The Climate Fix Book Club, Chapter 9 & Full Book
Obliquity, Innovation, and a Pragmatic Future
This post wraps up The Climate Fix book club, sharing in PDF format Chapter 9 and links to all chapters below. The first part of Chapter 9 is reproduced below. I welcome your comments, critique and questions!
Chapter 9: Obliquity, Innovation, and a Pragmatic Future
Imagine that nations around the world were to decide that they want to increase human life spans. They might start their work by deciding on a goal. Today, the global average today is about sixty-nine years. One nation might suggest a target of a seventy-five-year average life span by 2050. Others might criticize the lack of ambition in this target, and press for eighty-five years by 2050. A great amount of time could be spent arguing about what the right target should be, and the negotiations might founder there, without even an agreement on the goal, let alone implementing it.
But let’s say that a target is agreed upon. One way to reach it would be to put an economic price on death: countries would be responsible for paying some amount when someone dies. There could be a death tax or, even more creatively, a cap on the number of allowable deaths in each country, with a decreasing number of permits issued each year. If a country experiences more deaths than they have permits for, then they will have to buy permits from other countries that are experiencing a lower death rate, and thus have surplus permits. Advocates for this approach would claim that the cap would stimulate innovation in medical research and prompt behavioral changes that lead to longer life expectancies. The permit market would mean that the market would decide how resources are best allocated, so that the “lowest hanging fruit”—the simplest or easiest actions to increase life expectancy—would get funded. The legal cap would provide certainty in achieving the targeted extension of life expectancies.
Such a scheme would not be without its challenges. For instance, some countries, such as Japan, already have long average life spans, and thus have less ability to make progress. They might argue for some sort of excess permits to reflect their historical achievements on health. Similarly, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have shorter average life spans, reflecting historical realities and long-standing inequities. These countries might argue for some time period to develop before being included under any sort of binding agreement, in recognition of history and their present circumstances.
Perhaps, a very creative policy entrepreneur might argue, a system of “death offsets” might be created, under which rich countries could get additional “death permits” by paying poor countries to improve their health outcomes, where there is much greater progress to be made. With a declining cap on deaths and a market-based instrument to efficiently allocate death permits, the world would inevitably move toward increasing the average human life span. Who could be against such an elegant approach to improving health outcomes? No one, obviously, except perhaps the nefarious industry-funded “health deniers”!
I have used this parable in many talks over the past few years, and inevitably the audience laughs at the notion of a cap-and-trade regime for extending life expectancies. The laughter is appropriate, as the example is a joke. But it is no more of a joke than efforts to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide employing the same type of policy. In much the same way that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a consequence of our actions, average human life spans are a consequence of actions, and consequences are extremely difficult to modulate directly via policy.
Policies are more effective when they focus on causes, not consequences. Despite the lack of internationally negotiated goals, the world has in fact seen a steady increase in average human life spans. This increase has been achieved with a focus on causes of poor health. We advanced average human life spans not by targeting it directly, but by focusing on a large set of individual diseases and public health challenges that lead to mortality. When we make progress on these health challenges, the fruits of our efforts show up in statistics of advancing average human life spans. The best route to advancing human life spans is indirect, focused not on seeking to change it directly, but on the phenomena that influence it. This logic is so compelling that any policy maker suggesting a global cap-and-trade regime on death would not be taken seriously, and for good reason.
Global emissions of carbon dioxide are the result of economic activity coupled with energy production and consumption. People in countries around the world expect to see continued economic growth, which means that, all else being equal, emissions will increase. In Chapter 2 I call this contemporary reality (which is grounded in a deeply held commitment to economic growth across political ideologies) the iron law of climate policy. The iron law holds that for the foreseeable future, efforts to reduce emissions through a willful contraction of economic activity are simply not in the cards. Countries around the world—rich and poor, North and South—have expressed a commitment to sustaining economic growth, and these commitments are not going to change anytime soon, no matter how much activists, idealists, or dreamers complain to the contrary. That is just the way it is, regardless of whether economic growth measures what matters most to a country’s well-being or if there are other metrics that might better capture quality of life.
Given the iron law, then, there are only two ways that decarbonization of economic activity will occur. One is through improving the energy efficiency of the economy—which includes changes both in the efficiency of specific activities, such as steelmaking and automobile gas mileage, as well as in the nature of the economy, such as the increasing role played by less energy-intensive services sectors—and the other is through decarbonization of the energy supply.
In recent decades improvements in energy efficiency have been the primary driver behind decarbonization of the global economy, with decarbonization of energy supply a distant second. This must change, if decarbonization is to accelerate to rates consistent with low targets for atmospheric carbon dioxide, such as 350, 450, or even 500 ppm. The need to focus on decarbonizing the energy supply results from the simple fact that under all scenarios of future energy demand, even those based on relatively modest economic growth, the world will need a vastly larger energy supply. Whether that need is 30 percent, 50 percent, or 100 percent more than today’s supply does not alter the basic calculus that to reach low stabilization targets implies a massive transition to a nearly carbon-free global energy supply. Advances in efficiency can alter the pace at which that transition takes place, but they will not change the end point. There is good news in that advances in efficiency often make sense for reasons other than decarbonization, most important being economic reasons, and thus have an independent justification. The bad news, of course, is that to the extent that efficiency gains do result in economic benefits they can stimulate the economy, leading to greater energy demand and thus greater emissions, unless the energy supply itself is decarbonized. Scholars and practitioners have debated the degree to which energy-efficiency improvements lead to greater energy demand. Even if there is no positive feedback effect on energy demand from energy-efficiency improvements, decarbonization of the energy supply still must happen.
But how do we accelerate decarbonization of the global economy through increasing the deployment of a low- or zero-carbon energy supply?