Results for “climate change” 362 found
Organic Disaster
Sri Lanka’s President abruptly banned chemical fertilizers earlier this year in a bid to become 100% organic. The ban has resulted in reduced production and soaring prices that, together with declining tourism and the pandemic, have created an economic crisis.
According to major Sri Lankan tea conglomerate Herman Gunaratne, one of 46 experts picked by President Rajapaksa to spearhead the organic shift, the move’s consequences for the country are unimaginable.
“The ban has drawn the tea industry into complete disarray… If we go completely organic, we will lose 50 per cent of the crop, (but) we are not going to get 50 per cent higher prices,” he reportedly said.
…Former central bank deputy governor W.A. Wijewardena reportedly termed the organic plan as a “dream with unimaginable social, political and economic costs”. He said Sri Lanka’s food security had been “compromised” and without foreign currency, it’s “worsening day by day”.
An island-wide survey of farmers found out that 90 per cent use chemicals for farming and 85 per cent expected sizable reductions in their harvest if disallowed to use fertilisers. Moreover, the survey said that only 20 per cent farmers had the knowledge to transition to completely organic production.
It also found that 44 per cent farmers are experiencing a decline in harvests, and 85 per cent are expecting a fall in the future.
The survey also revealed that many key crops in Sri Lanka depend on heavy use of chemical input for cultivation, with the highest dependency in paddy at 94 per cent, followed by tea and rubber at 89 per cent each.
With the shift from chemical to organic cultivation, Sri Lanka needs a large domestic production of organic fertilisers and biofertilisers. However, the situation is very bleak.
The government has responded to the soaring prices not by reversing its decree but in the usual way by imposing price controls, attacking “hoarders” and seizing stocks of agricultural commodities like sugar.
Organic farming has its place but it takes a lot of human capital to make it work and overall it results in lower yield and thus more land used. Nor is organic farming less polluting per unit of output. See this piece from the Annual Review of Resource Economics.
Organic agriculture is often perceived as more sustainable than conventional farming. We review the literature on this topic from a global perspective. In terms of environmental and climate change effects, organic farming is less polluting than conventional farming when measured per unit of land but not when measured per unit of output. Organic farming, which currently accounts for only 1% of global agricultural land, is lower yielding on average. Due to higher knowledge requirements, observed yield gaps might further increase if a larger number of farmers would switch to organic practices. Widespread upscaling of organic agriculture would cause additional loss of natural habitats and also entail output price increases, making food less affordable for poor consumers in developing countries. Organic farming is not the paradigm for sustainable agriculture and food security, but smart combinations of organic and conventional methods could contribute toward sustainable productivity increases in global agriculture.
*Unsettled*, by Steven E. Koonin
A few of you have asked me to review this book, sometimes presented as a clinching case for climate contrarianism. I thought it was fine, but not a great revelation, and ultimately disappointing on one very major point of contention. On the latter angle, on p.2 Koonin writes:
The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.
That is presented as a big deal, and yes it would be. But “minimal”? The economist wishes to ask “how much.” The more concrete discussion comes on pp.178-179, which looks at twenty studies (all or most of them bad), and reports they estimate that by 2100 global gdp is three percent less due to climate change, or perhaps the damages are smaller yet. Those estimates are then graphed, and there is a bit of numerical analysis of what that means for growth rates working backwards. There is not much more than that on the question, and no attempt to provide an independent estimate of the economic costs of global warming, or to tell us which might be the best study or what it might be missing. Koonin seems more interested in discrediting the hypocritical or innumerate climate change researchers than finding out the best answer to the question of cost.
To be sure, this is all a useful corrective to those who think global warming will destroy the earth or create major existential risk. I am happy to praise the book for that and for all of its other corrections of hysteria.
But I just don’t find the Koonin discussion of economic costs to be useful. The best estimate I know estimates global welfare costs of six percent, with some poorer countries suffering losses of up to fifteen percent, and some of the colder regions gaining. There is high uncertainty about average effects, so you also can debate what kind of risk premium can be considered. (I have myself written about how climate change may induce stupid policy responses, thus perhaps boosting the costs further yet.) You may or may not agree with those numbers, but the above-linked paper provides plenty of structure for considering the problem further, such as modeling migration and adjustment effects across different parts of the world. The Koonin brief meta-survey does not, it simply tells you that the junky papers don’t have the numbers to justify the panic.
