What will the presidential election in November mean for U.S. environmental policy? Although we don’t yet know who the Republican candidate will be, we know all too well what will be on his environmental agenda. The endless televised debates have exposed what the New York Times called “the broken windows of the Republican idea factory.” It’s not a pretty sight.

The candidates all share the same approach to the environment. Ron Paul plans to govern primarily by abolishing things. His hit list includes America’s foreign wars, but also the Federal Reserve, most federal taxes, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and all limits on offshore drilling and the use of coal and nuclear power. Rick Santorum agrees that energy companies must be entirely deregulated. Newt Gingrich will build a moon colony by 2020, and will replace the EPA with a new agency that “will operate on the premise that most environmental problems can and should be solved by states and local communities.” Mitt Romney promises to “eliminate the regulations promulgated in pursuit of the Obama administration’s costly and ineffective anti-carbon agenda,” and to slow down or block regulations in general whenever industry complains about their costs (i.e., always).

Do we really need to slow down the snail’s pace of current environmental regulation, and pay more attention to industry as it bemoans the cost of compliance? Consider the case of coal ash: produced in stupendous quantities by coal-burning power plants, it contains dangerous concentrations of arsenic, lead, mercury and other toxic metals. Improper disposal has led to contamination of groundwater in many communities, and to occasional disasters such as the billion-gallon sludge spill that inundated Kingston, Tennessee in 2008.

This looks like the poster child for hazardous waste regulation – except that the coal industry has consistently used its considerable political clout to win special treatment. Back in 1980, near the dawn of modern waste regulations, Congress directed EPA to study coal ash in detail before applying hazardous waste rules to it.

That process of study has already stretched over more than 30 years. Under the Obama administration, closure was finally in sight; in 2009, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said she would complete regulation of coal ash that year. It turns out that the industry’s clout is undiminished, and the revised Obama plan is to punt until after the election. In January a coalition of environmental groups announced plans to sue EPA to force regulation of ash disposal.

Industry’s grumbling about regulatory costs has taken two forms. One is the claim of job losses: regulation of coal ash as hazardous waste, according to an industry-sponsored report, would eliminate more than 300,000 jobs a year. I re-examined their report and found it to be close to a complete fabrication; using standard methods of economic analysis, regulation of coal ash as hazardous waste would cause a net annual gain of 28,000 jobs.

A more exotic claim is that the stigma created by regulation of coal ash disposal would destroy the market for ash reuse. More than one-third of coal ash is recycled, often used in construction materials such as concrete, cement, and wallboard. Although EPA’s proposed rules explicitly exempt ash recycling, the industry claims that regulation of ash disposal as hazardous waste would stigmatize all uses of ash, including recycling.

If coal ash disposal bears a regulatory stigma, is it deserved? Nuclear waste is stigmatized as dangerous, which is a huge setback for any plans you might have to bury it in your backyard. No one, however, would count the lost income from your inability to open a backyard nuclear waste dump as a cost of regulation. Nor would we count the loss of income if sales dropped for a different product that was mistakenly stigmatized as nuclear waste. The latter is exactly parallel to the purported stigma effect on coal ash reuse.

Liz Stanton and I critiqued the stigma theory in testimony on ash disposal rules in 2010. At the time, the idea seemed purely hypothetical. Now the industry alleges that regulatory uncertainty and “toxic” publicity are already driving down recycling; after soaring under the previous administration, the ash recycling rate stalled in 2008-2009 and declined in 2010.

The industry has missed the obvious explanation for these trends. Coal ash is created by electricity generation; ash reuse often occurs in construction. In the economic boom before 2008, construction grew more rapidly than electricity generation, so markets for ash reuse expanded relative to the supply. In the crash after 2008, the reverse was true: construction declined more steeply than electricity generation, so reuse markets shrank relative to ash supply.

Is regulation too expensive because it calls hazardous materials hazardous, and clueless customers could accidentally extend the resulting stigma to other products? In rational debate in ordinary times, this notion would be greeted with derisive laughter, at best. Yet in a year when leading presidential candidates discuss statehood for a non-existent future moon colony, or plans to make immigrants engage in voluntary self-deportation, it’s hard to know what will count as serious.

