By Beia Spiller

Originally posted on EDF's Energy Exchange.

Last week, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) co-hosted a successful forum on residential time-variant electricity pricing – which allows customers to pay different prices for electricity depending on when it is used – within the context of New York’s ‘Reforming the Energy Vision’ (REV) proceeding.’

Co-hosted with the New York Department of Public Service and New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, the full-day forum, “On the REV Agenda: The Role of Time-Variant Pricing,” brought together more than 150 regulators, utility executives, academics, and other stakeholders to explore how residential time-variant pricing works, what it can accomplish, and how best to implement it. Below is a recap of some of the high-level takeaways from the forum.

How time-variant pricing (TVP) works

One of EDF’s objectives has been to improve the efficiency of the electricity industry by pursuing a market-based approach to electricity pricing. In most well-functioning markets, the cost of making a product and its relative scarcity is reflected in the price. For example, a door is more expensive than the wood with which it is made in order to reflect the labor costs involved. Similarly, strawberries are more expensive during the winter because they are less abundant during that time. Customers understand that prices vary with production costs and over time, yet neither of these elements gets reflected in how residential customers currently pay for electricity.

Types of Time-Variant Pricing

• Real-time pricing (RTP)– Prices vary frequently over the course of the day to reflect fluctuating electricity costs.
• Time-of-use pricing (TOU)– The day is broken out into two or three periods of time (e.g., peak period, off-peak period, interim period) whereby prices vary by period, but remain consistent from day to day.
• Variable peak pricing (VPP) – Similar to TOU, except that peak period prices change daily to reflect system conditions and costs.
• Critical peak pricing (CPP)– A critical event (such as a heat wave or power plant failure) is identified when the price may increase dramatically to reflect system conditions.
• Critical peak rebate (CPR)– Similar to CPP, except customers are paid for cutting back on electricity during critical events relative to the amount they normally use.

Most utilities around the country charge customers flat prices representing an average of the costs and scarcity over the entire year. With flat prices, customers often end up paying more than they should because that average includes some very expensive energy that is produced to meet spikes in demand that occur only a few times a year. Avoiding these spikes in demand would lead to lower prices, yet flat prices leave customers unaware of these high-cost times. Time-variant pricing (TVP), on the other hand, helps to bridge this gap by signaling to customers when costs are high, incentivizing them to cut back on electricity use or shift to times when electricity is cheaper.

Lessons learned from implementing TVP across country

Our forum helped shed greater light on this type of pricing through lively discussions and presentations by a range of speakers who’ve had experience implementing or analyzing TVP. Utility representatives and consultants presented on lessons learned from TVP programs in various states, including California, Oklahoma, Illinois, and Maryland, where utilities implemented very different types of pricing mechanisms. For example, time-of-use and critical peak pricing were implemented in California, while variable peak pricing was used in Oklahoma, real-time pricing in Illinois, and peak time rebates in Maryland.

Despite deploying different technologies and outreach methods, the utilities saw similar outcomes in all four states. Time-variant pricing led to substantial reductions in peak-time electricity use and customers reported that they liked being able to respond to price fluctuations. Regulators and consumer advocate groups have been concerned about the effect of TVP on low-income customers, but they, too, cut back on electricity use, and in some cases, reported even greater acceptance than more affluent customers. Another key factor affecting TVP adoption was how the choice was structured: i.e., whether customers were asked to opt-in to a voluntary TVP program or opt-out of a TVP program in which they were automatically enrolled. Utilities saw much higher TVP adoption as well as greater total peak demand reductions when customers were automatically enrolled in TVP and allowed to opt-out.

A panel on TVP considerations featured speakers doing a deeper dive on:

1. Potential concerns regarding the impact of TVP on low-income customers;
2. Environmental impacts of TVP, and;
3. The role of customer-enabling technologies in reducing demand when paired with TVP.

TVP implementation in New York: opportunities and barriers

The forum’s final panel was of a more academic nature, bringing together thought leaders in the field to discuss the future of TVP in New York’s reformed electricity system. Stanford University Economics Professor, Dr. Frank Wolak, argued that utilities should provide real-time pricing (RTP) to residential customers. He recommended that RTP be levied only on the portion of a customer’s bill that reflects the costs of generating electricity. He noted that customers in New York have the flexibility to go to a third-party energy service provider and choose a flat rate if they wish to avoid the fluctuation in prices brought on by RTP. The panel also discussed how time-variant pricing can be implemented for the portion of a customer’s electricity bill that reflects a utility’s infrastructure investments (i.e., the delivery portion of the bill). These charges would help utilities avoid future infrastructure investments, such as substations, resulting from elevated peak demand.

Unfortunately, there are significant barriers to TVP implementation in New York State. For starters, customers don’t have the type of advanced, or smart, meter that provides detailed data on how much electricity is used each hour or minute of the day, making it impossible for utilities to bill on a time-variant basis. This theme was repeated throughout the day, with many presenters stressing the importance of utilities investing in an advanced metering system.

Another barrier to widespread TVP implementation in New York is the lack of incentive for utilities to make changes that would help them reduce costs, such as TVP. Instead, the current system reimburses the utility for incurred investment costs, creating a perverse incentive to spend more and avoid implementing TVP. The REV proceeding is looking into changing how utilities are paid (for example, based on performance rather than expenditures). This provides an ideal opportunity for the state to introduce time-variant pricing as part of a reformed electricity system.

Our successful forum not only helped reinforce the idea it is time to begin implementing TVP in New York but also offered guidance on the best way to do so. We hope the understanding gained from the forum will help guide the path to a cleaner, more efficient electric industry in New York.

For more information, check out our new time-variant pricing fact sheet.

By Gernot Wagner

By Jonathan Derbyshire, Prospect Magazine's The world of ideas.

Why is it so difficult to get people to worry about climate change? After all, the science is pretty unambiguous—pace the climate change “deniers”. Part of the problem, according to a new book, “Climate Shock,” by the economists Gernot Wagner and Martin L Weitzman, is that while what we know about global warming is bad enough, there are “unknown risks that may yet dwarf all else.”

Wagner, who is lead senior economist at the Environmental Defense Fund in the United States, visited London a couple of weeks ago. I caught up with him while he was here and talked to him about the difficulties of mobilising public opinion around the threats and challenges of climate change. 

GW: The big problem, frankly, is speaking the truth and talking about what scientists actually know and what they don’t know, which in many ways is even scarier. Saying the latest science out loud is [often taken to be] akin to catastrophising. That’s the big conundrum: on the one hand, “climate shock” shouldn’t be all that shocking—we’ve known this for quite a while. The problem is finding a way to state the scientific facts in a way that does not turn people off immediately.

JD: So it’s partly a public relations or political challenge then?

It’s more than that. Political, certainly. But it’s also a science communications challenge.

You mentioned scientific uncertainty just now. The book is, among other things, an attempt to deal with the challenge of climate change and the policymaking challenges from an economic perspective. But it’s also, it seems to me, a work of epistemology, almost—it’s a reflection on uncertainty and the implications that uncertainty has for policymaking.

