Here’s the conversation of the day between Don and Chuck. You’ve heard it before.
Don: “Chuck, ever get the feeling that you live Bill Murray’s life in the 1993 film Groundhog Day? I certainly do every time I hear about climate change. In the film, Murray wakes each morning to the same day which he runs through with some variations because he knows the past and the future. You know how we can rewind a video, nowadays instantly going to the very minute and second we want to see again? Well, I feel I am Murray in a way. I know the video will rewind, but I don’t have any control; I see the repeated end and the repeated beginning. And I can’t make any significant changes in either. That’s our world film on climate change. I fear this film will run for a couple of centuries. Heck, we’ve been at this repeatedly since the nineteenth century when Fourier and Tyndall identified carbon’s potential effect on the atmosphere.”
Chuck: “You mean people have been discussing greenhouse gases for two centuries? Wow! I didn’t realize. You’d think we would have a handle on this by now. I remember that the Clinton Administration started spending money on climate with Al Gore in the lead, and then the Bush Administration played down its significance before the Obama Administration pumped up the spending before the Trump Administration dampened it right before the Biden Administration said ‘Let’s get out there and spend, baby, spend.’ If I get your meaning, I can see how we are living in an eternal Groundhog Day climate film.”
Don: “I guess that spending part is what bothers me. I did some of those government-funded studies on greenhouse gases and green technologies back in the 1990s and early 2000s. I even wrote a policy for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania only to find, Groundhog-Day-style, that the following administration junked it because it was the product of the previous administration. Then in the 2000s, I was approached again to redo what I had already done for the state. I’m Bill Murray! So, if I add up all the money spent to fund me, the graduate students and professional consultants I hired, and the sundries of the studies, I’d say the repeated research was an unnecessary expense in light of its being sanctioned and abandoned and sanctioned again.
“I’m not an economist, but I have observed a few economic principles in action, some supply-demand stuff and inflation and the like. Take home-viewed movies, for example. VHS players initially cost a bundle in the late 1970s and early 1980s, maybe as much as $2,000 per unit. By the mid-1980s, the price was in the neighborhood of $400, then less, and less, and less. Of course, the machines and their tapes are antiques nowadays, valuable, I suppose only to a nostalgic collector or to someone who still wants to wait to rewind one of those tapes collecting dust in a closet. As antiques they probably cost more now than they did originally. Home-viewing, of course, has jumped to different technologies and, with them, to different cost structuring as multiple providers compete. Anyway, after I read an article on the current administration’s estimated price of carbon, I began thinking about the cost of a VHS player way back then and of the analog of rewinding and fast-forwarding.”
Chuck: “So, when you talk about the price of carbon, you’re not talking about carbon as in diamonds or graphite in pencils. You mean ‘climate-change-carbon,’ that stuff we emit because we like living the way we live with relatively cheap energy for heating, cooling, electrifying, and traveling.”
Don: “Precisely, that kind of carbon, the stuff emitted by coal-fired power plants, oil-burning engines, natural gas furnaces and fireplace logs for heating homes, and the planes, yes, the planes, both public and private crossing overhead and spewing carbon into the atmosphere. So, I guess in 2021 we’re now once again going to revisit climate change, aka global warming, in the United States. We’re going to save the planet in a never ending replay.”
Chuck: “Well, that’s noble, isn’t it? That’s a cause worth the effort, isn’t it? You don’t want to have all those Jupiter Red-Spot size hurricanes hitting the vacation homes and old people in a Floridian retirement community. Or do you? Don’t you know the billions of dollars in damage they cause? And what about sea level. Yeah. There’s a problem for low-lying states like Florida. In fact, all the coastal plain states will lose property. And goodbye Bourbon Street, or at least, goodbye to much of the delta, or as Paul Simon calls it, to a “national guitar” that starts in Memphis and runs down to the Gulf.”
Don: “I understand. I’ve heard this before. Bad things are predicted if we don’t stop global warming. But I just wanted to mention the cost, the cost of carbon emitted by our civilization. There’s a recent study that is serving as the new guideline for the current administration’s efforts to curb climate change. According to an estimate by Raphael Calel and others, carbon emissions will cost between $10 trillion and $50 trillion over the next two centuries. * Now you can couple that bit of research with what will become the newly revised ‘social cost of carbon.’ Anyway, there’s also a group of distinguished people who have offered a ‘roadmap’ to the administration that includes raising the recently reduced estimated economic cost of carbon dioxide from $1-7 per ton to $50 per ton. Fifty bucks per ton! Now I know these guys are smart economists, probably far smarter than the average Donald, but why $50? Well, say the authors, ‘Climate science and economics have advanced since 2010…Devastating storms and wildfires are now more common, and costs are mounting…and new econometric techniques help to quantify dollar impacts.’ ** As usual, I look for analogs, so I have to ask, whether or not there is an analog between the costs of VHS players and climate costs. Those players started out high, then went low, and are now back up with antique players. Carbon was given a value; it was dropped; and now it’s back up to that $50 per ton. But is there an inverse rule here? That is, unlike VHS players whose cost came down as the number of VHS players went up, with an increase in all those little carbon dioxide molecules the cost has just risen. However, before you interrupt, let me say I see the limp in the analogy.”