The current administration’s environmental policies have frequently been a disappointment, but the choice in the November elections seems sure to be between disappointment and disaster.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the world is again conferring about what to do about climate change, and again deciding to do very little. If it wasn’t so serious, it would be funny. The satirical publication The Onion greeted the COP17 conference in Durban, South Africa by announcing the release of a new report showing that global warming may be irreversible if no action is taken to prevent it before 2006; in an example of fair and balanced reporting, they also interviewed a critic who put the point of no return as late as 2010.

The real debate in Durban seems less realistic than The Onion’s satire. Should the Kyoto Protocol, currently scheduled to expire next year, be extended or replaced by a better agreement to limit emissions? Will the promised $100 billion funding for climate adaptation – let alone the larger sums that will actually be needed – somehow materialize? Or should we just agree to keep talking?

While others are not blameless, the United States is the leader of the do-nothings, the country whose inaction ensures a global climate stalemate. As long as the world’s largest economy, with the largest cumulative emissions and the greatest resources to tackle the climate crisis, refuses to act, others are not likely to move forward on their own. Yet there is not a snowball’s chance in Texas that any significant climate policy will survive the current U.S. Congress.

Thus the global failure to protect the earth’s climate can be traced back to the dysfunctional state of American politics. With the Republicans increasingly committed to science denial and the Democrats unable or unwilling to challenge them, climate policy is going nowhere.

What can be done to break through this deadlock? Two recent comments provide a helpful frame for the debate, identifying what will be needed.

First, it has become fashionable to claim that talking directly about climate change isn’t necessary, since we can achieve the same goals by supporting energy research and development, green jobs, competitiveness, or energy security. David Roberts explains on Grist why this strategy cannot work: the climate crisis is much too urgent and extreme to sneak up on it without disturbing anyone; a massive, frontal attack on the problem, with a mobilization of resources comparable to wartime, is needed to avoid devastating climate change.

An outline for that mobilization against climate change is provided by Naomi Klein in The Nation. After attending a Heartland Institute climate-denial conference, Klein concludes that the Tea Party denialists, dead wrong on climate science, are right about the political economy of climate policy: solving the problem would require fundamental changes in capitalism-as-usual. She sees the need to go beyond the current free market ideology in multiple arenas with big-ticket public sector investments in emission-reducing infrastructure; planning for changes in energy use, farming practices, and employment patterns; elimination of dirty-energy subsidies and reinvigoration of environmental regulation; and “taxing the rich and filthy” to pay for it all.

That may not amount to socialism, but it’s several giant steps to the left of American politics, with an active role for government in leading and shaping the economy – perhaps comparable to the high points of Scandinavian social democracy. While it’s a tall order, it’s more plausible than some counter-proposals from Klein’s critics. For example, Environmental Defense Fund economist Gernot Wagner claims that the market can protect the climate if we just put a price on carbon emissions, citing prices as low as $20 per ton of carbon dioxide. That low estimate comes from a U.S. government task force report, which applied a conventional economic analysis that minimized uncertainties and worst-case risks. In a re-analysis of the government calculations, including key climate uncertainties, Liz Stanton and I found that the damages could range up to more than $800 per ton of carbon dioxide. But adoption of a price that high is at least as hard to imagine as Klein’s activist agenda.

I would quarrel with Klein’s analysis only in its emphasis on reducing long-haul transport, and on finding alternatives to growth for developed countries. Only air transport, which is rare for freight, imposes intolerable environmental burdens. And while alternatives to growth will be needed in the long run, it is politically suicidal to advocate this until there is substantial progress towards income equality and economic security.

Meanwhile, it is urgent to get started. As The Onion said last year, “climate change, the popular mid-2000s issue that raised awareness of the fact that the earth’s continuous rise in temperature will have catastrophic ecological effects, has apparently not been resolved, and may still be a problem.” Indeed, the problem doesn’t get smaller if we deny its existence. And nature doesn’t make compromises to break filibusters in the Senate – it only responds to actual changes in emissions.

Or we could wait, and talk again next year.

Is it true that there’s no such thing as bad publicity? If so, we’re in luck. The paper that Elizabeth A. Stanton and I wrote on the social cost of carbon has been discussed on the Bishop Hill blog, a leading forum for British climate skeptics – and in comments on that blog and on Twitter by Richard Tol.

Bishop Hill cites us as estimating that the social cost of carbon – the monetary value of the present and future damage caused by emitting one ton of carbon dioxide – could be $1,000 or more. Tol calls this estimate “complete nonsense,” and Bishop Hill refers to the increase from the U.S. government’s $21 estimate to $1,000 and higher as “fairly jawdropping.”

