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When The Rate Of Return And The Rate Of Growth Do Not Matter Much For Piketty

So, I have finally gotten around to reading Piketty's monumental book.  Something struck me right away that I think many ignore, at least I have seen no one comment on it.  His emphasis on the importance of r > g, (rate of return on capital as he defines it greater than GDP growth rate) seems overblown.  Now I must admit that he repeatedly warns that the path of the distribution of income and wealth is hard to predict and that many factors are involved.  But it is also the case that he makes little of how often the direction of change does not correspond with the direction of change in this simple equation, that its effect is overwhelmed by other factors.

This can be seen by considering the first two figures in the entire book, which appear in his Introduction and that he declares are the most important in the book, what he is trying to explain ultimately.  The first shows the share of the top decile  of the US income distribution from 1910-2010 and the second shows the ratio of capital to income for Britain, France, and Germany from 1870-2010.  What is striking is how often changes in these have little to do with changes in r-g.  As it is, he argues in the book for the near constancy of r in all these nations over a long period of time, which means effectively that it is changes in g that largely drive this gap.

So, what do we see?  For the US the top decile starts out well off in 1910, reaching a peak just before the Great Crash, then it falls to the 1970s after which it rises again, reaching nearly its 1920s level by 2010.  However, what is not discussed much is that nearly all of the decline in inequality occurs in one tiny period: World War II.  He spends almost no time in this large book focusing on that peculiarity.  It is true that g was high in this period, but not that much higher than during the 1960s or for that matter the 1920s.  In the 1960s there was little change in this top decile share, which essentially got as low as it was going to go by 1945 and basically bounced around after that not moving much until it took off after 1980 or so.  And  in the 1920s rather than falling, the top decile share actually rose rather then fell.  It fell initially at the beginning of the Great Depression when g fell hard.

He does provide an explanation of the 1920s and early 30s, but it goes against his basic story about g.  What led to the peak at the end of the 20s?  A sharp rise in capital gains income.  And the following decline was the reversal of this with the stock market crash.  OK, that is almost certainly correct, but it goes against the story about g.  And how is it that essentially all of the decline in income inequality from 1931 to the 1970s occurred in the early 1940s?  He really does not focus on this, but he does indicate what is up, and it is important for his policy discussion at the end of the book.  That is when the US federal tax code went into its most progressive state, with the top marginal income tax rate moving up to the 90+% level in 1940, just in time for the war, where it would stay until the mid-1960s tax cut.  Of course there was a surge of g, and we know that increased employment of women and minorities helped lower inequality, but it is striking how much change in inequality was in these five years alone.

The story in Europe is slightly different, and, of course, it focuses on wealth rather than income.  There, with some minor differences between the three countries, wealth compared to output starts out very high in 1870 and stays there until  World War I, then only to massively collapse in all three countries, although not quite as much in the UK as in Germany and France.  Capital makes a slight recovery during the 1920s, when g was up compared to the previous decade (ooops, going the wrong way), only to decline after 1930 steadily, reaching a minimum in 1950 for all three.  For France and Germany it starts rising again, steadily in the case of Germany and continuing until now.  With Britain it sits at the same level 1950-1970, and then starts rising. 

But here is the catch.  During the 50s and 60s, economic growth was much higher in both France and Germany than in the previous two decades, and also it was higher than in Great Britain, which put in a sclerotic performance during those decades.  But if a higher g is supposed to be associated with less wealth inequality, that is the exact opposite of what we see here.  Wealth inequality declines during the troubled 30s and 40s, only to reappear in the high growth 50s and 60s in France and Germany, while failing to do so in the more stagnant UK. 

Now he does provide quite detailed stories of what was going on in these nations, although his focus is most detailed for France.  War, inflation, and bankruptcy destroy fortunes, although the direct damage of war is not really all that important.  The end of all this allows for capital to reaccumulate, at least in France and Germany, if not Britain.  But this simply emphasizes how these other factors can easily overwhelm what is going on with g.

Indeed, the vast majority of the decline is not in the Depression or the much more physically destructive World War II, but in the decade of World War I.  Here is where capital simply plunges, falling by more than half in both France and Germany, and by about a third in Britain.  What is curious is that the largest part of this decline is in foreign holdings, which simply collapse.  His discussion of the increase in foreign assets in the nineteenth century involved the colonial empires of these nations, although this was not so important for Germany, which he really does not discuss.  But, while Germany lost its foreign empire, if anything those of Britain and France increased due to  WW I, reaching their peaks in the 1920s as they picked up former colonies of Germany, as well as ones in parts of the former Ottoman Empire.  Piketty simply never acknowledges this.

What else happened?  Oh, the Bolshevik Revolution, which led to the repudiation of tsarist Russian debts, many of whose bonds were owned in these countries, and also the expropriation of foreign company holdings in Russia.  Needless to say this has nothing to do with g.

So, a number of critics have argued that policy really drives all this more than his grand dynamics of r and g.  Offhand looking at his own numbers, this would appear to be the case.  In many decades what is happening to distribution is going in quite the opposite direction from what should be the case if one just looks at r and g (mostly just g).  If it is not policy that is causing this, it is some exogenous shock.

