Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

Many major industries have climate risks, starting with insurers.  In this Wonk Room repost, Brad Johnson explains what the SEC did today to help investors understand what those risks are.  I’ll add a note on the two anti-science SEC commissioners at the end.

UPDATE:  SEC has put out a Press Release (and a video of the Chair’s statement).

In a 3-to-2 vote, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission determined today that companies “must consider the effects of global warming and efforts to curb climate change when disclosing business risks to investors.”

Guidelines approved today require companies to weigh the impact of climate-change laws and regulations when assessing what information to disclose, the commission said. The SEC is responding to investors who said companies aren’t providing enough data on the potential risks to their profits and operations from environmental- protection laws. In the 3-to-2 vote, the commission said companies in the U.S. should also consider international accords, indirect effects such as lower demand for goods that produce greenhouse gases, and physical impacts such as the potential for increased insurance claims in coastal regions as a result of rising sea levels.

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The fireworks should fly for this one.  It looks to be Sunday on CNN at 1 and 5 ET (click here for Info).  People should post a video when and if it goes up Sunday afternoon.  I’ll be winging it to Copenhagen then.

This debate is courtesy of Fareed Zakaria (international times below):

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Still, should we be starting a project like this when the economy is depressed? Yes, we should — in fact, this is an especially good time to act, because the prospect of climate-change legislation could spur more investment spending.

Consider, for example, the case of investment in office buildings. Right now, with vacancy rates soaring and rents plunging, there’s not much reason to start new buildings. But suppose that a corporation that already owns buildings learns that over the next few years there will be growing incentives to make those buildings more energy-efficient. Then it might well decide to start the retrofitting now, when construction workers are easy to find and material prices are low.

The same logic would apply to many parts of the economy, so that climate change legislation would probably mean more investment over all. And more investment spending is exactly what the economy needs.

So let’s hope my optimism about Copenhagen is justified. A deal there would save the planet at a price we can easily afford — and it would actually help us in our current economic predicament.

So Paul Krugman wrote in his NYT column today, “An Affordable Truth.”  He has been at the forefront of those explaining why domestic climate action won’t hurt the economy in the long term and is likely to boost it in the near term (see Krugman offers Climate Economics 101, “claims of immense economic damage from climate legislation are as bogus, in their own way, as climate-change denial” and Krugman : Climate action “now might actually help the economy recover from its current slump” by giving “businesses a reason to invest in new equipment and facilities”).

Here’s more from The Nobel laureate in economics, first on the emails:

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With the employment news today about 100,000 jobs better than expected — “the nation’s employers had all but stopped shedding jobs in November” — I thought I’d run this graph Nate Silver posted a couple weeks ago in a post titled, “It’s [Still] The Economy, Dumbass.”

Nate wrote “this is my favorite graph in quite some time,” and pointed out

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An architect and construction manager discuss materials at the site of the Research Support Facilities Project for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which they hope will provide a national blueprint for making buildings greener and cutting energy use.  This piece by guest blogger John Podesta was first published here.  For more on NREL, see my exclusive video interview with director Dan Arvizu here.

The U.S. economy is officially now in “recovery”—our nation’s gross domestic product grew by 2.8 percent in the third quarter of 2009, and growth seems to be continuing—but we still face the challenge of how to create American jobs. Since the start of the Great Recession in December 2007, we have not seen net job growth in a single month. There are increasing indications that even if the economy continues to grow it will happen too slowly to absorb quickly the 16 million people out of work and searching for a job. This in and of itself could stall the nascent recovery, as unemployed consumers are unable to consume at the level businesses need to see before they will hire and expand.

Congress and the Obama administration made enormous strides toward a solution to this problem, most notably by passing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act earlier this year. At the same time, the Federal Reserve has eased credit conditions and continues to keep interest rates low to encourage investment. These actions should be applauded. The fact that we are now emerging out of the Great Recession and not mired in a second Great Depression should not be taken for granted.

But sustained job creation is a long-term problem that cannot be solved with short-term solutions alone. The Federal Reserve believes it may take years before unemployment numbers come down to acceptable levels. Focusing only on short-term and emergency job creation, year after year, will put us in a position of ignoring the long-term investments we need to get our economy back on track. A combination of short- and long-term strategies will begin to ease the unemployment burden on the 16 million people now out of work and on our economy, and will truly allow this country to move forward on a more stable and sustainable economic path.

In short, we must act today to create jobs now and avoid the specter of another “jobless recovery,” but we also must act today to create jobs for next year, the coming decade, and beyond.

The Center for American Progress proposes a wide-ranging set of policies to create jobs. These proposals include: (more…)

Freakonomics got super freaky. And super wrong.

