The End of Doom (32 page)

Save the Climate: Cut Subsidies

The first rule for getting out of a hole is to stop digging. In this case, it's crazy to pay people to burn more fossil fuels if one is concerned about man-made global warming. The International Energy Agency estimates that government consumption subsidies for fossil fuels amounted to $544 billion in 2012. Ending subsidies would encourage consumers and producers to cut back on the use of fossil fuels, which in turn would reduce carbon dioxide emissions. And that would save taxpayers a great deal of money.

Nitrous oxide exists naturally in the atmosphere, but as a result of human activities, its concentration has increased by 20 percent over preindustrial levels, making it the third most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and methane. Nitrous oxide is a long-lived gas that has a global warming potential of 310, meaning one molecule traps over 310 times more heat than a molecule of carbon dioxide. The amount of nitrous oxide put into the atmosphere is equivalent to about 3 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, which approximates the emissions of half of the world's entire vehicle fleet. In addition, nitrous oxide depletes the stratospheric ozone layer that shields the earth's surface from damaging ultraviolet light. So reducing nitrous oxide emissions is a twofer—cutting it lowers the temperature and protects the ozone layer.

Two-thirds of human nitrous oxide emissions come from agricultural activities—for example, using nitrogen fertilizer or livestock waste management. It is not an exaggeration to say that the invention of a process to synthesize nitrogen fertilizer made the modern world possible, as fertilizers boost crop yields as much as 50 percent. Nitrogen fertilizer that isn't taken up by plants boosts input costs to farmers. However, farmers have to make trade-offs between a number of different costs for fuel, equipment, seed, labor, fertilizer, and so forth in order to make a profit, and managing nitrogen fertilizer is usually not at the top of the list for improving the bottom line.

That being said, if it's economic and ecological madness to subsidize the burning of fossil fuels, it's just as barmy to subsidize agriculture in the amount of $300 billion annually. The World Bank reported in 2012 that fertilizer subsidies in India amounted to 2 percent of that country's GDP. Agricultural subsidies clearly encourage farmers to overuse fertilizer, which in turn produces nitrous oxide emissions that harm the ozone layer and raise global temperature.

Real Intergenerational Equity

Comedian Groucho Marx once famously quipped, “Why should I do anything for posterity? What has posterity ever done for me?” Many people are worried about “intergenerational equity” with regard to how global warming will affect future generations. But perhaps Marx had the right question.

Consider that University of Groningen economist Angus Maddison calculates that annual per capita income in real dollars in 1900 in Western Europe was $3,200. Today Western European average incomes average $21,800. Per capita income averaged $4,000 in the United States in 1900. Currently, average American income is $30,500 per capita, according to Maddison's figures. In other words, contemporary Europeans and Americans are around seven times richer than their great-grandparents were three generations ago. The true intergenerational equity question becomes: How much would you have demanded that your much poorer ancestors give up in order to prevent the climate change we are now experiencing? We stand in exactly that same relation to people who will be living in 2100.

Total global GDP in 1900 in real dollars was about $2 trillion. The World Bank calculates that in 2012, global GDP stood at $72 trillion. In other words, global GDP increased by thirty-six times over the past century. Average per capita global real income in 1900 was about $1,300. Dividing the World Bank figure up by the world's population of 7.2 billion, one finds that global average per capita income is around $10,000. Of course, it is not equally distributed among people.

What about the future? If global economic growth continues at around 3 percent per year, total GDP in real dollars would reach $888 trillion in 2100. Many scenarios, including those used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggest that world population will stabilize or even fall below 8.5 billion people by 2100. This yields an average income of over $104,000 per person in three generations. So should people living now and making a global average of $10,000 per year be forced to lower their incomes in order to boost the incomes of future generations that in some IPCC scenarios will have incomes in 2100 over $107,000 per capita in developed countries and over $66,000 in developing countries?

Let's take the worst-case scenario devised by British economist Nicholas Stern, in which global warming is so bad that it reduces the incomes of people living in 2100 by 20 percent below what it would otherwise have been without climate change. That implies that global GDP would rise to only $710 trillion by 2100. That would reduce average incomes in 2100 to only $84,000 per person. In other words, people living three generations hence with the worst consequences of climate change would still be more than eight times richer than people living today. Another way to think of that much future climate damage is that it is equivalent to reducing global economic growth from 3 percent to 2.7 percent over the next ninety years.

An Emergency Backup Plan to Cool the Planet

Say that the world has adopted measures that will lead to the massive deployment of low- and no-carbon energy technologies, but it turns out that global warming starts to occur at a much faster pace than climate models had projected. To prepare for just such a situation, some researchers have suggested various geoengineering techniques that could be deployed to slow the rise in temperatures until the low-carbon economy can take hold.

“Prudence demands that we consider what we might do if cuts in carbon dioxide emissions prove too little or too late to avoid unacceptable climate damage,” asserted climatologist Ken Caldeira in a 2008 roundtable on geoengineering in
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
What should we do? “We need a climate engineering research and development plan,” declared Caldeira. He added, “We cannot afford a new period of Lysenkoism and allow political correctness to pollute our scientific judgment. Scientific research and engineering development should be divorced from moral posturing and policy prescription.” The National Academy of Sciences released two reports in February 2015 endorsing research into geoengineering strategies that could be deployed to counteract man-made global warming. One is
Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool the Earth
and the other is
Climate Intervention: Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration
. The NAS reports argue that both should be pursued.

One proposal involves injecting sulfur particles into the stratosphere, where they would reflect sunlight back into space, thus cooling the planet. There has already been one recent natural experiment that proved this idea could work. In 1991, the Mount Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines cooled the planet when it blasted millions of tons of sulfur particles into the stratosphere; the particulates formed a global haze that lowered average temperatures by about 0.5°C for more than a year.

