We have seen that an economically efficient path for humanity involves starting now to reduce future warming from greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuels, and that there are many policy paths that would achieve this goal, while increasing national security, reducing damaging price shocks, reducing unintended consequences of the energy system, and perhaps increasing employment. But, many more issues arise for most people.
Climate change especially hurts future generations, and poor people living in hot places now, whereas relatively wealthy people living now in colder places are using the most fossil fuels per person and thus driving climate change. This is clearly an ethical issue. However, if everyone today were to hugely and very rapidly reduce fossil-fuel use, the economic damages would be high across the world, so the ethical discussion is more complex than simply telling people to quit burning fossil fuels.
Many people argue that actions to counter global change will cause government intrusions into people’s lives that are ethically unacceptable to libertarians. However, additional consideration shows that some possible policies are not especially intrusive. Furthermore, the history that governments often become especially active during hard times and natural disasters, and the clear scholarship that failure to act will promote hard times and natural disasters, suggests that libertarians may instead favor appropriate government actions now.
Response to climate change can also reduce extinctions and take out insurance against disasters, and may avoid some bad societal conditions.
By the end of this module, you should be able to:
To Read | Materials on the course website (Module 12) | |
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To Do | Quiz 12 Unit 3 Self-Assessment Capstone Project [1] |
Due Friday Due Friday Due Finals week -- see Syllabus link for precise date. |
If you have any questions, please email your faculty member through your campus CMS (Canvas/Moodle/myShip). We will check daily to respond. If your question is one that is relevant to the entire class, we may respond to the entire class rather than individually.
If you have any questions, please post them to Help Discussion. We will check that discussion forum daily to respond. While you are there, feel free to post your own responses if you, too, are able to help out a classmate.
Billions of people follow religions with strong statements on right and wrong, addressing what we should do as well as what we can do. Billions more people have moral codes developed in other ways. Maximizing the utility of consumption is probably not the only motivation, and arguably not the main motivation, for many people. We want to stay alive and have some fun, raise our children, help other people, and do the right things for the right reasons.
How do we do deal with problems as big as energy and environment, when there is so much good on many sides? Let’s look at a few more issues. This is not a complete list, and we cannot tell you what to do, but some of the “obvious” arguments may not be quite as clear as they first seem, and other arguments provide useful guidance.
Perhaps the greatest challenge in energy and environment is to help people now and in the future, and no single action can be best at doing both. Business-as-usual is highly likely to bring an inefficient economy and natural disasters that motivate government intervention, so many libertarians may wish to support some intervention now to avoid that greater future intervention. Even many ardent environmentalists deeply dedicated to helping future generations recognize our dependence on fossil fuels and the dangers of changing too rapidly. But wise policy action will help people now and in the future, while helping preserve endangered species, and taking out insurance against possible if unlikely extreme disasters.
As an Earth scientist, Dr. Alley suspects that he took the easy way out, leaving the hard problems for economists, political scientists, and ethicists. Consider the two short discussions below, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, “Libertarians for Government Intervention?” and “Environmentalists for Economic Growth?”
Perhaps the most common argument about the philosophy of global warming and fossil fuels comes from those who favor libertarian principles and the free market. Many individuals and groups argue that “solutions” to the climate-change problem will cause government growth, but “that government is best that governs least” (Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849), and that the government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers.
Reading the 21-page document from US President Obama’s administration outlining policy responses to CO2 and climate change, as introduced in the previous module, may suggest how many regulations could be written to deal with this issue. And, more regulations generally bring more government.
Despite such a clear example, however, this argument really is more nuanced. A libertarian's desire for less government may actually recommend response now to fossil-fuel CO2.
Enrichment: To learn more about how government intervention was implemented in our pioneering past, see the Enrichment titled Scarcity and Government Intervention in Colonial Massachusetts.
First, as described in the previous module, there is no requirement for complex regulations to respond to climate change. Indeed, a carbon tax on fossil fuels, at the point where they are extracted from the ground or imported into a country, could be simpler than some of the taxes it might replace. Most fossil fuels currently have some tax or impact fee levied on them, so many of the mechanisms to implement a carbon tax already exist. And there are far fewer producers of fossil fuels than there are people earning wages, so replacing wage taxes with carbon taxes could make many things easier.
An additional issue is that, in times of shortage or crisis, governments often become more active or intrusive—the recent recession led to “stimulus” activities in many countries, as did the depression of the 1930s, and natural disasters frequently motivate government efforts. Thus, careful actions to avoid shortages and natural disasters may limit government rather than promote it.
The strong scholarship showing that ignoring climate change leads to a suboptimal economic path, and that rising CO2 is likely to increase natural disasters of many types, is surely relevant. The statements from the US military that global warming is expected to make more work for them also suggest that ignoring climate change may increase government intervention.
Hence, free-market proponents or libertarians might argue that their goals are better served by guiding simple and transparent policy responses to climate change rather than by opposing all responses.