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner are to blame for the global financial crisis.

See, back in 2005, they wrote “Freakonomics,” a wildly successful book brimming with interesting stories about why incentives matter and how actions have unintended consequences. Indeed, incentives do matter, and actions (or publications) do have unintended consequences: Their book made economists around the world more inclined to come up with cute little analyses of the business of being a drug dealer or the impact of a first name on a child’s success. And that distracted them, so they didn’t notice the giant housing and credit bubbles that in hindsight were plain to see. A global collapse ensued.

That’s all nonsense, of course. The forces that led to the current economic troubles were far too big for any one book, or even one current of economic thought, to have caused them. The argument that the Freakonomics guys are to blame for the crisis is provocative and clever and sounds vaguely plausible. It may even contain a kernel of truth. But it fundamentally defies any clear-headed look at reality.

In other words, it’s just like many of the anecdotes that fill “Superfreakonomics,” the sequel to the original bestseller.

This is the Washington Post book review by Neil Irwin.  I think this review just edges out Elizabeth Kolbert’s, but it’s close.  In particular, Irwin covers the U.S. economy and the Federal Reserve for the paper, not climate, so he hits some other parts of the book, like “Patriotic Prostitutes” and drunk walking:

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… let’s be clear that, first, for the most part, the allocation of allowances affects neither the environmental performance of the cap-and-trade system nor its aggregate social cost….

Third, we should be honest that the legislation, for all its flaws, is by no means the “massive corporate give-away” that it has been labeled.  On the contrary, more than 80% of the value of allowances accrue to consumers and public purposes, and less than 20% accrue to covered, private industry.  This split is roughly consistent with the recommendations of independent economic research.

The above quote is from a May analysis of the Waxman-Markey clean energy and climate bill by Harvard University’s Robert Stavins — who is certainly not anyone’s idea of a progressive economist (see here and here), although he is obviously one of the country’s leading economic experts on cap-and-trade.

Some commenters here and elsewhere have described the allocation distribution in the climate bill as a big giveaway to polluters.  The most credible progressive experts I know on energy economics dispute that description (see “Preventing windfalls for polluters but preserving prices — Waxman-Markey gets it right“).

Today, Stavins posted “Confusion in the Senate Regarding Allowance Allocation,” which notes:

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UPDATE:  For an independent vindication of my reporting here, see Bloomberg interview of Dubner and Caldeira backs up my reporting on error-riddled Superfreakonomics. Dubner is baffled that Caldeira “doesn’t believe geoengineering can work without cutting emissions.”

I wish I didn’t have to waste valuable blogging time writing this post to set the record straight.  If, like most people, you understand that Dubner and Leavitt — and Roger Pielke, Jr and Marc Morano — regularly make misstatements and/or misrepresent what others say and that the latter two regularly smear people based on those misrepresentations, you might skip this post.

On the other hand, Dubner and Leavitt still don’t understand what they got wrong — both in the entire chapter and in how they mis-portray the views of the primary climatologist they rely on.  So this post will be useful to set that record straight.  Also, anyone who wants to know how I do things may also find this interesting.  As you’ll see, I have accurately represented what Caldeira believes, and the Superfreaks have not.

The verdict on the book by leading economists is in.  As Nobelist Krugman writes today:

Legalistic quibbling about who said what in an email isn’t going to help Dubner and Levitt here: in this crucial chapter, there’s an average of one statement per page that’s either flatly untrue or deeply misleading.

Berkeley economist Brad DeLong writes today:

Thus I have a little unsolicited advice for Levitt and Dubner. If I were them, I would abjectly apologize.

He then goes through the chapter, offering them suggested page by page edits.

Thus, when I broke the story last Monday, I was accurate in my assessment:  Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’: New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and patent nonsense — and the primary climatologist it relies on, Ken Caldeira, says it is an inaccurate portrayal of me and misleading in many places.

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In SuperFreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner write of Ken Caldeira (page 184), “Yet his research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight.”  What he really believes, as he wrote me last weekend, is:

I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies….  It is wrong to mug little old ladies and wrong to emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero.

Caldeira, the primary climatologist Superfreakonomics relies on, has himself updated his website (click here) to debunk the book’s characterization of his views.  He puts under his picture the following quote:

“Carbon dioxide is the right villain,”  says Caldeira, “insofar as inanimate objects can be villains.”

I noted in Part 1 that Ken Caldeira, wrote me last weekend:

If you talk all day, and somebody picks a half dozen quotes without providing context because they want to make a provocative and controversial chapter, there is not much you can do. The standard way to protect against this, of course, is to give short interviews.

Another thing they said that was misleading (out of many) is that….