Most books are written about what we know. This book is about what we don’t know. We clearly know enough to act. We’ve known enough to act for years, decades. Now, the more we find out, the more apparent it gets that what we don’t know is in fact potentially much, more worse. Choose you favourite analogy here—Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “black swans,” Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns”. That’s what it’s all about. The things we don’t know will most likely be the things that bite us in the back.

This is one of the things that makes climate change a public policy challenge unlike any other.

Climate change is uniquely long-term. It is uniquely global. It is uniquely irreversible and uniquely uncertain. You could probably identify other policy issues that combine two of those four factors, but none that I know of combines all four like climate change [does].

Continue reading in Prospect Magazine.

By Gernot Wagner

Think of the atmosphere as a giant bathtub. There’s a faucet—emissions from human activity—and a drain—the planet’s ability to absorb that pollution. For most of human civilization and hundreds of thousands of years before, the inflow and the outflow were in relative balance. Then humans started burning coal and turned on the faucet far beyond what the drain could handle. The levels of carbon in the atmosphere began to rise to levels last seen in the Pliocene, over three million years ago.

What to do? That’s the question John Sterman, an MIT professor, asked two hundred graduate students. More specifically, he asked what to do to stabilize concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere close to present levels. How far do we need to go in turning off the faucet in order to stabilize concentrations? Here’s what not to do: stabilizing the flow of carbon into the atmosphere today won’t stabilize the carbon already there at close to present levels. You’re still adding carbon. Just because the inflow remains steady year after year, doesn’t mean the amount already in the tub doesn’t go up. Inflow and outflow need to be in balance, and that won’t happen at current levels of carbon dioxide in the tub (currently at 400 ppm) unless the inflow goes down by a lot.

That seems like an obvious point. It also seems to get lost on the average MIT graduate student, and these students aren’t exactly 'average'. Still, over 80 percent of them in Sterman’s study seem to confuse the faucet with the tub. They confuse stabilizing the inflow with stabilizing the level.

What this video to avoid making the same mistake:

Excerpted from Climate Shock.

By Gernot Wagner

Q&A with Karin Rives first published on EDF Voices.

Before climate change gets so bad that we may be forced to “geoengineer” ourselves out of catastrophe, a new book—Climate Shock—suggests that we reframe the problem altogether.

Gernot Wagner, a lead senior economist at Environmental Defense Fund and co-author of the book, says we ought to look at climate change as a risk management problem and treat it as such. I had a chat with Gernot about the book he will release next week together with Martin L. Weitzman, a professor of economics at Harvard University.

Karin Rives: Many books have already been published on climate change. What’s new or different about Climate Shock?

Most everyone focuses on what we know about climate change. Our book is about what we don’t know.

Call it Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Black Swan,” or the Rumsfeldian “unknown unknowns”—a state of complete and dangerous uncertainty and unpredictability. Call it what you want, but it’s that tail that may yet wag us in the end.

What we know is bad. What we don’t know is potentially much worse. Climate, in the end, is a risk management issue. Just like homeowners take out insurance against fires and flooding, society needs insurance against climate change.

KR: So what do we know?

Last time the planet experienced as much carbon in its atmosphere as there is now, sea levels where up to 66 feet higher than they are today. Camels lived in Canada. That was more than 3 million years ago. The geological clock read “Pliocene.”

We certainly know enough to take reasoned action today. And almost everything we don’t know points in one and only one direction: that action is all the more urgent.

KR: Why do we need to read this book now?

The time to buy our insurance policy is now—while we still can. And I’m speaking both metaphorically and literally.

Insurance here, of course, is to avoid dumping carbon into the atmosphere. We pay to have our trash picked up instead of just dumping it for free onto our streets. We similarly need to pay to avoid dumping carbon into our atmosphere.

That’s not free, but it’s still relatively cheap to do—and much cheaper than experiencing the consequences of unchecked global warming.

KR: What should be my three most important takeaways from your book?

Scream, cope, and profit.

We need to get the right policies in place, and soon. That’s “scream.” Then there’s some global warming we can no longer avoid—and that we are already experiencing. Let’s prepare ourselves better for that.

“Profit” is, of course, what you would expect two economists to say, dollar signs in their eyes and all. All that starts with smart investment decisions. Green, clean, and lean isn’t just got for the planet. It’s also the right financial choice and we need to ensure that it is much more so going forward.

The main takeaway, in the end, is that this isn’t some artificial battle between capitalism and the climate. It’s not about sticking it to the man. It’s about sticking it to carbon.

By Gernot Wagner

By Kenneth Gillingham, David Rapson, and Gernot Wagner.

The rebound effect from improving energy efficiency has been widely discussed—from the pages of the New York Times and New Yorker to the halls of policy and to a voluminous academic literature. It’s been known for over a century and, on the surface, is simple to understand. Buy a more fuel-efficient car, drive more. Invent a more efficient bulb, use more light. If efficiency improves, the price of energy services will drop, inducing increased demand for those services. Consumers will respond, producers will respond, and markets will re-equilibrate. All of these responses can lead to reductions in the energy savings expected from improved energy efficiency. And so some question the overall value of energy efficiency, by arguing that it will only lead to more energy use—a case often called "backfire."

In a new RFF discussion paper, "The Rebound Effect and Energy Efficiency Policy" we review the literature on the rebound effect, classify the different types, and highlight the need for careful distinction between causal links—which are indeed worthy of the “rebound” label—and mere correlations, which are not. We find, in fact, that measures to improve efficiency, despite potential rebound effects—are likely to improve welfare, generally.

Among the key questions about the rebound effect are a) whether the net benefits of energy efficiency increases are positive (for a costless improvement, the answer is almost certainly "yes"), and b) whether the increase in demand for energy services uses so much additional energy that it leads to greater, rather than less, demand for energy itself (the answer is almost certainly "no").

Our findings are clear: while it is possible for rebound effects to be large in some settings, there is no reliable evidence supporting rebound effects so large that improving energy efficiency leads to more energy use. Backfire is theoretically possible, but even the theoretical predictions rely on channels that are either a) second-order in magnitude (and thus unlikely to overwhelm primary effects), or b) lacking in empirical evidence of their existence and magnitude. Globally, we have little reason to worry about backfire. While there is much uncertainty about the size of the so-called "macroeconomic rebound" (how re-equilibration of markets and such hypothesized effects as induced innovation from the energy efficiency improvement may lead to a rebound), we consider a plausible upper bound of the total effect to be in the range of 60 percent (that is, 60 percent of the potential energy savings will be lost to rebound), with most studies pointing to a smaller effect.

Regardless of its size, we find that the rebound effect is very likely to be welfare-improving. In fact, in the extreme, energy efficiency improvements that come about from innovations or otherwise have no cost are unequivocally welfare-enhancing. If the improvements come with costs, such as air pollution from more driving or more expensive technology, those need to be weighed against the energy savings, emissions savings, and welfare benefits from the policy.