So in what sense is the Koonin book useful for furthering my understanding of my number one question of concern? Of course not every book has to be written for me, but at the end of the day it didn’t cause me to update my views much at all.
Green energy vs. green jobs
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the opening bit:
One of the most disturbing trends in recent economic thought is the view that green energy should be viewed as a source of good jobs. Such attitudes are bad for our polity and for our economy.
To be clear, the need for greener energy policies is imperative. Honest observers may disagree about the best paths forward, but a simple example illustrates the point about jobs.
Let’s say America’s energy supply was composed primarily of solar, wind, hydroelectric and nuclear power, mostly automated with a few workers for oversight and a dog to guard the factory gate.
The biggest obstacle to green energy is not that American voters love pollution and carbon emissions, but rather people do not wish to pay more for their gasoline and their home heating bills. If we insist that green energy create a lot of good jobs, in essence we are insisting that it have high labor costs, and thus we are producing a version of it that will meet consumer and also voter resistance.
That would be close to ideal, even if it involved fewer jobs on net than the current energy infrastructure. Ideally, we should be striving for an energy network that hardly provides any jobs at all. That would be a sign that we truly have produced affordable and indeed very cheap alternatives to energy produced by fossil fuels.
The issue of cost is all the more urgent because climate change is a global problem, not just a national one. We could make North America entirely green, but climate change would proceed apace, due to carbon emissions from other countries, most of all China and eventually India.
So what we need to produce are very cheap renewable technologies, ones so cheap that the poorer countries of the world will adopt them as well. If we insist on packing a lot of labor costs (“good jobs”) into our energy technologies, we will not come close to achieving that end.
And I suspect my colleague Don Boudreaux would remind us all of Bastiat’s excellent Candlemakers’ Petition to the Sun, relevant here in its very specifics.
I really have not seen Democratic economists pushing back against the Biden administration on this point. #thegreatforgetting
From Charles Kenny
Friends: I’m writing to tell you about my latest book and ask you to take a look (and share the news).
Your World, Better is written for the smart and engaged middle school student. It looks at how America and the World has changed since the reader’s parents and grandparents were young: what has happened to health and wealth, homes, school and work, rights and democracy, war and the environment, happiness and depression. It talks about the things that have gotten better, the sometimes-intensifying challenges that remain, and what readers can do about them. (Some of you might hear echoes of my earlier book Getting Better –it is a source, but this is a very different text).
I wrote it because my (middle school age) elder daughter’s friends appear largely of the opinion that everything is terrible, and after the last eighteen months it is a little hard to blame them for thinking that. Your World Better is optimistic, but it doesn’t shy away from the considerable problems we face: from inequality through discrimination and depression to climate change and infectious threats. It is meant to encourage kids to help make the world better: tip them from hopelessness toward action, not into complacency. I hope you think I get the balance right.
The pdf of Your World Better is available to download in my blog for free. Or you can buy a kindle version for 99 cents or a hard copy for $8.10. Any author royalties from those sales will be donated to UNICEF.
Deregulation has never been more imperative
Electric vehicle charging stations can in fact be provided by the private sector, just as gas stations are. But will state and local governments step out of the way?:
There are several regulatory barriers to the deployment of EV charging infrastructure including permitting of charging infrastructure, the lack of a technical standard for charging infrastructure, policy uncertainty regarding sale of electricity, regulation regarding EV-related investment by utilities, etc. Cities which face these regulatory barriers should address them as early as possible by building political consensus and then mandating the relevant government agency to address each issue whether it be modifying building codes, streamlining permitting, deciding a standard in consultation with OEMs, etc. As mentioned in Chapter 4, city governments hold a comparative advantage in zoning and building codes and permitting, and they should use those levers to good effect. Cities should use their regulatory influence smartly to remove / mitigate barriers to create a conducive environment for private investors. This report also shows that perse a direct subsidy to private infrastructure providers is not required because charging networks offer a viable business opportunity – the notable exemption being cities with large proportions of on-street residential parking where residents might be undersupplied with charging infrastructure as the economics under those conditions are less appealing.
Here is the full report, from Stephen Crolius and the Clinton Climate Change Initiative.
What I’ve been reading
1. Devaki Jain, The Brass Notebook. What is it like to grow up in a Tamil Brahmin family, be molested by relatives and Nobel Prize winners, and go on to be an economist? Short and extremely readable. The personal tale is very charming, the politics (Nyerere and Castro, never repudiated) are not.
2. Walter Isaacson, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. This excellent book is exactly as you think it is going to be.
