Climate Misconception #5: Personal change will solve the climate problem

Whatever the political issue, there seems to be a tendency for people to personalize it—to believe that if only each individual would look in the mirror, recognize how her behavior contributes to the problem and vow to mend her ways, the world can be set right again.  I will skip how this mindset operates in other contexts and consider it just in relation to climate change.

We are talking about a shape-shifting mentality that shows up in many forms.  There is the flat out claim that the solution to climate change is in each individual heart; don’t wait for governments or other organizations to take action, just do what needs to be done yourself.  Then there is the moralistic stance according to which the world is divided into good people and bad people, where the good people are the ones who live their lives in an ecologically responsible fashion, and the bad people are everyone else.  (You know, them.)  And even among those who understand that collective action is necessary to avoid the worst that climate change has to offer, there are arguments like, “Al Gore (or Jim Hansen or whoever) should have the integrity of his convictions and stop flying to conferences/meetings/demonstrations.”  Each person’s individual action must thus be judged and found consistent with Right Living or condemned.

There is more to be said about individualist ideology, and especially its moralistic embellishment, than I can take on here, but a few points specific to climate change policy and the political movements we need to enact them cry out to be made.

1. Climate change is a collective action problem.  Let’s cue the prisoner’s dilemma here.  If you are familiar with the PD, you know exactly where I’m going and can skip ahead.  If not, let’s suppose that there are two people in the world, Arthur (A) and Everyone Else (E).  (We fold everyone else up into a single person to make it easier to discuss.)  There are two options for both A and E, to personally refrain from every sort of fossil fuel use or to use these fuels when convenient.  We will call the first option cooperation (C) and the second defection (D), which is the game theory convention.  (Cooperation is whatever is in the interest of the other player.)

Each player has two influences on his or her well-being, lifestyle convenience and forestalling climate change.  Let’s say that, of the two, forestalling climate change is more important, but convenience still matters.  Finally, whether or not climate change takes place depends entirely on what E does, since there are billions of people and A is just one of them.

There are four possible outcomes for A:
(1) no climate change, personal convenience
(2) no climate change, personal inconvenience
(3) climate change, personal convenience
(4) climate change, personal inconvenience

Given what we’ve said about personal values above, the listed order is the order of preference.  Now we have everything we need to construct a “payoff matrix”:

Here I’ve included only the payoff to A, since each individual in the Everyone Else group can be viewed as an A when they make their own choices.  You can check these payoff entries by going back to the list of outcomes to make sure that each outcome results from the cooperation and defection choices of A and E.

Best for A is to defect when E cooperates; this means that climate change will be stymied by the voluntary self-denial of the multitudes of others, but A gets to continue to drive, eat frozen seafood flown in from distant locations, and all the other nice things that E abjures.  This is the free rider effect.  Worst is to cooperate while E defects—the worst of both worlds.  As you can see, no matter what E does, A is better off defecting.  But the irony of the situation is that if every single person is in A’s situation, each will tend to make the same choice, to defect, with the result that the whole planet ends up in the lower right-hand cell.  Indeed, that’s pretty much where we’re at these days.  (There are wrinkles in the prisoner’s dilemma that allow for shared cooperation to emerge over time, but they aren’t likely to materialize when there are so many anonymous participants, and the costs of denying oneself all the conveniences of a carbon-fueled lifestyle are so large.)

The moral of this story is that there are many things in this world that require cooperation between people; they won’t come about on the basis of individual, disconnected action.  Ending the use of fossil fuels is one of them.

2. Connected to this first point is a different collective action problem.  Many of the alternatives to a high-carbon lifestyle themselves require collective action.  It’s a lot easier to give up driving if there’s a train going where you want to go, but individuals acting separately don’t have magic wands that make trains appear.  The same goes for smart grids and job opportunities in walkable, dense urban neighborhoods.  Markets can sometimes overcome economies of scale and interaction effects (nonconvexities), and sometimes not.  In any case, each individual faces only those choices that are available at the moment, not necessarily those they dream of.

3. When people talk about choices that feed or counter climate change, they assume that the consequences are self-evident.  Drive a car, burn the gas.  Fly in a plane, burn the jet fuel.  Turn on the air conditioner, and your electric utility is probably burning something or other.  So far so clear.  But lots of choices are extremely complex.  Take one that’s trivial but typical: which causes more climate change, cleaning and reusing your plastic bags or throwing them out and getting new ones?  It’s not obvious.  On the one hand you have the energy consumption that goes into heating water for cleaning, on the other the fossil fuel feedstock for the plastic the bag is made of.  As a consumer, how are you supposed to know?

And that’s a relatively easy one.  Is it better to buy a new car with high gas mileage or stick with your old clunker?  This means trading off fuel efficiency for the fossil fuels that go into producing a new car.  And it further depends on how much you drive, how the car was made, and how the machines that made the car were made, and so on.  In fact, when you think about it, the carbon content of every good you buy is truly complex if you take into account all the indirect upstream costs—the stuff that goes into the stuff that goes into the stuff that produces and ships the final good to your doorstep.

This is an old conundrum in intellectual history, the economic calculation problem.  It surfaced during the 1920s and 30s, when economists debated whether a nonmarket economic system could be tolerably efficient.  The answer, which most people who’ve studied the matter have come to accept, is no.  It’s simply too hard to try to calculate in advance the entire interconnected system of production and consumption effects.  But the same is true for carbon.  Using today’s state of the art techniques, we can sort all our goods and services into a few hundred sectors, measure the direct carbon use of each and its contribution to the other sectors and crank out a rough estimate of the total carbon cost of each item.  Unfortunately, the economy doesn’t have a few hundred goods but millions of them, and there are practically an infinite number of options available to produce each one a bit differently—for instance if the prices of fossil fuels change.

In the end you can guess but you can’t know for sure.  Even if you wanted to be the Saint of Carbon Self-Denial, there’s no set of instructions you can follow that tells you how to do it.  At some point policies have to be enacted that put a significant price on carbon, and then, through the normal operation of prices, you’ll find out about that plastic bag and the rest of the carbon mysteries.

4. Finally, let’s take a quick look at that morality business.  What does it mean, for instance, to say that people who fly in airplanes are evil, or at least are guilty of contradicting their stated principles?  There are lots of perfectly good reasons to want to fly places.  The world would be better off if more people had international experiences that enlarged their vision and helped them form friendships with others whose customs and languages are different.  Science, the arts, and just about every other field is enriched when smart, creative people come together from all over for meetings, expositions, and symposia.  Why shouldn’t students be able to attend far-away colleges and universities, including those in other countries?  What about touring musicians?  Athletes?  And why is it so bad to travel to magnificent scenery or historic wonders or just visit friends and family?  What makes any of this immoral?

It is true that serious action to prevent catastrophic climate change will require restrictions on the extraction of fossil fuels and that, with existing technology, this will greatly curtail the amount of air travel that can occur.  If and when that happens, we will have to adjust.  In the meantime, whether or not you or I take a plane trip next month will have negligible impact on the climate but large impacts on everything else that matters to us individually.  What’s with the blame thing?

And two more points.  First, if by flying in a fuel-sucking jet a climate campaigner can move forward the moment of serious, effective policy adoption by a single minute, it’s worth it.  Second, a political philosophy that leads people to classify almost all of their fellow citizens as immoral is not a very helpful guide to building a winning coalition.