In short, undue emphasis on backfire is a mere distraction. Or as we put it in a recent letter to the editor of the New York Times: energy efficiency improvements such as "LEDs alone won’t solve global warming or global poverty, but they are a step in the right direction for both."

Published on Common Resources. The RFF Discussion Paper is here: "The Rebound Effect and Energy Efficiency Policy."

By Gernot Wagner

By Inês Azevedo, Kenneth Gillingham, David Rapson, and Gernot Wagner.

Lighting is critical to our livelihoods. Humans have used lighting technology since long before industrialization. For many centuries, this lighting was extremely inefficient, with over 95% of the energy consumed wasted as heat. Recently, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for their remarkable contributions towards highly efficient light emitting diode (LED) technology. A day later, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus reignited a long standing debate with an Op-Ed in The New York Times claiming that these developments are not likely to save energy and instead may backfire. (TheTimes has since corrected a crucial point of the article, and it has published three letters to the editor, including one by a subset of co-authors here.)

As evidence for these claims, Shellenberger and Nordhaus cite research that observes the vast improvements in the efficiency of lighting over the past two centuries having resulted in “more and more of the planet [being] dotted with clusters of lights.” They take this as evidence of how newer and ever more efficient lighting technologies have led to demand increases and, thus, have “led to more overall energy consumption.” Further, they refer to “recent estimates and case studies” that suggest “energy-saving technologies may backfire, meaning that increased energy consumption associated with lower energy costs because of higher efficiency may in fact result in higher energy consumption than there would have been without those technologies.”

First off, yes, it is likely that many efficiency improvements are associated with some rebound effect. It’s been with us forever, and it’s been known for over a century. More efficient lighting leads to people using more light. Key here is “leads to.” Causality matters. More on that in a minute.

For now, a quick look at the actual technology in question. It turns out the technology developments for LED lighting are, in fact, much greater than previous advances in lighting. Figure 1 [see the pdf] shows the dramatic pace of technology change in LED efficacy. The Nobel Prize was well-deserved: LEDs provide a major energy-saving innovation.

But what about the claim that this efficiency improvement will only lead to more energy use? This claim is simply not justified. Noting that lighting dots the globe at night today when it did not in the 19th century may be confounding correlation with causation. The world is also much wealthier today and the service provided by light from electricity is very different than candlelight. Perhaps earlier lighting would have dotted the globe at night in 1850 too had we been as wealthy as today and had consistent lighting. We cannot say without looking at the evidence.

The evidence we have is quite clear. Shellenberger and Nordhaus say “The I.E.A. and I.P.C.C. estimate that the rebound could be over 50 percent globally,” and they then proceed to talk about “backfire,” a rebound effect of over 100 percent. That’s quite a jump from 50 to 100. What’s missing here is that most studies, including the IEA’s and their own(!), take 60% as an upper bound. The IPCC summarizes the evidence as thus:

“A comprehensive review of 500 studies suggests that direct rebounds are likely to be over 10% and could be considerably higher (i.e., 10% less savings than the projected saving from engineering principles). Other reviews have shown larger ranges with Thomas and Azevedo (Thomas and Azevedo, 2013) suggesting between 0 and 60%. For household‐efficiency measures, the majority of studies show rebounds in developed countries in the region of 20-45% (the sum of direct and indirect rebound effects), meaning that efficiency measures achieve 65-80% of their original purposes.”

We have each performed our own detailed surveys of the literature (Azevedo 2014; Thomas & Azevedo, 2013; Gillingham et al. 2013; Gillingham et al. 2014) and largely agree with these statements from the I.P.C.C. The bottom-line: the evidence for a “backfire” is weak. The rebound effect is clearly there, but first it’s generally relatively small—especially in developed countries. Perhaps most importantly, where it does exist—and it does—it’s good.

Energy inefficiency can’t be good. That doesn’t yet mean that efficiency alone is sufficient. Every economist worth his or her degree would conclude that we need a price on carbon or a similar instrument. Bonus fact: there’s no direct rebound effect with pricing mechanisms.

As the Nobel Committee notes in its press release: “The LED lamp holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids.” In short, and as two of us say in a shorter letter to the editor, LEDs alone clearly won’t solve global warming, nor will they solve global poverty. But they are a step in the right direction for both. Thank you, Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura, and to the Nobel Committee for recognizing their work.

Published in full as part of a broader post on "Is There Room for Agreement on the Merits and Limits of Efficient Lighting" by Andrew Revkin on the DotEarth blog of The New York Times. For a shorter take, see our letter to the editor of The New York Times. For a longer take, see "The Rebound Effect and Energy Efficiency Policy."

By Gernot Wagner

Episode 5 of Paul G. Allen and Morgan Spurlock’s We The Economy explores the hidden value of natural capital:

A Bee's Invoice from We The Economy, starring Adrian Grenier, Gernot Wagner, Jodi Beggs, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

By Jeremy Proville

This post was co-authored with Sara Snider and Stacy Small-Lorenz. 

 

Join us in Washington, DC on December 8 for a pre-ACES Conference workshop- “Getting Better Biodiversity Outcomes from Coordinated Environmental Markets.”  We welcome anyone interested in exploring the space where environmental markets, including habitat markets, interact with each other and conservation programs. Come investigate with us how biodiversity can benefit from the optimal design and coordination of markets.

Getting Better Biodiversity Outcomes from Coordinated Environmental Markets is a free pre-conference workshop for ACES Conference attendees.

Monday, December 8, 2014

1:00-4:30pm

Washington, DC

Register here for the ACES Conference and sign-up for this workshop!

Aligning Incentives to Maximize Environmental Benefits

Environmental markets have the potential to enhance and conserve key elements of ecosystems; however, this requires coordinated and informed decision-making. During the workshop, we will explore the evolution of habitat markets and how such markets should be designed to achieve the greatest net benefit, covering both biological and regulatory considerations of habitat market design. We will also discuss scenarios in which it could be appropriate to combine habitat markets with other markets (e.g. water and air quality) to create added-value incentives.  We will emphasize topics such as the interface of markets with federal conservation programs, the challenge of establishing baselines for landowners enrolling in habitat markets, as well as the economic and legal challenges of stacking.

 

Engage with Environmental Market Experts around Case Studies

Environmental markets experts will lead us through an engaging discussion of the challenges and opportunities for biodiversity markets and stacking in moderated panel and breakout discussion format. Confirmed panelists include:

• Jessica Fox, Senior Project Manager, Electric Power Research Institute
• Kevin Halsey, Senior Consultant, EcoMetrix Solutions Group
• Chris Hartley, Environmental Markets Analyst, USDA Office of Environmental Markets
• Rene Henery, California Science Director, Trout Unlimited
• Alex Pfaff, Professor of Public Policy, Economics and Environment, Duke University
• Morgan Robertson, Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin
• Jeremy Sokulsky, Chief Executive Officer, Environmental Incentives
• David Wolfe, Director of Conservation Strategy, Environmental Defense Fund
• Stacy Small-Lorenz, Senior Scientist, Environmental Defense Fund (Moderator)

Workshop participants will have the chance to discuss basic and complex questions around these topics by working through real-life scenarios. We will touch upon potential pitfalls, such as double-dipping, legal inconsistency, and market incompatibility, as well as the challenge of establishing baselines for landowners.  As environmental markets move forward to incentivize better biodiversity outcomes, we must be ready to collaborate and coordinate with fellow ecosystem service professionals to achieve real success.  Let’s get started at the ACES Conference!

