Wanted: Emissions-Lite Girls. And Thawed Dinosaurs.

I work in the most unsexy profession there is.

Before I tell you what I do for a living, I want to see if you can guess. Am I a…chess grand master? Nope, guess again: that cerebral intensity and rare talent for sweeping queens off their feet put Bobby Fischer and his coworkers a safe distance from the bottom of the rankings. Perhaps a fast food chef? Closer, but again, perhaps there’s a layer of meaning to “i’m lovin’ it” that not all of us can appreciate. Plumber? Nay! Despite a bad rap earned by a few careless tradesmen wearing their jeans one size too large and one inch too low, the prurience of the plumber is attested to by the fact that, next to pool boys, they probably have a starring role in more pornos than any other profession. Plus, as of the recent election, plumbers have now been elevated to the status of amateur politician and foreign policy expert.

Nope, my profession’s inherent unsexiness dwarfs all of these. I am a climate policy wonk. It’s sort of like being a monk, except instead of making beer and occasionally trying to do good in the world through acts of charity, you stare at a screen and think about ways to reduce atmospheric concentrations of invisible, scentless gases that will lead to devastating effects on our planet and way of life many decades from now.

I know what you’re thinking. “Aww that’s great! Good for you!” And secretly, “Damn, that IS unsexy. I thought he might at least be a schoolteacher. But perhaps the accompanying levels of altruistic feel-fluffy-goodiness must compensate for that overwhelming level of unsexiness.”

Wrong. Here’s why working on climate change is inherently unsexy. First off, the subtext of the all-too-typical reaction above: whenever you tell someone that you work on climate change, the “that’s great” usually gets accompanied by a slightly pitying, slightly bemused smile, the same sort of smile you’d get if you said you banged your head against a wall for a living.

In our society, success is sexy. The problem with working on climate change – an invisible, long-term problem – is that there is no good metric for measuring success. In other professions, success is measured by real-world, tangible results. Successful doctors have healthy patients. Great musicians have sold-out concert halls and platinum selling albums. Talented plumbers have useable toilets and the occasional interview on Fox News. On the other hand, if you’re a brilliant climate policy tactician, you’ll have a great design for a cap-and-trade program or an amazingly efficient carbon tax…but you’ll get scolded for wanting to dismantle the economy or having too much sympathy for polar bears. In climate-wonk world, if you’re good at what you do, you quite literally have nothing to show for it. The whole point of being successful in addressing climate change is that you’ll never see any results; success is measured by a total absence of anything happening. Greenhouse gas emissions will go down, so temperatures won’t rise. Storms won’t increase in intensity or frequency. Droughts won’t get worse. And let’s face it, that’s incredibly boring. “Helping things stay the same” is hardly something to brag about. In fact, it’s one of the lowest-selling bumper stickers out there (just doing slightly better than “Proud Parent of an Honors Student…at a Suicide Bombers Academy!”). Success is decades away and invisible.

If you still doubt that climate policy is a notoriously unsexy line of work (perhaps your heart’s still aflutter over the idea of a baby polar bear savior) let me tell you exactly what I think about all day. I think about cap-and-trade. I see that you still have Knut paddling around in your eyes, so allow me to continue. Cap-and-trade is a market mechanism designed to achieve a desired level of pollution reduction (in this case, greenhouse gases) in the most low-cost manner possible. This is done by setting a cap on the total level of emissions allowed across the economy, and then creating a market (and thus a price) for these emissions by distributing tradable emissions “allowances” (basically, rights to emit). Sources have to hold allowances equivalent to their emissions, and since these allowances can be freely bought and sold, and some emitters will have more low-cost opportunities for emissions reductions than others, the market will ultimately find the most low-cost emissions reductions available to achieve the desired level of emissions.

Holy-shit-boring, right? And that’s just the tagline. Cap-and-trade design is enormously complex and tremendously unrewarding (again, if your policy works, you’ll likely see slightly higher energy costs, and suffer the blame for them, along with static sea levels that allow an extenuation of our love affair with Gulf Coast real estate).

