How Climate Change Policy May Cause Economic Disruption

A little while ago, I wrote a post discussing why I didn't think that a tax on emissions of greenhouse gases would result in an overall decrease in buying power spread across the economy. In that post, I focused on how a policy might work out if it were slowly phased in; my intention was to set aside the possibility of certain problems that a climate policy may expect to face in order to focus only on a particular set of concerns about overall buying power in the light of increasing the cost of emissions. In this post, I want to address some of the issues I set aside in that earlier post. Particularly, I wanted to focus on the possibility that by implementing a new climate change policy, we could disrupt the existing economic order in a very significant way, and that this might be expected to produce some very worrisome impacts. (Again, this post will talk about carbon taxes; if the translation to cap-and-trade schemes is confusing, I can explain.)

So here's the deal. As I explained in the previous post, a good carbon tax is built on the idea that we make carbon-emissions-intensive goods more expensive with a tax. The proceeds are used to finance a tax cut elsewhere which has the effect of making non-emissions-intensive goods relatively less expensive by increasing consumers' buying power (stated in terms of nominal dollars). This would tend to have the effect of increasing the demand for non-emissions-intensive goods at pre-tax prices, and lowering demand for emissions-intensive goods at prices reflecting the pre-tax price and the carbon tax.

In the previous post, I discussed an example involving two consumers (Cynthia and Xavier) who were part of an economy including rocks (which do not take carbon emissions to produce) and rubber balls (which do take carbon emissions to produce). Before the tax, both rocks and rubber balls cost $5. After the tax, rubber balls cost $6 and the price of rocks is unchanged. The proceeds of the tax on the rubber balls, I said, was used to finance a tax cut so that the consumers each ended up having more buying power than they would have had otherwise (in dollar terms).

If such a policy were enacted, we would imagine that people would shift their consumption choices in the direction of rocks and away from rubber balls. If we held market prices fixed for the moment, we would expect people to demand more rocks and less rubber balls. This could create an incentive for suppliers to decrease the prices of rubber balls in order to avoid building up excessive inventories, and to increase the prices of rocks in order to avoid creating a shortage. Alternatively, it could create an incentive to decrease the production of rocks and to increase the production of rubber balls. In practice, it would more than likely be a combination of both.

So here's the problem: In our modern economy, there is a lot of capital invested in the production of emissions-intensive goods. In our example economy, we might imagine that many rubber balls are produced using a sophisticated ball-making machine. And it may be that at the new lower demand, some of the companies that invested in these ball-making machines would need to sell them or might even go out of business. The people who made the ball-making machines would see demand for their products drop, and perhaps they would be put out of work. The ripples would move outward.

Of course, on the flip side, the rock producers would experience some seriously good times, at least at first. Once the drop in rubber ball demand put some people out of work and decreased the salaries of others, it's conceivable that the decrease in those individuals' consumption would balance out the increase in demand for rocks created by the carbon tax, or even outweigh it.

It should be clear that the more drastic a tax is imposed, and the more quickly it is implemented, the more significant the impacts on the structure of the economy. In our example, we might imagine that the tax was imposed only with a five year warning. In the scenario, it seems rather likely that the impacts would be substantially less severe. Producers would have time to plan for the tax, and they would be far less likely to make investments that would turn out to be really awful. Or alternatively, we could imagine that the tax was relatively small, and so the shift in demand might be rather small.

But with a quickly implemented or severe tax (or both), it seems rather clear that the impacts would be very noticeable. A number of otherwise sound investments would be converted into misallocations of resources, and these would need to be liquidated. It seems important that we acknowledge this possibility when we think about our climate policy options. Of course, nothing said here shows that we should reject climate taxes; I just think this is a side of the picture that needs to be seen.

Lighting Authoritarianism Is Hilarious

It appears that the European Union is set to ban certain energy-inefficient light bulbs, "forcing consumers to buy more energy efficient alternatives." First to go will be conventional 100 and 60 watt pearl bulbs and frosted 25 and 40 watt bulbs; the rest of the inefficient bulbs will be "phased out" (i.e., prohibited by force of law) by 2012.

Do I care? No. But I did find one part of the article to be utterly brilliant. According to the owner of the British lighting chain Ryness, "We are seeing people coming in and bulk buying. People like frosted bulbs because they have a softer light." But according to a spokesman for The Lighting Association, a European Trade Association, "Consumers will realize in the end that the alternatives provide substantial savings and have equivalent light quality to incandescents." Sends chills down your spine, doesn't it?

For the uninitiated, the problem with the spokesman's statement is not that "They're regulating light bulbs! Communism is right around the corner!" The problem is that this guy has an opinion about the quality and value of these products that is very clearly not shared by a lot of people. And these people are apparently willing to spend a whole lot of extra money in order to have light bulbs that this guy finds to be equivalent to the cheaper ones. So could it be that the fluorescents have yet to prove their value to some people?

I personally use compact fluorescents in my home. They work just fine, and I'm very happy to save the money, energy, and space it would take to maintain a supply of incadescents that would match the life of the fluorescents. But the light bulbs are very much not the same. Fluorescents take time to heat up, they look funny, and they emit a decidedly different quality of light. Maybe I will "realize" that this wasn't true after I haven't seen an incandescent light bulb for a while, but while I still see the differences every day, it's pretty difficult to come to that "realization." Again, I don't mind the differences, but some people might. And if they're willing to actually pay money in order to not use fluorescents, then why on Earth would I want to forcibly stop them from doing so?

One possible answer might lie in the fact that the European Union is trying to limit CO2 emissions. Using energy inefficiently, then, is not just a waste of money -- it's a contribution to global climate change. I may be reading into this too far, but it seems to me that what's happening here is a proclamation that "The differences between fluorescent and incandescent bulbs are not important enough to justify allocating a portion of our CO2 budget to allowing consumers to use incandescents." But this is exactly the kind of mindset that market-based policies are designed to avoid! The whole point of a market-based policy is that you increase the price of the thing you want to avoid, and people cut back wherever it's the least uncomfortable for them to do so. The policy is specifically designed to make it so regulators don't have to decide where those cuts will take place; that's the problem with centrally coordinated programs!

According to the owner of Ryness, if you watch what people are doing, you will clearly see that switching from incandescent light bulbs to fluorescents is not the least uncomfortable thing to do. The fact that people are motivated to actually go to the store and buy massive quantities of light bulbs suggests that they are quite uncomfortable indeed with this switch, and are willing to significantly go out of their way to avoid it!

And so in conclusion, facepalm.

Some Thoughts on the Cost of a Carbon Tax

Lately I've been hearing a lot from some people on the Right about potential climate change legislation and why it's going to be horrible. The idea from some of these people seems to be that whether we have an auction-based cap and trade system (which would be relatively imbecilic but seems more or less inevitable) or a carbon tax system, the end result is going to be that we end up paying a whole bunch of money, and we're all going to go straight to the poor house as a result.

Since I think that auction-based cap and trade systems are excruciatingly dumb, I'll focus my comments on a carbon tax system. If this gives anyone an ulcer, I'll be happy to explain how these thoughts can apply to a cap and trade regime, but I'd rather not have to do those gymnastics if no one's ultimately going to care. The subject of this post, then, is whether or not a carbon tax should be expected to force us all into poverty. I will avoid here the question of whether or not such a policy would be advisable in an all-things-considered sense, since that's a question far too big for this post. Suffice it to say that I don't think the necessity of such a policy is as obvious as some people make it out to be. But that's a conversation for elsewhere.

So here's how an effective carbon tax (in the sense of mitigating contributions to climate change) might be expected to work. The government slowly phases in a tax on things like coal, natural gas, and petroleum which are cited as sources of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as other influences on the climate system like agriculture, land clearing, etc. The revenues from the tax are used to finance a tax cut (ideally structured to cancel out some of the potentially worrisome distributive effects of the tax) or to finance some government expenditure that otherwise would have resulted in a tax increase (i.e., paying for the preposterous stimulus programs). The goal of the policy is to increase the price of energy-intensive goods with the tax, and to use the revenues to ensure that people do not lose overall purchasing power. Accordingly, people would have an incentive to shift their consumption away from energy intensive goods and towards non-energy-intensive goods. And while those who purchase disproportionately energy-intensive goods would be expected to suffer, those who purchase disproportionately non-energy-intensive goods would actually be expected to benefit.