 

 

Enter the Conversation

EDF has a long history of creating innovative market-based solutions to our environmental challenges, including the historical trading program in the 1990s that dramatically decreased acid rain and reduced exposure to harmful pollutants. Now, we continue to develop multiple markets in order to maximize environmental benefits, such as habitat restoration and carbon sequestration. A Community on Ecosystem Services’ (ACES) Conference this December provides an in-depth forum for exploring these topics with representatives from government, academia, conservation NGO’s and the private sector.

By Jonathan Camuzeaux

This blog post was co-authored by Gernot Wagner and first published on EDF Voices.

Put Republican Hank Paulson, Independent Mike Bloomberg, and Democrat Tom Steyer together, and out comes one of the more unusual – and unusually impactful – climate reports.

This year alone has seen a couple of IPCC tomes, an entry by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the most recent U.S. National Climate Assessment.

The latest, Risky Business, stands apart for a number of reasons, and it’s timely with the nation debating proposed, first-ever limits on greenhouse gas emissions from nearly 500 power plants.

Tri-partisan coalition tackles climate change

The report is significant, first, because we have a tri-partisan group spanning George W. Bush’s treasury secretary Paulson, former mayor of New York Bloomberg, and environmentalist investor Steyer – all joining forces to get a message through.

That list of names alone should make one sit up and listen.

Last time a similar coalition came together was in the dog days of 2009, when Senators Lindsay Graham, Joe Lieberman, and John Kerry were drafting the to-date last viable (and ultimately unsuccessful) Senate climate bill.

Global warming is hitting home

Next, Risky Business is important because it shows how climate change is hitting home. No real surprise there for anyone paying attention to globally rising temperatures, but the full report goes into much more granular details than most, focusing on impacts at county, state and regional levels.

Risky Business employs the latest econometric techniques to come up with numbers that should surprise even the most hardened climate hawks and wake up those still untouched by reality. Crop yield losses, for example, could go as high as 50 to 70 percent (!) in some Midwestern and Southern states, absent agricultural adaptation.

The report is also replete with references to heat strokes, sky-rocketing electricity demand for air conditioning, and major losses from damages to properties up and down our ever-receding coast lines.

Not precisely uplifting material, yet this report does a better job than most in laying it all out.

Financial markets can teach us a climate lesson

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Risky Business gets the framing exactly right: Climate change is replete with deep-seated risks and uncertainties.

In spite of all that we know about the science, there’s lots more that we don’t. And none of that means that climate change isn’t bad. As the report makes clear, what we don’t know could potentially be much worse.

Climate change, in the end, is all about risk management.

Few are better equipped to face up to that reality than the trio spearheading the effort; Paulson, Bloomberg and Steyer have made their careers (and fortunes) in the financial sector. In fact, as United States Treasury secretary between 2006 and 2009, Paulson was perhaps closest of anyone to the latest, global example of what happens when risks get ignored.

We cannot – must not – ignore risk when it comes to something as global as global warming. After all, for climate, much like for financial markets, it’s not over ‘til the fat tail zings.

By Jeremy Proville

This open letter, co-authored by Gernot Wagner and first published on EDF Voices, was written in response to a New York Times article citing Dr. Roger Bezdek’s report on “The Social Costs of Carbon? No, The Social Benefits of Carbon.”

Dear Dr. Bezdek,

After seeing so many peer-reviewed studies documenting the costs of carbon pollution, it’s refreshing to encounter some out-of-the-box thinking to the contrary. You had us with your assertion that: “Even the most conservative estimates peg the social benefit of carbon-based fuels as 50 times greater than its supposed social cost.” We almost quit our jobs and joined the coal lobby. Who wouldn’t want to work so selflessly for the greater good?

Then we looked at the rest of your report. Your central argument seems to be: Cheap fuels emit carbon; cheap fuels are good; so, by the transitive property of Huh?!, carbon is good. Pithy arguments are fine, but circular ones aren’t.

First off, cheap fuels are good. Or more precisely, cheap and efficient energy services are good. (Energy efficiency, of course, is good, too. Inefficiency clearly isn’t.) Cheap energy services have done wonders for the United States and the world, and they are still doing so. No one here is anti-energy; we are against ruining our planet while we are at it.

The high cost of cheap energy

Yes, the sadly still dominant fuels—by far not all—emit carbon pollution. Coal emits the most. Which is why the cost to society is so staggering. Forget carbon for a moment. Mercury poisoning from U.S. power plants alone causes everything from heart attacks to asthma to inhibiting cognitive development in children. The latter alone is responsible forestimated costs of $1.3 billion per year by knocking off IQ points in kids. All told, coal costs America $330 to 500 billion per year.

Put differently, every ton of coal—like every barrel of oil—causes more in external damagesthan it adds value to GDP. The costs faced by those deciding how much fossil fuel to burn are much lower than the costs faced by society.

None of that means we shouldn’t burn any coal or oil. It simply means those who profit from producing these fuels shouldn’t get a free ride on the taxpayer. Conservative estimates indicate that carbon pollution costs society about $40 per ton. And yes, that’s a cost.

Socializing the costs is not an option

As someone with a Ph.D. in economics, Dr. Bezdek, you surely understand the difference between private benefits and social costs. No one would be burning any coal if there weren’t benefits to doing so. However, the “social benefits” you ascribe to coal are anything but; in reality they are private, in the best sense of the word.

If you are the one burning coal, you benefit. If you are the one using electricity produced by burning coal, you benefit, too. To be clear, these are benefits. No one disputes that. It’s how markets work.

But markets also fail in a very important way. The bystanders who are breathing the polluted air are paying dearly. The costs, if you will, are socialized. Society—all of us—pays for them. That includes those who seemingly benefit from burning coal in the first place.

Your claim that what you call “social benefits” of coal dwarf the costs is wrong in theory and practice. In theory, because they are private benefits. As a matter of practice because these (private) benefits are very much included in the calculations that give us the social costs of coal. What you call out as the social benefits of coal use are already captured by these calculations. They are part of economic output.

Our indicators for GDP do a pretty good job capturing all these private benefits of economic activity. Where they fail is with the social costs. Hence the need to calculate the social cost of carbon pollution in the first place.

So far so bad. Then there’s this:

Plants need carbon dioxide to grow, just not too much of it

In your report, you also discuss what you call the benefits of increases in agricultural yields from the well-known carbon dioxide fertilization effect. It may surprise you to hear that the models used to calculate the cost of carbon include that effect. It turns out, they, too, in part base it on outdated science that ought to be updated.

But their science still isn’t as old as yours. For some reason, you only chose to include papers on the fertilization effect published between 1902 and 1997 (save one that is tangentially related).

