What can I do to reduce my carbon footprint? There has been much talk and public debate about taxes, trading schemes, emission cuts and jobs lost or gained. Putting all that aside, what role can each individual play in reducing one’s carbon footprint?

Here are some surprising facts provided by the Government of Queensland: Apparently your microwave uses more energy to power its little digital clock 24/7 than to actually heat food—so switch it off at the wall. If that’s too hard, use a remote switch in a convenient location that controls all powerpoints in your kitchen. Most of us happily operate a TV by remote, so why not our wall sockets too?

When choosing between driving your car and public transport bear in mind that an average car produces 330 g CO2/km. With a hybrid you can get that down to 140g, catching a bus reduces it to 8g per person, a train weighs in at 3g per person, and walking or riding your bicycle produces exactly zero CO2. Now, driving is often inevitable and no one is suggesting you need to walk everywhere—but just bear those numbers in mind in situations where you do have a choice.

When you buy stuff, remember that pretty much anything you buy requires energy for production and transportation. And until we have converted to a low-carbon economy, most energy is generated by emitting CO2. Be mindful of each purchase. Do you really need it? (Think ‘declutter’ as well as climate change here.) Could you find the same item of better quality so it lasts longer? If you choose between two products, the one with less packaging probably has a lower carbon footprint. (Using your own mug rather than paper cups for coffee will save a lot of packaging.) Buy local to reduce transport.

Here is one with a bit of entertainment value: reduce your consumption of dairy and meat products. Why? Well, it’s good for your cholesterol … and cow’s flatulence is a source of greenhouse gas emissions. To paraphrase Monty Python, every little fart and burp is sacred in the battle to save the planet.

Consider moving your investments, including superannuation, to funds that invest sustainably. Use your latent financial power to direct businesses to more responsible practices.

Engage the media and politicians. Make them aware of your priorities. Write letters and emails. Ring talkback shows. Make sure action on climate change is viewed as an imperative by those who are responsible for the public discussion and the action.

So, to sum up, what can you do right now? Whatcanidorightnow.com.au has the answers.

If worrying about all of this is too hard, here is one simple thing that you can do to help the planet while saving money without any loss to your quality of life: Do not buy bottled water—instead, refill your filter bottle out of the tap.

And if you want to be terribly serious and try something totally innovative, have a look at The Cube.

Finally, here are some NGO’s in Australia that accept donations to help their efforts to decarbonize our economies and to reduce our carbon footprint:

• Australian Conservation Foundation
• The Climate Institute
• Safeclimate
• Conservation Council of W.A.

If you want even more information, sign up to our Twitter feed.

The difficulty and importance of the global warming campaign is many times greater than every other environmental struggle. Controlling carbon pollution requires a wholesale industrial restructuring and defeat of the most powerful industry coalition ever assembled.

Yet in the face of this challenge, I think it is true to say that environmentalism in Australia has lost its way. I have put forward three reasons for the failure of environmentalism.

First, like most Australians, some environmentalists find it hard to accept what the climate scientists are really saying. They do not believe, in their hearts, that things can be as bad as the science indicates. Like all of us, they are prone to engage in wishful thinking and cling to false hopes.

Secondly, some environment groups have opted for incrementalism, the belief that small step-by-step changes are the only way forward because the political system and the public are unwilling to accept major changes.

Thirdly, over the last two decades environmental activism has been professionalised. The professionalisation of politics has seen a sharp decline in membership of the mainstream parties and the rise of a “political class” of career politicians, staffers, spin doctors and apparatchiks.

Some environmental NGOs have simply adapted to this new landscape. The “political class” have become the new targets of their activities, so NGOs have abandoned activism for the techniques of lobbying and media management and are now dominated by people with lobbying and media skills.

In other words, they have become insiders. As insiders they are subject to all of the pressures and inducements the powerful can mobilise—access to ministers, consultations, the attention of journalists and so on.

In the face of the failure of mainstream environmentalism to achieve significant progress on the biggest issue it will ever face, we need a new environmental radicalism. Many in the environment movement are fearful of radicalism because they believe it will turn off voters. Yet given the cavernous gap between the far-reaching actions demanded by the science and the tokenistic actions the public is willing to support, Australians need to be thoroughly shaken up.

I was watching an episode of the TV serial Mad Men, set in New York’s Maddison Avenue in the early 1960s. Betty Draper is the beautiful and self-absorbed wife of the show’s main character, advertising executive Don Draper. Betty arrives home to find her black housekeeper Carla listening to the radio from which the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. can be heard giving a moving speech. Carla quickly turns the radio off.

“Who was that?” asks Betty.

“That was Dr King speaking at the funeral of the little girls”.

In 1963 four black girls were killed in Birmingham, Alabama when their church was bombed by white supremacists.

“It’s a terrible thing”, says Betty. “I am not sure America is ready for civil rights just yet.”

After a strategy in the first half of the 20^th  century emphasising public education, litigation and lobbying politicians, in the 1950s the civil rights movement embarked on a campaign of mass civil disobedience—marches, boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, and nonviolent resistance. They directly confronted racism in all its manifestations.

Their activities alienated large segments of the white population, who felt threatened and enraged. Their protests and actions created crisis situations that the authorities didn’t know how to handle, but which often played to their advantage. Like Betty Draper, most white Americans may not have been ready for civil rights, but that did not diminish the urgency or rightness of the cause and the strategy. Americans had to be made ready for civil rights.

The same pattern defined the early women’s movement. In Britain, after women’s suffrage bills were defeated by the main parties in 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, many activists became frustrated with moderation and reasonableness, of working within a system controlled by men.

Some moderate women’s groups, accepting that many people believed married women already had the vote because “their husbands voted for them”, decided to be pragmatic, to take one step at a time, and advocate voting rights for single women only.

Declaring a commitment to “deeds, not words”, Emily Pankhurst and the suffragettes engaged in direct confrontation with oppressive institutions at every turn. They attacked the major political parties, and refused to become the lap-dogs of powerful men.

For their militancy, they were reviled by the defenders of the old order, denounced by the press, and criticised by many who said they supported women’s rights. Members of the Liberal Party assaulted Pankhurst and her supporters, blaming their radicalism for a Conservative win in a by-election.

So there were plenty of timid people telling the leaders of the civil rights movement and the suffragettes that they must not push too hard or demand too much because society was not ready for change. But it was only by pushing hard that the civil rights radicals and the suffragettes made society ready for change.

Naming Emily Pankhurst one of the 100 most important people of the 20^th century, Time magazine wrote: “She shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back”.

That must be our strategy. In the case of climate change, gradualism is fatal. For women’s suffrage and civil rights the price of gradualism was perhaps two, three or four more decades of discrimination. In the case of climate change the price of gradualism is the battle lost, because a delay to doing what we must for another one or two decades will lock in our fate for a thousand years.

The women’s movement and the civil rights movement had history on their side and were always going to succeed sooner or later. The environment movement also has history on its side; and something more tangible, the relentless force of scientific facts.

Yet incrementalism reinforces a political system that acts above all else to maintain the structure of power—a system dominated by parties that always put the interests of the economy, economic growth, and corporations first, parties that have shown themselves to be dragging the chain at best, or actually taking us backwards.

When Carla turned off the radio after her mistress arrived home unexpectedly, Betty Draper said “It’s OK. You can listen to your program”. I was reminded of this by an astonishing headline in the business pages of the Sydney Morning Herald:

“In a blow to environmentalists, the International Energy Agency forecasts world energy consumption will continue to rise sharply and CO2 emissions will jump …” (11 November 2010).

As long as newspapers think accelerating carbon emissions are “a blow to environmentalists” we know we are losing. One thing is now very clear; in the case of climate change the public has adopted a range of strategies to avoid the truth. They don’t want real action on climate change; they only want symbolic actions that require nothing of them.

Sometimes coaxing the public to your point of view reaches an immovable barrier. Sometimes people must be jolted out of their complacency by militancy, even if that means a period of rancour, turmoil and danger. The task of environmental campaigners is not to pander to public evasions but to make those evasions untenable, to blast away the pretences people use to blind themselves to the science, to make them see what is coming down the road.

A wave of environmental radicalism, of uncivil disobedience, will have succeeded when the conservative press begin praising Bob Brown and Christine Milne as voices of reason and moderation, as indeed they are.

The most committed defenders of the status quo are those who most fear environmentalism— the mining corporations, the defenders of the establishment in the Liberal Party and the ALP, and their boosters and apologists in the media. These conservatives see environmentalism as a profound threat to their world.

