Stephen Schneider, Ph.D.

Global warming is hype. The hockey stick, the front end is already off, which means the whole thing is a joke. What’s your take on that?

Well, those people who say that because it hasn’t warmed up much in the last 10 years, and therefore global warming is kind of a joke, if I said that in any scientific meeting, I would get instant laughs, without even having to make a joke, because it is scientifically absurd.

It’s like trying to figure out Willy Mays’ lifetime batting average by how well he did in the summer of 1958. You’ve got to look at the whole record. 10 years is a very short term in climate. In climate, we talk about 25-50 year trends. On the 25-year trend, it’s upwardly sloped. If you went from 1992, to 2002, that 10-year period, it looked like we were going to hell in a hand basket, we were going up so fast.

Why the sun was more active, there was El Nino, and there was global warming from human activities. Now, from 1998, the hottest El Nino year, till about now, the sun has been quiet, we haven’t had much El Nino, so it’s flat. So, if you put the two together, it looks just like a little bump, and a little bump. You know, one good summer hitting, one bad summer hitting. Means absolutely nothing.

And, even funnier, is people like Senator Inhofe saying that snow in Washington, means global warming, when even conservatives in the scientific community said that January was the warmest year in their record. All that of that is noise. No competent scientist ever talks about short-term records being anything other than weather noise. This is all political pandering to some client interest, somebody who paid their campaign bills for some constituency at home.

The EPA is considering C02 a problem with our national security. They say it is complete nonsense. Why would the EPA rule it as a threat?

We have a clean air act which was approved by congress, signed by presidents, by republic presidents, as well as democratic presidents. There was a definitional problem about whether greenhouse gasses should be included under pollution that legally, the EPA must regulate. Now, there was a five to four supreme court decision, where the majority of I might say, republicans, agreeing, I think that the planetary interest is more important for their partisan history, for which I commend them, that C02 is indeed a pollutant, in the sense that it’s side effects can be damaging to health and the environment, and society.

And, therefore, they ordered the EPA to look into appropriate regulations. So, what the Obama administration is doing is exactly what the Supreme Court decision and the Bush administration told them they should be doing. Now, Obama and his EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson have said, “we would rather do this by legislation, than by regulation by EPA. But, if we have no legislation, we have to protect national interest and national health. And, therefore, given the supreme court requirement, there’s nothing else that they can do but pursue that avenue because congress has not only dropped by ball, but seems to want to kick it out of the hands of everyone who wants to pick it up”.

And, that’s exactly what these lawsuits are. They are not about the planetary interest, that doesn’t cross the mind of most members of congress, I’m sorry to say, as an American. They’re not even about the national interest, they are about local special interest, they’re about who pays the campaign, and this is inconvenient stuff, because it could hurt the market share of big businesses that are in their districts. That’s exactly what’s going on.

Don Young thinks the whole global warming thing is a fear attempt to control the American people to change the way we live. What do you make of that?

In 1992, President Bush I went to Rio De Jinero Earth Summit, over the advice of some advisors. Although he made a strong statement that the American way of life is not up for negotiation, he nonetheless did the right thing for history. He signed the UN framework convention on climate change, which created the process that had the Copenhagen meeting. And, the United States Senate approved it.

It is the law of the land, and about 190 other countries that we have to stabilize greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, at a level that prevents in this law, dangerous antiprogenic interference with the climate system, meaning, some damages from what we do, to use the atmosphere as a free sewer to dump our tailpipe and smokestack waste. So, given that, and given that it’s the law, we have to pursue a variety of approaches to try to slow down the rate at which humans are impacting on the climate.

Now, when somebody asserts that the United States is a victim and a target of the UN conspiracy, and I get hate emails, with words I could not print death threats, saying I am a communist dupe of the United Nations’ attempt to create a world government, to take away American, religious, and economic freedom. Of course, this is all complete nonsense, since I have always been a very strong democrat, with a little d. I love democracy, though it has its problems.

America cannot forget that we have accumulated the most number of tons in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide than all the other countries. So, therefore, we are the number one planetary, global warming scofflaw.

How can we not take the first steps and to do it initially to try to rectify, literally, our debt to the environment, since we were the most major accumulator. Now, China has taken over for us. But, they haven’t accumulated to our level yet. They are now earning money faster than we are, meaning, putting more junk in the air, but their bank account is not as big. So, we have to make a deal with people. That deal doesn’t happen without rules. Those rules don’t happen without cooperation. That will involve the UN, plus other side agreements.

It’s complete nonsense to assert that somehow the US is the deliberate target of a conspiracy, in order to take away it’s economic agenda, when in fact, the US was the largest polluter, and it has an obligation to correct it’s past misdeeds.

