Nisbet found that more than 80 percent of those funds were devoted to promoting renewable energy, communicating about and limiting climate change and opposing fossil fuels, while only two percent, or $10.5 million, was invested in technologies that would lower carbon emissions like carbon capture storage or nuclear energy. The donations themselves were also very concentrated; more than half of the money disbursed by the philanthropies was directed to 20 organizations in total.

“One of the conclusions that I think is probably the most important from the Nisbet study is that there’s not a lot of support for intellectual diversity on the climate issue, which is a shame because what the world’s doing isn’t working,” Pielke, a professor at the University of Colorado Center for Science & Technology Policy Research, told Western Wire. “So you’d think that there’d be at least some resources going into looking at new approaches, alternatives, even if they’re contingency plans.”

But according to Nisbet’s research, that is not where the vast majority of environmental grants are being applied. Funding for non-profit journalism, communications plans, and political campaigns dwarfs that of developing new technologies for carbon abatement. And yet, despite more than $150 million being invested in messaging, polls show that the push has failed to register climate change as a top-tier policy concern for Americans.

“If we’re worried about the accumulating amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, then for all the politics, for all the noise, for all the heat, it is ultimately a technology problem,” said Pielke..”

The key in doing so will be to shift the characterization of climate change from that of a political football to a question of innovation, according to Pielke.

One of the major reasons for the stagnation in climate progress can be attributed to the extreme polarization of the issue over the past few decades. Nisbet notes in his study that environmental causes began partnering with other grassroots organizations seeking “social justice-oriented solutions to climate change” and employed an “intersectional” strategy which connected the issue to other causes more aligned with the liberal ideology in order to build a larger movement. Nisbet says this strategy “likely contributed to deepening political polarization, serving as potent symbols for Republican donors and activists to rally around.”

In an absence of legislative action and failure to cultivate broad, bipartisan support for long term solutions, policy has been relegated to executive action, which can be reversed once another administration enters the White House.

“The problem is, that the climate issue has for 20 years been owned, taken over, by some of the most far-left activists, who have the leading voices on the issue,” Pielke said. “The politics inside of the climate movement such as it is, tend to favor progressively getting more extreme… if Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger and me—aren’t considered acceptable company in the climate movement – they’re never going to get to [Republican Senator from Oklahoma Jim] Inhofe.”

Ultimately, according to Pielke, there is an argument to be made on both sides of the spectrum that acting on climate change will be beneficial in the long term. Market forces can be powerful, as witnessed with the rapid adoption of shale gas once it was established as a cheaper, cleaner fuel source.

“Until the community embraces the idea that we don’t know everything about how to solve this issue, politically, technologically, policy-wise, then there is really not a lot of motivation for engaging in that difficult process of building bridges, searching for policies that might work,” Pielke said.

Cue the twitter attacks on Nisbet and Pielke Jr.(too numerous and boring to recount here).

Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute responded with this twitter thread:

1. Going to engage this against my better judgement. The issue at bottom is not about differing theories of change, it is about how we negotiate both the uncertainties associated with climate change and differing values about how we orient toward those uncertainties.

2. The effort to remove Roger from 538 was culmination of years of effort at CAP &elsewhere to delegitimize his work &ours. Strategy was to a) conflate the green climate agenda with climate science and b) reduce the debate to a zero sum conflict between climate advocates &deniers