Silent economics

Mar 16, 2015
Bishop Hill in Climate: WG3, Economics, Foreign

Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute, is up in arms today about an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by the Conservative peer Matt Ridley. Ridley's article, which extolled the virtues of fossil fuels, attracted Schmidt's ire because of one sentence in particular:

The next time that somebody at a rally against fossil fuels lectures you about her concern for the fate of her grandchildren, show her a picture of an African child dying today from inhaling the dense muck of a smoky fire.

Schmidt has variously described this statement as "totally abhorrent" and "asinine".

Conflating climate change concerns w/a disregard for African children dying from smoke inhalation by @mattwridley is totally abhorrent.

— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) March 14, 2015

 

I fail to see why. Either we think that Africans should have greater access to fossil fuels or we don't. It is neither "abhorrent" or "asinine" to consider which of the two available options is preferable. It is a question of economics and morality - a subtle one but one that must be answered. 

I'm sure economists will be able to advise us about the technicalities of weighing up costs in the present and costs in the past, but here is the essence. In the schemes favoured by the green movement the theoretical costs of climate change in the distant future loom large in the present; deaths from wood fires in the Africa of today look much less important, perhaps even fading into insignificance. The accusation is not, therefore, that greens are callous about deaths in Africa. It is that they discount the future so little that they end up treating wildly hypothetical harms in the far distant future as being of greater importance than real, actual harms happening today. This is a stark contrast to the attitudes and approaches among bad right-wingers, to whom those deaths in Africa look much more like a clear and present crisis. The future, we wickedly declare, can take care of itself.

I'm therefore unequivocal in my belief that the real benefits of fossil fuels far outweigh the theoretical harms. My response is a clear "yes" to more coal and gas for Africa. Schmidt, meanwhile, will not say one way or the other. Indeed, over the weekend, I asked my many climate scientist followers on Twitter to venture their own opinions, but not a single response was forthcoming. I think many people will find this attitude surprising, given the number of deaths from wood smoke in Africa. Recognition that fossil fuels are of vital necessity for Africans might be off-message; it might impact on funding; the "colleagues" might be upset. But silence in the face of such a death toll is inexplicable.

Some might even find it "abhorrent".

Article originally appeared on (http://www.bishop-hill.net/).