Conaway says the IPC has 21 models based on reactions. What’s your take on these models?

Climate science is a very tough discipline. And, the reason for that, is it has multiple interacting systems. The other problem is, what they ask us — they meaning the 125 governments that comprise the intergovernmental panel on climate change, the IPCC, including the United States, it’s a cacophonous world out there. All kinds of claims are made about catastrophic outcomes, good outcomes, my own personal view, end of the world, good feud, two lowest probability outcomes. It’s a bell curve with multiple possibilities. And, what we do is try to widow out the relative likelihood of all these various outcomes.

That’s the role of the US national academy of science, of the IPCC, which is to do the analysis of risk. Most people have a pretty good idea of what risk is, it’s what can happen — let’s say if it’s a negative, that’s a negative risk — multiply times the probability. If it’s a really, really rare event, we don’t worry about it. You know, if it’s a really common event, even if it’s not so serious, we might worry about it. Then, there’s risk management. That’s what to do about the risks.

That’s a personal value judgment, where every human and every voter has an equal right to everybody else. First part – science, risk, second part? Politics. What to do. Now, how does politics get informed? They have to be told risk. Risk is a projection of what happens in the future. Now, we scientists love to be data driven — give me data, give me data. We’re always pressing congress; we need money for satellites, we need money for ships, and all this kind of stuff.

Because, if we don’t have the data, we don’t know how to evaluate, A. What’s happening, and B. Why? The data matters. Unfortunately, how much data do we have in the future? I love to ask my classes. Finally, a bold student holds up a zero. Exactly. So, how can you predict the future? How do you do it in a football game, how do you do it in the economy? How do you do it in military security? How do you do it in health? You build a model. That’s your representation of the most importance processes, which contribute to outcomes.

And, we build a model. We use real data, build a model of the atmosphere, model of the oceans, model of the trees, the ecosystems, the chemistry. We drive that model, the social models, how many people will be in the room? What standards of living will they demand? What kind of technology? We going to be a cold world with tons of pollution? Are we going to be a solar wind nuclear world with very little?

Those are not answered. So, then what we do is we have scenarios, low emissions, medium emissions, and high emissions. And, we show the consequences of those for whether or not we’re going to get one meter or four meters of sea level rise. So, we use our models as partly cloudy crystal balls to project the future for one simple reason; there’s no other way. There is no data on the future.

And, then I hear somebody tell me, I don’t believe in models. Oh really? What do you believe in? They say, I believe in data. So, let’s see, they’ve got temperature going this way, C02 going that way, as soon as they associate these two curves, they have a mental model. Those of us who consider ourselves good scientists believe an explicit mathematical model that can be tested is much better than an implicit mental model of somebody not skilled in testing and evaluating. That’s how the IPCC works.

And, it doesn’t build models, it takes them from literature. If there are people who do not like that process, perhaps they can get a scientific degree and tell us an alternative. There is no alternative. The future hasn’t happened. It requires models.

The big key is, how do you test the models? And, how credible can they be? And, you do that by getting a community of scientists, policy makers, managers, industry people, environmental groups all around the world, put them together for two years to fight, get the reports reviewed by two or three rounds, justify the responses to the reviews to review editors, and it’s called the IPCC, not the ravings of various people on the congressional record.

Postal rates are going up, he says, maybe postal rates are what the problem is. What’s your take?

Well, there are people who use metaphors that are completely idiotic. And, no quality scientist ever associates two things and says, therefore this proves them because the model is that they’re connected. So, we build models with the underlying physics and chemistry and biology of the atmosphere. We test them locally, regionally, we test them on ice ages from before.

Every time a volcanic eruption goes off and throws dust high in the atmosphere, it cools the earth, the models cool the earth. When it was warmer, 125,000 years ago because the earth’s orbit was different, we put that in the same model we used to project global warming, it actually projects it. It was warmer then, that the sea levels were higher because the ice melted when it was warmer.

We’re not pulling this stuff out of our left ear. I mean, this is stuff that goes through major strictly peer-reviewed heavily debated issues. Now, tell me again? I forgot –

So, we don’t just look at correlation. Now, how is it that we determined that an IPCC — they said, that warming, itself over the last century and a half is unequivocal? That’s based on thermometers, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and plants blooming earlier in the spring, and birds coming back earlier. It’s unequivocal, meaning that the evidence is so overwhelming that it’s not — it’s not really a debate anymore.

The much more sophisticated debate is, how much of that is from our earth? And, how much from us? And that’s — that’s what we call a detection and attribution study. So, we have detected a very significant change. Now, what can we attribute it to? In order to do that, you have to have an alternative set of cause and effect possibilities. So, one possibility is — it’s all natural internal variability.