For an updated perspective, try one of the most comprehensive economic analysis to date, pointing to large aggregate losses. Or try this Science article, casting serious doubt on any claims that carbon dioxide fertilization could offset the impacts on agricultural yields from climate change.

Farmers and ranchers already have a lot to endure from the effects of climate change. There’s no need to make it worse with false, outdated promises.

Coal lobby speaks, industry no longer listens

It’s for all these reasons that, to borrow the apt title to the otherwise excellent New York Times story that ran your quote: “Industry Awakens to Threat of Climate Change”. And it’s precisely why the U.S. government calculates the social cost of carbon pollution. Yes, sadly, it’s a cost, not a benefit.

To our readers: Want to get involved? The White House has issued a formal call for public comments on the way the cost of carbon figure is calculated, open throughFebruary 26. You can help by reminding our leaders in Washington that we need strong, science-based climate policies.

By Gernot Wagner

From Forbes.com:

By Bob Litterman and Gernot Wagner

Whenever the conversation turns to climate change, someone is sure to opine that there’s no silver bullet. The issue is simply too complex to have one solution. When you focus on all the changes that need to occur to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally it seems like a multifaceted approach is the only way forward.

Most of the world’s vexing problems share that feature. Mideast peace, nuclear non-proliferation, Eurozone stability, and plenty of other national security problems have no single right plan of attack. Some past plans might have brought us tantalizingly close to a seeming solution, but then reality started interfering once again, reconfirming the complexity of it all.

Climate change must surely be in that category. No single country, no single technology, no single approach can seemingly solve this one for us once and for all. Picking a single technology will almost inevitably end in some form of disappointment. Bureaucrats, the saying goes, ought not to try to pick winners. Leave that to venture capitalists for whom failure is a way of life. For every Apple and Facebook, there are dozens who never make it out of the garage. And clean technology doesn’t yet even have a single Apple and Facebook as the standout approach revolutionizing the field.

It turns out, though, that how you frame the issue is crucial. If you think like an engineer there are dozens of challenges. If you think like an economist, there is one. It’s guiding the ‘invisible hand’. How can you create the appropriate incentive to decrease the pollution that’s causing climate change? For that, the government need not be in the business of picking winners at all. What it should—and can—do is identify the loser that’s been clear for decades: greenhouse gas pollution. And the solution is equally clear: create incentives to reduce emissions by pricing it. If we make this one change, most other actions that are needed will follow.

That’s what the European Union has done by capping carbon emissions from its energy sector, including large industrials, covering almost half of total carbon emissions. That’s what California is doing with over 80 percent of its total global warming emissions. It’s what China is experimenting with in seven city and regional trials, including in Beijing and Shanghai. All these systems put a price on greenhouse gas pollution.

On the other side of the ledger, there are still much larger incentives to consume fossil fuels in many other countries. The International Energy Agency estimates that global subsidies are well over $500 billion. These subsidies, which incentivize emissions, sadly dwarf the paltry incentives to reduce them. Free marketeers, small government advocates, and others who dislike distorting government subsidies should be appalled at the tax money poured into fossil fuels.

There’s one simple principle that’s been around in economics for so long that no economist worth his or her degree would question the conclusion: increase the price, watch the quantity demanded go down. It’s such a universal truism that economists call it the “Law of Demand.” Generations of graduate students have estimated the effects of price on demand for anything from the generic widget to demand for car miles driven. People may be irrational at times, but one thing that we know for sure is that they respond to incentives.

Everything we know from decades of the study of human behavior would lead us to believe that carbon pollution will go down as the price on emissions increases. The only interesting question is by how much.

The prescription then for anyone seriously concerned about climate change is simple: price carbon to the point where its now unpriced damages are incorporated into the price, and get out of the way. It’s simple. It works. It’s conservative to the core.

It’s also a silver bullet solution if there ever was one.

Bob Litterman is a Partner at Kepos Capital, LP. Gernot Wagner is a senior economist at the Environmental Defense Fund.

By Gernot Wagner

From EDF Voices:

Tell someone you are a “climate economist,” and the first thing you hear after the slightly puzzled looks subside is, “How much?” Show me the money: “How much is climate change really costing us?”

Here it is: at least $40.

That, of course, isn’t the total cost, which is in the trillions of dollars. $40 is the cost per ton of carbon dioxide pollution emitted today, and represents the financial impacts of everything climate change wreaks: higher medical bills, lost productivity at work, rising seas, and more. Every American, all 300 million of us, emit around twenty of these $40-tons per year.

The number comes from none other than the U.S. government in an effort to uncover the true cost of carbon pollution. This exercise was first conducted in 2010. It involved a dozen government agencies and departments, several dozen experts, and a fifty-page, densely crafted “technical support document,” replete with some seventy, peer-reviewed references and an even more technical appendix.

Cass Sunstein, the Harvard legal scholar of Nudge fame, who was co-leading the process for the White House at the time, recently declared himself positively surprised how the usual interest-group politics were all-but absent from the discussions throughout that process. This is how science should be done to help guide public policy.

The cost of carbon pollution is too low

The number originally reached in 2010 wasn’t $40. It was a bit more than half as much. What happened? In short, the scientific understanding of the impacts of rising seas had advanced by so much, and the peer-reviewed, economic models had finally caught up to the scientific understanding circa 2007, that a routine update of the cost of carbon number resulted in the rather dramatic increase to near $40 per ton. (There are twenty pages of additional scientific prose, if you want to know the details.)

In other words, we had been seriously underestimating the cost of climate change all along. That’s the exact opposite of what you hear from those who want to ignore the problem, and the $40 itself is still woefully conservative. Some large companies, including the likes of Exxon, are voluntarily using a higher price internally for their capital investment decisions.

And everything we know about the science points to the fact that the $40 figure has nowhere to go but up. The more we know, the higher the costs. And even what we don’t knowpushes the costs higher still.

Howard Shelanski, Sunstein’s successor as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA, pronounced “oh-eye-ruh”), has since presided over a further update of the official number. In fact, this one didn’t incorporate any of the latest science. It was simply a minor technical correction of the prior update, resulting in a $1 revision downward. (The precise number is now $37, though I still say $40 at cocktail parties, to avoid a false sense of precision. Yes, that’s what a climate economist talks about at cocktail parties.)

And once again, it all demonstrated just how science ought to be done: Sometimes it advances because newer and better, peer-reviewed publications become available. Sometimes it advances because someone discovers and fixes a small mathematical error.

Your input is needed

While announcing the correction, Shelanski added another layer of transparency and an opportunity for further refinements of the numbers: a formal call for public comments on the way the cost of carbon figure is calculated, open through January 27.

We are taking this opportunity seriously. EDF, together with our partners at the Natural Resource Defense Council, New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, is submitting formal, technical comments in support of the administration’s use of the cost of carbon pollution number as well as recommending further revisions to reflect the latest science.

The bottom line, as economists like to put it, is that carbon pollution costs society a lot of money. So as the technical experts trade scientific papers, you can help by reminding our leaders in Washington that we need strong, science-based climate policies.