An argument often coupled to limiting government is that responses to climate change should be avoided because governments should not be in the business of picking winners and losers. This argument might be applied to favor government actions that are general rather than specific. For example, people who do not want the government to specifically promote certain groups might favor a carbon tax rather than loan guarantees to start-up companies.
More generally, a little careful reflection will show that any significant government action gives arelative advantage to some people or groups over others. And, deciding to continue with current policies is a significant government action, which also gives arelative advantage to some people or groups over others. Thus, governments cannot avoid “picking winners and losers” at some level.
A silly and extreme example of government actions benefiting some people more than others may be a useful starting point. Suppose government-supported doctors stop an epidemic and save the lives of millions of people. In the short-term, the government has caused money loss for gravediggers, undertakers, shop owners selling sympathy cards and flower arrangements, the real estate agents and auctioneers who would have disposed of the property of the deceased, lawyers who would have handled the estates, and many others.
Perhaps more seriously, consider the history of the construction of modern storm and sanitary sewers, and clean water supply in London in the latter 1800s and in many other cities. This massive effort ended cholera outbreaks that had brought huge death tolls, and otherwise greatly improved public health and well-being. But, modern sanitation also ended whole professions such as “night-soil hauler” (those who gathered human waste and sold it to farmers as fertilizers), while making new professions—the government actions unequivocally created winners and losers. Furthermore, the transition to modern sanitation was greeted with many of the same arguments about government intervention, individual liberty, and natural processes that now address climate-change issues, including The Economist editorializing against aspects of the transition, as mentioned earlier.
Earth: The Operators' Manual
A fascinating case study on the transition from "night-soil haulers" to sanitary sewers is dramatized in this clip.
Credit: Earth: The Operators' Manual [2]. "Toilets and the SMART GRID (Powering the Planet) [3]" YouTube. April 22, 2012.
Pushing this analogy a little further, suppose that after scientific arguments were brought forward linking poor sanitation to death from cholera, the lawmakers of London had decided to do nothing to improve the sewers, and a huge cholera epidemic had then engulfed the city. (One additional and somewhat outlying epidemic did occur before the cleanup was completed, but no more epidemics occurred after the full system was in place.) It seems highly likely that the families of the deceased would have viewed the decision, which favored business-as-usual rather than cleanup, as a policy decision with very clear losers. And, it seems highly likely that the families of the deceased would not have been happy with that decision.
The analogy to the modern situation with CO2 is not exact. When London was deciding about sewers, the scientific knowledge showing that human waste in drinking water spread cholera was not nearly so strong as the scientific knowledge we now have showing that CO2 from fossil fuels in the air changes the climate; the Londoners did not have knowledge of the mechanism causing the illness, for example. But, “clean this up or you might die next week” tends to provide a stronger motivation than “clean this up or risk a suboptimal economy over the next decades”. The issues of attribution of extremes are very relevant here, though; people now are dying in disasters that cannot be said to have been caused by climate change, but that are being made more likely or worse by climate change.
Enrichment: For more on the history of winners and loses from interactions with governments, see the Enrichment titled Public-Private Partnerships in Oklahoma.
Grossly oversimplified, considering the use of fossil fuels and the damages from the resulting climate changes, the big winners today are wealthy people living in places with winter, air conditioners and bulldozers who are changing the climate a lot, and the big losers today are poor people living in places without winter, air conditioners and bulldozers who are not changing the climate much.
With winter, the warming may hurt ski areas, but warming up the uncomfortably cold times may have relatively little cost or even overall benefits. Air conditioning allows people to work during hot summers and saves them from heat-related illness, thus greatly reducing the damages from excess heat. And bulldozers (and all the other machines) allow building walls against the rising seas or otherwise dealing with problems arising. People lacking winter, air conditioners and bulldozers are endangered by rising heat stress and sea level without the means to deal these problems.
The main religions and traditions of the world all include some principle or law functionally equivalent to the “Golden Rule”, which is often stated as “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”.
The Wikipedia entry, Golden Rule [5], is fascinating to read for the remarkable universality of this “ethic of reciprocity”. You also might look at Vogel, G., 2004, The evolution of the Golden Rule, Science 303, 1128-1131 for a bit on the science of this, and how it extends beyond humans.
And, it is very clear that if the people causing the most climate change are suffering the least from it, and the people causing the least climate change are suffering the most from it, the Golden Rule is not being followed. No one can legally dump their human waste in your yard, but people can dump their fossil-fuel waste into the atmosphere you live in and change the climate where you live.
This is an important ethical argument that concerns many people. However, the answer may not be as simple as stopping the waste-dumping. Because the winter air conditioner-bulldozer people can help the have-nots get air conditioners and bulldozers to deal with the changing climate.