So, you take your computer model. And, you don’t push it with anything, you just let it run for 1000 years. And, you calculate how the temperature drifts up a couple tenths degree, it drips down from decade to decade. Now, you compare that with the records we have, and you find out that it’s pretty good. There is a drift of a couple of tenths of a degree and down. And, this is Celsius.

And, we’re a little under one Celsius warmer now than we were a century and a half ago. So, the noise of this drift is much less than the signal of the last century and a half, but it’s still part of it. Now, you drive the models with what we call natural forces. You’ve got measurements of when those volcanoes went off. So, you put that in your model. Then, you get three or four years of cooling after each one of them

Now, the model starts to approximate a little bit of the temperature record you actually observed from 1900 till now. Now, you drive the models and also the energy output changes of the sun, which we observed for 30 years, but we extrapolate backwards, assuming the sun behaved the same way. Nobody knows that for sure, but that’s the best assumption – you get a slightly higher scale. But, not very much scale. Maybe only 10% of the whole record can be accounted for by natural forces.

Now you add in greenhouse gasses, some aerosol, some human activities, and what you find is you get a dramatically higher correlation. 50% of the variability explained from about 1970 on, and it’s what we call fingerprint of — of humans did it, not nature. That’s not where we stop. That’s not enough for us. So, what we say is, if the sun did it, as you’ll find in the Wall street Journal editorial page, almost every other opp ad on climate, okay? And, it would have warmed the stratosphere, where the ozone is, the middle of the lower atmosphere, and the surface.

If we did it, and we drive that into our models, it predicts the stratosphere cools, lower atmosphere warms. What happened? The latter — the stratosphere cooled. Well, does that prove global warming? No. About a 50% chance it warmed on it’s own. The stratosphere. 50% chance it cooled, got a 50% chance the lower atmosphere warmed on it’s own, 50% chance it cooled. So, it’s a 25% chance we just got lucky. But, that’s not the only fingerprint. We also have the other ones.

What about the other finger prints? Well, the models predict that night warms up more than day. Did that happen? Yes. Well, it’s 25% chance. But, now we’ve got two. Models predict middle of continents warm up more than middle of oceans. Did that happen? Yes. Models predict, lower latitude is warmer, did that happen? Yes.

In fact, there’s nothing at that scale that the models predict that hasn’t happened. So, therefore if you put three, four, five events together, the probability of chance is less than 10%. So, what did IPCC say? Very likely that most of the last 50 years of warming is due to human activity. Very likely to us means, greater than 90%. In fact, that’s conservative. We could have said virtually 99%, and the reason we didn’t say that, is there could be some mysterious unknown pressure that nobody ever thought of.

So, we leave a little room at the top like, in judging skating — in the Olympics, and for — we miss something, and we say, okay, it’s very likely, okay, greater than 90 — though the statistics allow you to say much higher than that and that’s how the process works. And, we sit there and hear this framed, as if somehow the IPCC and national academy of science, and the climate community is deliberately exaggerating this, we’re in fact deliberately understating it, because we tend to be a conservator discipline.

Can you respond that we’re not just correlating something simple like human activity and increasing temperatures?

The first thing anybody does is they look for trends that correlate. Fine. That gives you an idea that there may be a connection. Now, if you are a polemicist, you stop right there. If you’re a real scientist, you say, what’s the underlying cause? Does that make any sense? What are the processes that matter? So, what scientists do, is they put in the processes, they use the correlations to drive them, and then what they do is they model the outcome under a whole range of plausible p — possibilities, and processes, and they now compare that to the actual observations of what happened.

And, when they get the highest correlation between what they predict under — forces A, B, and C, and what actually happened, then you have a higher confidence that it took all three of those forces. The climate system, is not simple. It is not driven by just one thing. It’s driven by many things. And, the human signal only is emerged from the noise of natural background over the last 50 years.

And, it is slated to get — to become the dominant signal over the next 50 to 100 years. And, the fact that it’s emerged, and it’s already detectable, it’s already attributable at least in half to us, is concerning enough that the future projections have a high degree of confidence that makes us worry out loud, and why we inform the political world that they’d better think about this problem.

Some people have said, because of this so-called climategate, I prefer to call it denyergate, because the victims and villains have been reversed, here. The hackers should be the focus of the gate. As in Watergate. But, that aside, because of that, people have said, well, the hockey stick. You know, it’s not clear whether the handle — that’s the 1,000 years ago, to the year 1900 was correctly done by the first group. And, they’re right. It’s not clear it was correctly done. There are now 12 groups that have done it. The handle is very wavy. Every one of these 12 independent groups — the blade — that’s the temperature of the last 50 years, rises above the waving handle.

