Richard Epstein on Climate Change
2017-08-13 · Guest: Richard Epstein (Professor of Law at NYU) · 52:03
Science and Politics of Climate Change
Bob Zadek and Professor Richard Epstein discuss the complexities of climate change, distinguishing between scientific data and political rhetoric. They critique the Paris Climate Accord as a wealth transfer mechanism and explore the benefits of carbon dioxide, such as global greening, while advocating for technological progress over alarmist policy.
Topics: Climate Change, Global Warming, Paris Climate Accord, Carbon Dioxide, Environmental Policy, Political Polarization, Scientific Method, Wealth Transfer, Nuclear Power
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Richard Epstein: Professor of Law at NYU, Hoover Institution
- Caller (Nick): Life Scientist
- Caller (Jacob): Listener
The Science and Stability of Climate [00:29]
Bob Zadek: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. The show of ideas, not attitude. No siree, never attitude, always ideas. Thanks so much for listening. Join my conversation at any time at 424-BOB-SHOW.
This morning’s topic is tough stuff. We are going to discuss climate change. The strange thing about this topic is there is a worldwide political debate, worldwide political conversation on matters of science. How did we get to a point where the world is openly debating science? Science is not the type of topic that should be debated in a political environment. Science is left for scientists, and the world of science guides political thinking. But here we are, debating science. It’s almost a flashback to the famous Scopes trial early in the 20th century, when there was an actual trial on the subject of whether evolution was an acceptable theory or not, and it was actually a trial on that subject.
To help us understand this strange scientific/political debate that the world is engaged in, I’m happy to welcome back Professor Richard Epstein. Richard teaches law at NYU Law School. He is a trained—he has a trained scientific background. He is schooled in economics as well. He is perhaps the perfect mentor for all of us to help us sort through the complex, perhaps intractable subject of climate change. The topics we’re going to try to cover is: what’s going on with the science, what’s going on with the politics, and what is the moral approach that we as individuals and we collectively as a country should be taking towards the subject of climate change and the effect of our behavior on generations hundreds, if not thousands of years in the future. Richard, thank so much for sharing with us your thoughtful commentary and wisdom. So Richard, here we are debating a scientific subject. Now, what is the fight in the big picture, the global picture? What is it all about? And why are we talking about it so much today? Specifically, tell us about the global politics centered on the Paris Accord. Help us understand so we can follow the news. What’s going on on the subject of climate change, the science, and the politics?
Richard Epstein: Well, it’s a complicated subject, but climate change has always been with us. It doesn’t matter what sort of time span you wish to choose, you can find major periods of climate change even within decades. You can certainly find it over the century and millennia, and you can find it over the global history. And the central feature about this climate change is twofold. One is that it’s highly variable, so that sometimes things get warmer, sometimes they get colder, sometimes there’s more carbon dioxide, sometimes less carbon dioxide. And yet the other thing is the system never spins out of control, because if it did spin out of control, it meant that somewhere along the line the entire system would have collapsed and there would be nothing by way of organic life on earth, whether you’re talking about plant or animals.
So it has to be a kind of a self-stabilizing system. At least that’s the conventional wisdom. And the way in which I think you could see this kind of visually is imagine that you have two spheres, a big one and inside of it you have a little one. And what happens is if the little one kind of goes up on one of the sides, after a while the natural tendency is to come back to the bottom and it’s a stable system. If on the other hand you put the little one on top of the small one and it’s kind of perched there and it goes off to one side, it’s just going to fall down and tumble. So we do know that there has to be a huge amount of resilience built into the particular system. Well, that’s the background condition.
Then of course you get this other thing known as man coming along. And it’s quite clear our ability to do manufacturing, our ability to build dams, our ability to engage in all sorts of complicated chemical experiments means that we can have an impact on the nature of the environment that no other species in the history of the world can. Exactly how big it is is of course can be debated. Nothing that we can do is going to be like the meteor that crashed into the earth about 65 million years ago in the Yucatan and simply shattered everything. Most of the things that we do are not even going to be as sort of dramatic as something like Mount Saint Helens. When that thing went up, it spewed out dust and dirt all over the atmosphere and changed temperature and conditions a lot of places. But over a long period of time with large numbers of people, you can change many kinds of systems.
And so the question then is what’s this going to do to the long-term trends associated with human stability? And the issue that people seemed to have focused on is global warming, which at some level is probably a good thing, but at other levels is going to be a bad thing. And what they’re going to then do is to ask the extent to which you can say that certain greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide, but methane is also a small player in this game, can by trapping heat inside the earth change temperatures. And it sounds like a very simple inquiry, but it really isn’t, because basically the carbon dioxide level that can trap heat might be able to through cloud cover keep it from coming in from the sun, so you increase heat from one source, you reduce heat from another source.