Strong scholarship shows that wealthier people in colder places are using fossil fuels faster per person than the rest of the world, and this is causing climate changes that primarily are hurting poorer people in warmer places, and future generations. Does this mean that wealthy people should stop using fossil fuels now and let the rest of the world catch up?
Click for answer.
Suppose, as a thought experiment, that by continuing with business as usual, climate change will increase the economy by 2.5% in a high-latitude industrial country, and reduce the economy by 25% in a low-latitude agricultural country of similar size and similar population, but that today the economy is 20 times bigger in the high-latitude country. Or, the high-latitude country could spend 2.5% of their economy to stop climate change. If you poke around with those numbers, allowing the climate change to occur gains the high-latitude country more money than the low-latitude country loses, whereas working to stop the climate change prevents the relatively large loss from the low-latitude country but leaves the countries combined with a smaller economy. Allowing the climate to change, and taking some of the extra money from the high-latitude country and giving it to the low-latitude country, could leave both countries better off than working to stop the climate change.
Lots of questions arise. Maybe the biggest one is whether the high-latitude country will really transfer that money. And, can the transfer be efficient, and will the low-latitude country be happy with charity rather than their traditional lifestyle, and more. But, the economically optimal path allows much climate change to occur because the use of fossil fuels is so valuable to people now. The tendency for many low-latitude poor countries to subsidize fossil fuels for their people may be viewed as showing how much those people want the energy from the fossil fuels.
Perhaps the most direct interpretation of this these two brief studies is to provide support for the idea that wise response involves both helping people now, and heading off future changes, and that these may occasionally work at cross purposes.
Many other issues are ethical or include ethical elements. Some are quite complex, but others much simpler. Let's take a look at a few more as we move forward in this module.
The world’s governments have agreed, through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to avoid dangerous anthropogenic influence on the climate system. What exactly that means was not spelled out in the Convention, but many people have tried to interpret it.
Perhaps the easiest interpretation is that, as global average temperature rises, damages rise faster, so temperature change must be limited to some chosen value. Some groups have advocated for 2°C above the average for some specified time before the bulk of human-caused global warming. As discussed in Unit 1, stopping the warming at 2°C would require considering many human-caused changes, including the warming effects of methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases, such as chlorofluorocarbons, the effect of soot on the reflectivity of snow, and more, although CO2 is still the biggest issue. If we go too far beyond 2°C, we are fairly confident that CO2 dominates, because it has the biggest source and stays around long enough to really accumulate in the atmosphere. And, in that case, it doesn’t matter where the CO2 was emitted, and it doesn’t matter very much when the CO2 was emitted because it mixes around the globe and accumulates in the air. Thus, if we were to accept a number such as 2°C warming, or 3°C, or 4°C, then we have essentially specified the total amount of fossil-fuel CO2 we can emit to the atmosphere.
But, who gets to emit that CO2? The people who got started first? The people with the biggest economy? The people who pay the most for the right to do so?
If you looked at the Enrichment earlier in this module about Eastham, Massachusetts, you saw a tiny bit of the long history of people negotiating over rights and responsibilities of “commons”, those parts of the Earth that we control together rather than individually. The atmosphere and ocean are the greatest commons of all, spreading whatever we do around the globe and thus linking all of us.
Per nation, China is now the biggest emitter of CO2 per year. But, per person, China still falls far behind many other countries including the United States. And, if you include emissions in the past, China is not even close to much of the developed world. But, is a modern Briton really responsible for the industrial revolution?
We might decide to divide the allowable emissions by country, or by person and might use future emissions only, or include past emissions back some time to be determined. (R.T. Pierrehumbert, 2013, Cumulative carbon and just allocation of the global carbon commons, Chicago Journal of International Law 13, 527-548.) This is a quite different approach than the economic optimizations, and strikes many people as being inherently fairer—each person (or perhaps each country) gets a share. One could even set up a program of trading the shares, in a cap-and-trade system.
Additional issues arise, however, and, history may matter in additional ways. A sustainable future seems likely to involve solar cells and a smart grid with a lot of computer power. The solar cells and transistors for the computers were invented at Bell Labs, in the USA. One might make a case that some fossil-fuel burners have used the energy to contribute to the valuable intellectual commons. Indeed, it is almost impossible for a person to live without having some negative impact on the carrying capacity of the planet, so one might balance the negative against the positive—did someone, or some country, contribute more than they took?
This issue can become rather personal. Dr. Alley travels a lot to do research and communicate about energy and environment. Personally, he has taken actions such as bicycling rather than driving to his office, and his family works in other ways to reduce emissions. But, those efforts don’t fully offset the effects of his travels. He tries hard to “phone in” talks and meetings rather than traveling, but he still travels. Is he wrong to travel to do the research and communicate the results? You might argue that he is.