So, when people say, ah-hah, climategate proves that the hockey stick is false and there’s no human induced warming, that’s completely wrong, because the waviness of the blade –

The waviness of the hockey stick handle never had anything to do with anyone’s assessment of the likelihood of human induced climate change. It came out from fingerprint evidence, based on direct observations and model comparisons that had nothing to do with a hockey stick. Once again, a misframe, mostly by special interests in denial.

They’re not interested in the truth. There’s no consequence for lying, other than their buddies get a larger fraction of market share. For us, in science, there’s a consequence for lying. You get a lousy reputation, you don’t get promoted, you don’t get your papers accepted, because it’s — blind peer review, you don’t get your grants. Science is not playing at a level playing field with the advocacy world, where the philosophy is, win one for the client. You use that philosophy in science, you are drummed out as an irresponsible person. And, you can feel free to use that.

The science is not settled, is what they love to say. Is the science settled, Steve?

I give at least one or two lectures a week, in popular audiences literally from — professors to grad students, undergrads, high school, sometimes junior high, right on down to congressional committees. And — every time I do that, I always begin by asking my audiences if the science of global warming settled. And, by settled, I don’t mean every detail. I mean that humans are an important component. I always define that.

And then, so I take a vote. You know, I did it in New Zealand not long ago. Maybe 70% said yes. When I did it in Texas, maybe 20% said yes. All looking at the same data. So, you’re getting people with already a very different political mindset, because of the people that they trust, framing the problem, and they don’t usually look it up for themselves.

So, my third question to my audience is: how many think it’s a stupid question, whether the science is settled? They giggle and I raise my hand. And, why is that? Because, climate science, like any other complex system science, health care, military security, education, international trade, economic development, all of these have multiple components of complexity. There’s never such a thing as 100% knowledge. We have well-established components, we have competing explanations, and we have speculative components.

Just like the American Tobacco Institute did for 35 years, they cited the few studies that were speculative and ignored the dozens that were well established and then bamboozled the public into saying it isn’t proved, it isn’t settled. In fact, to this day, we still don’t know the exact biological mechanism, whereby smoking causes cancer, but the data is so amazingly overwhelming that it would be wildly irresponsible in the courts, if we already agreed not to regulate it.

I believe that the climate science is pretty close to that state on the well-established parts. Unequivocal warming, very likely human activities, very likely significant increases in the future, very likely significant side effects, like fires and hurricanes and other things. Not every event is negative. It’s good for the shipping industry to have shorter routes across the arctic. But, it’s bad for the polar bear system and the hunting culture. You can always find winners and losers everywhere.

So, what we do is we try to aggregate. And, what we conclude is, once you warm up another degree or two, the aggregation of damages starts looking much worse than the benefits of the fossil fuels. That’s why we need to get off these, according to economists. A question we’re fighting about is the rate, and who pays, and all that kind of stuff.

Conway said, Where are the skeptics? Where is Galileo? Where are today’s Galileo’s?

Galileo never said the world was flat. He just simply said that the moons of Jupiter mean there’s no celestial seers, and that shattered a church dogma for which they showed him the torture instruments. The reason that we celebrate Galileo and Einstein, right off the tip of the head. There aren’t that many more, is because such paradigm breakers, such incredible out of the box thinkers are very rare. Most science is what we call normal science.

And, that refining the technique, we’re changing the answer from one degree, to three, we’re moving it around. We’re not going to dramatic cooling. So, the point is that we’re adjusting the knobs as we get more information. We’ll take many, many decades before those knobs are adjusted to high precision, well after the time it takes to suffer the consequences, which is why we have a political discussion. So, for every true Galileo, there are 1,000 pretenders.

And, almost all the climate deniers are completely obviously in the pretender category. If they wish to spread their denial, then why don’t they go to the meetings? The American association for The Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical, the American Meteorological Society, where they can fight it out with an audience that knows. Where do they go? Wall street Journal Editorial Board, advertising blogs, FOX News, so they’re ending up not debating with people who can point out the utter garbage in these assertions, but they’re simply making assertions and using the available instruments to try to propagate quite frankly, propaganda.

And in the scientific community, you can’t make a wild statement without getting your colleague to go after you. And, then you have a fight out in front of everybody else. And, then the body of scientists, try to winnow out over the period of decades, who’s right? And, that’s exactly what we do. That is not the process of political advocacy, where the object is to win for the client, not to tell the truth.

