GREEN INFLUENCE

A discussion of different approaches to climate policy

Last week, the U.S. government released the Fourth National Climate Assessmentwhich outlined the dire economic and environmental consequences of climate change. Instead of highlighting key findings of the report—two good summaries are available here and here—we'll contextualize the current climate debate within legal history, which shows the limitations of current economically-focused arguments for climate policy.

A 2010 Yale Law Journal article by Jedediah Purdy situates the current climate debate within the long tradition of political argument about the natural world, and challenges assumptions that environmental values which appeal to moral and civic duty are too weak and vague to spur political action. In fact, Purdy argues that major environmental legislation emerged from "democratic argument over the value of the natural world and its role in competing ideas of citizenship, national purpose, and the role and scale of government." Purdy does more than just argue that environmental public language is more coherent than conventionally understood, he argues that understanding climate policy through economic self-interest diminishes the role political struggle plays in shaping national values and interests:

"Consider one example that makes little sense through the lens of narrow self-interest, much more as part of an ongoing debate over environmental values: the organizing project that has led 1015 city governments to adopt the goals of the Kyoto Protocol (a seven percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2012) through an instrument called the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. Since the costs are not zero, and the benefits, in theory, are almost exactly that, the question of motivation is still fairly sharply presented.

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In private interviews and public statements, city officials explain their efforts in several ways. They are quick to cite the advantage certain regions hope to enjoy from early adoption and manufacture of technologies that may later become standard. They embrace a simple public-choice motive: city governments hope to benefit from green-development block grants and, in the longer term, density-friendly economic development, and early efforts may position them to do both.
They also regard themselves as engaged in political persuasion that they hope will induce others to take similar action. Whether this is plausible is partly endogenous to the politics itself. This politics seeks to affect the reasons—specifically those grounded in environmental values—that people understand themselves to have for joining collective undertakings. Rather than a specimen of an independently established logic of collective action, it is an engagement with that logic itself."

Link to full paper.

• In a 2018 article, Purdy looks more deeply at the history of environmental justice, and why its concerns were left out of mainstream environmental law: "Mainstream environmental law was the last major legal product of 'the great exception,' the decades of the mid-twentieth century when, unlike any other time in modern history, economic inequality was declining and robust growth was widely shared." Link.

• A 2017 dissertation examines the environment as an object of politics, as opposed to natural capital, and argues that the environment is a "political problem that entails ongoing negotiations over the legitimacy of market rule, the role of the state in relation to the market, and the value of ecological stewardship." Link.

• The new climate reports have brought attention back to solar geoengineering, which the Guardian, covering a Gernot Wagner paper, notes is extremely inexpensive and possibly an option for desperate circumstances: “The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report said geoengineering might be adopted as a temporary “remedial measure” in extreme circumstances.”Link.

GREEN GROWTH CONDUNDRUM | PEOPLE AND THE POOR LAWS

HARD CAPS

Economic growth vs. natural resources

A recent Foreign Policy op-ed by JASON HICKEL examines “green growth,” a policy that calls for the absolute decoupling of GDP from the total use of natural resources. Hickel synthesizes three studies and explains that even in high-efficiency scenarios, economic growth makes it impossible to avoid unsustainably using up natural resources (including fossil fuels, minerals, livestock, forests, etc).

“Study after study shows the same thing. Scientists are beginning to realize that there are physical limits to how efficiently we can use resources. Sure, we might be able to produce cars and iPhones and skyscrapers more efficiently, but we can’t produce them out of thin air. We might shift the economy to services such as education and yoga, but even universities and workout studios require material inputs. Once we reach the limits of efficiency, pursuing any degree of economic growth drives resource use back up.”