But, if all of the scholars who understand the problem were to sit down and shut up the moment they understand, would the rest of the world ever gain the knowledge needed to reach a sustainable future? A stunt biker trying to jump over an obstacle will accelerate to hit the ramp hard, and many people believe that in studying and communicating about the Earth, scholars are doing the same thing, accelerating towards a possible problem so that we can jump over it.
Indeed, most people, if they see a person in danger, will provide warning and try to help, and will disapprove strongly of someone who fails to warn an endangered person. (In certain circumstances, failure to warn or failure to report can be a crime.) So, are scientists and engineers morally obligated to travel and communicate and invent and build to warn and help fellow humans? A firefighter battling a dangerous blaze may set a small fire to control a big one; are the CO2 emissions of some travelers fully analogous? And, does such CO2 count against the “fair share” that started this section?
We won’t answer any of these questions for you. But, we suspect that in thinking about them and discussing them with others, you will gain interesting insights that might help many other people. Instead, we’ll move on to some topics that may prove a little easier.
Whether or not the limits on growth and measures of growth (from Module 10) are treated properly in economic models, the other part of the discount rate is easier to discuss ethically. The economically efficient path typically allows much global warming to occur in part by treating people today as being more important than people in the future—the pure rate of time preference. In the extreme, if you could spend a penny now to stop a problem that would cause the end of civilization ten thousand years in the future, it would not be economically justified under the simplest application of the optimizations. (Economists do understand such issues, as discussed briefly in Module 10, but reducing them to absurdity is sometimes useful to start a discussion, just as long as everyone remembers what was done.)
We do often behave as if we are more important than future generations, as observed by economists. But when we are discussing what policies we should adopt, is that an ethically justifiable stance? Especially when considering future generations, rather than just ourselves in a few decades, many people are very uneasy assuming that we matter more than they do. And, if this pure rate of time preference does not apply to future generations, or applies at a lower level, then more action is justified now to avoid climate change than is calculated in the economic optimizations.
For more on the ethics of the Pure Rate of Time Preference, and how using a lower value motivates much more effort now to reduce global warming, see the Stern Review (Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, 2006 [6], Her Majesty’s Treasury, United Kingdom,).
Many scientists have speculated on the possibility that we can use genetic engineering to bring back extinct species. But, so far, we can’t. And, we don’t know whether we will be able to. Furthermore, a lot of rare species in remote rain forests or deep in the sea are very unlikely to ever leave us samples that we could use to bring them back, and extinction may come before we even discover many of those species. Some of those species may have genetic diversity that would improve our food crops, or in other ways help us—the mere fact of their existence means that they are unique in some way, and do some thing(s) well. Others may offer no commercial prospects, but they raise the question of whether it is right for us to cause extinction. Many people and many religions have rather strong views about being stewards of the Earth and the creatures on it, and causing widespread extinctions is often not viewed as good stewardship.
If we value the other species on the Earth, climate change is a real challenge that risks widespread extinction. Simply switching back to burning trees rather than fossil fuels is not a good answer. Finding ways to sustainably generate power while not changing the atmosphere is a better answer. So, greater efforts to reduce global warming than the economically efficient path would be justified if we value biodiversity, or traditional lifestyles, or natural ecosystems, more than they are currently reflected in measures such as GDP.
If you already watched the pika video back in Module 10, you don’t need to watch it again. But, if you didn’t, or you want to review, here it is because it is relevant in both Modules.
RICHARD ALLEY: (VOICEOVER) American pika's live in though Western US and Canada, and except in very special circumstances, they have to live in cold places. They're related to other pikas, and to rabbits and hares. They're lagomorphs.
Pikas don't hibernate despite living in cold places. They spend the summer making hay. They run around gathering up flowers and leaves, grasses, and what they can, and they stow them in a space under a rock. And then they can hide in this hay and stay warm during the winter and eat it, and they're having a very good time there.
Many people think pikas are really cute. On one of our early family vacations, finding a pica was a goal, and we went out of our way looking for pikas, and we found them and we had a ball doing it.
Because pikas like cold climates, many populations are being placed in danger by a warming climate. This figure shows in the bluish areas the suitable habitat for pikas recently in the US. And then the little red areas in the centers there show the habitats that are expected to remain around the year 2090-- one human lifetime from now-- if we follow a high CO2 emissions path.
Some populations of pikas out in the Great Basin are already endangered or have disappeared. We looked at the economic analyses of global warming, which compare cost of reducing climate change to the cost of the damages if we allow change to continue. And which show that we will be better off if we take some actions now to reduce warming.
But in general, such economic analyses do not include pikas. Loss of populations of pikas, even extinction of the pika has little or no economic value. We personally spent money on tourism that involved pikas. But we probably would have gone to see something else if pikas hadn't been there.
Pikas aren't really monetized. They haven't been turned into their monetary value. And so the loss of pikas isn't monetized either in these calculations, nor would be loss of polar bears or many, many other species.
