For More Responsible Climate Politics

by Will Wilkinson on October 19, 2009

Ryan Avent writes:

I think it would be irresponsible not to continue studying the issue and looking for potential geoeingineering fixes, but I think that anyone suggesting that we should abandon the effort to cut emissions in favor of a geoengineering approach has not thought the matter through. It should be considered the last ditch effort, only pursued seriously when it is clear that emission cuts will not prevent catastrophic warming.

I’ve thought the matter through, but I still don’t understand this ordering of priorities.  I understand the strategic political motivation to make all potential technological fixes to global warming seem like wacky, hare-brained, mad-scientist schemes to block the sun, but the more I think that through, the less it looks like responsible politics.

Just suppose that some form of climate engineering could (1) do as much or more to slow or halt warming than could regulatory approaches (2) at a much lower cost while (3) posing no special problem of international coordination. Perhaps Avent has already made the case that some technology (or combination of technologies) meeting this description is less likely to emerge in the coming decades than an effective scheme of international carbon emission controls. If he has, I’ve missed it. However, if the success of a primarily technological approach is no less probable than the success of a primarily global political-regulatory approach, it would be egregiously irresponsible to discourage public support of efforts to discover such technology. If the probabilities turn out to favor engineering over politics, then emissions cuts, not engineering, should be considered last ditch.

Of course, the probabilities aren’t independent of public opinion, which isn’t independent of our attempts to persuade. I sense that Avent believes that an increased awareness of and interest in climate engineering would come at the cost of public support for domestic climate legislation and international regulatory coordination. That is, I sense that he believes he is combating a danger to the prospects of his favored policy. But then he’d better convince us that the danger he is combating is not all that serious. If the political prospects of a successful, binding international scheme of emissions cuts depend crucially on success in keeping the public sufficiently ignorant or disapproving of alternatives, then that goes to show just how poor the political prospects really are. In which case, the justification for trying to keep the public ignorant or disapproving of alternatives would seem to be considerably weakened.

  • Barry
    Throwing in a comment from Rortybomb (http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/a-lit...), which also has a trackback below: "Having spent a fair amount of brainpower and energy over the past month trying to convince right-leaning folks and libertarians that having three bureaucrats sit down and come up with a default ‘vanilla option’ checking account won’t be a first step on the road to serfdom, I’m somewhat confused by the wave of excitement among right-leaning folks and libertarians for having three bureaucrats sit down and come up with the optimal level of sulfur to be pumped into the stratosphere at the north and south poles."
  • Paul Zrimsek
    This ever-so-baffling paradox may have something to do with the fact that in the one case the alternative is having three bureaucrats sit down and come up with an emissions cap to be imposed on the entire economy, while in the other the alternative is having three bureaucrats do nothing at all.
  • Regardless of the merits, geoengineering is going to be thrown into the pot of denialist arguments. That's the political problem -- not environmentalists casting doubts on valid technological proposals for dirty political reasons. (There's politics on both sides, incidentally).

    If there were an overall consensus on the major issues, geoengineering proposals would certainly be worth at least a look. But there isn't. Every major point of the argument is denied by players who are many orders of magnitude more powerful politically than they are intellectually. And for them, geoengineering is just another thing to pull out of the bag and throw.

    Environmentalism and free market utopianism (cornucopianism) have always been deadly enemies, and few of the utopians have made a good-faith effort to figure out what's going on. There's too much at stake for them to do that.
  • meno
    "if the success of a primarily technological approach is no less probable than the success of a primarily global political-regulatory approach"

    Who pays for this technological approach? Santa Claus?

    If geo-engineering is to save us for the cost of merely a few hundred billion, who is going to foot the bill? You don't get a choice between global political-regulation and geo-engineering. Funding international geo-engineering efforts requires global political agreement - and regulation about who funds it.
  • meno
    "There's also another question being begged here: Without carbon taxes, and given the free rider problem, who has an incentive to invest in geoengineering?"

    That question is not so much begged here as robbed blind.

    The whole damn point of current international attempts is to put a price on carbon emission. Countries can then choose to cut their net emissions by reducing burning coal, or by geo-engineering (planting a million super-trees, for example) - or to keep burning coal and pay some other country for carbon-credits to plant a million super-trees.

