Global Climate Change: Mitigation vs Adaption.

Great Debates
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For the purposes of this thread Anthropogenic Global Climate Change is to accepted as a fact. The topic here is given that there are real but difficult to quantify risks of serious effects from such changes, and that such changes are real risks even under the most optimistic scenarios, and that there is limited amount of money to invest in preventing and preparing for such scenarios, how much should be invested in mitigation (limiting future CO2 and other contributory gases) vs preparation for adaptation to some changes that may already be unavoidable and that we are at risk for even if we achieved the most ambitious international goals in decreasing future emissions.

This article lays out some of the issues.

Thing is we have finite resources. Assuming the experts are correct in the assessments, how should we balance our current spending? How much of what we spend on mitigation can also do double duty for adaptation? One such example is in technologies for energy efficient management of potable water, which will become more scarce and more energy intensive to create and manage in a global climate change scenario (details here.)

Thoughts?

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IMO we are trying to snuff out a fire by piling stacks of $100 bills on it. While that may eventually work it’s not a wise use of money. The goal should be a $1 bucket of water.

-The solution should utilize current technology and current infrastructure to affect the largest base causes with the least amount of money. It should also utilize domestic material to offset money flowing out of the country for energy. That keeps the tax revenue in the country as well as the principle wealth which becomes available for reinvestment.

The two largest producers of CO2 are coal power plants and automobiles. The solution should cover both areas.

I’ve already stated my opinion regarding bio-diesel. It’s not just the technology, it’s the fact that it reduces CO2 in coal plants and delivers a cleaner burning diesel fuel to cars that would get substantially better gas mileage. It also utilizes current technology and current distribution nodes so no additional retooling costs are involved. We have tremendous coal reserves so it utilizes our own resources.

The end result would be a reduction in CO2 in power plants as well as auto emissions. It doesn’t require any changes in electrical distribution or automotive technology so no additional costs are involved. Diesel automobiles would cover a broader spectrum of end user and be cheaper than hybrids.

No government programs need to be instituted and no extra taxes need to be levied. It will generate more jobs and keep the wealth from flowing out of the country. All this will increase GNP (and therefore tax revenue), which can be rolled into the next generation of low emissions technology. It will re-energize the automobile industry.

It doesn’t make sense to penalize people with extra taxes and then push limited technology or cars nobody wants. We need the best return on investment so that we can affect real changes now and provide the monetary resources for changes in the future.

Finally, I would like to point out that we could scrub CO2 directly if it should prove necessary as well as technology aimed at directly reducing temperatures.

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Climate change or no, you always want to be moving to the new technology. Incandescent light bulbs should be phased out, coal and gas should be phased out, nuclear reactors should be built, and fusion reactors should be the new Space Race sort of massive research mission.

The main problem, though, is getting India, Russia, and China to play along. We’re going to flop over to new, cleaner technologies pretty much regardless of anything. But from a climate standpoint, that’s pretty pointless if other guys come in to fill the gap. Ultimately, the only way to enforce that is going to be something in the manner of tariffs and trade-agreements, but I’m rather doubtful that such a thing could possibly happen.

As such, I would be interested in seeing what sorts of countermeasures there possibly could be. At some point in the future, we’re going to want to be able to control the climate; there’s no reason to leave it in nature’s hands. We might as well start the process now, even if nothing could possibly come of it for a hundred years. Ultimately, I think that for as much of a long-shot as that may be, it’s more likely to have an effect than trying to impose pollution standards on three such massive countries as Russia, China, and India.

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I am in the group that believes that you should concentrate on adaptation, as well. It has been both much colder and much warmer in the past than it is now, and it will probably be both in the future. Sure, a climate control machine is nice, but how likely do you think it is that we’ll figure it out before we are extinct?

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Global warming isn’t going to make us extinct unless the climate gets into some sort of feedback system that turns our atmosphere into firey gas. So far, no one is projecting something like that to happen any time in the next few centuries, if it’s even possible.

