For those of you convinced that the coming U.S. presidential election is make or break for limiting the damage of climate change, here’s a one question quiz. Which candidate released a statement saying: “Under my Administration we will continue to reduce CO₂ and focus on American made energy”?  Many on both the right and left will be surprised to hear it was Donald Trump. This from a former president who deleted virtually all references to climate change from government websites, pulled out of the only major international climate agreement of the 21^st century, and tweeted that climate change was invented by China to undermine U.S. manufacturing (later claiming the China part was a joke). 

We have indeed come a long way from 2016 and are, perhaps, finally at a point where many in both parties may recognize that climate change is an existential threat to human well-being at home and abroad. There is a bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in Congress, and the Conservative Climate Caucus has 82 members. What’s taken us so long, and, more importantly, how do we move forward from here?

The effects of increasing greenhouse gases on the global temperature have been known since the late 1890s, when the first climate model was created by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius (it does a remarkable job of predicting the warming that occurred over the last century plus). The warming footprint of CO₂ produced by fossil-fuel burning was first detected in 1938, and studies by scientists at Exxon and elsewhere in the 1960s and 1970s showed that increasing emissions would lead us into dangerous and uncharted climate conditions if fossil fuel use was not curtailed. By the 1990s the first in a seemingly endless series of consensus reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made the same point, and those reports appear every five years or so – to much fanfare in left leaning news outlets and little coordinated international action.

The political left tends to couch this story as proof that monied interests (particularly fossil fuel companies) have been so dishonorable, paid off so many politicians, and tried so hard to discredit what is one of most robust scientific consensuses in history that despite decades of incontrovertible evidence of this impending catastrophe emissions keep going up and up and up. As a colleague said the other day in despair: “They [oil companies, utilities, industry] have blocked any meaningful progress on climate for 30 years.”

Let us be clear – it is unequivocally the case that fossil fuel companies have, for decades, deliberately tried to undermine a global scientific consensus on the causes and threats of human caused climate change. It’s also true those on the political right have been slow to acknowledge the cause, nature, and enormity of the threat climate change imposes. These are some of the reasons we have lost the chance to keep global warming below 1.0, 1.5, and maybe even 2°C.

But just because the left was the first to “accept the science” does not mean the left has a copyright on the solutions to the current challenge. No one does. We are going to need everyone around the table to tackle this defining challenge of our century (and perhaps of all centuries so far in human history). It does not help to proclaim “it’s all your fault.” It does not help to shoot down any proposed solution advocated by your political opponents. It does not help to repurpose the phrase “climate change denial,” which used to mean unreasonable denial of the scientific consensus that human combustion of fossil fuels was the primary driver of climate change, and deploy it against anyone advocating for market-based approaches to the climate problem.

These approaches are rampant on our college campuses, on the left side of the aisle in our legislative bodies, and in blue states filled with climate conscious SUV drivers who still heat their large homes with fossil combustion. This alienates a growing group of conservative climate concerned policymakers, business people and ordinary citizens who are anxious to contribute to solutions. It also alienates the vast middle who are concerned about climate change but not enough to make it their primary issue.

This ideological purity test is counterproductive, and gives the false impression that there is only one pathway to solutions. Perhaps worst of all, it ignores the fact that enormous amounts of progress are being made on the climate problem, progress that has resulted from a variety of political, economic, and social approaches. For decades, scientists have been saying “There is no silver bullet, but there is silver buckshot.” Until recently, we took this to mean that there are lots of small solutions that combined can add up to a big effect. But there another way to interpret this phrase – lots of different social, political, and economic approaches, some embraced by the right, others by the left, are needed to keep temperatures in the “bad but not horrible” range. 

To illustrate the claim that real progress is being made using the buckshot of solutions from across the ideological spectrum, let’s start by looking back a couple of decades. For many Americans, 2006, the year Al Gore produced his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” was the year climate change made it onto the radar. The left embraced his message, at least in part because it came from a left-leaning politician. The right rejected it, at least in part for the same reason.

If you had asked a scientist in 2006 how much warmer the planet was going to get under “business as usual,” they would have said 4-5°C (7-9°F) by 2100. China was ramping up coal use at unprecedented rates, and India would soon follow suit. Emissions in the U.S. and Europe were falling slightly, mostly because of outsourced manufacturing, but the rapacious consumption in these wealthy regions was driving the rise in manufacturing emissions elsewhere. New fossil fuel deposits and drilling technologies meant the world was awash in “methane gas” (also known as natural gas), particularly from the U.S. and Russia. This provided for cheap electricity and heating, producing more energy per unit of CO2 emitted at the point of combustion.  But methane itself is a potent greenhouse gas, and leakage from the well to the point of use may make it little better as an emissions reduction strategy than oil or coal. 

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