Blog Action Day: Is The CBO Trying To Kill Humanity?
Blog Action Day: Is The CBO Trying To Kill Humanity?
Today is Blog Action Day, with thousands of blogs discussing global warming.
Doug Elmendorf, CBO
Yesterday, Doug Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, testified before the Senate energy committee about the “comparatively modest” cost of a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon pollution. The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal blared “Congressional Budget Chief Says Climate Bill Would Cost Jobs” and “Cap-and-Trade Would Slow Economy, CBO Chief Says.” Conservatives leapt on the reports to cheer the “end” of “cap-and-tax.”
Of course, Elmendorf’s testimony is nothing new. Elmendorf warned that jobs in the fossil fuel industry would be lost, and that overall GDP growth would be slowed by less than one percent by 2020. No one is arguing that there won’t be a shift from pollution-based industries to clean-energy industries. But doing so will create millions more jobs than are lost, as energy companies invest in American workers instead of foreign oil and mountaintop removal. The effect on GDP is within the margin of error of future estimates of growth. Even pessimistic studies by the National Association of Manufacturers find that U.S. GDP will increase by $9 trillion with limits on carbon pollution.
What upset me, however, was the portion of Elmendorf’s testimony that was not reported. Although he recognized that his estimates do not take into account the economic impacts of climate change, he testified that the changes that scientists call “catastrophic” would be barely noticeable in the U.S. economy:
Most of the economy involves activities that are not likely to be directly affected by changes in climate. Moreover, researchers generally expect the growth in the U.S. economy over the coming century to be concentrated in sectors — such as information technology and medical care — that are relatively insulated from climate effects. Damages are therefore likely to be a smaller share of the future economy than they would be if they occurred today. As a consequence, a relatively pessimistic estimate for the loss in projected real gross domestic product is about 3 percent for warming of about 7° Fahrenheit (F) by 2100. [Dale W. Jorgenson et al., 2004]
Elmendorf goes on to cite Nordhaus & Boyer (2000) to claim “the risk of catastrophic outcomes associated with about 11°F of warming by 2100″ gives a projected “loss equivalent to about 5 percent of U.S. output and, because of substantially larger losses in a number of other countries, a loss of about 10 percent of global output.” (By way of comparison, US GDP collapsed by nearly 50 percent during the Great Depression.)
This is frighteningly nonsensical. The CBO is arguing that the collapse of the national electricity grid, water supply, food system, and physical infrastructure from heat waves, desertification, disease outbreaks, wildfires, floods, and catastrophic storms would barely affect the national economy. In fact, seven to 11° F (4 to 6°C) warming would lead to unimaginable changes in our planet by 2100:
– One to three billion people around the world exposed to “increased water stress” (aka drought)
– More than 40 percent of the world’s species go extinct
– Widespread coral reef mortality
– Terrestrial biosphere becomes a net carbon source
– Productivity of cereal grains decreases in low, mid, and high latitudes
– Sea level rise of 0.6 – 1.3 meters (2 to 4 feet)
– About 35 percent of global coastal wetlands are lost
– Twenty percent of world’s population exposed to increased floods
– About 20 percent of arable land disappears (same amount becomes arable in previously frozen north)
– Arctic warms by 27°F
The effects in the United States would be similarly disastrous:
— heat waves of greater than 90° six months of the year in Texas, Florida, Arizona, southern California
– 5-month heat waves in California interior, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina
– 4-month heat waves in Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, North Carolina
– 4-month heat waves greater than 100° in Texas, Arizona, southern California
– 3-month heat waves greater than 100° in Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, California interior
– 2 to 3-month heat waves everywhere in US except New England, northern Great Lakes, and the mountains, Pacific NW coast
– 1 to 2 months of greater than 100° everywhere except New York-New England, northern Great Lakes, mountains, Pacific NW coast
– 40 percent less precipitation in the Southwest
– Dust Bowl returns to Midwest
– Smog levels throughout summer above 10 ppb all across country
– Pollen count doubles again to four times pre-industrial levels
– Doubling of large wildfires in the West, as aspen and lodgepole pine disappear completely
– Tripling of coastal damage from storms
– Inundation of 10,000 square miles of U.S. land, including 25 to 80 percent of coastal wetlands
Texas and California, our top agricultural states, are already suffering from unprecedented heat and drought. Under 7 to 11°F warming, they would no longer be able to support agriculture. Corn crops start failing at above 90 degree weather, and soybean fails above 100 degrees. There would be no snow, maple, or cranberry industries in New England. The economists’ argument is that since the U.S. agriculture industry only represents about three percent of GDP, its total devastation would be hardly noticeable.