Let me illustrate this in action. Let's say we have an economy with two goods: rocks and rubber balls. Producing and using rocks, in our example, does not involve any net impact on the climate system, whereas producing rubber balls involves the use of a substantial amount of fossil fuel. Rocks and rubber balls both cost $5 before the tax. Now let's imagine that every year, Xavier typically buys three rocks for $15, and three rubber balls for $15. And imagine that Cynthia usually purchases five rocks for $25 and only one rubber ball for $5.

Now we implement a carbon tax of $1 on rubber balls, so they now cost $6. The argument from some on the Right says, "Well look; now Xavier's consumption would cost $33 and Cynthia's consumption would cost $31, instead of both costing $30! This is a tragedy!"

But watch: let's say that Xavier and Cynthia don't change their consumption patterns in light of the tax. Xavier ends up paying $3 more in taxes to finance the purchase of the rubber balls, and Cynthia ends up paying $1 more. The government now uses its $4 to finance a $2 tax cut for both Xavier and Cynthia. So now Xavier ends up paying $1 for consuming a disproportionately high amount of rubber balls, and Cynthia actually gets paid $1 for consuming a disproportionately low amount of them.

In such a scenario, we might expect that the parties would see an opportunity to benefit from shifting their consumption away from the more expensive rubber balls. And the extent to which they were doing this before others or to a larger degree, they would benefit. Those who stubbornly insisted on consuming rubber balls, the argument goes, would simply be forced to pay the price for their anti-social behavior.

Things are a little more complicated with real governments who never actually do things like returning all the money, and where there are costs associated with implementing and enforcing the tax. But at least that's the idea. If the tax is revenue neutral, the only people who go to the poor house are the people who have a far greater impact on the climate than everyone else. And when those people go to the poor house, everyone else gets paid for being more responsible. So yes, some people would lose, but it seems like the advocates of this policy would want this sort of thing to be happening. Accordingly, the argument from some on the Right -- which focuses not on how we wouldn't want to trust the government with this policy, and not on how expensive it would be to implement, but only on the fact that it involves an increase in prices -- seems to me to be an utter failure in its current form.

Accordingly, it seems to me that this argument should be abandoned. There are other more plausible arguments that could satisfy the Right's thirst for some reason to oppose climate change legislation. They could question the ethical basis for such a policy, arguing that cost-benefit analysis (by which the policies are typically justified) are not ethically legitimate grounds for the kind of intervention that would be involved in the policy, and that the philosophical groundwork that would be necessary for an alternative analysis has not been satisfactorily settled. They could voice doubts about the government's ability to implement a policy like this in any way that wouldn't be a disaster more morally questionable than letting climate change happen. They could argue that given the amount of restructuring that will be necessary to substantially decrease our contributions to climate change, the resources we use to mitigate climate change could be better used fighting malaria around the world, bringing clean water to those who don't have it, researching cancer and AIDS, or any number of other things. But this overly simplistic argument about costs is misguided, and should be trashed.

A Tentative Plan for an Overly Ambitious Climate Change Project

Anyone who's been following my work will know that a main focus of my research is global climate change, viewed from an ethical and political perspective. In this post, I want to sketch out where I'd like to go with that research and how I'd like to compose a complete product. These will only be sketches, and only working sketches at that; I imagine things will change rather dramatically as I move forward. But hopefully they'll help me to organize my thoughts. And if anyone out there is interested in helping me work on some of this stuff, I'd really love to know. It would be amazing to be able to finish this project for a dissertation, but I don't know if that will be possible if I have to do this all alone... Anyway, here it is (as usual, the mainstream scientific standpoint is taken as a premise for the first parts):

1. Collective Action Problems and Coercion

Climate change is a problem that, on its surface, seems to fit right into the model of a public goods problem. People acting on their own independent interests are collectively producing something that appears to be bad. If we were to desire to prevent this bad thing from coming about, we would either need to alter the set of incentives facing the relevant agents (in this case, basically everyone) so that they would adjust their behavior, or perhaps we would need to take steps to mitigate the effects of their actions.

When we talk about an appropriate response to climate change, however, we don't have in mind a sort of Buchananite consensus-building endeavor in which we try to get everyone to agree to a system that would uncontroversially represent an improvement over the current one. Rather, we intend to coerce people -- that is, to influence them to follow plans besides their own by force if necessary -- in order to bring about the desired outcomes.

But we can't just go around coercing people whenever we think we could bring about "better" social outcomes by doing so -- we need some justification for infringing upon individuals' rights to self-determination. Accordingly, this section would attempt to sketch the kinds of reasons that one might offer in defense of an infringement of someone's right to self-determination, all focusing on duties held by the individual whose rights are being infringed.

I will discuss self-defense briefly, acknowledging Roderick Long's contributions in thinking about dealing with climate change from this paradigm, but ultimately conclude that it doesn't make much sense to approach the issue of climate change in this way. I will therefore sketch out two alternative sources of duties which might help us to justify coercion: the duty to show appropriate respect for others' rights and the duty to attempt to mitigate tragic or catastrophic consequences. The next two sections will be elaborations of these issues.

2. Climate Change as an Infringement Upon Rights

This section will draw heavily on my paper, "Justice and Climate Change: Towards a Libertarian Analysis," which will be coming out in The Independent Review in the Fall. It will outline the foundations of a duty to respect others' rights, and explore the ways in which we might think of climate change as infringing upon rights. I will build upon my earlier paper to address some of the issues that were left undiscussed there.

One way in which I will go beyond that paper in this section will be to discuss the question of whether these infringements upon rights would constitute rights-violations. I will predicate this discussion on the premise (which I will challenge in Section 4) that individuals who contribute to global climate change are responsible for the rights-infringements, and search for ways that those individuals might try to defend their actions. The purpose of this discussion will not be to reach any definitive conclusions, but rather to give us a starting point for thinking about these questions in Section 4 when we try to pin down exactly what individuals are responsible for, and how we should think of their duties in light of such an analysis.

3. When Are Consequences Correlative?

This section draws its inspiration from the concept of correlations between duties and rights, observing that some intuitively plausible kinds of duties don't seem to correlate with rights. Some of these duties which are non-correlative with rights seem to make reference to things that we owe to ourselves or to ideals to which we are committed. But others seem to have to do with our duty to promote "the good," or at least refrain from promoting "the bad" or destroying "the good."

In this section, I will attempt to approach the impacts of climate change from this sort of consequentialist perspective, trying to decide when consequences correlate with duties to act in certain ways. I will initially focus on impacts on groups of humans and on cultures, but I will attempt to expand my discussion to incorporate a consequentialist theory of environmental ethics. Much like in the previous section, my discussion in this section will be structured so as to rely on a set of carefully chosen suppositions about individuals' responsibility for bringing about these consequences that will be challenged in Section 4, but not in a way that makes the discussion here useless. Again, the purpose of the discussion here will be to create a starting point for the analysis in Section 4.

4. Collective Responsibility and Individual Duties

This section will bring into focus the emergent nature of the climate change problem, and attempt to engage the literature on collective responsibility in order to understand how we should approach this problem. I will focus particularly on Virginia Held's discussion of the responsibility of "random collections" to organize themselves to address faults corresponding to non-distributive predicates like "caused global climate change." I will draw attention to Held's reservations about the choice of a proper decision-making procedure and search for a resolution to this problem in the literature relating to the selection among sets of alternatives that are impartially reasonable to prefer to inaction.

I will also use this section to directly engage the idea of the social provision of public goods, wondering whether we can think of the ideas presented in this section as justifying or demanding this practice, or if we should rather treat the discussion here as suggesting serious limitations on the extent to which we should be looking to social decision-making mechanisms to fulfill this capacity. I will attempt to show that in certain situations, the line of thinking introduced here can be used to support social measures aimed at providing public goods without relying on perfectionist ideas. But I will also show how these arguments do not establish the sort of paradigm that perfectionists would want, and that my view cannot therefore be seen as a reconciliation between liberalism and perfectionism.

5. Justifying the Enforcement of Duties

In this section I will discuss the jump from the idea that individuals have certain duties (as discussed in the previous sections) to the idea that we could be justified in coercing these individuals to act in the manner prescribed by their duty. I will need to explore the sorts of considerations which justify the enforcement of duties and use them to try to distinguish cases where intervention is justified from those where it is not. Here I will flesh out the questions introduced in Section 4 relating to reasonable pluralism and impartiality, expanding my discussion to cover all duties. I will also explore a dialectical approach to thinking about the justice of coercive enforcement of duties. This section will set the stage for Section 6 and Section 7 by arguing that certain kinds of answers to the questions posed in those questions would make coercion unacceptable.