Chuck interrupting: “I was going to say apples and oranges.”
Don: “So, those guys who recently raised carbon’s cost to civilization to $50 per ton probably would argue that they see normalized costs, if I understand correctly. That is, they’re taking the nominal costs, the costs in dollars as measured in a specific economic time frame, and they’re changing the cost according to some standardized scale that adjusts for matters not like inflation, but rather in carbon’s increased effect on the planet. In doing so, they consider what they call ‘natural capital,’ you know, things like soil or water resources that, once lost, cannot be regained.”
Chuck: “Normalized costs?”
Don: “To understand normalized costs, consider hurricane damage. When devastating Hurricane Camille hit in 1965, it had a nominal cost of $1.4 billion. Standardize that or normalize that, and the number jumps to $26.4 billion. Obviously, that jump is to the value in dollars either averaged since 1965 or determined by today’s value. Makes sense, right? When I was a kid bread cost less. You know the statement about the decreasing value of a dollar based on purchasing power. On a normalization scale, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Harvey in 2017 cost $116.9 and $62.2 billion in damages, even though their nominal costs were each $125 billion. Making normalizations of costs is easy to do in hindsight. Heck, everything is easier to do in hindsight. I don’t think Japan would have attacked Pearl Harbor if it could have operated by hindsight. ‘Seemed a good idea at the time,’ Isoroku Yamamoto probably said seven months later when the Japanese Navy lost the Battle of Midway. Hindsight. Yeah, Bill Murray had it in Groundhog Day and used it to find the human value of his actions. I wish we had it for climate costs.
“I guess I question all this back-and-forth climate spending and valuations of carbon emissions because of one inescapable fact: People can’t really predict well. They can make guesses, even educated guesses, but no one, not even Nostradamus, is a Nostradamus when it comes to details. Fifty bucks per ton as opposed to the discarded $1-7 bucks per ton? That’s the outcome of a prediction whose details cannot be known except in hindsight. I know, I know, Chuck, you’re going to say ‘The models, the models.’ Am I right?”
Chuck: “Well, if things continue as they are, then such-n-such will occur. Southern Florida’s population will increase, more buildings will go up in low-lying areas, sea water will gradually replace shallow fresh ground water because of density differences, and costs will go up for everything every time a storm hits. After all, if you build another house, that’s another house that gets storm damage or that goes under the waves like Atlantis. So, yes, I can see why they increased the value of a ton of carbon to $50.”
Don: “Given the historical nature of inflation and population growth, I can see that an increase from $1 per ton of carbon to as much as $50 per ton of emitted carbon seems like a reasonable inflated estimate to the folks who are part of the in-the-know loop. As an outsider, I can only guess. But unlike the more accurate hindsight economics of damage caused by Katrina, Harvey, and Camille, the future economics we’re dealing with include unknowns as much as knowns, or maybe even more unknowables than knowables. And the new cost estimates are all founded on unvarying beliefs that the world is getting warmer and that that’s a bad thing caused by humans.
“I made a prediction when VHS players first came out and cost as much as $2,000. I told my kids that the price would come down and also that we didn’t need to spend a bunch of time and money sitting still in front of a TV that suddenly cost an extra couple of thou to watch. Well, I was right. The price did come down. And I was wrong at the same time: Even with parental restrictions that made continued room for school work and sports, we did start spending some time watching rented movies. It’s easy to be both right and wrong, especially when it comes to human behavior. It’s folly to conclude that one can accurately predict details on the basis of general trends and vogue assumptions that world temperatures will rise exponentially. Everyone buys into the hockey-stick temperature rise based on one tree-ring study but ignores another tree-ring study that shows a different pattern; everyone is sold on the same assumptions. What if the predictions aren’t as detailed as they pretend to be? This might not seem relevant here, but since she was a teen, my wife has contended that ‘You never know who you are until you are.’ Or, in another version: 'You never know what you are until you are.' With climate forecasts, I’d have to paraphrase her and say, ‘You never know if your model is correct until your prediction comes true.’ Or, rather, ‘You never know if your actions today won’t produce unintended consequences until the unintended consequences bite you in the economic butt.’ Wean ourselves off fossil fuels? Noble idea, right? ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘but let’s try to anticipate the negative consequences, and let’s consider that human behavior and circumstances are often unpredictable. Who knew the toll of the 2020 pandemic in 2019? Everyone knows the toll in 2021. Hindsight. Rewinding the tape.’”
Chuck: “I see what you mean, but those guys who push for the upward revision of carbon costs have included what past projections don’t include, the so-called natural capital costs, the costs that come from environmental effects. Dry out the soils and lower the water tables, and you destroy agriculture, and that affects everyone by making food scarcer and more expensive. You can’t be narrow-minded and think only of tax dollars and fossil-fuel jobs.”
