Articles by Adam Stein

With all the upbeat talk about an environmental labor boom, is rhetoric running away from reality?

Someone help me puzzle this out:

Proposition 1: A shift to renewable energy and energy efficiency will result in a boom in green-collar jobs -- good service-industry work that can't be outsourced. This proposition is attractive because it holds forth the promise of a grand alliance between greens and the labor movement. See, e.g., Tom Friedman and everyone who posts on Grist.

Proposition 2: The optimism over green-collar jobs is a classic example of the make-work bias, a widespread economic fallacy that mistakes amount of work for wealth creation. The actual effect of greenhouse-gas reductions on labor markets is unclear, so environmentalists should stick to environmental policy. See, e.g., various environmental economists.

I don't have a clever opinion here, although I will say that the case for a positive labor impact from energy efficiency measures seems decently solid. Efficiency is, after all, an unambiguously good thing for the economy as a whole. If it costs us less to get the same amount of stuff, we're all richer. Certainly this is a nice thing for consumers, and because energy industries tend not to be labor-intensive, we can expect that wealth creation at the expense of energy producers will be a net benefit for employment as well. I think.

The impact of renewable energy, on the other hand, is more difficult to suss out. More to the point, it's not clear that anyone has sussed it out. Discuss.

The presidential debates once again highlight the obvious

Matthew Yglesias notes the environmental policy gap between Democratic and Republican presidential contenders: "On the Republican side, we have Mike Huckabee who thinks global warming is a serious problem but doesn't have any particular ideas about dealing with it."

It strikes me as worse than that. When I read Andy Revkin's run-down of the weekend's debates, this made me want to get my shrill on:

Mike Huckabee called for a billion-dollar prize for the first 100-mile-per-gallon car (a concept that might seem a bit goofy, but that has been embraced by some influential economists).

It did indeed seem a bit goofy at first. Then I thought again. This idea goes well beyond goofy to ... deeply unserious? Insulting? Inane? Consider:

• 100 mpg-equivalent cars already exist.
• 100 mpg isn't all that ambitious. A bunch of kids are planning to bring a commercially viable 200 MPGe car to market in 2009.
• 100 mpg cars aren't a hugely important policy goal.

So, let's see: a climate change an energy independence plan consisting of a billion-dollar prize for technology that already exists will probably soon be supplanted, and isn't a high priority.

Of course, this was just one throwaway line in a debate. But I'm thunderstruck by the level of policy discourse on one of the most important issues of the day. Then I remember that voters don't actually care about this stuff, and it all sort of makes sense.

Please, can we lay off the calls for sacrifice in the face of climate change?

This New York Times editorial says a bunch of stuff that I agree with, in a way that doesn't seem helpful at all:

The overriding environmental issue of these times is the warming of the planet. The Democratic hopefuls in the 2008 campaign are fully engaged, calling for large -- if still unquantified -- national sacrifices and for a transformation in the way the country produces and uses energy.

The term "sacrifice" gets bandied about a lot, mostly as a way to lend moral seriousness to arguments about climate change. Are you merely paying lip service to the issue, or are you willing to lay down the hard truths?

Of course, no one really knows how much sacrifice will be required. Economic projections of the cost of dealing with climate change put the value somewhere around "not terribly much." But who knows? It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future.

The bigger problem is that the term "sacrifice" misrepresents the process. Decarbonizing involves millions of consumers and businesses making billions of small consumption decisions in response to price signals, just as they do every day.

As personal transportation becomes cheaper, the poor benefit and the climate suffers

In an interesting bit of synchronicity, the Times ran two nearly identical articles on the rocketing popularity of motor scooters in the developing world, one focusing on Iraq, the other on Laos. Although neither article mentions global warming, the pieces do neatly wind together some of the threads that will continue to pressure our climate system well into this century.

The first thread is the rise of China as the world's factory floor. In this case, cheap Chinese bikes are flooding foreign markets. Available for as little as $440, these scooters are within reach of the very poor.