The op-ed sparked debate about the state of capitalism in the current climate crisis, most notably in an Bloomberg op-ed by NOAH SMITH, who claims that Hickel is a member of “a small but vocal group of environmentalists telling us that growth is no longer possible—that unless growth ends, climate change and other environmental impacts will destroy civilization.” Though Smith’s op-ed doesn’t directly engage with many of Hickel’s points, his general position prompted a clarifying (and heated)response from Hickel:

“Noah is concerned that if we were to stop global growth, poor countries would be ‘stuck’ at their present level of poverty. But I have never said that poor countries shouldn’t grow—nor has anyone in this field of study (which Noah would know had he read any of the relevant literature). I have simply said that we can’t continue with aggregate global growth.

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While poor countries may need some GDP growth, that should never—for any nation, rich or poor—be the objective as such. The objective should be to improve human well-being: better health, better education, better housing, happiness, etc. The strategy should be to target these things directly. To the extent that achieving these goals entails some growth, so be it. But that’s quite different from saying that GDP needs to grow forever.”

• From a study on the limits of green growth: “GDP cannot be decoupled from growth in material and energy use. It is therefore misleading to develop growth-oriented policy around the expectation that decoupling is possible. GDP is increasingly seen as a poor proxy for societal wellbeing. Society can sustainably improve wellbeing, including the wellbeing of its natural assets, but only by discarding GDP growth as the goal in favor of more comprehensive measures of societal wellbeing.” Link.
• In a recent article, Juan Moreno-Cruz, Katharine L. Ricke, and Gernot Wagner discuss ways to approach the climate crisis and argue that “mitigation (the reduction of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions at the source) is the only prudent response.” Link.

CARBON TAXES | WORLD TRADE DATABASE

ENERGY BOOM

A new carbon tax proposal and a big new carbon tax research report

Representative Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) introduced a carbon tax bill to the House last week (though it is “sure to fail” with the current government, it's unusual to see a carbon tax proposed by a Republican). According to Reuters, “Curbelo said the tax would generate $700 billion in revenue over a decade for infrastructure investments.” A deep analysis is available from The Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia SIPA, which started up a Carbon Tax Initiative this year.

For a broader look at carbon taxes, earlier this month the Columbia initiative published a significant four-part series on the “economic, energy, and environmental implications of federal carbon taxes” (press release here).

The overview covers impacts on energy sources:

“The effects of a carbon tax on prices are largest for energy produced by coal, followed by oil, then natural gas, due to the difference in carbon intensity of each fuel. Every additional dollar per ton of the carbon tax increases prices at the pump by slightly more than one cent per gallon for gasoline and slightly less than one cent per gallon for diesel.”

And examines a few possible revenue uses:

“How the carbon tax revenue is used is the major differentiating factor in distributional outcomes. A carbon tax policy can be progressive, regressive, or neither.”

Overview here. Link to report on energy and environmental implications; link to report on distributional implications; link to report on implications for the economy and household welfare.

DATA OWNERSHIP BY CONSUMERS | CLIMATE AND CULTURAL CHANGE

DATA IS NONRIVAL

Considerations on data sharing and data markets 

CHARLES I. JONES and CHRISTOPHER TONETTI contribute to the “new but rapidly-growing field” known as the economics of data:

“We are particularly interested in how different property rights for data determine its use in the economy, and thus affect output, privacy, and consumer welfare. The starting point for our analysis is the observation that data is nonrival. That is, at a technological level, data is not depleted through use. Most goods in economics are rival: if a person consumes a kilogram of rice or an hour of an accountant’s time, some resource with a positive opportunity cost is used up. In contrast, existing data can be used by any number of firms or people simultaneously, without being diminished. Consider a collection of a million labeled images, the human genome, the U.S. Census, or the data generated by 10,000 cars driving 10,000 miles. Any number of firms, people, or machine learning algorithms can use this data simultaneously without reducing the amount of data available to anyone else. The key finding in our paper is that policies related to data have important economic consequences.”

After modeling a few different data-ownership possibilities, the authors conclude, “Our analysis suggests that giving the data property rights to consumers can lead to allocations that are close to optimal.” Link to the paper.