Unfortunately, the threat posed by environmentalism is not nearly as great as they imagine, and is diminished by the actions of pale greens everywhere who believe that working within the system and massaging the public can save us from climate catastrophe.

In the 1990s and early 2000 there was some justification for an incrementalist strategy. But climate science now shows that the situation has become so urgent, and the forecasts so dire, that only radical social and economic transformation will give us a chance of avoiding dramatic and irreversible changes to the global climate.

So let me leave you with a final thought. The historic responsibility of environmentalism cannot be overstated. Beyond women’s suffrage, beyond civil rights, its mission is nothing less than saving humanity as a whole. Today’s environment movement is no place for the faint-hearted.

(This is the transcript of a talk presented by videolink to the National Climate Action Summit, University of Melbourne, 9 April 2011.)

Note: This post was authored by Professor Clive Hamilton.

The difficulty and importance of the global warming campaign is many times greater than every other environmental struggle. Controlling carbon pollution requires a wholesale industrial restructuring and defeat of the most powerful industry coalition ever assembled.

Yet in the face of this challenge, I think it is true to say that environmentalism in Australia has lost its way. I have put forward three reasons for the failure of environmentalism.

First, like most Australians, some environmentalists find it hard to accept what the climate scientists are really saying. They do not believe, in their hearts, that things can be as bad as the science indicates. Like all of us, they are prone to engage in wishful thinking and cling to false hopes.

Secondly, some environment groups have opted for incrementalism, the belief that small step-by-step changes are the only way forward because the political system and the public are unwilling to accept major changes.

Thirdly, over the last two decades environmental activism has been professionalised. The professionalisation of politics has seen a sharp decline in membership of the mainstream parties and the rise of a “political class” of career politicians, staffers, spin doctors and apparatchiks.

Some environmental NGOs have simply adapted to this new landscape. The “political class” have become the new targets of their activities, so NGOs have abandoned activism for the techniques of lobbying and media management and are now dominated by people with lobbying and media skills.

In other words, they have become insiders. As insiders they are subject to all of the pressures and inducements the powerful can mobilise—access to ministers, consultations, the attention of journalists and so on.

In the face of the failure of mainstream environmentalism to achieve significant progress on the biggest issue it will ever face, we need a new environmental radicalism. Many in the environment movement are fearful of radicalism because they believe it will turn off voters. Yet given the cavernous gap between the far-reaching actions demanded by the science and the tokenistic actions the public is willing to support, Australians need to be thoroughly shaken up.

I was watching an episode of the TV serial Mad Men, set in New York’s Maddison Avenue in the early 1960s. Betty Draper is the beautiful and self-absorbed wife of the show’s main character, advertising executive Don Draper. Betty arrives home to find her black housekeeper Carla listening to the radio from which the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. can be heard giving a moving speech. Carla quickly turns the radio off.

“Who was that?” asks Betty.

“That was Dr King speaking at the funeral of the little girls”.

In 1963 four black girls were killed in Birmingham, Alabama when their church was bombed by white supremacists.

“It’s a terrible thing”, says Betty. “I am not sure America is ready for civil rights just yet.”

After a strategy in the first half of the 20^th  century emphasising public education, litigation and lobbying politicians, in the 1950s the civil rights movement embarked on a campaign of mass civil disobedience—marches, boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, and nonviolent resistance. They directly confronted racism in all its manifestations.

Their activities alienated large segments of the white population, who felt threatened and enraged. Their protests and actions created crisis situations that the authorities didn’t know how to handle, but which often played to their advantage. Like Betty Draper, most white Americans may not have been ready for civil rights, but that did not diminish the urgency or rightness of the cause and the strategy. Americans had to be made ready for civil rights.

The same pattern defined the early women’s movement. In Britain, after women’s suffrage bills were defeated by the main parties in 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, many activists became frustrated with moderation and reasonableness, of working within a system controlled by men.

Some moderate women’s groups, accepting that many people believed married women already had the vote because “their husbands voted for them”, decided to be pragmatic, to take one step at a time, and advocate voting rights for single women only.

Declaring a commitment to “deeds, not words”, Emily Pankhurst and the suffragettes engaged in direct confrontation with oppressive institutions at every turn. They attacked the major political parties, and refused to become the lap-dogs of powerful men.

For their militancy, they were reviled by the defenders of the old order, denounced by the press, and criticised by many who said they supported women’s rights. Members of the Liberal Party assaulted Pankhurst and her supporters, blaming their radicalism for a Conservative win in a by-election.

So there were plenty of timid people telling the leaders of the civil rights movement and the suffragettes that they must not push too hard or demand too much because society was not ready for change. But it was only by pushing hard that the civil rights radicals and the suffragettes made society ready for change.

Naming Emily Pankhurst one of the 100 most important people of the 20^th century, Time magazine wrote: “She shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back”.

That must be our strategy. In the case of climate change, gradualism is fatal. For women’s suffrage and civil rights the price of gradualism was perhaps two, three or four more decades of discrimination. In the case of climate change the price of gradualism is the battle lost, because a delay to doing what we must for another one or two decades will lock in our fate for a thousand years.

The women’s movement and the civil rights movement had history on their side and were always going to succeed sooner or later. The environment movement also has history on its side; and something more tangible, the relentless force of scientific facts.

Yet incrementalism reinforces a political system that acts above all else to maintain the structure of power—a system dominated by parties that always put the interests of the economy, economic growth, and corporations first, parties that have shown themselves to be dragging the chain at best, or actually taking us backwards.

When Carla turned off the radio after her mistress arrived home unexpectedly, Betty Draper said “It’s OK. You can listen to your program”. I was reminded of this by an astonishing headline in the business pages of the Sydney Morning Herald:

“In a blow to environmentalists, the International Energy Agency forecasts world energy consumption will continue to rise sharply and CO2 emissions will jump …”

As long as newspapers think accelerating carbon emissions are “a blow to environmentalists” we know we are losing. One thing is now very clear; in the case of climate change the public has adopted a range of strategies to avoid the truth. They don’t want real action on climate change; they only want symbolic actions that require nothing of them.

Sometimes coaxing the public to your point of view reaches an immovable barrier. Sometimes people must be jolted out of their complacency by militancy, even if that means a period of rancour, turmoil and danger. The task of environmental campaigners is not to pander to public evasions but to make those evasions untenable, to blast away the pretences people use to blind themselves to the science, to make them see what is coming down the road.

A wave of environmental radicalism, of uncivil disobedience, will have succeeded when the conservative press begin praising Bob Brown and Christine Milne as voices of reason and moderation, as indeed they are.

The most committed defenders of the status quo are those who most fear environmentalism— the mining corporations, the defenders of the establishment in the Liberal Party and the ALP, and their boosters and apologists in the media. These conservatives see environmentalism as a profound threat to their world.

Unfortunately, the threat posed by environmentalism is not nearly as great as they imagine, and is diminished by the actions of pale greens everywhere who believe that working within the system and massaging the public can save us from climate catastrophe.

In the 1990s and early 2000 there was some justification for an incrementalist strategy. But climate science now shows that the situation has become so urgent, and the forecasts so dire, that only radical social and economic transformation will give us a chance of avoiding dramatic and irreversible changes to the global climate.

So let me leave you with a final thought. The historic responsibility of environmentalism cannot be overstated. Beyond women’s suffrage, beyond civil rights, its mission is nothing less than saving humanity as a whole. Today’s environment movement is no place for the faint-hearted.

(This post is the final post of a three-part series. See Part 1: Introduction and Part 2: Revisiting Limits to Growth.)

Part 3: The Psychological Down Side of Growth

(a)  Subjective well being/ happiness

Despite attempts to develop a more complex understanding of human progress, policy makers and many economists still habitually conflate economic growth with improved well-being and greater happiness as did 19^th century economic theorists. However, it is now clear that there is no necessary relationship between the two.

While it is true that increasing income improves health and wellbeing up to a point, the gains – whether measured at an individual or a societal level – flatten out very quickly (Bok, 2009). As many have shown, at low levels of economic development, when many people live in poverty, even modest economic gains produce significant effects on the quality of life – better food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education and life expectancy. It also improves people’s happiness and sense of wellbeing. In these circumstances, it makes sense for national policy to focus on economic growth. But beyond a certain threshold, and it turns out to be at quite a modest level of income, further growth results in little gain either in well-being or life expectancy. At this point other factors are more significant influences on the quality and length of life.

