Climate change: humility recommended

The Economist, in a long article about the US state of Louisiana's coastal erosion problem (much of which is caused by factors other than climate change) says:

The state’s impressive coastal policy illustrates America’s ability to adapt to a natural disaster that is already upon it. It does not seem to have nudged the state, or the Republican Party, any closer to policies that might slow the warming that is contributing to that disaster. (My emphasis) Louisiana fights the sea, and loses, the 'Economist' 26 August

I approve of the tentativeness implied by 'might', and it's good to see others implicitly question whether stopping greenhouse gas emissions is the best way of achieving whatever are our goals concerning the climate. I would argue that the fundamental question we should be asking ourselves is:

Are we more concerned about climate change, or about the impacts of climate change on human, animal and plant life?

Accepting that there is a climate change problem, and that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are responsible (to an uncertain degree) for it, we need, I think, to challenge the pervasive assumption that the most efficient way of mitigating its negative impacts is to reduce those same greenhouse gas emissions. With the word 'might', the Economist would seem to agree.

A Social Policy Bond regime would specify very clearly what we want to achieve. We would express our policy goal as a combination of physical, social, biological and financial measures that must fall within specified ranges for a sustained period. Only then would holders of Climate Stability Bonds be paid out. These bonds would, in effect, contract out the achievement of our multiple climate goals to the private sector, leaving it to respond to our ever-expanding scientific and technical knowledge. Current policy is rigid and arrogant, in that it is based entirely on current science and assumptions about future trends. It cannot adapt to new knowledge. We shall need a multitude of diverse, adaptive approaches to achieving our goals relating to climate change and its impacts - many of which will have nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions. Climate Stability Bonds would encourage them. Current policy, as well as being politically divisive and imposing extremely high upfront costs, will not.

Nappies, LCAs, and the environment

From an article in a recent New Scientist:

Greenhouse gas emissions from the production of various materials reveal that recycling is always greener than using virgin resources Throwaway culture: the truth about recycling, Bob Holmes, 'New Scientist', 22 July

This is problematic for two reasons. First: I think it's a mistake to define 'greener' as 'generating a lower level of greenhouse gas emissions'. Why? Because production inevitably entails numerous other environmental impacts. Second: because 'always' is anyway too definitive.

Life Cycle Analyses (LCAs) are not a simple exercise, but one conducted by the UK's Environment Agency compared the environmental impacts of disposable nappies (diapers) against home- and commercially-laundered cloth nappies. The conclusion:

For the three nappy systems studied, there was no significant difference between any of the environmental impacts – that is, overall no system clearly had a better or worse environmental performance, although the life cycle stages that are the main source for these impacts are different for each system. Life Cycle Assessment of Disposable and Reusable Nappies in the UK (pdf), Environment Agency, 2005

This LCA considered a wide array of environmental impacts: 'resource depletion; climate change; ozone depletion; human toxicity; acidification; fresh-water aquatic toxicity; terrestrial toxicity; photochemical oxidant formation (low level smog) and nutrification of fresh water (eutrophication).' Climate change, note, is just one of these impacts. This study was published 12 years ago, and its conclusion might have changed since then - which is my second point: that even if we can say now that recycling aluminium, say, is currently 'greener' than producing from the virgin resource, it might not always be so. Weighting environmental impacts, apart from being largely subjective, can never be definitive: our scientific knowledge about these impacts changes, as do the technologies of extraction and recycling and numerous other relevant variables. Our current policymaking system, as applied most spectacularly to climate change, relies on our trying to identify the source of a problem and then basing policy instruments for decades ahead on that - ossified - knowledge of scientific relationships. As well as failing to account for our rapidly expanding scientific knowledge, it necessarily ignores potentially massive changes in social, financial or biological variables.

My suggestion is that policymakers or environmental campaigners stop focusing on how things are done and instead target environmental outcomes, measured in terms of human, animal and plant health. Environmental Policy Bonds could target quite ambitious goals at the national or even global level. Just choosing their target could force policymakers and the rest of us into clarifying what we really want to achieve. For example: do we primarily want to influence the climate, or are we more concerned about the adverse effects of the climate on human, animal and plant life? The difference is subtle, but it might be that doing the former is not the most efficient, nor even a feasible, way of mitigating the latter.

Clarification of goals is one crucial advantage of the Environmental Policy Bond concept. Another is that the bonds, being tradeable, could target ambitious, long-term goals that will probably require the lifetime of multiple democratic government administrations to achieve. A bond regime would not dictate how our goals shall be achieved, nor who shall achieve them. At any one time the bonds will be held by that coalition of interests who are - or who think they are - the people who will be most efficient at achieving the next step on way to the bonds' redemption.