Feel free to pick your jaw back up; we never said that the social cost of carbon is $1,000. We did say that the value should reflect important climate uncertainties, and that our modeling of those uncertainties produced a range of possible values from $28 to almost $900 for emissions today, or from $64 to about $1,500 for emissions in 2050.

A wide range of possible values is the only reasonable economic representation of scientific uncertainty about climate outcomes. Since the science says that outcomes are uncertain over a wide range, but catastrophic risks cannot be ruled out, then the corresponding economic evaluation should say that the social cost of carbon (SCC) is uncertain over a wide range, but catastrophically high costs cannot be ruled out. The reduction of the range of potential outcomes to a single, precise value such as $21 (or $1,000) slips in a radical change in the structure of information; it implausibly asserts that economists can find certainty where scientists cannot.

What are the uncertainties we considered? Using William Nordhaus’ DICE model, we examined median vs. 95^th percentile climate sensitivity, high vs. low discount rates, and high vs. low estimates of damages at low temperatures, and at high temperatures. The multiple combinations of high/low estimates on four parameters gave us 16 variants of the SCC, spanning that vast range.

Richard Tol, in a comment on Bishop Hill, suggests that his forthcoming literature review of SCC estimates should be used instead of our analysis. In that article, updating his similar, earlier review, he includes 311 estimates, of which 184 (59%) come from his own publications. Those who want a Tol-centric review of the SCC literature should certainly consult his periodic updates, although readers should realize that these articles are self-referential to an extent that is unusual in academic literature reviews.

In debates on Twitter sparked by the Bishop Hill discussion, Tol has raised a number of other complaints. I am accused of having received funding from Friends of the Earth. Guilty as charged. I have also done work funded by the European Commission, various United Nations agencies, national and state governments, and charitable foundations, as well as other environmental NGOs. Tol has, on the other hand, cited obscure legal grounds for failing to reveal anything about his own funding. But really, we should judge one another’s work on the basis of its content, not its funding.

Since the Bishop Hill discussion Tol has tweeted, more than once, his belief that Liz Stanton and I are “mediocre” economists – a very weak substitute for substantive comment on our work. Come on, Richard: hurling hostile epithets at those we disagree with does nothing for the quality of debate.

And Tol has tweeted quite inaccurately about my critique of his FUND model. In an article with another co-author, I found that:

• FUND estimates that the worst economic impact of climate change will be the increased cost of air conditioning.
• FUND’s analysis of agriculture assumes a large net benefit from the first several degrees of warming, based entirely on research published in 1996 or earlier (the field has changed dramatically since then).
• Equation A.3 in the agricultural module (see the FUND documentation) of FUND versions 3.5 and earlier contains a serious risk of division by zero, for a plausible (relatively high-probability) value of one of the variables.

FUND version 3.5, containing that software error, was one of three models used in developing the U.S. government’s estimate of the SCC. When I recalculated FUND’s SCC estimate after attempting to correct the divide-by-zero error, the number more than doubled. If you’re interested in this, read my article, and the FUND 3.5 documentation – or if you’re truly fearless, the FUND 3.5 source code.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Tol disagrees. I’m sure you’re about to have a chance to read his response.

This article was also posted on the Real Climate Economics blog.

Does environmental protection destroy jobs? That may be the strongest argument that the pro-pollution lobby has going for it. No one wants to endorse dirty air and water in so many words, but hey, we’re just trying to save jobs at a time when millions are out of work. In one of the latest reincarnations of this idea, the electric utility industry claims that regulating the disposal of coal ash could eliminate up to 316,000 jobs.

Ever sensitive to industry’s needs and wishes, Republicans in the House of Representatives have drafted a bill to ban federal regulation of coal ash, H.R. 2273. It’s expected to reach the floor of the House for a vote this week. Lobbyists supporting H.R. 2273 helpfully point out that it will stop the destruction of 316,000 jobs.

A quick reality check: regulating coal ash disposal means using earth-moving equipment, which doesn’t drive itself, constructing new facilities which don’t build themselves, and so on. Close your eyes and try to picture this, and you may see some workers on the premises. Environmental regulation generally creates jobs, including lots of blue-collar jobs in construction and manufacturing.