3. S.M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician. Memoir involving many of the 20th century’s top mathematicians and physics types, including von Neumann, Gamow, Banach, Edward Teller, and Ulam himself, among others. Scintillating on every page, as a historical chronicle, as biography, and as a look into how a brilliant mathematician thinks.
4. Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX. A fun and informative treatment of what the title promises. I hadn’t know that Musk met personally with the first three thousand employees of SpaceX, to make sure the company was hiring the right kind of people. He thought he could detect a good hire within fifteen minutes of conversation.
5. Matthew E. Kahn, Adapting to Climate Change: Markets and the Management of an Uncertain Future. I read this some time ago, it is just published, here is my blurb: “Are you looking for an approach that recognizes the costs of climate change, and approaches the entire question with an economic and political sanity? Matthew E. Kahn’s new book is then essential reading.”
The new Peter Boettke book is The Struggle for a Better World, which is his best statement of classical liberalism to date.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Those new service sector jobs: “no bison experience necessary.”
2. Where does the climate change struggle stand now? (New York magazine)
3. The Pfizer shots likely give sterilizing immunity (i.e., you don’t then infect others).
4. Vaccine supply chain details.
5. The decline in higher ed enrollment is much steeper among men.
Progress on Nuclear Power
In the last year two new nuclear reactor designs have been approved, the first time this has happened in a generation. In September, the NRC approved NuScale’s small modular reactor (SMR) and a few days ago they approved GE-Hitachi’s SMR. The Trump administration has also invested billions in nuclear power research and in 2018 passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act.
President Donald Trump signed into a law new legislation that will speed up the development of advanced reactors in the United States.
The Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act (NEICA) eliminates some of the financial and technological barriers standing in the way of nuclear innovation.
It also represents a strong commitment by the government to support the commercial nuclear sector, ensuring that the U.S. maintains its leadership around the globe.
Nuclear pairs extremely well with hydrogen, a carbon-free near pollution-free fuel, and nuclear also works great with solar (to smooth out capacity).
Will President Trump be remembered as the environmental president? Probably not. You can read dozens of pieces on Trump’s environmental policies (“rollbacks,” “reversals”) including this long Wikipedia article that never once mention nuclear, despite the fact that nuclear remains a leading technology for making progress on climate change.
Samuel Brittan has passed away
At the age of 86, he was one of Britain’s great liberals. He wrote columns for the FT for almost fifty years, defended capitalism, and also was an early advocate of an ngdp approach. From the FT:
Brittan had a wonderful, restless intelligence which made him an ideal, if demanding, companion…Peter Jay wrote that when he was economics editor of The Times, he was “haunted by the spectre . . . of Brittan endlessly at work, morning, noon and night, reading, reading, reading, while I tried ineffectually to reconcile the demands of work and family life”.
His Capitalism and the Permissive Society is now but a shell of a listing on Amazon, but I can recall Roy Childs excitedly telling me about the book. Back then, it seemed like the way forward for liberalism, a way to develop a truly emancipatory vision of free market capitalism. Now all that seems so long ago.
Here is Sam’s Wikipedia page, note the badly “off” and misrepresentative second sentence: “He was a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a non-profit organisation “restoring balance and trust to the climate debate” that has been characterised as promoting climate change denial.”
Here was Sam in the 2009 Spectator:
I have no expertise on the subject of global warming; nor do I have a strong view about it. But I do know attempted thought control and hostility to free speech when I see it; and I find these unlovely phenomena present among all too many of the enthusiasts for climate action. Words such as ‘denial’ are intentionally brought into the debate and recall those who deny the reality of the Nazi Holocaust.
Here is John McDermott’s Ode to Sam upon Sam’s retirement in 2014. And here is Cardiff Garcia on Sam.
Thursday assorted links
*False Alarm*, the new book by Bjorn Lomborg
The subtitle is How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.
I agree with the author’s claim that climate change is not an existential risk for humanity. Still, both the title and subtitle bother me. The alarm does not seem to be a false one, even if many of the worriers make grossly overstated claims about the end of the earth. And right now “climate change panic” is not costing us “trillions,” rather virtually all countries are failing to reduce their carbon emissions and most are not even trying very hard.
There should be more of a focus on the insurance value of avoiding the worst plausible scenarios, which are still quite bad. There is no argument in this book which overturns the Weitzman-like calculations that preventive measures are desirable.
I can report that the author endorses a carbon tax, more investment in innovation, and greater adaptation, with geoengineering as a back-up plan, more or less the correct stance in my view.