There is now a substantial literature on “subjective well being” designed to assess what factors affect people’s perceptions of the quality of their lives. The research is based on large scale surveys of national differences in responses to questions about happiness and general satisfaction. The scope of such studies is extensive, ranging from questions about whether and to what extent increases in income result in greater happiness to the effects of marriage on happiness and the impact of crime levels on life satisfaction. Subjective well being (SWB), measured by self-reports, is the indicator most often used. It refers to ‘a broad category of phenomena that includes people’s emotional responses, domain satisfactions, and global judgements of life satisfaction’ (Diener et al., 1999, p. 277). It consists of two elements: an affective one (positive or negative feelings) and a cognitive one, which is how people judge the extent to which their lives meet their expectations.  According to Diener and Seligman (2004) the major dimensions are pleasure, engagement and meaning.

It is no surprise that the two most important predictors of life satisfaction are health status and family situation, and while studies show that there is also a positive correlation between income and happiness, the effect is largely due to the benefits which accrue to low income earners. Put simply, $10,000 buys a lot more “happiness” for someone earning $20,000 than someone earning $200,000 a year. Although per capita income has continued to increase in the developed economies over the last half century or so, happiness has not, the so-called “Easterlin Paradox”.

Some recent research suggests that, at a national level, subjective well being depends less on income and more on people’s perception that they have free choice in their lives rather than being subject to external authority (Welzel et al., 2003). Radcliff (2001), for example, found that people tend to be happier under social democratic welfare regimes, although he is careful not to argue that this is a causal relationship. Ingelhart and Welzel (2005) have also shown that in all the major cultural groups, happiness is linked with people’s sense of freedom. In their most recent international comparisons,  Ingelhart and his colleagues take this a step further, showing that “democratization, economic growth, and growing social tolerance contributed to a rising feeling that people have free choice and control of their lives.” Using an index of the extent to which a given community accepted people of other races, immigrants and homosexuals as neighbours, they showed that people living in more tolerant societies tended to be happier, no matter what their own beliefs. In their review of the relevant literature, Diener and Seligman (2004) concluded that people with the highest reports of well being are not those who live in the wealthiest countries but those who live in nations which have effective political institutions, where human rights are protected, where corruption is low and mutual trust is high. A rational response would seem to be to shift the policy goals toward improving the quality of life rather than “to continue the inflexible pursuit of economic growth as if it were a good in itself” (Inglehart, 1997, pp. 64–65).

In fact, the research indicates that beyond a certain point, relative income is all that matters. Hence, an across the board rise in income will have little effect on happiness. Furthermore, there is also evidence that people readily adapt to their circumstances; while increased income may have a transitory effect on happiness, the effect quickly dissipates.

(b)The effects of environmental degradation on well-being 

 What is often also overlooked in the simple equation of wealth and happiness is that the social and environmental costs of rising consumption may generate health and well-being risks of their own. People exposed to persistent noise, drought and unusual weather are more likely to report feelings of unhappiness – and, in the case of extreme heat in Australia, even to be admitted in increased number to emergency psychiatric care (Nitschke et al., 2003). Sherwood and Huber (2010) have shown that, while it appears to be generally assumed that humans will simply adapt to warmer climates, in reality “even modest global warming could…expose large fractions of the population to unprecedented heat stress, and that with severe warming this would become intolerable” (p 9552).

In recent studies, the state of the environment has been shown to be an important in predictor of national differences in subjective well being. Rehdanz and Maddison (2005), for example, found that for 67 countries tracked  between 1972 and 2000, climate variables were shown to have a highly significant effect on SWB and projections from these trends indicated that countries with very high summer temperatures (like Australia) were the most likely to suffer reductions in wellbeing as a result of climate change. Panel data from 10 European countries were used by Welsch (2006) to analyse the effects of air pollution on SWB. He found that, after controlling for income, differences between countries and changes over time could be predicted by objectively measured air quality.

In one of the few studies to examine the effects of environmental conditions on well being in a developing economy, Smyth and his colleagues (2008) found that people living in Chinese cities with high levels of atmospheric pollution, environmental disasters and traffic congestion reported significantly lower levels of well-being. They later studied the relationship between environmental surroundings and personal well-being across six Chinese cities and found a strong negative association between atmospheric pollution and personal well-being.

The psychologically adverse consequences of destruction of the natural environment have also been documented in Australia (Conner et al., 2004). Interviews with people living in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales found that “the transformation of the environment from mining and power station activities was associated with significant expressions of distress linked to negative changes to interviewees’ sense of place, well-being, and control” (p 47). Pollution can affect well being both through an awareness of the adverse health and ecosystem effects of pollution as well as through the direct health effects. Several researchers (Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Gowdy, 2007; MacKerron and Mourato, 2008) have reported negative correlations between perceptions of pollution and well being.

Economic activities that diminish the quality of the environment and increase pollution harm the communities that are supposed to benefit. Conversely, contact with the natural environment has been shown to reduce stress, improve children’s behaviour and increase well being. Indeed patients appear to recover faster from surgery when they are able to see plants, flowers and trees. Although we might like to think that the natural environment is a tool at our disposal, that we are entitled, as the Book of Genesis suggests, to exercise “dominion” over “all the earth”, in fact we are part of the natural world and, for better and for worse, inextricably tied to the earth and deeply affected by it. Poets understand this. Politicians should too.

References

Bok, D. (2009). The Politics of Happiness What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being. Princeton University Press.

Conner, L., Albrecht, G., Higginbotham, N., Freeman, S. & Smith, W. (2004). Environmental Change and Human Health in Upper Hunter Communities of New South Wales, Australia. EcoHealth 1 (Suppl. 2), 47–58.

Diener, E & Seligman, M. (2004). Beyond Money. Toward an Economy of Well-Being. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5 (1), 1-31.

Diener, E., Suh, E., Lucas, E., & Smith, H. (1999). Subjective wellbeing: Three decades of progress. Psychological Bulletin, 25, 276–302.

Easterlin, R. (2001). Income and Happiness: Towards a Unified Theory, Journal of Economics, 111.

Ferrer-i-Carbonell, A.  & Gowdy, J. (2005). “Environmental Awareness and Happiness,” Rensselaer Working Papers in Economics 0503, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Department of Economics.

Inglehart, R. (1997). Modernization and postmodernization: Cultural, economic and political change in 43 societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

 Inglehart, R., Foa, R., Peterson, C. & Welzel, C. (2008). Development, Freedom, and Rising Happiness: A Global Perspective (1981–2007). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3 (4).

Sherwood, S. & Huber, M. (2010) An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 107 (21), 9552-9555.

Smyth, R., Nielsen, I., Zhai, Q., Liu, T., Liu, Y, Tang, C.Y., Wang, Z., Wang, Z. & Zhang, J. (2008). Environmental surroundings and personal well-being in urban China, Monash Department of Economics Discussion Paper 32/08.

van Praag, B., & Baarsma, B. (2004). Using Happiness Surveys to Value Intangibles: The Case of Airport Noise (Tinbergen Inst. Discussion Paper No. 04-024/3).

Welsch, Heinz (2006). ‘Environment and happiness: Valuation of air pollution using life satisfaction data.’ Ecological Economics, 58 (4), 801-813.

(This post is the second of a three-part series. See Part 1: Introduction and Part 3: The Psychological Down Side of Growth.)

Part 2: Revisiting Limits to Growth

Whether the focus is on pollution, biodiversity loss, resource depletion or climate change, the underpinning cause is the same: the human consumption that drives economic growth. As the ecologist Jane Lubchenko said in her address as the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1998, “During the last few decades, humans have emerged as a new force of nature. We are modifying physical, chemical, and biological systems in new ways, at faster rates and over larger spatial scales than ever recorded on earth. Humans have unwittingly embarked upon a grand experiment with our planet. The outcome of this experiment is unknown, but has profound implications for all of life on Earth”.

Our levels of consumption are high and rising and, in the West, we are more affluent – and wasteful – than we have ever been.  Add to that the rising affluence of the middle classes in India and China who are beginning to consume like we are, and it is obvious that climate change is not the only momentous problem we’re facing; there are many serious commentators who believe we are already overshooting the earth’s carrying capacity.  Visit any large city and witness the vast activity of the modern market place, the mobilisation of resources and energy from around the world. Two questions immediately suggest themselves: How can this last? And do we actually benefit from all that consumption?

Dasgupta (2010) has demonstrated that a country’s wealth per capita can decline even while GDP per capita increases and the UN Development Index records improvement. This is because the GDP does not deduct the depreciation of capital (including natural capital) since nature is taken to be a fixed, indestructible factor of production. As Dasgupta points out (p 6), the problem with this assumption is that it is wrong: “nature consists of degradable resources. Agricultural land, forest, watersheds, fisheries, fresh water sources, river estuaries and the atmosphere are capital assets that are self-regenerative, but suffer from depletion and deterioration when they are overused”. 