In the end the reason we have a climate problem is not that there is a stain on the human heart, but because there is an unfortunate side effect to using fossil fuels that would otherwise be wonderful resources.  It’s an effect that occurs in the aggregate and has to be met at that level.

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Climate Misconception #4: Reforestation can play a big role in combating climate change

Enlarging forests is one of the big topics in climate change policy.  The literature on carbon uptake by trees and soils is immense, and one of the few functioning global agreements is REDD, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, which has funneled nearly $200 million into programs to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations by bulking up forests.  On a smaller scale, many of the carbon offsets people purchase when they do things like air travel go to pay for tree planting.  The idea is that forests store carbon, and more carbon in the forest means less in the atmosphere.

Before going under the hood to look at the actual carbon flows involved, I should take a moment to mention a couple of important problems with REDD and similar programs.  First, whatever their impacts on atmospheric carbon, forests happen to be places where lots of people live.  To manage forests strictly for their carbon fixing potential frequently means disrupting traditional ways of life or even turning forest dwellers into carbon policy refugees.  Read, for instance, this recent report by Oxfam of the expulsion of thousands of forest inhabitants in Uganda.

Second, forests are more than carbon repositories.  They are habitats for plant and animal species, sources for food and medicine, bulwarks against soil loss, and intricate water management systems.  Alas, single-minded policies to promote tree growth often result in turning forests into plantations of fast-growing trees.  In many regions, for instance, reforestation projects favor eucalyptus trees, which, although native to Australia, grow rapidly in a variety of climates.  And so one sees a profusion of eucalyptus monocultures which allow their growers to sell lots of carbon credits, but often have negative effects on the other functions that forests should perform.

Still, what about all that carbon that forest projects claim to fix?  Aren’t there significant climate benefits to weigh in the balance?

Answering questions like this is where we begin to see big payoffs from moving beyond immediate carbon flows and thinking about carbon cyclically.  In a way, this misconception is the same as the pollution one I described previously, but it involves carbon leaving the atmosphere rather than entering it.

Consider what happens when you purchase a carbon offset and someone plants a tree.  As advertised, the tree draws carbon from the atmosphere as it grows.  At some point, however, the tree stops growing: either it is harvested, or it burns in a forest fire, or it dies from some other cause.  Then most of its carbon makes its way back to the atmosphere.  (Some may settle in the soil, but there is carbon exchange between soil, water and atmosphere too.)

One immediate effect of this series of events is that some carbon temporarily makes its home in the tree rather than in the atmosphere.  This could be beneficial if we are trying to buy time for other policies to take effect, but it is essentially building up a carbon debt that will have to be repaid later on, ready or not.  Whatever you think of this transaction, it is not a simple reduction of greenhouse gases, as your offset coupon may claim.

More to the point, the best way to think about carbon storage in forests is to compare steady states before and after the tree plantings.  Carbon is fluxing from atmosphere to forest and from forest to atmosphere, but what matters is the average amount of carbon fixed in the forest over time.  If a forest used to store X tons of carbon but now stores 2X in perpetuity, it does indeed represent a reduction in greenhouse gases.  This is what I referred to as tweaking the carbon cycle in an earlier post.

But how do we find out how much today’s actions, like planting trees, alters the steady state carbon storage of a forest?  Good question.  It’s not easy at all.  First, we have to know quite a bit about forest ecosystem dynamics.  For instance, fires, storms and other disturbances, which burn up or knock down lots of trees, are part of the equation.  Another consideration is whether particular forest interventions, like the planting of eucalyptus monocultures, are sustainable.  (Degradation of mycorrhizae, on which trees depend for nutrient uptake, may result from changes in forest composition.)  An enormous uncertainty, however, is climate change itself.  The various habitats that make up this planet are not going to be the same in fifty years as they are today.  Many regions will lose forest cover no matter what we try to do about it.  Planting more trees in such locations is simply useless.

And finally, of course, there is us.  To guarantee that a forest will arrive at a new, higher steady state of carbon storage means to guarantee that people will not cut or burn its trees for generations to come.  And how do we guarantee this?

In short, projects that claim to offset the use of fossil fuels by growing more forests are promising more than they can deliver.  This is not an argument “against forests” or their protection, but it suggests that there are no loopholes that enable us to live within our carbon budgets but allow us to continue burning fossil fuels.

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Max Speaks!

You listen.

Climate Misconception #3: Measures that reduce our dependence on fossil fuels mitigate climate change

Before launching into this topic, we have to define a couple of terms.  Climate specialists like to distinguish between two types of policies, those that mitigate climate change and those that facilitate our adaptation to it.  Mitigation is about taking measures that reduce the degree of climate change we’ll be exposed to, and adaptation is about reducing the human and other costs of whatever climate change we can’t avoid.  It’s like the distinction between slowing the progress of a disease and treating its symptoms.

Adaptation is extremely important, and it becomes even more important as we continue fossil fuel extraction that guarantees ever greater amounts of atmospheric carbon concentrations.  I don’t have too much to say about these kinds of policies, however, and will focus almost entirely on mitigation.

The vast majority of writing and policy wonking on climate change mitigation is concerned with expanding the use of noncarbon energy sources, promoting energy efficiency and taking other measures that wean humans from fossil fuels.  In my view, this is an immense confusion, but one which, because it has an element of truth, is more confounding than outright error.

This is easiest to explain with an example.  Consider the following hypothetical event: a proposal is made to increase investments in wind energy in order to increase its output by, say, 100 gigawatts (GW).  To persuade us, advocates convert this output to CO2 equivalents based on the fossil fuel that would otherwise have to be burned in order to provide the same energy.  Analysts writing about carbon policy then discuss what percentage of our carbon emissions this would eliminate, and you might see this and other renewable energy projects summed up in tables showing how far along we could be toward meeting some emission target in 2030 or whenever.  (The previous post went after the annual emission target business.)

But guess what?  In itself the wind project doesn’t have any impact on climate change at all.  Wind turbines don’t put any greenhouse gases (GHG’s) into the atmosphere, and they don’t take any out.  What does affect climate change is the amount of fossil fuel we extract and burn.

Ah, you say, by getting some of our energy from wind, we get less from fossil fuels, so why split hairs?  The reason is that the hairs are rather sizeable:

1. There is no law of nature or economics that says that humans must use a fixed amount of energy.  We can have more wind energy and more energy from fossil fuels.  In fact, in a growing, developing world we probably will.  No doubt investing in wind energy systems will reduce the fossil fuel consumption that would have otherwise occurred, but hardly one for one.  Simply treating renewable energy inputs as equivalent to fossil fuel reductions is wrong—but people do it all the time.

2. By increasing the supply of energy, renewable energy projects reduce the cost of fossil fuels below what their price would have been otherwise.  For every potential user of coal, oil or gas who switches over to a renewable source, there is that much less demand for the nonrenewable kind.  Ordinary forces of supply and demand will therefore cause some degree of price reduction (again, compared to what it would have been without the renewables) for carbon fuels and somewhat more compensatory demand for them.  One scenario which might come to mind is that consumers in wealthier countries will shift their demand to renewables, making it affordable for more people in lower income countries to get energy from coal and natural gas.  That’s good for energy equity, which I would hardly want to minimize, but it’s not good for the climate.