Global warming means that we will have to relocate our prime farm lands, move back further from shores, and build our houses to tougher standards due to increased strengths of storms. So the argument is that it’s cheaper to prevent global warming than to adapt to it, not that it will actually kill us. It will increase hardship in impoverished nations, so there is the chance for increased rates of mortality in those areas, but that’s nothing like human extinction.

Now, there really is the threat of a feedback system kicking in at some point, but I don’t know that it’s clear that such a thing could happen even if we burnt off all of the petroleum and coal we have on the planet.

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The issue is how to invest in adaptation now in order to diminish the future costs. These investments range from local city planning issues to the level of international structures.

At the city planning level it means siting new critical facilities on higher ground in coastal areas and developing the long term contingency plans for moving other facilities as sea levels rise. It means investing in adequate shore protection now. It means planting drought tolerant trees now so that they are large enough to provide some temperature moderation in 40 to 50 years. It means building water management and conservation systems into city design now to be ready as well.

It means investing in drought tolerant crops and in a diversity of crops to deal with changing conditions, especially for those parts of the world likely to be seriously adversely effected with droughts and heat by even modest CO2 increases, such as Africa.

It means developing energy efficient means of desalinating water on a large scale and for shepherding potable water resources in an energy efficient manner as well.

Certain diseases are reasonably expected to be more major players in the next several decades, in particular malaria and dengue. Investing more in research for treating and preventing these diseases cost effectively and building the health care capacity in at risk parts of the world is also on the list.

Global climate change is predicting to create over 150 million displaced people over the next several decades. Many Pacific Island populations will fairly soon be swept away. The international systems to deal with these circumstances both emergently and in a long term basis must be fostered. The systems to prevent these population migrations from destabilizing political structures in regions of the world that have never been stable to start with have to be strengthened as a high priority item. These migrations of displaced people also feed into the health issues mentioned above.

Mitigation investment can decrease the risk that adaptation will be as costly as it otherwise would but it can neither prevent the need to adapt at all nor completely assure us that drastic effects will not occur even if we significantly lower the risk. On the scale of global climate change investments these preparations are not all that expensive now and may save large increased costs later, but if some money needs to be diverted from some mitigation to fund it (again, there are limited resources available) then we must do it.

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FWIW this is a good start.

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Without taking a position in the debate at this point, I’ll just highlight some of the unknowns that we have to fill in to be able to make educated guesses:

  1. We need models that show low and high range warming predictions, along with realistic error bars that allow us to know the uncertainty of each projection so we can price in risk.

  2. We need a figure for a reasonable discount rate so we can determine the net present value of future warming damage.

  3. We need estimates for the cost of various mitigation strategies.

  4. We need further models showing us the warming trends and damages that would occur if we incorporated those mitigation strategies.

Here’s a Net Present Value Calculator. Play around with this a bit, and you can see how sensitive our model is going to be to assumptions about the discount rate.

For example, let’s say we want to avoid a tornado in the year 2109 which is going to do a trillion dollars in damage. How much would it be worth spending today to mitigate that?

If you assume a discount rate of 3%, the net present value of that damage is only 52 million dollars, and we’d be losing money in the long run if we spent any more than that. If the discount rate is closer to the historical average of what looks to be around 5.5%, the net present value is only $4.7 million dollars. If you go to the other extreme, and assume that you can fund this with a 1% discount rate, the net present value jumps to 369 million dollars.

Of course, to do a proper calculation you need to consider the effects over time, and not just a lump sum ‘damage’ in 100 years. So you’d want to use a little calculus to work out a function which integrates damage over time, then apply a discount rate function to match it, and see where the curves take you. You could approximate this well enough by just taking some intermediate data points and averaging them out.

So there’s one critical number you really need to work out. And beware studies on either side of the political spectrum that use discount rates way out of whack with reasonable numbers. For example, the Stern Review, often quoted as an authoritative source by AGW activists, had to come up with a new concept called a ‘social discount rate’, which assumes the net present value is exactly the same as the future cost, except for the rare chance that the future generation won’t exist at all. So Stern came up with a discount rate of .1%, a truly nutty number which, if applied to other economic decisions, would lead to horrible mismanagement of capital.

