An open letter on Ireland's proposed Climate Change Bill

A chara,

Climate change is a real and significant threat to human welfare, particularly in the poorest parts of the world. While an effective 'solution' to this threat will require global cooperation over a sustained period of time, this is no excuse for not acting now to begin the process of reducing our dependence on carbon-intensive activities.

Ireland has a great record of leading the world in initiatives aimed at reducing global poverty. This work should be complemented and reinforced by action on climate change. Ireland could take the lead in demonstrating to other rich countries (and the rapidly developing 'emerging economies') that reducing carbon emissions can be achieved without jeopardising economic or social welfare. In fact, these goals can be enhanced by such initiatives. This is not only the morally right thing to do, it is also in our interests. Such leadership would help to restore Ireland's image internationally, which has been so tarnished by the excesses, greed and corruption of our recent economic boom and bust. At the same time, intelligent climate legislation could provide an additional source of revenue for government, while potentially improving our competitiveness over the long-term.

Unfortunately, the proposed Climate Change Bill produced by The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Climate Change and Energy Security (and due to be debated in the Dail today, Thursday), will not achieve any of these worthy goals. The proposed bill would legislate for ambitious emissions reduction targets, with the Taoiseach responsible for ensuring that these targets are achieved. The Taoiseach would also indicate what levels of emissions he/she expects each year. How is the Taoiseach to predict annual emissions levels or to enforce any such medium to long-term targets? This is equivalent to imposing legislation that requires the Taoiseach to predict levels of economic growth each year, or somehow to enforce medium to long-term economic targets.

Unless this legislation envisages an entirely new, centrally-planned economic system in this country, I do not see how its objectives can be achieved.

Legislation of this nature will do two things:

1) It provides a convenient sound-bite for politicians to hide behind. It is relatively easy to say "we have proposed/introduced legislation that will force emissions to fall by x% by 2050" etc. without actually specifying how such targets will be achieved (i.e. without having to stand up to various interest groups who may stand to lose from specific climate-related legislation).

2) Such a law obliges the presiding government to make various interventions to attempt to reduce GHG emissions. Crucially, however, it leaves the choice of specific interventions as a purely political decision. How will the government of the day decide how and where to reduce emissions? On what basis? We surely should be sufficiently well chastened in this country by recent experience of political interventions in the property sector (in the form of tax breaks etc.) to understand what a dangerous scenario this type of legislation will create.

We should not allow politicians the convenience of meaningless targets to hide behind, or the opportunity to use climate change legislation as a means of making themselves and their friends better off in the next round of crony-political-economy.

Setting ambitious long-term targets might sound good, but in reality this does not provide any greater certainty to businesses, investors, or consumers, simply because such targets are purely aspirational and are not credible without specific measures to achieve them.

The optimal climate change policy from both an equity and an efficiency perspective is to place a tax on carbon emissions, and allow people to choose the best way for them of reducing carbon dependency. This would obviously have revenue raising potential - revenue that is so desperately needed right now - while any potential threat to vulnerable people could be mitigated by using part of the revenue raised to provide reimbursements to those on low-incomes. Taxes are never popular, but the people of Ireland are acutely aware right now that taxes must rise. In every crisis there lies opportunity. If only we had the courage to embrace this one.

Is mise,

Tom McDermott

Update: A version of this letter was published on the irisheconomy.ie blog on 11 November 2010.

Our happiness is inextricably linked with that of those around us

"Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an' he foun' he didn' have no soul that was his'n. Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his little piece of a soul wasn't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole.

...

"Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labour."

(Tom Joad, quoting the preacher, Casy, The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck).

Winning the battle with climate change skeptics?

The following post came out of a debate I was having with my brother about the role of "skeptical" views on climate change in the climate policy debate ...

The likely (and worst) effects of climate change in poor countries are almost indistinguishable from the effects of being poor.* The idea that (in the short term at least, and based on current expectations) money would be better spent on pursuing development goals rather than mitigation efforts (from poor countries' perspective), has often been made in the academic literature on climate change and development (see for example this article by Richard Tol).

For example, malaria represents a "winnable battle" (although "winning" is not as straightforward as some authors have suggested, see this article by Jeffrey Sachs & Pia Malaney), and deserves more attention and money. However, there is a very important and subtle distinction that some of the climate "skeptic" commentary seems to have missed (or intentionally omitted). That is, climate change will make these so-called winnable battles much harder to win. Furthermore, unmitigated climate change will have - almost certainly - disastrous consequences (especially for poor countries and poor people everywhere).

