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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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This is a guest post from economist Eban Goodstein, Director of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy.  It is partially excerpted from this Grist piece.  He and his colleagues at the E3 Network have just released a detailed study on The Economics of 350.  The figure compares cumulative emissions for a 350 ppm CO2 trajectory.

Recently, many climate scientists have doubled down on the “safe” level for atmospheric CO2.  To avoid global warming catastrophe-collapse of the continental ice-sheets and sea level rise of dozens of feet — prominent voices led by NASA’s James Hansen are now telling us we have to get down to 350 ppm, and quickly.

Game over?

No. Instead, time to adjust our thinking about what is possible.

Several co-authors and I recently completed a report for Economics for Equity and the Environment Network (E3), surveying the economic studies informed by recent science. The report  found that quicker action aimed at 350 makes good economic sense. With likely investments of about 1-3% of global GDP, we could rewire the planet with clean energy, rebuild global forests to trap billions of tons of carbon, create jobs, and stabilize the climate. And depending on the price of oil, these investments might actually save us money.

Is 350 Possible?

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MEMO TO THE MEDIA:  The nation’s energy and climate problems have reached the point where obstructionist politicians cannot be given a free pass to simply criticize those attempting to solve those problems while offering no credible alternatives or business-as-usual policies.

At 11:30 ET, Senators Boxer and Kerry (and others) will introduce the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.  For the cost of about a postage stamp a day per U.S. household, the bill would generate millions of clean energy jobs, while preserving and protecting clean air, clean water, and a livable climate.

At 2:45 ET, Senator Inhofe and other GOP Senators will hold a “Press Availability on Boxer-Kerry Energy Tax” in Senate Radio-TV Gallery S-325.  But in fact, it is Senate conservatives who are pushing the really big tax on Americans — a double tax, really, since doing nothing on climate and clean energy is the one certain way to ensure

1. Our energy bills soar just as they did under the do-nothing policies of George W. Bush and the conservative-led Congress and
2. Our children are saddled with the staggering cost of desperately trying to adapt to catastrophic global warming.

We know that if the final energy and climate bill that hits Obama’s desk retains the energy-saving provisions of the House bill, it could save $3,900 per household by 2030 and would cut the U.S. foreign oil bill $650 billion through 2030, saving $5,600 per household.

The only existing GOP energy proposal, the American Energy Act (AEA), is nothing more than a good old-fashioned 25% energy tax on consumers (see here).  The GOP plan — or doing nothing at all, as the GOP Senators will apparently propose today — means no savings from energy efficiency, no stop to soaring oil prices and a soaring trade deficit in oil when the economy and petroleum price rebound.  It means no effort to preserve a livable climate.  In short, it is just Cheney-lite, if it’s possible to be lighter than the Cheney energy plan.

What are the benefits to our children of not destroying their livable climate, of averting 10°F warming over much of this country and 5+ feet of sea level rise by century’s end, of not turning the oceans into a large, hot, acidified dead zone?

York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity published a recent analysis that found the “clean air, clean water, clean energy jobs bill creates $1.5 trillion in benefits.”  But that was at a low societal cost of carbon.  For a more reasonable estimated cost of the impacts of carbon dioxide, say, $68, they estimated the total cumulative net benefit of climate action is $4 trillion (see Chart 2, page 31 here).  And that didn’t even include an analysis of the plausible worst-case scenario for global warming, which we now know is 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic in 50 years!

In fact, a more rigorous new analysis by top “scientists led by a former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” found the “net present value of climate change impacts” of $1240 TRILLION on current emissions path, making mitigation to under 450 ppm a must.

Doing nothing thus imposes an unimaginable burden — a multi-trillion dollar carbon pollution tax — on our children and grandchildren.

A do-nothing energy policy also means higher energy bills in the next decade, just as it did in the last one.  In April, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a detailed analysis showing the main result of the Bush-Cheney plan was that energy costs rose more than $1,100 for the average American household:

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Even corporations are losing patience with the deniers: earlier this week Pacific Gas and Electric canceled its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest over the chamber’s “disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality” of climate change.

So the main argument against climate action probably won’t be the claim that global warming is a myth. It will, instead, be the argument that doing anything to limit global warming would destroy the economy. As the blog Climate Progress puts it, opponents of climate change legislation “keep raising their estimated cost of the clean energy and global warming pollution reduction programs like some out of control auctioneer.”

It’s important, then, to understand that claims of immense economic damage from climate legislation are as bogus, in their own way, as climate-change denial. Saving the planet won’t come free (although the early stages of conservation actually might). But it won’t cost all that much either.