Don: “True, but putting a specific price tag on carbon convinces people that it’s okay to spend trillions on a green economy now because it might save trillions over the next two hundred years. Might. There’s no guarantee. What if the economic prognosticators operated from faulty assumptions? What if we enter another Little Ice Age like the one from which we just emerged? What if they didn’t take into account the ramifications for people alive right now?
“Should I assume that the climate prognosticators practice what they preach? Or does all this climate stuff apply only to those who have no power? On a gut level, the hypocrisy in all this bugs me. I know that’s an emotional issue, but it’s one that has consequences for the so-called little guy who is going to pay a hefty price for carbon. As an example of hypocrisy, take the person that the current administration put in charge of climate change policy on the international stage. As a politician, he actually fought the emplacement of windmills in the waters offshore his luxury digs. The late Ted Kennedy also objected to those same windmills. Everyone wants green energy until it affects his backyard, or should I say, New England waters. The new climate tzar now argues that Earth will reach a ‘tipping point’ just under a decade from now. Once we cross that point, well, there’s no turning back he argues. Venus here we come. Unstoppable greenhouse gas effects will turn the planet into Hell. Deserts all around the world will expand. We’re all gonna be toast, is the general idea.
“Think of that tipping point prediction. It was supposed to occur some years ago; then it moved forward when it didn’t occur; and it moved forward again. Fast-forward the tape, and then rewind it; that’s what we keep doing. But the film is always the same movie. What if we do reach that tipping point only to find out that it means that we prevented another ‘ice age’ from occurring or at least that we staved off the next ice advance by a couple tens to a couple hundred thousand years? Do Canada, northern Europe, and Russia want ice sheets one-mile thick plowing over their cities? What would cost more to Canadians, the complete loss of their country to invading sheets of ice as in the last ice advance or a bit of warming that moves the corn and wheat belts into their farmlands? If I were Canadian, I’d gamble on becoming the world’s bread basket and developing ethanol refineries.
“But just consider the current political plan and the question it raises. So, if the United States undoes its reliance on fossil fuels to the detriment of its living citizens in favor of its future citizens and does so on the basis of an economic estimate, will one country change the destiny of the world? Will the USA impose restrictions on itself while other countries continue to serve their economic interests in the short term? And lost in the big shuffle, you, the little guy has to find some way to pay for the increased costs of electricity and gasoline. So, what happens to you? Certainly, nothing will happen to the self-established and wealthy elitists. If their past and current behavior is a predictor of their future, they won’t worry about the cost of carbon because they won’t live by any restriction. But look what happened in California and Texas, the grids dependent on green energy, on windmills, failed the customers.
“Considering costs, I find this climate stuff, regardless of what the experts say, to be a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s that kind of planet, a planet on which the consequences of doing one thing result in unintended consequences to something else. Let’s say that by spending trillions on green technologies, we go full throttle on allaying our fears that we’ll all roast in the greenhouse. Well, then that could mean using up valuable metal reserves.”
Chuck: “Metal reserves? What’s metal have to do with climate?”
Don: “Think solar panels. Now think cadmium, gallium, germanium, indium, selenium, tellurium, and most of all silver. Let’s say we want to turn the Sahara into a land of solar panels. Cover the entire sunbaked land, say. Sounds like a good idea. All that available sunshine and all that empty space. We could leave some pathways between rows of panels for caravans of camels. But covering, let’s say, just a fifth of the Sahara with solar panels would put a serious crunch on the supplies of those metals I just mentioned.
“And remember I said there would be unintended consequences? When you think of solar panels, what color comes to mind?”
Chuck: “Black.”
Don: “Yep. Black. Remember your blackbody radiation lessons in physics? Can’t have light-colored solar panels that reflect sunlight that could be converted to electricity. Absorption is key; thus, the color. So, imagine covering the Sahara with black panels, that is, converting a light-colored, highly reflective landscape into a dark, absorbing one. Solar panels have a limited efficiency; they need all the light they can get. That means that blackbody radiation takes over. A surface that, though hot under lots of sunshine, becomes hotter by the absorption and reradiation of solar energy. According to a study by Zhengyao Lu and Benjamin Smith, a solar farm the size of the Sahara would produce four times the current world electricity need, but…and here’s that big BUT: Once the ‘solar farm reaches 20% of the total area of the Sahara, it triggers a feedback loop. Heat emitted by the darker solar panels…creates a steep temperature difference between the land and surrounding oceans.’*** That process, they argue, increases monsoonal rains, increases plant growth in the Sahara which then darkens the landscape even more. A darker surface absorbs more solar energy. Lu and Smith estimate that a 20% coverage of the Sahara would increase the local desert temperatures by 1.5 degrees Celsius. That heating in turn would cause more warming at the poles, ironically. It would also, with that 20% coverage, raise world average temperature by 0.16 Celsius. Whoa! I thought this green energy stuff was supposed to ‘save the planet’ by cooling it.
“All those unpredictable and unintended consequences do what they always do, make, as Robert Burns wrote, the best laid ‘schemes o’ mice and men’ go astray. Peter loses money while Paul gains it. Bad for Peter; good for Paul. The plan to even things out just impoverishes one while enriching the other. Solar panels in the Sahara? Sure, we’ll simultaneously cool the planet by using less carbon-based energy and heat it by the simple physics of blackbody radiation.
