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Climate Change

6 min read

Part of Regulation and the administrative state.

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Every episode (5)

Who argued it

Richard Epstein ×2 · Myron Ebell · Sterling Burnett · Ronald Bailey

Environmental Policy · Environmentalism · Antitrust · COVID-19 · Monetary Policy · Inflation · Economic Growth · Public Policy

Background

Framing the debate

Bob Zadek opened a 2015 episode by noting that “climate change” as used in current discussion means a long-term change in climate trends caused by human activity, and asked Ronald Bailey whether the effect of hydrocarbons on climate is good news or bad news. Bailey, who said he had covered climate change as a reporter for over 30 years and attended the 1992 Earth Summit and 10 UN climate meetings, described himself as initially skeptical of man-made climate change as a problem, then changing his mind about 10 years before the interview and publicly urging people to take it seriously Ronald Bailey on the End of Doom (2015).

In a 2017 episode, Zadek framed the topic as a worldwide political debate on matters of science, comparing it to the Scopes trial, and introduced Richard Epstein as a professor who teaches law at NYU Law School with a trained scientific background and schooling in economics Richard Epstein on Climate Change (2017). A 2018 episode opened with Zadek saying ordinary Americans were being asked to decide a hyper-technical scientific issue, and that the subject had been renamed from global warming to climate change because the globe was not warming How to Spot Tabloid Climate Science (2018).

The science

Bailey said the world will be warmer because of burning fossil fuels and added carbon dioxide to the air, but that it will not be a catastrophe. Asked whether warming is per se bad, good, or simply different, he said it is probably not per se bad, and that the problem is the speed of change relative to the ability of the biosphere and humanity to adapt, with sea-level rise from melting glaciers the most concerning effect. He called the net effect a minus Ronald Bailey on the End of Doom (2015).

Epstein said climate change has always been with us and is highly variable, and that the system never spins out of control, which he illustrated with the image of a small sphere inside a larger one returning to the bottom. He said human manufacturing, dams and chemical experiments let people affect the environment as no other species can, though nothing people do would resemble the meteor that struck the Yucatan about 65 million years ago or be as dramatic as Mount Saint Helens. He noted that carbon dioxide distributes itself uniformly throughout the earth while water vapor, which he called perhaps the single most important greenhouse gas, tends to concentrate in some areas. Having studied the issue, he said carbon dioxide cannot be thought of as the dominant player, that he is a mild skeptic or “lukewarm-er” who accepts a weak positive connection between atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature, and that recent evidence tends toward the lukewarm-ing side Richard Epstein on Climate Change (2017).

Sterling Burnett, of the Heartland Institute, said the temperature stopped rising for 18 consecutive years while carbon dioxide emissions were going up, and that environmental group leaders had shifted from global warming to climate change because the globe was not warming. He said the key questions are whether humans are causing present climate change, whether that can be said with certainty, and whether catastrophe is in the offing requiring dramatic action How to Spot Tabloid Climate Science (2018).

Politics, policy and cost

Zadek described the Paris Climate Accord as a wealth transfer mechanism in the 2017 episode’s framing Richard Epstein on Climate Change (2017). In the 2018 episode, Burnett traced public scientific debate back over a hundred years, citing debates about sociobiology and evolution, and the 1960s debate over pesticides and DDT after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. He said DDT had wiped out malaria in the United States, where there had been 50,000 cases a year in the ’50s, and that people in developing countries were then told they could not have the cure because of thinning bird eggshells. He argued that once environmental leaders began talking about changing the economy and how people live, they left science for politics How to Spot Tabloid Climate Science (2018).

In a 2019 episode, Mark Joffe said carbon taxes and cap-and-trade are the kind of thing that prices emissions, and that if you could figure out for each metric ton of CO2 emitted how much damage it will cause from climate change and price that, the market could take it into account. He said there is a lot of religion and not as much science as one might like in the climate change debate, making the appropriate level of taxation very challenging. Zadek responded that the difficulty of the cost-benefit accounting tells him not to do it, and that government is forcing people to behave in a certain way based upon speculation and superstition Not Enough Bricks (2019).

Across episodes

The topic recurs across all four episodes, and the treatment shifts with the guest: Bailey in 2015 describes moving toward treating man-made warming as a serious problem to be solved by coming low-carbon and no-carbon technologies, while Epstein in 2017 and Burnett in 2018 argue that carbon dioxide is not the dominant driver and that the debate has been politicized. The episodes show no single developing argument so much as successive guests advancing different positions.

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