Consider, too, the world’s fisheries. The global catch rose from 19 million tons a year in 1950 to 80 million tons by 1990, with the result that 70% of the world’s saltwater fish are judged to be overexploited or fully exploited. Some fisheries have collapsed altogether. Similarly, many of the planet’s mineral and energy resources are being used so rapidly that we are fast approaching – and may even have passed – the peak of production, the case of oil being the most often debated (Speth, 2008).

Modern economies evolved on the basis of availability of cheap oil – cheap to extract, cheap to use; oil permeates every corner of our daily lives both as source of energy and a component of manufactured goods. No major industrial society can survive today without oil – food, transport, heating, plastics, cars, drugs, prosthetics, computers, housing. But global oil production is forecast to peak and then begin terminal decline, the “big rollover” where demand will exceed supply. Predictions vary about imminence of problem: some think it is already happening; others put it within the next 10-15 years; others still up to 40 years hence. But all agree that it is a real problem. It means that before oil runs out it will become too expensive to use for many purposes, especially private transport. Of course, it is the least well off in the community who are most vulnerable to such price increases, the same people who are often out of range for reliable public transport. Even if we ignore the global warming imperative to decrease oil use, even the most unvarnished optimists recognise that new fields in prospect will not cover the shortfall if we continue growth as usual. It is estimated that exploration is turning up one new barrel of oil for every six we consume. Just as oil supply is looking uncertain, global demand is rising faster than ever.

Despite optimistic pronouncements  about the dematerialisation of advanced economies, the aggregate volume of material used globally (and in most regions) is also rising quickly and – apparently inexorably; resources like fuels, wood, sand, minerals, biomass are being used at ever increasing rates. Material flow analysis, which tracks the extraction of such resources, shows that in 1980 we extracted and used 40 billion metric tons of such materials. Twenty five year later, the figure had increased by 45% to 58 billion (Schor, 2008). And despite improvements in the efficiency of production, the per capita consumption of such materials has been nearly constant because of the expanded scale of production.

These changes have human impacts too. The World Bank recently highlighted the fact that a third of the world’s population faces water scarcity, that 70% of the world’s fisheries are overexploited, that soil degradation affects a significant proportion of both irrigated and rain fed agricultural lands and that every year at least a million people die prematurely from respiratory illnesses linked to air pollution.

There are strong arguments – including from within profession of economics – that growth indicators like the GDP and the concept of growth itself fail to capture these unfolding environmental and humanitarian challenges. Indeed they mask inequities and fail to register actual declines in well-being, even in the wealthiest of countries

There have been some attempts to move to a more complex set of national accounts.  Work is being undertaken in the EU and within the OECD to construct robust indices to better capture wellbeing: composite indices of elements overlooked in the GDP – the state of environment, social indicators and non-market exchanges. Following international initiatives, Australian researchers (Hamilton & Denniss, 2000) also constructed an alternative index, the “Genuine Progress Indicator” to remedy the deficiencies in the GDP and to measure changes in well being in Australia over the last 45 years. This analysis showed that GDP per person increased from $9 000 to $23 000 or 2.1% per annum over the period 1950-1995 but the GPI rose at a rate of only 1.3% from $9 000 to $16 000.  Of note is that fact that the GPI did not increase at all from late 70s i.e. in the last two decades. In other words, the benefits of economic growth to the society were fully offset by the costs. The principal contributors to this phenomenon were found to be the increasing levels of foreign debt, the costs of underemployment and overwork, the impact of environmental problems, the escalating cost of energy resource depletion and the failure to maintain the national capital stock. Similar results have been obtained in many developed countries.

Economic growth does not appear to be the last word in improving the quality of our lives. On the contrary, it appears to be placing severe stress on our life support systems. As Lester Brown puts it (www.earth-policy.org), we need a Plan B.

References

Dasgupta, P. (2010) Nature’s role in sustaining economic development, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 365 (1537), 5-11.

Hamilton, C., & Denniss, R (2000). Tracking Well-Being in Australia: The Genuine Progress Indicator 2000. Discussion Paper no 35, Australia Institute, Canberra.

Lubchenko, J. (1998). Entering the century of the environment, Science, 279, 492.

Schor, J. (2010). Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. Melbourne: Scribe.

Speth, J. (2008). The Bridge at the Edge of the World. New Have: Yale University Press.

There are four cards on the desk in front of you: they are labeled A, 4, K, and 5. Your teacher tells you that any card with a vowel on one side will have an even number on the other side. You are supposed to test that rule. Which cards would you turn over to determine whether the rule is true?

If you are like most people, you’d turn over the A and the 4. Would this tell you whether the rule holds?

No, because it doesn’t matter what’s on the other side of the 4; whether that’s a vowel or consonant is immaterial to the rule. For a proper test, you need to turn over the 5—because if you had found a vowel on the obverse, then that would have falsified the rule.

People are notoriously bad at solving this type of logical problem, which goes by rather tortuous names such as “modus tollens” or “denying the consequent”.  I prefer to call it the Most Frightfully Boring Task, or MFBT.

Now for something completely different.

Imagine you are a liquor inspector tasked to enforce the legal age of 18. Suppose you walk into a pub and discover four fellows around a table. One is drinking coke, the second beer. The remaining two are sucking some unknown beverage out of two paper bags, but they very helpfully wear their IDs around their necks. One is 22, the other 16.

How would you enforce the law?

Easy—you ask the beer drinker for an ID and you look inside the 16 year-old’s bag.

Dead easy, anybody can do it.

Amazingly, the liquor-law enforcement is logically identical to the MFBT! Even though people struggle with the vowels and numbers, they have no problem being logical when the task is couched in everyday terms.

This is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. We reason badly in the abstract but we are quite smart within the context of everyday life.

This human frailty is routinely exploited by those who are trying to confuse the public about the well-established scientific fact that the Earth is warming, largely due to human CO2 emissions.

Their ignorance or ideologically-driven mendacity is easily revealed by translating denier illogic into an everyday equivalent—where all of us can instantly recognize some of the nonsense for what it is.

For starters, suppose that while you check his paper bag, the 16-year old suddenly says: “Apples don’t exist.” While your eyebrows are still rising, he adds, “but they grow naturally on trees!”

What? “Apples don’t exist but they grow naturally on trees?”

Needless to say, no one would trust that individual with the lives of their children if their future depended on logical coherence. Instead, we’d all wonder what had been inside his paper bag.

Now suppose the beer drinker says while handing over his ID: “The price of sheep is unknown, but I’d buy some now because they are cheap.”

What? “The price of sheep is unknown but they are cheap?”

One more reason maybe to raise the drinking age to post-primary-school logical literacy.  And no point trusting that fellow with your kids’ lives either, if their future depended on logical coherence.

Now here is the problem: Your kids’ future, and the future of their kids, very much depends on logical coherence—or more precisely, it very much hinges on protecting them and their future from the incoherent illogical mutterings just presented. This is because the sum total of the arguments made by so-called climate “skeptics” is an incoherent muddle of contradictions.

On a Monday morning your resident “skeptic” might tell you that global warming does not exist. On the Monday afternoon, she may tell you that the warming is all natural, just the same way that non-existent apples grow naturally on trees.

Nothing this incoherent can be right.

And on Tuesday, a so-called “skeptic” may drift into town and make claims about the temperature record not being accurate by showing you a picture book of thermometers. He might also assure you that there is nothing to worry about because it hasn’t been warming in the last 23 days anyhow. So the sheep are cheap but no one knows their price.

Nothing this incoherent can be right.

By Wednesday morning, your excited “skeptic” may have invented the possibility that the sun is causing global warming, and by afternoon tea time it might be cosmic rays, or El Niño, or Inspector Clouseau or whatever.

Nothing this incoherent can be right.

And nothing this incoherent is “skepticism”—instead, it reflects either ignorance, denial, or mendacious propaganda that can gain traction only by hiding its incoherence under the cloak of an abstract MFBT that people are known to find challenging.

As a final illustration, suppose you go to hospital after returning from the jungles of New Guinea with a temperature. You are stunned to hear the young intern opine that you couldn’t possibly have a tropical disease, because when you last visited the emergency room with a fever in 1976, you had the measles.

I bet you’d call your lawyer and file a malpractice suit the next day.