And, there’s a whole different way of doing things. So, we’re all looking for Galileo’s, but they’re very rare. That’s why they’re so celebrated.

Segal said to us there’s a good correlation between causes. He says even in the IPCC, you wont find consensus, to what degree man made is contributing. We don’t know to what degree humans are causing global warming. Is there a lack of consensus in the IPCC about the degree to which?

IPCC is a group of scientists. We separate out the well established and the competing explanations from the speculative. We talk in bell curves. There is a very strong consensus on the bell curve. If you want to go all the way over to the left hand side of it, we’re only going to warm up another degree or two. Go to the other side of it, Oh my God, five or 10, utter catastrophic outcome.

So, there’s a consensus on the bell curve. There isn’t a consensus on the individual number. What we’re looking at is risk management. Now, supposing it wasn’t a 2% chance that your house would burn down in a fire, but a 5% chance. You’d be much more inclined to buy insurance. We’re all buying insurance for a 2% chance. If we were a 1% chance, we’d still be buying insurance. For one in a million, maybe not.

So, the point is, consensus is not over the absolute conclusion. That’s a fraudulent frame. Consensus is over the confidence we have in these conclusions. That’s why IPCC has defined, on a quantitative scale what likely means 2/3 to 90%, very likely greater than 90, low confidence, less than 1/3 chance. And, I personally, with my friend Richard Moss, responsible for that, because we wrote the guidance paper, Uncertainties, in 2000, requiring that IPCC not use common language that isn’t defined on a quantitative scale, to make sure we’re all internally consistent.

We’re the first group that ever did that. That’s not becoming standard practice in assessments everywhere so that we know what we’re talking about. That’s how IPCC works. So, when somebody says there’s no consensus in PICC, that’s shows there’s no understanding of how system science is done in IPCC, because there’s incredibly strong consensus over whether particulars use well established competing explanations, or speculative, or what the bell curve looks like.

Not over the specific numerical outcome, because it’s very difficult to know that, and we are completely honest about it.

The Waxman, or cap and carbon, isn’t doing anything to solve the problem because China is going full blast with their coal.

I remember testifying in the Senate, in about 88 or 99, on Cafe. That’s the fuel efficiency standards. The industry was there, accusing me of unemploying the daughters of the workers, and all this kind of stuff. Then they said, oh, come on, the United States is only 22% of the world’s emissions, transportation is only 1/3 of that. You know, the auto industry is only half of that. And, if we have all these Draconian rules that are going to hurt our economy, put in, we’d only be 2% of world emissions.

And, so of course I was asked by the Senator, what I said to respond to that. And, I said that I’ve heard the coal industry say that the United States is only 22% of the world emissions, and they are 40% of that. And, if we put on these things which are going to unemploy the coal miner’s daughters all the proper emotional rhetoric, we’re only 2%, whatever the number was.

And, I said, I have heard other countries say this too; so if you have 50 people and each one of them is 2% of the problem, and they all demand exemption, what have you got? 100% of the problem. By that same logic, why should I pay my taxes? You know, I’m only one trillionth of the national income. Why should I vote? You know, I’m only one vote out of 50 or 100 million people. I mean, so therefore, I don’t have any obligation. We have an obligation to do our share, regardless of others. What we do is we negotiate with others and we do more when they do more.

China has a point; The United States is the largest accumulated emitter of greenhouse gasses. We’re responsible for filling up the atmospheric tank that atmospheric sewer with more of our pollution than any other country in the world has done. China is now polluting faster than we are, but they haven’t come up close to catching up to us. They’re one quarter per person of the emissions that we are.

So, they say it’s not fair for them to take any targets until they catch up to us. Well, what I’ve said, back to China is, wait a minute, you guys have got four times more population. You cannot pollute at our rate. We gotta make a deal here. We’ve got to stop wasteful consumption, you gotta stop wasteful emission, and switch your energy systems to high tech, to which they’ll say, but, that costs more money – you didn’t do that in your industrial revolution, now you want us to spend more money to maintain your economic power.

And, the only way to solve this problem is to make a deal. And, making a deal means you have to look for win-wins.

I don’t think it’s government to government, like donor-recipient. I think it should be corporate to corporate, where we have our corporations making profit sharing, and patent-sharing deals with Chinese and Indians and Mexicans and South Africans, so that way, each can bring the technology home. We get something for our investment. Government will have to negotiate the rules to make sure there’s no cheating.

But, I think there are a lot of win-wins out there, for which the enterprising here, as well as there, can make a lot of money by inventing our way out of this problem. It does not happen in a world poisoned by blame. It requires cooperation.

“The technology is not there, so why are we pretending that it is”?