    How the hell are you going to get geo-engineering going unless we first get the market to provide such incentives? Is Will Wilkinson arguing for a vast 5-year Great Leap Forward of govt-funded research because he thinks that's better than pricing carbon and getting the market to provide? Is Will Wilkinson arguing that he should pick between geo-engineering and cutting emissions because he knows *so* much about the price of each, instead of pricing carbon and letting the market decide?

    meno
  • Mike
    There's also another question being begged here: Without carbon taxes, and given the free rider problem, who has an incentive to invest in geoengineering?

    On a more basic level, I agree with horsecow about the assumptions. They remind me of the old joke in which someone asks an economist, "How do you open a can?" Answer: "Assume a can opener ..."
  • Positive externalities, especially those emitted by basic research, are often subsidized by government. Also if superfreakynomics is to be believed about the order of magnitude of the costs of some of these systems, we could find a middling rich donor looking to buy some esteem.
  • horsecow
    This is disappointing. Why do you frame the issue as if there were two, exclusive choices: 1) emissions control or 2) geo-engineering? Is there any reason we couldn't pursue both? Wouldn't that be a more sensible, don't-put-your-eggs-in-one-basket approach?

    In addition, your list of assumptions is pretty hilarious. It must be highly convenient to assume away the principal objections to your argument, namely that geo-engineering is, at this stage, not proven to be 1) more effective than regulation, 2) cheaper, nor 3) without special problems of international coordination. Why not assume that geo-engineering will also: 4) cure athlete's foot and 5) give the world a pleasant, pine-fresh scent?

    I agree with Craig McGillivary that the real concern here is that your (and others') "hand wavey" remarks about some magical solution that surely will come down the pike in a few years may convince people that this is not a problem that needs to be addressed at all.
  • I think there are clearly different kinds of geo-engineering. Painting houses white or building carbon absorbers are sensible things to explore, Dropping huge amounts of iron into our oceans creates huge risks. I see no reason why cap and trade couldn't be designed so that someone who develops a carbon absorber could use that to offset their coal plant.
    What Advent might be worried about is that politicians might take advantage of people's status quo bias. "Lets not reduce emissions because in ten years magical fairy technology will save us." Or alternatively "Jesus is going to come back to earth in 2020 anyway so what are we concerned about."
  • x_trapnel
    But you're sort of begging the question here--what's at stake *right now* is whether, in fact, this self-important rich country will, in fact, regulate itself. And your opponents are arguing that it ought to.
  • adina
    The difference is that, with political solutions, the "perpetrators" of climate change theoretically bear the costs, while with "technological" solutions, the greatest victims end up being the ones who invest the costs- they have the most at stake, and thus the greatest motivation to pony up for innovation. The onus shouldn't only be on those backed into a corner by others who don't care about their own negative externalities.
  • Do the "perpetrators" bear the costs even theoretically? Countries like China and India will have to bear much of the cost. And they won't agree to emission caps unless rich countries pay for much/most it. But that's just to say that they won't agree to (or stick with) a political "solution."

    Some important rich countries (ahem!) won't agree to regulate themselves as it is. Others have simply flouted self-imposed targets when convenient.
  • adina
    I agree with you that India and China won't cooperate.
    One way to deal with this is to calculate those countries' relative contributions to climate change, and charge the equivalent cost in the form of a tariff, while simultaneously getting rid of all protectionism-motivated tariffs (with perhaps no net change!) .
    It's true that there's no excellent way to deal with the comparative advantage that polluting countries have, when selling their goods. So we can have a matching program. Whatever is the average carbon tax placed upon all CD players sold in the world, the US will set an equivalent tax upon the CD players we sell. If China begins to corner the market by paying little to no carbon tax, then our average tax per CD player will also become very low, until a commercially stable strategy is reached.

    However, because the U.S. politicians love to identify trivial and largely symbolic targets (soda, rather than poor health, big screen TVs instead of overall power use, lawn watering on forbidden days in CA, rather than overall water use), I agree that it may be preferable to tolerate a major problem, rather than watch the government pretend to address it.
  • I think the real problem is that geo-engineering may do something besides succeed or fail. It may cause unforeseen consequences precisely because it succeeds. I have in mind a story from biology class, of scientists in a remote village who were constantly pestered by flies. They eliminated the flies, but affected the ecosystem in some zany way that caused the rat population to go haywire, resulting in an outbreak of... *bubonic plague.*

    I am all for the geoengineering approach in theory, and if and when it's viable it *should* be aggressively sold to the public, but I also think it's irresponsible to consider it viable before a metric shit-ton of research is produced demonstrating that the nightmare scenario above will not happen. This will take at least several years, and during that time it would be equally irresponsible not to throw all our weight behind renewable energy.