In all, then, the Social Policy Bond concept, as applied to the environment, would motivate bondholders to explore and implement diverse, adaptive initiatives that will efficiently achieve our environmental goals. This is something that our current policymaking system, based as it is on the use of fossilised science and heavily influenced by vested interests, simply cannot do.

Targeting long-term goals

James Hansen talks about climate change:

You’re talking about a system that responds on the timescale of decades to centuries — that’s a different time constant than the political constant.” James Hansen talking to David Wallace-Wells in The Uninhabitable Earth: Annotated Edition (reference 12)

It's not only climate change for which our current politics is inadequate. Any crisis building now, but whose effects will be felt only by future generations or, even more scarily, future administrations, is going to to be neglected within our current system. Our politicians face few incentives to consider future generations, and plenty of incentives to ignore them completely. We see this in the amassing of grotesquely inflated debt levels, badly thought-out immigration policies, under-investment in critical infrastructure, and environmental behaviours including, but by no means limited to, those that affect the climate. The narrow, short-term interests of powerful interests, public- and private-sector, win out every time. As for future generations: our politicians are expert at kicking the can down the road.

Social Policy Bonds could remedy this neglect of long-term consequences. They would create a coalition of interests in favour of achieving social and environmental goals that are currently too remote to receive much attention - though plenty by dystopian fiction writers. The way the bonds work would be to reward the achievement of our long-term goals at every stage of the process.

Social Policy Bonds (unlike Social Impact Bonds) are radeable, which means that bondholders don't have to hold them until redemption to see their value rise and realise a profit.. This allows the bonds to target effectively such remote goals as climate stability, universal literacy and world peace. The bonds would begin their work as soon as they were issued: those who buy the bonds would be motivated to begin the explore measures that would immediately raise the chances that the targeted goal will be achieved quickly. For most long-term goals, a large array of diverse measures will need to be proposed, implemented on a small scale, then either terminated or implemented more widely. No government can effectively oversee such a range of projects, nor can any single, conventional organisation. In particular, terminating failed approaches in favour of more efficient ideas does not come easily to government. But under a Social Policy Bond regime there would be every incentive to focus only on those approaches that will achieve our targeted goal most efficiently. And, crucially, the optimum mix of approaches will change over time - especially over the long time period that remote goals will require for their achievement. The bonds would give rise to a new type of organisation; ones whose composition and structure would change, perhaps radically, over the lifetime of the bonds, in response to changing circumstances and improving knowledge. Again, such adaptiveness is not a characteristic of government action, but it is an essential element of any attempts to solve our long-term problems.

Social Policy Bonds would represent a radical change from today's politics. But, as long-term problems threaten to overwhelm humanity (click on the source excerpted at the top of this post, for one example) it's clear that business as usual is not working. Targeting long-term goals and injecting market incentives into their achievement would seem to be our best hope. Social Policy Bonds, uniquely amongst policy instruments, would do both.

I've written about why I believe tradeability is important here, and why I am ambivalent about Social Impact Bonds here.

Climate change: means and ends

A leader in the current 'Economist,' referring to public- and private-sector commitments to run their operations on 100 percent renewable energy is titled: Better to target zero emissions than 100% renewable energy:

Most important, a 100% renewables target confuses means with ends. The priority for the planet is to stop net emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Putting too much emphasis on wind, solar and other renewables may block off better carbon-reduction paths. 'The Economist', dated 15 July

No. The real ends of policy have to do with the problems caused by climate change. Whether, and by how much, greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions contribute to those problems is still an open question. And, whatever the answer to that question, still more important to policymakers is whether reducing ghg emissions is the best way of dealing with climate change. For that, we need to go beyond the cant about renewables and beyond the Economist's - and almost everyone else's - focus on greenhouse gases to ask whether we are more concerned about climate change, or about the impacts of climate change on human, animal and plant life?

A Social Policy Bond regime would not assume that reducing ghgs is the best way of achieving our goals. Instead it would specify very clearly what our goal actually is. Most likely, we would express our policy goal as a combination of physical, social, biological and financial measures that must fall within specified ranges for a sustained period. We'd then issue Climate Stability Bonds that would be redeemed only when that had occurred.

Unfortunately an entire bureaucracy has grown around ghg emissions. It seems to me that the existence and activities of this bureaucracy embody the assumption that our trying (and most probably failing, though we'd never know either way) to influence the climate is the most efficient way of dealing with problems caused by unfavourable changes in the climate. I think that assumption needs to be challenged. Clarity about what actually we want to achieve, of the sort that a Social Policy Bond approach would necessitate, is the only feasible starting point.