And yet, exactly the same malpractice is perpetuated by those who claim that the present warming also happened 800 years ago (or 8000 or 80000 or whatever comes in handy) and that we therefore have nothing to worry about.

Ignoring the fact that present temperatures are likely the highest observed for nearly a millennium, this logic is like saying that your childhood measles prevent you from having a tropical disease now.

It’s like saying that because bush fires were caused by lightning strikes before people came to Australia, arsonists now don’t exist.

Nothing this illogical can be right.

It may strain credulity that anyone could be so muddled; but in fact, it takes little effort to go to a “skeptic” website and dig out dozens if not hundreds of incoherent mutterings and egregious flaws in elementary logic.

If you don’t like to infect your computer with links from the web’s netherworld, then even the ABC Drum occasionally offers up eruptions of illogical and involuntary hilarity. An individual who calls himself a “research fellow” at the “Institute for Public Analysis” recently offered up the medieval warm period as evidence against anthropogenic warming: Because there were vineyards in Greenland in the middle ages, the Arctic isn’t melting today because … who knows … but somehow it’s not CO2 that causes the Arctic to melt because the Vikings drank beer out of beaver skulls. Or something like that.

The medieval warm period is as relevant to current warming as ancient lighting-caused bush fires are to today’s arsonists.

The medieval warm period is as relevant to current warming as your childhood measles are to today’s tropical disease.

The same symptom can have multiple causes: Today’s fever may be a virus whereas your childhood fever was related to the measles. Today’s warming is caused by CO2 whereas previous warming episodes were caused by other factors such as variation in insolation.

The medieval warm period, if anything, tells us that the climate is sensitive to forcings such as greenhouse gas emissions, which is something that real research fellows at actual universities know very well. It is only “research fellows” at the “Institute for Public Analysis” who, securely anchored in their well-funded ignorance, cite the medieval warm period to indulge in muddled logical travesties.

The Institute for Public Analysis, it will be recalled, is known to be funded by mining, resource and tobacco companies. Although large expenditures for propaganda are standard corporate wastage, in this instance $20 worth of vermouth in a paper bag would have been sufficient to elicit the same logic.

Economic Growth and Human Wellbeing in Three Parts

The current debate about our planetary future is infused with fear that we may lose some economic prosperity during the transition to a low-carbon economy. Although those fears are largely misplaced, it is nonetheless important to examine to what extent our wellbeing as a species relies on economic growth. Do we need growth to be happy?

This three-part series of posts over the next few days addresses this issue. See Part 2: Revisiting Limits to Growth and Part 3: The Psychological Down Side of Growth.

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding, economist (1920-93)

 Abstract

The well being of nations and of their people is almost invariably judged by the rate of economic growth. Such growth is driven by the increasing consumption of goods and services. Accordingly, government policy is often based on the premise that higher growth rates and greater affluence are conducive to happiness – if the GDP is rising, we should all be better off, in every sense. Research here and in other developed countries shows that even when people obtain more money and material goods, they do not necessarily become more satisfied with their lives or more psychologically healthy. Once people are above modest levels of income, gains in personal wealth have little or no incremental benefit in terms of happiness and wellbeing.

In fact, research shows that merely aspiring to have greater wealth or more material possessions is likely to be associated with increased personal unhappiness. People with strong materialistic values and desires report more symptoms of anxiety, are at greater risk of depression, and experience more bodily discomfort than those who are less materialistic. They watch more TV, take more alcohol and drugs and have more impoverished personal relationships. 

Increasing consumption also results in the accelerated depletion of finite resources; in the pollution of air, land and water; in climate change and biodiversity loss; and, beyond a certain point, human discomfort. What is often overlooked in the simple equation of wealth and happiness is that the social and environmental consequences of rising consumption may also generate psychological risks of their own. People exposed to constant change, persistent noise, drought and unusual weather are more likely to report feelings of unhappiness and to experience in higher rates of mental illness. The ramifications of these effects will be discussed.

Part 1: How we live today

How did we come to think in exclusively economic terms (about policy)?

Tony Judt – ABC Radio National 13/01/2011

There are many who agree with the historian, the late Tony Judt, that “Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today.” In his book, “Ill Fares the Land”, Judt (2010) argued that for the last three decades we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material goals to such an extent that  “this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose”. He suggested that this pursuit is now firmly entrenched in an orthodoxy which judges achievement and public policy in exclusively economic, rather than moral, terms. The result is that when we consider whether to support a particular proposal or initiative, we don’t ask whether it’s good or bad, whether it will help bring about a better society of a better world, but rather, how will it affect the economy, whether it is efficient, whether it will lead to increases in GDP and, if so, how much it will contribute to growth.

Most people do not appear to regard this as a problem; the equation of wellbeing with economic growth is taken as given and the identity of society with the economy as uncontentious. Indeed, they do not see any alternative to this construction; it is simply the way the world works. Almost without exception, politicians, business people, journalists and financial commentators regard the need for economic growth as unarguable. In fact, to raise questions about economic growth is to risk banishment from contemporary political discussion.  But as Judt has pointed out, this avoidance of moral considerations in assessing public policy and the restriction of policy discussions to the narrow economic questions of profit and loss is not an inevitable human tendency but, as he put it “an acquired taste”, and a recent one at that.

Much of what we judge to be “natural” today would probably surprise our grandparents; the focus on growth rather than prosperity or the standard of living accelerated during the neo-liberal dominance in the 1980s, when we saw the emergence of an obsession with wealth creation, an increasing push to privatize public assets and growing disparities between rich and poor, both within and between nations. At the core of this is an uncritical admiration for “the free market”, a naive belief in endless growth and, particularly in the United States, hostility toward government action to modify any of these results.

As a consequence, a nation’s progress is now almost invariably judged by how it implements policies which lead to growth in the scale and scope of market activity; growth is the answer to almost every problem – more economic growth is invariably seen as beneficial. Other national attributes such as the level of equality, the incidence of social problems, the respect for human rights, the health and wellbeing of citizens, the state of the environment and contribution to global citizenship, to name but a few, are not given much weight – or much publicity. This near exclusive focus on growth appears to make people uneasy; as the same time as they are experiencing higher and higher levels of material comfort, 83% of Australians endorse the view that ‘Australian society today is too materialistic, with too much emphasis on money and not enough on the things that really matter’^[1].   

However, it remains the case that for many, especially those in a position to influence public policy, the economy and society are identical; if one grows, the other must be improving along with the quality of people’s lives. The market is seen as immutable and inevitable, a mechanical process optimal for arbitrating decisions about what resources are available and who should share in them. We are told that, left alone, markets will produce the most efficient – and just – outcomes. While this confidence may have been shaken a little in the recent financial meltdown, it rebounded remarkably quickly on the foundation of taxpayer funded bailouts of the corporate “victims” of market failure.

There are, of course, people who dissent from this orthodoxy, people who recognise that markets are part of a broader social fabric, human creations which come in a variety of forms, governed by rules and supported by agreed conventions and legislation and which do not always produce optimal outcomes for society. In his very entertaining treatise on capitalism, Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang (2010) examines the extravagant claims of the free market fundamentalists and concludes that “the fundamental theoretical and empirical assumptions behind free market economics are highly questionable” (p 252).

The GDP

A cursory perusal of any day’s media will reveal our continued, collective fixation with tracking changes in economic growth, usually indicated by shifts in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Regular bulletins on the state of the GDP are issued and events, such as the recent Queensland floods and cyclones, are read through the prism of their effects on growth. The goal of economic growth is clearly the touchstone for judging major public policy decisions and is the most familiar subject of economic commentary in the media.  Economies and firms are judged not just by whether they are growing, but by how fast they grow.  Some have described this as a “secular religion” and the historian J.R. McNeill concluded that “the overarching priority of economic growth was easily the most important idea of the twentieth century” (p 336).

Until fairly recently, little attention was paid to the costs of such a focus; now the consequences of environmental degradation and rising CO2 emissions – together with challenges to economic orthodoxy from within profession – are forcing some reassessment. As Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz (2009) has argued, using the language of orthodox economics, “pollution is a global externality of enormous proportions.” This is similar to the view expressed by Ross Garnaut (2010) in reporting on the economic effects of climate change, that “polluters are not paying the costs of the damage they cause.”  Orrell (2010) puts it more bluntly: “the real credit crunch is not the one involving banks, but the one involving the environment” (p 214).