“But, given the political and economic control of those who believe they can ‘save the planet,’ there isn’t much you and I can do short of running for political office, not something I have the desire to do. So, backed by political people who have in their heads that they know what is best for the planet, we’re headed into one of those ages when people live more for the uncertain predicted future than for the actual present because they are sure they know what is coming. They believe we will incur climate costs of $10 to $50 trillion over the next two centuries, but that they can offset those costs by spending trillions right now and de-establishing the sources of energy that made the modern world possible. And that’s not an exaggeration. There would have been no Industrial Revolution and subsequent Tech Revolution without fossil fuels. Should we also ignore the facts of past climate change, should we ignore that as the ice receded ten millennia ago, it made Canada, northern Europe, and Russia habitable. Keep in mind that those expansive and thick continental ice sheets melted before people began burning fossil fuels. Think, also, that the warmer world that melted the glaciers was accompanied by a sea level rise that led to the inundation of once exposed continental shelves, pushing the shoreline landward toward its current position in places a hundred or meters higher than the glacial low stand. All that happened without human interference.”
Chuck: “Well, that’s something to consider, but isn’t the warming faster now? And isn’t it true that once carbon gets into the atmosphere, it can stay a long time? We could be looking at centuries of a warm Earth, maybe even millennia. We might experience more droughts and more dangerous diseases that spread from the current tropics into mid latitudes.”
“I’ll skip over the paleoclimate and atmospheric history that says yes. For many humans and animals, bad things might happen. Instead I’ll mention that feedback loops occur all the time in Earth systems. Does a warmer Earth mean increased evaporation off the oceans, more cloud formation, more blocked sunlight, and eventually more cooling? Does a cooler Earth mean decreased evaporation, less cloud cover, more insolation, and new heating? What if the predictions are wrong? What if the projected cost is wrong. I had a general idea that the cost of the first VHS players would drop, but I didn’t know by exactly how much. Just remember that all climate models, no matter how inclusive they are, are subject to some subjectivity, some educated guesses and chosen algorithms, and definitely on what to include and exclude in the models. Wasn’t there a recent study that linked Earth’s magnetic field to climate? Who is going to control the Earth’s magnetic field or any of those Milankovich cycles that involve orbit shape, tilt of the axis, and precession? In the case of those many climate models, haven’t there been legitimate suspicions that some people with agendas have ever so slightly tweaked the data to support their foregone conclusions to convince the public? Don’t the wealthy people who are concerned about climate change continue a luxury lifestyle that includes flying to exotic places to discuss why you and I should not be allowed to fly to exotic places? Don’t many of those many researchers living on public money attend climate conferences around the world and then tell everyone else how to live while they themselves continue to enjoy a lifestyle afforded by a carbon-rich energy system? What’s their newest argument going to be? Will it be that everyone should see the economics, including the loss of ‘natural capital,’ as they call it? Don’t those projected economics favor spending trillions now to save trillions in the future?
“Back and forth we go. One administration questions the expenditures and policies centered on climate change, and the next one either fast-forwards the tape or does a rewind. And now, years after we have abandoned the VHS player technology, we can rewind and fast forward at incredible speed. Back and forth; forth and back. With the new technology, we can even skip to the end, bypassing all the near future to see, we think, the distant ending. But, in truth, regardless of the rewinding and fast-forwarding, only rewinding establishes reality because the only reality we can actually know is the one that’s come and gone. Remember what my wife contended from her teenage years onward: ‘You never know what you are until you are.’ We are individually rather complex entities, but we are nowhere in the ballpark of complexity when it comes to an entire Earth and extraterrestrial processes and interactions that influence climate. Those who are so sure that a tipping point is just under a decade away might live to see that no such tipping point is reached. And then what? Having spent trillions of dollars to prevent the tip, will they then say, ‘We were off by a year or two or a decade or so, or maybe even a century or more.’ Will they argue that we should continue to spend trillions of dollars because we all supposedly know that the tipping point is inevitable and that it will occur very soon?
“I hope we all live more than those next ten years and survive economically. It will be interesting to rewind the tape a decade from now to see those predictions in hindsight. Will we see ourselves replaying our own version of Groundhog Day, condemned to rewinding, fast-forwarding, and rewinding again?”
Notes
*Calel, Raphael, et al. Temperature variability implies greater economic damages from climate change. Nature Communications (2020) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18797-8 Accessed February 21, 2021.
**NYU. How to calculate the social cost of carbon? Researchers offer roadmap in new analysis. Phys.org. 19 Feb, 2021. Accessed February 21, 2021.
***Lu, Shengyao and Benjamin Smith. 11 Feb 2021. Solar panels in the Sahara could boost renewable energy but damage the global climate—here’s why. The Conversation. Online at https://theconversation.com/solar-panels-in-sahara-could-boost-renewable-energy-but-damage-the-global-climate-heres-why-153992 Accessed February 21, 2021.