Target environmental ends, not means

The current Economist looks at the the environmental cost of solar electricity generation and in particular at work done on quantifying the very big efficiency improvements in the production of solar cells since 1975. It appears that, over the lifetime of solar panels made today, there will be very significant cuts in emissions over those that would result from the consumption of fossil fuels in generating the same quantity of electricity. This is interesting but it doesn't actually tell us a great deal about the net environmental impact of substituting solar panels for fossil fuels. As one commenter puts it:

If you're going to measure the "clean" of solar power, why would you neglect the production of all of the minerals that are used in the process? These minerals include arsenic, bauxite, boron, cadmium, coal, copper, gallium, indium, iron ore, molybdenum, lead, phosphate, selenium, silica, tellurium, and titanium dioxide. Some of these minerals are difficult to source and mine, and almost always create a large degree of environmental damage in their wake. Source

There are also the environmental costs of providing backup (for when the sun isn't shining) in the form of batteries, or other storage, and the costs of disposing of the panels after their lifetime. As the Economist article says, "The consequence of all this number-crunching is not as clear-cut as environmentalists might hope."

This underlines what I have said in my previous post when it comes to making policy: rather than try government try to identify all the environmental implications of any policy with inescapably limited knowledge at fixed point in time, we should rather be identifying the outcomes we want to see and rewarding their achievement, however that is done. This would be more practical than attempting to conduct entire life-cycle analyses over all possible policy choices - which, even if it were possible, would be instantly made obsolete by new technology and our expanding scientific knowledge. It would also cohere more closely with goals that can be clearly articulated and that are meaningful to ordinary people: those that specify desirable levels of plant, animal and human health.

For more on applying the Social Policy Bond concept to the environment see here.

Policy for the post-truth era

US President Barack Obama talks about the new media system which:

...means everything is true and nothing is true. ...An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll. .... Ideally, in a democracy, everybody would agree that climate change is the consequence of man-made behavior, because that’s what 99 per cent of scientists tell us. And then we would have a debate about how to fix it. That’s how, in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, you had Republicans supporting the Clean Air Act and you had a market-based fix for acid rain rather than a command-and-control approach. So you’d argue about means, but there was a baseline of facts that we could all work off of. And now we just don’t have that. It happened here, David Remnick, 'New Yorker' dated 28 November

Science isn't a consensual process though, so even if the majority of scientists agree 
on one thing, whether it's anthropogenic climate change, or acid rain, or whatever, that should carry no more weight than the collective wisdom of experts in other fields, such as economists or opinion pollsters. There is a genuine problem here: how should we make policy when the relationship between cause and effect in our ever more complex societies is impossible to identify? It's not simply a question of following the opinions of existing bodies often backed by vested interests - nor of reflexively ignoring them: they might after all be right as well as self interested. Nor should we simply identify a problem then mindlessly dole out funds to the organizations whose stated objective is to solve it, but whose over-arching objective - in common, I think, with all organizations - is self-perpetuation.

We should instead recognize that resolving complex social and environmental problems, cannot wait for our receiving perfect information about causal relationships, and nor should we delay making decisions until such information becomes available - it might never happen. Take climate change: it's likely that, by the time we know the effects of man's greenhouse gas emissions on the climate, it will be too late to do anything to avoid or reverse their catastrophic effects on the environment. The current way of addressing the problem seems inadequate: extravagant gestures that might lead to some reductions in emissions that we think contribute to climate change, which might lead to some tiny, almost imperceptible (but unverifiable) effect on the climate some decades hence.

I think we can do better than this. We could use the Social Policy Bond idea, first to identify exactly what we want to achieve; and second to channel the market's incentives and efficiencies into achieving it. With climate change, we need to clarify whether we are more concerned about climate change, or about the impacts of climate change on human, animal and plant life. In other words, we define the outcome that we wish to achieve, then let the market decide how best to go about achieving it. Most social and environmental goals will embody an array of conditions that have to be satisfied for the goal to have been deemed met and the Social Policy Bonds redeemed. Our climate change goal should embody measures of physical, biological, social and financial variables that shall have to fall within a targeted range for a sustained period before the redemption of Climate Stability Bonds.

And as with climate change so with other major challenges.The important point is that the Social Policy Bond principle works even when the facts about what causes climate change, say, or crime, or war, are disputed. As such, Social Policy Bonds are the perfect policy instrument for today's post-truth politics.

Update 5 December: a version of this post for newcomers to the Social Policy Bond idea is available here

How not to address climate change

How not to address climate change:

Government Subsidies to Fossil Fuels are 22 Times Larger than Government Support to Adaptation on Climate Change

That's the header to article by Laura Merrill, put online on 2 June by the Global Subsidies Initiative. And here's my suggestion.