It is obvious that there are two main omissions from the models and theories of growth in neoclassical economics: the planet and the human families and communities which live within it. These models neglect the fact that the human economy is embedded in the biosphere which consists of living things, the products of living things and the necessary resources and conditions for living things to survive and thrive. When they are considered at all, such resources tend to be viewed as infinite; energy economist Adelman, writing in 1993 said, “minerals are inexhaustible and will never be depleted” (p xi). Often such consideration is simply omitted altogether, so problems are effectively defined out of existence. But recently, Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman reminded his readers that[2] “we’re living in a finite world, one in which resource constraints are becoming increasingly binding.”

As eminent UK economist Partha Dasgupta (2010) has acknowledged, “we economists see nature, when we see it at all, as a backdrop from which resources and services can be drawn in isolation. Macroeconomic forecasts routinely exclude natural capital.  Accounting for nature, if it comes into the calculus at all, is usually an afterthought to the real business of “doing economics”. We economists have been so successful in this enterprise that if someone exclaims “economic growth!” no one needs to ask “Growth in what?” – we all know they mean growth in gross domestic product (GDP)” (p 6).

Common sense tells us that there is a difference between the mere monetary transactions captured by the GDP and a genuine addition to a nation’s well being. It is clear, indeed, that increases in GDP do not necessarily indicate any improvement in the quality of life because it has a number of major shortcomings, including a failure to account for how increased output is distributed, the omission of household and voluntary work, the inclusion of expenditures incurred because of pollution, transport and industrial accidents, war, crime and ill health, the failure to account for changes in the value of stock of both built and natural capital or to measure public services (such as parks) not purchased in the market. Fundamentally, it says nothing about the content of the transactions which make up the GDP.  “More” or ”less” of something means nothing, unless we know of “what”.

All this matters because adopting growth as the pre-eminent social and economic goal and using the GDP as its index fixes the direction and content of national policy; if we continue to ignore the shortcomings of both the goal and the measure, policies will head us in the wrong direction, diminishing people’s quality of life and destroying the natural environment on which it depends.

References

Adelman, M.A. (1993). The Economics of Petroleum Supply, Cambridge, MIT Press.

Chang,  Ha-Joon. (2010). 23 Things They Didn’t Tell You About Capitalism. London: Allen Lane.

Dasgupta, P. (2010) Nature’s role in sustaining economic development, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 365 (1537), 5-11.

Judt, Tony (2010). Ill Fares the Land, New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/29/ill-fares-the-land/

McNeill, J.R. (2000). Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World. New York: Norton, p 336.

Orrell, D. (2010). Economyths: Ten Ways That Economics Gets It Wrong. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Stiglitz, J. (2009). A cool calculus of global warming. Project Syndicate Blog.

Societies rely on tacit “frames” to conduct and understand conversations. One popular frame in Western democracies is the notion of “balance”—the idea that all sides of an issue deserve to be heard and that solutions can be found by balancing their demands and needs. This idea entails the assumption that all sides have a roughly symmetrical entitlement to be heard.

There is much merit to this notion. In Australian politics, the introduction of the GST (a VAT equivalent) was a case in point. After much parliamentary and public debate, a compromise was found by which food remained exempt from the GST—balancing the original plan of omnibus taxation with the need to control the basic costs of living. Similar examples abound in most Western democracies.

Resistance to such balance may deservedly earn the label “extremist,” although this label is applicable only when the media landscape in which a debate takes place is not systematically distorted.

Setting aside such possible distortions for now, “balance” is only one of several conversational frames in society. In some situations the idea of a symmetric entitlement of opinions is ludicrous, and an alternative frame is used that gives strong preference to one side over the other—for good reason: Few would propose that the needs and opinions of law enforcement ought to be “balanced” with those of organized crime. Tax revenues are legitimately reserved for the police and judiciary, and there is no “balancing” public expenditure for crime lords, Godfathers, and drug barons.

One would rarely be labelled “extremist” when invoking the Law in preference to protection rackets, bribery, or the armed militias of drug barons.

Tragedy strikes when a society confuses the applicability of those two very different frames.

Imagine what would happen to a country when the head of its national broadcaster accused the police and courts of “group think” and suggested that the Consigliere’s opinions should be given more weight by the judiciary. Imagine a country in which the leader of a major party referred to the Law as “crap” and met with one of the Godfathers for an extended private chat. Imagine a country in which the rule of law has been replaced with the rule of who can shout the loudest in the media.

Those are not just scary thoughts. They represent the frightening reality that has engulfed not just Australia but also—and perhaps even more so—the United States. Segments of those societies and the media have lost their grip on which conversational frame applies to the greatest scientific and ethical problems humanity has ever faced—climate change and how to deal with it by decarbonizing our economies.

The only “balance” that applies to climate science is that of evidence—and not of opinion or interests. In the same way that the verdicts of the courts should trump the protestations of organized crime, so the peer-reviewed literature must always trump internet cacophony or the opinions of ideological think tanks.

Tragically, however, the media now often “balance” science with noise that could be debunked in a few mouse clicks. In Australia, a Catholic Cardinal recently provided a perfect if stunning illustration of such ill-conceived “balance” when he gave Dr. Ayers, the Head of the Bureau of Meteorology, a public lesson—not in seeking prayer or avoiding divorce but in how to conduct science. Thumping a particularly egregious piece of fiction written by an individual with no relevant peer-reviewed publications but several directorships of mining corporations, the Cardinal called Dr. Ayers’s testimony to the Australian Senate … “unscientific.” Unscientific, because Dr. Ayers relied on the peer-reviewed literature in coming to his judgment that the Earth is warming owing to human CO2 emissions.

On the positive side, this incident underscores that in modern Catholicism Cardinals have latitude to ignore the Holy See’s opinions. On the more negative side, the largely uncritical and detached stance of the national media reveals that they have abandoned the distinction between evidence and noise, between peer-review and internet memes, between science and anti-scientific ideology.

Lest one think that the Cardinal’s episode is an isolated incident, recent research at the University of Queensland found that among Australian politicians, the percentage whose views on climate are influenced by scientists—as opposed to some other source, perhaps cat palmistry—ranges from 44% to 98% across the different parties. The extremist party that in its majority rejects science is on the conservative side of politics (called the Liberal Party), whereas the party that nearly exclusively relies on peer-reviewed science is the Greens—yet, the latter are readily labelled “extremist” by the media whereas the former are considered mainstream and “serious.”

This situation brings into focus several important questions: Does it matter? And how do we move on from here?

There are some good arguments that this faux “balance” and misrepresentation of science ought to be set aside—after all, the vast majority of Australians are convinced that climate change is happening and most also admit that humans are largely responsible (even if only indirectly; Leviston & Walker, 2010). In light of peak oil and other good reasons to abandon fossil fuels, perhaps we should just move on and transition to renewable forms of energy—which Australians seem to support by an overwhelming margin—and ignore the noise and inaccuracies in the media?

Two considerations speak against this option. First, there is some evidence that correct understanding of the causes of global warming is associated with people’s intentions to change relevant behaviours. For example, Bord et al. (2000) showed in a survey of more than 1000 Americans that “knowing what causes climate change, and what does not, is the most powerful predictor of both stated intentions to take voluntary actions and to vote on hypothetical referenda to enact new government policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” (p. 205). Although this association may be moderated by other variables, such as political orientation (Malka et al., 2009), existing results leave little doubt that public misrepresentations of science are likely to have consequences, because public confusion about the science is one impediment to acting on climate change.

The second consideration may sound quaint in contemporary society but nonetheless cannot be ignored: It is simply a moral issue whether a society tolerates and acquiesces to systematic public misrepresentations and distortions of science and scientists. There is ample evidence for an association between public misperceptions of climate science and people’s preferred news outlets (Ramsay et al., 2010); people who preferentially get their news from Fox are most likely to be incorrectly informed about the state of climate science and in particular the consensus among climate scientists. This is not surprising in light of the recent revelation that casting doubt on climate data is a matter of editorial policy within this particular ”news” outlet.

So how do we move forward? Cognitive science has much to offer in this regard; from reframing to social norming and research on reasoning and ideology, we know much about barriers to public comprehension and action. That knowledge will be most helpful in assisting policy makers maximize the effectiveness of climate action.

But throughout, however the public debate may unfold, we must recognize that the only balance that counts in science is that of evidence. It appears inadvisable to lose track of that fact, even if segments of the media and society have slid into a bizarre corner from which evidence and reality appear “extremist” or “fundamentalist.”

(A shorter version of this article first appeared on The Conversation on 28 April 2011. It has been extended and updated for posting here)

References

Bord, R. J.; O’Connor, R. E. & Fisher, A. (2000). In what sense does the public need to understand global climate change? Public Understanding of Science, 9, 205-218.

