The End of Doom

by Ronald Bailey

  Some IPCC pathways toward stabilizing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere explicitly incorporate the development of new technologies that can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. One such carbon dioxide removal proposal is called bioenergy carbon capture and storage; this involves cultivating plants to absorb carbon dioxide as they grow and then use them as fuel to produce energy. When the plants are burned, the carbon emissions are captured and buried, resulting in negative emissions. Another proposal is direct air capture, a possibility offered by Columbia University researcher Klaus Lackner; this involves using a specific resin that absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide a thousand times more efficiently than trees do to capture the gas and then store it underground.

  Oddly, some environmentalists who profess to be very concerned about the dangers posed by man-made global warming fiercely oppose research on these geoengineering technologies. In 2011, Oxford University researchers planned to conduct what they called the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) experiment in which they merely planned to use balloons to loft a hose to harmlessly spew water droplets into the atmosphere. The experiment was called off under pressure from activists, who denounced it as the pursuit of a “very high-risk technological path” and asserted that “such research is a dangerous distraction from the real need: immediate and deep emissions cuts.”

  One suspects that the biggest risk that opponents fear is that geoengineering might actually work well. “If humans perceive an easy technological fix to global warming that allows for ‘business as usual,’ gathering the national (particularly in the United States and China) and international will to change consumption patterns and energy infrastructure will be even more difficult,” observed Rutgers University environmental scientist Alan Robock.

  Should global temperatures take off steeply, deploying any geoengineering plan would be rife with international political difficulties. For example, the novel climate created by geoengineering would likely shift rainfall patterns, with significant differential impacts on the agricultural sectors of various countries.

  Maybe so, but the activists already assert that man-made global warming is a big problem. Since that is so and there’s some chance it might come on faster than is currently projected, it is just plain irresponsible to oppose research that could lead to the development an emergency backup cooling system for the planet.

  How Much to Insure Against Low Probability Catastrophic Warming?

  How much should we pay to prevent the tiny probability of human civilization collapsing? That is the question at the center of an esoteric debate over the application of cost-benefit analysis to man-made climate change. Harvard University economist Martin Weitzman raised the issue by putting forth a Dismal Theorem arguing that some consequences, however unlikely, would be so disastrous that cost-benefit analysis should not apply.

  Weitzman contends that the uncertainties surrounding future man-made climate change are so great that there is some nonzero probability that total catastrophe will strike. Weitzman focuses on equilibrium climate sensitivity. Climate sensitivity is defined as the global average surface warming that follows a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. As has been discussed, the IPCC Physical Science report finds that climate sensitivity is likely to be in the range of 1.5° to 4.5°C and very unlikely to be greater than 6°C. But very unlikely is not impossible.

  Weitzman spins out scenarios in which there could be a 5 percent chance that global average temperature rises by 10°C (17°F) by 2200 and a 1 percent chance that it rises by 20°C (34°F). Considering that the globe’s average temperature is now about 15°C (59°F), such massive increases would utterly transform the world and likely wreck civilization. Surely people should just throw out cost-benefit analysis and pay the necessary trillions of dollars to avert this dire possibility, right?

  Then again, perhaps Weitzman is premature in declaring the death of cost-benefit analysis. William Nordhaus certainly thinks so, and he has written a persuasive critique of Weitzman’s dismal conclusions. First, Nordhaus notes that Weitzman assumes that societies are so risk averse that they would be willing to spend unlimited amounts of money to avert the infinitesimal probability that civilization will be destroyed. Nordhaus then shows that Weitzman’s Dismal Theorem implies that the world would be willing to spend $10 trillion to prevent a one-in-100-billion chance of being hit by an asteroid. But people do not spend such vast sums in order to avoid low-probability catastrophic risks. For example, humanity spends perhaps $4 million annually to find and track possibly dangerous asteroids.

  Nordhaus also notes that catastrophic climate change is not the only thing we might worry about. Other low-probability civilization-destroying risks include “biotechnology, strangelets, runaway computer systems, nuclear proliferation, rogue weeds and bugs, nanotechnology, emerging tropical diseases, alien invaders, asteroids, enslavement by advanced robots, and so on.” As Nordhaus adds, “Like global warming, all of these have deep uncertainty—indeed, they may have greater uncertainty because there are fewer well-understood constants in the biological and technological world than in the geophysical world. So, if we accept the Dismal Theorem, we would probably dissolve in a sea of anxiety at the prospect of the infinity of infinitely bad outcomes.” If we applied Weitzman’s analysis to our individual lives, none of us would ever get out of bed for fear of dying from a slip in the shower or a car accident on the way to work.

  Weitzman’s analysis also assumes that humanity will not have the time to learn about any impending catastrophic impacts from global warming. But midcourse corrections are possible with climate change. People would notice if the average temperature began to increase rapidly, for example, and would act to counteract it by cutting emissions, deploying low-carbon technologies, or even engaging in geoengineering. Other low-probability calamities, such as the entire Earth being transformed into strange matter by strangelets produced in high energy physics experiments, don’t allow for learning. As Nordhaus dryly notes, “There is no point in revising our views about strangelets in the microsecond after we discover that the calculations of the physicists are wrong.” And yet we do not shut down such experiments.