By Gernot Wagner

(This post first appeared on Climate 411.)

A nine-minute video, released earlier this fall, argues that climate mitigation is 50 times more expensive than adaptation. The claims are based on calculations done by Christopher Monckton. We analyzed the accompanying “sources and maths” document. In short, the author shows a disconcerting lack of understanding of climate science and economics:

1. Fundamental misunderstanding of basic climate science: Pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) were at around 280 parts per million (ppm).[i] One of the most commonly stated climate policy goals is to keep concentrations below 450 ppm CO2. Monckton, oddly, adds 280 and 450 to get to 730 ppm as the goal of global stabilization efforts, making all the rest of his calculations wildly inaccurate.
2. Prematurely cutting off analysis after ten years: Monckton calculates the benefits of the carbon tax over a ten-year time horizon. That is much too short to see the full effects of global warming or of the policy itself. Elevated carbon levels persist for hundreds to thousands of years.[ii]
3. Erroneously applying Australian “cost-effectiveness” calculation to the world: This may be the most troubling aspect from an economist's point of view. Monckton first calculates the effect of the Australia-only tax on global temperatures, which is unsurprisingly low, as Australia accounts for only 1.2% of world emissions. Next, he calculates the tax’s resulting “cost-effectiveness” — defined as the Australian tax influencing global temperatures. No surprise once again, that influence is there, but Australia alone can't solve global warming for the rest of us. Then, Monckton takes the Australia-only number and scales it to mitigate 1ºC globally, resulting in a purported cost of “$3.2 quadrillion,” which he claims is the overall global “mitigation cost-effectiveness.” But this number simply represents the cost of avoiding 1ºC of warming by acting in Australia alone. Monckton has re-discovered the fact that global warming is a global problem! The correct calculation for a globally applied tax would be to calculate cost-effectiveness on a global level first. If Australia’s carbon price were to be applied globally, it would cut much more pollution at a much lower cost. And that, of course, is very much the hope. Australia, California, and the European Union are called “climate leaders” for a reason. Others must follow.

What’s the real cost of cutting carbon? The U.S. government’s estimate of the cost of one ton of CO2 pollution released today is about $40.[iii] That's also the optimal price to make sure that each of us is paying for our own climate damages. Any policy with a lower (implied) carbon price—including the Australian tax—easily passes a benefit-cost test.

With all due respect Lord Monckton, 3rd Viscount of Brenchley, your maths are way off.

[i] "Summary for Policymakers," IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Working Group I (2013).

[ii] Results differ across scenarios, but a rough rule of thumb suggests that approximately 70% of the ‘peak enhancement level’ over the preindustrial level of 280 ppm perseveres after 100 years of zero emissions, while approximately 40% of the ‘peak enhancement level’ over the preindustrial level of 280 ppm persevered after 1,000 years of zero emissions (Solomon, Susan, Gian-Kasper Plattner, Reto Knutti and Pierre Friedlingstein, “Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 6 (2009): 1704-1709). Note that this refers to the net increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the exact molecule. Archer, David, Michael Eby, Victor Brovkin, Andy Ridgwell, Long Cao, Uwe Mikolajewicz, Ken Caldeira et al. "Atmospheric lifetime of fossil fuel carbon dioxide." Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 37 (2009): 117-134 discusses these two often confused definitions for carbon’s ‘lifetime,’ and concludes that 20-40% of excess carbon levels remain hundreds to thousands of years (“2-20 centuries”) after it is emitted. Each carbon dioxide molecule has a lifetime of anywhere between 50 to 200 years, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “Overview of Greenhouse Gases: Carbon Dioxide Emissions.” The precise number is under considerable scientific dispute and surprisingly poorly understood. (Inman, Mason, “Carbon is forever,” Nature Reports Climate Change 20 November 2008)

[iii] The precise value presented in Table 1 of the Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis Under Executive Order 12866 for a ton of carbon dioxide emitted in 2015, using a 3% social discount rate increased is $38. For 2020, the number is $43; for 2030, the number increases to $52. All values are in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars. For a further exploration of this topic, see Nordhaus, William D. The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World. Yale University Press (2013) as only one of the latest examples summarizing this kind of analysis. Nordhaus concludes that the optimal policy, one that maximizes net benefits to the planet, would spend about 3% of global GDP.

Many thanks to Michelle Ho for excellent research assistance.

By Gernot Wagner

By Gernot Wagner & Martin L. Weitzman

The headline in The New York Times yesterday was succinct. “By 2047, Coldest Years May Be Warmer Than Hottest in Past, Scientists Say.” Not, say, “around 2050” or “within our lifetime.” The specificity makes the crisis feel real, imminent and terrible. Call it a convenient truth.

The story was about a new study published this week in the journal Nature that calculated that by 2047, the average temperature will be hotter across most parts of the planet than it had been at those locations in any year between 1860 and 2005.

In truth, attention to the year 2047 is misguided. Climate around the world has already changed to a point where we can perceive humanity’s fingerprint. Extreme weather events like the two hurricanes that hit New York City in the past two years are going to be only more intense in the future.

Continue reading at nytimes.com/opinion.

By Nat Keohane

(This post first appeared on EDF Climate Talks.)

While Washington is stuck in gridlock, other jurisdictions around the world are moving forward on climate policy.

Market-based approaches to cutting carbon are in place in jurisdictions accounting for nearly 10% of the world’s population. Above: areas shaded blue have emissions trading programs that are already operating; areas in green have programs that are launching or being considered.

Market-based approaches to cutting carbon are already in place in jurisdictions accounting for nearly 10% of the world’s population and more than a third of its GDP. Many more jurisdictions are either moving ahead with market-based measures, or actively considering them.

As interest grows around the world, policymakers are increasingly seeking information about the range of existing and proposed initiatives.

In response, EDF has partnered with the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), a trade association that represents businesses involved in carbon trading and climate finance, to launch The World's Carbon Markets: A case study guide to emissions trading.

The online resource provides detailed information about key design elements and unique features of 18 emissions trading programs that are operating or launching around the world.

EDF has also put together a quick reference chart that makes comparing the 18 programs even faster and easier.

Growing interest in emissions trading

Market-based policies are a proven way to limit carbon pollution and channel capital and innovation into clean energy, helping to avert the catastrophic consequences of climate change.

While emissions trading programs around the world, like the ones we have looked at in detail, vary in their features, they all share the key insight that well-designed markets can be a powerful tool in achieving environmental and economic progress.

The countries, states, provinces and cities highlighted in this report, which are moving ahead with strong action on climate change, constitute a vital and dynamic world of “bottom-up” actions that complement multilateral efforts such as the ongoing United Nations climate negotiations.  Jurisdictions considering market-based approaches can use this new resource to learn from their growing number of peers already headed in that direction.

By Gernot Wagner

(This post was co-authored by Thomas Sterner and appeared first on EDF Voices.)

Last week, the Obama administration released new energy efficiency standards for microwaves, along with an update to the government’s official Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) figure. What do those two things have to do with each other? Well, the efficiency standards will help the planet by cutting the energy needs of microwaves, which will in turn save consumers money. And the new SCC numbers show just how expensive our addiction to fossil fuels has become.

