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Global warming: Moral vs Economic solutions

16 points by raphar 17y ago

btilly 17y ago
They are right that there are cheaper ways to cool the planet. However I believe that they are seriously misjudging the costs of excess CO2. For instance they barely mentioned that excess CO2 results in ocean acidification. How important is that? Well for a start we're threatening the survival of every animal that depends on calcium carbonate shells (think corals and shellfish), and then threatening the rest of the ecosystem within which they live. Injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to cool us down (and create more acid rain) helps our temperature, but doesn't help with the next pollution disaster. Or the one after that. Spending about 2% of current world domestic product on CO2 mitigation seems perfectly justifiable to me.
- harshavr 17y ago
  I wonder if there is a special advantage for geoenginnering solutions like carbon sequestration where instead of perturbing a complex system and using technology to individually manage all the negative consequences, we use technology directly on the variable we are influencing. It frees us from calculating all the consequences.
  - three14 17y ago
    Not really. I bet carbon sequestration kills a few people one of these days. What if someone pumps a lot of CO2 into a mine, and it ruptures into a small valley? CO2 is denser than air. Everything has consequences.
- incomethax 17y ago
  Spending about 2% of current world domestic product on CO2 mitigation seems perfectly justifiable to me. Morally, or economically? A 2% drop in world gdp would lead to at least as bad a recession (likely even worse) than the one we're in now. During the past year the world gdp rose 3.1% (See https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...) - which was about 2% lower growth rate on gdp.
  - btilly 17y ago
    A 2% drop in world gdp in one year would be bad. But a 2% drop compared to what we could have done over 10 years would be 0.2% per year, which would be minor inconvenience in any given year and is (as you noted) far outweighed by the ongoing growth. Furthermore if we don't do it, the eventual costs from the environmental disasters are so much higher that we would come out worse in the long run.
  - camccann 17y ago
    A 2% drop in world gdp would lead to at least as bad a recession (likely even worse) than the one we're in now. And a catastrophic failure of the ocean's ecosystem would have no economic impact at all, I guess? An economic analysis can't just ignore the risks of inaction when considering the costs of proposed solutions.
- gwern 17y ago
  > Spending about 2% of current world domestic product on CO2 mitigation seems perfectly justifiable to me. Just for kicks, how many people do you think would die annually if we spent 2% of annual GDP? (Remember to include all the people who will die prematurely because of diverted R&D, less income for medicine, distracted governments & elites, car manufacturers favoring fuel efficiency over safety etc.)
  - btilly 17y ago
    It entirely depends on how that money is diverted. Most people would be shocked to realize exactly how poor a return on investment money spent on medicine is. Removing most SUVs from the road would improve car safety substantially. (SUVs are a hazard for every other vehicle because of their size and poor handling in adverse conditions. They are a hazard to their drivers because an illusion of safety encourages risky driving while the high center of gravity makes them prone to rolling over.) 2% of GDP fades into noise compared with projected future growth in GDP. OTOH it is hard to overestimate how prone politicians are to make stupid politically motivated decisions. But if they do that then I blame the politicians, and not the cause.
    - gwern 17y ago
      > 2% of GDP fades into noise compared with projected future growth in GDP. Not really, when global GDP only grows a few percent each year... '2% of GDP' might seem small, but if we rephrase it as 'half of annual growth' or something more realistic? > It entirely depends on how that money is diverted...OTOH it is hard to overestimate how prone politicians are to make stupid politically motivated decisions. But if they do that then I blame the politicians, and not the cause. "My proposal assumes that men are angels and wishes are fishes; assuming that, everything will work out great! We'll have our cake of carbon reduction & not eat the cost of spending 2% of global GDP. And if it doesn't work, I blame anything but my proposal."
      - btilly 17y ago