It turns out that carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas. The single most important greenhouse gas perhaps is water vapor, which it’s very difficult for anybody to do anything about and it’s going to come in large quantities regardless of what human beings do. It turns out that water vapor and carbon dioxide don’t behave in exactly the same way. Carbon dioxide seems to distribute itself uniformly throughout the earth no matter where it’s released, and that’s what makes this a global problem if you’re thinking about the Paris Accords, whereas water vapor tends to concentrate in some areas but not in other areas. And so what happens is if you start to look at the way in which these things interact, you’re trying to project what’s going to happen to the change in temperature, and it’s an extremely complicated system. We’ve only mentioned two of the factors, but clearly there are multiple other factors that are going to be involved. And so the question then is how much of this can you attribute to carbon dioxide?
And on this issue, having done a fair bit of study, not of original work but kind of thinking about the studies that I do see, it seems to me that given the welter of other forces, the high up and down quality of the way in which temperature starts to move, that you cannot think of carbon dioxide as the dominant player. And in the eyes of many people that makes you a denier, a peculiarly ugly word designed to evoke images of the Holocaust denier. And on my view, it just makes me a sort of a mild skeptic or somebody called a lukewarm-er, saying yes, there is probably a weak positive connection between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the temperature, but the stress would be on the weak and that other factors may well be more important. And so the debate has become enormously intense, and folks like myself are probably in a minority, but it’s not a tiny minority. And the recent evidence that seems to be coming in tends to be more on this lukewarm-ing side than it is on the notion that the heat is going to blow us up. I can talk about it later, but at least for the moment what happens is the debate as it’s often characterized is one of attitude. One side calls the other side alarmist and the other side calls the one side deniers, and as you say that’s not a really very intelligent way to run this debate. The correct question is to ask at two: what impact at various levels does carbon dioxide have on temperature changes, that is the change in one leading to changes in others, and two, what other influences do you have to put into the mix to understand the full range of behavior? So that would be the agenda for the scientific side, and if you got that right then the political and philosophical questions should be easier to answer.
Historical Context: Warming vs. Cooling [03:50]
Bob Zadek: Now, the important—you mentioned in your introduction, you mentioned something that I want to be sure our friends out there do not lose track of. Even if you stipulate, even if you stipulate that behavior, manufacturing, and industrial behavior of man on earth is affecting the environment and in fact is causing the climate over time to get warmer. You mentioned, and I want to come back to it just for a moment, it’s not that clear whether or not that change is for the better or for the worse. There is a huge leap of faith that climate change, warming in whatever degree, is per se bad. But that’s hardly a given, and what would the debate be like if in fact climate change was great news and overall the planet, if you can think in those terms, a thousand years from now is—would be so grateful for our contribution to climate change. So we—we seem to minimize the discussion on whether climate change, assuming it’s correct, is a good thing or a bad thing, and that would change the whole discussion, wouldn’t it?
Richard Epstein: Yes, it would. I mean, look, one of the ways in which you could do this is there’s a debate that has taken place about the changes in temperature over the last thousand years. And the traditional account, which was widely accepted until fairly recently, was that there was something known as a Medieval Warming Period and something known as a Little Ice Age. And we have no doubt from the sociological accounts that which of these two things was better for mankind. In the Medieval Warming Period, you know, you had a Greenland that was actually green, you had a Labrador which had—was called Vinland because it had vines, and it turns out that the higher levels of temperature generally produced greater levels of agricultural development and greater levels of human satisfaction because the cold is very, very severe and the warm seemed to be doing well.
In the medieval—but when you get to the Little Ice Age, things were not so good and many people associate the decline in temperature with a decline in fitness of the human species, which made it more vulnerable to plagues, that resulted in fairly substantial amounts of lost food and so forth. So certainly if you’re talking about within a range of one or two or three degrees, you can’t assume that the current level is ideal.
Localized Environmental Factors vs. Global Trends [05:40]
Richard Epstein: To make this more complicated, a lot of this depends upon where you are in the system. So if you’re going to be in a northern climate which is ice-bound for a very long period of time and you could get a little bit of warmth into there, generally speaking warmth will contribute to survival and it’s a good thing. If it turns out that you think that the increased energy in a place like Bangladesh will lead to greater numbers of storms and monsoons and so forth, you could wipe out large numbers of people. So there’s nothing which says that you know that the effects of a change in general climate change on the earth are going to have positive and negative impacts all the way across. They’re going to vary from location to location.
And then just to make it a little bit more complicated, one of the mistakes that you see in this discussion all the time is sort of the understanding that if there’s a carbon dioxide influence on this, it’s the only thing that matters, and that’s clearly got to be wrong in some sense. To give you a couple of examples of what the problem is, people start talking about the complications of the rising level of water in the Everglades and in Florida, and that’s certainly true. Well, why would that be attributable to climate change when the general levels of ocean changes are relatively small, about four or five inches per century is the best guess and it seems to be declining? Well, it turns out there’s an aqueduct under Central Florida and as you drain that thing out, things start to sink. And if they start to sink, then the ocean is going to be higher relative to the land. But you can have land sinking instead of oceans rising, just as you could have oceans rising instead of land sinking. So unless you know all about these local conditions, you can’t figure out what’s going on. And causation matters, because if it turns out that it’s the local condition that’s driving this particular problem, then anything you do about global warming is going to have no serious effect, so it’s wasted expenditures, at least in this particular dimension.