6. Centralized Policy-Making in a World of Reasonable Pluralism

This section will explore the foundations of political authority outside of voluntary associations. I'm really not sure how I want to approach this section, but a coherent place to start seems to be with the philosophy of Joseph Raz. I'm very much over my head in even trying to imagine what sorts of things I'll want to discuss in this section, but it does seem like I'll have to address this issue. I guess this is what grad school will be for! Hopefully by the time it's ready to actually start writing this, I'll have done a whole bunch of work on the issues raised by this section and will have something worthwhile to say.

7. Finding an Appropriate Role for Uncertainty

Everything that will have been said to this point in the project will have been predicated on the idea that global climate change is undeniably happening in the way forecasted by the IPCC. This section will question this premise and introduce some of the uncertainties involved in the mainstream scientific analysis. It will also introduce the concept of storyline uncertainty and discuss the degree to which we can be comfortable with our predictions about the future.

I will then try to think about how uncertainty should play into our thinking about this issue. I will discuss the precautionary principle and the principles of procedural justice which are enshrined in our current legal system, as well as concerns about the burden placed on victims by standards of proof. I'm not entirely sure where I'll want to go with this, but I think I'm attracted to the idea of some kind of middle ground. I'm not sure, though, so don't hold me to it!

8. Pulling It All Together

In this final section I will attempt to put together all of the pieces discussed in the previous sections in order to compose a coherent answer to the question of how we should think about the justification for a coercive and centralized policy aimed at addressing global climate change. I will highlight areas where I think that reasonable people might find room for disagreement, and where I think my discussion here could be expanded or improved. I will also voice any doubts I have about my conclusions and attempt to identify some avenues for rejecting them. Finally, to the extent that I can do so coherently, I will offer some closing thoughts about the ways that my arguments might be engaged by the policymaking community and the general public.

Wait, Since When? (Update: Oh. Since Never.)

Update: I take it all back. See the bottom of this post.

In my current line of work (energy industry research), I come across quite a few government research reports, and generally I need to suspend my Austrian-ness and libertarian-ness as I read them in order to avoid getting frustrated. It's not that they're poorly written; in fact, they tend to be really well researched and thought out, and it's incredibly valuable to have access to them. But as one might gather from this post, there are sometimes little tidbits in them that make me want to pull my hair out. Moreover, they almost never make it a point to mention things like government failure, and are very often ignorantly perfectionist and guilty of the nirvana fallacy.

So I was very surprised to stumble across a report from the Congressional Budget Office, The Economics of Climate Change: A Primer, which described the problem facing policymakers like this:

The Earth’s atmosphere is a global, open-access resource that no one owns, that everyone depends on, and that absorbs emissions from an enormous variety of natural and human activities. As such, it is vulnerable to overuse, and the climate is vulnerable to degradation—a problem known as the tragedy of the commons. The atmosphere’s global nature makes it very difficult for communities and
nations to agree on and enforce individual rights to and responsibilities for its use.

With rights and responsibilities difficult to delineate and agreements a challenge to reach, markets may not develop to allocate atmospheric resources effectively. It may therefore fall to governments to develop alternative policies for addressing the risks from climate change. And because the causes and consequences of such change are global, effective policies will probably require extensive cooperation among countries with very different circumstances and interests.

However, governments may also fail to allocate resources effectively, and international cooperation will be extremely hard to achieve as well. Developed countries, which are responsible for the overwhelming bulk of emissions, will be reluctant to take on increasingly expensive unilateral commitments while there are inexpensive opportunities to constrain emissions in developing countries. But developing nations, which are expected to be the chief source of emissions growth in the future, will also be reluctant to adopt policies that constrain emissions and thereby limit their potential for economic growth -- particularly when they have contributed so little to the historical rise in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and may suffer disproportionately more of the negative effects if nothing is done.

The bolding in the above is mine. I honestly don't think I can think of another example of a central government publication being so good about acknowledging the power of spontaneous order and the need to avoid the Nirvana fallacy. So kudos goes to Robert Shackleton of the CBO's Macroeconomic Analysis Division, who wrote the study, for not sounding like someone who's ignorant of economic theory! I'm just starting to read through this report, but I'm already looking forward to hearing what he will have to say.

Those who have followed my work will be aware that I am generally hesitant to endorse the approach to the issue of climate change which treats the problem as a question about the most efficient allocation of social resources. It seems to me that efficiency considerations can only justify coercive and centrally organized social engineering in rather extreme situations, and I am not fully convinced that the specter of climate change qualifies (or that if it did, the currently popular policy approaches would be the appropriate way to handle the problem). And looking through the table of contents in Shackleton's report, it doesn't appear that he considers these issues. But this is typical in the mainstream discourse, and I am not entirely surprised -- I can't hold it against him.

However, I can hold it in favor of former CBO Director Peter Orszag, who mentioned my point of view in a presentation at Wellesley College in October. On the 13th slide of his presentation, Orszag wrote:

Alternative view: Valuation of future benefits should be viewed primarily as a decision about equity rather than as a traditional investment decision.

But viewed as an equity issue, inconsistencies arise relative to how other intergenerational trade-offs are analyzed

Of course, I don't think Orszag is right to brush aside my approach in such a cavalier manner. And I certainly think that if "inconsistencies arise" when policies are considered from the standpoint of equity, then that seems like a problem for the views which are made inconsistent, and not the idea that policies should be based on equity. But the greater point is that at least Orszag is aware enough of what's going on to bring up this issue.

And this concludes my statist love-fest. You can all go back to your various degrees of distrust, dissent, and anarchist tendencies now.

Update:

Ugh. I take back all my love for Shackleton. Way to break my heart, man! Enjoy:

The atmosphere and climate are part of the stock of natural resources available to people to satisfy their needs and wants over time. From an economic point of view, climate policy involves measuring and comparing the values that people place on resources, across alternative uses and at different points in time, and applying the results to choose a course of action. An effective policy would balance the benefits and costs of using the atmosphere and distribute those benefits and costs among people in an acceptable way.

And by "Enjoy," I mean, "Try not to break something. It'll be okay."

Properly Framing Skepticism: A Reply to Knappenberger

Update: Please see the comments for further discussion.

A few weeks ago on the MasterResource blog, Paul Knappenberger noted that, in light of generally stagnant global average temperatures over the last decade (and falling temperatures over the last half dozen years), we might justifiably begin to doubt the reliability of the models on which much of the concern over global climate change is based. On the basis of this concern and a few allusions to other lines of evidence which seem to cast doubt on the case for alarm, Knappenberger concludes that:

While coming years may or may not continue the cooling trend of the past several, they will almost assuredly continue to add to the growing evidence that our coming climate will likely be far less detrimental than the popular projections of it to which we are often exposed.

In writing this response, I don't want to create the impression that I think that Knappenberger does a bad job in his post. I think he built a very reasonable case for concern over the reliability of climate models, and to a large extent I agree with him. About a year ago, I wrote a post on this blog discussing some of my reservations about climate modeling, noting that models raise uncertainty in at least five important ways: There may be problems resulting from "tuning" models; the IPCC uses averages from multiple models, potentially distracting us from serious and different flaws in each model; the models cannot effectively model small-scale phenomena which could be important in determining the future state of the climate system; they make use of proscribed variables; and they cannot effectively capture unprecedented, game-changing possibilities without opening themselves up to radical uncertainty. Knappenberger discusses a number of these issues in his post, and I think he does a good job.

But I do have one objection to his handling of the issue with which he concerned himself in his post: his conclusion was not at all supported by his argument. I believe that Knappenberger has mistaken the absence of evidence to be the evidence of absence. He coherently argued that climate models had made a vague prediction about what would happen in the future, and that since the prediction has not obtained as expected, we have reason to doubt that the climate models are reliable. However, he then appears to jump from the claim that climate models (which predict warming) are unreliable to the claim that warming is unlikely. But this jump cannot be sustained without further evidence.

To illustrate the problem, we might imagine that we are on our way to the mall with a particularly superstitious friend when she suddenly exclaims, "I bet we find a parking spot right away; we've gotten green lights the whole way so far, and that usually means I'm going to find a parking spot!" We might be skeptical of this claim, and regard her thesis as entirely unsupported. But what does that mean about the prediction that we'll find a parking spot? It simply doesn't tell us anything. We'd need to throw out our friend's claim entirely and appeal to entirely different lines of evidence to discuss the truth of the matter. In the same way, showing that climate models' predictions of future warming are unreliable does not suggest that there will not be warming. It simply suggests that we should place less emphasis on their predictions in forming our outlooks, or discard them completely.

