Category Archives: Climate

Grow Or Collapse: Stasis Is Not a Long-Term Option

18 Wednesday Jan 2023

Posted by in Climate, Environment, Growth

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Growth is a human imperative and a good thing in every sense. We’ve long heard from naysayers, however, that growth will exhaust our finite resources, ending in starvation and the collapse of human civilization. They say, furthermore, that the end is nigh! It’s an old refrain. Thomas Malthus lent it credibility over 200 years ago (perhaps unintentionally), and we can pick on poor Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” thesis as a more modern starting point for this kind of hysteria. Lewis M. Andrews puts Ehrlich’s predictions in context:

“A year after the book’s publication, Ehrlich went on to say that this ‘utter breakdown’ in Earth’s capacity to support its bulging population was just fifteen years away. … For those of us still alive today, it is clear that nothing even approaching what Ehrlich predicted ever happened. Indeed, in the fifty-four years since his dire prophesy, those suffering from starvation have gone from one in four people on the planet to just one in ten, even as the world’s population has doubled.”

False Limits

The “limits” argument comes from the environmental Left, but it creates for them an uncomfortable tradeoff between limiting growth and the redistribution of a fixed (they hope) or shrinking (more likely) pie. That’s treacherous ground on which to build popular support. It’s also foolish to stake a long-term political agenda on baldly exaggerated claims (and see here) about the climate and resource constraints. Ultimately, people will recognize those ominous forecasts as manipulative propaganda.

Last year, an academic paper argued that growing civilizations must eventually reach a point of “asymptotic burnout” due to resource constraints, and must undergo a “homeostatic awakening”: no growth. The authors rely on a “superlinear scaling” argument based on cross-sectional data on cities, and they offer their “burnout” hypothesis as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox: the puzzling quiet we observe in the universe while we otherwise expect it to be teeming with life… civilizations reach their “awakenings” before finding ways to communicate with, or even detect, their distant neighbors. I addressed this point and it’s weaknesses last year, but here I mention it only to demonstrate that the “limits to growth” argument lives on in new incarnations.

Growth-limiting arguments are tenuous on at least three fundamental grounds: 1) failure to consider the ability of markets to respond to scarcity; 2) underestimating the potential of human ingenuity not only to adapt to challenges, but to invent new solutions, exploit new resources, and use existing resources more efficiently; and 3) homeostasis is impossible because zero growth cannot be achieved without destructive coercion, suspension of cooperative market mechanisms, and losses from non-market (i.e., political and non-political) competition for the fixed levels of societal wealth and production.

The zero-growth world is one that lacks opportunities and rewards for honest creation of value, whether through invention or simple, hard work. That value is determined through the interaction of buyers and sellers in markets, the most effective form of voluntary cooperation and social organization ever devised by mankind. Those preferring to take spoils through the political sphere, or who otherwise compete on the basis of force, either have little value to offer or simply lack the mindset to create value to exchange with others at arms length.

Zero-Growth Mentality

As Robert Colvile writes in a post called “The Morality of Growth”:

“A society without growth is not just politically far more fragile. It is hugely damaging to people’s lives – and in particular to the young, who will never get to benefit from the kind of compounding, increasing prosperity their parents enjoyed.”

Expanding on this theme is commenter Slocum at the Marginal Revolution site, where Colvile’s essay was linked:

“Humans behave poorly when they perceive that the pie is fixed or shrinking, and one of the main drivers for behaving poorly is feelings of envy coming to the forefront. The way we encourage people not to feel envy (and to act badly) is not to try to change human nature, or ‘nudge’ them, but rather to maintain a state of steady improvement so that they (naturally) don’t feel envious, jealous, tribal, xenophobic etc. Don’t create zero-sum economies and you won’t bring out the zero-sum thinking and all the ills that go with it.”

And again, this dynamic leads not to zero growth (if that’s desired), but to decay. Given the political instability to which negative growth can lead, collapse is a realistic possibility.

I liked Colville’s essay, but it probably should have been titled “The Immorality of Non-Growth”. It covers several contemporary obstacles to growth, including the rise of “stakeholder capitalism”, the growth of government at the expense of the private sector, strangling regulation, tax disincentives, NIMBYism, and the ease with which politicians engage in populist demagoguery in establishing policy. All those points have merit. But if his ultimate purpose was to shed light on the virtues of growth, it seems almost as if he lost his focus in examining only the flip side of the coin. I came away feeling like he didn’t expend much effort on the moral virtues of growth as he intended, though I found this nugget well said:

“It is striking that the fastest-growing societies also tend to be by far the most optimistic about their futures – because they can visibly see their lives getting better.”