The 'root causes' fallacy

The 'root causes' fallacy is my explanation for why we don't really do much to solve such seemingly intractable problems as violent political conflict (war and civil war) or other complex social and environmental problems, such as crime or drug abuse. For historical reasons, policymaking is almost entirely a top-down activity. Politicians and public servants see a problem, then decide what needs to be done about it. If they aren't certain what needs to be done, either they guess at the root causes, or they ignore the problem. What they are not comfortable doing (yet) is to contract out the finding of solutions to the private sector. And finding solutions to a problem does not necessarily mean that we have to find its root causes - which can take decades or, indeed, be impossible. This, from the Economist, writing about data-based models:

Too many things tend to happen at once to isolate cause and effect: liberalised trade might boost growth, or liberalisation might be the sort of thing that governments do when growth is rising, or both liberalisation and growth might follow from some third factor. And there are too many potential influences on growth for economists to know whether a seemingly strong relationship between variables is real or would disappear if they factored in some other relevant titbit, such as the wages of Canadian lumberjacks. A mean feat, 'The Economist', 9 January

When it doesn't supply an easy excuse for inaction, this supposed need to identify root causes before doing anything can be catastrophically costly when mistakes are made: policies are put in place that cannot easily be reversed. Take climate change: our governments have decided that they know the cause of climate change is anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. They know, or act as if they know, exactly the relative contributions of each of these gases to climate change. But there are at least as many variables affecting the climate as there are 'potential influences on growth', and that makes a nonsense of trying to implement policies whose success depends entirely on their correct identification. But the juggernaut has begun its downhill movement: climate change policy has led to the creation of organizations powerful enough to oppose removal of their funding and even to distort facts that might threaten their existence.

My solution: target outcomes, rather than the alleged means of achieving them. Instead of targeting climate change, target for reduction the negative impacts of adverse climate events on human, animal and plant life. Instead of trying (or pretending to try) to stop the civil war in Syria, target for reduction the numbers of people killed and made homeless in that country. Complex social and environnmental problems require diverse, adaptive approaches for their solution. They don't require that we identify their real or mythical 'root causes' before doing anything. By contracting out the achievement of solutions to a motivated coalition of holders of Social Policy Bonds, we could bypass the supposed need to identify root causes and instead concentrate on finding solutions to the problems they create.

For more about my approach to climate change see other posts on this blog, or this essay. For more about my approach to achieving peace, follow this link. 

Paris will fail

Why I think the Paris deal on climate change, which concluded on 12 December, will fail.

• It may not be enough. It targets, using ossified science, cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. But what if that achieves nothing? What if the climate continues to change much more than expected, because the deal's underlying calculations and assumptions are wrong? What then? The emission cuts are a supposed means to unspecified, but crucial, ends. It would be preferable to do the hard work of identifying exactly and explicitly what those ends are, expressed in terms of impacts on human, animal and plant life, perhaps combined with social and financial targets. Then we could target those ends directly and, importantly, measure progress toward them more accurately.


• It may be too much, in the sense that resources could be diverted into reducing gas emissions and away from projects that could have a much more positive impact on human, animal and plant life. 


• No buy-in. Ordinary people don't know or care about greenhouse gas emission volumes. What we do understand is adverse climatic events, and their effects on humanity and the environment. If we were to target those directly not only would we be solving real problems more efficiently, we'd also have more public understanding and commitment to the process. In short, you would get buy-in from the public, which is as essential as it is absent from the Paris agreement.

That said, the $100 billion to be transferred from the rich countries (that is, their taxpayers) to the developing countries (that is, their governments) to adapt to climate change could be useful - if that's where the money actually ends up. But, on past form, what isn't spent on luxury goods or otherwise squandered will end up in Swiss bank accounts.

To read more about how Social Policy Bonds could be applied to climate change see my paper here, or recent blog posts here, here and here.

Metrics for climate change

The Economist discusses metrics for climate change:

[T]aking the world’s temperature is not as easy as it sounds. Different parts of the planet warm at different rates, as do different layers of the atmosphere, so all sorts of corrections have to be applied to arrive at a single number. A truly simple, and arguably better, approach would be to use concentrations of greenhouse gases—the cause of the warming—as putative maxima. These gases mix rapidly into the atmosphere, so are easily sampled in ways that brook little dissent. Goal difference, 'the Economist, 5 December

I disagree, partly because greenhouse gases are not the sole cause of warming: we do not know, for instance, how big are the relative contributions of deforestation (through changes in albedo as well as carbon emissions) or different cloud types. Some proportion of climate change also comes from natural (non-anthropogenic) events. At least as importantly, our views about the greenhouse gases' relative contributions change dramatically with our growing scientific knowledge. There would, then seem to be a pragmatic basis, as well as the case for broader public engagement, for instead targeting for reduction the impacts on human, animal and plant life of adverse climatic events.