    All that said, I think it's important to treat the climate change issue as related to but distinct from the issue of dependence on oil and coal. From the latter perspective, there is an undeniable pure economic case to be made for aligning incentives towards renewable energy. Why waste money on elaborate efforts to harvest these increasingly scarce resources, when the sun is just throwing energy away, all the time? Do you agree?

    Finally, I think the thing you posted on Twitter about this ( http://bit.ly/3JziHJ ) was just plain conspiratorial. As a leftist, I think the vast majority of us believe that, e.g., international cooperation and a strong social safety net are good policies that sell themselves without the specter of a climate catastrophe.
  • "there is an undeniable pure economic case to be made for aligning incentives towards renewable energy. Why waste money on elaborate efforts to harvest these increasingly scarce resources, when the sun is just throwing energy away, all the time? Do you agree?"

    No. When carbon-based energy becomes more expensive than alternative sources of energy, THEN it will be a waste to dig it up, and no one will want to. To try to accelerate this eventuality by "aligning incentives" through taxes and subsidies is simply to harm people by forcing them to pay more for energy than they they otherwise would. The usual economic justification for this sort of thing is that it prevents a greater expected future harm, but given IPCC forecasts, you basically have to cheat to make the math work.
  • x_trapnel
    Your version is true under a definition of 'waste' that most of your opponents (and most humans, period) disagree with--a definition that says that waste only occurs in allocations that are pareto-inferior with respect to current endowments, preferences, and transactions costs.

    But this sort of accounting counts Bengladeshi lives as worth only as much as they can pay their rescuers (or pay off their extortioners). It's just not a remotely sensible way to calculate costs over the entire planet for decades.

    I suspect the definition of 'waste' that people are working with, if framed in economistic terms at all, implicitly idealizes my equalizing endowments or something.
  • x_trapnel
    Bah, that wasn't very clear. Let me try again:

    The whole point is that, by hypothesis, emissions are effectively an uncompensated tort. Take a less controversial case--genuinely health-impairing smog, as you used to have in LA and have in various other places today. The idea that we ought not count the damage to health in our assessment of whether the status quo is 'wasteful,' and that if this damage outweighed the lower cost of dirty industrial activity, then those harmed would buy off the polluters, ignores the way that assigning the rights to polluters, in a context of massive transaction costs, endowment inequalities, and 'taste for fairness' decision-making, biases the calculation.

    To use your argument from awhile back: this is moral philosophy, not a value-neutral technical exercise, and your position about what counts as waste / efficiency bears a rather steep argumentative burden.

    (That said, yes, all of this is only relevant if various proposals actually help!)
  • The enforcement of a carbon tax of the size needed to stop warming doesn't come with unintended side effects?
  • Even if I grant that it does, are the possible political side effects of a tax worse than the possible material side effects of throwing a wrench into a machine as complicated as *the climate?* All I'm saying is, let's get an exhaustive answer to that question first.
  • johnbr
    The economy is just as complex, if not more complex than the climate. It's also just as crucial to our well-being. But many people feel absolutely no unease at half-baked, politically compromised "experiments" in manipulating the economy to solve a short-term problem and damn the long-term consequences.

    If one is uneasy about one of these types of "forcing", they should be uneasy about the other.
  • This is all very hand wavey. Take a technology like artificial carbon sequestering "trees." What that would do is simply remove carbon from the atmosphere, like real trees, but at a much greater rate. They would be relatively easy to calibrate and fine tune. This is the sort of thing I had in mind. It wouldn't "throw a wrench" into the climate. It would pretty straightforwardly change "too much" carbon in the atmosphere to "not too much" carbon in the atmosphere. That is to say, it would fix the problem. That would be fantastic, right?
  • DogOfJustice
    Would not a carbon tax spur investment in artificial trees? Isn't that a large part of the point of carbon-limiting legislation ideas?

    Mike, unless I'm missing something, it would do NO SUCH THING, because a carbon tax does not reward removing carbon from the atmosphere, it only penalizes emitting it!
  • Mike
    Would not a carbon tax spur investment in artificial trees? Isn't that a large part of the point of carbon-limiting legislation ideas? i don't think emissions-cutting legislation/treaties will result in much emissions-cutting without a variety of technologies that do not currently exist, but emissions cutting legislation would help to create a more fertile environment for bringing such technologies into existence.
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