Compound Growth

A far better discourse on growth’s virtues is offered by Veronique de Rugy in “The Greatness of Growth”. It should be obvious that growth is a potent tonic, but its range as a curative receives strangely little emphasis in popular discussion. First, de Rugy provides a simple illustration of the power of long-term growth, compound growth, in raising average living standards:

This is just a mechanical exercise, but it conveys the power of growth. At 2% real growth, real GDP per capital would double in 35 years and quadruple in 70 years. At 4% growth, real GDP would double in 18 years… less than a generation! It would quadruple in 35 years. If you’re just now starting a career, imagine nearing retirement at a standard of living four times as lavish as today’s senior employees (who make a lot more than you do now). We’ll talk a little more about how such growth rates might be achieved, but first, a little more on what growth can achieve.

The Rewards of Growth

Want to relieve poverty? There is no better and more permanent solution than economic growth. Here are some illustrations of this phenomenon:

Want to rein-in the federal budget deficit? Growth reduces the burden of the existing debt and shrinks fiscal deficits, though it might interfere with what little discipline spendthrift politicians currently face. We’ll have to find other fixes for that problem, but at least growth can insulate us from their profligacy.

And who can argue with the following?

“All the stuff an advocate anywhere on the political spectrum claims to value—good health, clean environment, safety, families and quality of life—depends on higher growth. …

There are other well-documented material consequences of modern economic growth, such as lower homicide rates, better health outcomes (babies born in the U.S. today are expected to live into their upper 70s, not their upper 30s as in 1860), increased leisure, more and better clothing and shelter, less food insecurity and so on.”

De Rugy argues convincingly that growth might well entail a greater boost in living standards for lower ranges of the socioeconomic spectrum than for the well-to-do. That would benefit not just those impoverished due to a lack of skills, but also those early in their careers as well as seniors attempting to earn extra income. For those with a legitimate need of a permanent safety net, growth allows society to be much more generous.

What de Rugy doesn’t mention is how growth can facilitate greater saving. In a truly virtuous cycle, saving is transformed into productivity-enhancing additions to the stock of capital. And not just physical capital, but human capital through investment in education as well. In addition, growth makes possible additional research and development, facilitating the kind of technical innovation that can sustain growth.

Getting Out of the Way of Growth

Later in de Rugy’s piece, she evaluates various ways to stimulate growth, including deregulation, wage and price flexibility, eliminating subsidies, less emphasis on redistribution, and simplifying the tax code. All these features of public policy are stultifying and involve dead-weight losses to society. That’s not to deny the benefits of adequate state capacity for providing true public goods and a legal and judicial system to protect individual rights. The issue of state capacity is a major impediment to growth in the less developed world, whereas countries in the developed world tend to have an excess of state “capacity”, which often runs amok!

In the U.S., our regulatory state imposes huge compliance costs on the private sector and effectively prohibits or destroys incentives for a great deal of productive (and harmless) activity. Interference with market pricing stunts growth by diverting resources from their most valued uses. Instead, it directs them toward uses that are favored by political elites and cronies. Subsidies do the same by distorting tradeoffs at a direct cost to taxpayers. Our system of income taxes is rife with behavioral distortions and compliance costs, bleeding otherwise productive gains into the coffers of accountants, tax attorneys, and bureaucrats. Finally, redistribution often entails the creation of disincentives, fostering a waste of human potential and a pathology of dependence.

Growth and Morality

Given the unequivocally positive consequences of growth to humanity, could the moral case for growth be any clearer? De Rugy quotes Benjamin Friedman’s “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth”:

“Growth is valuable not only for our material improvement but for how it affects our social attitudes and our political institutions—in other words, our society’s moral character, in the term favored by the Enlightenment thinkers from whom so many of our views on openness, tolerance and democracy have sprung.”

De Rugy also paraphrases Tyler Cowen’s position on growth from his book “Stubborn Attachments”:

“… economic growth, properly understood, should be an essential element of any ethical system that purports to care about universal human well-being. In other words, the benefits are so varied and important that nearly everyone should have a pro-growth program at or near the top of their agenda.”