Of course for his current policy discussion, he argues that everything is now working to increase inequality.   The growth rate has fallen and policy has moved to favor the wealthy and those who inherit (particularly in the US on the latter).  So, policy must be changed if we are not to end up a patrimonial capitalism.  On that he probably is correct, but he may well have overstated the role of his grand dynamics and understated the role of everything else in his discussion, even as he provides many caveats on this point.

Barkley Rosser

Climate Misconception #9: Investing in clean technologies will solve the climate problem

Here we continue with Misconception #3, with a few more wrinkles to consider.

It has become popular in some circles to say that a fixation on reducing the use of fossil fuels—the thou-shalt-not approach to carbon policy—is a political non-starter.  No one will support a movement that’s so negative.  Instead, they say, we should emphasize the positive.  Let’s ramp up investment in clean technologies, provide lots of green jobs, and fossil fuels will take care of themselves.

I’ve already tried to explain why generating more renewable energy is not the same thing as reducing fossil fuel use by an equivalent amount, so I won’t repeat myself.  Here I’d like to broaden the focus and consider energy-saving technology in general.

The first point to make is that it isn’t always clear what the energy-saving technology is or how much it saves, once we take account of all the upstream inputs that go into it.  On a mundane level, this has come up in the debate over local laws that mandate the use of paper rather than plastic shopping bags at retail stores.  It’s a complicated problem of industrial ecology, and the answer is not likely to be the same in each city.  But this difficulty arises in nearly every technology choice, such as which materials to use for auto parts, what criteria should determine LEED (green building) certification, and so on.  This is our old friend the economic calculation problem: modern interconnected production systems are just very complex.  If we ever put a significant price on carbon, the price mechanism will tell us where net carbon savings actually lie.

The second point is that innovation is difficult to forecast.  Often the methods and products that prove to be the most successful were not the ones you would have bet on during the early stages of R&D.  This is not an argument against promoting research in green tech, but it suggests we need a large portfolio of research projects, anticipating that most will lead to a dead end.  Public R&D needs to be as entrepreneurial as private—perhaps more so, since the stakes are higher.  But the portfolio approach leaves us in doubt regarding the pace and direction of technological development.  We simply can’t know going in what and how much we’re going to get out of it.

And that leads to the main consideration, which is time.  As discussed earlier, what matters for climate change is the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  Every day we extract and burn more fossil fuels, this accumulation goes up.  A brilliant breakthrough that lowers the economic cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels doesn’t help very much if it occurs decades into the future, after we have already surpassed our carbon budget.

To put it bluntly: the physics of climate change imposes a timetable on us, summarized in the form of a carbon budget.  The longer we delay, the faster we have to reduce future fossil fuel consumption.  If we delay too long, no plausible transition path will keep us under budget.  But the development of new technology has its own timetable, which we can’t know for sure going in.  If nature’s schedule moves at a faster pace than technology’s, which it almost certainly will, we have to make a choice: more climate change or more economic disruption.  The point of our whirlwind tour of climate science at the beginning was to convince you that nature really calls the shots.

Consider an example.  One large contributor to fossil fuel use is air travel.  If you fly a few times a year this is probably your biggest individual carbon consumption item.  Living within the IPCC’s carbon budget means that, within a few decades, we have to get to near-zero use—and the path has to head downward sooner rather than later.  What will this mean for air travel?  With current technology the picture is bleak.  Biofuels can be used to power jets, but only at much greater cost, and if we try to substitute biofuels for hydrocarbons in all uses their cost would go through the roof.  There’s no getting around it: with today’s technology there needs to be a lot less flying.  Maybe future technologies can get around this; I really hope they can.  But if we take climate change seriously we can’t afford to wait for new technology before cutting back on air travel.  I realize this is not the positive message that, according to marketers, has the biggest political appeal, but the climate problem is inconvenient on many levels.

The upshot is that it would be great to increase investments in green tech.  In the current macroeconomic environment, with unused productive capacity and rock-bottom interest rates, it’s crazy not to.  But this is primarily about helping people adapt to the demands of fossil fuel reduction; it’s not a substitute for it.

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Climate Misconception #8: Local direct action against carbon-emitting projects will stop climate change

Before I say another word, I should make it clear that activism on behalf of serious climate policy is needed at every level, from global summits down to your own neighborhood.  One level does not take the place of another; we need all of them.

The misconception that bothers me, however, is one that has become rather widespread in the grassroots climate justice movement.  It opposes political action at the top and puts all its faith in direct action, hoping to end fossil fuel use one pipeline, rail line and mine at a time.

The problem is not the direct action, but the illusion which some have that this action is the policy itself and not just the politics to get there.

The first counterargument is the obvious one that there are simply too many pipelines, rail lines and mines; there aren’t enough local movements in the world to shut them all down.  Even if you could, the process would be driven by which fossil fuel operations are the most vulnerable to mass demonstrations, and the phaseout would be extremely disruptive from an economic point of view.  It will take decades to slowly turn off the carbon tap, and which sources continue to operate, for how long, and where the fuel goes are matters that should be subject to economic rationality, not the ups and downs of local politics.  (That said, the very high-carbon energy sources, like the Alberta oil sands, are candidates for immediate closure, and if direct action can bring this about, fine.)