        > > 2% of GDP fades into noise compared with projected future growth in GDP. > > Not really, when global GDP only grows a few percent each year... '2% of GDP' might seem > small, but if we rephrase it as 'half of annual growth' or something more realistic? Let's run the numbers, shall we? According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy#Economy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy#Economy over the part of this decade that has been measured, gross world product has grown an average of 3.1% per year, compounding annually. Projecting forward 20 years that means that we expect gross world product to increase 84%. If we go carbon neutral and the final gross world product ends up at 2% less than this simple projection, it grows about 80.5% instead. Thus we'd reduce the amount of total growth by about 4%. Take a 20th power and we find that the amount of growth in the end is reduced by a factor of 0.2% per year, compounding annually. Note that when I say 0.2% I don't mean that it would be 2.9% instead of 3.1%. Instead I mean that it would be 3.0934..% instead of 3.1%. The per year impact on economic growth rates could quite literally be missed as a rounding error. I think I am quite justified in saying that this is noise compared with our projected future economic growth. But the projected environmental catastrophe we address most definitely is not noise. > > It entirely depends on how that money is diverted...OTOH it is hard to > overestimate how prone politicians are to make stupid politically motivated decisions. > But if they do that then I blame the politicians, and not the cause. > > "My proposal assumes that men are angels and wishes are fishes; assuming that, everything > will work out great! We'll have our cake of carbon reduction & not eat the cost of > spending 2% of global GDP. And if it doesn't work, I blame anything but my proposal." Ridicule is always easier than thought. You made a list of ways in which you thought this effort could take lives. But your list is weak. Worse yet you haven't even tried to think about how global warming takes lives. 1. Projections by scientists say global warming threatens food supplies, resulting in potential starvation. 2. Projections by the CIA predict substantially increased geopolitical instability. This is likely to result in wars killing lots of people. 3. The World Health Organization claims that 2.4 million people die each year from air pollution. Today. Continued increases in industrialization on the current model would increase this figure substantially. A move to seriously replace fossil fuels would save many to all of these lives. After considering those factors I think that I am on solid grounds to claim that a serious attempt to solve global warming, even if it is done stupidly, is likely to save far more lives than the resulting potentially poor allocation of resources will cost. With the difference measured in the millions of lives/year. (Depending on what value you give each life, this alone could justify the whole project without even considering longer-term consequences.) Now please justify the energy I put into this post. Please come back with a response showing that you've read and thought about what I said, and either found it thought provoking, or found that you have substantive criticism based on verifiable facts.
SamAtt 17y ago
I agree with the analysis. The only thing I'd add (that they don't mention) is that the Earth's temperature will fluctuate wildly on it's own regardless of our CO2 output. We know this. The Earth dropped into an Ice Age and then got hot enough to thaw that ice age out all before we were even here. So the issue really has to do with finding ways to manipulate the Earth's temperature both ways, not just cool it down.
- swolchok 17y ago
  The Ice Age and thawing were on a geological time scale. Global warming caused by human pollution, not so much.
  - aceofspades19 17y ago
    How do we know that human pollution has caused global warming entirely ?
mitko 17y ago
Our question, at noted above, is what is the cheapest, fastest way to quickly cool the Earth. Yes, this approach will cool it! But what will happen next? The Earth is a very complex system and its behavior might be impossible to predict with certainty. The more we mess with it and pretend to be all-knowing gods the worse it will get.
- ams6110 17y ago
  Agreed. The complexity of the Earth's climate can't be reduced to a handful of TRUE/FALSE questions. Anything we do to attempt to manupulate it will either a) have no significant effect or b) have unpleasant, unforseen side-effects.
sfnhltb 17y ago
SO2 injection is just such a bad idea it is scary there are still people talking about it. The problem is even if you ignore the nasty side effects, as CO2 carries on rising you have to inject more and more SO2 every year to counter the increased CO2 (especially combined with SO2's much lower residence time in the atmosphere being in the range of a few days/weeks instead of CO2 being measured in centuries). It would also tie us in - if SO2 stopped being injected into the atmosphere for any reason, all the CO2 is still there and as the SO2 washes out of the atmosphere within a few weeks, the CO2 warming would come back full force immediately - the longer SO2 had been used to offset CO2, the worse it would be. Offsetting CO2 warming with a seperate cooling effect is risky, the real solutions are either reduction of CO2 output - and even that might not be enough for many countries/cities because of the decades of delays in any meaningful action that have been engineered since we knew what was happening - or some technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.
xiaoma 17y ago
The Copenhagen Consensus deals pretty much entirely with this question: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_priorities.html http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global...