There are two deeply false premises that are always out there. Number one is, if we have climate policy, we’re going to bankrupt the economy. We did a very, very good job of that without climate policy, by under regulated greedy bankers. I think that the second falsehood is that the technology is not there. The technology is not there, at the same cost of polluting technologies, not being charged a sewer-dumping fee. If we charged coal, oil, and the polluting enterprises for the damage they do to send kids to the hospital with asthma from air pollution, rising sea levels from global warming, all of a sudden, they wouldn’t look so competitive, relative to renewable or even some of the newer nuclear designs.

So, first of all, we’ve got to get the prices right. The problem is, the economy is used to the old prices. They’re rigged to the status quo by not charging the full cost. How can you call it a free market, when the price of energy does not include the cost of the damages from those systems? That is a rigged market to the status quo, which is very politically convenient, and pushed by members of congress from those states, who have those industries for obvious reasons that pork is thicker than ideology. So, that’s exactly what drives that kind of action.

But we cannot do what some of my environmentalist friends insist we can, which is to cut 30, 40% of our emissions by 20/20. That would be economically catastrophic, in my opinion. I don’t think you could build the solar machines and the smart grids fast enough. Our target has to be on a 2-3 decade time scale. What we need to do in the next decade is not get hung up on the numerology of what percentage of what we’re going to cut.

But instead, list the numbers of how much we’re going to spend to invent our way out of the problem. We all know that government is not good at building the best technology. We wouldn’t have had an internet, though, without 22 years of government investment in developing the technology. Would we have had a nuclear industry without the government? Absolutely not. So, you cannot do this without the government. But, then the government gets out of the way, after it spends the research and development costs to spin it up because the private sector is more efficient.

So, what we need now, is an equivalent set of government programs to deal both with our environmental safety through global warming and air pollution and so forth, and to deal with the creation of sustainable jobs, as we go through peak oil and that industry starts to crash, which is inevitable, and also, to decouple some dependents on foreign unreliable supplies. This is not going to happen overnight. It’s going to take one to two, to three decades to do. But, the longer we stall on the grounds that, Well, it isn’t going to produce an immediate bump, the more we have to do the decade later.

So, what are we doing? We’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, and Paul is us. Peter is the child. Because, they will have to pay Paul.

So, if we’re going to worry about short-term costs only, and not long-term safety and long-term costs, what we’re really doing is robbing Peter to pay Paul. But, Peter is our child living in the future and Paul is us right now. So, how greedy can we get? I mean, don’t we care about that kind of a generation and what legacy that we’re leaving them? I know there are people who say, Oh, but if we waste money on this climate problem, we’re denying our posterity, a legacy of wealth and infrastructure by spending money we don’t need to spend.

And, in the short run, there’s some truth to that. But, in the long run, what would have happened if we used that attitude before the internet was invented? Before electronics was invented? Before we had better trains, and not steam trains. We would have preserved the status quo indefinitely, to protect the special interests, in doing it the old fashion way. We’ve got to evolve. People will lose their jobs, more will be created. If we are a fair society, we would actually help the people who lose their jobs.

Two acts of good governments are needed, two. One, you’ve got to protect the comments, two, you’ve got to be fair. We’re having enough trouble doing one. And, it not helped by ovuscation, misstatement, and then media sound bites giving equal status of the bargaining table to positions that aren’t even remotely equal in the credibility of their pronouncements.

Segal quote, “The industry is going to spend all their money on allowances and not on the R and D they can be doing to bring new technology to the market.”

It is absolutely true that industry has to make decisions about how to deploy money between research and development for future opportunities, and paying fees and other things. But, the industry cannot pretend that just because the future is tomorrow, that their misdeeds in the past are all of a sudden forgiven. What are we going to do? Wipe out every debt? Well, we tried to do that in the banking crisis, and look what we got. We cannot wipe out every debt.

What people have polluted is a legacy they have to own. And, therefore we do have to have some charges for that and we have to deal with that. On the other hand, there’s a silver lining in this cloud. And, that silver lining as you start inventing your way out of the problem, you are inventing toys that you can sell to people all over the world who want these green alternatives. So, there’s a lot of money to be made by the next startup Google who figures out how to really do it cheaply, and, safely and socially acceptably.

That will not happen without government pump priming. So, we need some investment.

That will not happen without government pump priming, just like it took for the internet or the nuclear industry, or other electronic industries being started. And, I was giving a talk in Washington right back in the middle of the fiscal crisis, about the need for having public/private partnerships, where say, the feds, who provide loan guarantees, like they were doing for the auto industry, whose wounds were self-inflicted by refusing to build efficient cars, but we still bailed them out, and I even reluctantly agreed with those people who did it.