In short, energy efficiency and renewable energy sources have a complex, indirect relationship to actual reductions in fossil fuel use.  You can’t measure progress on the climate front simply by adding up the “wedges” you get from noncarbon energy boosts.  There is a simple way to measure climate progress, however: reductions in fossil fuel extraction that make it possible to keep our carbon budget in the black.

One way to think clearly about energy and climate is to change the box we put renewable and energy efficiency in.  As mentioned above, we typically see them as components of carbon mitigation policy, but it might make more sense to classify them as adaptation instead.  Why?  It’s true that they don’t further adaptation to climate change, but they do help us adapt to climate change policies.  Look at it this way: if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change, we have to dramatically reduce our consumption of fossil fuels.  The IPCC, for instance, gives us just over 400 gigatons to play with, period.  If we go on with business as usual, the world will hit that limit at around 2040, and anything other than cold turkey after that would be an adventure they advise us not to take.  This is a very tight constraint.

How can we adhere to this carbon budget without suffering a horrendous reduction in living standards?  That’s where renewables, energy efficiency, and other forms of decarbonization come in: they have the potential to enable us to live reasonably well despite the difficulties that phasing out fossil fuels will cause.  This is the sense in which they should be viewed as adaptations.

In another sense, their contribution is political.  As we’ve seen, it’s not easy to build popular support for tough carbon budget measures if the economic cost is viewed as severe.  Alternative energy investments reduce this cost and therefore lubricate the politics.

The upshot is that renewable forms of energy, energy efficiency and changes in what we consume to move away from energy-intensive products are all great and should be encouraged everywhere.  The one trap to avoid is to treat them as one-for-one reductions in fossil fuel use.  Measure that by fossil fuel use itself, directly.

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Climate Misconception #2: We need to set an emission target for 2030/2040/some other year to limit climate change

If you look at the proposals and pledges bandied about in the climate policy world, they mostly focus on getting to a particular emission target in a given year.  This would be reasonable if the greenhouse gas problem were like air pollution from particulates like soot, where a certain amount of the stuff is spewed into the air, people breathe it and get exposed to higher risks of lung disease, and then the pollutant is dispersed or precipitated away.

But it’s not.  CO2 and other greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, and it is this accumulation that determines how much climate change we are imposing on ourselves.  Graphically the problem looks like this.

On the vertical axis we have annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; on the horizontal axis it’s years ranging from today to many years from now.  Suppose the goal is to reach a target emission level by a particular year, the deadline.  Two paths to get there are shown: the first starts out slowly and then picks up speed, while the second makes the bulk of its cuts early on and then eases off.  Both get to the intended destination at the same time.

But GHG’s accumulate, so it isn’t the endpoint that matters, but how much has been cumulatively emitted along the way.  In other words, it’s the area under the curves that tell you how much climate change you’re going to have, and the blue shading shows the difference between the two.  No, the two paths, identical in terms of emission goals by some target date, are not the same.

To carry the logic one step further, suppose you have agreed to be on one of these paths and then, part of the way along it, you overstep the amount you were suppose to emit.  According to the mindset focused on annual emission goals, you should try to get back to the path as soon as possible.  But if the commitment is to a given accumulation of GHG, emitting too much in one year means you have to deduct that overage from your original target for the next year.  Of course, in the real world, we have been dawdling year after year for decades, so our plans have to be much more stringent than if we had taken action instead.

This is why the IPCC, in its latest assessment report, called for a fixed carbon budget, 1000 billion tonnes—which we are more than halfway to filling.  Annual emissions have no meaning in themselves; they matter only insofar as they add to the overall accumulation.

If you want to get real about climate change, drop the yearly emission target language and start talking about carbon budgets.

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Public Construction Spending: Krugman Needs to Look at His Own State

I am not criticizing but amplifying a post from Paul Krugman:

if no deal is made on the federal highway fund, it will soon plunge even further. It’s important here not to get caught up too much in the details. Yes, it’s absurd that the federal gasoline tax has been flat in nominal terms since 1993, which means that in real terms it has fallen 40 percent. But highways don’t have to be paid for with gas taxes — the fund could be (and has been) topped up with transfers from general revenue. And federal borrowing costs remain incredibly low by historical standards. So the highway issue should be seen as part of the larger craziness of infrastructure policy, in which spending has crashed at a time when by any reasonable criterion we should have been building much more.

Let’s turn to New Jersey:

Despite his promise to increase pay-as-you-go financing for the Transportation Trust Fund, Gov. Chris Christie has relied so heavily on debt for four years that the program will run out of borrowing capacity a year early, leaving the Christie administration without the funding it needs to pay for highway, bridge, and mass transit construction fifteen months from now.

But Christie found a way to rebuild the Pulaski Skyway. We covered that here. Basically he took Port Authority funds that were supposed to go for a much needed third tunnel under the Hudson River. So why isn’t Paul posting about the fiscal insanity in his own state? My bet is that he would but he is stuck in traffic trying to get back from New York City.

A Bad Coincidence: The Hobby Lobby SCOTUS Decision And the 50th Anniversary Of The Civil Rights Act

This one is so bad you might think somebody made it up.  So, prior to the Civil Rights Act 50 years ago, many segregationists in the South defended their conduct on religious grounds, indeed this was used to justify slavery itself, that Africans were descended from Ham who was cursed in Genesis for having shamed his father Noah by not covering him up when he had too much to drink.  Barry Goldwater opposed the Act precisely on libertarian grounds of business owners ought to be free to serve whom or whomever they choose on whatever grounds.  The Civil Rights Act said no, you cannot refuse people service on the basis of their race.

So, now with this latest SCOTUS decision we have "closely held corporations" being allowed to not provide insurance coverage for birth control if it violates the corporation's religious views, with the personhood of corporations being extended to new lengths.  Heck, given the weirdly arbitrary definition of this, that not more than five people own more than 50% of the stock, why not just say all of them can do so?  I mean, how do we know who the heck  is making the decisions in these outfits?  At least with a single proprietorship, we think we do know, but even they were not allowed religious exemptions to choose not to serve African Americans.

Of course, as Justice Ginsburg warned in her dissent, who noticed the parallel with the Civil Rights Act, we now have a bunch of groups run by religiously oriented businesses demanding the right to fire gay people.  This is getting even closer to what the Civil Rights Act was all about.  I am sorry that Martin Luther King, Jr. and LBJ are probably rolling over in their graves on this one.

Barkley Rosser

Climate Misconception #1: Climate change is a pollution problem

Again, before I begin, a word about the ground rules.  There are two that apply to the treatment of misperceptions.  The first is that I am not going to name names or try to document who said what.  My purpose is not to criticize anyone else but simply generate a little clarity.  Second, as with the whirlwind tour of climate science, I’m not interested in precision or scholarly heft.  The question I want to pose is simply, how should we think about this problem?  That sets a lower bar on how detailed I need to be.

