’s something inhuman about refusing to reduce the harms to punish the addict. First, because it won’t work —the vast bulk of addicts won’t stop using just because we refuse to reduce harms. But mostly, because of the monstrous aberration of meting out extraordinarily harsh “punishments” that will mostly land on the wrong targets.

We don’t, however, extend that same sort of reasoning to climate. The climate establishment is happy to let kids in Uganda grow up stunted by year after year of bad harvests under too-hot-to-farm conditions, just to prevent giving the New York financier any excuse to feel better about his private jet.

Only a monster —or a zealot— thinks like that.

The heaviest, harshest impacts from climate change will fall on the people who did the least to cause it. They’ll fall on today’s poorest people. And on people born long after you and I are dead; people who definitely, definitely aren’t to blame for any of it.

We owe it to them to try to reduce the harm as much as we can. We can do that by switching to safe, abundant, zero-emission energy. We can do it by developing ways to take carbon out of the atmosphere cheaply, at scale. We can do it by figuring out ways to make the planet cooler, directly.

But we can’t do it by holding the victims of climate change hostage to some puritanical strain that demands they suffer to preserve our sense of moral rectitude.