Some Charity to CAP

UPDATE: Julian Wong explains in the comments.

My friend and colleague Ben Hale tells me that we political scientists are trained to be cynical whereas philosophers like him are trained to be charitable. Maybe so. Here is an attempt at a charitable reading of a perspective attributed to a climate expert at the Center for American Progress:

Julian Wong, a senior energy policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, noted that energy efficiency, while all well and good, doesn't alone influence a country's absolute emissions.

A charitable reading of this is that Mr. Wong was horribly misquoted mis-paraphrased. Because as everyone knows, energy efficiency does indeed alone influence a country's absolute emissions. In fact, energy efficiency is really only one of two levers that we have to influence emissions, the other is carbon intensity of energy supply. So Mr. Wong should act quickly to correct the apparent misquote mis-paraphrase, as less charitable readings would all but certainly conclude that with perspectives like that, CAP doesn't really know what it would take to decarbonize the global economy.

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