I recently gave a talk to a student group at Connecticut College on the
economics of climate change. (The video is broken up into three parts on my
YouTube channel: one, two, and three.) In this post
I’ll summarize three of my main points: (1) There is a huge disconnect
between what the published economics research actually says about government
policies to limit global warming, and how the media is reporting it. (2)
President Trump taking the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement doesn’t really
affect anything on the margin, even if we stipulate the alarmist position on
climate change. And (3) If I’m wrong, and human-caused climate change
really does pose a dire threat to humanity in the next few
decades, then scientists are currently working on several lines of research
of practical ways to actually deal with the problem.
The “Consensus Research” Does Not Justify
Radical Political Intervention
I first clarified to the students that throughout my talk, I wasn’t going
to grab results from right-wing think tanks, or from “fringe” scientists who
were considered cranks by their peers. On the contrary, I would be relaying
results from sources such as the work of a Nobel laureate William Nordhaus
(whose model on climate change policy had been one of three used by the Obama
Administration) and from the UN’s own periodic report summarizing the latest
research on climate change science and policy.
To demonstrate just how wide the chasm is between the actual economics
research and the media treatment of these issues, I described to the students
the spectacle I observed back in the fall of 2018, when on the same weekend
news came out that William Nordhaus had won the Nobel Prize for his
pioneering work on the economics of climate change and that
the UN released a “Special Report” advising governments to try to limit
global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The media treatment (sometimes in the same story) presented these events
with no sense of conflict or irony, leading regular citizens to assume that
Nordhaus’ Nobel-winning work supported the UN’s goals for
policymakers.
But that is not true at all. Here’s a graph from a 2017 Nordhaus publication that
I included in my presentation:
As the figure shows, Nordhaus’ model—and again, this isn’t cooked up by
the Heritage Foundation, but instead was one selected by the Obama
Administration’s EPA and was the reason he won the Nobel Prize—projects that
if governments “did nothing,” total global warming would reach about 4.1
degrees Celsius. In contrast, if governments implemented the “optimal carbon
tax,” as Nordhaus would recommend in a perfect world, then total warming
would be about 3.5 degrees Celsius.
Anyone remotely familiar with the climate change policy debate knows that
such an amount of warming would terrify the prominent activists and groups
advocating for a political solution. They would quite confidently tell the
public that warming of this amount would spell absolute catastrophe for
future generations.
My point here isn’t to endorse Nordhaus’ model. My point is simply that
Americans never heard anything about this when the media
simultaneously covered Nordhaus’ award and the UN’s document calling for a
1.5°C limit. And yet, Nordhaus’ own work—not shown in the figure above,
but I
spell it out here—clearly concludes that such an aggressive target would
cause far more damage to humans in the form of reduced economic output, that
it would be better for governments to “do nothing” about climate change at
all.
With or Without the United States, the Paris Agreement Was Going
to “Fail”
To continue with the theme of how they’ve been misinformed, I reminded the
students of the media’s apoplexy when Trump announced his intention to remove
the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement (or treaty, in lay terms).
I showed them a headline in which famed
physicist Stephen Hawking said Trump was pushing the planet “over
the brink.”
I then asked the students rhetorically, “You would think that the Paris
Agreement was going to ‘work’ to contain the threat of climate change, except
for Trump pulling out and wrecking it, right?”
And yet, the pro-intervention group ClimateActionTracker.org nicely
illustrates that even if all countries met their pledges (including the
U.S.), it wouldn’t come close to limiting warming to the weaker benchmark of
2°C, let alone the newer, more chic target of 1.5°C. Things were even worse
if we evaluated the actual policies of governments (as
opposed to what they stated they intended to do, about
limiting their emissions).
Further, I included a screenshot (in the top left of the slide) from a Vox
article published before Trump’s Paris announcement, which
said not a single country on Earth was taking the 2°C target seriously.
Technological Solutions
After spending so much time showing that the political “solutions” were
failing even on their own terms, I summarized a few avenues of research
(see this
article for details) where scientists are exploring techniques to
either remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or reflect some incoming sunlight.
Although I personally do not think human-caused climate change is a crisis,
and do think that adaptation coming from normal economic growth will be more
than sufficient to deal with any problems along the way, nonetheless
scientists do have these other techniques in their back pocket, should they
become necessary to “buy humanity a few decades of breathing room” while
technology advances in the transportation and energy sectors.
Conclusion
Americans, especially students, are being whipped into a panic over the
allegedly existential threat of climate change. Yet the actual research,
summarized in the UN’s own periodic reports and in the research of a Nobel
laureate in the field, shows that at best only a modest “leaning
against the wind” could be justified according to standard economic science.
By their own criteria, the alarmist activists are admitting that political
measures are nowhere near achieving their goals. Their own rhetoric says that
these activists are wasting everyone’s time pushing solutions that will end
in catastrophe. Occasionally they slip up, as for example when Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez admits that her “we have 12 years left” was
not to be taken literally.
In order to bring light to the climate change debate, at this point one
just needs to actually screenshot and explain the evidence from the
establishment sources. The rhetorical framing of the issue is so far removed
from the underlying research that this alone is heretical.