Here’s a pretty good paper describing the problems with the Stern Review. The author is a believer in AGW, and believes it will cause significant damage and something needs to be done. But he also points out how sensitive the conclusions are to the value of the discount rate. For example, Stern assigns a cost to current carbon emissions of $310 per ton. Using a much more realistic discount rate of 3% against the same data gets you a carbon cost of $13/ton. The first conclusion would suggest drastic, sweeping action to eliminate carbon emissions today. The second suggests a very mild carbon tax at best, and not much else.

I’d suggest that a good start for this thread would be to take these identified unknowns and see if we can get a little consensus on what they should be before discussing what needs to be done.

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One problem right off the bat Sam is the difficulty in pricing the value of human suffering avoided and of human lives saved or lost. Don’t get me wrong, I do not take the position that a single human life is priceless. But performing economic analyses in the manner you propose avoid the isue of the value of deaths avoided, starvation abated, suffering decreased, by not putting a value on them at all, it seems to me.

Without question both mitigation and adaptation actions will have huge error bars about their potential future results no matter how such assets are valued.

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The reason I’m trying to stick to economic costs is because we would like to try to keep the discussion grounded in something resembling objective fact. The minute we start talking about non-economic factors like ‘quality of life’ or the value of a pristine forest, we leave the realm of objective fact and open the door to justifying any behavior.

On the other side, I could then claim that the future cost is zero, because for all we know people will have long left any coastal regions, or because our technology will be so advanced in 100 years that global warming just isn’t a problem. We’ll just erect our super sun shield and block it, or use our new super nano-carbon seawalls and protect all the coastal areas for pennies.

Now, we can get into all those other debates, but wouldn’t it be more productive first to try to come to an agreement over the more concrete, measurable things? If we can’t agree on those, there’s no point discussing the other stuff. And if we discuss the other stuff first, the debate will be nothing but more partisan pot-shotting across the fence.

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Oh I see your point and I think that you see mine. I have admittedly little understanding of discounting rates but I understand the difficulty of doing cost benefit analyses when human lives and/or suffering comes into play. My professional self is in medicine and we are full of cost benefit analyses that run straight into that difficulty. Lives saved and quality of lives saved have economic values* as uncomfortable as we are to price them. The refusal to put a dollar figure to those items** makes for bad decision making all the time. Sometimes that error is pretending that a single life is worth a whole economy or the whole world and sometimes it lies in refusing to value it at all. Both are extremely significant errors.

Part of my point is however that the range of variation in potential results resultant of variable values placed on those so called intangibles will dwarf the variability resultant of different discounting rates but that the spread that they cause will only go one way from the basic numbers that do not count their economic value at all. (A cumbersome phrasing I know but it’s the best I can do!)

I think that the exercise can easily come up with several scenarios and how likely or unlikely they are given different inputs. In fact the article linked to in the op includes a reference to this figure which gives some of those error bars that you desire. Costing out the concrete future costs will have moderately large error bars and discounting curent actions … I get lost there, honestly.

And of course after the experts do the number wonking over the concrete we can try to add in potential human costs, from adding nothing to it because of some deus ex machina, to valuing human lives and suffering highly. An interesting exercise might be that, barring some technologic miracle or alien intervention saving us, what price is placed on each life saved or each human living in hunger or continuously displaced to justify what current expense.

Be all that as it may. We have a circumstance in which I can personally only understand that current economic modeling undervalues future potential costs by its inability to price in that which we are reluctant to put a price on, human lives and suffering. And one in which those error bars include some outcomes at reasonable risks that will need already extant adaptation structures even under the most optimistic mitigation achievements. The less mitigation we do the more likely it is that we will be in even greater need of already extant and robust adaptation systems. Waiting until those systems are needed would be sorta like, well exactly like, building a levee after a hurricane.

  • FWIW The US Dept of Transportation states this:

That may represent a good calculation starting off point.
** For an example of the common mentality that refuses to accept that there is an economic value to human lives see here.