To give you another illustration which has been put in the news quite frequently lately, is you look at the Antarctic. It’s a funny place because it turns out on the western ice shelf there seems to be calving of a huge iceberg roughly the size of the state of Delaware. You’re not talking about small stuff. And before it broke, it was moving at, you know, three or four hundred feet per day away from the land over the Antarctic into the water. But on the other side of the Antarctic, it turns out that the ice pack is increasing. Well, to attribute the movement to carbon dioxide doesn’t explain why it doesn’t happen all the time and why it doesn’t happen on the other half. So the better guess is probably that there’s some volcanic activity, because Antarctica is actually land on top of which there is ice, and that that activity heats things up from within and it’s a much more powerful climate or temperature change than you could ever get from carbon dioxide, and that would explain the difference. Well, the Paris Accord, even if it were fully enforced, would not change that particular dynamic. So it really is important to ask which of these two causes seems to be more plausible.
And you know, one of the advantages you have about being a lawyer—I know it sounds very strange—is you do a lot of complicated toxic tort litigation and so forth in which you develop pretty good antennae for figuring out the causal connection between some general phenomenon on the one hand and some particular result on the other. You know, just trying to figure out whether or not a leak from one particular place in a farming system will cause damage in another is a kind of a complicated scientific inquiry. And so you’ve got to do that all the time. And one of the things that sort of distresses me about the global warming debate is anytime you see a particular form of localized activity, the presumption should be it’s a local cause, not carbon dioxide, but in the popular debate it turns out it goes the other way.
The Paris Accord and Energy Policy [07:38]
Bob Zadek: So now you mentioned the Paris Accords. So we have this scientific debate, if it still is an active debate, about whether or not human activity is affecting the climate far into the future. But then it starts to hit the political sphere, and when I say the political sphere, it starts to—the debate starts to create mandates where governments force individuals to do certain activities or not do certain activities which is contrary to their self-interest. So now government gets involved, which means points guns and jails at people to make them do something. So now we’re dragged into the political debate. And the Paris Accords were very much in the news, it was in the news during the Obama administration because Obama signed on to it. Richard will explain that. And then we have Trump backing off, withdrawing from—I’m not sure what the verb is, Richard will help us—the Paris Accords. So what did the—what were the Paris Accords? What did they hope to accomplish? And what is the—was the legal status of the Paris Accords?
Richard Epstein: Well, I mean, you start with the beginning. There’s this huge meeting in Paris, and for the most part it was populated by individuals who thought that climate change was real, was substantial, and was driven by carbon dioxide. Well, when you actually looked at some of the popular debates, what they did is they kind of confused two things. They said, “Look, you can tell that there’s a real change by man-made. Look at the amount of filth and smog and stuff that sits in the air.” And I remember seeing a picture in the New York Times about some of the huge amount of coal spewing forth from Central Europe—this is dirty coal from Germany, I might add. And well, I’m looking at that and I’m saying, “Wait a second, carbon dioxide is colorless, odorless, and tasteless like oxygen and nitrogen. What you’re seeing here is carbon in other forms which are really dangerous.”
And what you then discover is that somehow or other people seem to think that when you link together dirty products coming out of the use of carbon like coal, dirty coal and other things, with carbon dioxide, you’re talking about the same thing. But ironically, it’s exactly the opposite. It turns out the Germans are masters in using dirty coal, which has a huge negative impact on everybody who breathes that gunk in, creating all sorts of lung disease, asthma, emphysema, you name it, it can be done by it, and it’s relatively low in carbon dioxide. If they imported cleaner coal from the United States, there would be a higher level of CO2 emissions, but all that black and gunk-y stuff would disappear.
So what you have to really ask yourself is which do you think is the greater of these two problems? And in my view, it’s pretty clear that the immediate impact of the dirty coal is much more important than any modest change that’s going to take place in Europe in carbon dioxide levels from using coal. And if you want to deal with that, the last thing you should do is what Ms. Merkel did, was to shut down all the nuclear power capacity, which has no emissions of any sort whatsoever. But both in Europe, in Japan, and in the United States, but not in France, what people have done is let their nuclear plants age. They become extremely dangerous because they then have to constantly be patched up. And what we really need to do is to have an expedited program for putting new nuclear power in, which would eliminate the trade-off that you’re going to have between dirty coal products and everything else. So that’s one of the debates that you have is what are you trying to control, and it’s just completely crazy to think that the Paris Accords are going to do anything about filth except increase its amount. So much more complicated on that level.