If you believe that pikas are valued, that if you pay a little money to save pikas, or if you believe we have an ethical or religious obligation to preserve creation, including pikas, then the optimum path for you would involve doing more now to slow global warming.
If you don't believe pikas are a value, the economic still says that we should do something to slow global warming if we want to be better.
“As mining, oil, and gas profits have soared, living standards and overall economic growth in many resource-rich developing countries have remained flat or have even declined. This ‘resource curse’…” (United States Agency for International Development, 2010, Alliance Industry Guide: Extractives Sector, p. 4)
PRESENTER: This is a redrawn figure from Saxon Warner a famous paper from back in 2001. Each dot here is a country. And what we have at the bottom is how much of the economy of that country was exports of natural resources in the year 1970. So the countries that exported a lot of natural resources are out here. The countries with very little natural resources as a fraction of the total economy are down there. And then what's shown here is how much did that economy grow over the next 20 years.
What you' l notice is that all of the countries that really relied on exporting natural resources in 1970 had very slow or actually negative growth over the next 20 years. Some countries that did not have many natural resources also had slow growth, but all of the countries with fast growth did not rely on natural resources.Now a correlation does not tell you what caused it, but there are enough reasons to believe that when you rely really heavily on unnatural resources there may be a tendency to work hard to control the natural resource rather than to building a wonderful place for everyone to live. And if that's true then there may be some relationship in here that is meaningful and reliance on the natural resources may not be a good thing for having a big healthy economy.
PRESENTER: This plot from the OECD is actually fairly similar to the resource curse plot that we showed in the previous figure. High share of rents from natural resources and the national income, these countries out here on the far right, have a lot of oil or, otherwise, are relying on natural resources. So this is not that different from the previous plot.
But shown here, rather than economic growth, is how their students performed on an international test of mathematics competence. And what you'll notice is that for the countries that relied very heavily on natural resources, including the oil, you don't have those countries doing really, really well in this international comparison. Some countries that don't have natural resources also didn't perform well. But the countries that performed really well are fairly low in reliance on their natural resources. They're using something else to make their economy work.
Just like the previous figure, there is no proof in this one, that relying on oil gives you poor students. You could argue about who representative the test is. You can argue about history, whether people are taking it seriously. But in general, we like to see our students do well.
And in general, seeing this sort of behavior in the data makes some people nervous and makes them ask whether there really is a sort of resource curse, that relying very heavily on resources leads to poor societal outcomes. And if there's a chance of that, then some people wonder whether it might be wise long term to try to move your country more in this direction.
The two graphs here don’t answer questions but ask them. The first, from the well-known 2001 paper by Sachs and Warner (Sachs, J.D. and A.M. Warner, 2001, Natural resources and economic development, European Economic Review 45, 827-838), shows, for a wide range of countries, how much they depended on exporting natural resources (oil, coal, gas, diamonds, iron, etc.) in 1970, and how much their economies grew in the next 20 years. You will see a lot of variability, but no fast-growing countries that relied heavily on natural-resource exports, and many fast-growing countries that exported few natural resources. The second figure, from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 14 March 2012), compares student performance on a standardized test to their country’s reliance on “rents”; in economic-speak, the money that goes to a property owner for the oil pumped out from under their land is rent, so the horizontal axis in this plot is actually quite similar to the horizontal axis in the previous plot. You will again see much variability, but with the countries that rely most heavily on rents having poor student performance, and the countries with the best student performance having little reliance on rents.
The mere fact that we showed these plots and brought up this topic will make some people mad. A few people may argue that the data are somehow not representative. Many more will argue that correlation is not causation, and that some additional factor that correlates with reliance on natural resources is controlling economic growth and student performance. The extra factor might be a history of colonial oppression, or extreme initial poverty, or something else.
But, consider the possibility that reliance on selling oil or other natural resources does lead to economic difficulties. Turning oil, or diamonds, into money, requires controlling the resource and access to a trade route, and some knowledge and ability to get the valuable thing out of the ground and into the trade system. Extraction of a hard-to-get resource may be expensive and high-tech, requiring many people and great cooperation. However, for the most efficient producers of the easiest oil, the costs of production may be as low as $5 for a barrel of oil that sells for $100. That translates into a need for few people with few jobs, with huge profit (“rent”) available for controlling the resource.
Contrast that with the task of turning sand and red rocks into cell phones, which requires a complex web of technical, economic, social and political interactions, and a vigorous educational system. Selling a readily available, concentrated natural resource is a quicker and easier way to make money than is generating an integrated economy capable of doing a variety of high-tech, artistic, educational and other things. But, the integrated economy might just make a better place to live. And, the effort to control a scarce resource might just lead to the people in control taking actions that don’t make everyone happy.
