Skip to main content

The Climate Hawks Are the Economically Rational Ones

New York City, via Wikimedia
Here's a great story from Climate Central on the vulnerability of New York's transport system to climate change: 
This was also supported by Climate Central’s own scientific research published in March, which showed that during the next several decades, the frequency of damaging storm surges in places like New York will rise significantly as sea levels creep up. The research projected a sea level rise of 13 inches in New York by 2050, and found that global warming-related sea level rise more than triples the odds of a 100-year flood or worse by 2030. 
Without global warming, the odds of such a flood would be just 8 percent by 2030, but with global warming the odds rise to 26 percent. [...] 
Even without sea level rise, a 100-year flood would inundate large portions of the subway system, Jacob’s team concluded. But with a 4-foot rise in sea level, storm-related flooding would inundate much of Manhattan’s subways, including almost all of the tunnels crossing into the Bronx beneath the Harlem River and the tunnels under the East River. Five of the city’s subway lines have extremely low points of entry to tunnels, subways, or ventilation shafts: they are less than 8 feet above sea level.
Obviously, given the geographical position of New York seen above, this is no surprise, but read the rest anyway for some extremely troubling analysis.

To step back a bit, though, this is just yet more confirmation of the argument that the climate hawk position (meaning that vigorous action is needed to confront climate change) is the obviously correct position for the soulless, technocratic economist. Climate change is presented by conservatives (when they're not denying it altogether) as a kind of luxury good, something that we can indulge during the good times, but something we "can't afford" now, when we should focus on fixing the economy and creating jobs.

Now, this might be somewhat true when it comes to a few things, like national parks preserved only for their aesthetic merit, but when it comes to climate this is a crock. Properly understood delaying action on climate change is stealing from others and the future. It's happening right now, to a smaller extent. Carbon emitters profit by their activities, but the costs of their pollution are imposed on others. New York is already spending $1.5 billion to upgrade its climate defenses, and likely as not they'll have to spend tens of billions more. That money has been stolen. (Or, to use bloodless economist jargon, it's a "negative externality.") Even Hayek supported government action in this kind of situation. This used to be obvious when we talked about Soviet ecological disasters, like their pillaging of the Aral Sea. It maybe netted them some money in the short term, but eventually destroyed a big fishing industry and badly poisoned the surrounding population.

Delaying climate confrontation because "we can't afford it" is like not fixing a crumbling roof support beam in your house because you don't want to spend the money. You can either fix the beam now, or pay an enormously greater sum later when your house collapses. (Of course, we conservatives say "we can't afford it" they mean "we must have budget headroom to cut taxes on the rich.")

I should clarify that I'm very much in favor of additional arguments for climate hawking (hawkery?), like for example that billions of people will die if we don't do something. Furthermore, I'm not at all convinced that strong action on climate will even cost that much. I'm just pointing out that even on the most hardcore of free-market principles (Friedrich von Hayek, fer chrissakes!) the case for climate hawking is ironclad.

Comments

  1. "I'm just pointing out that even on the most hardcore of free-market principles (Friedrich von Hayek, fer chrissakes!) the case for climate hawking is ironclad."

    Only true if you believe in the value of rational thought processes.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "I'm just pointing out that even on the most hardcore of free-market principles (Friedrich von Hayek, fer chrissakes!) the case for climate hawking is ironclad."

    Only true if you believe in the value of rational thought processes.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well, I suppose. But I can't go in for a will-to-power struggle. Not my forte.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actual...

The Setswana Grammar Manual

One of my few successes during my service here was formatting the Peace Corps South Africa grammar manual for Setswana, written mostly by Art Chambers, an SA16 volunteer.  For anyone wanting to learn Setswana, I reckon it's a pretty good primer, so I present it for free here .  If you think it sucks and you want to make changes, or you'd like to take a look at the raw TeX file, you can find it here .

On Refusing to Vote for Bloomberg

Billionaire Mike Bloomberg is attempting to buy the Democratic nomination. With something like $400 million in personal spending so far, that much is clear — and it appears to be working at least somewhat well, as he is nearing second place in national polls. I would guess that he will quickly into diminishing returns, but on the other hand spending on this level is totally unprecedented. At this burn rate he could easily spend more than the entire 2016 presidential election cost both parties before the primary is over. I published a piece today outlining why I would not vote for Bloomberg against Trump (I would vote for Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or Biden), even though I live in a swing state. This got a lot of "vote blue no matter who" people riled up . They scolded me and demanded that I pre-commit to voting for Bloomberg should he win the nomination. The argument as I understand it is to try to make it as likely as possible that whatever Democrat wins t...