Wealth Transfers and Global Greening [10:58]
Richard Epstein: The second thing to understand about the Accords is that it wants to do is to create an elaborate transfer system of wealth, hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth over a 20 or 30 year period, which is supposed to pay the less developed nations in the world damages for the harm that carbon dioxide has produced which comes from industrial parties. And I regard these transfer payment systems as really quite bizarre. Let me see if I could explain why and give a couple of reasons. One is if you assume that there is some harm from carbon dioxide, the nation that produces it may be the first target, but what it does of course is it takes those goods and it transfers to other places, including many undeveloped countries. And so when you’re in an undeveloped country and you’re buying something that has been made with a carbon dioxide output, why don’t you have to bear some portion of that responsibility along with everybody else?
I regard that as a second-tier issue, which becomes extremely important, by the way, when you’re trying to have carbon dioxide taxes on goods that are transferred back and forth across borders—a nightmare which nobody should dream of. But the other thing is you’re trying to figure out what is the actual damage. And here it’s to go back to the science again. The following thing seems to be true. There is only one effect—it’s not temperature change—that seems to be more or less unambiguously attributed to the increase in carbon dioxide levels. And you’re talking about a change of about say 20 or 25 percent from 1900 to the present, from a little bit over 300 parts per million to a little bit over 400 parts per million. Non-trivial change and so forth.
But the key change seems to be in the amount of surface greening that has taken place on the earth. And it turns out that these numbers are quite large. Basically where there was just desert, now you’re starting to see greening and it’s about 11 percent of the earth’s surface when done by multiple studies on that particular point, including places like the Sahara, which were probably at one time much richer rather than being sand-like. So now you’re having a transfer payment for the harms contributed by carbon dioxide when in the short run the greening seems to be the single most important factor. Now, why do we know this? Well, it turns out if you’re somebody who’s running a hothouse of some sort or another with plants and you want to increase their growth, what do you do? You inject in some carbon dioxide because it allows them to engage more rapidly in photosynthesis. And what we have done is this with respect to the planet at whole.
And it seems as though there are many fewer possible explanations for greening than there are for temperature change. And so you’re probably more confident that the carbon dioxide does one rather than the other. It’s also the case that the impact on the changes on plant growth from carbon dioxide are probably more robust than those from temperature changes. So at least it looks in the short run that the so-called social cost of carbon is probably negative. Now, there are going to be lots of people who are going to disagree with me on this, many of whom are very prominent scientists, but the interesting feature is that the data which talks about the increase in green cover is not something which is the brainchild of somebody who is a skeptic about global warming. It was actually discovered by a series of Chinese investigators who were surprised themselves and who regard global warming as some kind of a serious danger. And it’s been replicated in Australia and other places as well. So when you’re looking at all this stuff, the Paris Accord seems crazy.
The Non-Binding Nature of International Accords [12:59]
Richard Epstein: Now, there’s a third feature which is absolutely nuts about the Paris Accord. What nation has been the single most responsible nation, Bob, for sort of keeping the level of carbon dioxide’s emissions down assuming that that’s to be a good? Well, the answer is the United States, because what’s happened is we’ve developed technology after technology which allows you to use fossil fuels more efficiently than before, to generate them with less amounts of energy, less amounts of waste, a fewer amount—less amounts of water, the whole thing. And so we’ve been able to basically increase our output and reduce our carbon dioxide quotas. And we agreed to immediate reductions. Well, we’ve already done a lot of stuff, which means that the next round is going to be harder.
If you look to India and China, they don’t have to do anything for 15 years. And the Chinese pollution now dwarfs by a factor of three or four the amount of carbon dioxide that comes out of the United States. And so what you do is you have this weird political deal in which the United States agrees to make rather substantial changes with relatively small gain, whereas the Chinese who could make rather substantial changes with huge gains don’t do this. What they’ve done is they’ve reduced the number of plants that they plan to build which will rely on coal. So instead of building say six or seven hundred, they’ll build four or five hundred. This is hardly progress. And so China and India turn out to be the major sources of pollution and the Paris Accord does nothing in the next 15 years to change the balance coming out of these two countries. And they can walk from this at any time if they want, because these Accords are not legally binding. That’s why President Trump could announce that he was out of this particular situation. They are kind of, shall we say, prototypes, they’re targets, they’re aspirations of one sort or another, but what they aren’t is commitments which if you fail to meet it will subject to, as you said, the man with the gun coming in through the door.