Don: “Chuck, ever get the feeling that you live Bill Murray’s life in the 1993 film Groundhog Day? I certainly do every time I hear about climate change. In the film, Murray wakes each morning to the same day which he runs through with some variations because he knows the past and the future. You know how we can rewind a video, nowadays instantly going to the very minute and second we want to see again? Well, I feel I am Murray in a way. I know the video will rewind, but I don’t have any control; I see the repeated end and the repeated beginning. And I can’t make any significant changes in either. That’s our world film on climate change. I fear this film will run for a couple of centuries. Heck, we’ve been at this repeatedly since the nineteenth century when Fourier and Tyndall identified carbon’s potential effect on the atmosphere.”
Chuck: “You mean people have been discussing greenhouse gases for two centuries? Wow! I didn’t realize. You’d think we would have a handle on this by now. I remember that the Clinton Administration started spending money on climate with Al Gore in the lead, and then the Bush Administration played down its significance before the Obama Administration pumped up the spending before the Trump Administration dampened it right before the Biden Administration said ‘Let’s get out there and spend, baby, spend.’ If I get your meaning, I can see how we are living in an eternal Groundhog Day climate film.”
Don: “I guess that spending part is what bothers me. I did some of those government-funded studies on greenhouse gases and green technologies back in the 1990s and early 2000s. I even wrote a policy for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania only to find, Groundhog-Day-style, that the following administration junked it because it was the product of the previous administration. Then in the 2000s, I was approached again to redo what I had already done for the state. I’m Bill Murray! So, if I add up all the money spent to fund me, the graduate students and professional consultants I hired, and the sundries of the studies, I’d say the repeated research was an unnecessary expense in light of its being sanctioned and abandoned and sanctioned again.
“I’m not an economist, but I have observed a few economic principles in action, some supply-demand stuff and inflation and the like. Take home-viewed movies, for example. VHS players initially cost a bundle in the late 1970s and early 1980s, maybe as much as $2,000 per unit. By the mid-1980s, the price was in the neighborhood of $400, then less, and less, and less. Of course, the machines and their tapes are antiques nowadays, valuable, I suppose only to a nostalgic collector or to someone who still wants to wait to rewind one of those tapes collecting dust in a closet. As antiques they probably cost more now than they did originally. Home-viewing, of course, has jumped to different technologies and, with them, to different cost structuring as multiple providers compete. Anyway, after I read an article on the current administration’s estimated price of carbon, I began thinking about the cost of a VHS player way back then and of the analog of rewinding and fast-forwarding.”
Chuck: “So, when you talk about the price of carbon, you’re not talking about carbon as in diamonds or graphite in pencils. You mean ‘climate-change-carbon,’ that stuff we emit because we like living the way we live with relatively cheap energy for heating, cooling, electrifying, and traveling.”
Don: “Precisely, that kind of carbon, the stuff emitted by coal-fired power plants, oil-burning engines, natural gas furnaces and fireplace logs for heating homes, and the planes, yes, the planes, both public and private crossing overhead and spewing carbon into the atmosphere. So, I guess in 2021 we’re now once again going to revisit climate change, aka global warming, in the United States. We’re going to save the planet in a never ending replay.”
Chuck: “Well, that’s noble, isn’t it? That’s a cause worth the effort, isn’t it? You don’t want to have all those Jupiter Red-Spot size hurricanes hitting the vacation homes and old people in a Floridian retirement community. Or do you? Don’t you know the billions of dollars in damage they cause? And what about sea level. Yeah. There’s a problem for low-lying states like Florida. In fact, all the coastal plain states will lose property. And goodbye Bourbon Street, or at least, goodbye to much of the delta, or as Paul Simon calls it, to a “national guitar” that starts in Memphis and runs down to the Gulf.”
Don: “I understand. I’ve heard this before. Bad things are predicted if we don’t stop global warming. But I just wanted to mention the cost, the cost of carbon emitted by our civilization. There’s a recent study that is serving as the new guideline for the current administration’s efforts to curb climate change. According to an estimate by Raphael Calel and others, carbon emissions will cost between $10 trillion and $50 trillion over the next two centuries. * Now you can couple that bit of research with what will become the newly revised ‘social cost of carbon.’ Anyway, there’s also a group of distinguished people who have offered a ‘roadmap’ to the administration that includes raising the recently reduced estimated economic cost of carbon dioxide from $1-7 per ton to $50 per ton. Fifty bucks per ton! Now I know these guys are smart economists, probably far smarter than the average Donald, but why $50? Well, say the authors, ‘Climate science and economics have advanced since 2010…Devastating storms and wildfires are now more common, and costs are mounting…and new econometric techniques help to quantify dollar impacts.’ ** As usual, I look for analogs, so I have to ask, whether or not there is an analog between the costs of VHS players and climate costs. Those players started out high, then went low, and are now back up with antique players. Carbon was given a value; it was dropped; and now it’s back up to that $50 per ton. But is there an inverse rule here? That is, unlike VHS players whose cost came down as the number of VHS players went up, with an increase in all those little carbon dioxide molecules the cost has just risen. However, before you interrupt, let me say I see the limp in the analogy.”
