It’s hard to keep track of the problems confronting Americans these days. But, just in case a reminder is needed, climate change is still a thing. Casual observers may have noted that US climate policy has been…underwhelming, see-sawing between ‘Build Back Better’ aspirations and climate denialism. Now climate policy wunderkind Varun Sivaram has called for a rethink on US climate (foreign) policy.

Noting the overall failure of US climate policy, Sivaram calls for ‘climate realism’. Claiming that “the very fact that climate has no political staying power is an indictment of the policy approach presented to U.S. voters” (more on this is a minute), Sivaram argues for a two-step change in approach. The first is to disabuse ourselves of four fallacies

1. Climate goals are achievable. Sivaram says they aren’t and we should just accept 3°C or more this century.
2. Reducing US carbon emissions matters. Sivaram says they don’t because most emissions going forward will come from the developing world.
3. Climate poses manageable risk. Here Sivaram argues that the tail risks are both catastrophic and plausible. It’s worth noting that under a 3°C scenario, these aren’t just ‘tail risks,’ so he’s underselling the fallaciousness of this fallacy
4. Clean energy transition is necessarily win-win. US is a major oil and gas producer, so clean transition will have some economic pain.

The second step, according to Sivarum, is to adopt the three pillars of climate realism:

1. Prepare for warming of at least 3°C—mass migration, increasingly grisly natural disasters, greater competition for resources and military position. In sum, a greater emphasis on resilience and adaptation over mitigation.
2. Invest in globally competitive clean energy technologies: Solid state batteries, advanced nuclear, next generation geothermal.
3. Lead international efforts to avert truly catastrophic climate change. Elevate effort to avoid the worst, civilization-endangering impacts of climate change to a top national security priority. Specifically geoengineering—hello Promethean gap! 

Ok that’s a lot to unpack. To start, there is no reason to believe that the failure of climate as a political project in the US is down to poor policy choice as Sivarum suggests. This matters because Sivaram claims that climate realism can work because it will implement policies with bipartisan support. But if the problem is politics not policy, then there will not be much bipartisan support to be had. That is, Sivarum elides the problem. It categorically cannot be the case that half the political establishment rejecting the idea that there is even a problem is the product of poor policy planning or execution. Policy isn’t the debate. The US hasn’t gotten past the first principles—political—stage of the discussion. 

Take as a contrast Finland,* which had a monumental swing in political orientation between its last government (elected in 2019, led by the Social Democrats under Sanna Marin in coalition with the Green Party) and the current government elected in 2023, which is led by the center-right National Coalition in coalition with the populist-right Finns Party. That is about as large a political swing as is possible in Finland. And while the current government has changed some of the climate policies, the climate politics have remained largely settled in large part because the general public and the private sector in Finland accepts the need for and importance of climate action. So, right off the bat, Sivarum misapprehends the problem in the United States. That means that pillars 1 and 3 of his climate realism are not so realistic after all and will suffer the same oscillations as the rest of American climate policy (see for example the removal of climate change from the Annual Threat Assessment)

Pillar 2 might hang on, but only where such technologies have economic and political support outside the realm of climate and not as a product of climate policy. While there might be some spillover effects into climate, they will be incidental because the political and economic ecosystem won’t exist to apply the technologies at scale. As STS scholars have long argued, technology doesn’t just manifest; it is embedded in social, political, and economic systems that give it form and meaning. Hoping technologies developed for other purposes might be used to address climate change requires a political and social context where that use can be imagined. 

By essentially giving up on mitigation, Sivarum pretends to be jettisoning ‘fallacies.’ But the thinking here has so many problems it is hard to detail them all. As Katharine Hayhoe has noted, we cannot adapt our way out of the climate crisis. Sivarum dramatically underappreciates the extent of the changes a 3°C or more scenario would entail. How would the international system deal with tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of refugees when domestic political systems are stretched to the breaking point by changes in agricultural productivity, weather patterns, storm intensity, freshwater availability, and so on? Would capitalism survive, and if not how would humans across the globe order their economic systems? Would the nation-state itself survive? By understating the consequences of abandoning mitigation, Sivarum isn’t embracing realism but rather fantasy. 

While Sivarum is undoubtedly correct that the majority of carbon emissions going forward will be from developing countries, that doesn’t make US climate mitigation action meaningless. Even setting aside the moral obligation the US has as the largest historical emitter of carbon, abandoning mitigation is unrealistic for a range of reasons. 

1. US will have to pay for mitigation eventually. The longer we wait, the more we have to pay as we mitigate and adapt in the teeth of increasingly vicious climate change. 
2. Active mitigation policy by the US will create political space for subnational actors in the developing world that want to push mitigation measures in their own countries. We have seen this dynamic play out in the US during the first Trump administration when subnational actors in the US looked to Europe for inspiration and support to pursue mitigation on the subnational level.
3. By pursuing ambitious mitigation the US can help shape the development and deployment of the advanced energy technologies of which Sivarum is enamored. Technology is ideas about form, function, and use of the material world.  Countries will be far more willing to accept those ideas from a United States that has been in the fight against climate change than one that has abdicated its responsibility. 

Readers at this point might ask if I have something better to offer. Honestly, no. I don’t know how to address the first principles problem of US climate politics. But hiding from that under the guise of ‘realism’ is anything but. And, perhaps more perniciously, Sivarum’s ‘realism’ offers to absolve Americans of our responsibility: Why bother to try to alter the politics around climate change if it isn’t ‘realistic’? Just give up, accept a world ‘full of horrors’ and continue as you were. International relations has and will continue to struggle to confront climate change as an analytical subject, but Sivarum’s surreal climate realism is surely not what we are missing.

*My time in Finland was made possible by Fulbright Iceland, Fulbright Finland Foundation, and the Fulbright/NSF Arctic Security Award.