And, so, a guy in the back of the room waves – he raises his hand, he’s wearing a three-piece suit. And, he says, professor Schneider, how much do you think it’s going to cost to have these loan guarantees to get these hundred startups, to get to them, to be Google? You know, and I said, Well, I don’t know, I haven’t costed it out. But, I’ve listened to my economist friends, my technology friends. Oh, 10, 20, maybe as much as 30 billion dollars a year for the next 10, 20 years. And he slammed his fist. He said, are you kidding? We’re in a fiscal emergency, we can’t spend that kind of money.

And, I am thinking, what am I going to tell this guy? Till the moderator said, well, answer the congressman’s question. Oh, congressman, I’m going to guess, because of the numbers, that you did, what if I were, I would have done, reluctantly voted both for the Bush and Obama bailouts. He said, Yes, I voted for them, and I was reluctant. And, I said, so, you already voted? Not $20 billion a year, but $750 billion in one year, to bail out a bunch of under regulated, greedy bankers?

You don’t want to spend 4% of that every year for the next decade or two, to help us invent our way out of a serious potential environmental crisis, jobs crisis, and crisis of oil supply? And he said, I didn’t say “me”, the guy said. I’m telling you what my colleagues would say. And, I think I got a little mad, and I said, well why don’t you tell your colleagues to look in the mirror, and see if there’s an ethical person looking back at them, or whether they really need a values transplant.

He said he agreed. But, I don’t know. But, the trouble is, that was witnessed by, what? 100 people? No cameras.

They say, “We shouldn’t be trying to pick winners and losers, the market should decide, let the market decide the best technology.”

I absolutely agree. The market should decide what’s the best technology, once a technology has been invented, and been tested for safety and so forth. How did these technologies get invented? Sometimes bright ideas of entrepreneurs. Very often substantial government investments to seed the industry. If we didn’t have an FAA, which is an underwrite of the airline industry, would they be as affective?

If we didn’t have a Price Anderson act, which is a law that guarantees a minimum level of liability to a nuclear power company if they were in an accident – I forgot the number. Something like half a billion dollars, something absolutely trivial, relative to what would happen if they were truly in an accident, that’s a deep subsidy. I’m not even opposing the subsidy. We have to have subsidies for mass transit, because it reduces air pollution and makes our cities livable.

How about farmers? 90 cents on a dollar of subsidized water. When I hear some of those guys saying that’s an entitlement, but the subsidies on mass transit or solar is a rape of the taxpayer, this is deep hypocrisy. Why is there subsidy an entitlement, but somebody else’s isn’t? Come on guys! We’re all in the same country. We’ve got to help each other. We’ve got to subsidize things that are good for the common good, and then after we get through that initial period, now let the market sort it out.

But, how does a market work when we’re not charging the main producers of coal, oil, and gas, for the damages of the side effects of air pollution. As long as that retains itself, the market is rigged for the status quo. It’s a political convenience, not economics.

They are saying the amount of green jobs is all overblown. There are foundations for windmills, then it’s over. There’s no big green job coming, it’s complete hype?

How many jobs in the future, what happens to the economy, all of these things are based on models. All of these models are based on assumptions. Special interest groups make assumptions radically favorable to their preexisting point of view. So, you’ll see somebody who’s opposing green energy, hiring some beltway bandit to sit there and run an economic model, with the most unfavorable possible assumptions, and say, very few jobs there. Then, they make the most favorable possible assumptions about the losses in traditional industries. I’m sorry to say, there are environmental groups which do exactly the same thing, on the other side.

And, the public is left in the state of it’s usual bamboozle, and the media unfortunately covers both side, as if they’re equally credible. Lincoln, helped to create the National Academy of Sciences, which is an independent, non-governmental government agency to assess the relative credibility of claim and counterclaim in science, is just because you cannot trust special interests to give you truth on technically complex things, the national academy both the science the climate, it assesses what can be done in technology, the rates of penetration, costs.

It’s shown that although economic costs of fixing the climate problem could be in the trillions of dollars, globally, that sounds like an astronomical number. My old, late friend, Carl Sagan used to talk about, billions and billions of stars and galaxies – people don’t have millions and billions, yet alone trillions, so it sounds daunting. But, the growth rate in the economy, over the last 10 years, including the recent recession is still over 2%? At 2% per year growth rate, the economic model is predicting trillions of dollars to fix the climate problem with slightly more expensive energy systems that are green means that we’re 500% richer in 2102, with relatively little carbon dioxide pollution, or we’re 500% richer in 2100, just two years earlier, with dramatic carbon dioxide pollution.

