Felix Salmon

Mark Thoma has an excerpt of Partha

Dasgupta’s review of Bjorn Lomborg’s new book today. It took me a while

to get Dasgupta’s point, so let me try and rephrase it in a slightly simpler

manner, since it was pretty opaque to me on a first reading.

Lomborg’s argument is the easy bit. Look at all the money that Plan A –

implementing Kyoto – would cost, and look at what benefits we would get

in return for that cost. Now, look at Lomborg’s Plan B. It costs a fraction

of the cost of implementing Kyoto, and the benefits are much higher. So if we

want to maximize the planet’s welfare, we should do things like build infrastructure

to protect against floods and hurricanes, while keeping the amount of carbon

in the atmosphere to a maximum of 560 parts per million. The cost is lower,

and the benefits are higher.

Hang on a second, says Dasgupta. The problem with Lomborg’s argument is that

he thinks he knows what the costs and benefits of a world with atmospheric carbon

concentrations of 560 parts per million are. But he doesn’t: nobody does. You

can’t just extrapolate from what we’re seeing at current concentrations of 380

parts per million, because the climate is a non-linear system:

The transition to Lomborg’s recommended concentration of 560 p.p.m. would

involve crossing an unknown number of tipping points (or separatrices) in

the global climate system. We have no data on the consequences if Earth were

to cross those tipping points.

So run Lomborg’s numbers again. Only instead of using Lomborg’s best guess

as to the costs and benefits of his Plan B, use a more reasonable range of probabilities.

You can even say that Lomborg’s best guess is the most likely outcome –

but you also have to assign some kind of probability to much worse outcomes.

If you do that, then Lomborg’s numbers cease to be nearly as compelling. Even

a small probability of a catastrophic outcome during the move from here to 560

parts per million sends the costs associated with Lomborg’s Plan B skyrocketing.

On the other hand, the costs associated with Plan A – call it Kyoto, or

anything else which stabilises atmospheric carbon at much lower levels than

560 parts per million – don’t rise nearly a much. The known, up-front

costs in terms of dollar expenditures are higher, to be sure. But the unknown,

contingent costs of irreversible future catastrophes? Those are lower.

There are two visions of the world at war with each other here. In the first

vision, the planet is on its way to environmental catastrophe, and we should

do anything and everything we can in an attempt to insure against that catastrophe

from occurring. In the second vision, climate change is a relatively gradual,

non-catastrophic phenomenon, which has consequences (floods, hurricanes and

the like) which we can protect ourselves against with infrastructure investment.

In the second vision, Lomborg is right: it’s a lot cheaper to build a hurricane-proof

house than it is to change the composition of the atmosphere in an attempt to

prevent that hurricane from occurring in the first place. But in the first vision,

Lomborg is wrong: all the hurricane-proof houses in the world will do precious

little good if the population of the planet is decimated by freak weather patterns,

food shortages, and a rapidly-increasing proportion of the Earth’s landmass

becoming uninhabitable because it’s too hot or too wet or otherwise impossible

to live on.

To put it another way, Lomborg’s choice between Plan A and Plan B is a false

one. He makes it sound like the costs of Plan B are low, while the benefits

are the same. But that’s a bit like saying that homeownership is always profitable

over the long run: in order to make such a statement you have to ignore the

possibility of catastrophe (or foreclosure). When you consider all

the possible downsides, and not just the most likely ones, it makes sense to

plump for Plan A instead.

This story seems

to be doing the rounds, with the implication that a chap named John Kanzius

seems to have invented a perpetual-motion machine. Of course, he doesn’t quite

come out and say so, but here, see for yourself:

An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention

that is being touted by one chemist as the "most remarkable" water

science discovery in a century.

John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate

seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He

discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies,

it would burn.

The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water,

the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel.

Obviously, if salt water really could be used as a fuel, then you have a perpetual-motion

machine. You just burn the fuel, run a turbine, and generate (presumably) more

than enough electricity to power the little radio transmitter you need to make

it all happen.

Except, well, it ain’t gonna happen. For one thing, they’re not burning water,

they’re burning hydrogen. And they’re using salt water. How do you get hydrogen

out of salt water? Electrolysis.

And I’m pretty sure that some kind of electrolysis is what’s happening here.

The thing is, the energy output of electrolysis, from the burning of hydrogen,

is lower than the energy input of electrolysis. And I’m quite sure that the

same thing is going on here: the energy needed to run the radio is greater than

the energy one could generate from burning the hydrogen.

Anyway, if you really needed proof that this whole idea is going nowhere fast,

just read down a bit further:

Roy will meet this week with officials from the Department of Energy and

the Department of Defense to try to obtain research funding.

If research funding were coming from Silicon Valley, home of the Green Bubble,

I might just take this seriously. If no one in the private sector is interested,

and the researchers are trying to get Defense to pay for it instead, you know

nothing’s going to come of this.

(By the way, the idea of burning water reminded me of Greek

fire. No one knows exactly how the Greeks managed to make this awesome weapon

which only burned harder when it came in contact with water, but I’m pretty

sure that radio waves were not involved.)

Deborah Solomon today has a

good primer on one of my pet subjects, carbon taxes vs cap-and-trade. She

says that it’s "the biggest political battle in Washington over climate

change," however, which is over-egging the pudding a lot: the economists

who support a carbon tax would, I’m sure, be perfectly fine with an cap-and-trade

system which auctioned rather than allotted carbon-emission rights. And in any

case, no one in Washington is seriously proposing a carbon tax as opposed to

a cap-and-trade system in the first place.

Naturally, as a cap-and-trade partisan, I think that Solomon is too nice to

the carbon-tax crowd.

Both cap and trade and a carbon tax attempt to use market incentives to get

businesses and consumers to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, which is a

gas produced by burning fossil fuels and, according to scientists, is a contributor

to global warming.

Imposing a tax or fee on each ton of carbon emitted would encourage technologies

that produce less carbon, advocates say. It would raise the price to consumers

of activities that burn carbon, such as driving. "If there’s an iron

law in economics, it’s that if you raise the price, you lower demand. And

so if you raise the price of burning fuels, you’ll lower demand for them,"

says Mr. Green."

First, and most important, a cap-and-trade system does not rely on "market

incentives" to reduce carbon emissions. It uses hard regulation: it caps

carbon emissions at a certain level, and the market just has to deal. It’s the

carbon tax, not cap-and-trade, which has to rely on that "iron law in economics"

which predicts that demand for carbon will fall if the price rises. (By the

way, "Mr Green" is Kenneth Green, of the AEI, an avowed carbon-tax

advocate.)

But I also need to tweak Solomon for the utterly unnecessary "according

to scientists" which she felt compelled to add into the first sentence.

Carbon dioxide is a contributor to global warming. That is a fact. Qualifying

it with reference to anonymous "scientists" merely makes it seem more

contentious than it is.