The first misconception is in some ways the deepest and most interesting of all of them.  When we think of environmental problems, we think of pollution.  The mental framework we invoke is that there is some specific environmental resource—the air, the water, the soil, our own bodies—that is being harmed by an overload of substances that have polluted it.  Air pollution is caused by chemicals going up smokestacks or out of tailpipes.  Water pollution can be traced to industrial discharges, agricultural runoff and other sources.  People watched with morbid curiosity as the radioactive emissions from Fukushima first contaminated parts of Japan, then spilled into its coastal waters and now (in much lighter concentrations) disperse through air and ocean currents.  Pollution is about harmful substances moving from point A (where they were confined or under control) to point B (the resource that is damaged by them).  For every instance of pollution there is an identifiable polluter, the individual, business or government that is responsible for causing this substance to go where it shouldn’t.

The pollution template has become so familiar that we apply it to new forms of environmental harm without giving it a second thought.  Loud people or machinery cause noise pollution; urban lighting causes light pollution.  Ignorant or dishonest thought pollutes our communications and very consciousness.  Pollution began as an act, developed into a metaphor and now structures how we think about wide swaths of modern life, wherever something we value is at risk of being destroyed or degraded.

It’s entirely natural that we would come to think about climate change as a pollution problem—natural but wrong.  The difference is the carbon cycle.  Here’s an example: suppose you cut down a tree and burn it.  In doing this, you’ve instigated a flow of carbon from biomass to atmosphere, and the atmosphere is where carbon operates as a greenhouse gas.  That makes you a carbon polluter, right?  Well, not exactly.  If a new tree grows to replace the one you cut down, it will cause a reverse carbon flux from the atmosphere back to the biota (living organisms).  The flows will be different in quantity and timing, but it’s simply wrong to isolate a single action within the carbon cycle, like cutting down a tree, from the complete operation of the cycle itself.  The pollution model, with its simple assumption that the impact of an act can be determined from a one-time transportation of a pollutant from location A to location B, doesn’t apply.

This also means that the people whose actions move carbon into the atmosphere are not necessarily “polluters”.  We’ll see this later when we look at electric cars.  The fact that carbon goes out my tailpipe but not yours doesn’t mean that I am a carbon polluter when I drive and you’re not.  As you can imagine, this misunderstanding plays havoc with the industry that calls itself carbon accounting.  I’ll go after that one later in the series.

As the earlier discussion of carbon and earth history should make clear, there is an action that is directly responsible for exacerbating climate change: bringing previously sequestered carbon out of the earth.  When that happens, the carbon reenters the global carbon cycle and will lead to an increase, sooner or later, in greenhouse gases.  Of course, the likely entry channel will be combustion, but if you make road paving material out of it or simply allow it to spill somewhere, the carbon will find a path.

Now if you’re so inclined, you can make loopholes, qualifications and intricate verbal distinctions that allow you to squeeze carbon into a pollution framework.  I’m not saying you can’t.  But invoking the pollution template in this context is an invitation to sloppy thinking.  The problem is not, how do we keep carbon out of the atmosphere, but how do we keep carbon down in the ground and out of the carbon cycle altogether?

If you’re hungry for specifics, stay tuned: several forthcoming misconceptions flow naturally from the initial mistake of thinking about climate change as a pollution problem.

Addendum: The cartoon version of the argument

Saying that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere should not be thought of as a pollution problem rubs a lot of people the wrong way.  Isn’t this statement just crazy?  To make the point as clear as possible, let’s look at it in pictures.

Version A: Cow farts according to the pollution model

In this version, Bessie emits a cloud of methane (CH4) which rises into the atmosphere.  Bessie is a polluter.  End of story.

Version B: Cow farts according to the carbon cycle model

Bessie is still sending methane onward and upward.  However, the carbon content of Bessie’s fart was derived from corn feed, and this situates it in the carbon cycle.  CO2 was withdrawn from the atmosphere, where it was temporarily fixed in corn plants as CH2O (approximately).  Carbon in this form was shoveled into Bessie’s trough.

Now, truth be told, Bessie is still a problem: her farts (and burps) effectively convert a less damaging greenhouse gas, CO2, into a more powerful one, CH4.  Her net effect, however, is less than this, because one has to take account of her entire place in the carbon cycle.  This net effect would be close to zero if we could light a match near Bessie’s butt and flare off her discharge, which would convert the methane back to good old CO2.  Of course, the rest of the corn-Bessie carbon cycle is complex, with questions related to land use alternatives, energy inputs into farming and corn processing, and so on.  But the point is that the entire carbon cycle has to be considered when passing judgment on Bessie, not just her direct emissions into the atmosphere, as the pollution model would have it.  If you think the whole world understands this, try googling “cow farts global warming”.

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Climate Change: Why Fatalism Could Be Fatal (Part III of Climate Science)

As we’ve seen, humans have been putting immense ingenuity into finding and extracting carbon-dense fuels, in the process reversing millions of years of earth history.  Once all that carbon finds its way into the carbon cycle, it will go wherever the cycle takes it—into, out of, beneath, around, and back into the atmosphere as it fluxes according to natural processes we humans have minimal ability to deflect.  Today’s topic is, what could go wrong with this?

Very generally, the direct causation between carbon and climate goes like this:

First, global warming causes global warming.  It gets hotter, especially at or near the poles.  Temperate areas see more punishing heat waves in the summer.  A few areas in Canada and Siberia might benefit from this; most regions will not.  The poorer tropical countries in particular really don’t need to be any hotter than they already are.

Second, changes in the greenhouse effect will alter the temperature differences in the air and ocean that cause the system of currents that govern our weather.  These currents are produced by convection, which is when warm gases or fluids rise, pulling in others to take their place.  Some currents, like the global ocean flows (thermohaline currents) that make us forget that Hamburg is at the same latitude as Edmonton, are fairly stable.  Others, like those that cause the oscillation between El Niño and La Niña over the Pacific, are highly sensitive.  But all of them could be altered if global temperatures change enough.

Third, changes in air and ocean currents cause precipitation patterns to change.  Some regions, like the US southwest, will experience chronic drought, while others will get heavier rains, such as more intense monsoons.

Finally, the combination of changed convection patterns and warmer oceans will likely cause more powerful storms.  Once in a century storms will hit once in a decade, and once in a decade events will become commonplace.  This is really beginning to concern insurance companies.

Meanwhile, when the climate changes, so do terrestrial ecosystems.  Many forests, for instance, will become unsustainable and evolve into grasslands or savanna.  “Evolve” is possibly not the right word: the transition will often take the form of raging forest fires.  Species, lovable like polar bears (not so lovable at close range) and less charismatic like thousands of varieties of plants and insects, will become extinct.  It’s difficult to predict what the long-range effect of ecosystem changes will be on us humans.

A different impact that has gotten a lot of attention is sea level rise.  This will happen for two reasons.  First, when you heat water it expands.  This effect is absolutely certain, and it provides the basis for conservative predictions of sea-level rise—less than a meter over the course of the twenty-first century.  More speculative is the effect of melting glaciers and ice sheets that sit on top of land masses.  (Only ice with land under it raises sea levels when it melts.)  To be precise, the progressive melting of major ice formations is fairly certain as the earth warms, as underscored by the recent findings concerning the massive West Antarctic ice sheet, but it will probably take a century or more before these larger impacts are felt.  The West Antarctic melt appears to be irreversible, and it guarantees an additional sea level rise of 12-15 feet—several hundred years from now.