Suppose that there is at least a little reality in this “resource curse”. A slow, predictable reduction in the concentrated high value of the fossil-fuel resource over a few decades in the regions relying heavily on it just might be the way to shift toward development of integrated economies, with greater economic growth and educational achievement. People looking at the two plots shown above often get a little nervous about betting the future on oil, or gas, or any other single, concentrated natural resource, which would move their region to the right on these plots—that doesn’t prove that their economy or their students will trend downward, but it does raise questions. And with the evidence, that for now, fossil fuels are more subsidized than a diverse portfolio of renewables, that nervousness may motivate more effort now to move away from fossil fuels than in the economically efficient path.
We all know that building things is more difficult than breaking them. No one could construct a college classroom or a computer or cell phone with just a hammer, but any of them can be broken with a hammer (a big hammer—a wrecking ball—for the classroom).
By analogy, we see no plausible way that simply raising CO2 in the atmosphere can turn the Earth into Eden, a paradise for all of us. But, the worst possibilities from global warming are rather scary—tropics too hot for unprotected large animals including us, farm fields too hot for our crops to grow, all of the ice sheets melting and raising sea level roughly 200 feet, poison gases belching out of anoxic oceans. We don’t think that any of these are likely, and they would be well into the future if they happened, but even a slight possibility of such outcomes is not balanced by a similar possibility of highly beneficial outcomes.
When faced with similar situations in everyday life, we take extensive precautions. Driving a car includes the slight chance of being killed by a drunk driver, so we use seat belts and put kids in especially safe child seats, buy cars with air bags and crumple zones, pay for road improvements and police surveillance, and support Mothers Against Drunk Driving. If we think that it is unethical to risk hugely damaging events in the future and that instead we should treat climate change like many other aspects of our lives and take out insurance, then more action would be justified now to slow the changes.
The extensive precautions we take in many ways to avoid possible large disasters are consistent with the Precautionary Principle. This is a generalization of the old medical principle “First, do no harm”.
The United Nations Rio Conference put it this way: "In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” (United Nations Environment Programme Rio Declaration on Environment and Development [10], 1992, Principle #15, DocumentID=78&ArticleID=1163).
We discussed earlier how actions have “winners” and “losers”, or at least help one group more than another. Some people have argued that the precautionary principle means that we should slow our changes to the environment until we understand better. But, other people have argued that moving away from fossil fuels might harm the economy, so we should continue with business as usual until we understand better.
In such a situation, one way forward is to assess our experience with similar changes in the past, both environmentally and economically. And, such a comparison suggests that we have successfully negotiated larger economic changes, but have no experience with changes so large in the atmosphere, as discussed next.
Looking first at the economics, moving towards the optimal path is often estimated to cost a few months of economic growth over a few decades if you ignore the value of the climate changes avoided, and to improve the economy if you count those changes. Suppose for a moment that all of the climate science proves to be wrong. (Yes, this is a crazy supposition, but just suppose.) If so, then shifting away from fossil fuels is not needed for climatic reasons.
Eventually, the shift still will be needed for supply reasons, so starting to shift now would be an exercise in getting to a sustainable energy system while there is still a fossil-fuel safety net. The fossil fuels not burned would still be there, and could be burned if desired. The economy would have slowed slightly. Some people would have lost jobs, and others gained them. But the big-picture costs of experimenting with a sustainable energy system for a few decades are projected to be small relative to the size of the whole economy.
Governments frequently change their portfolio of taxes and subsidies, so a policy response such as a partial switch from wage taxes to carbon taxes over a few decades would not be far outside of experience. Moving away from fossil fuels would not even lose the technical know-how in the industry, both because serious plans do not envision a complete end to fossil-fuel use releasing CO2 for at least decades, and because most of the skills likely would be needed for geothermal energy or carbon-capture-and-sequestration uses.
The extra costs of running a fully sustainable energy system, with its larger changes than for the economically optimal path, are often estimated as roughly 1% of the economy.
Energy is now about 10% of the economy, so this is an increase in energy costs, but less than some of the oil-price shocks that the economy has experienced in the past. And, this ignores the benefits of slowing and then stopping the warming and other changes from the CO2.
The extra cost of the optimal path, and even of a fully sustainable system, is similar to the extra cost of the modern water-and-sewer sanitary system, as opposed to a minimal system such as existed in London in the days of cholera. Humanity has surely done bigger things, both bad (think of a world war) and good, including building the current energy system. We probably have never agreed to do something this big, but we have muddled through larger changes.
In contrast, atmospheric CO2 is now higher than ever experienced before by modern humans and may be heading for levels not seen in tens or possibly even hundreds of millions of years. Thus, if one subscribes to the precautionary principle, striving first to do no harm, the economic effects of response are well within experience, whereas the climatic effects of failure to respond are well outside of experience. Thus, if you think that the precautionary principle is useful, you probably would recommend more action now to slow fossil-fuel emissions of CO2.
To see a little more on why you might want to take out insurance against disasters, go bungy-jumping with Dr. Alley in New Zealand in this clip.