So Paul Krugman wrote in his Friday NYT column, “It’s Easy Being Green.”  He provides more detail in two blog posts, “The textbook economics of cap-and-trade” and “Pigou, Glenn Beck, and the false case against cap-and-trade.”  For more, see my post “Intro to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar.”

Then on Monday, Krugman wrote another climate column, “Cassandras of Climate.”  It delivers a key political message:

I’m not, by the way, saying that the Obama administration was wrong to push health care first. It was necessary to show voters a tangible achievement before next November. But climate change legislation had better be next.

Why?  Because the climate situation is so damn dire.  As Krugman explains:

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This post, written by Brad Johnson and Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, was first posted here.  See also “EIA analysis of climate bill finds 23 cents a day cost to families, massive retirement of dirty coal plants and 119 GW of new renewables by 2030 — plus a million barrels a day oil savings.”

As Politifact wrote Friday, the numbers that conservatives like Beck are using are “false” — “Nowhere in the documents does the Treasury Department cite the $1,761 figure,” explains the fact-checking website.

Last night, Glenn Beck accused President Obama of “outright lies,” engaging in a “coverup” of the cost of his green economic agenda. Beck claimed that “buried” Treasury documents from March show that the cost of a cap-and-trade carbon market to regulate global warming pollution is $1,761 per household per year, despite the president’s assurance to the American public in June that “the price to the average American will be about the same as a postage stamp per day“:

I have a question. Did the President of the United States tell the people in Congress about this? Facts are stubborn. Don’t they suck? It is always the coverup that gets you. March 9. June 25. Mr. President, did you tell Congress about prior estimates? That, you know, that you knew about? Or did you just kind of keep it secret and hide it away from them and those pesky American people? I want to show you something that I said a few weeks ago. I was talking directly to the Democrats. I was telling them wake up. “Democrats in Congress, wake up! You are being played and you’re being bypassed.”

Watch it:

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When we last left CBS’s Declan McCullagh, he was promoting another fossil-fuel-funded, falsehood-filled CEI attack on clean energy reform.  I’ve been at Elizabethtown College talking to their terrific faculty and students, so I haven’t been able to respond in detail to all of the nonsense he has been peddling, but Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has another great post that I will reprint here.

Yesterday, libertarian blogger Declan McCullagh, a senior correspondent for CBSNews.com, made the incendiary claim that the Obama administration was suppressing Treasury Department documents detailing the true cost of limiting greenhouse gases. After CBS published the story, “Obama Admin: Cap And Trade Could Cost Families $1,761 A Year,” Republicans claimed this was a startling admission, since it has officially estimated an average household cost in 2020 of $80 to $175. It turns out, however, that the $1,761 figure was constructed by McCullagh himself, not the administration, using a new form of economic analysis, Twitternomics:

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Back on August 5, I explained How the Senate can fix cost containment in the climate bill with ‘price collar plus’.  E&E News then noted that Boxer was considering a modified ‘price collar’ for climate bill.   Now Energy Daily reports (subs. req’d):

Moving to assuage concerns about the potential costs of capping U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer has included an allowance “price collar” provision in climate change legislation she is drafting that would establish maximum and minimum prices for emission allowances in the early years of the cap-and-trade program the bill would create, The Energy Daily has learned.

The draft legislation, which Boxer (D-Calif.) plans to introduce at the end of the month, would establish an initial allowance price ceiling of $28 per metric ton of carbon dioxide and a price floor of $11, with the prices adjusted upwards annually thereafter, according to a source familiar with the measure.

Under the provision, if heavy demand pushed allowance market prices above the $28 ceiling, the government would borrow allowances from future years and sell them to regulated entities at the ceiling price, a move that in theory would reduce demand for allowances and lower prices.

The minimum, or floor, price would ensure that government-administered allowance auctions generate sufficient revenues to fund climate change adaptation efforts, for example, and other climate change-related public benefits.

This is almost precisely what I proposed.   I had originally suggested using the House’s starting floor price of $10, but recently suggested raising that to $14.  So $11 is a good start, but I hope Boxer and the Senate goes higher.  Equally important — the bill needs to have both the floor and ceiling rising 5% plus inflation every year thereafter.

This Carbon Collar is a vast improvement over the House bill.   Fence-sitting Senators and industries can legitimately see it as achieving stronger cost-containment protection than their analysis suggests the House bill now provides, including protection against speculators running the permit price up, while progressives can legitimately see it as achieving better environmental outcomes than their analysis suggests the House bill now provides. Win-win.

