The stench of climate change denial

This may seem a little strange to you, but when I think about my teenage years, I sometimes associate it with a faint smell of sewage. When I was in high school, my family lived on the south shore of Long Island, where few houses were connected to sewers. Most had septic tanks, and there always seemed to be one overflowing somewhere in the direction the wind was blowing.

Most of Nassau County ended up having a sewer. But many American homes, especially in the Southeast, are not connected to sewers, and there are more and more overflowing septic tanks, on a much larger scale than I remember from my vaguely smelly hometown, which is disgusting and also a threat to public health.

What is the cause? Climate change. Washington Post reported last week that “sea level has risen at least 15 centimeters since 2010” along the Gulf and southern Atlantic coasts. This may not seem like much, but it raises groundwater levels and increases the risk of pits overflowing. The looming wastewater crisis is just one of many catastrophes we can expect as the planet continues to warm, and it’s nowhere near the top of the list. But it seems to me that it graphically illustrates two points. First, the damage from climate change is likely to be more severe than even pessimists have tended to believe. Second, mitigation and adjustment—which will be necessary, because we would still face large climate impacts even if we took immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—will be much more difficult, as a political matter, than we think. they should be.

On the first point: calculating the costs of climate change and, relatedly, the costs imposed by polluters every time they emit an extra ton of carbon dioxide requires merging the results of two disciplines. On the one hand, we need physicists to calculate how much greenhouse gas emissions will warm the planet, how weather patterns will change, and so on. On the other hand, we need economists to calculate how these physical changes will affect productivity, health costs, and so on.

In fact, there is a third dimension: social and geopolitical risk. How will we deal with, for example, millions or tens of millions of climate refugees? But I don’t think anyone knows how to quantify those risks.

In any case, the physical aspect of this assignment seems very solid. Of course, for decades there has been a campaign aimed at discredit climate research and, in some cases, to defame individual climate scientists. But if one moves away from the slander, one realizes that climatology has been one of the great analytical triumphs in history. Climatologists correctly predicted, decades in advance, an unprecedented rise in global temperatures.

The economic aspect of the effort seems more dubious. And it’s not because economists haven’t tried. In fact, in 2018, William Nordhaus He received a Nobel largely for his work on “integrated assessment models” that attempt to bridge climate science and economic analysis.

However, with all due respect—Nordhaus happens to be my first mentor in economics—I have long been concerned that these models underestimate the economic costs of climate change, because a lot of things you didn’t think about could turn out. evil. The prospect of part of the United States being inundated by sewage was not on my list. In the latest studies, there is a tendency to raise forecasts of the damage caused by climate change. The uncertainty remains enormous, but presumably things will be even worse than we thought.

So what are we going to do about it? Even if we would take drastic measures To reduce emissions right now, many of the consequences of past emissions, such as much greater sea level rises than we have seen so far, are already, so to speak, assumed. So we’re going to have to take a wide range of measures to mitigate the damage, including expanding sewage systems to limit the rising tide of, well, sludge.

But will we take those measures? At first, climate denialism was about fossil fuel interests, and to some extent, it still is. But it has also become a front in the culture war, with politicians like Ron DeSantis of Florida who apparently have decided that even the mere fact of mentioning climate change is a liberal thing.

Now imagine the collision between that kind of policy and the urgent need for significant public spending on everything from levees to sewage systems to limit climate damage. An expenditure of that magnitude will almost certainly require new tax revenue. How long do you think it will take the cultural warriors on the right to agree to it?

Therefore, I am very concerned about the future of the climate. We probably won’t do enough to limit emissions. President Joe Biden has done much more than any of his predecessors, but he is still not enough, and Donald Trump has promised oil executives that, if he wins, he will reverse much of what Biden has done. Other than that, we are unlikely to do enough to limit the damage.

In short, it is not difficult to see some terrible outcomes in the not-too-distant future, even before total global catastrophe arrives. Bad things are coming, and we’re already starting to smell them.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner

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