The Price of Everything (33 page)

The poor are not enthusiastic about the prospect of an energy tax either. Americans in the top tenth of the income distribution emit 2.5 times as much carbon as people at the bottom. But families among the bottom tenth of the income pile spend more than a quarter of what they earn on energy—compared with only 3.6 percent for those at the top.

 

 

OPPOSITION TO EFFORTS
to avert climate change is arrayed along similar lines around the world. Poor countries in the tropics stand to suffer the most from warming. In Brazil, agribusiness accounts for one quarter of the economy. Agriculture accounts for 21 percent of India’s GDP, about seventeen times its share of the United States economy. By 2080, global warming is expected to reduce agricultural productivity across the developing world by 15 percent to 26 percent. By contrast, farmers working the vineyards of Germany’s Mosel valley might welcome climate change: a 1°C increase in temperature could increase their annual revenue by 30 percent, boosting the ripeness of their grapes. A 3°C rise would more than double the value of their land.

The heat also disrupts industrial activity and even political stability in poorer countries. Studying the relationship between temperature fluctuations and economic performance since 1950, researchers found that a 1°C increase in temperature reduced economic growth in poor countries by 1.1 percentage points but had no discernible effect on richer nations. But though developing nations stand most to gain from slowing the earth’s warming, they are the most resistant to accepting any new costs to effect change. They aspire to the same energy-intensive development strategies that the developed world used to get rich and have settled on an environmental strategy that consists of reminding the industrial world that climate change to date is its fault, so it has a moral obligation to fix it.

Rich countries face the flip side of this quandary. By the end of the century, more than 85 percent of the world’s population will live in the developing world. When presented with the bill to avert climate change, voters in rich countries see a plan to save people who will be born far in the future and halfway around the world. Developed nations can’t even bring themselves to push for aid for people alive in poor countries today. Despite commitments to raise their foreign aid budgets to at least 0.7 percent of their GDP, only Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have met the target. The United States and Japan, the two largest economies in the world, provide 0.2 percent and 0.18 percent of their GDP in development aid. Germany contributes 0.35 percent. What chance is there that they will agree to provide much more to help poor foreigners who haven’t been born yet and won’t be born for a while?

As the United States Congress debated endlessly over legislation to cap carbon emissions in the summer of 2009, Representative Joe Barton, the ranking Republican on the House Energy Committee, argued that “I’m concerned that we’re giving China a ticket to become the world’s greatest free rider, enjoying all of the benefits that developed countries enjoy without having to share any burden, and challenging American economic dominance in a way that hasn’t been done by anybody since before World War II.”

 

 

FOR ALL THE
various opposing interests, I believe the main reason for our cavalier approach to climate change is our inability to relate to pain in the future. Reducing carbon emissions requires making hard choices today. The projected costs of climate change, by contrast, are mostly meant to happen in a distant tomorrow. The absence of an imminent threat has allowed people to act as if warming were someone else’s problem.

Yet it is not entirely unreasonable that people would resist the proposition that combating climate change must be our paramount priority. It is difficult to estimate the environmental, social, and economic damages of warming. And slashing carbon emissions could be expensive, slowing economic growth and sucking money from things like providing education and investing in factories. How do we know this is the best way to address the problem? Helping poor countries industrialize and reduce their dependence on farming might provide their citizens a better future than trying to preempt future weather convulsions that could devastate their crops.

The calculation demanded of our generation is not about the value of greenery compared with having more stuff. It pits our needs for goods, services, and a working environment against the value we place on the needs of other people one hundred years from now.

In the 1970s, the environmental economist Talbot Page used a literary trick to alert us to the ethical conundrum brought about by our overuse of the environment. He suggested we put ourselves in the shoes of a young man growing up in a world about to come to an end due to the immoderate appetites of previous generations. “You might well call out to the ghosts of the first generation, demanding by what right it made its decision,” he counseled. “It would hardly be satisfying to hear the answer, ‘We took a vote of all those present and decided to follow our own time preferences.’ ”

Our own time preferences are not very nice on the future. In an influential study in the 1990s, people around the United States were asked about how they valued people in the future compared with those currently alive. Almost four out of ten said they would prefer to invest in a program that saved a hundred lives from pollution in the present to an alternative plan that would save four thousand lives twenty-five years down the road. Almost half thought saving one person in the present was worth more than saving seventy in a hundred years. Other studies have concluded our preference for the present isn’t quite as stark. In a more recent survey, only 28 percent of respondents said a death a hundred years from now wasn’t as bad as a death next year. Still, it is clear that people feel greater kinship with their contemporaries than with people of the future, who can come across as abstractions rather than people.

We act by these beliefs every day, ignoring the needs of our descendants. The old, who vote in large numbers, regularly get a better deal from the political system than the young, who do not vote. Government spending skews heavily in favor of the old. Social spending on the elderly amounted to $19,700 per person in 2000, according to one study; children got $6,380. And those who don’t expect to be alive very far into the future care less about what warming will do to it.

Only a quarter of Americans over the age of sixty-five believe global warming is a very serious problem, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. Among those aged eighteen to twenty-nine, almost half thought it was very serious. A poll in Europe also found that only one-third of those over sixty-five were very worried, compared with 40 percent of those aged twenty-five to forty-four, the prime childbearing age. Just over a fifth of the young were willing to pay a gas tax in order to curb carbon emissions, while only a tenth of the elderly were willing to do so.