The reason I belabor this point is that I think there's a broader point to be made here. There is a fundamental and important difference between an argument that says, "The state of scientific knowledge is not advanced enough that we can make a reliable prediction that distressing or catastrophic global climate change will occur in the relatively near future as a result of human activities," and an argument that says, "The state of scientific knowledge is advanced enough that we can make a reliable prediction that distressing or catastrophic global climate change will not occur in the relatively near future as a result of human activities." In his post, Knappenberger supports (effectively!) the first kind of argument. But in his conclusion, he advances the second kind, and without justification. I think it's critical that in thinking about climate change, we make sure to keep in mind this distinction and frame our skepticism in a way that we can defend.

On the FCCC's (and by extension, the IPCC's) Focus on State Decision Making

So I almost feel bad about this, but it's not really my fault. The IPCC put out a report in 1995 called Climate Change 1995: Economic and Social Dimensions of Climate Change; it was the contribution of the third working group to the Second Assessment Report. Normally, a used hard bound copy of the book will run you over $50; more if you want it in good condition. But because apparently some people don't understand what their goods are worth, I was able to utterly swindle some poor online merchant for a nearly immaculate copy for $20. INCLUDING SHIPPING! I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love imperfect information!

I've just started reading it, and let me tell you: these guys are good. They basically have everything they say so qualified that it's nearly impossible to disagree with it, no matter where you're coming from. But one thing has made me a little uncomfortable in these early goings (and it may just be because I'm overly sensitive to this kind of thing).

In its chapter on "Decision-Making Frameworks for Addressing Climate Change," the IPCC authors basically frame the issue of climate change as entirely something that is to be addressed through international political decision-making, embodied by the Framework Convention on Climate Change. The IPCC authors note that "First and foremost, the FCCC is a framework for collective decision making by sovereign states." They then acknowledge that for different states, different kinds of impacts will be politically important:

For example, European countries may focus most on the possible costs of abatement, whereas developing countries in Africa and South America may be most concerned with the burden of adaptation and vulnerability. Island states may be most threatened by a major loss of coastal land mass. Oil exporters may be most concerned about their potential loss of revenue from abatement strategies that reduce international fossil fuel consumption. An understanding of such differences in national perceptions, capabilities, and objectives must inform the decision process, particularly where those decisions must be reached collectively.

It seems to me that this focus on intergovernmental politics leaves out an important consideration, which is that large-scale collective action is only one tool with which societies can solve social problems. The IPCC neglects to discuss the importance of other tools, like community action and private activism. It seems to me that this way of looking at things sets up a dichotomy between "Fixing it!" and "Doing nothing" which cannot help but result in vast government intervention. I would expect a more balanced approach to the issue of climate change to be built on the foundation of recognizing that giant world governments can't always effectively solve problems, and that a part of the solution will need to come through other avenues.

I also worry that by framing the problem as a matter of political negotiation, the IPCC might be encouraging a paradigm which gives State decision-makers the power to treat their citizens as bargaining chips, rather than focusing on protecting them from mistreatment by the citizens of other countries and by other individuals within their own countries. As Paul Baer writes in his essay, "Adaptation: Who Pays Whom?":

...ethics and justice address the rights and responsibilities of individuals; obligations between countries are derivative, based on the aggregate characteristics of their populations, and pragmatic, given the existing state system.

Since climate change ultimately will be addressed within a social order which depends in large part on States to affect social change and to coordinate policy, I acknowledge that political bargaining will play a central role in any response to climate change. But to therefore think of the issue at hand as one of mere bargaining seems cynically realist and completely out of line with any coherent normative position. We all know what happens when issues are reduced to matters of mere bargaining: concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.

The thing is, though: much of the rest of the report does focus on the ethical considerations which should go into the decision-making process. So the realist "national interest"-based discussion in the early goings here seem like they might simply be at odds with what will be discussed later. I'll try to remember to post a followup to this post if the report starts to move away from this way of talking about things. But I figured it was worth pointing out while it's on my mind.

On Clean Coal (Or the Lack Thereof)

[Reposted from University and State]

I have a confession. There's something that's been eating at me for a long time, and I need to get it off my chest before my soul caves in on itself and I break a television in a rabid fury. I HATE THIS COMMERCIAL:

I'm saying this up front: this post is going to be way longer than is reasonable for a response to a tiny commercial. But someone needs to say this, so I'm saying it.

Let's dig a little bit into what's going on here. This Is Reality is a collaborative project between a number of environmental advocacy organizations, but I think it's pretty clear who's ringleading this operation: Al Gore's advocacy group, the Alliance for Climate Protection. So because it would be impossible to direct my ire at all of the organizations behind this commercial (since they all have different positions), and because the website for This Is Reality is filled with links to other Alliance projects, I will point my comments at the Alliance.

The Alliance has two other projects besides This Is Reality which represent its constructive alternative to the use of coal technology to generate electricity: We Can Solve It and Repower America. But to understand what they're talking about, it will be necessary to get some background on how electricity is currently generated. So here it goes:

Electricity demand fluctuates on a daily basis, like this:

Source: http://www.reliant.com/en_US/Platts/art/CEA_offices_fig1.gif

That's not actually an observation of demand; in reality things are a lot choppier. But the basic point you should take from it is this: during the work day when people are running lots of electricity-intensive equipment (and particularly in the summer and winter, space heaters and air conditioners), there's a rise in the amount of electricity demanded. You'll notice that there's a minimum amount of electricity that is always needed but the grid at any time of day. This daily minimum amount of power is called the "base load." And there's also a cyclical daily hump in electricity demand, called the "peak load."

Currently, base load is predominantly generated by large, centralized coal and nuclear plants (and some hydroelectric plants). These are by far the cheapest fossil fuel plants to run in terms of marginal cost per unit of power generated. But they have an important and inherent limitation: they can't ramp their output up and down very quickly. So they just chug along, producing the daily minimum amount of power around the clock.

Peak load can't be met effectively by these large scale plants, and that's where we find "peaking" or "cycling" plants. These are predominantly natural gas plants with some diesel reciprocating engines thrown into the mix. Natural gas plants are like enormous jet engines, and reciprocating engines are like giant motors; they can both be ramped up and down relatively quickly, and are therefore better suited for handling intraday fluctuations in demand, even though they cost more to operate.

So remember: Base load is the electricity that the grid needs around the clock, and it's produced in huge coal and nuclear plants (as well as hydroelectric plants). Peak load is the electricity that the grid needs to meet intraday fluctuations in demand, and it's produced in smaller natural gas and diesel plants. It all works out so electricity generation comes out looking like this (chart from 2006):

Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/ Sources_of_electricity_in_the_USA_2006.png

As you can see, coal generation makes up about 50% of our current electricity production. So now I think we can turn to the Alliance's proposal, from its Repower America project: "100% clean electricity within 10 years." What's going on here? Exhibit A: There is no such thing as clean coal. Exhibit B: We want 100% clean electricity within 10 years. Exhibit C: America currently generates about 50% of its electricity from coal plants, and a large majority of its baseload power.

So how, exactly, do they plan to eliminate all of the coal generation capacity in America in 10 years (never mind all the other fossil fuel generation which likely gets the label of "unclean" as well)? Repower America has a four part plan. But before trotting it out, let's look at exactly what they're trying to do, using their own graphics:

...Yea. So here it goes:

Step 1: Energy Efficiency. Now, the Repower America authors rightly cite a Department of Energy document forecasting an increase in American electricity demand by about a quarter of current use over the next two decades. To counter this, the authors propose that 28% of future electricity demand be cancelled out by efficiency gains. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt (I don't feel like fact-checking this one), and suppose that this can be done. We're saying, then, that we can keep electricity demand essentially flat over the next decade while this transformation is supposed to take place. So now we're sort of at square one: we're supposing that energy efficiency will not make the problem any worse, but we haven't made things any better yet. I don't even want to begin to think about how much it would cost to eliminate 28% of American electricity demand with energy efficiency measures. We're not talking about changing light bulbs or installing better windows. But more power to them if they can do it. Okay then, we're at flat electricity demand for the next ten years; three steps left to replace coal!

