It's a dirty secret in the blog world that occasionally bloggers will recommend that their readers read something that they themselves have not read. (Gasp.) But not this blog! At least, not any more! Or rather, at least not this time!
Yesterday I was going to recommend "Bringing Society Back into the Climate Debate" (PDF), a new paper by Roger Pielke Jr. and Daniel Sarewitz (found via their excellent Prometheus science blog). But then I realized that it's a PDF, it's wonky, it's written in dry academic language, and y'all would never read it. And really, how could I expect you to if I hadn't? So last night, I read it.
My initial reaction: They make an extremely good point. Enviros need to reconsider their monomaniacal focus on cutting CO2 emissions.
Go beneath the fold for a brief summary.
A common argument for cutting CO2 emissions is that human-driven climate change will have adverse effects on human societies, through increased natural disasters and concomitant diseases, famines, etc.
But is cutting CO2 emissions the best way to reduce those impacts? According to Pielke and Sarewitz, the research overwhelmingly indicates that the answer is No. The dominant factor in climatological effects on society are societal, not climatological.
... two well documented aspects of the climate-society relationship are largely absent from the climate debate: (1) the awareness that, over time, societal changes--demographic, social, economic, and other changes in the characteristics of human populations--are primary factors in climatic impacts on humans and human impacts on the environment; and (2) viable strategies for responding to such changes lie predominantly in the area of societal governance, not in efforts to control the future behavior of climate.
Enviros typically use the impact of climate on society as a rhetorical tool to argue for their preferred policy prescription: reducing CO2 emissions. But what if, instead, we approached it from the other end? Start with the problem: Damage done to human society by climate is immense, and indeed has been increasing throughout the century. The rise of such damage, measured in dollars or human lives, has risen at a rate vastly greater than warming of the atmosphere. So perhaps slowing -- not even stopping, but slowing -- the rate of warming is not the best way to address those damages. In fact, given that action we take now will have effects decades in the future, if at all, it is an extraordinarily inapt means of addressing the problem. The root of the problem lies in demographics, land use, economic development and disparities, etc.
Consider the following example, from Indur M. Goklany, of the Office of Policy Analysis, U.S. Department of the Interior, in the journal Science. He was addressing Brit science advisor David King, who was arguing -- as greens frequently do -- that global warming would hasten the spread of, and worsen the effects of, diseases like malaria. Wrote Goklany:
. . . the population at risk of malaria (PAR-M) in the absence of climate change is projected to double between 1990 and the 2080s, to 8,820 million. However, unmitigated climate change would, by the 2080s, further increase PAR-M by another 257- 323 million. Thus, by the 2080s, halting further climate change would, at best, reduce total PAR-M by 3.5% [=100 · 323/ (323 + 8,820)]. On the other hand, reducing carbon dioxide emissions with the goal of eventually stabilizing carbon dioxide at 550 ppm would reduce total PAR-M by 2.8% at a cost to developed nations, according to King, of 1% of GDP in 2050, or about $280 billion in today's terms. But malaria's current annual death toll of about 1 million could be halved at an annual cost of $1.25 billion or less, according to the World Health Organization, through a combination of measures such as residual home spraying with insecticides, insecticide-treated bednets, improved case management, and more comprehensive antenatal care.
In other words, if your concern is malaria, there are far more effective approaches to preparation and amelioration than reducing CO2 in the atmosphere. The same could be said of concerns about famine, dislocation, poverty, flooding, hurricanes, etc. etc. There are relatively cheap measures available that would drastically reduce the damage wrought by these phenomena -- and reducing CO2 just isn't one of them.
It follows, then, that some of the enormous quantities of research money devoted to long-term study of climate should be diverted to sussing out and recommending more short-term, efficacious policy shifts.
Before readers blow a gasket: This is not meant to be an argument against good energy policy. As the authors say,
this does not preclude other sensible reasons for energy policy action related to climate (e.g., abrupt climate change) and energy policy action independent of climate change (such as national security, air pollution reduction and energy efficiency). It does suggest that reduction of human impacts related to weather and climate are not primary among those reasons, and arguments and advocacy to the contrary are not in concert with research in this area.
Greens should really think about this. It's politically tempting to use global warming as a kind of trump card, a way of pushing our issues and our agenda to the front of the line. But we should consider whether it would be in our long-term interest -- and the long-term interest of humanity generally -- if we dialed it down a bit and threw our support behind some measures designed to relieve the great suffering taking place in the here and now, measures related to "land use, insurance, engineering, warnings and forecasts, risk assessments, and so on," as the authors put it.
These measures would, in the end, help our agenda anyway. I'll write more about that soon.
Climate-news poem: Breath-catching edition
EPA affirms California’s right to set tougher automobile emissions standards
Comments View as Flat
chris@organicmatter Posted 11:00 am
02 Mar 2005
not so fast
Forgive me for playing devil's advocate, but I've got two serious uncertainties about this approach (and no numbers to back them up, so take everything I say with a grain of salt):
1.) I don't necessarily accept that there are "relatively cheap measures" for dealing with some of these issues. Specifically I'm thinking of famine and poverty. Both are easy to rally people around, and to get governments to donate respectable sums of money toward, and yet I would argue that we've failed to make a significant dent in either problem from a global perspective.
