My meteorologist friend and sometime EconLog commenter Tom Lee had an excellent letter in today’s Monterey Herald. Here it is:
Humans get better at weather protection
“Study blames climate change for 37% of global heat deaths” reads the Herald headline, echoing a headline syndicated across the world. Sounds sinister, but surprisingly the study that generated the headline was not based on actual data on people who died because of heat. It was based on a computer model. If it were valid, one would expect it to agree with other data about heat-related deaths. Not so.
EPA-published records for heat-related deaths over the United states show no trend since about 1975. In fact, the most annual deaths occurred in 1980. If a warming climate were killing more and more people, wouldn’t we be seeing the most deaths now? The EPA heat wave index reaches back to 1895; the worst heat waves in the U.S. occurred in the 1930s with the Great Dust Bowl.
The article also claims an increasing toll due to global warming from storms, flooding and drought. But a plot of data from the EMDAT Global Disaster Database shows that climate- related deaths have plummeted in recent years. The reason: we humans have gotten much better at protecting ourselves from the weather. Increasing global wealth means that even the poorest are less vulnerable to the elements.
— Thomas F. Lee, Monterey
Interestingly, I posted on it on Facebook, but the post was apparently taken down without any message to me. So I did it again and it was taken down again. The third time is probably not a charm. The Facebook Stasi are apparently on their game. And what nerve Tom had in referring to data reported by that hotbed of libertarianism, the Environmental Protection Agency.
The picture above is of members of the Stasi.
Note: Before you get all hot and bothered, recognize that of course I know I’m exaggerating by referring to the employees of a for-profit firm as Stasi. I’m using the term they way the people on Seinfeld referred to the soup Nazi. In both cases, their private property gives them the absolute right to be petty, close-minded people who don’t want others to see alternative views, no matter how science-based.
READER COMMENTS
Stéphane Couvreur
May 3 2022 at 4:55am
Regarding the carbon tax at 23:20, I am not surprised that a government official speaks of this instrument as her preferred option to reduce carbon emissions. What I find more surprising is the lack of reaction of economists, who could argue that cap-and-trade is preferable. There can be a reasonable debate about this claim, of course, but I believe cap-and-trade to be preferable because:
1) it doesn’t have the word “tax” in the title and generates no revenue for the governement (provided that the quotas are allocated for free),
2) as a consequence of 1), there is no need to redistribute the receipts from the carbon tax as is standard with a Pigouvian tax,
3)
Jon Leonard
May 6 2022 at 5:36pm
A key difference between a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade system is how they handle errors in forecasting. That is, under a tax system it is easier for individual businesses to adjust if the overall target was chosen incorrectly. Under a cap-and-trade regime, the total amount of pollution is pre-determined; this either pollutes more than necessary if the cap is “too high”, or stifles the economy more than necessary if the cap is “too low”. As in many cases in economics, the central plan can be suboptimal.
Stéphane Couvreur
May 3 2022 at 5:08am
(Oops!)
3) as a consequence of 2), there are fewer opportunities of rent-seeking and buying constituencies with the said tax receipts.
I have seen no economist making those points. Nordhaus prefers the tax because, as he writes in an endnote, quotas are more susceptible to cause corruption in developing countries. Sumner considers “foolish” the idea of allocating the quotas for free in a cap-and-trade system (I don’t understand why, cf. opportunity cost). Harford considers that a tax or a cap-and-trade are almost equivalent and points to Weitzman’s 1974 “Prices vs quantities” article. Levitt fears that firms would be better at distorting politically the allocation procedure in a cap-and-trade system than with a tax.
Do you have an opinion on the subject, David?
Best regards,
Stéphane
David Henderson
May 3 2022 at 7:03pm
Stephane,
I have two opinions.
First, either the tax or the cap and trade opens things to rent seeking. Your point #3 applies, but you didn’t mention the extensive fight that would go on as various firms, individuals, and governments pushed for more than their pro-rata share of permits. It’s hard for me to judge which is worse.
Second, your point about not getting revenue for the government is a good one. They’re likely to waste a lot of it. In my ideal world, which I think is highly unlikely, given the political system, the revenue would go to reducing the federal debt or reducing the most distorting taxes, dollar for dollar. Those are likely to be taxes on capital. But the political pressure would be strongly against that and in favor of giving each person and household a check. So the chance to either pay down the debt or reduce distorting taxes would be wasted.
A bigger point, in my view, is that there’s not much justification at this point for either. Remember that the goal is to “solve” global warming, not to reduce carbon usage per se. Reducing carbon usage is one way to do so, but there’s virtually no evidence that it’s the least-cost way. I think that some form of geo-engineering is likely to be substantially less costly.
Stéphane Couvreur
May 4 2022 at 1:07am
Thanks a lot for this long and thoughtful response.
A quick reaction:
Your third and bigger point is entirely right. No system solves for the optimal trade-off between reduction and adaptation. I will keep this in mind.
As for the first point, as long as there is some emission reduction, I believe cap-and-trade offers fewer opportunities for rent-seeking. Here’s why:
– it can be organized to be a one-time thing, so the rent-seeking contest occurs only once, initially, whereas the fight for the carbon tax receipts can go on forever;
– there is not much in it for bureaucrats, whose task would be to monitor emissions and not to regulate or collect a tax, so there’s a chance they will be more impartial.
Going back to your third point, I agree that cap-and-trade is far from “perfect” in any meaning of the word. Most economist I’ve heard criticizing it had a very different argument: “The price of tradable permits turns out to be too volatile to encourage firms to invest in carbon reduction technology”, they say (sic).
Your answer is implicitly that adaptation is better than reduction. This makes a lot more sense. It was also David Friedman’s answer.
Stéphane
David Henderson
May 5 2022 at 10:41pm
You’re welcome.
Good point about one-time.