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Comments on
Chapter 4. Decision Support Resources.
[also available
PDF
Version] of the Strategic Plan for the Climate Change Science
Program (Review Draft, November 2002).
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Breakout Session 11
Scenario Development to Support National Scope
Decisions
Panelist Comments from Billy Pizer, Resources
for the Future
Comments dtd December 12, 2002
I would first like to thank the organizers for
inviting me to participate in this panel as well as commend the authors
and contributors to this chapter of the Strategic Plan [Chapter 4. Decision Support Resources]
for a very thorough and well-written draft. I will also note that my
perspective in these comments reflects not only my five years of
grad-school brainwashing in neo-classical economics, but also the recent
year I spent advising senior policymakers on this and similar issues at
the President's Council of Economic Advisers. There, I gained a particular
appreciation for how science, scientists, and policymakers interact.
Frequently, especially during my first few months at
the Council of Economic Advisers, I received emails of the form "If we
reduce emissions 10% in 2010, the cost will be ____. Please fill in the
blank." Initially, I responded as best I could but eventually I became
frustrated at my inability to convey the complexity of the answer in a
simple response. Eventually, I pushed back: Why are you asking this
question? What do you really care about? I think you are asking the
wrong questions.
This is my over-arching point in these comments:
Scientists need to not only respond to policymaker questions, they need to
push back and tell them when they are asking the wrong questions.
The interaction between scientists and
decisionmakers so far has led to a number of invaluable improvements in
our thinking about the climate change problem. One is a view of the
problem that focuses on risk management. This is not about affecting
relatively well-known outcomes associated with current activity -- this is
about influencing the risk of adverse and poorly understood consequences.
A second is a recognition of the role of irreversibilities -- both in the
environment and in our investments in human and physical capital -- and how
that affects the timing of decisions, especially as new information
becomes available. A third is an understanding that significant
uncertainty exists about mitigation costs as well as climate change
consequences, and this has important relevance for the design of policies.
Despite these advancements, I would emphasize that
these points have not been well disseminated to all the people who need to
understand them. An important continuing role for the interactions between
scientists and policymakers, as this chapters describes, should be
improved communication of these points. While there is a tendency to want
to move on to new and interesting things, nailing down the basics should
remain a priority.
Looking forward, my main concern is that decision
support efforts highlight for policymakers not only what is known and not
known well, but what is likely to be known in a timely matter. I
think Professor Jacoby's analogy in yesterday's New York Times article
nails the point home: when you find out you have high cholesterol, your
immediate response should not be to try and get better information about
the timing and intensity of the upcoming heart attack -- it should be to
reduce the risk. This is especially true if the information is likely to
arrive after the heart attack occurs. Nonetheless, a frequent line of
questioning on climate change has been to focus on ascertaining a safe
concentration level for 2100 rather than contemplating real policy options
to reduce risk in 2002.
Turning to some specific points in the chapter
itself, the discussion initially moves back and forth between issues of
decision support for "decisionmakers" -- i.e. those people setting national
policy and negotiating international agreements -- and "resource
managers" -- i.e., those people engaged in regional and sectoral policy,
planning and operating decisionmaking. This distinction between
decisionmakers and resource managers might loosely be recast as a
distinction between mitigation -- efforts to reduce the likelihood or
magnitude of climate change -- and adaptation -- efforts to minimize the impact
of, or maximize the resilience to, climate change when it occurs.
My first comment would be that despite the
inevitably of adaptation (it is the default policy after all), I think the
emphasis on adaptation/regional decision-making is less important
than the document presents at this time [e.g., page 39, line 5]. While we
need to understand the scope and cost of adaptation in order to
make an appropriate aggregate trade-off between mitigation and adaptation,
adaptation decisions remain relatively far in the future while the
mitigation decisions are much more pressing.
I would make a related comment about the importance
of other greenhouse gases and emissions from land-use [e.g., page 40, line
7]. We need to understand the scope and cost of emission reductions
in these areas in order to make an appropriate trade-off with
energy-related carbon dioxide reductions. And we should certainly pursue
those reductions in a timely matter. However, the magnitude of the
potential reductions as well as the time profile of consequences suggest
that an emphasis on energy-related mitigation decisions -- versus
non-energy-related mitigation decisions -- remains paramount.