Credit: Earth: The Operators' Manual [2]. "Look Before You Leap" (Powering the Planet) [11]." YouTube. April 22, 2012.
After completing your Self-Assessment, don't forget to take the Module 12 Quiz. If you didn't answer the Learning Checkpoint questions, take a few minutes to complete them now. They will help you study for the quiz and you may even see a few of those question on the quiz!
We have now come to the end of Unit 3. The purpose of this exercise is to encourage you to think a little bit about what you have learned well, and just as importantly, about what you feel you have not learned so well. Think about the learning objectives presented at the beginning of the Unit, and repeated below. What did you find difficult or challenging about the things you feel you should have learned better than you did? What do you think would have helped you learn these things better?
For each Module in Unit 3, rank the learning outcomes in order of how well you believe you have mastered them. A rank of 1 means you are most confident in your mastery of that objective. Use each rank only once - so if there are four objectives for a given module, you should mark one with a 1, one with a 2, one with a 3, and one with a 4. All items must be ranked. For each Module, indicate what was difficult about the objective you have marked at the lowest confidence level.
___Recognize that there is a cost to future society of emitting CO2 to the air today.
___Describe how one might balance immediate needs against protection from future losses.
___Explain why growth cannot be infinite in a world of finite resources.
___Use an Integrated Assessment Model to determine the most economically beneficial approach to dealing with emissions and climate change.
What did you find most challenging about the objective you ranked the lowest?
___Recognize the multitude of policy options available for our energy system and economy.
___Explain how the effectiveness of emissions treaties and carbon taxes can be verified internationally using remote data collection.
___Recognize that shifting gradually to renewable energy is likely to have little overall impact on employment rates.
___Recall that energy policies and subsidies have been in use for decades, and some of these have promoted fossil fuels over renewable resources.
___Research and evaluate an example of an energy subsidy reported by the IMF.
What did you find most challenging about the objective you ranked the lowest?
___Explain that decisions about energy and environment have important but very complicated ethical implications.
___Recognize that relying more on natural resources does not always correlate with greater wealth or higher quality of life.
___Recall that if we value our grandchildren's quality of life as much as we value our own, then it is worthwhile to do more now to avoid climate change.
___Assess what you have learned in Unit 3.
What did you find most challenging about the objective you ranked the lowest?
The self-assessment is worth a total of 25 points.
Description | Possible Points |
---|---|
All options are ranked | 10 |
Questions are answered thoughtfully and completely | 15 |
Unchecked, climate change is highly likely to bring widespread extinctions and ecosystem disruptions, which will make traditional human lifestyles difficult or impossible, with at least a slight danger of hugely damaging disasters. Ethical concern about such issues, and about the well-being of future generations, motivates more response now than the response that is already economically justified. Although responses can involve intrusive government actions, they do not need to, and a wise response may actually reduce government intrusions.
You have reached the end of Module 12! Double-check the to-do list on the Module Roadmap to make sure you have completed all of the activities listed there.
The United States government bought the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, acquiring all or parts of what are now 15 states as well as land that extended into what are now the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. This solved some problems for the US but created others, including a debate about whether the action was allowed under the US Constitution. What to do with all of this land became a long-term issue for the young country. Issues about the expansion of slavery were prominent in discussions.
The idea of making relatively small plots of land available to settlers at low or zero cost ('homesteading') was favored by many. But, opposition came from southerners who feared that this would work against plantation-style slave-holding agriculture, and from factory owners in the northeast who believed that cheap or free western lands would raise labor costs by giving more favorable opportunities to many low-cost workers. The secession of the southern states at the start of the US Civil War reduced opposition notably, and the Homestead Act of 1862 was passed soon thereafter. The Morrill Act allowed the creation of land-grant universities, which have provided so much valuable advice to homesteaders and others, and the act establishing the US National Academy of Sciences, which also has contributed greatly to the well-being of so many of these settlers, also passed about this time.
The Homestead Act offered 160 acres free to anyone who met certain requirements of living on and improving the land. Land was often distributed in a "land rush", in which a particular region was opened for settlement beginning at a certain time. 'Sooners' or 'moonlighters' (those who got in 'sooner' by the light of the moon) included some people, such as certain employees of the railroads or the government, who were legally allowed to go in sooner, but others who did so illegally. Complex and long-lasting court cases arose about land claimed by illegal Sooners. (Oklahoma is often called the 'Sooner State', a term that was viewed negatively a century ago because of the implication of cheating, but now is generally viewed positively.)
The homesteaders and their barbed-wire fences often came into conflict with ranchers or cowboys who used large tracts of land for cattle. In drier regions, 160 acres was really too small to make a productive and profitable farm, so in some sense, the government actions may have contributed to the great difficulties that arose when major droughts hit, as during the 'Dust Bowl' of the 1930s. Still, the settlement led to well-established, productive states where millions of people now live happily.