2.) Even if we accept that there ARE cheap ways of dealing with all of the potential consequences of climate change, I'm not sure that we can extrapolate that dealing with all of them in the aggregate is cheaper than major GHG cutbacks.
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Kira Posted 10:12 pm
02 Mar 2005
What about the others?
I've never particularly worried about the impact of climate change on human societies--other than famines, I guess, but even those tend to be more political than environmental. I've no doubt humans have the ability to develop new technologies to adapt to the changes. What worries me are the rest of the critters out there--plants and animals--who cannot migrate or evolve fast enough to get out of the way of melting glaciers, rising waters, warming temperatures, harsher storms, etc.
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Aimee Christensen Posted 5:58 am
03 Mar 2005
Forget about CO2???
I am afraid that this piece may have missed a key issue: a mandatory cap on CO2 emissions automatically puts a price on carbon, thereby increasing the cost of polluting and making cleaner energy technologies more competitive. Indeed, on the international market under Kyoto, the sale of 'emission reduction credits' for each ton of CO2 (or its equivalent in the other five greenhouse gases) enables renewable energy projects and projects that reduce industrial emissions of greenhouse gases to go forward - as well as landfill methane capture/power projects. It increases the rate of return of cleaner energy projects, making them more cost-effective for investors.
At a recent American Council on Renewable Energy conference in December (check them out at www.acore.org), I was surprised by what appeared to be a strong sentiment that a cap on CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions was the best way to get renewables into the marketplace. People also advocated for national renewable portfolio standards (that require a certain percentage of renewables in the electricity mix) as well as production tax credits, but I was surprised how much a cap and trade programs were mentioned.
So when 'greens' or enviros in the advocacy community argue for addressing global warming, particularly for the McCain Lieberman cap and trade bill, it's about getting cleaner technologies into the market. So we really get down to a conversation of language - and I think that is a critical issue, and raises the controversial head of the "Death of Environmentalism" paper advocating for an Apollo Alliance approach (www.apolloalliance.org). I love Apollo's work partnering enviros and labor, so am all for it, but pushing for a cap and trade program is one tool to get us to a clean energy future with great new jobs. It is, unfortunately, a tech-y way to talk about an exciting new future - 'let's pass a cap and trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions' - I admit.
But as I said to Senator Hagel when I asked him about his advocacy for markets and more consumer education and why he wouldn't therefore support a mandatory cap and trade approach, that cap and trade approach puts a price on pollution, and price is after all is the fastest educator of consumers and it lets the market pick the technology winners and losers!
Ever hopeful!
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edarnold41 Posted 6:36 am
03 Mar 2005
Ignoring the Elephant...
I too must claim ignorance of the full content of 'Bringing Society back into the Climate Debate', but from the quotes and article commentary, I suspect that the elephant in the living room is once again studiously ignored. Famine, pollution, destruction of the environment, and most of the other issues concerning environmentalists have one root cause: too many people. Every biosphere has a carrying capacity for the resident species, and the human species has gone way beyond that capacity, and continues to add to the burden at a monstrous rate.
The tremendous costs quoted for natural disasters such as the recent tsunami is not because such events have not happened before, but because the population that was there to be affected was two or three times greater than just a few decades previous. Read up on the rate of population growth in the Third World, and it becomes glaringly obvious why attempts to stamp out famine and epidemic diseases must always fail: solving the food shortage and improving health immediately lead to greater reproduction, starting another boom and bust cycle.
Pogo had it right: "We have met the enemy, and they are us...". Until population control becomes Job One, all the well intentioned fixes of one factor or another are just going to be futile BandAids on a growing cancer.
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David Roberts Posted 7:32 am
03 Mar 2005
Aimee,
I don't disagree with anything you say. I think a cap and trade program's a fine idea (though of course the devil is always in the details) for pushing the development of renewable energy technologies.
Perhaps my headline was poorly chosen. I'm not saying that we should disregard CO2, or abandon efforts to reduce emissions.
What I'm saying -- or rather, agreeing with the paper about -- is that in selling CO2 reductions, saying that they will reduce climate's impacts on society is not the way to go. There are other, faster, cheaper ways to reduce those impacts. We should be pushing for CO2 caps, but not at the expense of supporting other social policy that could have faster results, and not while overpromising about the results.
www.grist.org
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chris@organicmatter Posted 11:34 am
03 Mar 2005
Thanks for clarifying
Now this is a statement that I can stand behind. You'll never catch me saying that reducing GHG emissions (and that's all major GHGs, not just carbon dioxide) isn't essential, but neither is reducing emissions a silver bullet that will solve every climate related problem. Especially since we've already pumped enough extra GHGs into the atmosphere that we're guaranteed to see an increase in global mean temperature, even if we were to cut GHG emissions by 50% effective tomorrow.
Organic Matter: Blogging the environment
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jdhlax Posted 3:53 pm
08 Mar 2005
Root Of The Problem
This string points out the problem with concerning oneself with the symptom of global warming instead of the cause of the problem, which is industrial society's immoral pollution of OUR atmosphere. We should advocate that all pollution is immoral and that no one should ever be allowed to discharge any pollutants into OUR air, water, or land. Who would be willing to drive a car whose exhaust pipe ended in the passenger compartment?
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