Equally worrisome, however, is a quite different ocean event, a progressive, unstoppable decline in its pH.  Chemical reaction between the increasingly carbonized atmosphere and ocean surfaces is causing ocean water to become more acidic.  This is already a problem for commercial shellfish growers in my region, and it is likely to lead to the disappearance of the world’s coral reefs.  Worst case scenario: as acidification progresses plankton, the tiny (really tiny) shellfish on which the marine food chain depends, could collapse.

Now on to the serious stuff: feedback loops.  Human-induced (anthropogenic) climate change will produce various side effects that can either dampen or amplify the original effect of feeding additional carbon into the global carbon cycle.  One possible negative feedback would be increased cloud cover.  When you look down on them from an airplane, clouds are white, which means they reflect most of the light streaming at them from the sun.  The technical term for this is that they strengthen the earth’s albedo.  At one time scientists thought this might be a useful counterforce to human carbon-spewing.  Currently, however, the view seems to be that clouding over will not be our salvation.  So it goes.

So let’s worry about the positive feedback loops.  One that is probably already kicking in is the melting of the glaciers and ice caps themselves.   After all, they’re white, and after they disappear, whatever is underneath them is darker.  The biggest effect so far is likely to be the dramatic summer melting of arctic ice.  It’s great for shipping but not good in the way it reinforces climate change.

Albedo feedbacks are small change, however, compared to the really, really massive potential embodied in stored methane.  Recall from two posts ago that, while some organic carbon was sequestered over the millennia in the form of fossil fuels, another portion was stashed away as buried or frozen methane.  (To be precise, methane is natural gas, but the methane deposits we’re talking about now are not recoverable with current technologies.  Fortunately.)  How much methane are we talking about, and how does it compare to fossil fuels?  Let’s take a look:

Time out for a few technical notes: (1) The unit is tons of carbon.  (2) The source for fossil fuels is the latest Global Energy Assessment; for clathrates it’s the latest World Ocean Review.  (3) The fossil fuel numbers combine reserves (currently recoverable) and resources (potentially recoverable) and both conventional and unconventional sources.  (4) All amounts are reported as ranges; I took the midpoint of each range.  (5) There are large gas and oil deposits that will never be recoverable; I omitted these.  (5) Ocean clathrates consist of methane deposits located in portions of the ocean that are near enough to the land to capture lots of nutrients but deep enough so that the methane will condense and not rise to the surface.

The key point is the relationship between stored methane and carbon stored in fossil fuels.  As you should realize by now, the majority of fossil fuel deposits need to remain undeveloped if we want to avoid catastrophic climate impacts.  The precise amount is a point of dispute, but the IPCC, governed by a consensus process, says we should burn no more than 600 billion additional tons, and that’s less than 30% of the sum of all known fossil fuel reserves—leaving out resources altogether.

Now look at the methane.  Adding up ocean clathrates and peat deposits, it comes to about 27% of all potentially recoverable fossil fuels and about 1.8 times known reserves.  Here are two things you want to know right away.  One is that the fossil fuel budgets the IPCC and other scientific bodies propose are based on the assumption that none of this methane will escape and enter the carbon cycle.  The second is that, whatever the source, when a fossil fuel is burned it releases CO2, but a ton of methane release has about twenty times the greenhouse effect as a ton of CO2 because it targets a range on the light spectrum that CO2 misses.  In other words, if just a relatively small proportion of stored methane is released into the atmosphere, no matter how diligent we are in our own carbon budgeting, all bets are off.

As you can see, about 400 billion tons of carbon are biding their time in peat bogs.  This alone is equal to almost a fifth of all fossil fuel reserves, it is subject to the 20x amplification factor, and it doesn’t take all that much heat to release methane from a peat bog.  In fact, it’s probably begun to happen on a small scale and will increase (uncontrollably) as the earth continues to warm.  One of the reasons the IPCC and others want to set a 2ºC limit on average temperature rise is to prevent most of this peat methane from escaping.

But now take a look at its elder brother.  A carbon vault more than half again larger than all the world’s reserves of fossil fuels can be found in frozen methane deposits, known as clathrates, located in portions of the ocean that are near enough to the land to capture lots of nutrients but deep enough so that the methane will condense and not rise to the surface.  I should add, some of these methane deposits are also found in deeper freshwater bodies at arctic and subarctic latitudes.  Well, what do you suppose might happen as the greenhouse effect gets into high gear?  The risk is that the most vulnerable clathrates, the ones closest to the temperature tipping point at which they will expand and rise to the surface, will do exactly that.  Being methane—fierce greenhouse instigators—they will quickly kick global warming into an even more advanced phase.  And this will tip the next layer of clathrates, and so on.  The result would be an immense increase in greenhouse gas concentrations over a relatively short period time—perhaps measured in years rather than decades, much less centuries.  It would be alligators in the arctic all over again.  This, friends, is the risk of runaway climate change.

How likely is this to happen?  What’s the critical temperature increase that could set off such a process.  Damned if I know.  In fact, no one really knows.  There are teams of scientists monitoring arctic clathrate sites.  They have reported burps but not yet belches, if that’s reassuring.  Authorities in this field say that the likelihood of a catastrophic clathrate event remains small, but it’s not zero, and whatever the level of risk, it will increase as global temperatures increase.  This is the scenario that scares the bejesus out of everyone who studies it, although there’s no point in being paralyzed by the fear of something that hasn’t happened yet and might well never happen at all.  On the other hand, a small, measured dose of energizing fear could be quite valuable.

Incidentally, there is some evidence that massive, sudden clathrate releases have occurred at other points in earth history.

The final thing to bear in mind—and this is either good news or bad news depending on how you look at it—is that there is a very long lag between human activities that add carbon to the carbon cycle and impacts felt by those humans.  It takes decades for carbon to make its way into the atmosphere where it can do its heat-trapping thing.  Many of the processes this sets in motion, like the melting of ice sheets, take decades longer.  It is said that climate change is not in the future, but now: we are seeing hotter weather, longer droughts, bigger storms.  This is true, but these are the result of fossil fuel extraction that occurred decades ago, back in the days of Vince Lombardi and Mick Jagger.  (Hmmm.)  What we’re doing today will alter the world of our children and grandchildren.

If you’re an economist and you live and breathe present value calculation, that’s a benefit, since any bad stuff that happens a century from now is much less costly after you discount it back.  If you worry about the political capacity of contemporary society to act on the basis of consequences that won’t be felt until today’s citizens are dead and gone, it’s not so wonderful.

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In the Future, All Spell-Checkers Will Recognize Biogeochemical Cycling (Part II of Climate Science)

We haven’t done justice to carbon.  So far we’ve talked about it as a component of the atmosphere, the substance of living tissue and in sequestered deposits underwater or underground.  But carbon gets around a lot more than that.

The term you want to know is biogeochemical cycling.  This refers to the movement of carbon throughout terrestrial and marine ecosystems, propelled by the growth and decomposition of organisms, precipitation, chemical reactions and various other interesting processes.  Let’s begin with a picture:

There are lots of carbon cycling graphics on the web, but this one is nice because it provides some numbers.  I can’t vouch for their precision, but the orders of magnitude are about right.

To talk knowledgeably about the carbon cycle we need a couple more terms.  Carbon sinks are the locations where carbon accumulates and decumulates; think of them like reservoirs in a water management system.  Carbon fluxes are the movements of carbon from one sink to another, with the analogy to pipes that transport water.  Sometimes people refer to the back and forth movement of carbon between sinks as carbon exchange.

