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Fixing Climate Change Will Never Be Free
From Megan McArdle.
"Is fixing climate change free? That’s the suggestion of an international blue-ribbon panel in a new report,
which has been enthusiastically embraced by people who would like to
fix climate change. “This may sound too good to be true, but it isn’t," Paul Krugman says. "These are serious, careful analyses.”
I hate to be the person to pour cold water on this, but I happen to have this bucket right here …
The
details are a bit fuzzy so far (the report promises more in a
forthcoming technical appendix). But most of the benefit seems to come
from reducing respiratory diseases in the developing world and ending
fossil-fuel subsidies, which are, no matter what you may have heard on
the Internet, also concentrated in the developing world, not the U.S. tax code.
Essentially,
if developing countries stop selling artificially cheap gas, replace
their coal plants with a combination of nuclear, solar and wind power,
and get people to use gas or electricity for cooking and heating instead
of wood, dung or coal, we can go a long way toward reducing total
greenhouse-gas emissions. Further benefits come from building more
compact cities (they’re looking at you, America) and better conservation
of rural land.
These things may be splendid ideas. But as the New York Times suggests,
it may be a bit optimistic to think that they will actually leave us
with more cash in our hands. And getting the developing world to go
along may be a bit tricky.
For example, I am sure that China would
be a much healthier nation if it used more clean renewable energy
instead of dirty coal plants. I can even believe that switching to clean
renewable energy would generate enough savings in the future to cover
the cost of the fix. Still, I have some questions.
The first, most
obvious question: How much money would the Chinese would save on
medical bills by switching to renewable power, compared with, say,
installing stack scrubbers and other fixes to clean up particulate
emissions from the plants they have? The second, perhaps less obvious,
question: How far in the future will those benefits arrive -- in five
years? Or are we saying that China should stop building coal plants now,
build more expensive nuclear plants while hoping that solar and wind
come to cost parity, and thus deliver to their grandchildren a cleaner
country and a better budget picture?
Intertemporal comparisons of
this sort get really tricky in a developing country. Poverty has an
urgency that overrides other considerations, which is why so many people
have migrated from pristine countryside to squalid city. This sort of
cost benefit is relatively easy in America -- but it’s also not
money-saving, because we already made war on our particulate emissions.
There
are also political considerations. It’s easy to say that poor countries
should get rid of their fuel subsidies -- I mean, there, I just said
it, and it’s absolutely true, they should! On the other hand, I am not
attempting to hold onto power in a country that has built all of its
economic activity around absurdly cheap oil.
The transition costs
away from fuel subsidies are high, and they are difficult to make in an
economy where lots of people are subsisting close to the poverty line.
Noneconomic
costs are always hard to factor into these sorts of calculations. But
they need to be brought up, because they will factor heavily in any
analysis of the political feasibility of your proposal. For example,
they point out that Atlantans could save a lot of money on
transportation if their city had the petite footprint of Barcelona. But
said Atlantans would have to live in tiny apartments rather than large
single-family homes with yards. They might not like that. Especially
because the mini-Atlanta would have much less charm than Barcelona, its
residents having lacked the foresight to build their city on a lovely
beach in a long-declining European power.
This is not to say that
the report is wrong. But many of the people who read it seem to have
come away saying, “OK, great, it’s free, why can’t we do it?” Even if
this is a free lunch over the long term, it is not a free lunch right
now to the people who would need to make major changes in their lives.
No matter how long you point to the equations, they will resist.
I’m
a pessimist on the prospect of collective action on climate change, but
I’m a mild optimist on the technological frontier, because human beings
are endlessly creative, and so far, they’ve ultimately done what they
needed to, though they might kick and scream along the way. I think that
some combination of nuclear, solar and wind, plus adaptation and maybe
geoengineering, are going to keep climate change from being
catastrophic. But I doubt it will be free, and I’m quite sure it won’t
feel that way to many of the people who are affected by whatever changes
we do end up making.
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