On Global Warming

On Global Warming-Becker When climatologists construct models of global warming caused by industrial emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, they are much more like economists than the typical experimental biologist or physicist. By that I mean that they can only test the implications of their models with the data thrown up by current and past actual events, not by experimental isolation of particular forces. Since many other not well-understood or readily observed forces affect climate, it has been difficult to prove that these models give accurate predictions about future warming. This helps explain the considerable skepticism about whether man-made activities explain much of the temperature build-up in recent decades, although Posner is right that consensus on this has grown considerably during the past 15 years. So I agree with him that it is prudent to take actions to reduce the build-up of carbon gases in the atmosphere, but which ones? Despite his recognition of its many shortcomings, Posner believes the US should join the Kyoto Protocol. I disagree because this Protocol in its present form has major defects, even if one fully accepts the concern about global warming. The most fundamental problem is that some 140 developing nations are excluded, including China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and oil producers like Saudi Arabia. As a consequence, the greater the restrictions and costs imposed on companies in developed countries to cut back their emissions, the stronger their incentive to shift production to exempt nations, like China, India, and Mexico. This is economically inefficient, and helps explain why influential unions and companies in the United States oppose these restrictions. These production shifts could even have a perverse effect on pollution because poorer nations tend to pollute more per unit of industrial output than rich nations do. For companies in the developed world are, even aside from Kyoto, subject to popular pressures and laws to reduce their output of pollutants. Such restrictions are weak or absent in most countries trying to catch up to the economic leaders. One way to begin to overcome the opposition to Kyoto from developing nations, Congress, and the President, would be to start a system of marketable quotas, for example of CO2 emissions, that would be traded on a worldwide exchange. The total number of quota rights issued in any year would be determined by the level of worldwide emissions of CO2 allowed in that year. The EU is starting an exchange- modeled after the Chicago Climate Exchange that successfully trades sulfur dioxide emission rights- with a limited form of trading in their carbon emission quotas under the Kyoto Agreement. A most important modification of the Protocol would be to allocate to the major developing nations a greater share of the quotas than their share of emissions. This would make developing nations net sellers of quotas on the proposed climate exchange, and so they would collect payments (or “taxes”) from companies in the richer nations who on balance would buy quota rights to reach their production goals. Russia recently agreed to the Kyoto Protocol after much indecision probably because they expect to be net quota sellers in the foreseeable future. A favorable system of quota allocation might overcome the resistance of China and other developing nations to abide by the Protocol while they are industrially so far behind Europe, Japan, and the United States. It could also reduce the opposition in America-depending of course on how many quotas it receives- because companies in developing countries would have no artificial cost advantage in production, as long as they had to pay the market price for any quotas they receive. A tradable quota system is equivalent in its effects on production to a unit tax on emissions that leads to the same total quantity of emissions as the quota system. Indeed, the market price of a quota for say a ton a unit of carbon pollution would exactly equal the equivalent tax on that ton. So tradable quotas and taxes have the same beneficial effects on incentives to discover ways to reduce emissions. Posner is worried about the effects of abrupt, catastrophic, and irreversible changes in climate that could produce enormous damage to the world. Apparently, a catastrophic climate change occurred naturally about 11,000 years ago, and maybe at a few other times. These effects are possible in multiple equilibrium climate models- multiple equilibrium models are also used in economics- whereby a sufficient deviation from one climate equilibrium position can set in motion forces that lead to large and rapid movement to a wholly different, and possibly much worse, position. But a few naturally induced rapid climate changes in the course of thousands of years does not mean that the man-made risk of such a dramatic change should receive much weight. Given all the risks the world faces, such as terrorist control of nuclear and biological weapons, or runaway nanotechnology, genetically modified crops, and cloning-all very well discussed in Posner’s new book Catastrophe- I believe he is excessively concerned about climatic catastrophes. A sympathetic and informative review of such abrupt climate changes by Stephen Schneider of Stanford published in 2003 by the OECD’s Workshop on “Benefits of Climate Policy” reaches the modest conclusion that “My own personal value position, given the vast uncertainties in both climate science and impacts estimations, is to enact (and act on) policies to slow down the rate at which we disturb the climate system. This can buy us time to better understand what may happen-a process that will take many more decades- and lead to lower cost decarbonisation options.” I should add that throughout history, there has been a tendency to underestimate the potential for technological developments that greatly reduce the predicted doom from various natural and manmade disasters, such as claims during the past several centuries that the world is running out of wood, coal, or oil. One glaring and instructive example is the 1865 book The Coal Question by the great economist, W. Stanley Jevons, which predicted disastrous coal shortages by the end of that century. The lesson for warming is that new technologies may arrive much sooner than expected, technologies that not only effectively reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, but also help take them out of the atmosphere. Still, I agree with Posner that we might want to give financial and other incentives to speed up the development of ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. He may be right that governments should subsidize research on this topic, although he would agree that the subsidies to ethanol and the Synfuels corporation, and the hype about the potential of hydrogen to replace oil and coal, are not reassuring about government subsidies of other climate-improving technologies. It may be better to convince rich philanthropists to establish lucrative prizes for technologies that can remove carbons from the atmosphere. Perhaps even we should allow patents on these technologies, which would be purchased by signatories to the Kyoto Protocol through auctions of the type described skeptically in my previous commentary on patents.

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