Because, the growth rate of the economy is many, many, many more trillions in the cost of the economy. So, what these guys are doing is giving you a fraudulent frame. They’re telling you the absolute costs, not the costs relative to the growth rate associated with the fact that a market economy will grow. I am not anti-market. I want it to grow. But, you cannot leave a market just to the marketers.

There’s no incentive for them to clean up their act, if there weren’t regulations, making certain they weren’t hurting common property. It’s always been and still has to be a mixed, private, public partnership. It’s a legitimate way to draw the line in the sand, between collect the public and protect the private. That’s a legitimate issue of politics. But, to sit there and claim that the market system by itself will do it, almost nobody in economics believes that. They call it a market failure. They even have a fancy name, it’s a stock externality. And, those people who deny that we should be having internalized charges, are simply saying that there should be a free ride to polluting the world

When my neighbor objects to building codes that are going to restrain them from burning wood in their fireplace, claiming My home is my castle, and all these guys are out there, my answer is that, When your smoke is in my daughter’s lungs, sending her to the hospital with asthma, it’s not your castle anymore. You’re a public nuisance, and I’ll sue you, or why don’t we make an agreement to control your emissions. And it’s a, my God, it’s Locke Hobbs and Russo. We’re talking about the philosophers of 200 years ago, saying, you give up a little personal freedom to get more collective freedom.

If you’re going to argue that we should not be interfering with our personal freedom by constraining our entrepreneurial activity, well then I presume you’re out there shot gunning all the traffic lights and the speed limits, you object to having them enforced by cops and judges. I mean, why are we denying any doctor who claims to be qualified, the right to hang up a shingle — why do we have inspection? Why does the FAA every year, make pilots go through some kind of simulator test? Because there is a public right. And, that public right is just as important as a private right.

And, in fact, you lose private rights if you don’t protect the common. So, let’s argue politically, where the line in the sand is, and get off this complete nonsense that this is an issue in principle. It’s an issue in where it makes good sense to regulate. And, when you’re threatening the planetary life support system with potentially irreversible change over 100 years to make one generation of special interests richer. I don’t think that’s a good decision.

The short-term costs of shifting our energy, what is the cost for consumers for not?

It always amazes me to hear business people who are opposed to climate policy tell us that the short term cost of investment in long term systems are too high. Hey, haven’t these guys ever heard that there is no return on investment, without investment? Come on. These are the guys who are the pioneers in investment. They’ve invested fortunes in all kinds of things, whether it’s oil exploration, whether it’s private computers, whether it’s Google, and what have they gotten? Very rich. You don’t get something without investing something.

Does every startup work? No, most fail. So, therefore we have to have that entrepreneurial spirit. I’m with them. But, on the other hand, you’ve got to make the investment, otherwise you don’t get anywhere. If your only focus is on the short term, we would never do anything better.

We’re in a tough tradeoff. At the moment, we want to improve the economy as fast as we can, and help people develop. You do that with cheapest available stuff. Sometimes the cheapest stuff is subsidized, because you’re not charging all the pollution fees. On the other hand, if you keep dumping in the atmosphere, start raising sea levels, cause massive fires and intensified hurricanes, the economic damage from that, and then the health damage is even worse in the long run than the benefits you get from using the cheap available current technology when you can switch to others.

And, there was a famous study in the UK, done by a former treasury official named Nicolas Stern, which basically showed that in the short run, yes, there are costs, but that the horrendous potential damages from climate change is if we end up in the right hand half of unlucky. Remember, think of it as a wheel of fortune where the good slots are two or three times more warming than we’ve already had. That’s the “good ones”, and the bad ones are as much warming as between an ice and now, catastrophic outcomes.

He said, what kind of a society would take coin flip odds risk of potentially catastrophic outcomes that are much more costly than fixing the problem right now, with side benefits. Plenty of economic studies have shown that. And, these deniers of action, are really interested primarily in short-term market share. And, they are not looking at the business model of long-term, income return, and safety for a planet, because that’s not where their special interest is greased.

What are the costs that are coming from these potentially catastrophic events?

There’s no return on investment without investment. What is our return? First of all, you can make money by inventing your way out of the problem, then selling it, but there is another important return. That is, we are making our environment safer for our children, our grandchildren, and the rest of the plants and animals in the world. Isn’t it important to most people to leave the life support system of the earth in much safer condition than otherwise we’d do if we continue on business as usual? That’s a return which is almost incalculable.

And, to be able to fix it for a few trillion dollars, which over the course of the century is a trivial fraction of the growth rate of the economy, not to do that to me, is really to look in the mirror and ask yourself, is there a moral person looking back at you?

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