  At the end of his critique of Weitzman’s Dismal Theorem, Nordhaus investigates what combination of factors would actually produce a real climate catastrophe. He defines a catastrophic outcome as one in which world per capita consumption declines by at least 50 percent below current levels. Since output is projected to grow substantially over the coming century, this implies a decline that is at least 90 percent below the projected baseline. In contrast, the most extreme climate scenario presented by the gloomy Stern Review had people living in 2200 making do with only nine times current per capital consumption instead of thirteen times current consumption.

  Nordhaus ran a number of scenarios through the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model, his integrated assessment model. DICE would produce a catastrophic result only if temperature sensitivity was at 10°C, economic damage occurred rapidly at a tipping point of 3°C, and nobody took any action to prevent the catastrophic chain of events. Interestingly, even when setting all of the physical and damage parameters to extreme values, humanity still had eighty years to cut emissions by 100 percent in order to avoid disaster.

  Finally, the question must be asked: Why has no one ever applied a Dismal Theorem analysis to evaluate the nonzero probability that bad government policy will cause a civilization-wrecking catastrophe?

  Parsing the Poisonous Politics of Climate Change

  The public debate in the United States over climate change science and policy is particularly poisonous. On the one hand, Oklahoma senator James Inhofe denounces climate change science, declaring that “man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” On the other, former vice president Al Gore likens those who doubt the seriousness of climate change to odious Holocaust “deniers.” What prompts such a level of discord and disrespe
ct? Yale law professor Dan Kahan explains that climate change is not chiefly a fight over science, but is instead one involving a clash of strongly held values. Distressingly, Kahan and his colleagues at the Yale Cultural Cognition Project find in a 2011 study that the more scientifically literate you are, the more certain you are that climate change is either a catastrophe or a hoax.

  Many science writers and policy wonks believe that fierce disagreement about issues like climate change is simply the consequence of widespread scientific illiteracy. If this thesis of public irrationality was correct, the authors of the Yale study write, “then skepticism about climate change could be traced to poor public comprehension about science” and the solution would be more science education. In fact, the findings of the Yale researchers suggest more education is unlikely to help build consensus; it may even intensify the debate.

  To probe the American public’s views on climate change, the Yale researchers conducted a survey of 1,500 Americans in which they asked questions designed to uncover their cultural values, their level of scientific literacy, and their thoughts about the risks of climate change.

  The group uses a theory of cultural commitments devised by Aaron Wildavsky, which “holds that individuals can be expected to form perceptions of risk that reflect and reinforce values that they share with others.” As noted earlier, the Wildavskyan schema situates Americans’ cultural values on two scales, one that ranges from Individualist to Communitarian and another that goes from Hierarchy to Egalitarian. In general, Hierarchical folks prefer a social order where people have clearly defined roles and lines of authority. Egalitarians want to reduce racial, gender, and income inequalities. Individualists expect people to succeed or fail on their own, while Communitarians believe that society is obligated to take care of everyone.

  The researchers note that people who hold Individualist/Hierarchical values highly esteem technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Accordingly, they tend to be skeptical of claims about environmental and technological risks and suspect that such claims often amount to little more than unjustifiable excuses for trying to restrict the activities they prize. On the other hand, Egalitarian/Communitarians tend to be morally suspicious of innovation, industry, and commerce, seeing them as the source of unjust disparities in wealth and power. Consequently, they are all too happy to believe claims that those behaviors are risky and impose restrictions on them. In this view, then, Egalitarian/Communitarians would be more worried about climate change risks than Hierarchical/Individualists.

  The Yale survey employed a scale in which 1 means no risk and 10 means extreme risk of climate change. The average for the overall sample was a score of 5.7. Hierarchical/Individualists averaged 3.15 points on climate change risk, whereas Egalitarian/Communitarians scored 7.4 on average. The public irrationality thesis predicts that as scientific literacy and numeracy increases, the gap between Hierarchical/Individualists and Egalitarian/Communitarians should lessen. Instead, the Yale researchers found that “among Hierarchical/Individualists science/numeracy is negatively [emphasis theirs] correlated with such concern. Hence, cultural polarization actually gets bigger, not smaller as science literacy and numeracy increase.”

  Why does polarization increase with scientific literacy? “As ordinary members of the public learn more about science and develop a greater facility with numerical information, they become more skillful in seeking out and making sense of—or if necessary explaining away—empirical evidence relating to their groups’ positions on climate change and other issues,” observe the researchers. Confirmation bias, the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions, is ubiquitous.

