By Ken Lee

A few weeks ago, a very good-looking girl messaged me on Facebook. She would be in town and thought we could meet at the American Museum of Natural History to catch a lecture on global warming. I agreed. I knew about global warming but I had never been to the Museum before and there was always the chance she would be up for a drink afterwards.

At the Museum, polar explorers Will Steger and Tobias Thorleifsson recounted their arctic dogsled expedition across the collapsing ice shelves of Ellesmere Island. The aim was to provide a first-hand report on the impact of climate change. The message of a warming globe is one that most of us have already heard. What struck me though was the way Will Steger spoke about oil. On several occasions he mentioned oil and each time he would pause momentarily, frown, then phrase his words in the same way: ‘When oil prices rise—and they will—a low carbon economy becomes essential,’ or, ‘When oil prices rise—and they must—clean technology becomes economical.’ Will Steger’s point was clear and for a brief moment, I daydreamed of using Jedi mind tricks to raise the global price of oil.

A few years ago, the price of energy soared. And like an optical prism dispersing a beam of light, the ensuing energy crisis scattered public opinion into an array of colorful ideas. The most popular of these ideas was solar power and investors descended on the sector turning companies with names like ‘Solarfun’ into smart investments. The future of solar power was bright but when the recession drove down the price of energy, the sector deflated and has yet to regain its oomph.

Clean energy sounds best during periods of resource scarcity. When the price of oil rises, alternative energy becomes economically viable. This attracts additional capital, expanding scale, enhancing technologies and lowering the cost of production. This is the natural market mechanism and it works very well if everything is priced correctly. But economists have shown that this mechanism is distorted by the absence of environmental costs in the calculus of the cost-benefit equation; the true cost of oil is rarely factored into the markets and we still don’t know this cost.

Even though expensive oil motivates green investing, a price surge can be dangerous. It leads to short-term solutions, like drilling offshore or in the Arctic Refuge. In the tar sands, it justifies boiling huge plots of earth to extract a few drops of oil in a polluting process more reminiscent of careless alchemy than sustainable strategy. In developing countries, where academics have long documented a causal relationship between oil and violent conflict, it can serve as an impetus for further conflict.

In 1972, the economist Anthony Downs introduced his idea of the Issue-Attention Cycle, where an exciting problem will gain sudden attention for a short period of time before gradually fading away as other, more dramatic, problems arise. His theory, applied somewhat loosely, is applicable to the rise and fall of the solar sector. The energy crisis was a boon for environmentalists because it opened a window of opportunity for profitable green investments. But it was nevertheless a crisis and a crisis can lead to some pretty bad decisions.

So maybe this is the paradox—real environmental change will only be driven by some near catastrophe and all that comes with it.