Chuck interrupting: “I was going to say apples and oranges.”
Don: “So, those guys who recently raised carbon’s cost to civilization to $50 per ton probably would argue that they see normalized costs, if I understand correctly. That is, they’re taking the nominal costs, the costs in dollars as measured in a specific economic time frame, and they’re changing the cost according to some standardized scale that adjusts for matters not like inflation, but rather in carbon’s increased effect on the planet. In doing so, they consider what they call ‘natural capital,’ you know, things like soil or water resources that, once lost, cannot be regained.”
Chuck: “Normalized costs?”
Don: “To understand normalized costs, consider hurricane damage. When devastating Hurricane Camille hit in 1965, it had a nominal cost of $1.4 billion. Standardize that or normalize that, and the number jumps to $26.4 billion. Obviously, that jump is to the value in dollars either averaged since 1965 or determined by today’s value. Makes sense, right? When I was a kid bread cost less. You know the statement about the decreasing value of a dollar based on purchasing power. On a normalization scale, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Harvey in 2017 cost $116.9 and $62.2 billion in damages, even though their nominal costs were each $125 billion. Making normalizations of costs is easy to do in hindsight. Heck, everything is easier to do in hindsight. I don’t think Japan would have attacked Pearl Harbor if it could have operated by hindsight. ‘Seemed a good idea at the time,’ Isoroku Yamamoto probably said seven months later when the Japanese Navy lost the Battle of Midway. Hindsight. Yeah, Bill Murray had it in Groundhog Day and used it to find the human value of his actions. I wish we had it for climate costs.
“I guess I question all this back-and-forth climate spending and valuations of carbon emissions because of one inescapable fact: People can’t really predict well. They can make guesses, even educated guesses, but no one, not even Nostradamus, is a Nostradamus when it comes to details. Fifty bucks per ton as opposed to the discarded $1-7 bucks per ton? That’s the outcome of a prediction whose details cannot be known except in hindsight. I know, I know, Chuck, you’re going to say ‘The models, the models.’ Am I right?”
Chuck: “Well, if things continue as they are, then such-n-such will occur. Southern Florida’s population will increase, more buildings will go up in low-lying areas, sea water will gradually replace shallow fresh ground water because of density differences, and costs will go up for everything every time a storm hits. After all, if you build another house, that’s another house that gets storm damage or that goes under the waves like Atlantis. So, yes, I can see why they increased the value of a ton of carbon to $50.”
Don: “Given the historical nature of inflation and population growth, I can see that an increase from $1 per ton of carbon to as much as $50 per ton of emitted carbon seems like a reasonable inflated estimate to the folks who are part of the in-the-know loop. As an outsider, I can only guess. But unlike the more accurate hindsight economics of damage caused by Katrina, Harvey, and Camille, the future economics we’re dealing with include unknowns as much as knowns, or maybe even more unknowables than knowables. And the new cost estimates are all founded on unvarying beliefs that the world is getting warmer and that that’s a bad thing caused by humans.
“I made a prediction when VHS players first came out and cost as much as $2,000. I told my kids that the price would come down and also that we didn’t need to spend a bunch of time and money sitting still in front of a TV that suddenly cost an extra couple of thou to watch. Well, I was right. The price did come down. And I was wrong at the same time: Even with parental restrictions that made continued room for school work and sports, we did start spending some time watching rented movies. It’s easy to be both right and wrong, especially when it comes to human behavior. It’s folly to conclude that one can accurately predict details on the basis of general trends and vogue assumptions that world temperatures will rise exponentially. Everyone buys into the hockey-stick temperature rise based on one tree-ring study but ignores another tree-ring study that shows a different pattern; everyone is sold on the same assumptions. What if the predictions aren’t as detailed as they pretend to be? This might not seem relevant here, but since she was a teen, my wife has contended that ‘You never know who you are until you are.’ Or, in another version: 'You never know what you are until you are.' With climate forecasts, I’d have to paraphrase her and say, ‘You never know if your model is correct until your prediction comes true.’ Or, rather, ‘You never know if your actions today won’t produce unintended consequences until the unintended consequences bite you in the economic butt.’ Wean ourselves off fossil fuels? Noble idea, right? ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘but let’s try to anticipate the negative consequences, and let’s consider that human behavior and circumstances are often unpredictable. Who knew the toll of the 2020 pandemic in 2019? Everyone knows the toll in 2021. Hindsight. Rewinding the tape.’”
Chuck: “I see what you mean, but those guys who push for the upward revision of carbon costs have included what past projections don’t include, the so-called natural capital costs, the costs that come from environmental effects. Dry out the soils and lower the water tables, and you destroy agriculture, and that affects everyone by making food scarcer and more expensive. You can’t be narrow-minded and think only of tax dollars and fossil-fuel jobs.”
