Optimal climate change: Economics and climate science policy histories (from heuristic to normative)

Osiris

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 224-242

  Randalls, Samuel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CLIMATE CHANGE; COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS; ECONOMICS; HISTORY; MANAGEMENT; POLICY;

CLIMATE CHANGE; COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS; HISTORIOGRAPHY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; POLICY MAKING; PUBLIC POLICY;

EID: 79959701529     PISSN: 03697827     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/661273     Document Type: Article

References (170)

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16. Discount rates are used by economists to equate present and future costs; the lower the rate, the more expensive future costs appear over present costs and thus, for climate change analysis, the more likely that costly action should be taken now to prevent those future costs. Discount rates have been the source of much dispute in climate change economics, supporting Lester B. Lave's hypothesis that this was an ideal subject through which to examine the way economists treated discount rates more broadly.
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19. Ibid., 189.
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34. Other economists took up this work in the early twentieth century, including Henry Ludwell Moore;
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44. This work was partially supported by the U.S. Department of Transportation and was pub lished in the fi rst volume. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, which was established by Ralph D'Arge and Allan Kneese (who in 1978 became the first president of the Asso ciation of Environmental and Resource Economists).
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51. Richard S. J. Tol, "Europe's Long- Term Climate Target: A Critical Evaluation," Energy Policy 35 (2007): 424-32. Examples of this in the work of Nordhaus and others are presented in the next section.
52. This is the same argument used by third alkali inspector William Nicholson from the early 1900s for regulating industrial pollution in the United Kingdom.
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59. Neither D'Argenor. Nordhaus referenced the other's work extensively at any point dur ing the following years.
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65. There were clearly preceding studies of air pollution (see n. 25 above), Spash also neglects work in the 1980s, but ultimately the value of his claim comes down to the extent to which one includes partial or incomplete analyses and what counts in terms of climate change. Putting priority on this work is diffi cult given the different communities (pollution, energy, weather information) within which these economists were working during this period.
66. Ausubel and Biswas, Climatic Constraints and Human Action (cit. n. 26).
67. Oreskes, Conway, and Shindell, "From Chicken Little to Dr. Pangloss" (cit. n. 2), for more on Schelling.
68. Ibid. Note that there is no intention to single out Nordhaus here as some kind of scapegoat. Other economists made claims similar to his.
69. Nordhaus, "Economic Growth and Climate: The Carbon Dioxide Problem," American Economic Review 67 (1977): 341-6, on 344.
70. Nordhaus's farsightedness in choosing this limit at this time could be no more than a heuristic, but it resonates through many later climate change economic studies. See a critique of 1990s economic studies using doubling scenarios. Note.
71. Samuel Fankhauser and David W. Pearce, "The Social Costs of Greenhouse Gas Emissions," in The Economics of Climate Change: Proceedings of an OECD/IEA Conference, OECD (Paris, 2004), 71-86.
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75. It is beyond the scope of this article to trace the history of the varying temperature increases predicted from a doubling of CO2 con centrations, but they have been remarkably stable between 1.5°C and 4.5°C, though many social sci entists and policy makers since the 1970s have selected 2°C or 3°C (the mode) as the working fi gure in their analyses. A good analysis of climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 concentrations.
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79. The concentration- to- temperature relationship ("climate sensitivity") is also important, but given that concentration levels were used as proxies for climatic damages (as per the Nordhaus quotation discussed earlier), this relationship did not constitute a specific issue in economists' research, though it did add another layer of uncertainty.
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89. Edmonds and Reilly, "Future Global Energy and Carbon Dioxide Emissions" (cit. n. 42).
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107. It is interesting that Schneider added a note to the Meyer- Abich paper to express that its publication in draft form from the April 1979 Annapolis conference (the joint AAAS and DOE "CO2 Effects Research Meeting") was hastened "to generate discussion, debate and exchange on the very important, yet hardly explored, question of societal response to CO2."
108. Indeed, CO2 emissions would decline as a result of market forces, because a high- energy, high- CO2 future was only plausible if economically ineffi cient energy supply continued, according.
109. Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, "Energy, Economics and Climate-an Editorial," Climatic Change 4 (1982): 217-20.
110. Nordhaus published little on climate change between 1985 and 1989, a period that also saw him become provost of Yale University (1986-8).
111. William W. Kellogg, "Mankind's Impact on Climate: The Evolution of an Awareness," Climatic Change 10 (1987): 113-36.
112. The conference was titled "Second Joint UNEP/ICSU/WMO International Assessment of CO2 and Other Greenhouse Gases in Climate Variations and Associated Impacts."
113. Boehmer-Christiansen, "Global Climate Protection Policy" (cit. n. 46), 156.