Climate Stability Bonds could set such impact reduction goals. If, in time, and with the market's incentives on offer, bondholders decide that the best way of achieving such goals is to reduce certain greenhouse gas emissions, then that is what they will do. But it would seem hubristic and inefficient for governments or UN bodies to assume that that this is the best way of achieving meaningful reductions in those impacts. There are too many uncertainties, and the science upon which such a policy is based is inescapably ossified. See also my other recent posts on this question.

But who allocates the funds?

From 'the Economist', in a feature about climate change:

Energy firms do not spend a lot on research because there is no product differentiation in energy (electrons are electrons) and thus nothing exciting to sell until the price falls below that of the existing technology. So taxpayers will have to stump up most of the cash. If more money were forthcoming, a good deal of it would be wasted on dead-end projects. But that is the nature of research and development. Second-best solutions, 'the Economist', 28 November

I'm not sure whether funding research into alternative ways of generating electricity is a goal that ordinary people would find meaningful. But putting that aside, and assuming that 'taxpayers will have to stump up most of the cash', there are better ways of allocating that funding than via the usual activity-based, outcomes-don't-matter, formula that typifies government research programmes.

My proposal would be for the government to do what it's good at: (1) raising the necessary funding and (2) specifying a goal to be achieved, but then to bow out and allow a motivated private sector to allocate the funding to its chosen projects - something that economic theory, and all the evidence, suggest it can do more efficiently than the central planners in government. Social Policy Bonds could directly target cleaner electricity production, though I'd prefer they target broader and more obviously meaningful goals. Either way, a bond regime would lead to diverse, adaptive projects and bondholders would have powerful incentives to back only the most efficient ways of achieving whatever goal is specified. When government allocates funding, all sorts of criteria other than maximising returns per taxpayer dollar creep in. And we don't need to go beyond the energy sector to see that.

Climate change, again

I posed this question before but it bears repeating: are we more concerned about climate change, or about the impacts of climate change on human, animal and plant life? The popular assumption is that the most efficient way of mitigating the negative impacts of climate change is to reduce that which current science suggests are one of its major causes: greenhouse gas emissions. But we don't know that for certain, and we don't know the degree to which we can do anything about it. And we'll never know whether any of the costly policies suggested in this article will have had any impact whatsoever. It would seem preferable to spend our scarce resources on dealing with the impacts of adverse climatic events - whether they're caused by greenhouse gases or not. Floods are just as devastating whether caused by greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions or not. Climate Stability Bonds would, in fact, encourage ghg emission cuts if they are found to be the most efficient way of dealing with the adverse impacts of climate change on human, animal and plant life.

When I wrote along the above lines to an internet comment forum, one respondent said: 'What you don't do is cause a problem, then ignore it while you "fix" the symptoms.' My response is that we should not be dogmatic about whether we tackle causes or symptoms. The 'cause' of a large proportion of the crime problem is 'young men': we don't force all boys to undergo a sex change just so we can save money on a justice system.

There are undoubtedly symptoms whose root causes we can identify readily and address. There are others whose root causes are currently unknown or too expensive to tackle. We could still, with Social Policy Bonds, target the symptoms for solution and motivate bondholders to work out whether or not the best way of dealing with them is to go after possible root causes. There are problems whose root causes might never be unambiguously identified. But if we issue Conflict Reduction Bonds, for instance, there's no need to resign ourselves to living on a planet wracked by war.

Loyalty ... to what?

My previous post mentioned the climate change bureaucracy. Underpinning that bureaucracy are two assumptions: that it's better to deal with climate change than with its effects; and that cutting back greenhouse gas emissions is the best way of dealing with climate change. But what if those assumptions wrong?  Would the climate change bureaucracy reform itself?

Freeman Dyson reviews a biography of Max Planck:

My Princeton colleague Albert Hirschman published in 1970 a little book with the title Exit, Voice, and Loyalty ...., exploring these issues in a different perspective. Hirschman was writing as an economist about large-scale enterprises that he had seen in many countries, beginning with the railroads in Nigeria and ending with the American war in Vietnam. In each of these enterprises, gross failures were manifest, and the individuals occupying positions of responsibility had to choose between three alternative responses. Exit meant to quit the enterprise. Voice meant to stay on the job but speak out publicly for change of direction. Loyalty meant to stay on the job and give support to the continuation of failing policies. Hirschman observed that in the majority of enterprises, voice is sadly lacking. Most people choose loyalty and very few choose voice. Those who choose exit have only a small effect on the enterprise. If gross errors and injustices are to be corrected, voice must be fearless and fierce, loud enough to be heard. Max Planck: the tragic choices (subscription), Freeman Dyson, 'New York Review of Books', 22 October

"Most people choose loyalty": with existing organizations this means loyalty to the people in control and their way of doing things. It's perfectly understandable: most organizations have worthy-sounding goals and are staffed by ethical, hard-working people. I have met such people who work to ensure compliance with the Kyoto agreement's climate commitments. Their loyalty - naturally, understandably, but regrettably - is to the climate change bureaucracy. Though they may express private doubts about the value of their work, they feel they are in no position to question the bureaucracy that employs them or its underlying assumptions. The bureaucracy has an inertia of its own; it continues living and breathing and trying to grow, even when its goals conflict with those of society.