Don: “True, but putting a specific price tag on carbon convinces people that it’s okay to spend trillions on a green economy now because it might save trillions over the next two hundred years. Might. There’s no guarantee. What if the economic prognosticators operated from faulty assumptions? What if we enter another Little Ice Age like the one from which we just emerged? What if they didn’t take into account the ramifications for people alive right now?
“Should I assume that the climate prognosticators practice what they preach? Or does all this climate stuff apply only to those who have no power? On a gut level, the hypocrisy in all this bugs me. I know that’s an emotional issue, but it’s one that has consequences for the so-called little guy who is going to pay a hefty price for carbon. As an example of hypocrisy, take the person that the current administration put in charge of climate change policy on the international stage. As a politician, he actually fought the emplacement of windmills in the waters offshore his luxury digs. The late Ted Kennedy also objected to those same windmills. Everyone wants green energy until it affects his backyard, or should I say, New England waters. The new climate tzar now argues that Earth will reach a ‘tipping point’ just under a decade from now. Once we cross that point, well, there’s no turning back he argues. Venus here we come. Unstoppable greenhouse gas effects will turn the planet into Hell. Deserts all around the world will expand. We’re all gonna be toast, is the general idea.
“Think of that tipping point prediction. It was supposed to occur some years ago; then it moved forward when it didn’t occur; and it moved forward again. Fast-forward the tape, and then rewind it; that’s what we keep doing. But the film is always the same movie. What if we do reach that tipping point only to find out that it means that we prevented another ‘ice age’ from occurring or at least that we staved off the next ice advance by a couple tens to a couple hundred thousand years? Do Canada, northern Europe, and Russia want ice sheets one-mile thick plowing over their cities? What would cost more to Canadians, the complete loss of their country to invading sheets of ice as in the last ice advance or a bit of warming that moves the corn and wheat belts into their farmlands? If I were Canadian, I’d gamble on becoming the world’s bread basket and developing ethanol refineries.
“But just consider the current political plan and the question it raises. So, if the United States undoes its reliance on fossil fuels to the detriment of its living citizens in favor of its future citizens and does so on the basis of an economic estimate, will one country change the destiny of the world? Will the USA impose restrictions on itself while other countries continue to serve their economic interests in the short term? And lost in the big shuffle, you, the little guy has to find some way to pay for the increased costs of electricity and gasoline. So, what happens to you? Certainly, nothing will happen to the self-established and wealthy elitists. If their past and current behavior is a predictor of their future, they won’t worry about the cost of carbon because they won’t live by any restriction. But look what happened in California and Texas, the grids dependent on green energy, on windmills, failed the customers.
“Considering costs, I find this climate stuff, regardless of what the experts say, to be a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s that kind of planet, a planet on which the consequences of doing one thing result in unintended consequences to something else. Let’s say that by spending trillions on green technologies, we go full throttle on allaying our fears that we’ll all roast in the greenhouse. Well, then that could mean using up valuable metal reserves.”
Chuck: “Metal reserves? What’s metal have to do with climate?”
Don: “Think solar panels. Now think cadmium, gallium, germanium, indium, selenium, tellurium, and most of all silver. Let’s say we want to turn the Sahara into a land of solar panels. Cover the entire sunbaked land, say. Sounds like a good idea. All that available sunshine and all that empty space. We could leave some pathways between rows of panels for caravans of camels. But covering, let’s say, just a fifth of the Sahara with solar panels would put a serious crunch on the supplies of those metals I just mentioned.
“And remember I said there would be unintended consequences? When you think of solar panels, what color comes to mind?”
Chuck: “Black.”
Don: “Yep. Black. Remember your blackbody radiation lessons in physics? Can’t have light-colored solar panels that reflect sunlight that could be converted to electricity. Absorption is key; thus, the color. So, imagine covering the Sahara with black panels, that is, converting a light-colored, highly reflective landscape into a dark, absorbing one. Solar panels have a limited efficiency; they need all the light they can get. That means that blackbody radiation takes over. A surface that, though hot under lots of sunshine, becomes hotter by the absorption and reradiation of solar energy. According to a study by Zhengyao Lu and Benjamin Smith, a solar farm the size of the Sahara would produce four times the current world electricity need, but…and here’s that big BUT: Once the ‘solar farm reaches 20% of the total area of the Sahara, it triggers a feedback loop. Heat emitted by the darker solar panels…creates a steep temperature difference between the land and surrounding oceans.’*** That process, they argue, increases monsoonal rains, increases plant growth in the Sahara which then darkens the landscape even more. A darker surface absorbs more solar energy. Lu and Smith estimate that a 20% coverage of the Sahara would increase the local desert temperatures by 1.5 degrees Celsius. That heating in turn would cause more warming at the poles, ironically. It would also, with that 20% coverage, raise world average temperature by 0.16 Celsius. Whoa! I thought this green energy stuff was supposed to ‘save the planet’ by cooling it.
“All those unpredictable and unintended consequences do what they always do, make, as Robert Burns wrote, the best laid ‘schemes o’ mice and men’ go astray. Peter loses money while Paul gains it. Bad for Peter; good for Paul. The plan to even things out just impoverishes one while enriching the other. Solar panels in the Sahara? Sure, we’ll simultaneously cool the planet by using less carbon-based energy and heat it by the simple physics of blackbody radiation.