16 points by raphar 17y ago

They are right that there are cheaper ways to cool the planet. However I believe that they are seriously misjudging the costs of excess CO2. For instance they barely mentioned that excess CO2 results in ocean acidification. How important is that? Well for a start we're threatening the survival of every animal that depends on calcium carbonate shells (think corals and shellfish), and then threatening the rest of the ecosystem within which they live. Injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to cool us down (and create more acid rain) helps our temperature, but doesn't help with the next pollution disaster. Or the one after that. Spending about 2% of current world domestic product on CO2 mitigation seems perfectly justifiable to me.

harshavr 17y ago
I wonder if there is a special advantage for geoenginnering solutions like carbon sequestration where instead of perturbing a complex system and using technology to individually manage all the negative consequences, we use technology directly on the variable we are influencing. It frees us from calculating all the consequences.
- three14 17y ago
  Not really. I bet carbon sequestration kills a few people one of these days. What if someone pumps a lot of CO2 into a mine, and it ruptures into a small valley? CO2 is denser than air. Everything has consequences.
incomethax 17y ago
Spending about 2% of current world domestic product on CO2 mitigation seems perfectly justifiable to me. Morally, or economically? A 2% drop in world gdp would lead to at least as bad a recession (likely even worse) than the one we're in now. During the past year the world gdp rose 3.1% (See https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...) - which was about 2% lower growth rate on gdp.
- btilly 17y ago
  A 2% drop in world gdp in one year would be bad. But a 2% drop compared to what we could have done over 10 years would be 0.2% per year, which would be minor inconvenience in any given year and is (as you noted) far outweighed by the ongoing growth. Furthermore if we don't do it, the eventual costs from the environmental disasters are so much higher that we would come out worse in the long run.
- camccann 17y ago
  A 2% drop in world gdp would lead to at least as bad a recession (likely even worse) than the one we're in now. And a catastrophic failure of the ocean's ecosystem would have no economic impact at all, I guess? An economic analysis can't just ignore the risks of inaction when considering the costs of proposed solutions.
gwern 17y ago
> Spending about 2% of current world domestic product on CO2 mitigation seems perfectly justifiable to me. Just for kicks, how many people do you think would die annually if we spent 2% of annual GDP? (Remember to include all the people who will die prematurely because of diverted R&D, less income for medicine, distracted governments & elites, car manufacturers favoring fuel efficiency over safety etc.)
- btilly 17y ago
  It entirely depends on how that money is diverted. Most people would be shocked to realize exactly how poor a return on investment money spent on medicine is. Removing most SUVs from the road would improve car safety substantially. (SUVs are a hazard for every other vehicle because of their size and poor handling in adverse conditions. They are a hazard to their drivers because an illusion of safety encourages risky driving while the high center of gravity makes them prone to rolling over.) 2% of GDP fades into noise compared with projected future growth in GDP. OTOH it is hard to overestimate how prone politicians are to make stupid politically motivated decisions. But if they do that then I blame the politicians, and not the cause.
  - gwern 17y ago
    > 2% of GDP fades into noise compared with projected future growth in GDP. Not really, when global GDP only grows a few percent each year... '2% of GDP' might seem small, but if we rephrase it as 'half of annual growth' or something more realistic? > It entirely depends on how that money is diverted...OTOH it is hard to overestimate how prone politicians are to make stupid politically motivated decisions. But if they do that then I blame the politicians, and not the cause. "My proposal assumes that men are angels and wishes are fishes; assuming that, everything will work out great! We'll have our cake of carbon reduction & not eat the cost of spending 2% of global GDP. And if it doesn't work, I blame anything but my proposal."
    - btilly 17y ago
      > > 2% of GDP fades into noise compared with projected future growth in GDP. > > Not really, when global GDP only grows a few percent each year... '2% of GDP' might seem > small, but if we rephrase it as 'half of annual growth' or something more realistic? Let's run the numbers, shall we? According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy#Economy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy#Economy over the part of this decade that has been measured, gross world product has grown an average of 3.1% per year, compounding annually. Projecting forward 20 years that means that we expect gross world product to increase 84%. If we go carbon neutral and the final gross world product ends up at 2% less than this simple projection, it grows about 80.5% instead. Thus we'd reduce the amount of total growth by about 4%. Take a 20th power and we find that the amount of growth in the end is reduced by a factor of 0.2% per year, compounding annually. Note that when I say 0.2% I don't mean that it would be 2.9% instead of 3.1%. Instead I mean that it would be 3.0934..% instead of 3.1%. The per year impact on economic growth rates could quite literally be missed as a rounding error. I think I am quite justified in saying that this is noise compared with our projected future economic growth. But the projected environmental catastrophe we address most definitely is not noise. > > It entirely depends on how that money is diverted...OTOH it is hard to > overestimate how prone politicians are to make stupid politically motivated decisions. > But if they do that then I blame the politicians, and not the cause. > > "My proposal assumes that men are angels and wishes are fishes; assuming that, everything > will work out great! We'll have our cake of carbon reduction & not eat the cost of > spending 2% of global GDP. And if it doesn't work, I blame anything but my proposal." Ridicule is always easier than thought. You made a list of ways in which you thought this effort could take lives. But your list is weak. Worse yet you haven't even tried to think about how global warming takes lives. 1. Projections by scientists say global warming threatens food supplies, resulting in potential starvation. 2. Projections by the CIA predict substantially increased geopolitical instability. This is likely to result in wars killing lots of people. 3. The World Health Organization claims that 2.4 million people die each year from air pollution. Today. Continued increases in industrialization on the current model would increase this figure substantially. A move to seriously replace fossil fuels would save many to all of these lives. After considering those factors I think that I am on solid grounds to claim that a serious attempt to solve global warming, even if it is done stupidly, is likely to save far more lives than the resulting potentially poor allocation of resources will cost. With the difference measured in the millions of lives/year. (Depending on what value you give each life, this alone could justify the whole project without even considering longer-term consequences.) Now please justify the energy I put into this post. Please come back with a response showing that you've read and thought about what I said, and either found it thought provoking, or found that you have substantive criticism based on verifiable facts.