Conclusion

Agitation for “degrowth” is often made in good faith by truly frightened people. Better education would help them, but our educational establishment has been corrupted by the same ignorant narrative. When it comes to rulers, the fearful are no less tyrannical than power-hungry authoritarians. In fact, fear can be instrumental in enabling that kind of transformation in the personalities of activists. A basic failing is their inability to recognize the many ways in which growth improves well-being, including the societal wealth to enable adaptation to changing conditions and the investment necessary to enhance our range of technological solutions for mitigating existential risks. Not least, however, is the failure of the zero-growth movement to understand the cruelty their position condones in exchange for their highly speculative assurances that we’ll all be better off if we just do as they say. A terrible downside will be unavoidable if and when growth is outlawed.

Climate Alarmism and Junk Science

02 Thursday Dec 2021

Posted by in Climate, Research Bias, Uncategorized

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The weak methodology and accuracy of climate models is the subject of an entertaining Norman Rogers post. I want to share just a few passages along with a couple of qualifiers.

Rogers quotes Kevin Trenberth, former Head of Climate Analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, with apparent approval. Oddly, Rogers does not explain that Trenberth is a strong proponent of the carbon-forcing models used by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He should have made that clear, but Trenberth actually did say the following:

“‘[None of the] models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate [of the Earth].’“

I’ll explain the context of this comment below, but it constitutes a telling admission of the poor foundations on which climate alarmism rests. The various models used by the IPCCc are all a little different and they are calibrated differently. I’ve noted elsewhere that their projections are consistently biased toward severe over-predictions of temperature trends. Rogers goes on from there:

“The models can’t properly model the Earth’s climate, but we are supposed to believe that, if carbon dioxide has a certain effect on the imaginary Earths of the many models it will have the same effect on the real earth.”

But how on earth can a modeler accept the poor track record of these models? It’s not as if the bias is difficult to detect! On this question, Rogers says:

“The climate models are an exemplary representation of confirmation bias, the psychological tendency to suspend one’s critical facilities in favor of welcoming what one expects or desires. Climate scientists can manipulate numerous adjustable parameters in the models that can be changed to tune a model to give a ‘good’ result.“

And why are calamitous projections desirable from the perspective of climate modelers? Follow the money and the status rewards of reinforcing the groupthink:

“Once money and status started flowing into climate science because of the disaster its denizens were predicting, there was no going back. Imagine that a climate scientist discovers gigantic flaws in the models and the associated science. Do not imagine that his discovery would be treated respectfully and evaluated on its merits. That would open the door to reversing everything that has been so wonderful for climate scientists. Who would continue to throw billions of dollars a year at climate scientists if there were no disasters to be prevented? “

Indeed, it has been a gravy train. Today, it is reinforced by green-preening politicians, the many billions of dollars committed by investors seeking a continuing flow of public subsidies for renewables, tempting opportunities for international redistribution (and graft), and a mainstream media addicted to peddling scare stories. The parties involved all rely on, and profit by, alarmist research findings.

Rogers’ use of the Trenberth quote above might suggest that Trenberth is a critic of the climate models used by the IPCC. However, the statement was in-line with Trenberth’s long-standing insistence that the IPCC models are exclusively for constructing “what-if” scenarios, not actual forecasting. Perhaps his meaning also reflected his admission that climate models are “low resolution” relative to weather forecasting models. Or maybe he was referencing longer-term outcomes that are scenario-dependent. Nevertheless, the quote is revealing to the extent that one would hope these models are well-calibrated to initial conditions. That is seldom the case, however.

As a modeler, I must comment on a point made by Rogers about the use of ensembles of models. That essentially means averaging the predictions of multiple models that differ in structure. Rogers denigrates the approach, and while it is agnostic with respect to theories of the underlying process generating the data, it certainly has its uses in forecasting. Averaging the predictions of two different models with statistically independent and unbiased predictions will generally produce more accurate forecasts than the individual models. Rogers may or may not be aware of this, but he has my sympathies in this case because the IPCC is averaging across a large number of models that are clearly biased in the same direction! Rogers adds this interesting tidbit on the IPCC’s use of model ensembles:

“There is a political reason for using ensembles. In order to receive the benefits flowing from predicting a climate catastrophe, climate science must present a unified front. Dissenters have to be canceled and suppressed. If the IPCC were to select the best model, dozens of other modeling groups would be left out. They would, no doubt, form a dissenting group questioning the authority of those that gave the crown to one particular model.”