Bob Zadek: So the important point is when you read about the Paris Accords, Obama agreeing to them and Trump saying I’m not bound by them, it’s a vacuous, empty debate because Obama and therefore the United States government was never bound to anything. It was aspirational, like eating less sugar and behaving better. And when Trump says I’m signing off, that also is not any kind of a legal or a contractually or a treaty-driven change. It’s all aspirational, it’s all atmospheric, pardon the analogy. So the debate—
Domestic Law and Air Quality History [14:47]
Richard Epstein: Well, actually, yes and no. In the international arena you could pull out, but once you decide to have these aspirations, the entire web of domestic law dealing with environmental materials can now be galvanized. So the President can say, “Well, we are under this aspirational obligation not legally enforceable to do X, so it’s now easier for us to say that existing statutes or new statutes will make these things commanded command and control operations internal to the United States.” And so the reason why you wanted to get out of this thing was so as to make sure that the entire domestic environmental establishment wasn’t directed towards carbon dioxide when in fact it probably could be directed against things which are much more important.
You know, there’s a huge debate and I’m not competent to answer what the ultimate science is, but just how small particulate matter hurts lungs. We know the big stuff does it, the little stuff less, but it may do it a lot or less. And what you really want to do is to concentrate on the traditional forms of pollution with the asthma, emphysema, and all the other kinds of bronchial diseases that you get. And refocusing the debate it seems to me would be generally good. And remember, the United States has made remarkable progress in dealing with environmental stuff generally. When I moved out to Los Angeles in 1968, I could remember going to San Marino to visit somebody and by God the air was so filled with pollution that your lungs felt they were being stabbed by a thousand little knives. And if you checked the maps, the closer you were to the Pacific Ocean for the same house, the more expensive that house was because people were basically buying freedom from air pollution. And that gradient is surely down because of the massive improvements. The debate is how much of this is driven by law and how much of it is driven by technology. And the correct answer is a well-designed legal system that figures out the social cost of other kinds of pollutants, puts a tax or a prohibition on them, will in fact impose market incentives for market behavior which will then try to figure out how you reduce these bad outputs and increase the amount of stuff under it. So having a cap and trade system for sulfur dioxide or nitrous oxide and so forth probably a fairly good thing. It’s much more difficult to do it with carbon dioxide, where you’re not sure whether it’s good or whether it’s bad and where there are so many sources of this stuff, including you and me every time we exhale.
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek, I’m spending a wonderful morning with Professor Richard Epstein. We are talking about climate change, one of the most intractable political, scientific, moral, philosophical issues before us. I’ll be back in 30 really short seconds. Please stay tuned.
[Break]
The Politicization of Science and the Voter [19:29]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. Sorry for that slight delay in going to break, but I am back. Thank you so much for listening to my conversation this morning with Professor Richard Epstein. We are talking about a tough issue: climate change. Is it real? If so, what should be done about it? Is it good or is it bad? Richard, to me one of the most troublesome issues, strange issue in a lot of ways in the discussion on climate change, is that a discussion, as I said in my intro, of a scientific issue has become so politicized that in effect, in effect, candidates run for public office by aligning themselves with a political party. And by aligning themselves with a political party and using that as an identifier, they are aligning themselves with a scientific position so that in effect it is not our elected officials who deliberate policy, but they are elected to carry out in effect policy driven by science, which means that it is the voters who are making the ultimate decision on this complex issue of science. So here we have a couple of—a couple of hundred million people voting in effect voting on science by picking a candidate. It is absolutely bizarre. No voter in America is competent to vote on science, and yet that is how we decide which science is real and which is not. Isn’t that kind of strange and contrary to how our country is supposed to be governed?
Political Polarization and the “U-Shaped Curve” [21:06]
Richard Epstein: Well, elections are very funny things, and let me sort of explain what the problem is. When you vote for a political candidate, you’re not voting for somebody whose views on environmental issues are the only thing that matter, or even on global warming. What these guys do is have an array of positions on 10 or even 100 issues. And so they have views on labor relations, they have views on foreign affairs, they have views on school education, healthcare, and so forth. And what you do is you have to figure out whether you like the stuff that’s in the bag or not in the bag.
And what’s happened in American politics is the way the bags are put together when you pull the levers have radically changed. So if you go back, for example, say 50 or 60 years when I was a kid, what did—there was obviously a serious amount of overlap between Democratic and Republican parties. You had liberal Democrats, you had conservative Republicans of one kind or another. You had a fair bit of bipartisan activities, particularly on foreign affairs because there was an overlap on that particular stuff. If you try to figure out whether or not there was a huge sea change in the elections between say Harry Truman, who was a great president in many ways, and Dwight Eisenhower, easily underrated but also a very good president, the country was not, shall we say, in turmoil with respect to that choice.
But what’s happened is if you look at the items in the basket now, they’re no longer randomly assorted as they used to be. If you’re a progressive, your positions on pretty much every issue will align one to another and your candidate will satisfy them all. And if you’re a conservative, your market basket is made it much easier for you to choose because pretty much you like everything in that basket as well. And so if you’ve got two candidates, one with baskets which has things which say A positive, B positive, C positive down to Z positive, and the other guy has a basket which says A minus down to Z minus, what happens is now when you start to pick political candidates, there’s this huge divergence on just about every single issue. And that’s the kind of thing that we saw when the Democratic Party moved to the left and the Trump party, as the Republicans became, sort of got away from a lot of traditional free market, pro-growth, internationalist policies of the Republican Party and became a sort of a more hardline adversarial group.