SamAtt 17y ago

I agree with the analysis. The only thing I'd add (that they don't mention) is that the Earth's temperature will fluctuate wildly on it's own regardless of our CO2 output. We know this. The Earth dropped into an Ice Age and then got hot enough to thaw that ice age out all before we were even here. So the issue really has to do with finding ways to manipulate the Earth's temperature both ways, not just cool it down.

swolchok 17y ago
The Ice Age and thawing were on a geological time scale. Global warming caused by human pollution, not so much.
- aceofspades19 17y ago
  How do we know that human pollution has caused global warming entirely ?

mitko 17y ago

Our question, at noted above, is what is the cheapest, fastest way to quickly cool the Earth. Yes, this approach will cool it! But what will happen next? The Earth is a very complex system and its behavior might be impossible to predict with certainty. The more we mess with it and pretend to be all-knowing gods the worse it will get.

ams6110 17y ago
Agreed. The complexity of the Earth's climate can't be reduced to a handful of TRUE/FALSE questions. Anything we do to attempt to manupulate it will either a) have no significant effect or b) have unpleasant, unforseen side-effects.

sfnhltb 17y ago

SO2 injection is just such a bad idea it is scary there are still people talking about it. The problem is even if you ignore the nasty side effects, as CO2 carries on rising you have to inject more and more SO2 every year to counter the increased CO2 (especially combined with SO2's much lower residence time in the atmosphere being in the range of a few days/weeks instead of CO2 being measured in centuries). It would also tie us in - if SO2 stopped being injected into the atmosphere for any reason, all the CO2 is still there and as the SO2 washes out of the atmosphere within a few weeks, the CO2 warming would come back full force immediately - the longer SO2 had been used to offset CO2, the worse it would be. Offsetting CO2 warming with a seperate cooling effect is risky, the real solutions are either reduction of CO2 output - and even that might not be enough for many countries/cities because of the decades of delays in any meaningful action that have been engineered since we knew what was happening - or some technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.

xiaoma 17y ago

The Copenhagen Consensus deals pretty much entirely with this question: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_priorities.html http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global...