“But, given the political and economic control of those who believe they can ‘save the planet,’ there isn’t much you and I can do short of running for political office, not something I have the desire to do. So, backed by political people who have in their heads that they know what is best for the planet, we’re headed into one of those ages when people live more for the uncertain predicted future than for the actual present because they are sure they know what is coming. They believe we will incur climate costs of $10 to $50 trillion over the next two centuries, but that they can offset those costs by spending trillions right now and de-establishing the sources of energy that made the modern world possible. And that’s not an exaggeration. There would have been no Industrial Revolution and subsequent Tech Revolution without fossil fuels. Should we also ignore the facts of past climate change, should we ignore that as the ice receded ten millennia ago, it made Canada, northern Europe, and Russia habitable. Keep in mind that those expansive and thick continental ice sheets melted before people began burning fossil fuels. Think, also, that the warmer world that melted the glaciers was accompanied by a sea level rise that led to the inundation of once exposed continental shelves, pushing the shoreline landward toward its current position in places a hundred or meters higher than the glacial low stand. All that happened without human interference.”
Chuck: “Well, that’s something to consider, but isn’t the warming faster now? And isn’t it true that once carbon gets into the atmosphere, it can stay a long time? We could be looking at centuries of a warm Earth, maybe even millennia. We might experience more droughts and more dangerous diseases that spread from the current tropics into mid latitudes.”
“I’ll skip over the paleoclimate and atmospheric history that says yes. For many humans and animals, bad things might happen. Instead I’ll mention that feedback loops occur all the time in Earth systems. Does a warmer Earth mean increased evaporation off the oceans, more cloud formation, more blocked sunlight, and eventually more cooling? Does a cooler Earth mean decreased evaporation, less cloud cover, more insolation, and new heating? What if the predictions are wrong? What if the projected cost is wrong. I had a general idea that the cost of the first VHS players would drop, but I didn’t know by exactly how much. Just remember that all climate models, no matter how inclusive they are, are subject to some subjectivity, some educated guesses and chosen algorithms, and definitely on what to include and exclude in the models. Wasn’t there a recent study that linked Earth’s magnetic field to climate? Who is going to control the Earth’s magnetic field or any of those Milankovich cycles that involve orbit shape, tilt of the axis, and precession? In the case of those many climate models, haven’t there been legitimate suspicions that some people with agendas have ever so slightly tweaked the data to support their foregone conclusions to convince the public? Don’t the wealthy people who are concerned about climate change continue a luxury lifestyle that includes flying to exotic places to discuss why you and I should not be allowed to fly to exotic places? Don’t many of those many researchers living on public money attend climate conferences around the world and then tell everyone else how to live while they themselves continue to enjoy a lifestyle afforded by a carbon-rich energy system? What’s their newest argument going to be? Will it be that everyone should see the economics, including the loss of ‘natural capital,’ as they call it? Don’t those projected economics favor spending trillions now to save trillions in the future?
“Back and forth we go. One administration questions the expenditures and policies centered on climate change, and the next one either fast-forwards the tape or does a rewind. And now, years after we have abandoned the VHS player technology, we can rewind and fast forward at incredible speed. Back and forth; forth and back. With the new technology, we can even skip to the end, bypassing all the near future to see, we think, the distant ending. But, in truth, regardless of the rewinding and fast-forwarding, only rewinding establishes reality because the only reality we can actually know is the one that’s come and gone. Remember what my wife contended from her teenage years onward: ‘You never know what you are until you are.’ We are individually rather complex entities, but we are nowhere in the ballpark of complexity when it comes to an entire Earth and extraterrestrial processes and interactions that influence climate. Those who are so sure that a tipping point is just under a decade away might live to see that no such tipping point is reached. And then what? Having spent trillions of dollars to prevent the tip, will they then say, ‘We were off by a year or two or a decade or so, or maybe even a century or more.’ Will they argue that we should continue to spend trillions of dollars because we all supposedly know that the tipping point is inevitable and that it will occur very soon?
“I hope we all live more than those next ten years and survive economically. It will be interesting to rewind the tape a decade from now to see those predictions in hindsight. Will we see ourselves replaying our own version of Groundhog Day, condemned to rewinding, fast-forwarding, and rewinding again?”
Notes
*Calel, Raphael, et al. Temperature variability implies greater economic damages from climate change. Nature Communications (2020) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18797-8 Accessed February 21, 2021.
**NYU. How to calculate the social cost of carbon? Researchers offer roadmap in new analysis. Phys.org. 19 Feb, 2021. Accessed February 21, 2021.
***Lu, Shengyao and Benjamin Smith. 11 Feb 2021. Solar panels in the Sahara could boost renewable energy but damage the global climate—here’s why. The Conversation. Online at https://theconversation.com/solar-panels-in-sahara-could-boost-renewable-energy-but-damage-the-global-climate-heres-why-153992 Accessed February 21, 2021.
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