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The problem I have with including human suffering is that I’m not even sure how much of that there would be. If these changes happen over 50 years, they could be gradual enough that the people just slowly adapt.

Also, we’re talking about human suffering of people not even born yet. That’s problematic for many reasons. For one, we don’t do that kind of accounting for any other decisions we make. I don’t see anyone attempting to oppose the deficit on the grounds that paying it back in the future will take money away from things like bridge maintenance and health care and cause people to die, and then to work those numbers back into the ‘cost’ for the deficit.

And also, we don’t know what the economies of these countries will look like in 50 years, or what their political situations will be like, so we really have no way of knowing how much ability they will have to mitigate this stuff.

I think if you want to start including those factors we’ll rapidly reach an impasse because our initial assumptions will lead us to wildly varying conclusions right off the bat. I just prefer to see things in concrete numbers, at least as far as we take them, so we have a frame of reference from which to debate the other issues.

Also, realize that the argument can cut both ways. If you assume that people of the future will be much wealthier than we are, and have much better technology, then the social cost of a degree of warming should be much smaller for them. Maybe even approaching zero. How do you know? How do you even guess? We can’t predict what our economy will look like in five years, let alone fifty. And we can’t predict what technologies we will have, either. And we have a hard time attributing deaths to global warming today. What makes you think we can come up with an even remotely accurate number for the deaths caused by global warming among our grandchildren and great grandchildren?

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Another thing that should be mentioned is that human suffering (i.e. the economic Value of Life) is based on preventing death. Climate change is unlikely to cause a significant number of deaths in the US. So really we’re talking about the value of life in Africa and on small islands in the middle of the ocean. I’d be willing to bet that the values of those lives is (cruel as it may be) significantly lower.

Where you have to pay an American a significant salary (~$27 an hour) to have them go coal mining, in Africa I can get my pick of miners to go into shoddy diamond mines for what…50 cents an hour? Assuming a direct correlation, that brings the value of life from ~$6 million to more like ~$120,000, I think.

And again (cruel as it may be), Americans just don’t care as much about saving Africans as they do about saving Americans. So the value of life of an African to an American is going to be still less.

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Okay, it’s sort of a hijack, but it is of interest. Here is another bit aimed at pricing out lives values and discussing how the figures are arrived at. And here are some recent numbers from the EPA, which value lives differently than does the Department of Transportation.

Of course Sage Rat has a point: to be fair to the analyses these are Western lives. The world apparently values lives in the developing world differently. Currently preventing malaria costs less than $1000 per life saved (and by some analyses only $78 per life saved, and yet raising that money is difficult indeed. Again, the point is that one really needs to at least make these values explicit and deal with them above board. Do the calculation explicitly valuing a human live saved as $1000, so long as you have made it clear that such is the value. And that such may be subject to hyper-inflation if the world economy improves I guess.

Sam no there really is no realistic expectation of natural migration out of coastal cities or emptying Africa and much of Asia over the next 50 years, nor would Pacific Islanders be moving otherwise if it was not for rising waters and being swept off. C’mon. You know that.

And this thread is about adapting. Adaptation does not just happen, or at least happen well, at a societal and global level. It is prepared for. On the time scale of societies and infrastratructures that span societies 50 years is pretty damn fast.

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You can actually see that today. If we valued African lives at 5.8 million per person, then the Rwandan Genocide should have been worth preventing at a cost of 3.5 trillion dollars. Yet there were no countries willing to spend 1/100 of that amount to prevent it. For that matter, AIDS kills 2 million people a year and we should be spending about 11.6 trillion dollars each year to prevent them - a nonsensical number.

Perhaps a more realistic determination of the social cost of a death in Africa and other equatorial poor countries could be determined by examing how much we seem to be willing to spend to save them today. After all, if you think those lives are worth more, then wouldn’t it make sense to take the money that is spent to mitigate global warming today and give more aid to the people who are alive and suffering now, rather than spending it to prevent the suffering of their descendants?

