Robert J. Samuelson, in the Nov. 13 2006 issue of Newsweek, tries to claim that the Stern’s approach to global warming is alarmist public relations. While I disagree with that overall assessment, Samuelson has some things exactly right. (I’ll quote him in italics, but you should read the Stern Report, as well as his article, first.)

Samuelson argues:

• “With today’s technologies, we don’t know how to cut greenhouse gases in politically and economically acceptable ways.” True. Alternative energies like wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal are way too minor to make much of a dent in global energy demands quickly enough. And, nuclear energy (the choice of Stewart Brand and James Lovelock) is a significant political challenge, with environmentalists and intelligent people everywhere split on both sides. Lovelock, for his part (in The Revenge of Gaia), claims that only nuclear power could bring the amount of electricity our culture would need for a soft landing out of our carbon addiction. (Nuclear would be our methadone, so to speak.)
• In rich democracies, policies that might curb greenhouse gases require politicians and the public to act in exceptionally “enlightened” (read: “unrealistic”) ways. Well. Nicholas Stern spends the entire early chapter 2 on economic concepts like discounting and ethical concepts like regard for future inhabitants of the earth. In a certain sense, Samuelson is exactly right: it will be impossible to motivate governments of rich nations to act without an ethical regard for those most impacted by climate change in the future. If such an ethical regard is truly impossible, or as Samuelson puts it “unrealistic”, then we, and all future humans, are truly in trouble.
• Even if rich countries cut emissions, it won’t make much difference unless poor countries do likewise—and so far, they’ve refused because that might jeopardize their economic growth and poverty-reduction efforts. Very true. For instance, I wrote last week about peat bog burning in Indonesia, which on its own spews more carbon into the air than many Kyoto reductions. Beyond that, India and China are in hypergrowth mode, and China has an enormous stockpile of the nastiest coal you could imagine. There is no doubt that, even with Chinese governmental leadership on greenhouse gas reduction, many entrepreneurs, already used to horrific environmental problems and choking smog, will find a way to mine and market that coal.
• The notion that there’s only a modest tension between suppressing greenhouse gases and sustaining economic growth is highly dubious. True enough there also. As Bill McKibben argued long ago in The End of Nature, the solution to global warming most likely appears in a total reversal of our acquisitive, consumptive ways. In Jared Diamond’s Collapse, we read that a deep re-evaluation of core values is often necessary to prevent collapse. Well, yes — in this case, the value of economic growth.
• The other great distortion in Stern’s report involves global warming’s effects. No one knows what these might be… Erm, well. I depart from Samuelson here. The science really isn’t that complex. You have ice on land — glaciers –, it melts, the resulting water goes into the oceans, changing ocean currents and salinity. Meltwater from the top of mountains which helped communities survive flows away and is gone forever, leading to droughts. Permafrost and floating ice melts, changing a reflective white into an absorbtive brown or blue, leading to rapid rises in temperature. Changing climate zones leads to the survival of insects which could never survive before, leading to massive die-offs of trees (as currently in British Columbia). These are critical dynamics of the 21st century, and it isn’t too hard to see where they lead. And they have all, on a smaller scale, already happened.

What Samuelson needs to do is take a risk assessment job at an insurance company which guarantees oceanfront property in a hurricane zone, or tree stands in Canada, or roads and pipelines on permafrost — and then decide what the 30 year horizon looks like.

This will be the first of my posts about the Stern Review Report.  (Living on Earth had a discussion about the Stern Review on 11/3/2006.)

The aim of this blog is to sort out the various ways human society and culture is going to (need to) shift, in the face of the shifts in climate. One especially interesting moment comes when it emerges that a few quasi-positive things will happen in the US as global warming gets going. (See the chart on page 57 of Chapter 3.) Essentially: for a brief time, yields for certain crops will probably go up, and winters will get milder. These effects will occur mostly before global averages have gone above 2 degrees centigrade higher.

Think about those effects. They seem to mean that the worst carbon polluter, with the largest amount of global warming skeptics, will have some minor positive effects at the beginning of global warming’s toll. As any quick look at the map and the distribution of people in the US will show, most people either live on the coasts — where global warming’s effect is muted prior to rising seas and if you can ignore hurricanes — or in the north-east and rust belt — where winters are usually nasty, and reprieve from the cold and high heating bills will be appreciated, by especially the lower and middle classes.

In a time when the US needs to be a leader rather than a complaining follower, it is not good news that some nominally good effects of a warming climate will be felt by people on the coasts and by people in the snow belt during the next 15 years or so.