Business as usual is not a good option (as argued in this RealClimate post and this Economist article). The projections now being made about what unmitigated climate change will look like are startling, and scary (see for example this article by Andrei Sokolov and colleagues, and the report from the Hadley Centre in the UK, as reported here in The SundayTimes). The debate needs to be about how much mitigation is optimal, when and how to pursue it, and how to balance resources devoted to mitigation with those devoted to adaptation (from a poor country's perspective this essentially means development).

This is a very worthwhile debate, and should not be stifled by those who use the ugly term "climate denier" and make personal attacks on anyone 'silly enough' to be skeptical about climate change - or the proposed policy responses to it. (Ironically, this is exactly the sort of small-minded condescension that environmentalists and other 'social crusaders' have had to put up with for years).

One thing that is dangerous about the skeptics' approach - and the headlines they generate in some sections of the popular media - is that people are very willing to believe a voice that tells them "everything is fine, everything is going to be ok". We fundamentally prefer the easy option (psychologists term this "cognitive fluency"). We find it very difficult, on the other hand, to take a threat seriously if we have difficulty imagining it happening (people are a lot more frightened by the idea of being attacked by a shark than killed by falling debris from a plane, but apparently that is irrational - the latter being 30 times more likely! This is the so-called 'availability bias' - see this article by Oliver Burkeman, writing in the Guardian).

Climate change, and its potential consequences definitely fall into this category of being difficult to imagine.

As a footnote to this discussion, I'm not sure what is meant by saying that climate change is an 'unwinnable battle' (as I think has been suggested by some of the skeptics who, although not explicitly doubting the existence of climate change - and the contribution human activities are making to it - have challenged the rationale for attempting to prevent it through emissions reductions). There is a strong degree of irreversibility in climate change. However, the level of warming/change is still up for grabs - the irreversibility aspect makes precautionary emissions reduction now, although expensive, all the more justifiable (as the Economist also argues, in the article cited above). If the 'unwinnable' aspect is the contention that we will never change people's behaviour, then I think that is very naive. People will respond to the right incentives (a tax on carbon being the best way to create those incentives), and will change behaviour very quickly when the alternative becomes economically more rewarding. Not easy to get this right, but hardly 'unwinnable'.

*Note: That is, excluding the potential for inundation leading to the destruction - or at least forced relocation - of entire communities or even nations. In fact, this has already happened to the Charteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea.

Easter Island

The economy of Easter Island collapsed as a result of resource exploitation: trees were felled to use as sleds and rollers for moving giant stone statues. This led to soil erosion and a collapse of the economy. (As described in this article from the IT, Friday 8 January, 2010).

The only economist who got it right...

... Marx of course! (see Deaglan de Breadun's article in the Irish Times).

Forever blowing bubbles

Hyman Minsky's model of the credit cycle includes five stages: displacement, boom, euphoria, profit-taking, and panic. See this article "The Minsky Moment" from the New Yorker (February 4, 2008).

Paul Krugman has also written a nice piece, entitled "The Ice Age Cometh" on the evolutionary psychology behind irrational asset price bubbles.

Race and prisons in America

The New York Review of Books published an article by David Cole on America's prisons in November 2009. Some of the statistics jump out. For example; the US incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation on earth (its rate of incarceration is 40% higher than its nearest 'rivals' Russia and Belarus); while african-americans make up just 13% of the US population, they represent over 50% of the prison population (together with Latinos, the two groups account for over 70% of US inmates); blacks are 8 times more likely to end up in prison in the US than whites.

The article notes that "For an entire cohort of young black men in America's inner cities, incarceration has become the more-likely-than-not norm, not the unthinkable exception". This observation has the hollow ring of familiarity to anyone that has read Malcolm X's autobiographical account of the young black man's experience of life in the ghetto suburbs of major American cities during the pre-civil rights era years of the '40s and '50s. (Or for that matter watched The Wire, or read Jay-Z's account of how he got involved in selling drugs).

Up to 1975 the US incarceration rate had been steady at about 100 per 100,000. Since then, the rate has ballooned to 700 per 100,000.

According to the article:

"Drug convictions alone account for more than 80 percent of the total increase in the federal prison population from 1985 to 1995. In 2008, four of five drug arrests were for possession, and only one in five was for distribution; fully half of all drug arrests were for marijuana offenses."

Blacks make up about 14% of monthly drug users, around the same proportion they represent of the total population. However, the statistics on drug crime are hugely disproportionate:

"37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses are black as well as 56 percent of those in state prisons for drug offenses. Blacks serve almost as much time in prison for drug offenses (average of 58.7 months) as whites do for violent crimes (average of 61.7 months)."