Thanks.

Most economists would suggest that we start quite modestly, and ramp up or mitigation efforts as our wealth increases and technology costs fall, rather than simply continuing to twiddle our thumbs.

The global atmosphere is a classic open-access resource, so analysis of climate change as a commons problem is one of the single most effective analytical tools we have.

Technological advance increases pressure on the reource, in turn creating pressures to find ways to manage the problem. But because of the open-access nature of the resource, absent new technologies (such as barbed wire) that make it easy to privatize the commons, reaching effective agreement is subject to problems of coordination (rules and free-riding) and enforcement (cheating). And social pressure is a frequently occuring aspect of the solutions communities devise to managing common resources. Solutions may lie both in building mutual confidence and trust to overcome prisoners’ dilemma issues, finding appropriate tools to persuade recalcitrant parties, and new technologies/institutions that may privatize the commons.

As I have also pointed out Public Choice analysis about how decision-making within individual countries is subject to rent-seeking and rent-capture problems, and by the short horizons of decision-makers, is also quite helpful in understanding policy blockages and ways that policy is susceptible to manaipulation.

I am afraid I don’t understand why you would suggest that we abandon a commons analysis. Are you making a tactical point?

And the costs for sequestration are dodgy if you look closely. For example, a recent PESA (petroleum exploration society of Australia) article reported that University of Queensland had reduced the CO2 sequestration cost by half, to $25/ton CO2. That sounds like a technological breakthrough, but careful reading showed that the reduction in cost was purely economic. The CO2 was being sequestered in coal beds, so the sequestration process displaced methane, which was captured and sold. The increase in sequestration cost was entirely due to the increased market value of the methane over the course of the study period- the actual process remained unchanged. So if you are looking for the cost of carbon removal and sequestration, you really need to look at the nitty gritty details of how it works and what variables effect the cost.

But that leg-pulling joke aside, here’s an interesting thought experiment for the policy/politics/ethics folks:

Let’s say air capture, or any of the many geoengineering options being widely discussed (e.g. my colleague here at the UofA, Roger Angel’s recent idea* to block 1.8% of the incoming energy with a gadget at the L1 Lagrange orbital point), ends up being feasible in a few decades. And let’s say we actually reach the point where we can, as Roger [Pielke, not Angel] suggested, tune the atmosphere’s CO2.

[ * Roger Angel, 2006. Feasibility of cooling the Earth with a cloud of small
spacecraft near the inner Lagrange point (L1), PNAS: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/103/46/17184 (subscription require). Or see the free podcast of his recent talk at our Global Climate Change series at University of Arizona, in which he reviewed a whole range of options from solar cells to Paul Crutzen’s aerosols, to his satellites: http://podcasting.arizona.edu/globalclimatechange.html (or any of the others who spoke, focusing mostly on science of climate change]

What level do we tune it to? And who gets to decide that level? The “worst off” individual (to follow Rawls famous “Theory of Justice”)? Then we probably let the Maldivians decide, since under current projections, sea level rise could completely wipe them off the map. Places like Russia, on the other hand, would probably prefer to have some moderate global warming, because that probably would give them better agriculture in Siberia, and ice-free ports on the north atlantic.

Best,
Scott

No economic actors have incentives to invest in such technologies or to actually pay to use them, as there are no returns for them to capture, and nations are likely to embark on requiring that such technologies be used only if other countries share the costs. Free riders may prevent any action whatsoever.”

Actually, if world economic growth behaves as I expect in the 21st century, free riders won’t prevent any action (at least at the end of the century).

Let’s asssume the IPCC is approximately correct, and the CO2 concentration in 2100 is approximately 680 ppm. (I think that’s at least 100 ppm too high, but let’s forget that for the time being.)

If the concentration is 680 ppm in 2100, that’s ~300 ppm above the current concentration, and ~400 ppm above the pre-industrial concentration of 280 ppm.

Using a cost/ton of ambient CO2 scrubbing of approximately $250 ton of carbon, and approximately 2 billion tons of carbon per ppm of atmospheric CO2, that means it costs about $500 billion (or $0.5 trillion) to remove 1 ppm CO2 from the atmosphere.

Therefore, it would cost $150 trillion to get down from 680 ppm to the present 380 ppm, or $200 trillion to get down from 680 ppm to the pre-industrial value of 280 ppm.

If economic growth in the 21st century behaves as I expect, the world per-capita GDP in 2100 will be approximately $10 million. Using a population equal to the current population of 6 billion, the world GDP in 2100 will be 60 QUADRILLION dollars.

The projected costs of $150 to $200 trillion would therefore be 0.25 to 0.33 percent of world GDP in 2100. That’s equivalent to about $125 billion, when compared to today’s world GDP of $50 trillion. In other words, that’s approximately what rich countries give to developing countries every year in foreign aid.

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 1997: Asking the Right Questions: Atmospheric Sciences Research and Societal Needs. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 78(2), 255-264.
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-145-1997.13.pdf

We can make a good start on this by starting to analyze related problems and solving the simplest ones first, thus building experience and trust. Say global fisheries, for example?

No economic actors have incentives to invest in such technologies or to actually pay to use them, as there are no returns for them to capture, and nations are likely to embark on requiring that such technologies be used only if other countries share the costs. Free riders may prevent any action whatsoever.

The same is true with investments in adaptation/development in the third world. The Stern report and writings by Nordhaus and other economists make the same points.