Save the Earth in Two Not-So-Hard Questions: My reply to that silly Slate piece
Slate has published my reply to economist’s Steven Landsburg’s ill-informed hit-piece, “Save the Earth in Six Hard Questions: What Al Gore doesn’t understand about climate change.”
The editor wisely cut out some of my snarkier comments (Note to self: Slate is not Climate Progress!) but kept the title: “Save the Earth in Two Not-So-Hard Questions: What Steven Landsburg doesn’t understand about climate change” and the last paragraph:
Landsburg seems to believe that only economists can discuss climate change seriously, while the rest of us are wasting everyone’s time: “If you’re not talking about discount rates and levels of risk aversion, you’re blathering.” Landsburg’s piece proves that you can talk about those things and still be blathering.
I do have a serious point to make in the piece. There are two key questions that everyone in the climate change debate needs to answer:
- How great a threat does inaction on climate change pose for future generations’ quality of life–and for life itself?
- Will significant action on climate change require sacrificing our quality of life in any meaningful sense?
To see that the answer to the second question is a definite “no,” you need to define the threat in question 1, which I do at length in my book (and on Climate Progress) and briefly in the piece. My bottom line:
Now we know what truly meaningful “quality of life” losses future generations may face: Irreversible destruction of our coasts, hundreds of millions of environmental refugees, whole regions of the planet in permanent or near-constant drought, and massive species extinction on land and sea, to name but a few.
We must spend what it takes over the next few decades to avoid that fate, especially since it is only money and probably not more than 3% of GDP in 2050.
Landsburg offers a response to my article so lame it needs no detailed counter-response, since he doesn’t dispute a single point I make. He seems to think that economics provides a rigorous answer to the question of how much money we should spend to combat global warming. It doesn’t, especially not the vast majority of conventional economic analyses of climate change that Landsburg seems to favor, as I have argued previously (citing the important if too-neglected work of Harvard economist Martin Weitzman). Economics is one small piece of the puzzle that all of us must wrestle with.
Landsburg persists in his claim that these questions are critical: How much do we care about those future generations? How likely are they to be around in the first place? And how rich are they likely to be? Those are NOT the critical questions — The second and third question, as Landsburg poses them, are easily dismissed, as I do in the piece. The first question is meaningless until you answer my two questions, at which point the question answers itself. We obviously should care enough to avoid subjecting the next 50 generations to a ruined climate. Whether we do care enough, of course, remains to be seen, but that is not a question economics can answer, only time….
Thanks to everyone who offered comments on the original piece.
October 26th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
good answer.
an economist is someone who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. This economist thinks that if you have money, your life is complete and valuable. But we are humans before we are economic machines with more of an attachment to our biology than our money. When our body says die, utimately we will die no matter how much money we have. The environment we live in is also our biology.
beware of people who only value what they can count.
October 26th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Steve Landsburg replies in Slate:
Nothing that Joe Romm (or Al Gore) can tell us about the dire effects of global warming can tell us how much we ought to spend to combat it. Should we spend 1 percent of our incomes? Five percent? Twenty percent? “A whole lot” is not a useful answer to that question.
Because future generations are among the beneficiaries of climate control, the appropriate expenditure level depends critically on the questions Mr. Romm would prefer to ignore: How much do we care about those future generations? How likely are they to be around in the first place? And how rich are they likely to be?
Those are hard questions. But a refusal to confront them is a refusal to take climate issues seriously. I think climate policy is important enough to think about. Mr. Romm, apparently, prefers to bury his head in the sand.
October 27th, 2007 at 1:43 am
Mark Witte,
Joe has dismissed as irrelevant and immaterial author Landsburg’s three critical questions. Let me take a stab at it.
How much do we care about those future generations? Better put, how much should we care about them? As much as we care about ourselves, really. This is an ethical perspective as well as a biological imperative to propagate a prosperous species.
How likely are they to be around in the first place? How far forward do you want to go? 100 years? 200? For sure. 1,000? Yeah! 10,000? Well, you never know.
How rich are they likely to be? You would have to define richness. If you mean the absence of subsistence and lower poverty, I would say the chances are good.
For an economist the first question should always be how much money to spend on global warming and who will spend it. Joe has said he will soon present his top three priorities toward a climate solution. It may surprise you that he proposes policies that are not economically or socially disruptive. They will in fact, he contends, be of great economic benefit.
October 27th, 2007 at 2:11 am
Well, I guess I’ll try to answer some of these hard questions posed by Dr. Landsburg:
How much do we care about those future generations?
Quite a bit.
How likely are they to be around in the first place?
Is this in relation to his stupid asteroid argument? I dunno, Steve, a lot of people believe in the Rapture; should we plan policies around that contingency as well?
I’ll make this prediction: the human race will not go extinct in the next two hundred years. Can we move on?
And how rich are they likely to be?
Don’t really know, but I am willing to guess that relocating two billion people and moving them to Alaska might mean we won’t all be billionaires in a couple hundred years.
October 27th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
What is truly amazing is the extent to which Landsburg, an economist, ignores basic economic concepts. Lets talk about some concepts that Landsburg ignores.
* Normal replacement costs
Many of the coal fired steam plants are old, and are coming to the end of their useful life. New Coal fired steam plants are nearly as expensive as Nuclear power plants to build, and in addition they cost more to operate. The cost of coal is tied to the cost of crude oil, because coal mining makes intensive use of crude oil derivatives. Thus the cost of fuel for coal fired steam plants is expected to rise dramatically over the next 30 to 40 years. Thus replacement fo aging steam plants would be less expensive if reactors were substituted for new coal fired power plants. Thus the substitution of reactors for coal fired steam plants is economically rational even wiyjout considering the problem of CO2 emissions.
