Nobel Prize Economist: 3 Choices Every Country Has On Climate | Ep. 456 with Gary Yohe

Gary Yohe (0:00)

In 5 or 10 years, if the temperature has gone up, another couple of tenths of a degree centigrade, it's going to be even worse. It's before the fact, everybody's in danger. After the fact, we know who it was.

Daniel (0:11)

Gary Yohe spent 40 years fighting a war most people never saw. Eight reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a share of the Nobel Peace Prize, 30 words he wrote, adopted by 195 nations.

But are we past the point of no return?

Gary Yohe (0:30)

No, we are past the point of better preparation. These predictable monsoons would create tens of thousands of deaths of people who were drowned from the flooding. The reason so many people died is they stayed behind because...

Daniel (0:52)

So Gary, I don't think most people would understand why somebody studying economics and climate would go together well. What are the similarities between those two?

Gary Yohe (1:04)

It's really a matter of being connected to each other.

Economics is a study of its own.

Has to do with worrying about scarce resources on the planet. Climate change is driven by emissions of greenhouse gases from economic activity. And so the connection of those emissions back to those drivers and their markets is one place where economists have something to say. And then the emissions cause increases in concentrations and temperature warming. That warming causes climate impacts like sea level rise and droughts and variety of things like that. Those all have consequences. And it's when the consequences show up that economists have something to say as well. One of the metrics that people want to use to measure the consequences of the events caused by climate change have to do with with economics and the trade-offs and the economic system and how it responds automatically to those sources of risk and what's leftover that causes real trouble to humanity.

Daniel (2:19)

So you said that there's only three choices right now, abate, adapt, or suffer. Can you break those down?

Gary Yohe (2:28)

Yeah.

It's a very simple way of organizing your thoughts. They aren't my words. They're John Holdren's words when he was a climate science advisor to President Obama for eight years. Whenever he would give talks about climate change, he would mention that.

And it really, really makes a difference. The story that I told about emissions going to temperatures and then impacts and then consequences, has policy levers embedded in it.

Abate means investing in processes and policies that reduce emissions of e-trapping gases. That's mitigation, that's abatement. Adaptation says, okay, look at the impacts and then think about the consequences. How can you respond to ameliorate some of the damages, some of the effects of the impacts that are harming things that you value? So that's the adaptation part. And then the last part is a realization that no combination, feasible combination of abatement and adaptation will fully eliminate all of the potential consequences, all of the risks, particularly the high consequence events that may or may not have been anticipated or even experienced before.

But even in normal times, you won't make enough investment in either of the first to make yourself completely safe. So that leads to a third response, which is try to build resilience as much as you can. Try to make the consequences of the residual damages to individuals as small as they can. Allow them to recover more quickly than they otherwise might. Invest in a variety of those sorts of programs. Invest in insurance coverage for damage from poisonous chemicals that get into your house from fires down the road. Make your house uninhabitable as the houses that burn down. A variety of things like that.

Daniel (5:00)

Seems like every day I hear on the news about some sort of natural disaster that is way worse than ever before in that area. Obviously, information does travel faster now and we're seeing more of it, but are we past the point of no return?

Gary Yohe (5:17)

No.

We are past the point of better preparation. We've known about this problem for 40 years, and we haven't been successful in doing very much.

Climate change will continue, and it is possible, though, that we could get temperatures to peak and then start to come down. That's another whole story. But in terms of a lot of the damages that we're seeing in extreme events, which were unimaginable a few decades ago, maybe, which now seem to be routine, is here to stay for a long time, decades, maybe centuries.

You are absolutely right about the coverage on the news. I watched the ABC World News tonight. It's 30 minutes. They do 22 minutes of content. And I would say that nine days out of 10, out of two week period, there will be at least two or three minutes on an extreme event with large consequences that can be quickly attributed to warming temperatures and human emissions of greenhouse gases.