So it’s not surprising that, in my new report on the impacts of coal ash regulation, I found that it would increase employment by 28,000 jobs. Not only does regulation require coal-burning power plants to hire construction workers and others; additional jobs are created in the industries that produce equipment and supplies, like the earth-moving equipment; and still more jobs are created when those workers spend money on food, housing, and everything else.

Why, then, would anyone imagine that regulations kill jobs? My report also dissects the industry estimate of up to 316,000 jobs lost. More than 50,000 of those jobs are completely unexplained, resulting either from errors or from hidden assumptions that are not discussed in the industry report. Most of the rest – more than 200,000 – come from a wildly exaggerated estimate of the effects of a 1 percent increase in electricity rates. (Utilities would pass on the costs of regulation to their customers whenever possible, giving rise to the rate increase.)

That implausibly super-sized response to a small price increase, the basis for the industry’s job loss figure, was based on a single estimate in an unpublished academic paper. The use of that figure ignored the many caveats and qualifications from the paper’s author. One of those caveats, as I explain in my report, could mean that lower employment causes higher electric rates, rather than vice versa.

What happens when you do the analysis correctly? I used the industry’s own estimate of the cost of regulation (from another study by the same consultants who came up with the job-loss estimates). I ran this number through the widely used IMPLAN model of the U.S. economy, which calculates direct, indirect, and induced (even more indirect) job impacts. The result is that the numerous expenditures required by regulation for waste disposal, wastewater treatment, and construction and operation of new facilities, combined with the impact of electricity rate increases on consumers, would lead to a net gain in employment.

Effects on employment are not the only basis on which to judge proposed regulations – perhaps not even the most important. The stated purpose of EPA regulations is to protect human health and the natural environment. The EPA and independent researchers have identified many health hazards associated with coal ash disposal sites; drinking water from wells near one type of ash disposal facility can create a 1 in 50 chance of getting cancer from arsenic in the water. A biologist has identified $2.3 billion of fish and wildlife losses due to releases of pollutants at 22 coal ash disposal sites.  These are the types of issues that should be central to the debate on regulatory proposals.

Strict regulation of coal ash disposal would create a net increase of 28,000 jobs. This conclusion doesn’t, by itself, clinch the argument for such regulation. But it does free us of the unfounded fear of massive job loss, allowing us to evaluate the regulation on its merits.

In a recent blog post, Tufts University professor and former ExxonMobil executive Bruce Everett claims to have had hundreds of conversations with advocates of active climate protection over the last ten years. From these conversations he claims that they – an almost entirely unnamed group of “Climatistas”  –  make ever-changing, unsubstantiated arguments, and cannot answer his objections.

I’m not sure who his “Climatistas” are, or why they were struck dumb by his garden-variety climate-skeptic arguments. But here’s a quick response. I’ll try to resist the temptation to respond to his rhetoric in kind.

Substantively, there are eight paragraphs in his “Climate Change Switcheroo” commentary that argue against the “Climatistas.” Here are his eight main points, with my responses.

1.“We can’t tell yet if the observed warming is outside the natural range of variation.”

Year after year, we’re breaking records for high temperatures. The European heat wave of 2003, which killed tens of thousands of people, was outside the range of recorded temperatures. The wildfires that swept through Russia last year, devastating crop yields, were likewise outside the range of historical experience. I can put you in touch with my relatives in Texas, if you’d like first-hand information about this year’s “observed warming.” On the other hand, which parts of the world are getting colder? Has anyone broken any records for cold temperatures lately?

See Barnett et al., “Human-Induced Changes in the Hydrology of the Western United States” (Science, Feb. 22, 2008), a study that identifies human influences on declining snowpack, rising winter temperatures, and seasonal changes in runoff. See Westerling et al., “Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity” (Science, Aug. 18, 2006), on the alarming recent increase in the same region’s forest fires, closely correlated with rising temperatures.

2. The “embarrassing Climategate email scandal” has reduced the popularity of the “hockey stick” argument [a graph of temperatures vs. time looks like a hockey stick on its side, horizontal until recently, then angled ominously upward].

The “Climategate” scandal of 2009, in which someone stole and published a lot of e-mails from scientific researchers, established beyond a doubt that leading climate scientists are rude and competitive in private conversation. Shocking news, I know, but that’s about it. Repeated government inquiries in the U.K. and here have established that the stolen e-mails do not challenge or undermine the published record of climate science. Where is the peer-reviewed research showing that the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures is wrong? As I said, it’s getting hotter – just like the hockey stick graph implies.