That is what conventional organizations do. Under a Social Policy Bond regime though, things would be different. A bond regime would lead to new kinds of organizations: ones whose composition, structure and range of activities would be subject to continuous change. Their entire purpose would be to achieve society's goals, as expressed in the redemption terms for Social Policy Bonds. Their composition and activities would depend entirely on how efficient its members and projects are in helping to achieve that goal. Assumptions as to who is best placed to achieve society's goals or how they will go about achieving those goals would be subject to continuous questioning by would-be investors in the market for the bonds. These investors would have interests exactly congruent with those of society as a whole: to achieve our social and environmental goals as efficiently as possible. They would, in short, be loyal to society's goals rather than, as at present, to a hierarchy, ideology or dubious assumptions.

Climate change: the fundamental question

Social Policy Bonds impose a useful discipline on policymakers. They oblige us to be very clear about what we want to achieve. Nowhere is this more necessary than with climate change. The fundamental question, which I don't see posed in policymaking circles or indeed anywhere else is:

Are we more concerned about climate change, or about the impacts of climate change on human, animal and plant life?

There seems to be a pervasive assumption that the most efficient way of mitigating the negative impacts of climate change is to reduce that which current science suggests (but does not know for certain) are one of its major causes: greenhouse gas emissions.

A Social Policy Bond regime would not make that assumption. Instead we would specify very clearly what we want to achieve. We would express our policy goal as a combination of physical, social, biological and financial measures that must fall within specified ranges for a sustained period. Only then would holders of Climate Stability Bonds be paid out.

In fact, there's a strong case for ensuring that policy be independent of our views about what's happening to the climate. For instance: a family made homeless by an earthquake or a missile is just as homeless as one made homeless by rising sea levels. Perhaps we should target for reduction the human cost of all disasters, whether caused by adverse climatic events, other acts of God, or by man. Impacts on animal and plant life could be targeted by other bond issues.

Unfortunately an entire bureaucracy has grown around climate change as a discrete problem. It seems to me that the existence and activities of this bureaucracy embody the assumption that our trying to influence the climate is the most efficient way of dealing with problems caused by unfavourable changes in the climate. I think that assumption needs to be challenged.

Climate change: current policy is doomed to fail

[T]he representation of clouds in climate models (and of the water vapour which is intimately involved with cloud formation) is such as to amplify the forecast warming from increasing atmospheric CO₂—on average over most of the models—by a factor of about three. In other words, two-thirds of the forecast rise in temperature derives from this particular model characteristic. Despite what the models are telling us—and perhaps because it is models that are telling us—no scientist close to the problem and in his right mind, when asked the specific question, would say that he is 95 per cent sure that the effect of clouds is to amplify rather than to reduce the warming effect of increasing CO₂. If he is not sure that clouds amplify global warming, he cannot be sure that most of the global warming is a result of increasing CO₂. Uncertainty, scepticism and the climate issue, Garth W Paltridge, in 'Climate Change: the Facts,' edited by Alan Moran, 2015

The 'forecast rise in temperature' referred to by Professor Paltridge is that made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The book in which Prof Paltridge's essay appears is a collection of skeptical essays, and one which, like the website Watts up with that? is at first persuasive to non-scientists like myself. But then so too are most of the arguments on the other side of the debate; the ones agreeing with what has become the mainstream view, that anthropogenic climate change is happening. (There's also an equally convincing website: RealClimate.org.) 

We know that science is not a consensual process. So what are policy people to make of these irreconcilable differences? We can all agree that there are uncertainties, not only about the fact of climate change but also about the details: the magnitudes, the causes, the impacts. We can also agree that these uncertainties are not going to disappear any time soon. Conventional policy has a hard time trying to deal with such uncertainty. It seeks to identify, with a high degree of certainty, those causes, magnitudes and impacts of climate change, then come up with something to tackle the root causes. Conventional policy has identified greenhouse gases as those causes and keeps coming up with measures aimed at cutting emissions of those gases into the atmosphere. Or, more cynically, aimed at pretending that such cuts in emissions will happen: these measures are unpopular, divisive and expensive. As well, the costs are all upfront and the climate benefits - there's almost universal agreement about this too - will be slow in coming and probably not very significant. (It's likely any cuts will have beneficial effects on things other than climate, but they are not driving policy.)