I think it'll be useful, before moving on, to quickly adjust the figures to take out the influence of energy efficiency, to normalize the contributions to actual energy produced (which should roughly match up with today's total demand). In the Repower America Scenario A, solar photovoltaics, biomass/municipal, and geothermal will be relied on for 4% of electricity production each, wind for 37.5%, and solar thermal with storage for 18%. Notice that today, these technologies combine for only 2.4% of total production. If the Alliance gets its way, we have a lot of work to do in 10 years, and it's going to be expensive! So on now to step two, where we find out how they're going to produce all that power without fossil fuels.

Step 2: Renewable Generation. And I quote: "Generate 100% of US electricity from truly clean carbon-free sources. Renewable energy generation technologies like solar thermal, photovoltaics, wind, geothermal and biomass have been adding clean reliable power to the grid for more than a decade...It is now time to dramatically ramp-up the contribution of renewables to the energy mix." Now, conspicuously absent from that list is hydroelectric power, and for good reason: there really isn't much potential for expansion there (and there are also some important environmental concerns associated with the dams that are used to generate it), and the authors accordingly hold hydroelectric generation constant in their analysis. Even more conspicuously absent is a word barely mentioned in the Repower America plan: "Nuclear." Even though nuclear electricity generation produces no CO2, is projected to increase substantially in coming years, and is currently the only major existing large-scale alternative to coal for baseload power, the authors hold nuclear generation constant as well.

We'll touch on this point again later, but for now, it will be useful to once again jiggle the calculations. So let's cancel out the influence of nuclear and hydroelectric generation, which account for roughly a quarter of total electricity production today and in the future according to the Repower America scenarios. What's left is the current influence of renewables and the fossil fuel generators: coal, natural gas, and petroleum; together they account for about three quarters of the total power generation, and we'll call this the "flexible space" (since apparently we're holding the other quarter fixed). In the future, renewables will ostensibly fill this entire space, even though they only fill about 3% of it now. Currently, the space is two-thirds filled by coal, a quarter filled by natural gas, rounded out by a 2% contribution from petroleum. In the Repower America plan, we get solar photovoltaics, biomass/munipal, and geothermal each on the hook for 6% of the flexible space, solar thermal for 26.5%, and wind for 55%.

I want to focus on the fact that "Other Renewables" make up a whopping 2.4% of electricity generation today. In spite of all the hype, this is not actually all that surprising, as there are three main hurdles facing renewable energy generation technologies today. 1) They are generally more expensive than conventional methods of generation; 2) It is often the case that the ideal places to generate electricity from renewable resources are not the places where people live, and it is expensive to build transmission lines that can carry electricity over long distances; and 3) The generation characteristics of many renewable technologies are such that electricity is either not produced consistently and reliably, or production cannot be coordinated to respond to demand. Because we're dealing with a one-dimensional analysis (that is, preventing climate change is clearly the only thing that matters to these people, no matter the cost), we'll just throw out (1) for now. Who cares what it costs! But how does Repower America respond to (2) and (3)? We need to go to the last two steps to find out.

Step 3: Build a Unified National Smart Grid. Because renewable energy is often produced far from demand centers, Repower America proposes to build a giant system of transmission lines across the entire country in order to ensure that renewable energy can be integrated into the grid. Remember, kids: cost is no object; we're fighting climate change! So now, and I quote: "It will allow us to connect solar power in Arizona with manufacturing centers in Ohio or allow us to use evening wind power on the East Coast to support late afternoon peak demand in Nevada." So what're we looking at for a price tag? American Electric Power drew up a proposal for something like this at the behest of a group of wind power advocates, and projected the cost at $60 billion (or about a half of a percent of US GDP, or six months in Iraq). But I should note that AEP's plan was based on producing enough transmission capacity to allow wind power to reach a 20% share of America's electricity needs; I'm not sure the transmission system they've described could handle the kinds of transfers that would be needed to make 100% renewable energy feasible. But remember, cost is no object, and this apparently can be done.

So now we're a little closer to seeing how coal could be replaced, but there's still an important hurdle: many renewable energy sources are either inconsistent and unreliable, or don't produce energy at the same time that it's demanded.

A little more background is needed here. As I said before, some of the biggest problems with renewable electricity generation from technologies like wind and solar have been about timing and control. For example, photovoltaic solar generators only produce energy during the day, and they can't really be adjusted to produce only the electricity that you need. During the summer and winter, when there's a lot of space heating or air conditioning going on, that doesn't matter too much. Most electricity use happens during the day anyway, and grids can pretty much use whatever electricity they can get during those times. But in the spring and fall, when intraday fluctuations are smaller, those operating characteristics aren't particularly helpful. From one study exploring the impacts of large-scale use of solar generation:

Source: http://www.nrel.gov/pv/pdfs/39683.pdf

Source: http://www.nrel.gov/pv/pdfs/39683.pdf

As you can see, in the second chart, the contribution of solar energy drops the residual peak demand (that is, the demand during peak demand periods after the impact of the contribution from the solar generator) significantly below the normal daily minimum level. If this electricity were going to be used by the system, the baseload plants would need to be ramped down to the new minimum levels, and expensive peaking plants would need to fill in the gaps. Needless to say, this wouldn't happen; utilities would just dump the extra power. This means that if solar power were going to be implemented on a very large scale, it would need to be profitable even with the use of only a portion of the electricity generated by the systems. Looking at wind generation, one can see that the problem is exacerbated by the fact that wind generation doesn't necessarily line up with the peak demand period for a grid. One example from New York yielded this result:

Source: http://www.nyiso.com/public/webdocs/documents/white_papers/ wind_management_whitepaper_11202008.pdf

At least part of the rationale for the National Unified Smart Grid seems to be the idea that power can be sent from areas with unneeded excess generation to those where the electricity can be used, so that something along the lines of a "law of averages" approach would help to ensure a more stable grid system. But can wind power really be relied on the carry the burden of base load? I'm not sure. Remember, of the flexible space in the area of generation, big baseload coal takes up about two thirds of the generation we need to replace. Solar thermal, which apparently can be effectively (if expensively) utilized for baseload power when combined with storage technology, is being relied on for 26.5% of the space. The 6% each taken up by biomass/municipal and geothermal could ostensibly go towards base load requirements as well. But we need to acknowledge that wind is being asked to do a whole lot of work here, and I'm not entirely sure if that's realistic.

And unlike natural gas and diesel plants, it appears to me that none of these technologies can be dispatched on the scale that would be necessary to completely address jumps in peak demand. You simply can't just demand that the wind blow harder or the sun shine brighter. If a heat wave comes along and the wind is dead along the West Coast while people are blasting their air conditioners like there's no tomorrow, we need a source of on demand power. Natural gas currently serves a very important role in bringing flexibility to the grid. It doesn't appear to me that there's any generation technology with that characteristic in the Repower America portfolio.

A piece of the solution to this problem is provided by the "Smart Grid" component of the "Unified National Smart Grid" plan. This basically mirrors the Department of Energy's vision of the future of the electricity grid, and involves the use of smart metering technologies and communication between utilities and end-users of electricity to allow for "demand response" programs. This would allow utilities to tell their customers in times of system stress or unexpectedly high demand that they should reduce their electricity consumption. Utilities would generally pay customers to do this, and some plans include the ability for utilities to remotely control some of the appliances in their customers' facilities in order to initiate these drops in demand instantaneously. But there's a limit to how effective a demand response program can be. Ultimately, it's an important part of the job of a utility to be able to provide electricity on demand, and relying on customers to put up with unavailability of electricity is simply not a feasible option.

What's needed to make this plan technologically feasible is an effective form of energy storage. This would allow grid operators to build up energy reserves to respond to unexpected changes in supply or demand which could not be remedied by the almost nonexistent responsive capacity of a generation portfolio pretty much entirely dependent on resources which can't ramp production quickly up and down when needed. And that's where the final step comes in.

Step 4: Clean Plug-in Cars. When I saw this, I first thought, "Here is where, as they say, the plan jumps the proverbial shark."

The way that Repower America apparently expects to provide added stability to the electricity grid of the future is to basically use plug-in electric hybrids as batteries which can be charged when excess electricity is available, and drawn upon when electricity is needed by the grid. Now, a lot of people are talking about this as an important part of our energy future, and I'm one of them. I think plug in cars are a great idea. But the authors at Repower America are nuts if they think that the adoption of plug-in hybrid cars widespread enough to bring about this kind of energy storage capability would be consistent with their use of the Department of Energy's projection of electricity demand! A large plug-in hybrid fleet (in addition to taking longer than 10 years to materialize) would put an enormous strain on the electricity grid, forcing the already tenuous production of electricity from only renewables to somehow come up with thousands or millions more gigawatts of electricity. Perhaps it could be done; after all, we're not taking cost into account, remember?

