And yet it still appeals to some …
Recently Myles Allen wrote a piece for the Guardian suggesting we should use direct action to mandate fossil fuel companies deliver carbon capture technology, and appears to be juxtaposing this with carbon taxes. A few global warming blogs I read took issue with the piece. I’m suspicious about the feasibility of carbon capture technology, so the idea of forcing fossil fuel extractors to implement this technology seems far off to me, but I believe we need to get serious about carbon, so in principle the idea appeals to me, along with a whole bunch of emergency measures. Rational economics suggests that Allan’s policy is at best going to be no different to a carbon tax that applies an equivalent cost to carbon production, and probably less efficient, but I suspect that there is something going on here that lies outside of economic theory, and I think it can be well understood by reference to a couple of public health principles, and some successful public health campaigns. Basically, over the next 30 years we need to go carbon neutral, that is to a society that exhausts no carbon. If we delay, we may have to go negative. Some economists think we can do this simply by taxing carbon. I want to use the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) to show that’s probably impossible without broader measures; and then I will use the example of HIV to show that the debate about mitigation may also be a lost cause, or at least to show that we shouldn’t be too confident that humanity can solve a serious problem through mitigation measures alone.
Comparing Decarbonization with the FCTC
Let’s not beat around the bush: the purpose of the tobacco control movement is to eliminate the consumption of tobacco from the face of the earth. One day there will be no smokers, because smoking is a poison. But the goal of the FCTC is to achieve a non-smoking world through the free choice of individuals – through health promotion and intervention measures aimed at reducing smoking. The FCTC proposes a variety of methods to achieve this goal, but only one of them is taxation. Taxation has been a core tool deployed against tobacco, and with devastating effect, but it has not eliminated tobacco smoking. Taxes on tobacco in Australia, for example, have essentially increased exponentially since 1985, but they haven’t achieved their goal: something around about 20% of Australians smoke, and Australia (as the picture above shows) is one of the most aggressive anti-smoking nations on the planet.
And this is the thing that is relevant to decarbonization: 16% of Australians still smoke, despite huge legislative efforts to convince them to stop. Not just punitive taxation, but a whole raft of other measures: plain packaging, banning smoking in public areas, very strict measures against underage smoking, bans on advertising, forcing cigarettes to be hidden from shop counters, widespread distribution of subsidized treatments for tobacco addiction, huge investment in educating general practitioners about smoking cessation, investing overseas aid money in developing alternatives to tobacco crops and increased funding to police action against illicit tobacco trading. With regards to children, a whole range of laws have been passed to prevent them from getting access to tobacco. Companies and public organizations – especially hospitals – have gone further, passing laws to prevent teachers, doctors and nurses smoking within sight of such facilities. The WHO will not employ smokers. Some states and countries have suggested a gradually increasing age-related ban, so that everyone coming of age in the west is permanently banned from smoking – a kind of generational form of prohibition.
Yet despite this campaign, 16% of Australians still smoke. What would the equivalent measures be in a “voluntary” decarbonization scenario: finding that massive carbon taxes failed to prevent the use of carbon-based energy, governments would be required to ban certain uses of coal or oil, would force all petrol companies to use the same non-branded advertising, would require all public organizations to use non-fossil fuel energy and would push big private companies to do the same; would pass incredibly strict air quality laws; would invest aid money heavily in non-fossil fuel energy products; would introduce any other public measures against carbon that could be effectively policed; would heavily subsidize all alternative energy sources.
Without these interventions, smoking rates would not have dropped to 16%; and smoking is an addictive substance. If exponentially increasing taxes cannot prevent smoking, why do carbon tax advocates think it will work to reduce carbon emissions to the required level : zero?
The lessons of HIV and AGW mitigation strategies
In the early years of the HIV epidemic, before treatments became available, the only prevention was behavioral change: wearing a condom, and always using a clean needle. In a few settings, promotion of condom use worked, but in sub-Saharan Africa HIV became a generalized epidemic before people even knew what it was, and by the time the preventive measures were understood it was widespread and devastating. In this context, mitigation through behavioral change became a completely ineffectual tactic. From 2000 under PEPFAR, the Presidents Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, testing and treatment strategies – essentially, adaptation strategies – became widespread in sub-Saharan Africa. This wasn’t due to any progressive plan of George Bush’s, but through dumb luck they were successful because treatment reduces the infectiousness of treated people by about 95%. In the long term, in the face of a complete failure to effectively disseminate behavioral change in Africa, testing and treatment made huge gains in combating HIV, and now there is a lot of confidence that if well managed and supported by international donors these strategies may be sufficient to eliminate HIV. Those of us (like me) who grew up in the era of HIV in the west, where HIV never became a generalized epidemic and gay men responded well to condom use initiatives, were initially unwilling to believe the success of test and treat strategies – we falsely believed that our mitigation strategies would work in all settings, but we were wrong. As the evidence came in, I changed my mind and now recognize that behavioural change for HIV (mitigation) is a tactic that works in unique settings (primarily, injecting drug users, politically connected gay men and unionized sex workers). In a generalized epidemic, such strategies fail.