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<Extreme Content!>

I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if more African lives could be saved, and more cheaply, by simply assassinating every new dictator as he came up. Sniper bullets are surely quite expensive as far as ammunition goes, but still far short of a few billion or trillion dollars.

If the West was given full ability to set up high yield crops across arable Africa, I wonder what sort of output that could achieve (i.e. I’m not sure how much arable land there is or how much it can be improved.) It’s a decent bet that you could make a profit by it.

Of course, everyone would go into hissy fits if you ever proposed it. You’re possibly better off to consider sending up a global parasol into outerspace to lessen the output of the sun on the Earth.

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No doubt. By the same token, think how much AGW would be lessened if we came over there and scrapped all your gas guzzlers, and bulldozed up your endless fields of McMansions for high yield crops. Sure, you’d have to live in tenements and catch crowded metros to get around, but hey, it’s a small price to pay for global happiness.

IOW, what does Africa have to do with GCC? Outside of South Africa’s admittedly contributive coal power plants, that is? And even those supply power to several other countries, so by any Kyoto-style CO[sub]2[/sub] trade scheme, the effect is spread over a wider range.

Not much, apparently. SubSaharan African soils are very poor, they’re depleted because of being a stable craton for so long. The high-yield areas are the geologically-active ones like the Rift Valley, which is already rather intensely farmed (check it out with Google Earth sometime), or else devoted to parkland (and we do want to preserve some biodiversity, don’t we?) The only country where a strategy like you’re proposing would make much difference now is Zimbabwe, where I say (other than the actual assasination bit) you’re welcome to interfere. South Africa already uses modern farming, and we make a good living off it, but we’re the temperate edge of an otherwise tropical continent.

I’m not so sure. You’d be better off going with a Brazilian solution and running cattle than crops, given the tropical nature of most of SS-Africa. Only, good luck with the Tsetse Flies.

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Nothing. I’m talking about adaptation not mitigation. The countries that are going to be unable to adapt to the climate change are more likely to be unable to due to their leadership than because there aren’t the resources. Or at least that would be my guess.

I decided to try a quick Google since I frankly haven’t studied African agricultural potential. Here’s a report from the InterAcademy Council on the subject, which might be a good place to inform myself (and anyone else.)

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And a bit about livestock, in particular.

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=46167

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Sam, I am not quite sure yet that you get that we are talking about investing in adaptation as well as mitigation, as you have so far only discussed mitigation costs. To be sure those are part of that discussion but not the only part of that discussion.

That said, let us attempt to deduce what value the world currently places on a life in the developing world for economic investment purposes. One approach might be to compare what poor countries spend on health care per capita compared to rich countries as our proxie. About 1% as much. So using round numbers if we accept $5million/statistical life in Western countries then $50K/statistical life is the value for developing world lives. In the medical world we often actually calculate it according to expected year of life saved (and that certainly makes sense from an economic analysis, considering effect on GDP) and the developing world’s expected increased mortality will be largely in the young. That could move those numbers up some but for simplicity I think we can ignore that.

The other factor to price in is the effect on the rest of the world due to potential geopolitical instabilities introduced.

Again, here the question for now is the cost of investing in adaptation systems now, versus not dealing with adaptation until the need is banging at the door, and comparing those potential savings to the potential marginal savings from that much additional mitigation investment.

Another complication to that analysis are the offsetting contemporaneous benefits from each investment type. In other threads we have discussed the possibility that mitigation investments have some offsetting present day pay-offs (the possibility of providing an economic stimulus by creating a new industry in “green collar jobs”, etc.). Here we must consider that present day investments in preparing for adaptation in the future have potential similar global present day economic stimulus effects, present day morbidity and mortality effects, and present day effects on geopolitical stability that offset their costs some as well. Truth be told if the value of $50K was used* then I highly suspect those offsetting benefits would likely more than justify the costs of adaptation investments on their own.

*The difficulty is that these sorts of investments are rarely made in a rational economic analysis manner and so are scattered irrationally from an economic POV. This is at least as true in America as it is in the developing world, but that would be a whole different conversation.