Conventional policy, then, is failing. I think there's a broad consensus about that too. Some think it's too little; others think it's too drastic. But either way, it's not good enough. Even in their own terms, Kyoto and subsquent agreements are failing.

So here's my suggestion. Instead of targeting what might or might not be the cause of what might or might not be anthropogenic climate change, why not target exactly what we want to achieve? It could be an array of ranges within which physical, biological, social and financial indicators must fall, for a sustained period. We could aim for relative and sustained stability in those indicators that are important to plant, animal and human life. A Climate Stability Bond regime would do this, regardless of what we currently think is driving the climate. It is not only clouds (see excerpt above) whose contribution is uncertain: it's the relative contribution of the various greenhouse gases or any of a large number of other variables, anthropogenic or not. The conventional approach, which looks for root causes before doing anything significant, isn't working, and cannot work when our knowledge of such causes is expanding rapidly. Climate Stability Bonds, as well as being versatile in the range of variables that they target, would reward people who achieve our goals, whoever they are and however they do so. Bondholders would do the work of identifying the causes and effects of climate change on a continuous basis. They would research, explore and implement those measures that will achieve the best return on our scarce resources. They will, very probably, implement a very broad range of measures on a diverse, adaptive basis: something that no government or supra-national body can do. 

There are things that governments can do well. Indeed, there are things that only governments can do at all. These usually are areas in which causal relationships are clear and stable, and the benefits of an established approach are large and unchallenged. None of these conditions apply to climate change. It's time for a different approach.

Greenhouse gas emissions accelerating

Michael Le Page, writes in New Scientist (18 July) about the 'coal renaissance' and in particular about the heavy investments in coal power of poor, fast-growing countries in Asia and Africa. The result is that 'global CO2 emissions are rising faster than ever. And they are likely to continue to grow.' Indeed 'not only are carbon emissions rising, the pace has accelerated since 2000'. A graph (in the print issue) illustrates this: emissions rose at an average rate of 1.3 percent a year from 1970 to 2000, and have been rising at 2.2 percent since then.

I have for years been pointing out the futility of the Kyoto agreement and other apparent attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. I favour a clearer identification of what we actually want to achieve. Is it reduced greenhouse gas emissions? Even with that exceptionally narrow and arguable goal (can we really identify all the greenhouse gases and weight their contribution to climate change accurately?), Kyoto, as Mr Le Page tells us, is a failure. Will reducing greenhouse gas emissions, even were we to be successful in doing that, actually affect the climate? To what end? Nobody knows. But perhaps Kyoto and its interminable followups is intended to be a respectable-sounding forum within which bureaucrats from all countries can talk to each other and syphon off enough taxpayers' money to bring up their families. Ok, yes, it's had more success there. But that's probably not an achievement that taxpayers support with enthusiasm.

We do need to focus on what we want to achieve. Climate Stability Bonds, which I advocate, don't need to be exclusively, or even partly, about aiming to reduce the variability of the earth's climate. We could target some physical and biological indicators of climate change, but we could instead, or as well, target social and financial measures, such as the numbers of people killed or made homeless by adverse climatic events and the cost of compensating them, or the costs of preventing the negative impacts from arising at all.

A bond regime would be sufficiently versatile to include all these indicators, and more. It wouldn't even require people to agree on the - still questioned - thesis that the climate is actually changing or that, if it is changing, it's something for which we are responsible. It would, though, require clarity and honesty about what we want to achieve. Hmm, perhaps that's why it's gone nowhere in the 25 years or so it's been in the public arena. But all is not lost, yet. For more, see this page, and the links therefrom.

Chopping down trees to fight climate change

It's inefficient, at best, for central government to try to prescribe how to achieve most social or environmental goals. Society's just too complex for any large, fixed organization fully to understand. But politicians aren't known for their humility. This is what happens when government thinks it knows how best to achieve its environmental goal of reducing greenhouse gases (not to be confused with trying to prevent climate change, but that's another story):

For the sake of a greener Europe, thousands of American trees are falling each month in the forests outside this cotton-country town [Oak City, North Carolina, US]. .... Each day, dozens of trucks haul freshly cut oaks and poplars to a nearby factory where the wood is converted into small pellets, to be used as fuel in European power plants. Soaring demand for this woody fuel has led to the construction of more than two dozen pellet factories in the Southeast [of the US] in the past decade, along with special port facilities in Virginia and Georgia where mountains of pellets are loaded onto Europe-bound freighters. European officials promote the trade as part of the fight against climate change. Burning “biomass” from trees instead of coal, they say, means fewer greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. .... But ...scientists say, Europe’s appetite for wood pellets could lead to more carbon pollution for decades to come, while also putting some of the East Coast’s most productive wildlife habitats at risk. How Europe’s climate policies led to more U.S. trees being cut down, Joby Warrick, 2 June

It's a typical government intervention; confusing the causes of a problem (climate change) with the supposed causes of a problem (coal burning) and imposing a restricted (geographically limited to the EU) pseudo-solution to a problem that goes beyond politicians' sphere of influence. The result: government intervention makes things worse even on its own terms.