So let’s take a look at all this fluxing.  Begin with atmospheric carbon.  Some of it is fixed through the process of photosynthesis into living tissue, where it shows up as either land or marine organisms.  If it’s on land, it can readily migrate into the soils; if it’s at sea it can become dissolved carbon or make its way to ocean sediments.  But carbon can also be exchanged directly between atmosphere and ocean in both directions.  Soils too, as they weather, can release carbon.

It’s important to recognize that carbon exchange is everywhere.  Here is where the water management analogy breaks down.  A water system has a fixed number of pipes; control them and you control everything.  The global carbon cycle moves through every surface and interface, in every gust of wind, drop of water, in every leaf—everywhere.  Human beings can influence it to some degree, for instance through land use policies, but only to a limited extent.  It is a massive, pervasive natural process that transcends us in every respect.  In fact, we ourselves, physically, are just tiny elements in that process, temporary carbon sinks that exchange constantly with the environment and are destined to release their carbon after death.

Does this sound benign?  There is a limit to how much carbon can be concentrated anywhere in the system, because fluxes will restore a degree of equilibrium.  If the carbon concentration in the atmosphere gets out in front of the carbon in the ocean, for instance, fluxes from air to sea will be greater than those in the opposite direction, and a new equilibrium will arise.  This is a force for stability.

Alas, there is another force that destabilizes this cycle—us.  Clever creatures that we are, our fossil fuel operations reintroduce carbon that had been kept out of the cycle for eons.  We mine or pump this stored carbon, and then it joins all the rest of the carbon in its many sinks and fluxes.  The critical moment is when carbon that had been excluded from the cycle is returned to it.  Once this happens, it simply increases the amount that cycles through the system: the sinks all get bigger carbon loads (if they can handle them), and the fluxes get bigger too.

This is one of the fundamental truths of the carbon cycle—one that many policy-makers and opinion-molders misunderstand—so it bears repeating: don’t blame the carbon cycle!  The problem is not that carbon moves from the plants to the soils, or the soils to the atmosphere, or the atmosphere to the ocean, or wherever.  It will do that.  The problem is that we’ve made the cycle bigger by adding additional carbon to it that had been locked out for millions of years.  Once we do this, our ability to steer it is limited in the short run and nearly zero in the long run.  As we’ll see, a lot of what people talk about in the realm of climate policy consists of exactly this misguided approach.

To sum up, today’s message is simple: carbon cycles through our world propelled by biological, geological and chemical forces.  It doesn’t like to sit still.  It is folly to try to control its movements.  If you want less carbon in the atmosphere, don’t try to prevent fluxes into it—stop adding to the amount of carbon that flows through the cycle.  Until we figure out a feasible way to withdraw carbon from its cycle completely, through artificial sequestration (and this is very iffy), keeping fossil fuels in the ground is what it’s all about.

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Piketty and the Capital Theory Dustup

I’ve been thinking some more about the odd treatment Piketty gives the capital theory debate on pp. 230-232 of K21.  Its strangeness is summed up in the following sentence:

Controversy continued, however in the 1950s and 1960s between economists based primarily in Cambridge, Massachusetts (including Solow and Samuelson, who defended the production function with substitutable factors) and economists working in Cambridge, England (including Joan Robinson, Nicholas Kaldor and Luigi Pasinetti), who (not without a certain confusion at times) saw in Solow’s model a claim that growth is always perfectly balanced, thus negating the importance Keynes had attributed to short-term fluctuations.  (p. 231)

Anyone who has studied this debate knows that this summary bears no relation at all to what was actually argued over.  Piketty seems like a smart, open-minded guy, so I would have to assume that he hasn’t read the original documents; his take must have been formed by what he was told in grad school.  If so, this passage can be read as a reflection of how the Two Cambridges battle has been turned into official history.  That’s a discouraging thought.

As for myself, I think I disagree with both sides.  The UK Cantabrigians said that the value of capital is determined by its cost of reproduction, which is a function of its composition, the technology of production and the division of income between labor and capital.  Thus the value of capital depends on its return, and this circularity is what makes aggregate valuation underdetermined.  The upshot is that this return is necessarily a political, not a technical factor.  (Cue Marx.)

The Massachusetts Cantabrigians said that the value of capital is determined in general equilibrium, which encompasses cost of production and the productivity of capital goods.  The reproduction constraint of the UK crowd doesn’t apply, because agents can rationally incorporate their expectations of capital’s productivity in market transactions that pertain to future economic states that differ from the present.  (Cue Arrow-Debreu.)

On this issue I would side with Keynes, for whom profitability does depend on the future, but who viewed the future as truly, radically unknowable.  The result is that there is a cost price for capital goods and a constantly fluctuating market valuation of capital-in-use, and there is no theoretically determinate relationship between the two.

Or to put it differently, the owl of realized capital valuation flies at dusk.

The Wannabe Caliphate Openly Declares Itself

So I earlier argued here that ISIS(ISIL) or DAEESH was not yet claiming itself to be a caliphate, and that its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was only calling himself "al Hakim," or "Ruling Emir," even as I recognized that he had turned over this title to someone else, preparing the way for possibly declaring himself caliph (khalifa), while the media was already doing so inaccurately.

Well, now it has happened.  Yesterday his group declared that henceforth they are to be called "The Islamic State," no more ISIS vs ISIL vs DAEESH.  And his followers have sworn fealty to him as, yep, khalifa, or caliph.  They are now a genuine wannabe caliphate. As usual, Juan Cole provides the best current and historical discussion at this location.

Compared to my previous piece, he has a few differences.  He claims the Ummayyads were just "Arab kings" rather than caliphs, although that disagrees with most of what I have read.  He claims that most Muslims accept that the caliphate died in 1258 with the Mongol conquest of Baghdad.  He also claims that it was only in the 1880s that the Ottoman sultans claimed to be caliphs.  Finally, he says that Taliban leader, Mullah Omar also has claimed to be caliph as well as al-Hakim, Ruling Emir, and he speculates on what would happen if he and al-Baghdadi were to end up in the same jail cell arguing over who is really the caliph.  To that I have no answer, although I note that Cole also reports on details of some truly horrific behavior of al-Baghdadi prior to being thrown into Camp Bucca for 2005-2009, that he would bomb weddings and then bomb the funerals coming out of the bombed weddings.  Such is our current world.

Addendum:  The tale of the history of caliphates is more complicated than is presented in any of my posts or in those of Juan Cole either, with quite a few self-proclaimed caliphs running around out there in different periods, most of them with little power, and also ongoing controversies about just who was a caliph or not and how much secular versus religious power they had.

So, just to add a bit, there was another fairly serious rival caliphate to the Abbasids during 1130-1269 based in Morocco, which ruled portions of Spain for awhile as well.  It may be that in the later stages of the Abbasid caliphate, there was a separation of religious from secular authority.  And for the Ottoman sultans, whatever their claims earlier, it is clear that in 1880 Sultan Abdulhamid II made a major effort to assert that he was a full caliph, with this partly to make claims for ruling Muslims in India rather than the British (with some there actually recognizing his authority), as well as offsetting modernizing/Europeanizing "Young Turks," who would in the end overthrow both the sultanate and the caliphate in 1924 when Mustafa Ataturk was i power.