The above figures are actually misleading, because these are just the effects estimated under 4°C warming, not the even more unimaginable 6°C. Scientists are now warning that our current emissions levels may lead to 4°C warming by the 2070s.
It should also be noted that this kind of catastrophic warming would guarantee the long-term collapse of the Greenland and west Antarctica ice sheets, leading to sea level rise of over 12 meters (39 feet) in about 300 to 1000 years. But hey, I guess economists would argue that would spur growth in the floating-city industries.
7 Responses to “Blog Action Day: Is The CBO Trying To Kill Humanity?”
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Where is the CBO’s calculation for where the replacement for the ~200 eQuivSlaves* each of us is used to having are gonna come from once fossil carbon has a price; once peak oil dynamics kick in; once this country, whose fiat currency has been “golden” due to OPEC denominated its oil sales in the US dollar, has that crutch snatched and/or whittled away?
* human energy equivalent of the fossil carbon benefit accrued to US citizens due to the “oil economy”—calculated at 500 hrs per gallon of gasoline.
And if one thinks US citizens will adjust and learn to get by with the loss of even just one to two percent of them (such as the CBO’s prediction of what will happen to the GDP by 2020 implies—and, BTW, this is before the real costs of ACES/CEJAP kick in), such thinking is sorely misguided . . . unless you are employed inside the beltway where substance-less hope and meaningless change are the religion of the day.
Won’t us self-absorbed boomers, and boomer-wannabes, either whine to “mommy” that things are unfair and/or start serious social mayhem first—and before the worst of the climate-driven mayhem kicks in?
. . . unless it has.
I am watching the first snowfall accumulate outside my window. This is happening before we have had our first killing frost. While October snow storms have happened once or twice before in my life, I don’t remember one coming before a killing frost. And October 15th is about a month later than what I could count on for that as a kid.
The low that is associated with this frozen precipitation is parked right where the Gulf Stream should be. It is forecasted to basically sit there for the next few days and then move east rather than being pushed north-east as the Gulf Stream usually does/used to do. The jet stream is in a strong “summer” pattern now. That too is not “normal.”
Welcome to the new “normal” and the impacts of of what, when some of the papers that Elmendorf cites were written assumed wouldn’t happen for 100 years, is now likely to happen in 10.
October 15th, 2009 at 8:32 pmYipes! What these effects really suggest is that there will be almost no place to hide. Above and beyond the GDP numbers, one needs to tally up the actual insurance and other losses due to things like farms turning to dust, resorts permanently flooded, and increased mortality. What isn’t even mentioned or perhaps considered is the cost of civil unrest that may well arise when people feel trapped in overheating cities with the cost of food rising and the word gets out that we, as a society, could have done something about this but chose not to for short term profit. Global warming summer might turn out to rival nuclear winter.
October 15th, 2009 at 10:03 pmElmendorf has been a wild card in the equation from day one, he is one who often cites facts and figures only to be rebutted after the dust of his hysterics settles to a clearer denouement.
October 16th, 2009 at 1:04 amShould not have the position, to partisan, to Hoover Institutionesque.
Structurequity — To be fair, this isn’t really Elmendorf’s fault — it’s the entire profession of economics. Elmendorf is just summarizing from the “best” of economic literature, which is terribly, terribly flawed.
October 16th, 2009 at 9:21 amonly 3% loss in output when the temperature increases by 7 F degrees? How do they get that?
October 16th, 2009 at 10:10 pmHeat waves have many effects economists don’t think about. People don’t go out to restaurants when the temperature goes above 95. Air conditioners break down. People can’t work in extreme heat. That’s too small a number.
As pointed out above, the price of oil goes up, as it becomes scarce. Economists are supposed to know the law of supply and demand. At least some projections of possible price increases should be made. The price of oil was $20 a barrel 10 years ago; it has more than doubled in this decade already (not considering the speculation bubble.)