  In addition to climate change risks, the Yale researchers surveyed participants for their views on the safety of nuclear power. In this case, greater scientific literacy was associated with reduced concerns about the risks of nuclear power for both groups. However, the gap in perception about the risks of nuclear power between Hierarchical/Individualists and Egalitarian/Communitarians expanded rather than converged as scientific literacy increased. In other words, as scientific literacy increased, Hierarchical/Individualists became much more comfortable with the risks of nuclear power than Egalitarian/Communitarians did. Again, everybody suffers from confirmation bias.

  The Yale researchers chalk up this kind of divergence on technological and scientific risks to the pursuit of individual expressive rationality at the expense of collective welfare rationality. Basically, people in both groups are forming beliefs that advance their personal goals and help them get along with the friends and coworkers they interact with on a daily basis. They illustrate the point by observing that “a Hierarchical Individualist in Oklahoma City who proclaims that he thinks that climate change is a serious and real risk might well be shunned by his coworkers at a local oil refinery; the same might be true for an Egalitarian Communitarian English professor in New York City who reveals to colleagues that she thinks that ‘scientific consensus’ on climate change is a ‘hoax.’”

  Kahan and his colleagues then argue that what is individually rational when it comes to expressing cultural values becomes collectively irrational in the pursuit of policies aimed at securing society members’ health, safety, and prosperity based on what the best scientific evidence reveals about risk and risk abatement. In addition, the researchers note, beliefs about the risks of climate change “come to bear meanings congenial to some cultural outlooks but hostile to others.” In this case, Egalitarian/Communitarians, who are generally eager to rein in what they regard as the unjust excesses of technological progress and commerce, see carbon rationing as an effective tool to achieve that goal. This view is distilled in Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Not surprisingly, Hierarchical/Individualists are highly suspicious when proposals involving carbon rationing just happen to fit the cultural values and policy preferences of Egalitarian/Communitarians.

  Kahan and his colleagues at the Yale Cultural Cognition Project suggest the Hierarchical/Individualists discount scientific information about climate change because it is strongly associated with the promotion of carbon rationing as the exclusive policy remedy for the problem. They note that other policies that could address climate change might be more acceptable to Hierarchical/Individualists—for example, deploying more nuclear power plants, geoengineering, and developing new technologies to adapt to whatever climate change occurs. While the values of Hierarchical/Individualists steer them toward discounting the dangers of climate change, it is also true that the values of Egalitarian/Communitarians push them to magnify any dangers and to discount the risks that top-down policy interventions pose to the economic well-being of society. Confirmation bias is everywhere.

  The Cultural Contradiction of Environmentalist Opposition to Nuclear Power

  In one of the more aggravating tales of environmentalist self-preening, former activist and now Vermont Law School professor James Gustave Speth details in his book Red Sky at Morning: America and the Global Environmental Crisis how he and others managed to stop the development of no-carbon-emitting fast breeder reactors in the 1970s. For example, as a young attorney for the activist Natural Resources Defense Council (which he cofounded) and the Scientists’ Institute for Public Information, Speth filed a key 1973 lawsuit against a government plan to commercialize fast breeders.

  Fast breeders are nuclear power plants that can produce more fuel (about 30 percent more) than they use. An additional benefit is that they can produce electricity by burning up highly radioactive nuclear waste and the plutonium removed from nuclear weapons. And it gets better: the radioactive wastes generated by fast breeder reactors after their fuel is recycled decays in only a few hundred years instead of the tens of thousands it takes to render the wastes from conventional reactors harmless. Because the reactors produce more fuel than they use, we would not have to mine any more uranium for thousands of years. And new fuel-processing technologies have
largely allayed concerns that the plutonium produced by fast reactors could be diverted and used to produce nuclear weapons. In other words, fast breeders might have been the ultimate in renewable energy.

  The US government projected that as many as two hundred no-carbon-emitting fast breeder reactors would have been generating power by 2000. No one knows for sure if that projection would have come to pass, but had it done so, current US emissions of carbon dioxide would be roughly a third lower than they are now. Thirty years later in his manifesto, Speth asserts that “the biggest threat to our environment is global climate disruption, and the greatest problem in that context is America’s energy use and the policies that undergird it.” The irony of how his youthful opposition to zero-carbon nuclear energy has contributed to the “context of America’s energy use” he now decries evidently escapes Speth.

  Nuclear power generation is much safer than coal-power generation. Taking occupational deaths and deaths from pollution into account, one rough estimate finds that coal generation kills about 4,000 times more people than does nuclear generation per unit of power. A study by NASA researchers estimated that by displacing coal generation nuclear power avoided somewhere around 1.8 million deaths from air pollution between 1971 and 2009.

  There has been a lot of progress in reactor designs since the 1970s. Westinghouse’s new AP1000 reactor is chock-full of all sorts of new safety improvements that can shut down a reactor in crisis with no human intervention. Babcock & Wilcox has designed small modular reactors that could be manufactured and fueled at their plant and then taken by rail to be slotted into already built generating facilities. Once the reactor fuel is spent, it is shipped back to the plant for refueling.