And for those of you for whom it matters, Ramadan Karim, really (and apparently the now "IS" chose the first day of Ramadan to make their announcement, for better or worse).

Barkley Rosser

Defending "Reform Conservatism" With Derpitude

The new book that many conservative commentators are touting as representing a supposedly new and innovative set of conservative policy proposals is Room to Grow: Conservative Reforms fo a Limited Government and a Thriving Middle Class, put out by the YG Network and edited by Yuval Levin.  Aside from a couple of general bloviatory chapters by Peter Wehner, Levin, and Ramesh Ponnuru, most of the rest of the essays do provide some proposals on various issues, with families the focus of three of the essays.  Some of the proposals are not unreasonable, but only a few of them are really new, with many being old Republican standbys, in some cases going back as far as at least a half century.

James Capretta wants to replace ACA with tax credits on top of the employment system.  If these are supposed to work through the fed income tax system, then how will those without employer insurance who are in the 47% that do not pay fed income taxes gain from this.  Supposedly the system will "guarantee continuous coverage for all Americans," although how this is to be achieved is not made clear, all of this to be achieved with lower costs due to using free markets...

Robert Stein opposes cutting marginal income tax rates, but wants larger child allowances. Not necessarily unreasonable, but more like a marginal adjustment rather than a wild innovation.

Frederick Hess wants school reforms, a hodge podge of online courses and education savings accounts and requiring schools to be more transparent about their "return on investment metrics."  Aren't we already doing the latter with SOLs?  Oh, and he wants to reduce regulations on teachers, which might not be a bad idea, but not again wildly innovative.

Andrew Kelly wants to reform higher ed by changing the student-loan program for give incentives for higher ed programs to "remain affordable."  I am all for restraining costs in higher ed, which have gotten way out of control, but attacking this through the student loan program strikes me as a no-go.  The problem seems to be higher admin salaries and numbers, but how does messing with student loans do anything about that?

Scott Winship advocates using block grants to  states for anti-poverty programs.  Now this is a proposal that is a good half century old, if not older, and an old perennial of conservatives.

Michael Strain wants to increase employment by reducing licensing requirements, providing relocation assistance, and lowering the minimum wage for the long-term unemployed.  The first looks good to me, but this is mostly controlled at state levels, although there has been a surge of this sort of rent seeking at state levels that should be stopped.  I note that relocation assistance might cost money, ahem, although I think it is a good idea.  No comment on the final one.

Adam J. White wants to reform energy by encouraging fracking.  The word "environment" appears once with policymakers urged to "take seriously the concerns that Americans voice regarding the new energy infrastructure's environmental impacts," although he clearly wants the infrastructure for  fossil fuels to go through anyway.  Not a whisper about climate change.

Carrie Lukas is back with families, although opposing fed support of childcare, which she says parents do not like.  She wants resources returned to  parents that will be gained by "consolidating government spending programs," and she wants "policymakers...creating an environment so that women can pursue their vision for happiness and raise their children as they see fit, and target assistance on those truly in need."  Does this mean that she opposes increasing the child exemption that Stein proposes?  I do not know what specific policies lead to this outcome.

James Pethokoukis wants financial reforms and an end to "cronyism," but is amazingly vague on how this is to be achieved, although he want "to limit regulation, reform the financial system, and allow for 'permissionless innovation,'" which this last I might support, but the rest looks like just total mush.

Finally, W. Bradford Wilcox is back on the pro-family schtick, repeating Stein's call for increasing the child tax credit  (to $4.000, how revolutionary!!!), and he also wants to end the marriage penalty in various means-tested programs and the tax code, which I am also OK with, I think.

Some of this is not unreasonable, while some is vague, and some is just worn out old stuff around forever (block grants to states again???).  I will grant that this is better than the usual stuff one hears coming out of commentators on Fox News, so  I suppose we should applaud all this reasonableness.

So, what am I really picking on and where does the derpitude come in?  Well, I had heard about this book previously, but one of my more scholarly libertarian FB friends posted a link to it through a piece in "The Week," by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, "Vox, derp, and the intellectual  stagnation of the left," in which this book is touted as showing how conservatives are all innovative and new and underpy, while "the left," especially as shown by Ezra Klein's Vox and also the New Republic are suffering from "epistemic closure" and "derp."  The comments for my friend's post were worse than even Gobry's with nobody realizing how, well, derpy they were all coming across as.

Gobry claims that "the left" only supports three things, all of them supposedly showing "stagnation" (and derp) due to being "from the 60s."  These are demanding higher marginal taxes on the rich, rasing the minimum wage, and tightening environmental regulation.   Well, actually it was in the 60s that the top marginal income tax rates in the US began to be cut with the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut, but Gobry is too full of derp to apparently know that.  Raising them is an old idea of the 30s and 40s.  Minimum wages have been around since earlier as well, and it is true that in real terms they reached a max in the 60s, so anybody calling for increasing them would be heading vaguely back to then when we had lots of job growth in spite of those supposedly job killing high minimum wages (and while Strain wants to cut min wages, so innovative he is, although that has been going on since the 60s in real terms, so looks like another policy dating from the 60s, derp again).  Finally, it was the 70s when major environmental legislation dates from, but Gobry (and the reform conservatives) do not seem to care at all that much of the world is worried about global warming.  Not a problem for him or his people.  Frack on, derp derp derp!

Finally, as for Gobry's criticism of Klein's Vox, which I pay no attention to myself, his big criticism there is to dump on them having a bunch of posts defending Obamacare and saying that it works.  How dare they?  Somehow I do not think that Gobry has noticed Krugman's point that of 6 famous forecasts of doom about ACA by its opponents, not a one of them has come true.  And in fact that this is what these articles in Vox are about.  But, hey, Gobry is handing out a party line, even when it is screamingly false, while accusing those he is criticizing of engaging in derp.  Sorry, but all the derp appears to be on the side of the one calling it out, which he thought he was being so clever to do.  Instead, he is just engaging in derp, derp, derp all the way.

Barkley Rosser

"Say's Law sank without trace."

Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, J. K. Galbraith (1975), pp. 218-220:

The belief that the economy would find its equilibrium at full employment depended partly on what had long been called Say's Law — for J. B. Say, the French counterpart and interpreter of Adam Smith — and partly on the corrective movement of wages, prices and interest rates when there was unemployment. Say's Law, not a thing of startling complexity, held that, from the proceeds of every sale of goods, there was paid out to someone somewhere in wages, salaries, interest, rent or profit (or there was taken from the man who absorbed a loss) the wherewithal to buy that item. As with one item, so with all. This being so, there could not be a shortage of purchasing power in the economy. Movements in prices, wages and interest rates then validated J. B. Say and also ensured that the fundamental tendency of the economy would be to operation at full employment. People and firms saved from their income, and this saving had, obviously, to be spent. This happened when it was invested in housing, plant, capital equipment. If people saved more than was invested, the surplus of savings would bring down interest rates. Investment would thus be stimulated and saving (at least in theory) discouraged. So the excess of savings would be eliminated and Say sustained. Prices of goods would also fall in consequence of any short-fall in purchasing power that resulted from an excess of savings. This would encourage buying and, by reducing the income from which savings were made, also reduce savings. Again Say was sustained. Until Keynes, Say's Law had ruled in economics for more than a century. And the rule was no casual thing; to a remarkable degree acceptance of Say was the test by which reputable economists were distinguished from the crackpots. Until late in the '30s no candidate for a Ph.D. at a major American university who spoke seriously of a shortage of purchasing power as a cause of depression could be passed. He was a man who saw only the surface of things, was unworthy of the company of scholars. Say's Law stands as the most distinguished example of the stability of economic ideas, including when they are wrong. 