Nearly 100% of of ground transportation vehicles will have to be replaced during the next 20 to 40 years. Because of the continued dramatic rapid rise of the cost of crude oil, Electrically powered vehicles will have significant cost advantages over vehicles powered by crude oil derivatives. Thus the substitution of battery powered hybrid and all electric cars for gasoline powered cars, will be economically rational, even with out the problem of CO2 emissions.
Short hall trucks can also be built to be entirely dependent on batteries, Again the operation costs will be less than if motors powered by crude oil derivatives are used.
Long hall transportation can be accomplished by electrically powered trains. The cost of crude oil will bake long range trucking more expensive than transportation by electrified rail. Thus even if we do not consider the economic costs of global warming, the economic benefits of using the process of ordinary replacement to substitute CO2 free technology, for CO2 emiting technology make doing so a no brainer.
* Other secondary benefits
The health related costs of burning carbon fuels in transportation and power production are enormous. For example, In the relatively small Basque region of Spain researchers found that that there had been over 280,000 hospital admissions for respiratory related illnesses. The average hospital stay was for respiratory related illnesses was over 5 days. A few years ago a group of Canadian doctors began to look at the health related costs of producing electricity from coal. They found that atmospheric pollutants from coal fired electrical generating plants were a significant source of health problems in the province of Ontario. The economic costs of coal related health problems was $4.4 billion a year. There is little doubt that emissions from coal fired powqer plants and fossil fuel engine are a major cause of a worldwide asthma epidemic. In the United States alone, the number of people with asthma grew from 6.7 million people in 1980 to 17.3 million in 1998, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Thus the elimination of CO2 generating power olants and the use of CO2 producing transportation technology would save an enormous ammount of money in health related expenses.
* Substitution
Researchers believe that the world production of crude oil is about to peek, and within 10 years it will begin to decline. In the meantime tens of millions of new consumers in China and India are entering the market for personal transportation. This is a formula to drive the price of crude oil ever higher. As of today, the price of crude, which was $12 a barrel as recently as 1998, stands over $90 a barrel today (10/27/07). Experts forecast crude prices as high as $150 a barrel by next year. We either have to engage in an insane competition for an increasingly rare resource, or find a substitute for crude oil in transportation. Electrical energy is a proven source of power for transportation. Thus for surface transportation in the United States, electrical energy will supply an economical and rational substitute for crude oil derivatives. An added economic benefit of this substitution will be that the cost of crude oil will no longer effect the United States’ International Balance of Payments.
* Conclusions
An extremely powerful economic case can be made for the replacement of CO2 emitting technology in the generation of electrical energy and in transportation. This case exists without reference to global warming. Most of the cost of the replacement will be born as normal replacement costs. Major economic benefits will flow from the replacement of CO2 emitting technology, that are not associated with the risk of global warming. Thus even if the risk of global warming were slight, and in fact it is far from slight, the secondary economic benefits of replacing CO2 emitting technology are so great that replacement would be rational even in the absence of a CO2 related environmental risk.
The replacement of CO2 emitting technology with CO2 free substitutes can be financed with
October 27th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Well done Joe. It is interesting that economists believe their discipline offers a comprehensive lens through which the totality of any question can be grasped. People don’t call them on it enough; glad you did.
Marc Sagoff, in The Economy of the Earth dispatches that notion nicely from a philosophical perspective. As a friend of mine says, “Economists are the natural prey of philosophers.”
And to Marc above — “I’m willing to guess relocating two billion people …” sort of says it all.
October 29th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
The first economic question, “What is the uncertainty in the data?”
Major Arctic Sea Ice melt come in 3 years, when it was predicted in no less than 40 years; that means that schedules of events in the IPCC models may be off by an order of magnitude. When the IPCC says, “A minimum of sea level rise of X in a century, we need to be aware that amount sea level rise may actually occur in 10 years, and that there may be problematic sea level rises sooner. Moreover, the sea level rises stated in the IPCC are minimums that we can expect, not the maximums.
If we are going to make risk management decisions based on the information in the IPCC, then we convert the information in the IPCC into risk management terms. Forecasts in IPCC are minimum provable, or most likely. That is not how we manage risk. We engineer and design for the maximum likely or maximum credible event. Nothing in the IPCC provides a basis for risk management activities, planning, engineering, or public policy. The data in the IPCC is raw science, not an engineering basis of design, signed by professional engineers prepared from data developed using ASTM methods. There is a difference.
When the IPCC says that they cannot calculate sea level rise from dynamic ice movements – that does not mean the probability of such dynamic movements is low or that the result will be minimal. It means, they do not know, and the rules of the document do not allow them to estimate.
In the last couple of years we have seen an enormous increase in the number of moulins in the Greenland ice sheet. And, last summer, broad swaths of Greenland received significant rain. The moulins allowed the rain water to carry heat into the heart of the ice sheet. This transfer of heat from a ice free open ocean to the heart of the Greenland ice in not something that is captured in any of the IPCC models. In my experience, ice that gets rained on, falls apart and slides downhill. The moulins prove the process has started. However, because scientists think differently than engineers, this very real and current risk did not make it into the IPCC reports.
The IPCC report is different in terms of quality of data from other event risk reports that are normally prepared by engineers, and which are the normal basis of calculating economic tradeoffs. By not recognizing the nature of the IPCC data; Landsburg hugely underestimates the economic costs, and how soon those costs could accrue