Will Environmentalists Engage in a Cost/Benefit Dialog?

Glenn Doty notes with sadness:

What would be nice is if someone actually tried to nail down a rough estimate for the global net economic benefit, and the national net economic benefit, for different paced CO2 reduction strategies.

The fact that environmental lobbies continue to discuss the environment separately from a discussion of economics has rendered the discussion completely useless. If you don’t tell someone how much they stand to gain or lose from different strategies, they will always hedge their investments to minimal and/or token investments.

Curiously, people are willing to GIVE more than they are willing to invest in beneficial enterprise that has a low perceived ROI. So since the environmentalists refuse to engage in a cost/benefit dialog – preferring to keep the conversation tied to just “doing good” – they make certain the average American is only willing to support the absolute minimum investment. We need more investment, so it’s time we start analyzing the dollars as well as the sense.

We all know that increasing the rate of adoption for wind and solar (and geothermal – eventually), and more importantly increasing the investment in improving insulation and building efficiencies and helping with growth strategies and efficiency planning in the industrializing third world; all will help reduce the long-term impacts of global warming. There’s no-one out there who doesn’t understand that.

We need to know how much a 50-year strategy will cost and how much we would benefit from it as opposed to a 100-year strategy, and how much that would cost, etc.

I don’t agree with your premise, i.e., that environmentalists refuse to engage in a cost/benefit dialog.  In my last book, Is Renewable Really Doable? I had terrific discussions on this topic with Dr. Jason Scorse, author of “What Environmentalist Need to Know About Economics,” and Dr. Robert Pollin (check out this resume’), whose entire career is built around quantifying the economic benefit of “green” investments; he’s a key adviser to the Obama administration on this subject, and he was fairly specific in his talks with me.

Moreover, there are household names like Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute and Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The Third Industrial Revolution” who both travel the globe speaking and writing on this exact subject. 

Now the question could be raised, “Are they correct?”  I’m not sure that’s an answerable question, as there is so much uncertainty in so many of the key factors – even in the short-term, let alone the 50- and 100-year time frames, a few of which are:

• Unknown positive or negative feedback cycles in global warming

• Impact of other existential threats to civilization: disease, food shortages, nuclear weapons, financial implosions, and any of dozens of other “black swan” events

• Impact of yet-to-be-discovered technologies

What I can tell you is that, in the absence of internalizing the externalities, i.e., putting a price on our energy-related follies and extravagances, and letting market economics dictate a “business as usual” approach to world energy policy, you can kiss this planet good bye in terms of its ability to support the human species.