114. The emergence of the IPCC from discussions within the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1988 established a scientifi c reporting process that would enable a consensus opinion on climate science to be formulated, but it did not include signifi cant discussion of social science or policy agendas.
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116. Michael Oppenheimer, "Developing Policies for Responding to Climatic Change: An Editorial," Climatic Change 15 (1989): 1-4.
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118. Piers Vellinga and Rob Swart, "The Greenhouse Marathon: Proposal for a Global Strategy," in Climate Change: Science, Impacts and Policy, eds. Jill Jäger and H. L. Ferguson (Cambridge, 1991), 129-34.
119. Samuel Randalls, "History of the 2°C Climate Target," Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 1 (2010): 598-605.
120. The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security, Conference statement (Toronto, 1988);
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128. U.K. Energy Committee, Energy Implications of the Greenhouse Effect, vol. 1 (London, 1989), 42. Emphasis in the original.
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131. Spash, "Trying to Find the Right Approach to Greenhouse Economics" (cit. n. 35);
132. Van den Bergh, "Optimal Climate Policy Is a Utopia" (cit. n. 15).
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135. Nordhaus, "An Optimal Transition Path for Controlling Greenhouse Gases," Science 258 (1992): 1315-9, on 1315;
136. Nordhaus, "Count before You Leap," Economist, July 7, 1990, 21-4. In 1991-2 he also advocated low- cost geoengineering to offset warming;
137. Fleming, Fixing the Sky (cit. n. 31).
138. Nordhaus, "Optimal Transition Path for Controlling Greenhouse Gases" (cit. n. 79). A more com plete formulation was published in 1994;
139. Nordhaus, Managing the Global Commons: The Economics of Climate Change (Cambridge, 1994).
140. William R. Cline, The Economics of Global Warming (Washington, D.C., 1992);
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142. Fankhauser and Pearce, "Social Costs of Greenhouse Gas Emissions" (Both cit. n. 39);
143. Colin Price, "Emissions, Concentrations and Disappearing CO2," Resource and Energy Economics 17 (1995): 87-97;
144. Spash, "Trying to Find the Right Approach to Greenhouse Economics" (cit. n. 35);
145. Mort Webster, Chris Forest, John Reilly, Mustafa Babiker, David Kicklighter, Monika Mayer, Ronald Prinn, Marcus Sarofim, Andrei Sokolov, Peter Stone, and Chien Wang, "Uncertainty Analysis of Climate Change and Policy Response," Climatic Change 61 (2003): 295-320.
146. OECD, Convention on Climate Change: Economic Aspects of Negotiation (Paris, 1992).
147. IPCC, Scientifi c Assessment of Climate Change (Cambridge, 1990);
148. David Pearce, ed., Blueprint 2: Greening the World Economy (London, 1991).
149. Boykoff, Frame, and Randalls, "Discursive Stability Meets Climate Instability" (cit. n. 2).
150. UNFCCC, "Report of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change on the Work of the Second Part of Its Fifth Session, Held at New York from 30 April to 9 May 1992," document no. A/AC.237/18 (part 2)/ Add.1 (Geneva, 1992), available at http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/a/18p2 (accessed 24 January 2011).
151. Nordhaus, "Optimal Transition Path for Controlling Greenhouse Gases" (cit. n. 79), 1317.
152. Tom M. L. Wigley, Richard Richels, and Jae Edmonds, "Economic and Environmental Choices in the Stabilization of Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations," Nature 379 (1996): 240-3.
153. Richels and Edmonds, "The Economics of Stabilizing Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations," Energy Policy 23 (1995): 373-8.
154. Fankhauser and Pearce, "Social Costs of Greenhouse Gas Emissions" (cit. n. 39), 76.
155. Nordhaus, "Economic Growth and Climate" (cit. n. 39), used precisely this doubling scenario in 1977.
156. Richels and Edmonds, "Economics of Stabilizing Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations" (cit. n. 86), 376.
157. Munasinghe et al., "Applicability of Techniques of Cost- Benefi t Analysis" (cit. n. 16).
158. Barker, "Economics of Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change" (cit. n. 8).
159. Agency, Climate Change in the European Union (Copenhagen, 1996).
160. Liverman, "Conventions of Climate Change" (cit. n. 1).
161. Tol, "Europe's Long- Term Climate Target" (cit. n. 28).
162. To clarify, the point being made here is not that economists set the 2°C temperature target; that would be an absurd claim. Rather, a confl uence of interests defi ned the problem as one in which scientists determined what would happen at different temperature levels and economists could then work out associated cost curves such that an optimal economic- climate policy could be forged. The fi gure of 2°C could then become a tolerable ecologi cal and economic target that the economists could optimize emissions pathways to reach (but not go beyond). While this fi gure is politically and economically actionable, such a policy is fraught with pitfalls due to the uncertainties in the relationship between emissions, concentrations, and tempera ture.
163. Boykoff, Frame, and Randalls, "Discursive Stability Meets Climate Instability" (cit. n. 2);
164. Randalls, "History of the 2°C Climate Target" (cit. n. 66).
165. Greenpeace, "Memorandum 9," in Energy Policy Implications of the Greenhouse Effect: Memo randa of Evidence, U.K. Energy Committee (London, 1989), 54-68, on 61. It is unclear, however, exactly what concentration levels this refers to.
166. DOE, Environmental and Societal Consequences (cit. n. 50).
167. Azar, "Are Optimal CO2 Emissions Really Optimal?" (cit. n. 12).
168. While Mike Hulme argues that climate models dominate climate change research, I argue that economics has dominated climate change social science; Hulme in this volume.
169. Nelson, "Economists, Value Judgments, and Climate Change" (cit. n. 11).
170. Grubb, "Who's Afraid of Atmospheric Stabilisation? Making the Link between Energy Resources and Climate Change," Energy Policy 29 (2001): 837-45, on 837.