But it's at this point where we really have to step back for a moment and ask ourselves, is this really what we think is going to happen? Even if we really want to stop climate change, does it make sense to try to completely eliminate fossil fuel technologies from the electricity generation landscape? Should we really just close the doors on billions upon billions of dollars in infrastructure investment? Is it really the best idea to try to force utilities to stop using coal, natural gas, and diesel to power their grids (or to offer them the money to convince them to do it voluntarily)? OF COURSE NOT!

So now we can finally get to why I hate that frikkin' commercial. There is such a thing as CLEANER coal technology, and we'd better darned well be ready to work towards implementing it! And we'd better keep an open mind towards expanding the use of cleaner natural gas and petroleum generation (which can be more energy efficient than coal) as well! And we SURE AS HELL better start building nuclear plants!

Smaller, decentralized coal plants can be used to provide heat to nearby buildings and homes, typically producing energy efficiencies much higher than can be achieved at large, centralized plants. Natural gas turbines typically operate at higher efficiencies as well, and they can be harnessed for combined heat and power too. By gasifying coal, petroleum coke, and other carboniferous feedstocks for use in Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) plants, we can also increase energy efficiency, even if we don't use the more concentrated resulting CO2 exhaust stream for Carbon Capture and Sequestration projects. Higher energy efficiency means less CO2 emitted, and doesn't necessarily force us to completely abandon cost-effectiveness. Looking for synergies for the use of waste CO2 could also be part of a solution. By burying our heads under the sand with a proposal to completely eliminate fossil fuel technologies, we draw attention away from these critical possibilities, and ultimately obstruct their development and implementation.

Nuclear power is CO2-free, and also needs to be a part of the answer. We simply can't expect to replace all of our baseload coal capacity without relying on nuclear power to help fill in the gap. To be sure, the increased use of renewable resources will need to be a huge and central part of our energy future. But to expect it to be the only part is flat out ridiculous, and trying to convince the American people otherwise is simply unreasonable and counterproductive.

Like it or not, we need fossil fuel technologies to meet our energy demands. And in addition to the technological feasibility we've discussed so far, and the monetary cost, that's because we're not going to employ the entire frikkin' country and its resources producing renewable generation facilities for the sole purpose of preventing climate change. Perhaps the most grating part of the Repower America plan is its repeated focus on job creation.

Here's something to chew on: When people consume their income, they consume goods and services that are produced by everyone else. If a substantial percentage of people are employed removing our existing infrastructure and replacing it with new infrastructure that serves exactly the same needs as the stuff that was there before, then it means that the people whose products are being consumed by the "green workers" are getting nothing in return for what they created. Imagine that Tom, Dick, and Harry are an economy. Tom produces food, Dick produces liquor, and Harry produces dirty magazines. At the end of the period, Tom, Dick, and Harry each have enough from selling to the others to end up with enough food, booze, and porn to go home happy. Now in period two, the government hires Harry to replace Tom's and Dick's doors with new doors that are no different from the old doors, except they're better for some reason which doesn't directly impact Tom or Dick. Tom and Dick still produce their food and booze, and the government taxes them to pay Harry for his services. Harry ends up with some food and some booze, but not as much as before, and Tom and Dick are in similar situations. And no one has any porn! What a terrible shame! So we can talk about jobs all we want, but what's really important is that at the end of the day, what goes around is what people produce. And if people are producing stuff that doesn't do anyone any good, everyone ends up worse off for it.

Now, it will immediately be countered that talking about costs is well and good when we're thinking about what to make for dinner, but climate change is a matter of justice. And while that would shift the debate away from my objection, which was that it's infuriating that Repowering America keeps harping about its plan's potential for job creation when it's undoubtedly going to make people generally worse off, I'll grant the point. The debate about climate change ultimately does come down to a question of ethics. But as Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer point out in their book, Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming, "The real issue, even ethically, is what will work..." (118). And this plan being pushed by the Alliance simply won't work.

Going a step farther, I defy anyone to give me a legitimate ethical argument which ends in the conclusion, "...and therefore, we must repower America with 100% clean energy in ten years, or else we will neglect our moral duty." I can't believe I'm about to sound like Bjorn Lomborg (*shudder*), but I'm not stopping myself. Watch:

Much of the climate change we can expect in the future is already in the pipeline. Taking a slower approach to reducing emissions, and embracing our need to maintain some carbon-intensive generation, would produce enormous efficiency gains and seriously accelerate progress in other areas of our economy. If we took some of the hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars that we would save by not implementing Al Gore's plan, and put it towards fighting malaria, restoring the rainforests, researching AIDS, promoting better energy efficiency in the developing world, and helping those who will need to adapt to the now inevitable impacts of climate change, we could likely do a lot more good in the world, even from the perspective of dealing with the impacts of climate change. Further, our descendents would likely be richer and better able to deal with their changing climate, and to help those who were not brought along by the rising tide of economic prosperity.

I'm not saying that nothing should be done to fight climate change. But driving our entire economy into the ground in order to fight a problem which is already partly out of our control doesn't seem like it's the best answer from anyone's perspective: even the victims', and even the environment's. We can be more energy efficient. We can use less coal and natural gas and oil. We can learn to harness the sun and the wind and the soil. We can learn to live as responsible members of the biotic community. But we have to learn to do that. And everyone will be better off if we don't rush ourselves into a more impoverished lifestyle to make it happen. Remember, before we were comfortable and well taken care of, the environment was the last thing on anyone's mind; look at China.

And remember, we're saving the world for future generations. Imagine if the industrial revolution had been stopped to prevent mercury poisoning. 'Nuff said.

So in closing, I hate that commercial because it represents a loss of perspective. It takes an important issue and reduces it to a set of overly simplistic talking points. We need to address climate change, to be sure. And that means a shift away from CO2-intensive electricity generation and towards renewables and clean technologies. But taking half of the most reasonable and important responses entirely off the table is irresponsible and counterproductive. It makes it so I end up talking to people who say, "No! No new coal plants!" instead of, "Is the plant going to produce combined heat and power?" And that's a problem, because if they scream about wind and solar, the utilities are going to laugh at them, whereas if they scream about capturing the heat stream for the benefit of the community, they might actually end up having an impact. The commercial makes it so the people who care most about fighting global warming get the absolute wrong idea of how to go about doing that. And that's a darned shame.

Update:

For anyone interested, the current breakdown for electricity generated from renewable resources by technology is as follows: Biomass electricity accounts for about 1.1%, wind for 0.6%, geothermal for 0.3%, and solar for about 0.01%. Hopefully that puts the Alliance's plan in a little better perspective.

On the Plight of Polar Bears

For a moment, I'd like to take as a premise that some Taylor-esque "attitude of respect for nature" on steroids is actually the correct approach to environmental ethics, and that we therefore have an enforceable obligation to treat all teleological centers of life (including non-conscious organisms) with respect for their intrinsic value as living things, not to be interfered with or harmed without amply justificatory reasons for doing so. I don't actually believe this to be true, but I do think that if we want to discuss environmental ethics in a way that doesn't get a whole class of people up in arms right from the start, my interpretation of Taylor's system is a great departure point for two reasons. First, it deals with moral significance in a way that's immediately accessible to me -- that is, it insists that we take certain things into account, but allows that certain reasons would justify our sacrificing those things without implying that we were failing to properly take them into consideration. And second, it would satisfy a wide range of different classes of people with concern for the environment (though I will leave out the notion that ecosystems and other spontaneous orders are the proper objects of moral concern, as I see them as being morally equivalent to human economies). So for the sake of this discussion, we'll simply grant that this system is correct and move on.

In this post, I want to begin to explore an issue that I feel to be central to the issue of climate change. Much of the concern surrounding climate change is focused on the probability that a rapidly changing climate system would create conditions in which ecosystems, as they exist today, might be thrown irreparably out of balance. This is quite reasonably expected to result in a large number of species' having a harder time with life than they would if climate change had never occurred.

One clear example of this theme in public discourse today is the concern being expressed about the future of polar bears. I feel that this is noteworthy because a) No one is actually going out and killing any polar bears, and b) Each of the polar bears that are dying are living lives which not particularly unusual in the scheme of polar bear existence, though no doubt they are on the worse end of the range of typical polar bear lives. This seems especially true in light of the solitary nature of a normal polar bear's lifestyle; it's not as if close-knit polar bear communities are being torn apart or anything like that. Polar bears are living their daily lives in the way that they would under any other conditions, except they are increasingly finding themselves in environments that are not particularly well equipped to support polar bears. To be clear, this happens all the time to animals -- most notably those living on the dynamic edge of their species' natural range. It's just that in this environment, there are more polar bears living this sort of life, and in many places, no new polar bears are successfully making it into the species' active population.