3. The heat-trapping properties of atmospheric carbon alone would not account for the projected degree of warming; the “scary scenarios” are all based on “highly uncertain assumptions about non-carbon factors, such as cloud formation. Climate models tend to assume that all non-carbon factors enhance rather than mitigate the greenhouse effect… the point is at least arguable.”

It’s true that uncertain feedback effects determine the exact strength of global warming, and hence the temperature increase expected from any given level of emissions. The uncertainty, however, is asymmetric: it is easier to rule out the very low temperature increases that Bruce suggests as hopeful possibilities; it is unfortunately difficult, perhaps intrinsically impossible, to rule out dangerously high temperature increases. See Roe and Baker, “Why is Climate Sensitivity So Unpredictable?” (Science, Oct. 26, 2007), for a good summary of the current understanding of this complex issue.

It is simply not true that climate models assume all non-carbon factors enhance the greenhouse effect. IPCC calculations and all other major models include positive and negative contributions to global warming from a variety of gases and aerosols, with cooling effects from sulfates and some particulates. The interplay between positive and negative effects is central to these models.

4. “There are large numbers of scientists who disagree with at least part of the [hypothesis that warming is caused by human activity].”

Really? Is there a reason why they never show up on statistical surveys of scientific opinion? (Perhaps all five of them are too busy appearing on Fox News.)

A survey of 486 U.S. climate scientists in 2005 found 88% agreed or strongly agreed we have “great certainty” that human activities are accelerating global warming (Rosenberg et al., “Climate Change: A Profile of US Climate Scientists’ Perspectives,” Climatic Change, 2010). A survey of more than 3,000 earth scientists around the world found 82% agreed that human activity has been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures; agreement was much higher than 82% among climate scientists, while lower among petroleum geologists (Doran and Zimmerman, “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Eos, 2009). Another study found that 97-98% of the most active climate researchers agree with the IPCC conclusion that human activity is unequivocally responsible for global warming; the relative expertise, prominence, and frequency of publication was substantially higher for those who agree than for those who are unconvinced by the IPCC findings (Anderegg et al., “Expert Credibility in Climate Change”, PNAS, June 21, 2010).

5. “Some risks just can’t be mitigated at acceptable cost. The costs of decarbonizing the economy would be so high that it would require government coercion on a scale unprecedented outside of totalitarian countries.”

So why has Denmark moved so heavily into wind power? Are they secretly a coercive, totalitarian country? Or Germany, where elected governments from all major parties have continued to promote renewable energy (without destroying Germany’s remarkable competitiveness in world markets, by the way)? Why did the Stern Review and many other economic analyses conclude that 1-3% of world output – a smaller percentage than the US, or China, now spends on the military – would be enough to solve the problem? Does your understanding of democracy allow spending of that magnitude on the military, but not on the environment?

6. Studies that show carbon reductions are affordable, such as the McKinsey abatement cost studies, use unreasonable assumptions about capital cost.

Interest rates have dropped sharply in the last few years, as the economic crisis has unfolded, lowering the cost of capital. Meanwhile, the McKinsey studies, done a few years ago, also assume that oil costs $60 per barrel. As oil prices go up, the net cost of abatement goes down: the capital cost is unchanged, but the value of the energy saved is increased. Should we plan on oil returning to $60 per barrel any time soon? Or should we recognize that abatement is a useful hedge against high and increasing energy prices – just in case there’s another energy crisis in our future?

7. Some of the inarticulate Climatistas who Bruce has crossed paths with did not understand net present value, and believed that individuals should not discount future income.

Okay, if you found a student or two who didn’t understand or believe in net present value calculations, they were wrong. But try picking on someone your own size: does Nicholas Stern understand net present value, in the Stern Review? How about Martin Weitzman, a Harvard economist who’s no slouch at mathematics? Both of them believe that it’s urgent to do something big, and soon, about climate change. Serious economic models, which often find it’s possible to abate emissions, are done by analysts of clear economic literacy, employing net present value calculations. It’s not as easy and entertaining to mock them – but it’s a more important discussion to engage in.

8. Julie Nelson, the only named “Climatista” in Bruce’s commentary, allegedly believes that “humans would be much better off if we responded to threats viscerally and instinctively rather than wasting too much time analyzing pros and cons.”

