By Andrew Christie
The Tribune printed a double-barreled attack on renewable energy and minimization of the economic impacts of climate change by ultra-conservative “climate skeptic” Jay Ambrose on Dec. 10 (“Climate change: Is being reasonable asking too much?”) It was the same old sales pitch, repeatedly refuted, with one slightly newer element: The article was the latest pivot in the new fall-back strategy for the “what me worry?” contingent as they continue to twist away from the implications of both climate data and real-world events.
To that end, Ambrose downplayed last October's IPCC report as “interesting views” on the horrendous costs of increasing wildfires, rising seas, crop failure, killer storms, blackouts and battered infrastructure.
Not to worry, because:
“We have a counter-assessment that the report’s estimates of the cost of all this won’t be overwhelming relative to GDP growth. According to analyses in the Wall Street Journal, even small growth will compensate for the damages and adjustments.”
No doubt, the former residents of Paradise and the survivors of the next monster hurricane and floods will be relieved to hear this.
To be clear, IPCC report estimates the economic cost from 2 degrees’ Celsius warming to be $69 trillion. As Eugene Linden, author of “Winds of Change: Climate, Weather and the Destruction of Civilizations” has written, “Even this figure might prove radically conservative.” Linden also noted, without affixing a dollar cost, the prospect of waves of destabilizing immigration from areas of the world where it has become too hot to survive and mass starvation implied in the findings of “a number of studies [that] predict yield declines of up to 70% for vegetables if the world warms beyond 2 degrees Celsius.”
Here’s how Ambrose characterizes this last scenario: He notes the prospect of “cows having fewer plants to chew,” so “dairy products will decrease.” He stops there, rather than draw out the implications of people also having “fewer plants to chew,” because it’s all about GDP, not starvation.
And about that figure that “might prove radically conservative:” Indeed it might, because it is. As the Climate Web put it in response to both the economic analysis in the Climate Assessment and the Wall Street Journal’s “counter assessment,” such efforts at forecasting are “not unlike hitting a dartboard bullseye from five miles away in a windstorm.” Also: “These economic impacts ignore a large part of the economic impacts picture, focusing as they do on just a few economic sectors. Not included at all, for example, are the economics of the international and national security impacts of climate change for the United States, or the evolving climate change systemic risk literature which goes so far as to suggest that climate change could lead to an economic collapse long before 2090.”
Ambrose dissed solar and wind power because sometimes the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. Google “Battery Storage Poised to Expand Rapidly” to see just how creaky this argument has become.
He made the inevitable pitch for nukes as the salvation of a warming planet. He should stop. Per the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, improving the efficiency of electricity generation from conventional power plants would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 47 percent, equivalent to the carbon reductions achievable by 800 nuclear power plants. One dollar invested in efficiency cuts seven times as much carbon as a dollar invested in nuclear power. A dollar invested in wind energy creates 2.3 times more energy and five times more jobs.
What the Ambrose article came down to was this dusty and deeply confused recipe: No significant government action necessary, build more (government subsidized) nukes, leave the free market alone to work its magic.
Fortunately, some incoming Congress members have a much better idea.