In recent weeks, two hurricanes have smashed into Florida, with one trekking northward through Georgia and the Carolinas. Each left death and destruction in its wake. Annually, wildfires destroy homes and forests from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest and eastward along the length of the Rocky Mountains. Record heatwaves are becoming commonplace. Parts of the US Northeast, including Connecticut and Vermont, have been inundated in recent years with torrential rains and flooding.
Any one of these events might be written off as a ‘once in a century’ freak occurrence. But the sum total of all the violent storms, wildfires, droughts, heatwaves and floods occurring annually and worldwide reflects the consistent pattern of a changing global climate. To suggest otherwise is to be blind to data, deaf to science, and oblivious to logic.
There is much about our planet’s changing climate that science can teach us. And economics can also help us with means to slow or even reverse its primary source, human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and methane.
For example, science can help us understand cause and effect, and within broad parameters, various likely outcomes, such as warming ocean waters near the equator that spawn and nurture ever more violent hurricanes packing ever larger quantities of water around their vortexes. Economics can offer ways to internalize the cost of harmful greenhouse gas emissions, for example via carbon taxes or ‘cap and trade’ permit schemes. Economics can also devise policies that encourage faster adoption of non-carbon emitting energy production, for example via subsides for wind or solar power generation.
But there is much we do not know about climate change. Might ocean currents shift, potentially cooling parts of the earth’s surface even as others bake? Which communities will be hardest hit by storms, drought, or floods? Who will pay? How much of the cost of remediating climate change should be borne by today’s generations, and how much should be assumed by future generations who would benefit from today’s decisions?
Those uncertainties are vast, and will require much modeling, data gathering, and analysis before we are better equipped to address them.
But one thing we can say today with certainty—climate change is forcing everyone to understand that free market, libertarian ideals of human self-interest are incapable of addressing the life and death challenges it poses.
Consider the volte face of various Republican members of the US House of Representatives, the US Senate, governors, and local officials in states hardest hit by this season’s hurricanes. When their constituents lose family members, friends, and entire communities to the violence of hurricanes, those same erstwhile critics of the federal government, who previously proposed cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) budget, suddenly become converts, asking for more federal support to aid their devastated regions.
The point here is not to call out hypocrisy. That is self-evident and largely meaningless.
Instead, a more meaningful dynamic is at work. In the face of climate change and the havoc it wreaks, individuals and communities increasingly recognize that they need help from their government.
Humans are compassionate. None of us can watch the devastation and horrors of violent storms and not feel compelled to lend a hand. Help arrives in many forms: federal, state and local government assistance, as well as via enormous works provided by non-profits whose expertise and resources make them well suited to be among the first responders to natural calamities.
The collective action of government, philanthropy, and individual sacrifice is inspiring. In selfless acts of bravery, determination, and collective will, we see the best sides of ourselves, our neighbors, our communities, and our country.
But we must also recognize that community requires sacrifice of self-interest to better achieve the common good. Just as in the case of national defense, our response to the violence wrought by climate requires us to put others, and other priorities, before self. Crucially, that applies to preparedness, and not just when crisis necessitates selfless response.
To make our communities more resilient, we must aim to prevent the preventable, and to become better prepared for the next time. Among others, we must be willing to pay higher taxes to finance public investments to make communities more resilient to wind, rain, drought, and fire hazards.
Ultimately, we must recognize what economists have known since their discipline first emerged: individual self-interest and free markets, while demonstrably the best anti-poverty program known to man and the best avenue to unleashing individual material aspiration, are also profoundly deficient when it comes to always ensuring the common good.
That is not because Adam Smith was wrong about the ‘invisible hand’, but rather because the assumptions in which self-interest equates to the common interest do not consider the possibility that our actions, however seemingly innocuous, can have devasting impacts on others. Collectively and in our most mundane daily activities—heating or cooling our homes, driving to work, to pick up our kids at school, to run errands, or to visit friends and family—we, and generations of humans before us, collectively abet climate change. That same climate change that, one day, may destroy us and our communities.
Collective challenges require collective responses. That is true whether the challenge is national security, a public health crisis, combatting crime, or ensuring that our homes are protected from fire. We accept that in many facets of life common purpose requires collective sacrifice. And, in democracy, one important way we do so is by paying taxes with the aim that public works will help us to achieve desirable outcomes for ourselves and our communities.
It requires no leap of faith to see that the same applies to climate change. Collective challenge requires collective sacrifice. That statement is neither polemics nor political. It follows from the remorseless logic of classical economics.
There are those, of course, who will continue to espouse faith in the primacy of individual liberty and free markets, deriding collective responsibility as ‘socialism’, or worse. In the context of climate change, however, such espousal merely reflects ignorance, a dismissal of both sound science and sound economics.
In sum, there is much we know and much do not know about climate change. But one thing has become certain. Addressing the challenges of climate change will require collective understanding, collective will, and collective sacrifice if we are going to better respond to, and possibly prevent, future crises.