The SCC is used to estimate the damages from carbon emissions (and the benefits from reducing those emissions) for the purposes of regulatory benefit-cost analyses. The central estimate for the SCC is now around $35 per ton of carbon dioxide pollution emitted today.

That’s the administration’s estimate of the damage—to human health, ecosystems, and the economy—caused by every ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. The average American emits about 20 tons each year.

The new cost of carbon figure is a welcome step forward, reflecting the latest versions of the underlying models. The bad news is that the increased number also shows that our lack of a comprehensive climate policy is becoming ever more costly.

Moreover, this updated SCC number underestimates the true costs of carbon emissions. For example, the current SCC quickly rises to $55 per ton under a lower discount rate (that is, an estimate that doesn’t “discount” harms to the wealth and health of future generations by quite as much as the administration did in reaching its $35 per ton figure).

The value of one ton of carbon dioxide would rise higher still with a declining discount rate, something that, in line with the general consensus among economists, would more closely reflect the true costs of climate change. And none of that includes the cost of extreme climate events.

Basing Policy on Science

The good news: the administration’s latest numbers show exactly how policy analysis should be done—rigorously and consistent with the latest advances in science and economics. For example, instead of using older versions of three main SCC models to calculate its official number, the administration now uses the most recent peer-reviewed versions of each. That simple but important step helps to bring the new official SCC more in line with the latest academic literature.

In short, the administration’s economics are slowly and carefully catching up with what we all can see outside our windows. While atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have just passed the 400 parts per million threshold for the first time in over 3 million years, the real costs of climate change keep piling on.

What the country really needs, of course, is for Congress to pass a comprehensive climate policy. Only then will Americans stop living in a world where their personal behavior leads to socialized costs of at least $35 for each of the 20 tons of carbon dioxide we emit every year. Until then, the Obama administration is right to at least include these costs in its own regulatory impact assessments.

By Gernot Wagner

Via EDF Voices. This first appeared online in an article posted at ensia.com.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is broken. Robert F. Kennedy said as much in his first major presidential campaign speech. Simon Kuznets, the father of GDP, acknowledged its shortcomings. GDP is an imperfect indicator of human well-being at best, and outright misleading at worst.

Still, we shouldn’t scrap GDP and start over.

Up to a point, GDP does tell us important facts about people’s lives, livelihoods and aspirations. Living on a dollar a day is miserable no matter how you look at it.

Choking on economic growth, of course, is equally bad. There are a few simple, well-established steps we ought to take to bring GDP closer to where we should be. That, by the way, isn’t “Green GDP” or “green accounting.” It’s honest accounting.

Start with accounting for the true value of natural assets still in the ground. We don’t “produce” coal. We extract it. And the fact that the ton of coal extracted today is no longer there for the taking tomorrow should show up in our national income accounts. A ton of West Virginian coal adds about $30 to GDP. Honest bookkeeping would decrease that amount to $15. The same holds for oil, trees, water and all the other valuable natural assets that fuel our economy but are largely treated as free in our GDP accounting.

Then quickly move on to pollution. Every ton of coal, every barrel of oil causes more in external damages than it adds value to GDP. Properly measured GDP ought to reflect that fact.

In the end, policy makers should expand their horizon and look at a dashboard of indicators to get a fuller picture of the true state of the economy, society and the planet. Yet when it comes to GDP itself, the name of the game is fixing it rather than scrapping it. We know how to do that. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis is at the ready. Let’s have a go at it.

See the original post on ensia.com for a perspective from Sir Partha Dasgupta, Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Cambridge. 

By Gernot Wagner

(This post was first published on EDF Voices.)

The Office of Management and Budget is nerd heaven: a bunch of people getting their professional kicks from analyzing federal regulation. This bean counting may sound painfully lacking in glamour, but it’s incredibly important. OMB’s annual report to Congress on the benefits and costs of all major rules adopted by most federal agencies over the past 10 years shows how efficiently, or inefficiently, those agencies are functioning.  And the conclusion is clear: the Environmental Protection Agency comes out on top.

  Source: OMB’s “Draft 2013 Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations"

These numbers are based on the 2013 draft report, so they could still change. But the pattern is the same as in any of theirreports from the past few years, including the final 2012 report that came out last week.

None of this is to diminish the contributions of the other government agencies, but if you are a do-gooder trying to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people, EPA is the place to be.

One of the driving forces behind this rule is the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, an extraordinary achievement for clean air and public health. Because of these standards, all coal fired power plants will for the first time be required to control their emissions of toxic air pollutants — including mercury, arsenic and acid gases. Forty years after the Clean Air Act signed by Richard Nixon, twenty after the landmark Amendments signed by George H.W. Bush, we are finally getting around to regulating mercury from burning coal.

The analysis of the benefits of reducing mercury pollution demonstrates just how much we underestimate the benefits of environmental protections. For example, when it comes to reducing mercury pollution, the benefits are based on EPA’s estimates of increased wages of (higher IQ) children born to families that catch freshwater fish for their own consumption.

Think about that one for a second. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin in all its forms, but the EPA estimates do not include mercury that is inhaled or that enters our bodies through other means. And there is nothing in the estimates about the fact that mercury harms the brains of our kids, regardless of whether it influences their future earning potential.

In a sense, this analysis is the moral equivalent of arguing that we should have child labor laws because keeping kids in school makes for more productive workers later on. This kind of reasoning, alas, is  why economists are often called names unfit for a family-friendly blog. It’s the most reductionist argument you can find in favor of reducing mercury. (In fact, the bulk of the benefits that were quantified by EPA are due to inextricably connected benefits in reducing deleterious particulate pollution.)

Costs, by the way, are relatively well estimated, since businesses are all-too willing to share them. So yes, there are costs—but they are small relative to benefits. And costs, as opposed to benefits, are typically overestimates. They are largely based on current available control technologies. They don’t consider that industry may invent an entirely new and unexpected way of complying with regulations at lower cost. This happens over and over again, and it comes with a name: entrepreneurial ingenuity. Works every time.

These omissions and shortcomings on either side of the equation only stand to bolster the most important claim: benefits outweigh costs more than 10 to 1 for all major EPA regulations adopted in the past decade.

For every dollar invested, Americans get $10 worth of benefits. I’ll take that ratio any day.

By Gernot Wagner

(This post was first published on EDF Voices.)

Nudge is the best kind of book. It presents the type of head-slappingly obvious solutions to public policy problems that make you wonder why you needed a book to tell you about them in the first place. Place the veggies before the French fries in the cafeteria, and people will eat more greens. Enroll employees into retirement programs with the option of opting out rather than in and they’ll save more as a result.

Such nudges are the best kinds of policy interventions: minimum intrusion, maximum freedom of choice, maximum relative impact. But one area in which Nudge comes up short is global warming. Putting smiley faces on your electricity bill as a reward for using less electricity than your neighbor, something oPower has done with utilities around the country, helps bring down electricity use by 1 to 3%. Better than zero, but not the solution by a long shot.