Of course, global warming is a classic generalized epidemic. Mitigation won’t work by itself, but at the moment we have no alternatives – just like HIV in the 1980s. We need to do whatever is necessary to prevent further spread of the disease, but as soon as someone finds an effective treatment (carbon capture and storage) we need to switch.
Public health lessons for decarbonization
If we can’t eliminate smoking through exponentially increasing taxes, why do we think we will do better with carbon? No one really cares if people choose to smoke, it’s a personal choice and a non-zero smoking rate is no big deal. But we need to be carbon neutral within 30 years. We couldn’t do that through taxation alone for smoking, so why does anyone think we can do it for decarbonization? Such a goal is going to require measures well in advance of the FCTC, and those measures are pretty harsh. We also need to accept the possibility that mitigation measures aren’t going to work. In health, naturally, no one assumes that prevention is the only cure. We look for a cure. The same attitude needs to be applied to carbon. We need a range of strict legislative responses, and we need major investment in projects to find cures. And we need to treat this situation with the same urgency we applied to the HIV epidemic – or more. Carbon taxes alone will not be enough. We need a full range of legal interventions, now.
Compromise and Conceit 
November 28, 2013 at 11:58 pm
Great post. I’m about to dash out so I’ll keep this short. I just want to say that I don’t take issue with Allen’s piece. I actually think his idea is really good and I want to see legislation dealing with this problem now. I think what you say about taxation and smoking is very relevant. It helps but not the full 100% which is what we need here.
November 29, 2013 at 4:56 am
Yes, to be completely clear, the blog post written by Rachel didn’t take issue with Myles Allen’s article. I took issue with it in the comments though 🙂
November 29, 2013 at 5:56 am
I did have a comment about this though
Surely we have significantly reduced smoking in much of the developed world, so it must have played some kind of role. Also, smoking is something people actually enjoy doing. This may be true for people who like driving fast cars, but if we made carbon so expensive that alternative energy sources became viable and cheaper, I don’t think anyone would care. As long as the lights were on, they could watch TV, and cook their food, they wouldn’t mind if the electricity was from coal, natural gas, wind, solar, geothermal,nuclear, …..
November 29, 2013 at 10:22 am
Thanks for your comments, Wotts and Rachel. I should start by saying I wrote this post while drunk after a fine dinner and one too many glasses of sake, so my apologies if some aspects of it are a bit unclear …
Rachel, I don’t take issue particularly with Allen’s piece, but my understanding is that carbon capture and storage is not currently a functional technology, in which case his point is really just a delaying tactic. Were it a functional tech then I would see it similar to the test-and-treat vs. behavioral change debate in HIV: we should be using both, and we should invest the most in whatever intervention is most effective and cost-effective. This is why I raised the HIV example: when PEPFAR was first proposed it was (rightly) seen as a sop by George Bush to his christian supporters, so he could be seen to be doing something about HIV without promoting condom use. But it did make treatment available to a lot of people, and knowing your sero-status is an important (though not complete) part of controlling HIV risk behavior. Many spoke against the plan at the time (in measured tones), but subsequently treatment was shown to reduce transmission and now we know that PEPFAR has made a huge difference to the spread of the disease. So what started for the wrong reasons and was seen as only partially effective turned into a huge tool. We should perhaps see adaptation and carbon storage technology in this light, not throw them out completely because they aren’t mitigation tactics. However, that said … the technology doesn’t seem to be ready, and wasting time and money on something that just doesn’t work is silly.
Wotts, yes we have significantly reduced smoking and we have done this through taxation, but the lesson of the FCTC is that taxation alone is not enough. We’ve done a lot of other very strict non-economic interventions to achieve the low level of smoking in the developed world and they’re still not enough. Your point that smoking is something people do for fun is well taken, but then electricity use is an essential product, which will make it harder to shift through taxation than a “leisure” activity like smoking; and it’s also harder for individuals to make choices in an energy market than in smoking. Also, a lot of people start smoking for reasons that probably aren’t related to “leisure” and have a lot to do with community and structural factors – targeting their ability to consume through pricing is not going to change those factors. This is why the FCTC recommends much more than taxation.
It’s an interesting contrast actually, because compared to the FCTC a lot of what is currently being proposed for decarbonization looks incredibly naive. The FCTC has pages of material about what should be done, it isn’t a one page long document saying “let’s raise taxes.” And no one in the tobacco control world would stake their position on a single intervention – there is no one in tobacco control who would oppose, say, plain packaging because taxes! So why do people debating decarbonization take single positions?