And when you have an election where that’s the way things are aligned and there’s nobody in the middle, then instead of having a nice bell-shaped curve, so when the Democrats win you move a little bit to the left, Republicans win you move a little bit to the right, now you’ve got a U-shaped curve. And if the Democrats win, you move all the way in one direction. If somebody like Trump wins, you could easily move in the other. Well, if you think the outcome of an election is going to affect everything, you’re going to invest a lot more moral energy in it, and part of that moral energy is going to be denunciation of the other guys. And global warming is a really powerful card in this thing, because on the one side you’re saying it’s a hoax and a fraud, and on the other side you’re saying you’re bringing the universe to an end.
Media Science vs. Actual Data [23:18]
Richard Epstein: To give you an idea of how extreme it is, take somebody who I might think is a real rabble-rouser, though he should know better, somebody like Paul Krugman. He writes in the New York Times that you’re talking about the Axis of Evil by those people who disagree with him on global warming. And he says everybody on that particular side is acting in bad faith and they’re all friends of the Koch family and they all want dirty fossil fuel and so forth. And the phrase “Axis of Evil” is meant to describe these people as being the equivalent of what we would want to say talking about North Korea and Iran and the Soviet Union. I mean, it’s just crazy to start hearing things like that, but it’s very, very common to see that.
Another rabble-rouser, somebody like Al Gore. I mean, I can’t think of anybody who’s more ignorant on technical issues than he, and yet, you know, he goes out there, makes films, gives speeches, and he’s really stirring up the crowd. The good news on this one, Bob, is that the electorate seems to be, shall we say, overdosed on this. They don’t see any concrete evidence of this in their own life here or anywhere else around the earth. And so his recent movie has thankfully been a bust.
Bob Zadek: Thank goodness. He got a very bad review almost universally. Richard, we have a caller this morning, Nick from San Carlos. Nick, are you still with us?
Caller (Nick): I am, and listening to the conversation. It was great.
Bob Zadek: Thank you, Nick. Good morning. What’s on your mind?
Caller (Nick): Good morning, sir. Professor Epstein, how are you? A big fan, by the way. But um, yes, this is an interesting topic. So I am a life scientist, I work mainly in drug development, gene silencing. I’m held to a certain level of, I would say, standards that are a function of the scientific method. I’ll stop there. That same scientific method, though, is pretty broad across a lot of different sciences. So I’m trying to teach myself a little bit about climate science and math and kind of see where it’s weak and strong. If I even mention to anybody that there are some weak areas of it, there’s just no listening. They believe it inherently. It reminds me of the fact that the public seems to get their education specifically in sciences—that’s what Mr. Zadek was talking about earlier—from TV, as if they’re the ones that are providing this versus, you know, a classroom, which is a completely different environment. But if I did that in the drug development sector, you’d put me in jail.
Richard Epstein: Well, I mean, look, my view about this is slightly different from yours. If you have good TV, it could explain a lot. If you have bad TV, you can’t explain anything. I mean, and so what happens is I will just give you an incident that I happened to catch. One of my friends who’s an eminent scientist, a man named Will Happer, and he is a member of the National Academy of Science and so forth, and a physics professor first at Columbia and then at Princeton. In his retirement, he’s basically leading the Carbon Dioxide Coalition as a skeptic about the negative impacts of carbon dioxide on the world. And he’s on a television show with Bill Nye. And Bill Nye the science guy, and you know, Nye is crazy as far as I can tell, but he keeps saying, “Well, I don’t care much about global warming, but unless we’re in the lead on solar technology, the United States is going to fail.” And so what you do is you watch this quiet-spoken Southern scientist who actually knows what he’s talking about against this guy who’s waving his hands up and down and as best I can tell doesn’t know a single thing about anything that he wants to talk about.
So what do you say about TV? What you say about it is if you put the wrong people on, you’re going to get the wrong kind of message. If you put somebody on who’s a little bit quiet, you could explain a lot of this. I mean, one of the things that I think you understand this is most people if you sort of gave them a bell curve, what you do is you draw a picture of the curve. You don’t give them the equation with E to the X and Y and Z or whatever the powers are, because people can understand the pictures. And so television’s a picture medium, so you do it in that particular way and then what you do is you vary the various elements to show them how the bell-shaped curve keeps its essential symmetry even as you change the parameters, but could have a steep peak in the middle or it could be much flatter, and then you could explain that the total probabilities necessarily have to be one when you sum from zero to—rather from minus infinity to plus infinity. And amazingly enough, the bell curve seems to be able to do all of those things. So I’m not skeptical about all this. It’s just a question of who does it, and if it’s the ranters and the ravers, they’re going to drive out the somebody who doesn’t know anything.