So the question I want to pose here is, ought we to be concerned about this sort of thing from a moral standpoint? There are two reasons that we could answer in the affirmative, given the moral framework we've adopted. First, because these sorts of problems will make people worse off, and we care about people. As John Broome writes:

As the ice retreated at the end of the latest ice age, forests migrated northwards at perhaps 1 km per year. This appears to be about the maximum they are capable of in uncultivated country, and they will certainly not be able to manage the much faster movements required by the present global warming. Furthermore, many ecosystems have become isolated by human activities, so they will only be able to migrate much more slowly, if at all. The natural world is therefore likely to be very much impoverished. And this will impoverish humanity. One might hope that the progress of technology has made agriculture more independent of the natural world: agriculture can migrate faster than nature ecosystems, and new crops can be matched to new conditions. But it seems overoptimistic to believe that agriculture can be restructured on this scale throughout the world without major costs. And in any case, we all need the natural world around us to make our lives rich and worthwhile. Life will not be so good in a more barren world.

Though extremely important, I want to set that kind of concern aside for now in order to focus on the second reason that we might object to the impacts of global climate change: that we would be disrespecting non-human nature by allowing things like the polar bears' plight to transpire.

Now, remember that no one is doing anything to the polar bears. What is happening is that the bears are being put in a context where they will likely and predictably fail to flourish on account of the actions of people. And although the plight of the polar bears can surely be foreseen by the people causing it, it's important to acknowledge that no one is acting maliciously; the contributors to climate change are simply living their normal lives. If these people respected the polar bears, some might argue, they should not only avoid actively harming the polar bears, but also modify their lifestyles to avoid the destruction of the bears' environment.

But is this right? Does it disrespect the polar bears to bring about the destruction of their environment by pursuing our own ends? It seems to me that a decent place to start would be to think about a similar example in human affairs, to determine what we would say if the polar bears were people, and then ask whether the example really captures the situation in which the bears find themselves. In another post, I asked whether individuals like farmers and fishermen could have rights to environmental conditions. I wrote:

Many individuals, notably farmers and fishermen, may be adversely affected by the effects of shifts in their regional climates for the organisms on which they rely. So far as these individuals have a right not to be interfered with in pursuing their livelihoods and wellbeing with the aid of resources which are naturally available to them, it would seem to constitute an infringement of their rights to push their climate systems out of their previous states, bringing about environmental conditions which are injurious to their interests and livelihoods.

It may be objected that the preceding discussion assumes that individuals have a right to certain environmental conditions, where no such right exists. I believe, however, that such an argument would fail to take into account our earlier discussion of rights. Conceivably, an objector would point to the inherent instability and variability in the climate system, and argue that clearly we are not entitled to complain about such changes. But as we noted before, to have the right to something means only that we are entitled to certain things from other moral agents.

For example, no rights violation would occur if a naturally occurring shift in your regional climate were to produce temperatures too high for you to continue to grow wheat on your land. But if your neighbor installed an enormous heater on the edge of his property and blew warm air onto your property, killing your wheat crop, we might find good reason to object. And it seems that the reason that we would object would be that you have the right to certain environmental conditions, of which you were being deprived by your neighbor’s actions. I think that this objection does reflect something which we have an entitlement against being deprived of in the absence of morally significant reasons, and so far as climate change does inspire this objection, it constitutes an infringement of rights of this kind.

So if we think that the polar bears are in the same kind of situation as farmers and fishermen whose environmental conditions are being destroyed, I think we might have some reason to think that we would be disrespecting the bears to continue to destroy their habitats. But are polar bears really like farmers and fishermen? At first glance, the comparison seems sound: both groups rely on the natural environment to provide them with the things they need to survive, and both are being put in a situation where their environmental "life support systems" are being compromised because of others' actions.

One issue arises here which is pretty much endemic to any problem dealing with justice and animals: Do polar bears really have the same kind of relationship with their life support systems as humans do? Do polar bears really think of their environment as producing their livelihood? And when conditions deteriorate, do they notice that this has happened? The relevance is this: Do we mistreat polar bears when they are never aware that anything has gone awry? I think the answer may well be yes. If I push a rock down a mountain onto your house, I am not absolved of guilt if you think that the rock fell naturally.

So, then, are we committed to the position that if we accept the truth of Taylor's attitude of respect for nature, it would be wrong to cause global climate change because of what would happen to polar bears? I'm not sure. Taylor is quick to point out that there are other considerations that come into play when taking non-human animals into account which can justify sacrificing them or their interests to ours. Taylor's own account is sort of sketchy, but the point is more or less that if the reason you're doing what you're doing is sufficiently significant, then it can be permissible to sacrifice an animal's interests to your own. But would the actions which contribute to climate change satisfy this criterion? Would they justify infringing on the farmers' and fishermen's rights? I'm not entirely sure. But what I think I have done is to establish that if we adopt the attitude of respect for nature, there's at least some reason to believe that contributing to climate change is disrespectful to the polar bears, and that's sort of what I was hoping to find out.

When It Comes to the Environment, Why Discount?: A Reply to Carden

I apologize in advance for the quote-bombing in this post, but a) I find that footnotes don't mix well with blog posts; b) I wanted to make sure that the references were preserved so that people can go back later and check out some of the sources that helped guide my reasoning here; and c) I didn't feel like putting in the effort necessary to polish this into a finished piece -- it's late. Maybe I'll revise it later. But without further ado:

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In his article, "Should We Be Recycling Paper or Building Battlestar Galactica?," Art Carden asks:

If environmental stewardship obligates us to be mindful of future generations in making our day-to-day decisions, what should we do? Should we be recycling paper and preventing people from building parking lots to save trees? Or should we acknowledge that the planet will be destroyed sooner or later and try to find ways to build something like the Battlestar Galactica so the species will be preserved?

To answer this question, Carden turns to the issue of how future conditions should be compared to conditions today -- that is, how the future should be discounted against the present. He explains that "Questions about 'the world we are leaving for our children' and complaints about the alleged short-sightedness of present generations are ultimately claims that we are discounting the future inappropriately," and so the appropriate social discount rate becomes the focus of his analysis.

Carden is correct to point out that different approaches to discounting the future can have very significant consequences on the way we evaluate different sets of outcomes. In their essay, "Uncertain Discount Rates in Climate Policy Analysis," Richard Newell and William Pizer discuss a range of plausible discount rates which could be applied in forming climate change policy. They note that "Looking 400 years into the future, the plausible 2-7% range of discount rates has a corresponding difference in discounted values of 200 million-to-1. And there is little justification for narrowing our range..." Stephen Gardiner builds on this idea in his essay, "Ethics and Global Climate Change," pointing out that when the rate used to discount future events is positive, "all but the most catastrophic costs disappear after a number of decades, and even these become minimal over very long time periods." Carden himself is aware of this difficulty, acknowledging that on the other hand, using too low of a discount rate will force us to recognize that "at some point, the sun will die out and the planet we are so concerned about protecting will someday be no more, all else equal."

Further complicating this issue is the fact of radical uncertainty surrounding predictions about the future, especially when discussing people's values. In order to properly discount future events, we would need to know what those future events would be. But in their essay, "Carbon Dioxide and Intergenerational Choice," Ralph d'Arge, William Schulze, and David Brookshire suggest that even if we forget about the difficulties faced in predicting the physical outcomes of our actions:

...given changing lifestyles, substantial future shifts in technologies, and probabilities of drastic world political-social events, any quantitative measures of benefits or costs in 100 years are not subject to better than 2-4 orders of magnitude accuracy, and may even switch sign...

Thomas Schelling drives this point home in his essay, "Climate Change: The Uncertainties, the Certainties, and What They Imply About Action":

...what will the world be like in 50, 75, or 100 years when climate change may become acute? Think back seventy-five years: what was the world like, compared with now? Will the world be as different from now in seventy-five years as it is now from seventy-five years ago? How would we, seventy-five years ago, have predicted the consequences of climate change in today's world, and who are the "we" who might have predicted those consequences?

Accordingly, John Broome writes in his book, Counting the Cost of Global Warming, "Cost-benefit analysis, when faced with uncertainties as big as these, would simply be self-deception." So at this point, you might be ready to throw your hands up in frustration and demand to know why we should even bother thinking about this at all, since anything we come up with will likely be ad hoc and speculative. And that would be a good question: why should we be thinking about this in the first place?

