In today’s New York Times, we read John Tierney making the argument that energy systems have an internal logic and will naturally decarbonize. Bonus: that means we don’t need a “rousing speech” for Earth Day. In fact, double bonus, we don’t need to do anything except get filthy rich!

1. There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else. No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries. No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers’ passions to use energy, make money and buy new technology — and that, believe it or not, is good news, because…

2. The richer everyone gets, the greener the planet will be in the long run.

He bases his argument on the Kuznets curve, which basically says that as countries’ per capita incomes rise, they pollute more, but after they hit certain thresholds, they start to slide down the backside of the environmental curve. So, you might start out with a horribly polluting chemical plant in a southern China, but once they worker-citizens have some cash in their pockets, they start lobbying for clean up.

It seems, by-and-large, that things tend to follow this pattern for certain types of pollutants, say, sulfur dioxide. But Tierney (through Jesse Ausubel’s work) extends this curve to carbon dioxide. That requires two huge assumptions: one, carbon dioxide is like other local environmental pollutants, and two, that we won’t run out of some key fossil fuels (i.e. oil). CO2, though, isn’t like other pollutants. You don’t become a Superfund site by spewing out too much CO2; humans don’t die from CO2 exposure. Its effects are subtle, global, and long-term. Dealing with CO2 is more like dealing with poverty or institutional racism than it is like dealing with contaminated water. If you’re born into a rich country, you’re part of the problem no matter what you do. And if you’re poor or brown, you’ll probably disproportionately bear the impacts. This doesn’t strike me like the kind of problem that gets solved on its own, even if Ausubel (and Tierney) argue for a hands-off approach.

“Energy systems evolve with a particular logic, gradually, and they don’t suddenly morph into something different,” Tierney quotes Ausubel.

To someone in 1920, that statement would seem totally ludicrous. If you were born in 1890, you likely no electricity and used little crude, except maybe for lamp lighting. Your fuels were wood and food for yourself and grain for your horses. Then, in 1920, you’ve got a coal-fired burner miles and miles away lighting up your home through electrical transmission lines and you’re driving a car burning oil. The system did suddenly morph, even if it can shoehorned into some

But then what do we make of the rapid rise of crude in the early part of the century? Or rapid rise of coal in the last half-decade? Sure, if you bet on status quo, you’ll get it right a lot of the time, but you’ll miss the times of rapid change, the inflection points.

The coal rebound we’ve seen since 2000, which stopped and reversed a decline for coal in the world’s energy system, flies right in the face of the natural “decarbonization” logic that Ausebel argues for. And it could get worse if we run out of oil and turn to coal-based synthetic fuels. The richest country in the world — the US — is also far more carbon intensive than Europeans. That could just be geography (we’re all spread out) but it could mean that people and politics and policy matter more than the economic determinism of the energy system.

“There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else,” Tierney writes. And that may be true. But cheap oil is going away, the impacts of global warming are being felt, coal is growing, and renewables and the grid they need are maturing. We’re at a moment not unlike the one at the turn of the last century where times already are a-changin. We just don’t know how yet.