And so when I think about my friend Happer talking with this crazy man on television, I sort of half agree with you because I’m sure most people who don’t know anything will watch gesticulation rather than listen to kinds of argument. So yes, I agree with that, and I think that it’s certainly very important. But too many—I mean, it’s interesting, let me just put it the following way. One of the ways in which when you read this literature on the pro and anti side that you tend to do things is you start looking at which of the guys are going to give you numbers, tables, charts, figures, and so forth. So I just give you another illustration about the Paris Accord. The president of MIT wrote this letter to the President of the United States saying you don’t know anything about global warming and the seas are going to rise and the deserts going to be bad and adverse effects of one kind or another, and he just does it, there’s not a single source of documentation. So then a bunch of skeptics on the other side write a series of refutations to this presidential letter and they have graphs and tables and charts and they cite to this guy who’s an expert on sea level rise and that one who’s a level on greening and so forth. Once you see that, then the thing that you have to understand is that the persons who are willing to give you the concrete information generally ought to be more trusted than those who don’t.
And it’s also hugely important, most of the people who are on the skeptical side, they don’t generate their own data, which would lead me to be somewhat suspicious. What they tend to do is to take public data and give it a different interpretation. So let me give you another example. I want you to imagine the temperature changes that take place in the 20th century. And carbon dioxide is moving up slowly but steadily throughout this entire period. There’s a burst of temperature increase, then there’s a decline, then there’s another increase, and then it’s flat for the last 18 or so years. Well, you can’t if you sort of put the two curves against one another, the up-down and flat nature of the temperature stuff doesn’t map very well into the carbon dioxide at all. But you can do something very strange with this. You can be the New York Times, you can look at this flat plateau which is higher by a small amount than any of the previous periods, and you can say, “Well, this was the sixth hottest year on record, you ought to be in panic.” Or that 18 of the 18 hottest years have come in the last 18 years. This is all true, but the variation in those years is less than a tenth of degree centigrade. So it depends on how you state the point, and the great advantage of putting a graph out there—and this is a graph by Richard Lindzen put out from MIT, a prominent retired global scientist and so forth—is if you see this thing zigging and zagging like that and then you look at the carbon dioxide curve and see it moving up smoothly, you start to think, “Wait, the one cannot be an obvious causal explanation for another.” And you don’t have to be a genius to figure this out. What you have to be able to do is to read and understand simple graphs.
Bob Zadek: Nick, thank you so much for your call this morning. We sure appreciate your being a regular listener to the show. Thank you so much. And we have another—Richard, we have another caller, we have Jacob on the line. Jacob, you still with us this morning?
Equitable Balance and International Compliance [29:18]
Caller (Jacob): Yes. Professor Epstein, how do people understand the logic and the rationality of the so-called equitable balance that is achieved with certain countries being allowed to be gross polluters such as China? Does it somehow correct the historical imbalance? Is there some balance there, invisible hand, that’s showing that this is equitable and this is not equitable? Or as for instance is China being the sole arbiter of what’s good for compliance, whether international law or treaties, they get to decide how to comply best for China?
Richard Epstein: Well, look, I mean, I agree with the implication of that. The word “equitable” is one of the trickiest words in the English language, and let me give you a sensible interpretation of what it means and a nonsensical interpretation. The sensible interpretation would be that if you have a pollutant which is known to cause harm, like nitrous oxide, what you generally do is want to tax all individuals in proportion to the amount of nitrous oxide that they emit. Now, if the gas turns out to be local in terms of its adverse consequences, then you’d want to concentrate the tax on those people and the benefit’s going to go locally, so you do it as a local matter. If it turns out it’s international, you’ve got to do this as a global matter.
But the Chinese situation when we’re talking about equitable is completely off base because there’s no effort to try to figure out what the tax is going to be based upon the total amount of emissions, assuming for the sake of argument that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. And so a system which says to the guys who’ve managed to take all the precautions, “Take more,” and to the guy who’s taken no precautions it said, “Do as you will,” that’s not equitable, it’s nutty. And the problem about Obama is, you know, this man had this kind of world-historical vision for himself as the coming of an intellectual Messiah. I knew him when he was at the University of Chicago, this man is no intellectual giant. And what he does is he constantly gets confused on all of these issues and believes that somehow or other by putting the United States in a position of sacrifice, we’re going to lead by example for the rest of the world.
Well, leading by example works when there’s a close relationship of trust between two people. But if you have somebody, and China’s become a much more despotic country in the last 10 years than it was earlier on, they’re not going to do a good thing because you’ve done the good thing. They’re going to take the benefit and laugh and do whatever it is that they turn out to please. So my own view about this is if the Chinese thought that carbon dioxide was a menace—and I don’t know whether they do or they don’t, I know what they say—well, they say, “Well, the United States is taking care of this a little bit, so we can afford to emit a little bit more.” There’s no reason for us to cooperate, we’ll just take an advantage and play the game strategically. And this cannot be regarded as equitable.