Oh, you’ll have to tune in later for that mistake.  For now, I just wanted to make clear that Caldeira does think these guys misrepresented him and made many misleading statements.  He also wrote me:

So, yes, my representation in the Superfreakonomics book is damaging to me because it is an inaccurate portrayal of me. The problem is the inaccurate portrayal, not my actions or statements.

The well-known Berkeley economics professor and blogger J. Bradford DeLong has begun his multiple takedowns of SuperFreakonomics. In one headline, he echoes a query from TNR’s Brad Plummer, Does “Superfreakonomics” Need A Do-Over?

DeLong also prints an email from Dubner, which I excerpt:

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This post looks at Nobelist Krugman’s first take-down of the single most stunning economic error in SuperFreakonomics.  I’ll also take on the authors disingenuous response to the critics (including me), “The Rumors of Our Global-Warming Denial Are Greatly Exaggerated.”

No, I don’t know any critics who called them global warming “deniers” — I don’t use the word in my critiques.  The authors are disingenuously trying to take the high ground by misrepresenting their opponents and creating strawmen, which is their modus operandi in the book.  The primary climatologist the book relies on, Ken Caldeira, said in an extended email interview with me “it is an inaccurate portrayal of me” and “misleading” in “many” places. Levitt and Dubner use the far-far-out James Lovelock as the primary scientific foil in their discussion in order to make their nonsensical views seem plausible (see “Lovelock still makes me look like Paula Abdul, warns climate war could kill nearly all of us, leaving survivors in the Stone Age“).

Still, it’s worth remembering, the book contains these two inane sentences (among many, many others as I’ve shown in Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3):

1. “Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception.”
2. “In other words:  it’s illogical to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing new carbon emissions.”

The authors aren’t deniers per se, but the book is staggeringly anti-scientific and illogical.

And the economics, what little of it there is in the chapter, is utterly wrong.  Krugman just savaged them this morning on their biggest howler.  The Superfreaks write:

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First a favor:  Please digg my original debunking of Superfreakonomics by clicking here.

I’m trying to draw as much attention as possible to the post since the book comes out Tuesday, it has a huge media blitz, and will be heavily reviewed.   My post already been referenced by Nobelist Paul Krugman on his blog (”A counterintuitive train wreck“) and Mother Jones (”The Freaky Science of SuperFreakonomics“) and Think Progress (”SuperFreakonomics Gets Climate Change Super Freaking Wrong,‎” among others.

What’s interesting is that since my original post and various other debunkings around the web, the publisher has stopped Amazon from allowing people to search the book.  It’s fairly common for publishers to allow such searching, though not all do — see Amazon bestseller list here.  But I don’t know of a single instance where searching was allowed and then stopped.  It seems to me the publisher must be concerned that bloggers and others could actually see and quote the myriad errors and sheer illogic and patent nonsense for themselves and not bother buying the book, which at least for now has dropped down to #9 on Amazon (it was 3 or 4 over the weekend).

Obviously, a book that contains the sentence, “Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception,” is anti-scientific.  But probably the worst thing about the book from the point of view of spreading anti-scientific disinformation is the use of the phrase “global cooling” in the subtitle, SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.  Millions of people who never even buy the book will now be subjected to that long-debunked piece of nonsense in book reviews and elsewhere.  The book hits the trifecta of global cooling mistakes:

1. The climate chapter begins with a full page pushing the myth that there was some sort of scientific consensus about global cooling in the 1970s.  Not — see “Killing the myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus.”  The chapter leads off with a NYT article, but, as we’ve seen, even The NYT’s climate coverage in 1970s was a megaphone for science, not ‘global cooling’ alarmism.
2. The chapter pushes the “we’re cooling now myth.”  On page 186, Levitt and Dubner write, “Then there’s this little-discussed fact about global warming: while the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased.”  Sadly, it isn’t “little discussed” — the deniers and media have been pushing this for months now, so it doesn’t even qualify as a contrarian view, just utter rubbish, the kind of conventional wisdom these guys used to debunk.  See The BBC asks “What happened to global warming?” during the hottest decade in recorded history! and Skeptical Science explains how we know global warming is happening: It’s the oceans, stupid! and NYT’s Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation.
3. The chapter pushes the dystopic notion that the only “cooling” strategy we need to address global warming is pumping massive amounts of acid rain pollution into the atmostphere, which I (and Caldeira and Robock) debunk in Part 1 and Part 2:

Frankly, it’s not possible for one person to debunk every error and illogical statement in just that one chapter — and I haven’t even gotten to the economics, which has one of the biggest blunders of all, as we’ll see.  Fortunately, lots of other people are joining in.  The Union of Concerned Scientists has a thorough debunking of the science here,  summarized below:

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