Beyond Denial: How Oil Execs Shaped a Landmark Climate Study [View all]

https://www.propublica.org/article/wedges-climate-research-bp-fossil-fuel-princeton

IT IS RARE that a single scientific paper shapes how people think about a challenge as daunting as climate change. But one, known as “Wedges,” published 22 years ago by researchers at Princeton University, told an irresistible story.

It made solving climate change seem possible, even simple. It claimed that the world didn’t have to wait for innovation because it had the tools to start work immediately.

The trick was to do a little of everything and let the effects add up. Renewable energy, nuclear power and conservation were certainly pieces of the solution puzzle. But so were a slew of steps that involved using oil, gas and coal despite the carbon dioxide emissions they would continue to produce.

One fix that “Wedges” leaned especially hard on was carbon capture and storage, a technology that promised to grab carbon pollution from smokestacks and other sources and trap it forever underground. Do that enough, and climate change could be curtailed without upending the world as we know it.

The paper, written by scientists Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, became a phenomenon. Former Vice President Al Gore highlighted it in his Oscar-winning climate change documentary. U.S. presidents from George W. Bush to Joe Biden incorporated ideas from it into policy. The United Nations’ panel on climate change worked it into at least three major reports over more than a decade. It was presented in classrooms at Harvard and MIT and cited more than 3,000 times in scientific papers. It was even turned into a board game.

For a generation, people learning how to address global warming were taught the ideas in the “Wedges” paper.

*snip*