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You’d think the serious media (and politicians) would treat with some skepticism the disinformation issued regularly by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which runs fossil-fuel-funded, falsehood-filled ad campaigns aimed at destroying the climate for centuries.  But as Brad Johnson shows in this Wonk Room piece, the pathological disinformers of CEI are still treated as if they had the credibility of, say, a CSI pathologist.

According to Declan McCullagh, a libertarian blogger who works for CBS Interactive, secret Obama administration documents reveal that the cost of clean energy cap-and-trade legislation would be $1,761 per household — despite official estimates from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Energy Information Administration of about a postage stamp a day [see summaries and links below]. Based on Treasury Department documents acquired by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), McCullagh claims that “a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent“:

The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent. A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration’s estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.

This is pure twaddle. McCullagh is confabulating a “disclosure” out of whole cloth:

Obama’s Plan Would Have Established Tax Cuts For Working Families. In his State of the Union address, President Obama proposed a green economy plan that would create a $100 to $200 billion carbon market and use the money raised from polluters for middle class tax cuts.

Congress Did Not Adopt President Obama’s Plan. The Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) is comprehensive clean energy legislation, coupling the carbon market with national renewable energy and energy efficiency standards. Unlike Obama’s plan, the ACES Act would establish a more limited carbon market, distribute most permits for free to polluting industry, with provisions that compel utilities to pass along their value to ratepayers, and provide further assistance for low-income consumers. One can’t use an analysis of Obama’s proposal to calculate the economic benefits of the legislation now being considered.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act Builds A Clean Economy For A Postage Stamp A Day. The EPA estimates a net cost of about $100 per household per year, which would be fully offset for lower-income consumers. The Congressional Budget Office — which did not consider the energy efficiency measures or the cost of inaction — determined “that the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion—or about $175 per household.”

The American Clean Energy and Security Act Cuts Electricity Bills And Dependence On Foreign Oil. The EPA has found that Waxman-Markey cuts household electricity bills by seven percent by 2020. The EIA found the legislation would save Americans $5,600 per household in reduced dependence on foreign oil.

To come up with false claim that Obama’s plan was “the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent,” McCullagh ignored where the money would come from — polluting industries with billions of dollars in annual profits — and where the money would go — tax cuts for working people.

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Fossil fuels have very volatile prices.  Solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, energy efficiency — not so much.   So the Senate Committee on Energy &  Natural Resources should be holding a hearing on how the climate and clean energy bill — which  accelerates the transition to clean energy sources that never run out and that stabilize the energy bills of American taxpayers — decreases voltality.

After all, the House bill’s huge push on energy efficiency (which is nowhere to be found in the Senate energy bill), actually keeps American energy bills flat (or declining) even as the carbon price rises (see “The triumph of energy efficiency: Waxman-Markey could save $3,900 per household” and “New EPA analysis of Waxman-Markey: Consumer electric bills 7% lower in 2020 thanks to efficiency“).

But in fact on Tuesday the committee is having a hearing “to explore potential costs and price volatility in the energy sector as a result of a greenhouse gas trading program.”  Why?  As E&E Daily (subs. req’d) explains:

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As award-winning journalist Eric Pooley concluded in a comprehensive study of the media’s mistakes and biases during the Lieberman-Warner climate bill debate, “The press failed to perform the basic service of making climate policy and its economic impact understandable to the reader and allowed opponents of climate action to set the terms of the cost debate. The argument centered on the short-term costs of taking action–i.e., higher electricity and gasoline prices–and sometimes assumed that doing nothing about climate change carried no cost.”  See How the press bungles its coverage of climate economics — “The media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress.” The following repost from guest blogger Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, looks at a new study that aims to help address the flaw in economics coverage.

A new analysis of clean energy legislation finds that it will produce likely economic benefits of $1.5 trillion. The finding by the New

York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity explains that the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) is “cost‐benefit justified under most reasonable assumptions about the likely social cost of carbon.’” In “The Other Side of the Coin: The Economic Benefits of Climate Legislation,” the Institute for Policy Integrity finds that the “benefits of H.R. 2454 could likely exceed the costs by as much as nine-to-one”:

Using conservative assumptions, the benefits of H.R. 2454 could likely exceed the costs by as much as nine-to-one, or more. The estimated benefits do not include a significant number of ancillary and un‐quantified benefits, such as the reduction of co‐pollutants (particularly sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide), the prevention of species extinction, and lower maintenance costs for energy infrastructure. Due to those limitations, the benefits estimates should be considered to be very conservative.

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