• Jones and Tonetti cite an influential 2015 paper by Alessandro Acquisti, Curtis R. Taylor, and Liad Wagman on “The Economics of Privacy”: “In digital economies, consumers' ability to make informed decisions about their privacy is severely hindered, because consumers are often in a position of imperfect or asymmetric information regarding when their data is collected, for what purposes, and with what consequences.” Link.
• For more on data populi, Ben Tarnoff has a general-interest overview in Logic Magazine, including mention of the data dividend and a comparison to the Alaska Permanent Fund. Tarnoff uses the oil industry as an analogy throughout: “In the oil industry, companies often sign ‘production sharing agreements’ (PSAs) with governments. The government hires the company as a contractor to explore, develop, and produce the oil, but retains ownership of the oil itself. The company bears the cost and risk of the venture, and in exchange receives a portion of the revenue. The rest goes to the government. Production sharing agreements are particularly useful for governments that don’t have the machinery or expertise to exploit a resource themselves.” Link.

RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIALS | HIERARCHY & DESPOTISM

EVIDENCE PUZZLES

The history and politics of RCTs 

In a 2016 working paper, JUDITH GUERON recounts and evaluates the history of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in the US, through her own experience in the development of welfare experiments through the MDRC and the HHS: 

“To varying degrees, the proponents of welfare experiments at MDRC and HHS shared three mutually reinforcing goals. The first was to obtain reliable and—given the long and heated controversy about welfare reform—defensible evidence of what worked and, just as importantly, what did not. Over a pivotal ten years from 1975 to 1985, these individuals became convinced that high-quality RCTs were uniquely able to produce such evidence and that there was simply no adequate alternative. Thus, their first challenge was to demonstrate feasibility: that it was ethical, legal, and possible to implement this untried—and at first blush to some people immoral—approach in diverse conditions. The other two goals sprang from their reasons for seeking rigorous evidence. They were not motivated by an abstract interest in methodology or theory; they wanted to inform policy and make government more effective and efficient. As a result, they sought to make the body of studies useful, by assuring that it addressed the most significant questions about policy and practice, and to structure the research and communicate the findings in ways that would increase the potential that they might actually be used." 

CARBON DIVIDENDS | SECTORAL BARGAINING

CLIMATE PREDICTION MARKET

How to link a carbon tax to climate forecasting

A 2011 paper by SHI-LING HSU suggests a way of using a carbon tax to generate more accurate predictions of future climate conditions:

“The market for tradable permits to emit in the future is essentially a prediction market for climate outcomes. And yet, unlike prediction markets that have been operated or proposed thus far, this prediction market for climate outcomes operates against the backdrop of an actual and substantial tax liability. Whereas prediction markets have heretofore largely involved only recreational trading, this prediction market will operate against a regulatory backdrop and thus will provide much stronger incentives for traders to acquire and trade on information.”

 Link to the full paper.

A 2018 paper by GARY LUCAS and FELIX MORMANN suggests using similar predictions for climate policies beyond carbon taxes:

“We explain how both the federal and state governments could use prediction markets to help resolve high-profile controversies, such as how best to allocate subsidies to promote clean technology innovation and which policy strategy promises the greatest reduction in carbon emissions.” 

Link to their paper.

• In 2016, a group of researchers modeled the way that information would converge in a climate prediction market, and found “market participation causes most traders to converge quickly toward believing the ‘true’ climate model, suggesting that a climate market could be useful for building public consensus.” Link.
• Tyler Cowen wrote about Hsu’s paper in 2011: “I think of such fine-tuning as a misguided approach. Is there such a good ‘basket’ measure of climate outcomes with sufficiently low short-term volatility?” Link.
• A 2017 paper by Michael Thicke makes a similar point about prediction models for science generally: “Prediction markets for science could be uninformative or deceptive because scientific predictions are often long-term, while prediction markets perform best for short-term questions.” Link.