Leviston, Z. & Walker, I. A. (2010). Baseline survey of Australian attitudes to climate change: Preliminary report. CSIRO (Behavioural Sciences Research Group).

Malka, A.; Krosnick, J. A. & Langer, G. (2009). The Association of Knowledge with Concern About Global Warming: Trusted Information Sources Shape Public Thinking
Risk Analysis, 29, 633-647.

Ramsay, C.; Kull, S.; Lewis, E. & Subias, S. (2010). Misinformation and the 2010 election: A study of the US electorate. Program on International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland.

President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. Recent U.S. surveys reveal that only 1 in 3 Republicans accept this simple fact, notwithstanding the incontrovertible evidence provided by something as straightforward as a Hawaiian birth certificate. The remaining 2 out of 3 Republicans either believe that President Obama was born outside the United States (between 45% and 51%, depending on the particular poll) or they profess uncertainty about his place of birth.

What motivates people who, based on Republican demographics likely earn a living in business or dentistry or some other well-paying job requiring at least a modicum of literacy, to overlook the obvious and subscribe to patent absurdities instead?

Last year, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, America’s highest scientific body, summarized the current state of climate science thus: “Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.”

Notwithstanding the Academy’s crystal clear statement, recent surveys reveal that the majority of U.S. Republicans do not accept this scientific fact. Climate science is clearly more complex and intricate than a birth certificate, so perhaps this is not altogether surprising. However, complexity alone does not explain why acceptance of the science decreases among Republicans with level of education as well as with their self-reported knowledge: Whereas Democrats who believe they understand global warming better also are more likely to believe that it poses a threat in their lifetimes, among Republicans by contrast, increased belief in understanding global warming is associated with decreased perception of its severity.

What motivates people to reject facts that are so strongly supported by evidence? And why are Republicans more likely to engage in such “denial” than Democrats?

The psychological literature provides some insight into this question.

To begin with, it must be realized that this has nothing to do with the particularities of American politics or some idiosyncratic aspect of the Republican Party itself. The same division of the political spectrum has been observed in other countries such as Canada (Heath & Gifford, 2006) or Australia (Leviston & Walker, 2010). The problem thus runs deeper; it crosses national boundaries but it always reveals a fissure along the left-right continuum of politics. Why?

Numerous studies converge onto the conclusion that there is a strong correlation between a person’s endorsement of unregulated free markets as the solution to society’s needs on the one hand, and rejection of climate science on the other (e.g., Heath & Gifford, 2006; Kahan, 2010). The more “fundamentalist” a person is disposed towards the free market, the more likely they are to be in denial of global warming. This ideological bent can be identified in a number of ways; for example, Heath and Gifford (2006) used a 6-item scale that pertains exclusively to the free market, whereas Kahan and colleagues have worked with a more elaborate scale that picks up people’s “worldviews” across a broader range of issues. Ultimately, the subtle differences between the various instruments pale in comparison to the common denominator: Endorsement of free markets in combination with other streaks of “hierarchical” or “authoritarian” thinking are statistically associated with rejection of climate science.

But why? What do markets have to do with geophysics?

The answer is that global warming, like many other environmental problems, poses a potential threat to laissez-faire business. If emissions must be cut, then markets must be regulated or at least “nudged” towards alternative sources of energy—and any possibility of regulation is considered a threat to the very essence of their worldview by those for whom the free market is sacrosanct. (As an aside, this fear of regulation can actually be counter-productive; there is evidence that regulation can have beneficial effects to the industry being regulated; Farzin, 2003. So rational self-interest is insufficient to explain the fear of regulation).

It is this deep psychological threat that in part explains the hyper-emotionality of the anti-science discourse: the fear of Obama as an alien “other”; frenetic alarmism about a “world government”; the rhetoric of “warmist” or “extremist” leveled at scientists who rely on the peer reviewed literature; the ready invocation of the spectre of “socialism”—they all point to the perception of a threat so fundamental that even crazed beliefs constitute an alluring antidote.

Does this mean that free-market economies are incompatible with action on climate change? Does this mean that irreconcilable differences remain between action on climate change and people with a “free-market” worldview?

Fortunately, the answer is “no” to both questions.

First, mainstream free-market economies embarked on a path towards reducing emissions long ago, and some of the most vigorous proponents of decarbonization of their economies are European leaders from the conservative side of politics, such as Britain’s David Cameron or Germany’s Angela Merkel. Likewise, mainstream free-market outlets such as The Economist have little patience for climate denial but instead focus on moving forward and creating new business opportunities in the clean-energy sector. Finally the peer-reviewed literature in regulatory economics is replete with analyses of the best way forward to cut emissions, further revealing the current wave of climate “skepticism” to be an exercise in misguided futility.

Second, there is evidence from the laboratory that reframing necessary action against climate change (or some other environmental problem) as a business opportunity rather than as a regulatory burden may elicit support for policy measures even from people whose worldview predisposes them towards the free market (Kahan et al., 2007). The fact that this reframing can enable people to support action on a problem whose very existence they would otherwise likely deny offers a path forward from the current impasse.

A related and quite intriguing result arose from a recent survey of some 5000 Australians (Leviston & Walker, 2010). The results showed that although people who identified with the conservative party (called the Liberal Party in Australia) were less likely to accept that humans cause climate change than people affiliated with other parties, they nonetheless held large corporations and industrialized countries responsible for it. In other words, “humans don’t cause climate change but large corporations are responsible.” One interpretation of this slightly illogical position is that public protestations of climate denial do not reflect people’s actual knowledge and acceptance of the science, but simply signal one’s tribal identity to other members of the tribe, as Naomi Klein has recently suggested.

References

Farzin, Y. H. (2003). The effects of emissions standards on industry. Journal of Regulatory Economics, 24, 315-327.

Heath, Y. & Gifford, R.(2006). Free-market ideology and environmental degradation: The case of belief in global climate change. Environment and Behavior, 38, 48-71.

Kahan, D. M. (2010). Fixing the communications failure. Nature, 463, 296-297.

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Putting a price on carbon emissions is often discussed as one of the main solutions to anthropogenic global warming.  Carbon dioxide is a pollutant and in economic theory, pollution is considered a negative externality – a negative effect on a party not directly involved in a transaction, which results in a market failure.  The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change concluded that climate change represents “the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen.”

Despite the economic benefits of addressing this market failure, many skeptics argue that putting a price on carbon emissions will cripple the economy.  Such arguments generally focus solely on the costs associated with pricing carbon while wholly ignoring the benefits.  For example, a Heritage Foundation analysis of the Waxman-Markey climate bill proposed in the US House of Representatives in 2009 concluded that the legislation would cost the average American family $1500 per year – a figure 10 times higher than any non-partisan economic analysis (see below). 

The reason the Heritage estimate was so high is that it evaluated the costs of a carbon cap, and then ignored the distribution of those funds.  When a price is put on carbon emissions, it creates a revenue stream.  The funds which are generated from the carbon price can be distributed in any number of ways – usually through reductions in other taxes, investment in research and development of ‘green’ technologies, funding of energy efficiency programs, etc. 

The Heritage Foundation report effectively assumed that the generated funds would disappear into a black hole.  Their analysis was the equivalent of doing your household finances by adding up your expenditures while ignoring your income.  It sure looks bad, but tells you nothing about your overall finances.

Here we will look at a few of the climate bills proposed by the U.S. Congress which would have put a price on carbon emissions, and examine a number of economic analyses mainly by non-partisan economic groups which evaluated both the costs and benefits of each proposal.

Carbon Pricing Proposals

Lieberman-McCain (2007)

Senators Lieberman and McCain introduced the Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2007.  This bill would have capped greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at 22% below their 1990 levels in the year 2030, and 60% below 1990 levels in 2050.  The Energy Information Administration (EIA) analyzed this bill using the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS), and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) analyzed the bill as well.

Lieberman-Warner (2008)

Senators Lieberman and Warner introduced the Climate Security Act of 2008.  The bill called for a steadily-declining GHG cap, reaching 15% below 2005 levels by the year 2020 and 70% below 2005 levels by 2050.  It was analyzed by the EPA using results from two economic forecasting models: the ADAGE model developed at Research Triangle Institute (RTI) in North Carolina; and the IGEM model run by a consulting firm founded by Dale Jorgenson, a professor at Harvard.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) analyzed this bill using their Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model, and the EIA and Congressional Budget Office (CBO) also analyzed the bill.

