By James Pethokoukis

Since
the birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s, concerns about the
environment and climate have often been marked by dour pessimism
about the future. But has the mainstream scientific consensus about climate
change evolved over the past several decades? And just how great a cost is
climate change likely to impose in the next century? Steven E. Koonin joined
“Political Economy” to answer these questions and more.

Steve is a professor at New York University and a nonresident senior fellow here at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously, he served as the Under Secretary for Science at the US Department of Energy under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011. This year, he published “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”

Below
is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full
discussion here. You can also subscribe to my
podcast on Apple
Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.

Should what we have learned in the past 20 years make us
more concerned because either the potential outcomes are worse or we’re more
certain about those outcomes?

I
think we should be less concerned. And of course, your matter of concern
depends a little bit on where you sit. And so I sit as a citizen of a developed
world country and I’m not starved for energy. If I were somebody in China and
India, I might have a different set of concerns, but my own concern has been
tempered by realizing just how adaptable human society is. Again, if you look
at the 20th century, as the globe warmed a degree, we saw the greatest
improvement in human welfare ever as the population quadrupled from two billion
to roughly eight billion people.

And
if you look at the projections of what’s going to happen with the global
temperature by the end of this century, we’ll see another one and a half
degrees roughly, and that’s not going to make civilization fall apart. Come on,
it’s not going to happen at all. And in fact, the IPCC says that. It’s says
that compared to other forces, demographics, technology, regulation, trade and
so on, climate is a relatively small impact on the economy.

How should we approach the worst-case scenario
projections?

Unless
you can quantify those probabilities, it hardly makes sense to think about
them. Of course, all kinds of crazy things can happen, but unless you can put a
number on it, you can’t sensibly think about it. All you have is emotion.

There are many crazy things that could happen (the proverbial asteroid, etc.) and we just get on with life. With respect to the climate system itself, there was a paper last summer in which four noted mainstream economists analyzed eight different tipping points, including the proverbial outcasting of the permafrost, the slowing down of the Atlantic circulation, the desertification of the Amazon, and so on. And it turns out that those add about 1 percent or 2 percent to the economic damages at the end of the century, which were already a couple percent for a couple of degrees temperature rise. So at least the best mainstream economic thinking is the economic damages of rising temperatures including tipping points are at the percent level, a nothing burger.

Has the argument for taking action on the climate been
changing? Is it something different now than it was 30 years ago or 10 years
ago?

I
think there’s, at least among the experts, a better understanding of just how
difficult it is to change the energy system or to build a reliable energy
system in the developing world. Anthony Downs talked about the cycle of issue
acceptance or issue prominence. Public issues, at least in the West, go through
a series of five phases where at first it’s only among the experts, then
suddenly the public realizes that there is a problem and great enthusiasm for
solving it. Stage three is they realize just how difficult it’s going to be to
solve it. Stage four, then stage five: It fades into the background.

I
think we are well into stage three now, when you look at what happened in
Glasgow where developing countries said, “We need energy and we’ve got the
wolf at the door. We got to worry about that. And maybe a couple of generations
from now we’ll worry about our emissions.” And that’s not an unreasonable
attitude for them to take. We in the US, EU will have a different attitude, but
unfortunately, the US is only 13 percent of global emissions. And even if we
went to zero, it would be wiped out by the growth in the rest of the world
within a decade.

Do you have thoughts about geoengineering as a kind of a
break-the-glass option if things get bad fast?

I’ve
been thinking about this for 15 years or so. So there are two modes. One is
that we suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and it’s hard to be against
that. We could do that by planting more trees or by physical, chemical methods.
The other mode is to make the Earth a little bit more shiny to reflect a little
bit more sunlight. The Earth right now reflects about 30 percent of the
sunlight. If it were 31 percent, it would counteract almost all the warming
effect of greenhouse gases produced by humans that we’ve seen so far.

And
there are schemes to do that. You could put particles up in the stratosphere.
You could try to make particles over the ocean a little bit more common, things
of that sort. I think it’s a subject that needs to be researched. And compared
to 15 years ago, you can now talk about it in polite company, because people
are starting to realize how hard it is to reduce emissions. I’m very much
against deployment except in an extreme situation and with full discussion
among all the world’s nations about doing that.

What is the argument you would make or the policy advice
that you would give that might be persuasive to folks being flooded with
information from activists painting a very apocalyptic scenario?

I would say the first thing to do is to cancel the climate crisis, namely to tell people there is no emergency here. This is a complex problem that has different facets and different solutions. So first of all, let us stand back and take a much better understanding of the problem. Climate literacy and energy literacy are woefully lacking among policymakers. And the second thing I would do is let us sit down and formulate a plan that will gracefully let us reduce emissions without disrupting the economy, employment, the way people live their lives, or the nation’s geopolitical standing and its dependence upon foreign sources of energy.

That’s not so specific, but I think elements of those plans to get a little more specific will be the development of small modular nuclear reactors, a push to develop battery storage longer term, a push on fusion energy, which has seen some interesting progress in the last year or so, things of that sort. But is the world going to end in 10 years or 20 years? Absolutely not. Come on.

The post 5 questions for Steven Koonin on climate science appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.