So let's talk about the main decision:
energy-related carbon dioxide mitigation. The draft document states that
it will be difficult to generate a true representation of the salient
decisions concerning mitigation given the diversity of issues identified
over the past several years [page 41, line 17]. The document highlights
issues such as the costs and impacts of concentration paths over time, and
costs and benefits of various stabilized atmospheric concentrations [line
19]. It then goes on to describe an increased role for stakeholder
interaction and management of this interaction [line 27].
My belief is that taking the immediate concerns of
policymakers as a given -- or even as a primary research driver -- ignores the
crucial feedback that scientists have on policymaker thinking. I have one
particular concern in mind: the focus both at home and abroad on "safe"
atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. In my opinion, the
climate-related decision research has focused too much on pathways to
various concentration targets, leading policymakers to focus on questions
of long-run stabilization -- emission pathways, technologies, international
burden-sharing, etc. -- that we may never be
able to agree upon.
This is the main point I made a second ago. The 1992
Rio Convention commits its signatories to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse
gases at a safe level. We imagine first that such a threshold exists, and
second that science can reveal it in a timely way. We are trying to manage
the exact time and severity of our heart attack rather than starting to
reduce the risk.
To this end, I believe that one of the most valuable
contributions of a decision support program could be to elaborate on the
kinds of uncertainties that are likely to remain for some time and the
consequences for decision makers. Interaction with policymakers remains
critical, but scientists and research agenda managers should actively
challenge whether the policymakers are asking the right questions based on
what may or may not be answerable. If a policymaker is asking for a
cost-benefit analysis of different long-run concentration levels, someone
needs to explain that the range of uncertainty on such an analysis is so
large, and unlikely to diminish, that it is of questionable value.
**Instead, the policymaker might be encouraged to ask whether, absent a
concentration target, science can inform an alternative kind of goal to
get things started. I will note that this is one of the key problems we
faced when I was at CEA: absent a roadmap of the ultimate goal, how do we
calibrate the first step?
Along these same lines, I would ask whether the
scenario development [page 45, line 14] might be supplemented by an
analysis of how gradual, incremental, policy could be reformed over time
as the true scenario unfolds. Not only based on increased knowledge about
climate change, but based on increased knowledge about the policy's own
efficacy in reducing emissions as time passes. Does a first round of
technology incentives work? How will we know if they have worked? If they
do not work, how should the policy be reformed and when?
Basic scenario development is useful for conveying a
story. How many nuclear power plants do I need if no conservation occurs
and no other non-fossil alternatives are viable? But there are so many
combinations of possible assumptions, one can quickly become overwhelmed
by the different "If..., then..." possibilities. I would encourage a scenario
effort that attempts to highlight the importance of a flexible,
diversified, and adjustable policy response, but not one that purports to
fine-tune a particular decision.
I am very supportive of research to improve
simulation of climate change consequences in response to alternative
emission scenarios and natural forcings through applied climate modeling
[pages 47-52]. Despite the difficulty in using such models to establish
"safe" concentration levels in a timely matter, over time, they should
provide feedback to the policy process.
A final area that I might add to the discussion is
some attention to the evolutionary nature of policymaking. One need only
look as far as the Clean Air Act over the past thirty years to see that an
initial policy approach will almost certainly be modified. Are there
certain policy designs that lend themselves to modification and others
that do not? In particular, will a policy that initially addresses a
subset of emission sources in a differential manner -- say power plants and
passenger vehicles through cap-and-trade and CAFÉ -- create institutional
obstacles to future improvements? Are there some institutions, such as a
project-based crediting system for the capture of fugitive greenhouse gas
emissions, that will be useful regardless of the future policy design?
Summarizing, my main concern is that decision
support not be viewed as a way to simply make science more responsive to
policymaker questions. I believe this ignores the fact that the
scientific discourse over climate change is what has led to policymaker
questions in the first place, and that a failure to grasp the limitations
of scientific analysis can lead to a dead-end in policy development. The
science program should continue to work on communicating the basics of
risk management and decisions in the face of uncertainty and learning, but
should also keep policymakers focused by showing them (1) why some
decisions are less important than others, now, (2) which decisions
must be made before uncertainty is resolved, and (3) what lines of
questioning are unlikely to help resolve policy debate. |
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