There is much in this book of value, and the criticisms of the exaggerated worriers are mostly correct. Still, the oppositional framing of the material doesn’t seem appropriate these days, and Lomborg will have to choose whether he wishes to be “leader of the opposition,” or “provider of the best possible message.” Or has he already chosen?
That was then, this is now, pandemic public protest edition
Greta Thunberg is calling on other young climate activists to avoid big protests and move their demonstrations online amid efforts to contain the novel coronavirus. Over the past year and a half, Thunberg has incited thousands of students across the globe to protest inaction on climate change. She’s inspired many to join massive demonstrations like those outside United Nations climate conferences in New York and Madrid last year. Now, she’s asking people to stay home…
Just as she does when it comes to climate change, Thunberg urged people to “unite behind experts and science” to address the current public health crisis posed by the novel coronavirus…
“We’ll have to find new ways to create public awareness & advocate for change that don’t involve too big crowds,” Thunberg tweeted. “Listen to local authorities.”
Here is the relevant article. I don’t recall anyone protesting her decision at the time, or arguing that the benefits of the climate change protests would outweigh their public health costs, or even attempting such a calculation.
I am inclined to conclude that some mix of two truths must hold, though I am not sure in what combination: 1) Many of you care less about climate change than you may think, compared to other issues, and/or 2) The lockdown has made us all somewhat batty.
I thank A. for the relevant pointer, noting that no one else seems to have considered this parallel, which is perhaps evidence for #2?
Our regulatory state is failing us, installment #1437
Officials at the Internal Revenue Service have warned that $1,200 relief checks may not reach many Americans until August or September if they haven’t already given their direct-deposit information to the government. Taxpayers in need of answers from the IRS amid a rapidly changing job market are encountering dysfunctional government websites and unresponsive call centers that have become understaffed as federal workers stay home.
Here is the full piece by Jeff Stein. And here is me in WaPo:
Cowen said it’s inexplicable why the federal government, given all the warnings and evidence from China of a spreading pandemic, did not move more rapidly.
“You know, Trump was terrible, but you can’t just pin it on him. It’s far more systemic than that. The NBA [which suspended its season on March 11] really gets so much credit. I would put the NBA in charge of fighting climate change at this point.”
The piece there is by Dan Balz.
The Coronavirus Killed the Progressive Left
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Yes trolling, but trolling with the truth. Here are scattered excerpts:
— The egalitarianism of the progressive left also will seem like a faint memory. Elites are most likely to support wealth redistribution when they feel comfortable themselves, and indeed well-off coastal elites in California and the Northeast are a backbone of the progressive movement. But when these people feel threatened in their lives or occupations, or when the futures of their children suddenly seem less secure, redistribution will not be such a compelling ideal…
— The case for mass transit also will seem weaker, because subways and buses will be associated with the fear of Covid-19 transmission. In a similar fashion, the forces of NIMBY will become stronger, relative to those of YIMBY, because people secure in their isolated suburban homes will feel less stressed than those in densely packed urban apartment buildings.
— There is likely to be much more government intervention in some parts of the health-care sector, but it will focus on scarce hospital beds and ventilators, and enforce nasty triage, rather than being a benevolent move toward universal coverage. If anything, it will drive home the message that supply constraints are binding and America can’t have everything — hardly the traditional progressive message.
— — The climate change movement is likely to be another victim. How much have you heard about Greta Thunberg lately? Concern over the climate will seem like another luxury from safer and more normal times. In addition, the course of anti-Covid-19 efforts may not prove propitious for the climate change movement. If the fight against Covid-19 suddenly improves (perhaps a vaccine working very quickly?), Americans may come to expect the same in the fight against climate change.
There is much more at the link, of course some of you will hate it. And of course Sanders and Warren did not exactly dominate voter sentiment, and that was largely pre-Covid.
Totally false thoughts about the coronavirus (overheard on the street)
“Yes, Trump’s poor coronavirus response is inexcusable. But let’s get real people, the Dem candidates have been holding mass rallies and only today did Bernie and Biden cancel them. Are they so ahead of the curve?”
“Reductions in air pollution due to COVID-19 in China have probably saved more lives than have so far been lost to the virus.”
“Thank god for the automatic social distancing effects of NIMBY.”
“If you want to get ratioed, try suggesting that climate change will help all the more.”
“In part we should be happy to hear there are so many cases in Iran, because the country still seems to be holding together.”