Somebody should rework this study.
Structurequity and Brad,
At another CAP related blog, CP, the more rosy aspects of Elmendorf’s CBO’s assessments (and McKinsey’s) are trumpeted while comments are moderated there that point out the stated, less-than-the-whole-story, assumptions used to reach such assessments, which, as zamia observes, need reworking. We are, quoting Dorothy in the “Wizard of OZ,” no longer in Kansas and assumptions need to change. It is my observation that privileged humanity is emotionally challenged to face the “facts” concerning just where we are in the AGW dynamics. My aforementioned “religious” sensibilities—ironically—of the privileged secular left, are, systemically, the consequence of a “moral” meme that is captive to a non-rational dynamic. That dynamic (motivated reasoning) is, itself, what made the substance-less hope and meaningless-change that enabled the current administration to win the office of the Presidency as effective as it was. Therefore, and relative to a real reworking of an economic analysis, who, in the mindset of our for-profit news media and blue/red divided society is qualified to rationally do so?
Ironically, an iteration of this motivated reasoning dynamic was given air time on NPR this AM when both interviewer and interviewee of the “Superfreakonomics” segment of “Weekend Edition Saturday” talked about “simple” and “cheap,” relative to the logic of embracing geo-engineering, as though what is both simple and cheap was a shared sensibility; was fact. However, thanks to the dynamics of motivated reasoning—and systemically—such apparently shared perceptions have a very high probability of being little more than the heightened feeling that constitute the core trigger to the trap of engaging in motivated reasoning.
Consider: exorbitant quantities of resources have been expended to create, protect, and expand US hegemony. That hegemony is systemically dependent on the “success” of global capitalism. Such capitalism is, in turn, enabled, or financed via a now flash frozen. but collapsed consumer credit bubble. This economic bubble was inflated over the past century—at least in the US (it got an earlier start in Europe)—through a private central banking system engaged in increasingly unregulated fractional reserve banking dynamic. This dynamic is institutionalized through a fiat currency system (which, BTW, in the case of the US, is unconstitutional—see Article 1, Section 8 (and coining money and establishing its value). Such interrelated dynamics have been, and are, neither simple nor cheap.
Denial withstanding, and systemically, the dynamics of global capitalism have been environmentally, socially and economically unjust. In an ironic iteration of the critique encompassed in the framework of “freakonomics,” such has been the unintended consequences of the embracing of an unconstitutional currency and a publicly guaranteed (but increasingly unregulated) private fractional reserve banking system; the stari decisis, starting in 1886, related to affording 1st Amendment rights to corporations under the 14th Amendment; the implementation of Presidential signing statements that effect the unconstitutional Unitary Executive theory; and the violation of the Establishment Clause, the 1st Amendment, as global capitalism has functionally become the established religion of the Republic. And relative to this last Constitutional issue, one obscured a bit by the dominate memes’ ethics and our current social lexicon, the fact of it has been most recently been demonstrated by the bailout, the accounting rule changes for banks, the proliferation of new “discount windows” at the Fed, and an extra-legal inclusion of the otherwise insolvent—and formerly uninsured—institutions within the financial sector under the protection of the public guarantees of the FDIC. BTW, the FDIC, now, all but insolvent is pre-charging its fees through 2012 to make it through 2009 without going hat-in-hand, to Congress for needed revenues. Such behaviors are so extra-ordinary, that they constitute acts that are comparable to those of the more traditionally understood religious behaviors; of a “blind faith“ relative to a ”religious“ trust held in a failed economic model.
From my analysis (and I would like to think, a rational one), all that seems observably “simple” and “cheap” about the current systemic dynamic is the sense of morality that has allowed it to unfold as it has; as it is. Does not the morality, as implied by both the tone of voice and phrasing used in the NPR interview this morning, function so as to evoke the feelings that this complex, unjust, and costly approach to social intercourse feels “simple” and “cheap,” when, in fact, it is very much, neither?
October 17th, 2009 at 3:03 pmI totally agree with Zamia.
October 20th, 2009 at 5:36 pmThis study has to be reworked as a solution needs to be taken in regards to climate. After reading this post, it would be better to have that decision made sooner rather than later.