Waxman-Markey (2009)

Congressmen Waxman and Markey introduced the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.  This bill would have reduced greenhouse gas emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% by 2050.  It was analyzed by the CBO, EPA, EIA, and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

Kerry-Lieberman (2010)

Senators Kerry and Lieberman introduced the American Power Act.  This bill would have reduced greenhouse gas emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% by 2050.  It was analyzed by the Peterson Institute, EPA, EIA.

Generic Policy

Research groups (MIT, RTI, and the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratories [PNNL]) have also analyzed the economic impacts of a generic comprehensive, economy-wide climate policy to reduce GHG emissions 50-80% by the year 2050.

Study Assumptions

These studies compare a particular climate policy scenario with a reference scenario corresponding to the model projection of business as usual (BAU) – that is, a world in which the economy continues on its current course with carbon emissions unchecked.  All assume that a climate policy would be implemented in the year 2012, and most project economic impacts through the year 2050.  The analyses evaluate the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but do not measure the resulting payoff – the benefits of averting dangerous climate change.  Nor do they consider the ancillary benefits, such as the improved local air quality and reduced ocean acidification. 

They merely compare the economic impact of the climate policy to a BAU scenario where climate change does not impact the economy.  Therefore, it is important to bear in mind that these analyses overestimate the policy impact on the economy as compared to a realistic BAU scenario in which climate change impacts the economy.  These analyses should be viewed as a comparison between policy impacts and a scenario in which our understanding of the climate is wrong and the climate does not change significantly as GHG emissions continue to rise. 

Since it is difficult to predict how much climate change will impact the economy, or how much climate change will be averted as a result of these policies (particularly since they may trigger similar GHG emission reduction policies by other countries), the comparison to an unrealistic BAU scenario is the best we can do.

Impact on Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

The majority of these analyses find that the evaluated climate policies impact the US GDP by less than 1% as compared to BAU.  The main exception is the IGEM analysis, which finds a 2.15% reduction in GDP for the Lieberman-Warner by bill by 2030, and a 3.59% reduction by 2050 compared to BAU.  The IGEM model is an outlier because it assumes when the price of energy (and other goods and services) rises, people will respond by choosing to work less than they otherwise would (EDF 2008).  This is a counter-intuitive and illogical assumption, since increasing costs generally result in people working more to increase income correspondingly.

Another outlier was the SAIC analysis of Waxman-Markey, which was funded by the National Association of Manufacturers, which has strongly opposed climate legislation.  The study incorporated some unrealistically conservative and pessimistic assumptions, for example that American companies will be unable to deploy clean energy and energy efficiency technologies in a timely manner.  Nevertheless, the report concluded that by 2030, GDP would grow 95% as much under Waxman-Markey as compared to BAU.

The MIT analysis in the generic 80% GHG emissions reductions below 1990 levels below 2050 (the scenario with the largest GHG emissions decrease) found that by 2030, GDP would increase by just 0.44% less as compared to BAU.

Figure 1 and Table 1: Modeled Impacts of Climate Legislation on US GDP

It is crucial to recognize that “GDP loss” here does not refer to a net shrinkage of GDP; on the contrary, the GDP is still growing, but it is growing fractionally more slowly than it would do under the BAU scenario. This distinction is an important one, but it is often overlooked or intentionally confused by those who seek to obstruct action on climate.

Impact on the Federal Deficit

The CBO analysis of Waxman-Markey found that the bill would reduce the federal deficit by $9 billion by the year 2019.  The CBO analysis of a similar bill proposed by Senators Kerry and Boxer found the bill would reduce the federal deficit by $21 billion by 2019 and “would not increase the deficit in any of the four 10-year periods following 2019.”  And the CBO also found that Kerry-Lieberman would decrease the deficit by $19 billion by 2020.

Impact on Energy Independence

In the MIT analysis of Lieberman-Warner, the United States would spend $20 billion less on foreign oil in the year 2020, and $81 billion less in 2030. 

Impact on Gasoline Prices

The EIA study of Lieberman-Warner found that the bill would add 42 cents per gallon to gas prices in 2030 as compared to BAU (a 12% increase).  Analyses of Waxman-Markey found that it would increase gas prices 22 to 35 cents per gallon by 2030 (6 to 9%).  The Peterson Institute analysis of Kerry-Lieberman found it would increase gas prices by approximately 10 cents per gallon (3%) by 2030 vs. BAU.

Impact on Utility Bills

Analyses of Waxman-Markey found that its impacts on monthly utility bills by 2030 ranged from a $5.60 decrease to a $2.80 increase vs. BAU.  The Peterson Institute analysis of Kerry-Lieberman found that by 2030, monthly utility bills would range between a $0.67 decrease and a $2.62 increase compared to BAU.

The potential decrease in monthly electric bills is due to the energy efficiency programs established through the bill’s provisions.  Though energy prices are expected to increase modestly, energy consumption is expected to counteract these increases as households take advantage of these energy efficiency programs.

Impact on Household Costs

The analyses of Waxman-Markey concluded that the bill would cost the average American household between $84 and $160 per year by 2020, which corresponds to $0.67 to $1.28 per person per week.  The majority of the increase comes through increased gasoline costs.  The studies also concluded that the costs would be lower for lower income families.  For example, the CBO analysis of Waxman-Markey concluded that families in the lowest income quintile would see a net decrease in average annual costs of about $125 in 2020 due to low-income assistance provisions (CBPP 2009).

Over the entire span of the Waxman-Markey bill (to 2050), EPA found the average annual cost would be $80 to $110 per household in current dollars (64 to 88 cents per person per week).

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Although most economic analyses of these policy proposals only estimated the costs, a study by the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) also evaluated the benefits of Waxman-Markey by using a range of possible values for the social cost of carbon (SCC).  SCC is effectively an estimate of the direct effects of carbon emissions on the economy, and takes into consideration such factors as net agricultural productivity loss, human health effects, property damages from sea level rise, and changes in ecosystem services. It is a difficult number to estimate, but is key to any cost-benefit analysis of climate legislation. Figure 2 from the IPI study illustrates how the direct benefits of Waxman-Markey compare to the costs for two economic models (ADAGE and IGEM) in relation to SCC in Figure 1.

Figure 2: Costs (light blue and red points) and Benefits (dark blue and purple points) vs. SSC values ($ per ton of carbon dioxide) for H.R. 2454 using two economic models (ADAGE and IGEM)

Real-World Example

Ten northeastern states in the USA (Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont) implemented a carbon cap and trade system which will reduce their CO2 emissions from the power sector by 10% by 2018 in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).  The RGGI recently commissioned a study to examine the impacts of the system, and the results give us a real-world example which is broadly consistent with the economic study predictions of benefits outweighing costs.

The study found that by investing carbon funds in energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, the states achieved $3–4 savings for every dollar invested.  The program also created thousands of jobs (18,000 job years – that is, the equivalent of 18,000 full-time jobs that last one year), and individuals and businesses who took advantage of the energy efficiency programs funded by the carbon pricing system actually saw their energy bills drop.  RGGI provides us with a real-world example of carbon pricing benefits exceeding the costs several times over.

Bottom Line – Carbon Pricing is Relatively Cheap

To summarize, most of these economic analyses agree that a carbon pricing policy will reduce U.S. GDP-growth by less than 1% over the next 10–40 years as compared to an unrealistically optimistic BAU scenario in which climate change does not impact the economy.  In other words, the economy might grow by around 3% instead of by 4% under BAU.

The analyses also concluded that the evaluated policies would reduce the federal deficit.  Gas prices would rise somewhere between 3% and 12% over the next 20 years compared to BAU.  Although energy prices would rise modestly, energy costs would be offset through increased efficiency.  Total household costs would rise somewhere in the ballpark of 75 cents per person per week vs. BAU.  Studies which conclude costs will be significantly higher either make unrealistic assumptions or only consider half of the picture.

In addition, energy independence and air quality would be improved.  The reduction in GHG emissions would be a major step toward addressing both climate change and ocean acidification, although these beneficial impacts were not included in these economic analyses.

In short, even when compared to the perfect world where climate change has no impact on the economy, carbon pricing would have a very minimal economic impact, and would have several ancillary benefits.  Compared to the real world in which unchecked increasing GHG emissions will certainly lead to numerous adverse economic impacts, putting a price on carbon emissions to reduce those impacts will almost certainly prove to be a net economic benefit.  A cost-benefit analysis concludes that direct benefits of carbon pricing would outweigh the costs by a factor of at least 2, and would result in a net savings of at last $1 trillion by 2050.

(This is an updated and extended version of a post that has previously appeared on Skepticalscience).