FAIRNESS IN ALGORITHMIC DECISION-MAKING | ADMINISTRATIVE DATA ACCESS

VISIBLE CONSTRAINT

Including protected variables can make algorithmic decision-making more fair 

A recent paper co-authored by JON KLEINBERG, JENS LUDWIG, SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN, and ASHESH RAMBACHAN addresses algorithmic bias, countering the "large literature that tries to 'blind' the algorithm to race to avoid exacerbating existing unfairness in society":  

"This perspective about how to promote algorithmic fairness, while intuitive, is misleading and in fact may do more harm than good. We develop a simple conceptual framework that models how a social planner who cares about equity should form predictions from data that may have potential racial biases. Our primary result is exceedingly simple, yet often overlooked: a preference for fairness should not change the choice of estimator. Equity preferences can change how the estimated prediction function is used (such as setting a different threshold for different groups) but the estimated prediction function itself should not change. Absent legal constraints, one should include variables such as gender and race for fairness reasons.

Our argument collects together and builds on existing insights to contribute to how we should think about algorithmic fairness.… We empirically illustrate this point for the case of using predictions of college success to make admissions decisions. Using nationally representative data on college students, we underline how the inclusion of a protected variable—race in our application—not only improves predicted GPAs of admitted students (efficiency), but also can improve outcomes such as the fraction of admitted students who are black (equity).

Across a wide range of estimation approaches, objective functions, and definitions of fairness, the strategy of blinding the algorithm to race inadvertently detracts from fairness."

Read the full paper here.

UNIONS' NET FISCAL IMPACT | ENROLLMENT PATTERNS IN HIGHER ED | RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

BASIC OPPORTUNITY

Considerations on funding UBI in Britain

The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) published a discussion paper on UBI. ANTHONY PAINTER outlines some key points here, including some thoughts on funding:

“To fund the ‘Universal Basic Opportunity Fund’ (UBOF), the Government would finance an endowment to cover the fund for 14 years from a public debt issue (at current low interest rates). This endowment would be invested to both fund asset growth and public benefit. The fund could be invested in housing, transport, energy and digital infrastructure and invested for high growth in global assets such as equity and real estate. This seems radical but actually, similar mechanisms have been established in Norway, Singapore and Alaska. In the latter case, Basic Income style dividends are paid to all Alaskans. Essentially, the UBOF is a low-interest mortgage to invest in infrastructure and human growth that brings forward the benefits of a sovereign wealth fund to the present rather than waiting for it to accumulate over time.”

Full paper is available here. And here is the longer section on “The technicalities of a Universal Basic Opportunity Fund,” including building and administering the fund. ht Lauren

• A new working paper on the Alaska Permanent Fund: "Overall, our results suggest that a universal and permanent cash transfer does not significantly decrease aggregate employment." Link.

CONTENT MODERATION | CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE | RURAL POLICIES

HOW TO HANDLE BAD CONTENT

Two articles illustrate the state of thought on moderating user-generated content

Ben Thompson of Stratechery rounds up recent news on content moderation on Twitter/Facebook/Youtube and makes a recommendation:

“Taking political sides always sounds good to those who presume the platforms will adopt positions consistent with their own views; it turns out, though, that while most of us may agree that child exploitation is wrong, a great many other questions are unsettled.

“That is why I think the line is clearer than it might otherwise appear: these platform companies should actively seek out and remove content that is widely considered objectionable, and they should take a strict hands-off policy to everything that isn’t (while — and I’m looking at you, Twitter — making it much easier to avoid unwanted abuse from people you don’t want to hear from). Moreover, this approach should be accompanied by far more transparency than currently exists: YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter should make explicitly clear what sort of content they are actively policing, and what they are not; I know this is complicated, and policies will change, but that is fine — those changes can be transparent too.”

Full blog post here.

The Social Capital newsletter responds:

“… If we want to really make progress towards solving these issues we need to recognize there’s not one single type of bad behavior that the internet has empowered, but rather a few dimensions of them.”

The piece goes on to describe four types of bad content. Link.

Michael comments: The discussion of content moderation--and digital curation more broadly--conspicuously ignores the possibility of algorithmic methods for analyzing and disseminating (ethically or evidentiarily) valid information. Thompson and Social Capital default to traditional and cumbersome forms of outright censorship, rather than methods to “push” better content.

We'll be sharing more thoughts on this research area in future letters.