Rogers discusses one more aspect of the underpinnings of climate models, one that I’ve covered several times on this blog. That is the extent to which historical climate data is either completely lacking, plagued by discontinuities or coverage, or distorted by imperfections in measurement. The data used to calibrate climate models has been manipulated, adjusted, infilled, and estimated over lengthy periods by various parties to produce “official” and unofficial temperature series. While these efforts might seem valiant as exercises in understanding the past, they are fraught with uncertainty. Rogers provides a link to the realclimatescience blog, which details many of the data shortcomings as well as shenanigans perpetrated by researchers and agencies who have massaged, imputed, or outright created these historical data sets out of whole cloth. Rogers aptly notes:

“The purported climate catastrophe ahead is 100% junk science. If the unlikely climate catastrophe actually happens, it will be coincidental that it was predicted by climate scientists. Most of the supporting evidence is fabricated.”

Bill Gates, Wayward Climate Nerd

17 Wednesday Nov 2021

Posted by in Climate, Energy

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Bill Gates’ considerable philanthropic efforts through the Gates Foundation are well known. Much of the foundation’s activity has focused on disease control and nutrition around the globe. Education reform has also been a priority. Many of these projects are laudable, though I’m repulsed by a few (see here and here). During the coronavirus pandemic, Gates has spoken approvingly of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (lockdown measures), which are both coercive and ineffective (and see here). He has earned the enmity of anti-vaxers, of course, though I’m not anti-vax as long as the jabs are voluntary. The Gates Foundation funded the World Health Organization’s effort to provide guidance on digital vaccine passports, which is a de facto endorsement of discrimination based on vaccination status. His priorities for addressing climate change also raise some troubling issues, a few of which I address below.

Squeezing Policy from a Definition

Gates put a special Malthusian twist on a TED Talk he did back in 2010 using an equation for carbon dioxide emissions, which he’s reprised over the years. It gained a lot of notice in 2016 when a few sticklers noticed that his claim to have “discovered” the equation was false. The equation is:

CO2 = P x S x E x C,

where P = People, S = Services per person, E = Energy per service, and C = CO2 per energy unit.

This equation first appeared as the so-called Kaya Identity in a scientific review in 2002. Such an equation can be helpful in organizing one’s thoughts, but it has no operational implications in and of itself. At one level it is superficial: we could write a similar identity for almost anything, like the quantity of alcohol consumed in a year, which must equal the population times the ounces of alcohol per drink times the number of drinks per person. At a deeper level, it can be tempting to build theories around such equations, and there is no question that any theory about CO2 must at least preserve the identity.

There’s an obvious temptation to treat an equation like this as something that can be manipulated by policy, despite the possibility of behavioral links across components that might lead to unintended consequences. This is where Gates gets into trouble.

Reality Checks

As David Solway writes, Gates’ jumped to the conclusion that population drives carbon emissions, reinforcing a likely perspective that the human population is unsustainable. His benevolent solution? A healthier population won’t breed as fast, so he prescribes more vaccinations (voluntary?) and improved health care. For good measure, he added a third prong: better “reproductive health services”. Let’s see… what share of the 0.9 -1.4 billion reduction in world population Gates prescribed in 2016 would have come from terminated pregnancies?

In fact, healthier people might or might not want more children, but lower child mortality in the developing world would reduce certain economic incentives for high fertility. Another reliable association is between income and child bearing: an increase in “services per person” is likely to lead to smaller families, but that wasn’t given any emphasis by Gates. Income growth is simply not part of the narrative! Yet income growth does something else: it allows us to more easily afford the research and investments required for advanced technologies, including cleaner energy. These things take time, however.

Solway points to other weaknesses in Gates’ interpretation of the Kaya Identity. For example, efforts to slow population growth are not reliably associated with “services per person”, fuel efficiency, or carbon efficiency. In other words, carbon emissions may be powerfully influenced by factors other than population. China is a case in point.

Centralized industrial and social planning is generally ill-suited to advancing human well being. It’s especially suspect if the sole objective is to reduce carbon emissions. But Gates knows that lowering emissions without a corresponding drop in real income requires continuing technological advances and/or more efficient decisions about which technologies to deploy. He is a big advocate of developing cheap hydrogen power, which is far from a reality. He is also excited about carbon capture technologies, which are still in their infancy.