That solution would be making polluters pay: putting a price on carbon dioxide through a direct cap or tax on carbon pollution. Cass Sunstein, who wrote Nudge with Richard Thaler, says as much in his latest piece on the topic. He laments the fact that we don’t seem to be able to get these kinds of taxes passed, and then adds a few items to his running list of things we can do, all under the broad heading of setting “clean-energy default rules”: Change the default printer setting to “print on front and back,” and people will. Enroll people into programs where they spend extra for clean energy (with the option of opting out), and 90% will choose to stick with the clean energy.

All these proposals represent the best of what nudges ought to be. Policymakers need to set defaults either way. So set them in the way that goes furthest toward achieving your goal. Just that there’s still a big gulf between the policies we know are necessary and what appears to be doable.

The plastic bag solution

But there is one policy that seems to bridge the gap between the type of non-intrusive nudges Sunstein champions and the type of policies he knows are ultimately necessary to do something about global warming. They’re called bag taxes.

In 2002, Ireland started charging shoppers 15 eurocents a plastic bag. The result: bag use plummeted 90 percent. That's a billion bags a year.

In 2010, Washington, D.C., began charging 5 cents per disposable bag, paper or plastic. As a result, plastic bag usedeclined 80 percent within a year by some estimates.

These fees are tiny. Compared to the $100 worth of groceries you’ll be carrying home in your bags, they might as well be zero. The point is that they are not. The fees are big enough to change the default behavior of shoppers. A few pennies (and the odd public information campaign) are all it takes to motivate shoppers to bring reusable bags to the store.

It’s quite a leap from plastic bags to carbon prices. The principle is the same: It’s the price that counts—a price that is directly connected to an action. Change the action (stop using plastic bags) and you avoid the fee. Similarly, increase the price of carbon, watch carbon pollution fall. This price-up-demand-down relationship is so well established, it’s one of the very few actual “laws” economists have. Violations are tough to find. Plastic bags and carbon certainly don’t violate this common sense principle.

Bag fees and carbon prices have this important feature in common. They don’t just nudge, they also charge consumers for the cost of their—our—actions. For carbon dioxide, there are plenty of studies that estimate the cost to society of this type of pollution. The right price for each ton of carbon dioxide would be at least about $20. Given the fact that the average American emits his body weight worth of carbon dioxide every day and a half, that comes out to about $1 per day. Double it to account for the fact that there are plenty of damages we haven’t yet incorporated in the official number, and doing something serious about global warming is still a bargain at $2 per person per day.

As an insurance policy against the worst effects of global warming, that’s tiny. Never mind how small a price, though, the politics of actually doing it are tricky, to say the least. The plastic bag lobby just isn’t as important as the fossil lobby. And bag fees can be implemented on the local level. A carbon price can’t. It requires Congressional action, a seeming oxymoron these days. Even with carbon, though, states—if not cities—can lead the way. Look no further than California and its comprehensive cap-and-trade system. It limits carbon pollution with a firm, declining cap, giving Californian businesses maximum flexibility in how to make their operations more efficient and innovate their way out of the high-carbon, low-efficiency bind. That ought to be a template for the nation.

Meanwhile, we can do a lot worse than look to plastic bag fees as a model for the kinds of policies that we know are necessary to tackle global warming. Cass Sunstein, the co-author of Nudge, and Cass Sunstein, the policy analyst calling for a price on carbon pollution, would approve.

By Gernot Wagner

(Note: This post was co-written with Graham McCahan and was first published on EDF Voices.)

Congress may be ignoring climate change these days, but there are laws already in place that make progress possible, right now, on this defining issue.

Take the Clean Air Act. Under it, the President has begun to use his authority – as confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court – to regulate greenhouse gases in a serious way.

The Global Change Research Act is another, lesser known law that could have a major impact on the national understanding of what climate change is doing to our world.

Congress passed the Act in 1990 to provide for “a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.” What that means, in part, is that the government must prepare a National Climate Assessment every four years. The next report is due out this June.

April 12 was the deadline for public comments on the draft report.

A lot has happened since the last assessment in 2009. The country has begun to experience the effects of climate change: droughts, floods, heat waves, two hundred-year storms hitting New York City within two years. The abnormal is becoming the new normal. (True, no single such event can be conclusively linked to the fact that the average American emits carbon dioxide equal to his body weight every day and a half. But that’s like saying that no single Barry Bonds homerun or Lance Armstrong Tour de France win can be linked to doping.)

This year’s quadrennial report should set the standard as an analysis of these phenomena. Thus far, the draft assessment, written by some of the nation’s leading scientists and experts, is rich in sobering data and analysis on things like extreme weather and the damage it is causing. But its consideration of the economic impacts of climate change – the enormous and rising costs — is scattershot and incomplete.

For example, the draft report shows that the 2011 Texas drought cost farmers and ranchers in that state over $5 billion. And it tells us that wastewater utilities will have to spend between $120 billion and $250 billion by 2050 to adapt their infrastructure to a changed climate. But the draft makes no attempt at a rigorous estimate of the costs of climate change, or the rising costs of inaction in the face of it.

Between now and June, this weak spot needs to be shored up by the report’s authors.

EDF, in its official comments to the National Climate Assessment, is urging that it incorporate all relevant information on the economics of climate change, whether from the federal government or the private sector. That’s the only way to get a handle on the costs that climate change is levying on each and every one of us.

Recently, for example, the independent, nonpartisan, U.S. Government Accountability Office, warned that climate change “presents a significant financial risk to the federal government” in four key areas:

1) Damage to federal property and infrastructure, and associated adaptation costs.

2) Rising costs for federal insurance programs. For instance, the federal government’s crop insurance costs have increased from an average of $3.1 billion per year from 2000 through 2006 to an average of $7.6 billion per year from 2007 through 2012; and these costs are projected to increase further.

3) Costs related to providing assistance to state and local governments to respond to local climate impacts.

4) Rising costs of climate disaster relief. For example, federal disaster declarations have increased over recent decades, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) obligated over $80 billion in assistance for disasters from 2004 through 2011. The growing number of disaster declarations—a record 98 in fiscal year 2011 compared with 65 in 2004—has contributed to increased federal disaster costs.

Material like that should be included in the final assessment.

The same holds true for data from the private sector. In a recent report, the world’s largest reinsurance company, Munich Re, analyzed the costs of severe weather in North America. It found that the number of natural catastrophes escalated from 1980 through 2011, as did the losses for weather-related events during the same time period – both insured and uninsured. The total losses from weather catastrophes over these three decades exceeded $1.06trillion. About half, $510 billion, were insured losses. The rest wasn’t. All of it was ultimately born by all of us – whether in increased taxes or insurance premiums, or directly out of our wallets.

The Global Change Research Act compels the government to make a definitive assessment of what climate change is doing to the nation’s health and welfare. In that spirit, the National Climate Assessment, when it is released in June, should strive to be the last word on the issue – to set the terms of the debate.  And let’s hope it also helps move our elected leaders to action.