Researchers and entrepreneurs at Intellectual Ventures have devised a “garden hose to the sky” method for cooling the planet. The firm, founded by polymath and former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold, proposes to hoist an eighteen-mile hose using helium balloons attached every few hundred yards to pump liquefied sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere as a way to mimic the cooling produced by the Pinatubo eruption. The group estimates that setting up five sulfur injection base stations would cost a mere $150 million and cost $100 million per year to operate. If particular areas of the globe—say, the Arctic Ocean and Greenland—are warming up too fast, it might be possible to lower regional temperatures by this means.

Another proposal involves marine cloud whitening, in which hundreds of ships cruise the world's oceans spewing salt water as a mist into the atmosphere. The salt particles would function as cloud condensation nuclei, which would increase the extent and brightness of low level clouds over the oceans. These whitened clouds would reflect sunlight back into space, thus cooling the earth's surface. By one estimate, a fleet of 284 ships spewing salt water into the air at a cost of $1 billion per year would offset about 0.6°C of warming. To reduce future temperatures by 1.9°C, 1,881 vessels would have to be deployed at a cost of $5.8 billion annually.

Some IPCC pathways toward stabilizing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere explicitly incorporate the development of new technologies that can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. One such carbon dioxide removal proposal is called bioenergy carbon capture and storage; this involves cultivating plants to absorb carbon dioxide as they grow and then use them as fuel to produce energy. When the plants are burned, the carbon emissions are captured and buried, resulting in negative emissions. Another proposal is direct air capture, a possibility offered by Columbia University researcher Klaus Lackner; this involves using a specific resin that absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide a thousand times more efficiently than trees do to capture the gas and then store it underground.

Oddly, some environmentalists who profess to be very concerned about the dangers posed by man-made global warming fiercely oppose research on these geoengineering technologies. In 2011, Oxford University researchers planned to conduct what they called the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) experiment in which they merely planned to use balloons to loft a hose to harmlessly spew water droplets into the atmosphere. The experiment was called off under pressure from activists, who denounced it as the pursuit of a “very high-risk technological path” and asserted that “such research is a dangerous distraction from the real need: immediate and deep emissions cuts.”

One suspects that the biggest risk that opponents fear is that geoengineering might actually work well. “If humans perceive an easy technological fix to global warming that allows for ‘business as usual,' gathering the national (particularly in the United States and China) and international will to change consumption patterns and energy infrastructure will be even more difficult,” observed Rutgers University environmental scientist Alan Robock.

Should global temperatures take off steeply, deploying any geoengineering plan would be rife with international political difficulties. For example, the novel climate created by geoengineering would likely shift rainfall patterns, with significant differential impacts on the agricultural sectors of various countries.

Maybe so, but the activists already assert that man-made global warming is a big problem. Since that is so and there's some chance it might come on faster than is currently projected, it is just plain irresponsible to oppose research that could lead to the development an emergency backup cooling system for the planet.

How Much to Insure Against Low Probability Catastrophic Warming?

How much should we pay to prevent the tiny probability of human civilization collapsing? That is the question at the center of an esoteric debate over the application of cost-benefit analysis to man-made climate change. Harvard University economist Martin Weitzman raised the issue by putting forth a Dismal Theorem arguing that some consequences, however unlikely, would be so disastrous that cost-benefit analysis should not apply.

Weitzman contends that the uncertainties surrounding future man-made climate change are so great that there is some nonzero probability that total catastrophe will strike. Weitzman focuses on equilibrium climate sensitivity. Climate sensitivity is defined as the global average surface warming that follows a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. As has been discussed, the IPCC
Physical Science
report finds that climate sensitivity is likely to be in the range of 1.5° to 4.5°C and
very unlikely
to be greater than 6°C. But very unlikely is not impossible.

Weitzman spins out scenarios in which there could be a 5 percent chance that global average temperature rises by 10°C (17°F) by 2200 and a 1 percent chance that it rises by 20°C (34°F). Considering that the globe's average temperature is now about 15°C (59°F), such massive increases would utterly transform the world and likely wreck civilization. Surely people should just throw out cost-benefit analysis and pay the necessary trillions of dollars to avert this dire possibility, right?

Then again, perhaps Weitzman is premature in declaring the death of cost-benefit analysis. William Nordhaus certainly thinks so, and he has written a persuasive critique of Weitzman's dismal conclusions. First, Nordhaus notes that Weitzman assumes that societies are so risk averse that they would be willing to spend unlimited amounts of money to avert the infinitesimal probability that civilization will be destroyed. Nordhaus then shows that Weitzman's Dismal Theorem implies that the world would be willing to spend $10 trillion to prevent a one-in-100-billion chance of being hit by an asteroid. But people do not spend such vast sums in order to avoid low-probability catastrophic risks. For example, humanity spends perhaps $4 million annually to find and track possibly dangerous asteroids.

Nordhaus also notes that catastrophic climate change is not the only thing we might worry about. Other low-probability civilization-destroying risks include “biotechnology, strangelets, runaway computer systems, nuclear proliferation, rogue weeds and bugs, nanotechnology, emerging tropical diseases, alien invaders, asteroids, enslavement by advanced robots, and so on.” As Nordhaus adds, “Like global warming, all of these have deep uncertainty—indeed, they may have greater uncertainty because there are fewer well-understood constants in the biological and technological world than in the geophysical world. So, if we accept the Dismal Theorem, we would probably dissolve in a sea of anxiety at the prospect of the infinity of infinitely bad outcomes.” If we applied Weitzman's analysis to our individual lives, none of us would ever get out of bed for fear of dying from a slip in the shower or a car accident on the way to work.