Urban ethics and theory

Other than the obvious harm to human life and society, the Russian fires are clearly prompting greater interest in climate change even among the formerly disinclined (e.g., Putin).

This article in this week’s Economist does as nice a job as I have ever seen of explaining why the fires have such significance:

Both heatwaves and heavy precipitation are more common everywhere than they were 50 years ago. Reflecting the latter trend, the Indian monsoon has been seeing more of its rainfall in extreme events than it did in the past. No single one of those events can be directly attributed to climate change; nor can Russia’s heatwave. The pattern of increases, though, fits expectations—and those expectations see things getting worse.

link: Fires and floods: Part of the main | The Economist

They see things getting worse faster from here.

Via Matt Kahn’s Environmental and Urban Economics blog

Marty Weitzman is one of those people that planners simply do not seem to read, and they should, because his contributions to environmental economics are enormous. Matt Kahn linked to a recent paper from Weitzman available via NBER

From the abstract:

A critical issue in climate-change economics is the specifcation of the so-called
“damages function” and its interaction with the unknown uncertainty of catastrophic outcomes. This paper asks how much we might be misled by our economic assessment of climate change when we employ a conventional quadratic damages function and/or a thin-tailed probability distribution for extreme temperatures. The paper gives some numerical examples of the indirect value of various GHG concentration targets as insurance against catastrophic climate-change temperatures and damages. These numerical examples suggest that we might be underestimating considerably the welfare losses from uncertainty by using a quadratic damages function and/or a thin-tailed temperature distribution. In these examples, the primary reason for keeping GHG levels down is to insure against high-temperature catastrophic climate risks.

Matt Kahn, in response, discusses how the coastal reduction likely from sea change might not be unmanageable given new vertical farming technologies and urban densities:

So we need 424,000 of 52 million or .8% of the earth’s land area to be inhabitable after climate change really kicks in. As of right now, from a spatial portfolio point of view, I certainly think it is possible. If the world’s population shrinks or we reduce our caloric intake, the necessary quantity of viable land would shrink further. Implicit in my forthcoming book Climatopolis is my optimism that there will continue to be “safe” geographical places to settle and build new cities. I would like to know whether any climate change models predict that there are scenarios under which we cannot find 424,000 safe square miles of inhabitable Earth to build anew?

link: Environmental and Urban Economics

Here is a link to Dr. Kahn’s forthcoming book, which I have pre-ordered (and so should you).

Whether you can get on board with Weitzman’s argument, it’s nice to have strong technical discussion of the “fat tail” problem rather than the usual straw man arguments from people like Nassim Taleb.

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Robert McLaughlin is a physicist at Stanford, whose essay in the American Scholar is headlined: The earth doesn’t care if you drive a Prius.” This is a misleading because McLaughlin is not really interested in policy or individual choice. He’s interested in writing about geologic time and how inconsequential humans are to it:

The great ice episodes were not the only cases of natural climate change, however. Six million years ago the Mediterranean Sea dried up. Ninety million years ago alligators and turtles cavorted in the Arctic. One hundred fifty million years ago the oceans flooded the middle of North America and preserved dinosaur bones. Three hundred million years ago, northern Europe burned to a desert and coal formed in Antarctica. The great ice episodes themselves were preceded by approximately 30 smaller ones between one and two million years ago, and perhaps twice that many before that.

link: What the Earth Knows: an article by Robert B. Laughlin | The American Scholar

What, if any, are the policy implications of geologic time as a perspective? We interventionists seem to think that we are changing the world, and we need to change it back. Honestly, can we support that idea when humans really are so much dust in the wind? Does McLaughlin’s recounting of geologic time strengthen the argument for intervention or weaken it?

One of the problems with this type of approach is that if you suggest the compact cities aren’t an effective climate strategy, you get labeled “pro-sprawl” as soon as the words are out of your mouth. One of my colleagues did it the other day: once I questioned whether compact development would have the intended effect, I got slotted, immediately, as somebody who opposes rail development (no, only wasteful ones) and who thinks tract housing represents the highest form of human freedom.

Instead, there are many reasons to think about changing urban design and urban form, and climate is only one of them. And if development is not an effective climate strategy; and if, as McLaughlin seems to be suggesting, there aren’t any effective climate strategies, then we should be discussing adaptation in development rather than prevention.