Let's return to the point that got us started on this whole subject: Carden wrote, "Questions about 'the world we are leaving for our children' and complaints about the alleged short-sightedness of present generations are ultimately claims that we are discounting the future inappropriately." But is it true that questions about the world we leave behind ultimately reduce to questions about the appropriate way to discount the future?

Some people don't think so. In his essay, "Environmental Risk, Uncertainty and Intergenerational Ethics," Kristian Ekeli argues that "To discount the future implies that current interests and preferences count for more than those of future generations." Accordingly, Newell and Pizer note that "Many economists...have argued that it is ethically indefensible to discount the utility (i.e., well-being) of future generations--although this does not imply a zero discount rate for their consumption..." So by asking how exactly we should discount, we seem to ignore the important idea that it might not be appropriate to even approach this question in terms of discounting. If we really care about the condition of our descendents, it seems unclear why we would think of their well-being as being inherently less important than ours. But if we do not discount the future, then are we committed, as Carden seems to suggest, to the view that we should begin preparing to save our species from the end of the world?

I say, not so fast. It will be immediately apparent upon reflection that Carden's approach to this issue is blatantly utilitarian. The idea seems to be that the appropriate task of the social critic is to evaluate a society's decisions against the benchmark of aggregate well-being in order to determine whether or not people are doing what's best for everyone. But as David Schmidtz points out in his book, Elements of Justice, sometimes we get better outcomes when we don't actively aim to engineer a utilitarian ideal. Schmidtz writes:

A reflective consequentialist morality is not about one versus five. It is not even about costs versus benefits. It is about how we need to live in order to be glad we are neighbors. It's about getting on with our lives in way [sic] that complements rather than hinders our neighbors' efforts to get on with their own.

So even if we adopt a utilitarian mindset, it is not clear that the appropriate way to approach the issue of environmental destruction is to try to calculate the costs and benefits of alternative social policies. As we noted above, we are faced with serious uncertainty at every turn -- it could even turn out that by acting to promote wellbeing by being more focused on the well-being of future people, we would actually make them worse off. For example, imagine if in the industrial revolution, people were prohibited from burning coal to avoid causing mercury pollution. Our fish would be safer to eat, our natural environment would be healthier, and many of our children would avoid being harmed by toxic exposure to the metal, but I imagine that few would argue that on the whole, the policy would have been for the best.

Perhaps, then, the best way to provide for the future would be to focus on the world we live in today. There are plenty of things that we can do to make the world a better place: search for a cure for AIDS, learn to live in peace with one another, and yes, even develop an appreciation and respect for the natural world. As Aldo Leopold wrote in his book, A Sand County Almanac:

Only those able to see the pageant of evolution can be expected to value its theater, the wilderness, or its outstanding achievement, the grizzly. But if education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking.

If we turn our focus to making our world a better place for today, the society we pass on to future generations will make for a much better place to live for our posterity as well. And I think that's something we can all agree to promote.

That being said, I have left an important issue unaddressed: Is environmental destruction unjust? An important objection to the utilitarian approach to looking at the world which we have used thus far is that it fails to take proper account of the seperateness of persons. If by acting in a particular way with respect to the non-human environment, we treat others (whether today or in the future) in a manner contrary to an attitude of appropriate respect for their value as individuals, then we must think long and hard about our actions. As Robert Nozick writes in his book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, "...there is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives."

I cannot give the question of whether environmental destruction or degradation is unjust the attention that it deserves here, largely because I have not entirely settled the issue in my own mind. But I think that it will suffice for now to suggest that if we are to discuss environmental destruction and degradation from an ethical point of view, it will not do to approach the issue from the standpoint of utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. We must acknowledge that we do not always have the power to consciously shape the future in accordance with our desires, and that sometimes, the greatest successes in living together come from letting people get on with their own lives. If we are to find reason for conscious and organized action in response to environmental damage, it seems to me that an attribution of injustice would be the appropriate way forward. And so I think that while Carden's attempt to grapple with this issue was admirable, I have to conclude that he sort of missed the boat.

On the Unified Smart Grid

My boss had me take a brief look at Al Gore's WeCampaign's proposal for a Unified National Smart Grid, and I figured I'd post my summary here in case anyone cares about these sorts of things. I apologize to the hardcore libertarians in the audience for my decidedly less-hostile-to-statism-and-intervention tone, but such is life.

The Smart Grid: An Introduction
http://www.oe.energy.gov/DocumentsandMedia/DOE_SG_Book_Single_Pages.pdf

Smart Grid is the name of a Department of Energy initiative charged with the modernization of the national energy grid.

The Premise: Existing electricity infrastructure is approaching the limits of its capacity. It is in the public’s interest to have a secure and efficient supply of electricity. But because existing technologies do not allow generators to effectively communicate with their consumers, and because rates have historically been unresponsive to dynamic market conditions, the importance of increased efficiency and security has not been properly captured in the market price of electricity. Accordingly, the current incentive structure does not encourage electricity producers to invest in more efficient and reliable technologies. This can lead to socially costly system failures, power outages, and energy quality issues (the DoE estimates that these issues cost Americans $100 billion per year). Government action is being used to bring about a more efficient outcome by allocating social resources towards the modernization of our nation’s grid.

The Strategy: It appears to be twofold. First, the DoE will incentivize investment in new energy infrastructure and promote research into new efficiency-improving technologies. A cornerstone of this approach seems to be the widespread introduction of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) to allow customers to coordinate their energy use with grid conditions through the use of customizable personal profiles. The increased cohesion, responsiveness, and customizability of the Smart Grid would bring about lower costs, smaller loads put on existing infrastructure, and greater flexibility in responding to problems.

The second part of the strategy will be to promote decentralization of electricity generation through distributed facilities. By localizing production capacity and utilizing a broader portfolio of smaller scale production methods, grids would be better protected against problems. The technologies introduced through the first part of the strategy will also increase the potential for the success of distributed production methods, and allow for energy solutions that are more tailored to the specific needs of customers.

Unified National Smart Grid
http://www.repoweramerica.org/elements/unified-national-smart-grid/
http://www.repoweramerica.org/elements/analysis/

Unified National Smart Grid is a concept put forward by the WeCampaign, a project of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection.

The Premise: Our current national grid is plagued by “Balkanization” and an excessive reliance on CO2-intensive generation methods. The technology for a CO2-neutral economy exists, but realizing this goal would require a nationally integrated system of electricity transmission so that electricity could be used far away from its point of generation.

The Strategy: Most of the efficiency-promoting infrastructural improvements of the DoE’s Smart Grid program are embraced by the WeCampaign proposal. The major difference, though, can be found in the fundamentally different paradigms in thinking about the nature of an ideal future generation regime. The Smart Grid program is focused on encouraging decentralization and distributed generation, allowing communities to be more self-sufficient and independent of failure-prone regional systems. The WeCampaign proposal seeks to go in precisely the opposite direction, centralizing the production and distribution of electricity using a vast new network of transmission lines to transport electricity all over the country.

The most obvious question raised by this strategy has to do with the cost of erecting high-efficiency electricity transmission lines across the United States to create a nationally integrated grid: even if it were true that such a system could be constructed, and that if it were constructed it would be possible to have a CO2-free economy, it would be unclear that we would really want to pursue such an option. Surely there are other values besides mitigating climate change! A one-dimensional analysis like the one offered by the WeCampaign ignores the fact that there are other important things besides responding to climate change. Neither the monetary nor the opportunity cost of a nationally integrated system is ever addressed in the WeCampain analysis, and one can only suspect that both would be formidable.

Conclusion

The Smart Grid plan described by the DoE is among the better kinds of government policies. It is clearly set out as a response to transactions costs which prohibit the attainment of certain public goods, and acknowledges that the decentralized planning of market actors must be relied upon in order to achieve an efficient solution to our electricity needs. The central features which distinguish the WeCampain Unified National Smart Grid proposal from the DoE’s plan are a single-minded focus on the use of CO2-free electricity production methods and an integrated national electricity transmission system. Both of these features, I think, would require substantial arguments which are not offered by the WeCampain, and on their face seem economically unfeasible. Accordingly, it’s very difficult to imagine that the DoE would amend their policy to accommodate the WeCampaign’s suggestions (unless the WeCampaign can generate enough public support to force the adoption of a clearly bad policy).