This history can be viewed, or 'spun', in many ways. An opponent of government actions might point to the unfairness of government and railroad employees having access to lands before others, and might point out that government meddling in the free market helped cause the economic and human tragedy of the Dust Bowl. A proponent of government actions might counter that 15 states and millions of people owe their existence to proactive government policies. The story is very different if viewed from the perspective of native Americans, cowboys, plantation owners, factory owners, homesteaders in relatively rainy places or near water sources, homesteaders in relatively dry places far from water sources, and many other groups.
A few points relevant to this chapter are very clear, however. The main events were not controlled by the public, nor by private interests, but by diverse public and private groups and individuals interacting in various ways. The many different interacting groups were impacted by the main policy decisions in distinct ways, with greater or lesser benefit or harm. And, each policy decision built on a long history of earlier decisions that themselves had winners and losers; thus, changing paths is a policy choice with winners and losers, but keeping the same rules is also a policy choice with winners and losers. Because society tends to adapt to existing policies, a change always has short-term costs of switching these adaptations, no matter how beneficial the long-term outcome and this plus the political effort needed to make a change tend to favor continuation of existing policies. But, the choice to continue existing policies is still a policy choice with winners and losers.
A few of the many resources on this topic include:
Serious European settlement of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, USA began with the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620. The land was almost totally tree-covered, but logging for fuel and building material, and to clear fields for cultivation, quickly became widespread. Wood was burned in great amounts, boiling sea water to obtain salt for packing cod for shipping and to 'try' whale meat to extract the valuable oil. The consequences of deforestation, including soil drying and erosion, as well as the scarcity of fuel, became so severe that government actions were quickly taken.
In Eastham, the freedom-loving pioneers banned cutting of wood on the common lands in 1690 except to supply wood for sales out of town. In 1694, this prohibition was extended beyond the common lands to any source of wood. In 1695, cutting wood on the common was prohibited even for outside cash sales. Similarly, in 1711-12, Truro on the Cape was requiring Court-granted permission before people could cut wood for certain uses. (Rubertone, P. E., 1985, 'Ecological Transformations,' in Part II: Changes in the Coastal Wilderness: Historical Land Use Patterns on Outer Cape Cod, 17th - 19th Centuries, in McManamon, F.P. (ed.), Chapters in the Archaeology of Cape Cod, III: The Historic Period and Historic Period Archaeology, Cultural Resources Management Study Number 13 (Division of Cultural Resources, North Atlantic Regional Office, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, DC), p. 78.)
Interestingly, the scarcity was overcome, in part by the reliance of 'renewable' resources. With windmills to pump seawater into solar drying troughs, the Cape Codders secured large quantities of inexpensive salt, without cutting trees.
Dr. Alley summarized many estimates of the costs of dealing with climate change in his book Earth: The Operators' Manual. Some of those are repeated here.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 2007 found costs of between slight growth (0.6%) and somewhat larger magnitude shrinkage (3.0%) of global GDP in 2030, versus business-as-usual, for different paths toward stabilizing the atmospheric concentration of CO2 at between 1.6 and 2.5 times the level before the industrial revolution.
IPCC, 2007, Summary for Policymakers, in Metz, B., O. R. Davidson, P. R. Bosch, R. Dave and L. A. Meyer (eds.), Climate Change 2007: Mitigation. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, New York).
Much relevant work has been done in Germany. The German Advisory Council on Global Change also considered various rates and levels of stabilization, finding costs centered on about 0.7% of the world economy.
German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU [19]) (Grassl, H., J. Kokott, M. Kulessa, J. Luther, F. Nuscheler, R. Sauerborn, H.-J. Schellnhuber, R. Schubert and E.-D. Schulze), 2003, Climate Protection Strategies for the 21st Century: Kyoto and Beyond.
Comparable estimates - average about 1% cost, as low as 1% benefit and as high as 4% costs - were summarized in Hasselmann, K., 2009, 'What to do? Does science have a role?' European Physical Journal Special Topics 176: 37 - 51.)
Links
[1] http://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth104/node/1285
[2] https://www.youtube.com/@Etheoperatorsmanual
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJqDQ41m_KI
[4] http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/homestead-act/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
[6] http://mudancasclimaticas.cptec.inpe.br/~rmclima/pdfs/destaques/sternreview_report_complete.pdf
[7] https://web-archive.oecd.org/2012-06-14/87157-49881940.pdf
[8] http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/
[9] http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/90708415/
[10] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth104/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.earth104/files/Unit3/Mod12/rio-un-1992.pdf
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKDVC4HJg7c
[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON4K3Tyaxxc
[13] http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1998019326/PP/
[14] http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/071_fsab.html
[15] http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/
[16] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth104/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.earth104/files/Unit3/Mod12/homesteading-family.gif
[17] https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=SO010
[18] http://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=SO010
[19] https://www.wbgu.de/en/