The same confusion arises in other areas, especially those where experts think they have all the answers. So we see the targeting of a surrogate indicator like blood cholesterol in medicine, through the mass prescription of statins, which might, but probably won't, do anything to reduce the overall health of a population - with large upfront and certain costs in terms of finance and side effects. Of one thing we can be certain: government will not (pdf) look back at its policies and learn from its mistakes.

The solution, I think, is for governments to stick to what they are good at: articulating society's goals and raising the funds to achieve them. But, for complex social and environmental goals, government should contract out the actual achievement to a motivated coalition of interests, which will have incentives to explore diverse, adaptive ways of achieving our goals. A Social Policy Bond regime would effect such a contracting out. The bonds, being tradeable, would imply that this coalition could change, always to be composed of those who will be most efficient at achieving our goals. This, in turn, would mean that we could target long-term goals, including those, like climate change, that transcend national boundaries.

Er ... we meant wind-powered cars

The Economist urges cuts in greenhouse gas emissions with this compelling argument:

Moreover, high temperatures do not affect only outdoor workers. [A] study found that a week’s worth of outside temperatures over 32°C cuts production in car plants by 8%. The costs of doing nothing, Economist, dated 28 June

Wow, this climate change business is serious: we must cut back on greenhouse gas emissions - and quickly - or we could see big falls in the numbers of cars being produced!

You can't prove it

Climate sceptics are finding it ever harder to persuade the public that the climate isn't changing. So now some are turning to a more last-ditch line of attack: even if climate change is happening, it's not worth worrying about. Causes for climate concern, 'New Scientist', dated 7-13 December

If you're a politician, there's a genuine problem with climate change, as with many other environmental and social concerns: you can't do anything until cause and effect have been proven; and sometimes not even then. And that's supposing that you want to do something. When you don't really want to do anything, then obviously nothing will be done, except maybe you will perform some elaborate, expensive gestures, like participating in conferences, subsidising so-called green technologies (for a few years), and transferring token amounts of cash from taxpayers in the rich countries to rich people in the poor countries. Meantime, the challenge goes unmet.

Climate Stability Bonds could be the answer. Governments - or whoever actually wants to deal with climate change - could issue them without having to prove that climate change is actually happening, without knowing what's causing it, and without knowing what the best solution to it is going to be. The bond issuers would, in effect, be contracting out the discovery of what's happening, and how best to deal with it, to the market. And the market would have every incentive to be impartial and efficient about every aspect of the climate change challenge. That's a total contrast to the current policymaking environment, in which powerful interests can influence the interpretation and presentation of the science and policymaking. It's just not a rational way of dealing with the problem and it just might be leading us all into catastrophe.

No surprises here

The United Nations says it is “less and less likely” that global greenhouse gas emissions will be low enough by 2020 to stop the atmosphere warming beyond the internationally-agreed safety threshold – 2°C above its pre-industrial level. A report by the UN Environment Programme says current undertakings by world governments to cut emissions fall short of that goal, and emissions “continue to rise rather than decline”. Source

No surprise. If world governments were serious about doing something to moderate climate change, they'd reward people who help moderate climate change. Instead they have agreed on an elaborate, expensive, divisive and ineffectual policy of hand waving. The relationships are too obscure, or can be made to appear so: cutting greenhouse gas emissions might reduce climate change. But it might not. Even if it does, any benefits are likely to be minuscule. The costs are immediate, the benefits obscure and remote. It's not happening and it's not going to happen.

There'd be more popular support for targeting climate change directly. Under a Climate Stability Bond regime we could define our goal in ways that encompass an array of indicators: physical, biological, financial, so that all targeted conditions would have to be satisified and sustained before taxpayers become liable. We could choose to target goals including the reduction of casualties from adverse climatic events - something that ordinary people can understand and with which we can identify.

Apart from being comprehensible, the other big advantage of a bond regime is that it would channel resources into where they will be most effective at achieving our climate targets. It would encourage diverse, adaptive approaches, of the sort that Kyoto, with its fossilized science, cannot. And we are going to need diverse, adaptive approaches: the scientific relationships are too uncertain, and our knowledge expanding so rapidly, that any approach that focuses exclusively on just one variable (like the concentration of the few compounds identified as greenhouse gases twenty years ago) is going to fail. And it would fail even if it enjoyed support that took the form of actually doing something about it.