Finally, I note that William Connelly at Stoat is defending taxation on the basis that the costs of AGW all lie in the future, and we will be richer then so we shouldn’t sacrifice too much wealth now (since Future Us can afford these measures more). I think this is wrong for two reasons: 1) as I have said elsewhere, the effects of global warming are being seen now, not 30 years from now, and any cost due to AGW now needs to be taken into account as lost future earnings too, so on its own grounds the logic of delay put forward by people such as Stern is no longer valid; and 2) we don’t make policy on these economic growth terms only. Again the FCTC is a good example of this: smoking is an economically productive personal choice, but we still want it gone. In the short term it involves consumption that employs people and makes profits for companies; in the long term it bolsters demand for healthcare, which employs people; in the very long term, smokers die younger than non-smokers so they don’t cost as much in their dotage, and some estimates say that the complete elimination of smoking would cost govts in terms of lost taxes and increased health costs. Yet, for some reason, governments all over the world have signed up to eliminate smoking. Why? Because people dying young is a bad thing, regardless of the economic benefits thereof. I do not understand why in one huge part of our economy (health) we make decisions entirely in a non-economic framework based around spending more to save lives, but in another area (energy) we are restricted only to making decisions on the basis of their cost, and must completely discount the lives lost or ruined.
November 29, 2013 at 3:55 pm
Thanks for the response. Yes, I largely agree. I wouldn’t be arguing for a carbon tax alone and then leaving the market to respond. I can, as you suggest, see a role for a carbon tax though. What you say at the end is interesting. I had always assumed that smokers cost more through increased healthcare costs, but you’re suggesting that dying young actually saves money. If so, an interesting example of where we choose to make a moral judgement rather than using economic arguments that would probably suggest encouraging smoking. Probably because economists are comfortable using economic arguments that might shorten the lives of people who don’t yet exist, but less comfortable doing so if the people affected are already alive (although maybe this is politicians considering current voters rather than future voters).
November 29, 2013 at 4:22 pm
I think the strange focus on cost and economic growth in debate about AGW is partially a sign that most of the serious decision-makers don’t take the issue seriously – they still haven’t come to terms with the fact that modern industrial society is dependent on ecosystem services,and many of them can’t conceive of the possibility that humans could destroy those services. I notice in debates around the internet that a lot of very economically-focused people find it extremely difficult to, for example, take species loss seriously – when you read their comments about species loss, very economically-focused people tend to dismiss concern about biodiversity as trivial nature-loving. The other reason that the debate about AGW mitigation focuses so much on economic growth is, I think, that economics is sliding towards a religious worldview or maybe modern decision-makers see economics in a semi-religious light, like it can give them the answers to policy questions rather than providing a single inadequate tool with which to assess policy. I think health is an old enough policy field, run by well enough respected non-economists (i.e. doctors) that it can escape this slide into entirely economics-based arguments.
As an example, consider recent research on what to do about any major cause of death like e.g. HIV, and compare it with AGW policy. In a debate about what to do about a cause of death, the assumed desired outcome is reduced mortality. The policy question is then framed explicitly as “how can we best spend money to get this outcome.” The equivalent process for AGW would be to identify reductions in carbon and then ask “how can we best spend money to achieve this reduction.” But instead, the debate is rephrased by both denialists and some supporters of the orthodoxy (such as Stoat) into a question about how much economic growth now will be lost, compared to how much economic growth future people can afford. Somehow the real policy goal of reducing carbon gets waylaid into this (policy-irrelevant) debate about juggling current vs. future money.
Maybe this wouldn’t happen so much if AGW was more clearly killing people now (as HIV is), but I don’t think that’s the whole of it. I think doctors are immune to this kind of policy perversion because the central currency of their profession (lives) is also the currency in which the policy outcomes are expressed. But in AGW policy we have energy industry specialists and politicians dealing with policy; the central currency of their profession (dollars) is not the same as the currency of the desired policy outcomes (carbon); plus they don’t understand or respect the distal outcomes (lost biodiversity, fisheries collapse, agricultural failure).
Which means, in short, that we are fucked.
November 29, 2013 at 7:13 pm
I was thinking last night about the comments at Stoat regarding leaving AGW to be solved by future wealthier people and realised that this was not the right way to view the problem or solve it. Wrecking the climate for future generations is wrong. It doesn’t matter how much money the person being wronged has. Nothing changes that and GDP has nothing to do with whether something is right of wrong. That they may have more money than us is irrelevant.
I think the problem is better phrased as an ethical one. If we continue with business as usual, my generation and a few subsequent ones will reap the benefits. But 100 years or more from now, subsequent generations will have to pay and they will continue to pay for several centuries. A utilitarian would say it is unacceptable to have a smaller number of people benefit at the expense of a larger number and I agree with that.
The point you make about carbon capture technology not being feasible I would agree with. This is why I would like to see legislation of the sort Allen is proposing because it will be an incentive to develop the technology and I’m not ready to dismiss it as undoable.