Bruce urges readers to look at Nelson’s article – and you should. It is actually a thoughtful discussion of how economic theories and models often fail to reflect real-life experience; you’d never recognize it from Bruce’s snippy dismissal. Nelson’s conclusion is an excellent note to end on:

“The world we live in is profoundly unsafe, interdependent, and uncertain. Economics that neglects these facts—or, even worse, distracts us from them with stories about mechanism and predictability—does harm. It is high time for economics to catch up both with science, and with social needs, and become a positive force in dealing with climate change.”

This post was originally published by the Real Climate Economics.

Climate legislation, even in its most modest and repeatedly compromised variety, failed last year. And there won’t be a second chance with anything like the current Congress. What caused this momentous failure?

Broadly speaking, there are two rival stories. It could be due to the strength of opposing or inertial forces: well-funded lobbying by fossil fuel industries, biased coverage by increasingly right-wing media, the growth of the “Tea Party” subculture and its rejection of science, dysfunctional institutions such as the U.S. Senate with its filibuster rules, and the low priority given to climate legislation by the Obama administration.

Or it could be because environmentalists screwed up and shot themselves in the foot.

If you had to guess, which of these stories sounds to you like it would get more media attention? You’re right, that’s what everyone else thought, too. Gridlock in U.S. politics, and its effects on the fate of the earth, is such boring old news; the notion that misguided liberals have only themselves to blame sounds so clever and different.

This ecological niche has not gone unfilled. The Breakthrough Institute, whose motto could be “clever and different since 2005,” has repeatedly informed us that the death of environmentalism is the fault of environmentalists. Now “Climate Shift,” by American University political scientist Matthew Nisbet, claims that there was no media bias on climate issues in the last few years, and that advocates of climate legislation outspent their opponents, but still lost.

It’s not hard to see what’s wrong with “Climate Shift.” Nisbet evaluates bias in five well-established media outlets, finding that the New York Times and its ilk give very little attention to climate denial. This is like judging the role of religion in American politics by studying only Episcopalians. Nisbet’s comparison of funding for and against climate legislation mixes and matches incompatible data sources. Major corporations that expressed support for cap-and-trade legislation, BP and Bank of America among them, have large lobbying budgets – and may not have devoted them exclusively to climate advocacy.

The blog world is full of commentary on “Climate Shift,” including the definitive dissection of Nisbet’s errors by Joe Romm at ClimateProgress, and a nice piece by David Roberts at Grist on “hippie-punching” – his term for liberals gaining media attention by attacking other liberals. Rather than adding to the already ample Nisbet-critique literature, I want to speculate about the original question. What did cause the failure of climate legislation?

The boring old story about political gridlock and the strength of the opposition has to carry almost all of the weight. As Romm’s reanalysis of Nisbet’s data makes clear, opponents of climate legislation overwhelmingly outspent the supporters. And the Senate’s adoption of the 60-vote requirement for every substantive issue has made it hard for any new initiatives to prevail. Without a solution to these deep problems, the United States, and therefore the world, will fail to respond to the climate crisis in time to do anything about it.

Still, environmental advocacy wasn’t flawless, and there should be lessons from this experience about how to do better next time. I can see three related areas for improvement.

First, attention and effort narrowed abruptly from broad education and mobilization of popular support to targeting individual members of Congress. As a researcher who often works with environmental groups, I received requests in 2007-2008 for big-picture studies on topics like the costs to the U.S. economy of inaction on climate change. In 2009-2010, I got frantic calls asking if we could write up, in three weeks or less, exactly how climate change will affect six widely scattered states whose senators might be swing votes. (We couldn’t.) While it is important to influence potential swing votes, it is also vital to continue the broader educational effort.

Second, the focus on “framing” and “messaging” grew more and more relentless. Some thought about choosing frames and messages is desirable, but this is an area where it is definitely possible to have too much of a good thing. After a while, every group starts to sound the same and every spokesperson sounds interchangeable, repeating the same few “poll-tested” messages. A greater variety of voices and messages would increase the chances of communicating with different people and issues. And it would avoid the classic problem of monoculture: with only one crop (or message), there is a greater risk of across-the-board failure.

Finally, and most puzzling to me, one of the leading messages did fail. The small kernel of common sense in the Breakthrough shtick is that it’s important to talk about the concerns of ordinary Americans who are worried about their jobs and incomes. But here’s the amazing fact: environmental groups all know that, and constantly talk about the employment benefits of a green agenda. The economic case for “green jobs” is unimpeachably true: intellectual debate doesn’t build energy-efficient cars, appliances, wind turbines, solar panels, mass transit, and well-insulated buildings; it takes manufacturing and construction workers – lots of them – to produce and install these low-carbon technologies.

