Climate Change: There are no simple solutions

The Earth is warming. Human carbon-dioxide emissions are one of the major culprits. We have known this for a long time. But in the past two decades, evidence for global warming has become more noticeable on local levels, as with seasonal shifts, extreme weather events, declines in biodiversity and, depending on where you live, droughts. And it will get worse.

I would describe myself as risk-averse, future-oriented, and someone who worries easily. I don’t need to be convinced that we are not doing enough to mitigate the consequences of rising temperatures. Yet, I have become increasingly frustrated about the discussion of climate change in the media, which makes it look like the problem is to convince people that climate change is happening in the first place.

It is not. The problem is that we don’t know what to do about it, and even if we knew, we wouldn’t have the means to actually do it. And nothing whatsoever has changed about this since I learned of climate change in school, some time in the 1980s. Gluing yourself to a train will not create the policies and the institutions we would need to implement them.

A good example for this bizarre problem-denial is Greta Thunberg, here speaking to a crowd of about 10,000 people in Helsinki: “The climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we need to do is to wake up and change.”

Some people say that we should study to become climate scientists so that we can “solve the climate crisis”. But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we need to do is to wake up and change. pic.twitter.com/Twioq1pmfZ

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) October 23, 2018

I do not blame Greta Thunberg for being naïve. She’s a child, and she even admits to being naïve. When I was a teenager, I thought much the same, so who am I to judge her. But adults should know better than that. Yet, here we have Bill Nye who delivers his variant of “all we need to do is wake up”:

Still don’t think we should act on climate change? Ask @BillNye the science guy...pic.twitter.com/KYIvRpvxdC

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) May 14, 2019

But the fact that climate change happens does not tell us what, if anything, to do about it. And scientists really should know better than to mix “is” with “ought.”

As I said, I am future-oriented and risk-averse. These are my personal values. You may not share them. Maybe you don’t give a shit about what’s going to happen 50 years from now, and if that’s your opinion, then that’s your opinion. Maybe you are willing to accept the risk that a steep temperature rise will result in famine, social unrest, and diseases that eradicate some billion people. Or maybe you even think that getting rid of some billion humans, mostly in the developing world, would not be a bad thing. I don’t share these opinions, but there is nothing factually wrong with them.

Economists have a long story to tell about our responsibility to the coming generations. How much we value it depends on what is called the “future discount rate”, which quantifies, basically, the relevance we assign to what will happen in the future. This evaluation usually focuses on measures like the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and comes down to the question how much GDP per year we should invest today to prevent declines of GDP in the future. (If you are familiar with the literature, this is the Stern-Nordhaus debate over carbon pricing.)

The are many problems with that kind of argument. For starters, the GDP itself doesn’t tell you all that much about the well-being of people. It’s also somewhat unclear where to get the future discount rate. Economists have devised some methods to extract it from interest rates and the like. That is something you may or may not find reasonable. Also, we don’t know, just by discounting the future, how to factor in uncertainties about what is going to happen. Eg, one line of argument is that really what we should do is not look for a solution that is economically optimal, but one that minimizes the risk of a major ecological instability because then all bets are off.

Then there is the question what policies to pursue and how to implement them. A market-based solution, eg by putting a price on carbon, would be most likely to lead to an economically optimal strategy. The problem is, however, that this would necessitate an equilibrium readjustment of the global market which is unlikely to happen fast enough, even if we could get it going yesterday. And that’s leaving aside that equilibrium theory has its flaws, which is to say that economists aren’t exactly known for making great predictions.

Either way you turn it, resources that we spend today on limiting carbon-dioxide emissions are resources we cannot spend on something else, resources that will not go to education, research, social welfare, infrastructure. Oh, and they will also not go into that next larger particle collider.

 The world has two or maybe three decades of cheap fossil fuels left. Not using those makes our lives harder, regardless of how much we subsidize renewables. That, too, is a fact. Any sincere discussion about climate change should acknowledge it. It’s a difficult situation and there are no simple solutions.