Second, there are many sources of fossil fuel supply and a global demand to be served.  If you shut down one source, demand is likely to shift to others.  Unless direct action encompasses the whole system, the result is more likely to be displacement than an actual reduction in extraction.

Given the time frame available to us to meet carbon goals, there is no way to come close except through stringent laws at the highest possible levels.  Direction action can help create momentum to enact these laws and hold them accountable to environmental and social objectives, but they can’t substitute for laws all by themselves.

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Climate Misconception #7: The goal is for every organization to become carbon neutral

Has the carbon neutrality fad subsided?  It seemed a few years ago that every business, agency, college or other outfit wanted to achieve that vaunted status.  One hears less today.

Perhaps this post is unnecessary, but in case there are other carbon neutralists in the audience, a few points deserve consideration.

First, carbon accounting suffers mightily from the economic calculation problem.  It is difficult, bordering on impossible, for any fairly complex operation to determine its direct and indirect draw on fossil fuels.  One would need to know all the inputs into the inputs, and the inputs into them, and so on all up the line.  In practice carbon accountants rely on standardized measures of the carbon content of various items, but these are approximate at best.

Second, many of the accounting ploys in this line of work violate the strictures of the carbon cycle, as described in previous posts.  You can see this from the claim that arises from time to time that a particular enterprise is carbon negative.  No it’s not, at least not unless it engages in long-term sequestration of carbon that exceeds its own use, and no one I know of does that.

The carbon negative folks treat carbon uptake of vegetation like a simple deduction from the impacts of their other activities, thereby isolating this one moment of carbon flux from the larger cycle of which it’s a part.  (My own college does exactly this, by the way.)  It’s like saying that an airport must have a big population because so many people arrive there each day.

And of course the carbon accounting exercise often makes use of offsets, where the organization that purchases them gets credit for the carbon uptake of vegetation growth somewhere else–again in isolation from the carbon cycle as a whole.

The good news is that the carbon neutrality business is nearly carbon neutral.  It’s an unproductive use of human intelligence, but not much more than that.  The opportunity cost, however, is in what this intelligence could have accomplished if it were directed toward a more consequential goal.  Above all, organizations should give attention to how a significant shift in climate policy would affect their own operations—they should forecast and prepare.

Take my college, for instance.  They send students out to measure tree circumferences in the campus forest so they can broadcast their climate bona fides.  What they aren’t doing is examining what a dramatic rise in fossil fuel prices would do to their ability to attract students, especially commuters and those who come from out of state.  How would it affect their conference business?  The cost of their academic schedule compared to alternative start and end dates?  As we’ll see later on, there will be substantial, unavoidable economic dislocation if and when we ever start to get serious about phasing out fossil fuels.  Why not plan ahead?

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Climate Misconception #6: People who drive SUV’s are causing climate change; people who drive electric cars are the ones helping to solve the problem

This one is really just a corollary to the previous post, but it is so widespread it deserves its own moment in the sun.

1. There are lots of sensible reasons to drive an SUV.  They tend to be comfortable, if that’s what you’re looking for.  With their high clearance they are good for rutty Forest Service roads, which is often where you need to go to get to an interesting campsite or trailhead.  They are adept at hauling a trailer. They can carry more passengers and hold more gear.  Why second-guess the moral standing of every SUV driver you meet on the road?

2. Can you be sure that an electric car is a climate change lightweight?  First, focusing only on the direct relationship between your car and the atmosphere as you roll down the road falls into the climate-change-as-pollution trap discussed as Misconception #1.  Yes, there are no fossil fuels being burned in your car.  But your electricity has to come from somewhere, and the impact you have on the climate depends on the fuel source of the electric utility.  In fact, it may be more complicated than this.  Even if you are drawing power from a facility that uses only renewable energy, you might be displacing some other customer who has to switch to electricity from a fossil fuel source.  Without a rather detailed analysis it’s hard to say.

And then there’s the matter of the energy used up, directly and indirectly, in the production and maintenance of your car.  We are speaking here not only of the consumption of fossil fuels in the assembly process, but also the parts, and the parts of the parts, and the machines that make all these parts, and minerals that have to be extracted, processed and shipped for all of the above, and for the infrastructure that gets the juice into your car when you need it.

This is the economic calculation problem in spades.  If we ever get a real climate policy and carbon prices rise to where they ought to go, you’ll simply find out what the score is.

3. This post is not a diatribe against electric vehicles, any more than it is a defense of SUV’s.  And it’s completely agnostic on electric SUV’s.  The point is: don’t look for a solution to climate change based on shopping.  True, a vehicle is an expensive investment, so you might want to plan ahead and consider how you’ll be affected by climate policy, under the optimistic assumption that society will get its act together.  But if you want to do your thing to save the planet, get political, not shoppy.

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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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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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