So equitable sort of means pro-rata compensation for the harms caused. It doesn’t mean figure out whom you’d like to benefit and whom you’d like to hurt and put the benefits to the persons you like and put the harms on the people you don’t like, and that’s what the Paris Accords do. The thing that’s understood about it is it’s a nutty agreement in terms of the control of carbon dioxide and the transfer payments that it demands and the privileges that it gives to certain bad polluting countries are completely inconsistent with any rational system of social control. And I could say the same thing about American environmental law. If you wanted to control harmful pollution, the last thing you want to do is to keep with the operational details that we have with respect to the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. They’re much too complicated for their purposes and they tend to create huge amount of perverse incentives by keeping old plants which are dangerous in service and preventing new plants which are much safer from going into circulation.
Conclusion: Technical Progress over Crisis [32:58]
Bob Zadek: Jacob, thank you so much for being a listener and for your call this morning. This is Bob Zadek, I’m having a wonderful hour with Professor Richard Epstein. We are talking about climate change. Richard, we have a few minutes left to go. I want to just close with to me one of the most troubling parts of this conversation. Here we have, let’s say, an intellectually, a scientifically difficult issue, a politically difficult issue. And yet ask ourselves or I ask the audience to ask themselves: in our country, who is making the decision on what is the best policy? Well, one would think on a complex issue we have outsourced the decision-making to our representatives, the wise men who we elect to do our thinking, if you will, for us in Congress. And yet people are elected because of their established position on climate change, which means they are not invited to deliberate, they are being told how to vote by the voters. That means the voters have made the decision. So we have one of the most complex scientific issues being decided by voters who have no information to speak of, who just learn from mass media occasionally, and we have decisions being made that are profound, have broad economic and political significance, and being decided in effect by nobody.
Richard Epstein: Well, I disagree with that, Bob. Let me explain why. The popular environmental global warming always scores extremely low when you put it into a popular poll. Voters do not think of it as a particularly important issue. They care about war and peace and economic well-being, education and healthcare, affirmative action and all that stuff much more. And so they’re not the ones who do it. The problem is in this case much of it is driven by a series of elites. And these elites tend to be coastal and they tend to be very clubby one to another. And what they do is they tend to drive out people who disagree with them.
So one of the things that’s characteristic about this is virtually all of the people who take the lead on the skeptical side are no longer in the active academy. They’ve retired in one sense or another, they’ve gone to conservative think tanks or libertarian think tanks and so forth. So I don’t think it’s that what it is. I have no problem in talking about global warming before an ordinary audience. But one of the things that happens when I talk with people who are convinced that the end of the world is nigh and so forth is it’s not a debate anymore, it’s just a set of abusive remarks that come to me. I can recall going to sessions in public and some guy gives some statement about global warming and you ask a question and the answer comes back, “Well, the models will explain that but you’re too stupid to understand so I won’t tell you anything about it.”
What happens is—I’ll just give you one illustration. There’s that famous thing that was a graph which was put forward by a man named Christy, who’s a distinguished climate scientist, which took the composite average of 130-plus climate models and then plotted it over the last 30 years of observed data. And the models were wild high on virtually every case by a factor of two to two and a half over the original one. You know, this is pretty powerful evidence that there’s a kind of an alarmist quality going on, and yet it doesn’t seem to have changed the debate. And indeed, the one point I would end with is this constant refrain falls that people keep telling you, “You know, 97 percent of climate scientists believe in global warming.” And it turns of the current debate that’s just a wild overstatement. The views are much more nuanced than that. These data are old, unreliable. I would count myself as somebody who’d say, “Yes, I think more carbon dioxide, all other things being equal, produce some increment in temperature,” but that’s not the same thing as saying you’ve got a world-wide crisis on your hands. And so sort of keeping everything in perspective both on the political and the intellectual front is I think the thing that you have to do the most.
Bob Zadek: I feel much better now. Thank you so much. I envisioned a world in which we would be voting in a popular referendum on the Big Bang theory or something like that.
Richard Epstein: No, I don’t think that’s going to happen. And I mean there are obviously questions of what kind of trade-offs you have to make and how much you want to do present as against future and so forth. But I think in effect what you really want to do is to get a world in which you have steady incremental technical progress which increases the possibilities for human improvement and overall welfare and to go into crisis mode on the global warming which is going to unleash other forces that may be more dangerous—dirty pollutants, it may well be that you take less care dealing with various kinds of infectious diseases.
Bob Zadek: Richard, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. It’s always a pleasure to have you on the show. You have an open invitation. This is Bob Zadek saying so long for now. I’ll be back next Sunday with another hour of libertarian ideas.