 

 

THIS IS NOT
merely a conflict pitting altruism against self-regard. Even if we were designing our choices to best serve others, we would still be left in an ethical quandary. Partha Dasgupta, a Bangladeshiborn professor of economics at Cambridge University, crafted his own moral story to illustrate the democratic dilemma posed by climate change. Suppose, he suggested, that some voter were genuinely concerned about the long-term implications of climate change due to rising carbon emissions. She isn’t selfish—she knows that carbon emissions have massive social costs. She understands she can’t rely on her private interest to take a position on the matter. She must take into account the effect of her choices on others. But how to take future others into account?

For those deeply invested in the environmental movement, the answer to this dilemma is obvious. They couch arguments to save the environment in terms that appeal to the baby-seal lovers they assume live within us all. The environment, they suggest, is as inherently valuable as humanity. Nature is not to be conserved out of some estimate of its instrumental value to humankind. We should care for its intrinsic value, because it is the only nature there is. If we kill the last bear there will be bears no more. Earth First! puts it thus: “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth.” But it’s difficult to think this way when the debate is over allocating resources among competing virtuous endeavors.

Maybe we should abide by a rule that says we should leave the earth exactly as we got it so the next bunch can enjoy its bounty, as did we. No generation, of course, has behaved in such a way. Starting with the first sapiens who roamed the plains of Africa, humans have continuously altered their physical environment. By this rule, if we were given the choice of spending $1 billion to save the environment or to develop a vaccine that would benefit all future generations, we would have to choose the former.

If instead we tweak the mandate and demand that we bequeath at least as much “social capital” as we got—mixing in environmental assets with other good things like hospitals, roads, and educated people—we’re back at square one. How should we measure the value of the road against the damages caused by the exhaust from the cars and trucks traveling on it? Some things, like the extinction of the dodo, are going to be very difficult to value.

We might be moved to protect the future out of altruism. But if that is the case, should the urge to help unborn people two hundred years from now take precedence over the philanthropic inclinations we feel to help the unfortunate of the present generation? There are lots of priorities to choose from, including 33 million people living with HIV. In sub-Saharan Africa 9 mothers die for every 1,000 live births and 157 out of every 1,000 kids die before reaching the age of five. In Southern Asia, 46 percent of children under five are underweight and nearly a third of the working population earns less than one dollar a day.

John Rawls, perhaps the most influential American moral and political philosopher since World War II, argued that societies should strive to maximize the well-being of the least fortunate among them. No society that I know of has ever met this goal. But most democratic governments today redistribute income in some way, through taxes and spending programs, from the rich to the poor.

The recommendations to combat climate change in the
Stern Review
stand uncomfortably alongside this principle of social justice. If income per person were to grow by 1 percent a year over the next two centuries, less than half the pace of growth of the last century, people in the year 2200 would be 6.3 times as rich as they are today. Why should the poorer people of the present scrimp and save in order to protect the environment for their richer descendants, who could afford more environmental investments than we can?

Even if we were to decide that we should invest present resources to save future people from the perils of a warmer planet, another crucial question remains: how much?

The bill could be fairly high. The
Stern Review
, published in 2006, put the price tag on the worldwide effort to combat climate change at about 1 percent of the entire globe’s economic output. That amounts to about $600 billion a year.

With this investment, Stern suggested, we could stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at somewhere in the upper end of the range of 450 and 550 parts per million, compared with 430 ppm today, conserving energy and switching into more expensive nonfossil fuels. He said this should keep global temperatures from rising more than 2.5°C. It wouldn’t prevent all environmental damages, of course. Stern estimated that allowing 550 ppm of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would cause losses amounting to about 1.1 percent of the world’s economic product. That’s the equivalent of losing Indonesia or Turkey.

And there is a fair chance that the bill to avoid catastrophic warming is even higher. Vulnerable countries like the Maldives, a small archipelago of low-lying islands that rise only a few feet above sea level, are suggesting even a lower cap on carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. A couple of years after his initial report, Stern suggested that concentrations of greenhouse gases should best be kept below 500 ppm, an endeavor that would cost 2 percent of the world’s gross domestic product.

That is a lot to spend. Stern’s conclusion that the investment is worthwhile is based on a proposition that is either obvious or radically controversial about the value of human life. Stern assumes that the welfare of a person hundreds of years from now is worth the same as the welfare of a person alive today. Not everybody agrees.

Stern allows two modest adjustments to this equality. He acknowledges that the value of money to people is inversely proportional to how much they have. An extra dollar is worth less to an investment banker in New York than to a subsistence farmer in Michoacán. What’s more, there is a minuscule chance that a meteorite will strike a devastating blow to the earth at some point in the future and kill everyone on it. In this case the welfare of humans beyond that point in time would fall to zero. We would have no justification to spend anything to enhance their welfare because by then humanity would be extinct. Those tweaks aside, the bedrock concept of the equal value of human welfare across time leads Stern to a straightforward rule of thumb: devoting a given share of the current generation’s income to forestall global warming is justified if it produces a benefit amounting to at least the same share of that future generation’s income no matter how many hundreds of years down the line.