Why didn’t this frequently repeated, valid argument connect with public opinion? If we can figure that out, it will be a real breakthrough – and might even lead to a real climate shift.

Imagine a press release with this message: We’re not using more household energy than we used to — and the latest data won’t be available until next year. If you read that, I’m guessing you would join me in yawning and moving on to the next story.

That is what the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the federal agency that tracks our energy usage, just said — but it said it in a confusing way that sounded like a much bigger story, and was almost designed to mislead readers. Jess Zimmerman, writing in Grist, was among those whom they succeeded in misleading. Zimmerman’s article, “How Americans defeated efficiency with consumerism,” says that average household energy use has remained stable even as appliances have become more efficient, because we all have more appliances now.

Read the full article at Grist.

True or false: Risks of a climate catastrophe can be ignored, even as temperatures rise? The economic impact of climate change is no greater than the increased cost of air conditioning in a warmer future? The ideal temperature for agriculture could be 17^oC above historical levels?

All true, according to the increasingly popular FUND model of climate economics. It is one of three models used by the federal government’s Interagency Working Group to estimate the “social cost of carbon” – that is, the monetary value of the long-term damages done by greenhouse gas emissions. According to FUND, as used by the Working Group, the social cost of carbon is a mere $6 per ton of CO₂. That translates into $0.06 per gallon of gasoline. Do you believe that a tax of $0.06 per gallon at the gas pump (and equivalent taxes on other fossil fuels) would solve the climate problem and pay for all future climate damages?

I didn’t believe it, either. But the FUND model is growing in acceptance as a standard for evaluation of climate economics. To explain the model’s apparent dismissal of potential harm, I undertook a study of the inner workings of FUND (with the help of an expert in the relevant software language) for E3 Network. Having looked under the hood, I’d say the model needs to be towed back to the shop for a major overhaul.

FUND includes estimates of 15 categories of climate impacts, each calculated separately for 16 regions of the world. Yet most of the climate impacts, as seen by FUND, are too small to matter. Under the U.S. government assumptions (including a 3 percent discount rate), what goes into FUND’s total climate damage estimate of $6 per ton of CO₂? It consists of $8 for net increases in cooling and heating costs – those pesky air conditioning bills – minus $6 of net benefits in agriculture, plus $4 in damage costs for everything else.

It’s a little hard to fathom how “everything else” ends up so small. Sea-level rise, storm damages, droughts and floods, human deaths and diseases, extinction of species, forced migration of huge numbers of climate refugees: all that and more is valued at $4 per ton. Just two of those categories, water supply problems and extinction of species, account for $2, with a mere $2 remaining for everything else. Catastrophes – collapse of major ice sheets, accelerated methane releases from tundra or clathrates, collapse of rainforests, drastic changes in ocean currents – are excluded in FUND by definition.

We took a closer look at FUND’s net benefit of climate change in agriculture, and found three major problems. First, there’s a flat-out algebra mistake: FUND comes dangerously close to dividing by zero, which can lead to meaninglessly large calculations (this is scheduled to be fixed in the next version of the FUND software, but it affects the current U.S. government version and all FUND calculations to date). Second, FUND explores an implausibly wide range of supposedly beneficial temperatures. In the case of South America, FUND’s 95 percent confidence interval on the ideal temperature for agriculture extends to17^oC above and below historical levels.

Third, FUND’s treatment of agriculture is based on very old research, all from 1996 or earlier. Back in those days, estimates of near-term agricultural benefits from warming were common; since then, newer research has steadily reduced those benefit estimates and introduced new ways of approaching the problem. As it turns out, the rise in average temperatures is not as important as the number of days above a temperature threshold, 32^oC (90^oF) or less for some major crops – and climate change means that those damaging temperature extremes will occur much more often.

Quick fixes for some of the problems in FUND’s agriculture calculations would imply increases in the social cost of carbon of $10 to $16. These ad hoc fixes to the model, however, are no substitute for a thorough overhaul of its damage estimates. Until that overhaul occurs, FUND should be treated as a work in progress, not a definitive evaluation of the economics of climate change. It’s not ready for use in U.S. government estimates of the social cost of carbon, or for other policy-making purposes.

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