What We’d Do If We Actually Cared

Karl Muth outlines what global collective action to tackle climate change might look like, via giant fighting robots and sea monsters.

I’m not much of an environmentalist. Climate change is relatively low on my list of worries. I have little doubt we will find ways to adapt to our changing environment and, eventually, ways to modify our environment through the engineering of weather, thermostatic local control of weather patterns, and other advances. Yes, some people (and plants and animals) will die and some things will change. Some people will grow enormously wealthy from these changes, others will see their fortunes destroyed.

But I’m often in contact with economists who care about the environment to an extent I don’t. They talk about how policies are needed to change the policy toward climate and hence toward emissions, production balance, manufacturing prioritisation, and so forth. They appear on panels with names like “Sustainable Approaches to Macroeconomic Incentivecraft” (yes, they actually used the word “incentivecraft”) and “Saving the World Through Credits and Rabbits” (presumably a pun on “credits and debits”?).

A few years ago, I was having Ethiopian food in Gulu, Uganda with my dear friend Jenn Helgeson. Jenn is an Oxford graduate, a sharp economist, and affiliated with the Grantham Institute, a thinktank within the London School of Economics focused on climate change (and, particularly, its policy and economic implications). We discussed the then-recent empirical findings that people will, generally, not drastically adjust their personal spending (for instance, people will generally not spend two or three times as much to purchase an automobile that is slightly more friendly to the environment).

Anyone who has thought about this issue realises quickly that environmental policy is a regulatory issue, an economic issue, and hence an issue of state action (rather than any individual consumer or group of individual consumers being able to make much of a difference). The question then becomes: What would the state do if it cared about the environment.

Let me preface this hypothetical by defining what “cared about the environment” actually means. It means prioritising environmental gains over other types of gains, be they political or economic or otherwise. So, if Obama would like to save the environment, but knows that opening a factory in Detroit that makes SUVs (hardly the “green jobs” he loves to ramble on about) will get him substantially more votes than planting trees (because his administration prioritises job creation over environmental preservation), then that isn’t “caring about the environment” in the sense I’m discussing here. If China would like to save the environment, but would prefer to continue to have enormous economic growth (even if that growth is environmentally-damaging), then that’s not “caring about the environment” in my definition.

When I watch economists who are very invested in the saving-the-environment stuff, I am always struck by how dire they seem to believe the consequences of the status quo are. Sea levels will rise, millions will be displaced, people will starve, and so on. Basically, things will happen that wealthy Westerners are only exposed to in monster movies and disaster movies. If true, then “caring about the environment” basically means we should all band together and work on this issue at the exclusion of nearly all other research and development activities, and instead of other industrial output options.

I watched the film Pacific Rim (which I don’t recommend…) on a recent flight to America. In the film, sea monsters emerge from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and the world bands together to build massive robots which then fight the sea monsters in computer-generated hand-to-hand combat sequences. When I say “care about the environment” I mean this level of dedication to the cause of environmental preservation – Pacific Rim doesn’t show us what the rest of the world looks like (we only see the robot-piloting gladiators), but it seems the economy must be basically optimised around producing as many of these huge fighting robots as possible at the expense of anything else.

So, what would that look like? What policy step would be proof that the United States (which has, in a mixture of aid and defense spending, the resources to make enormous differences in this regard) actually cared about the environment in the sense that it was seen as a first-tier priority?

I think the answer is pretty straightforward.

The US has about eight hundred billion dollars of discretionary budget for defense, foreign aid, diplomatic assistance, and military cooperation (the actual number for fiscal 2013 was $803.8B). While I don’t expect this total amount would be spent on climate change prevention, let’s say the US allocated eighty billion dollars a year – one tenth of the amount.

With this amount, the obvious policy decision is to buy nuclear power plants for China. China plans to complete seventy “planned megacities” in the next forty years. The vast majority of these cities will be supported in their power needs by a planned network of new power grids and over 520 coal-fired power plants. While some of these power plants will be so-called “clean coal” plants and will include particulate sequestration technologies, the vast majority will not be (and will likely be stage-burner designs based on Soviet-era technology).

Recent cost studies in South Africa and Australia (arguably two of the most important markets for new nuclear plants with advanced technology – South Africa tending to favour new heavy-metal-cooled reactors while Australia predominantly uses Israeli-designed sodium-cooled reactors whose design pedigrees can be traced to late-1960’s French designs) put the cost of a new mid-sized reactor with a high capacity factor at around four billion dollars. Currently, there are about sixty nuclear reactors of this size or larger under construction around the world and about 220 proposed reactors. The UAE’s first nuclear reactor (designed by the South Koreans) will be on-line in 2015 and will deliver full capacity by 2017. This reactor is likely a good basis for the kinds of reactors the US would offer to build in China.

Each of these mid-sized reactors can more reliably produce peak power (defined as within 10% of maximum sustained output) while producing zero carbon emissions. The total power generated is an order of magnitude higher, with a mid-sized nuclear plant generating as much power as eight or nine Soviet-era coal facilities. In addition, since the Chinese are building fresh infrastructure around the plants, there are opportunities to harvest efficiency gains in grid design and power control. By preventing hundreds of coal power plants from being built across China, the US would re-shape the climate discussion and prevent one of the largest sources of problematic emissions.

But that’s what the US would do if it actually cared about the climate issue.

Which, as we’ve established, it doesn’t.