I think about this a lot, but the sad truth is, there is just no way to make cap-and-trade sexy, despite the fact that it’s all about internalizing externalities (anyone? anyone? no?). I’ve tried desperately to think up plotlines to thrillers involving climate policy wonks racing against the clock to keep unchecked climate change from wreaking havoc on the world, but the storyline inevitably gets bogged down in questions about whether allowances get given away freely or auctioned, whether agricultural emissions should qualify as offsets projects, and other such timeless questions that I’m sure plague all Hollywood boilerplate actioneers. I’ve even fantasized about “Cap-and-Trade: The Porno!”, which would of course feature gratuitous “trading” of “emissions” [allowances] and “full coverage” [of the electricity sector]. But I always run up against the ineluctable truth that other professions are just sexier by varying, but always prohibitive, margins. Firemen sweat and pant as they pull victims from smoldering ruins; I consider the tradeoffs between going with a 10,000 metric ton emissions reporting threshold or a 2,500 metric ton emissions reporting threshold, while occasionally adjusting the thermostat in my office. Lawyers stand up for justice and righteousness and maintain the rule of law; I think about various ways of limiting atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide equivalent to 500 parts per million over a span of decades. Other branches of work involve people who jump into volcanoes or discover holy grails hidden inside of lost arks stored deep within Thuggy temples; climate change has people who watch ice flow or sift through dirt trying to get a better sense of carbon cycles. It is really, really hard to make that sexy.

Yet, I’m working hard to think of ways that it can be. The emissions that contribute to global warming come from every sector of our economy, and meeting this challenge requires the active involvement of individuals at every level of society. But inspiring that involvement is going to take some work. Even if they grudgingly accept it’s a real problem, people are put off by climate change; switching light bulbs or wearing a sweater indoors in the winter or keeping your tires inflated is about as sexy as Dick Cheney reading his own medical records out loud. So finding a way to make climate change sexy is the first, and perhaps most crucial, step on the path to its invisible, thankless solution.

First off, media treatment of climate change needs a sexover. CNN’s “Planet in Peril” is a good start with its dramatic music and Bourne Identity editing style (who knew that rapidly cutting between pine trees and glaciers before quickly splicing to a worried-looking gazelle could be so stimulating?), but more could be done. First, Anderson Cooper should probably be greased up and shirtless, and carry a large semiautomatic weapon. As with anything on T.V., it would also help if there were dinosaurs. Perhaps Anderson could imply, between bursts of machine gun fire aimed at encroaching velociraptors, that warmer temperatures had awoken them from a 65 million year hibernatory slumber…and now they’re hungry! Also, it’s generally accepted that losing weight is a sexy thing to do. As it happens, it’s also good for the planet! Heavy people eat more (which requires more carbon-storying trees cut down to grow more food, or more methane-spouting cows, or more fertilizer, or all of these things) and require more energy (i.e. fuel) to move around in cars or on trains. So, we should pay people to lose weight, and calculate how much emissions go down for each pound they lose, achieving the coveted double dividend of a healthier planet and healthier populations (assuming, of course, they keep it off). Coupled with this, not nearly enough is being done to market a low-carbon lifestyle in a sexy way. Why haven’t we had a television campaign featuring the Emissions Lite girls giggling in bikinis as they switch their old light bulbs out for new compact fluorescents? Also, they should start giving glaciologists and climate modelers their own exhilarating soundtracks anytime they appear on T.V. (maybe they could borrow Anderson Cooper’s).

Alas, while this may offer a start, it fails to get at the inescapable unsexy fact that the rewards of good climate policy work consist of seeing absolutely nothing change in the world around us. I’m looking into playing chess or fixing sinks, but in the meantime, I remain condemned to thinking about how to keep those baby bears from drowning…and the negative consequences of “busting” the “cap”.