Renewables like wind and solar power play a large part in Gates’ vision. Those technologies cannot deliver a reliable flow of power, however, without either adequate backup capacity or a dramatic advance in battery technology. Gates over-promotes wind and solar, but I give him credit for acknowledging their intermittency. He attempts to come to grips with it by advocating nuclear backup, but it’s just not clear that he has integrated the incremental cost of the necessary backup capacity with other direct costs of these renewables… not to mention the considerable environmental costs imposed by wind and solar (see the “back-to-nature” photo at the top for a cogent illustration). Power storage at scale is still a long way off, and its cost will be significant as well.

We could deploy existing energy technologies to greater advantage with respect to carbon efficiency. We’ve already reduced CO2 emissions in the U.S. by substituting natural gas for less carbon-efficient fuels, but the Biden Administration would rather discourage its use. Gates deserves credit for recognizing the huge role that nuclear energy can play in providing zero-carbon power. Despite that, he still can’t quite bring himself to admit the boneheadedness of heavy reliance on intermittent renewables.

Bill’s “Green Premium”

Gates seems to have deemphasized the Kaya Identity more recently. Instead, his focus has shifted to the so-called “green premium”, or the incremental cost of using zero-carbon technology relative to a traditional source. Needless to say, the premium is large for truly zero-carbon sources, but Gates emphasizes the importance of using the green premium to guide development even in the here and now.

That’s fine, but it’s not clear that he gives adequate consideration to cases in which emissions, while not eliminated, can be reduced at a negative incremental cost via appropriate substitution. That describes the transition to natural gas from other fuels. This is something that markets can do without the assistance of ham-handed interventionists. Gates prefers nuclear power and says natural gas is “not a real bridge technology” to a zero carbon future. That’s short-sighted and reflects an absolutist mindset that ignores both the economic and political environment. The thinking is that if it’s not zero emissions, it’s not worth doing.

Gates emphasizes the need to sharply reduce the range of green premia on various technologies to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. But the goal of net-zero emissions 2050 is based on the highly unlikely proposition that global catastrophe awaits failing net-zero. In fact, the predicted consequences of doing nothing are based on drastic and outdated carbon growth scenarios and rudimentary carbon-forcing models that have proven to be severely biased to the upside in terms of predicting global temperature trends.

The idea that 2050 is some kind of “deadline” is a wholly arbitrary determination. Furthermore, the absolutism with which such goals are stated belies a failure to properly assess the true costs and benefits of carbon-based energy. If we so much as accept the notion that fossil fuels have external costs, we are then expected to accept that zero carbon emissions is optimal. This is not “science”; it is doctrine propped-up by bizarre and false scare stories. It involves massive efforts to manipulate opinion and coerce behavior based upon shoddy forecasts produced by committee. Even carbon capture technology is considered “problematic” because it implies that someone, somewhere, will use a process that emits CO2. That’s a ridiculous bogeyman, of course, and even Gates supports development of carbon capture.

Conclusion

I’ve never felt any real antipathy for Bill Gates as a person. He built a fortune, and I used his company’s software for most of my career. In some ways I still prefer it to macOS. I believe Gates is sincere in his efforts to help humanity even if his efforts are misdirected. He seems to reside on the less crazy end of the spectrum of climate alarmists. He’s putting a great deal of his private resources toward development of technologies that, if successful, might actually lead to less coercion by those attempting to transform private energy decisions. Nevertheless, there is menace in some of the solutions to which Gates clings. They require concerted action on the part of central authorities that would commandeer private resources and abrogate liberty. His assertion that the world is over-populated is both dubious and dangerous. You can offer free health care, but a conviction that the population must be thinned can lead to far more radical and monstrous initiatives.

The “green premium” promoted by Gates is an indirect measure of how far we must go to achieve parity in the pricing of carbon and non-carbon energy sources, as if parity should be an objective of public policy. That proposition is based on bad economics, fraudulent analyses of trends in carbon concentrations and climate trends, and a purposely incomplete menu of technological alternatives. Yes, the green premium highlights various technological challenges, but it is also a direct measure of how much intervention via taxes or subsidies are necessary to achieve parity. Is that a temptation to policymakers? Or does it represent a daunting political barrier? It’s pretty clear that the “median voter” does not view climate change as the only priority.