Supplementing Say, as noted, were the forces that kept the economy at full employment. These too were relatively straightforward. Were there unemployment, the competition for jobs would bring a fall in wage rates. Prices would be less immediately affected by the unemployment. The relationship of prices to costs would thus be made more attractive — real wages would fall — and workers whose employment was previously unprofitable to employers would now be hired. The fall in wages would not affect purchasing power; because of Say, that was always sufficient. Employment would continue to expand until the approach to full employment raised wage costs and arrested the hiring. Thus did the economy find its equilibrium at or very near full employment. From this also came the one decisive recommendation of the orthodox economists for ending unemployment. Do nothing to interfere with the reduction of wages in a depression. Resist all siren voices, including that of Herbert Hoover, who, it will be recalled, urged against wage cuts. On no matter was compassion so softheaded, for to keep up wages merely perpetuated the sorrow of unemployment and the sorrows of the unemployed. This was the doctrine, perhaps more accurately the theology, that Keynes brought to an end. There are numerous points of entry on his argument; perhaps the easiest is by way of the rate of interest. Interest, he held, was not the price people were paid to save. Rather it was what they got for keeping their assets in plant, machinery or similarly unliquid forms of investment — in his language, what was paid to overcome their liquidity preference. Accordingly, a fall in interest rates might not discourage savings, encourage investment, ensure that all savings would be used. It might cause investors to retreat into cash or its equivalent. So interest rates no longer came to the support of Say's Law to ensure that savings would be spent. And if Say's Law was no longer a reliable axiom of life, the notion of a shortage of purchasing power could no longer be excluded from calculation. It might, among other things, be the consequence of a reduction in wages. 

What people sought to save, in Keynes's view, had still to be brought to equal what they wanted to invest. But the adjustment mechanism, he argued, was not the rate of interest but the total output of the economy. If efforts to save exceeded the desire to invest, the resulting shortage of purchasing power or demand caused output to fall. And it kept falling until employment and income had been so reduced that savings were also reduced or made negative. In this fashion savings were brought into line with investment — which also, meanwhile, would have fallen but by not so much. The economic equilibrium so established, it will be evident, was now one in which there was not full employment but unemployment. Thus unemployment for Keynes was a natural condition of the economy. There was much else. And not all of Keynes's argument survived. The liquidity-preference theory of interest, for example, though it served Keynes's argument, did not gain permanent acceptance as a description of reality. But on two things Keynes was immediately influential. Say's Law sank without trace. There could, it was henceforth agreed, be oversaving. And there could, as its counterpart, be a shortage of effective demand for what was being produced. And the notion that the economy could find its equilibrium with unemployment — a thought admirably reinforced by the everyday evidence of the '30s — was also almost immediately influential.

Carbon and Climate in the Very Long Run

Before taking up today’s topic, let’s begin with the ground rules.  Scientists like to be precise and comprehensive.  They want to get the details right.  For them, it’s important to know exactly how evidence was acquired and how reliable it is.  It’s also important to use scientific terminology, since the words embody the conceptual structures that define and contextualize them.

I’m not going to do science.  My goal is much more limited, to summarize the main themes as they relate to the nature of the carbon problem and possible solutions to it.  This wouldn’t be enough if we wanted to get concrete and quantitative—for instance, if we wanted to calculate potential impacts of various policies in parts per million (ppm) carbon concentrations or warming effects in fractions of a degree Celsius.  As you’ll see, the objectives this time around are much more limited.

With that behind us, let’s consider how carbon in the atmosphere, on land and water, and under the surface of the earth have interacted over the long haul.

The earth is about 4.5 billion years old.  (This would be a lot of birthdays if we knew what day it came into being.)  Picture the scene 8/9 of the way to the present, about 500 million years ago.  There was a lot of carbon in the atmosphere, about 25 times the level of 200 years ago, before humans started playing around with it.

This carbon has the now-famous greenhouse effect of refracting the sun’s light so that infrared radiation can’t bounce back off the earth as fully as it comes streaming in.  The result is that our atmosphere traps heat, and with so much more carbon the long ago earth was a much warmer place.  That was useful, however, since the sun was also a weaker energy-source back then, sending about 4% less our way compared to today.  Nevertheless, overall average temperatures were way higher than today.  (Even just 50 million years ago there were alligators in the arctic.)

It was at this time that complex forms of life began to appear on this planet.  What is life?  Life as we know it (a Trekkie-ism) is built on molecules whose core is made up of carbon bonded with hydrogen and oxygen.  The growth of organic matter depends on photosynthesis, which looks like this:

Through this process, carbon from the atmosphere makes its way into plant tissue and the tissue of organisms that feed on plants directly or indirectly, which is all of us.  Of course, where there’s life there’s death, and dead tissue decomposes, releasing its carbon.  The familiar smell of methane signals a gas (CH4) that returns organic carbon to the atmosphere.

So with the emergence of life, carbon starts to go back and forth between living organisms and the atmosphere.  In itself this should not alter atmospheric carbon concentration, except for one detail: every now and then, rather than releasing its carbon back into the environment, a decomposing organism will get buried in sediment, and sometimes these carbon-rich sediments get pushed down into the earth’s crust as tectonic plates do their bumping and grinding act.  (In addition, as we’ll see later, some of the methane created by decomposition gets smothered or frozen and doesn’t escape back to the atmosphere either.)

In short, most carbon cycles back and forth, but a tiny bit doesn’t: it gets sequestered.  Give this process a few hundred million years, and it can add up to something.  Here is the picture of atmospheric carbon in the very long run:

The red line is atmospheric carbon concentration as a multiple of its level 200 years ago.  The black line is the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere, which has varied inversely, more or less, with carbon.  (Nitrogen makes up the rest.)  In case you're wondering, planet Earth today is at 2x baseline carbon, another 1 is probably baked in, and 4 or more is guaranteed unless we change course.  But I'm getting ahead.

To be sure, it’s not a simple, predictable downward trend, since there are lots of other factors at work, which we will gloss over.  The main point, however, is that, across the many ups and downs, the conversion of atmospheric carbon into living tissue and the sequestration of a portion of that tissue has had a systematic effect.  It’s given us an earth today that is quite different from the one multicell organisms encountered half a billion years ago.

So where did this carbon go?  Some of it can be found in carbon-based minerals, but most was either buried in the earth’s crust or in sequestered methane.  The pressurized underground stuff is what we call fossil fuels—coal, petroleum and natural gas.  These deposits were formed over millions, even hundreds of millions, of years, and the carbon they embody is what was once in the atmosphere when the world was younger and a whole lot hotter.

We’ll end this little review with our first takeaway: the problem of climate change stems from the exceptional cleverness of human beings, who have developed sophisticated methods to locate and extract fossil fuels.  These are fantastic energy sources, dense and versatile.  But in less than two centuries, humans have begun making noticeable progress toward undoing the last half-billion years of earth history.  As you might expect, that could have consequences.

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