The Rise and Fall of Ecological Economics

                                                            Comments due by Dec. 5, 2014

In September of 1982, a group of scholars met in Stockholm intending to reform -- even to revolutionize -- the study of economics. The new ecological economists saw the economy as embedded in, and supported by, natural systems; nature was not simply a factor in, but the foundation of, economic activity. By integrating models from ecology and economics, ecological economists sought to provide scientific arguments for preserving the natural world. The Stockholm meeting came at a critical time. During the 1970s, prominent environmentalists, encouraged by what they saw as a public awakening to environmental concerns, issued best-selling books and reports that predicted that if population, consumption, and with them the global economy continued to grow, the world would soon run out of food and other resources. By the early 1980s, however, these predictions had been discredited. The public worried more about unemployment and recession. They feared that the regulations environmentalists proposed would derail the economy or slow it down. Environmentalists faced a populist backlash. President Ronald Reagan swept into office in 1980 promising to get the economy moving again. Reagan had campaigned against "environmental extremists" who he said favored "rabbits' holes" and "birds' nests" over jobs and economic growth. He arrived in Washington determined to roll back environmental and other social regulations. He named anti-environmentalists to fill top spots at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and the Forest Service. The president promptly issued an executive order that subjected every major regulation to an economic cost-benefit test. The Reagan administration and other advocates of growth invoked mainstream economic science to justify pulling back regulations. Ecological economists responded by attacking mainstream economic science and contended that mainstream economists failed to properly acknowledge the value of the natural world and th services it provides. The environmental movement quickly embraced ecological economics because it promised to reconcile ecology with economics in a new science that would be reliably on the side of environmental protection. The MacArthur Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and other large foundations invested heavily in ecologica economics. Leading environmental figures such as Amory Lovins, Paul Hawken, Bill McKibben, and Al Gore  and popular writers like Thomas Friedman picked up its language and its concepts, as did the United Nations, European governments, and nongovernmental organizations. Ecological economics set out 30 years ago to be a redemptive science -- to "right size" the human economy for its natural infrastructure. But today, ecological economics finds itself at a political and academic dead end. Trapped in the amber of its mathematical models and conceptual constructs, ecological economics presents an object lesson for those who would appeal to scientifi theories, rather than to popular concerns, to provide an intellectual and political basis for an effective green politics. 1. Ecologists and economists made unlikely partners -- indeed, these disciplines have often appeared at odds with, and determined to ignore, each other. As Robert Costanza, the founding president of the International Society for Ecological Economics, acknowledged in the inaugural issue of Ecological Economics, "Ecology, as it is currently practiced, sometimes deals with human impacts on ecosystems but the more common tendency is to stick to 'natural' systems." The modeling of ecological communities or systems seemed purposely to leave out the human economy. At the same time, economists either took for granted or ignored the principles, powers, or forces that ecologists believed governed the world's natural communities. The market mechanism, or competitive equilibrium, that mainstream economists studied assigned no role to the natural ecosystem. Ecological economics sought to embed the study of economics within a larger understanding of how ecosystems work. Ecological economists also wanted to distinguish their scientific professionalism from the neo-Malthusian alarmism of the previous decade. The Club of Rome's 1972 best seller, The Limits to Growth, was associated in many reviews with dire projections: for example, that the world would run out of minerals, such as silver, tungsten, and mercury, within 40 years. In 1970, Paul Ehrlich, the neoMalthusian author of The Population Bomb, predicted that global food shortages would cause four billion people to starve to death between 1980 and 1989 -- 65 million of them in the United States. Further warnings poured forth in the Global 2000 Report (1980) and in annual State of the World reports by Lester Brown and the Worldwatch Institute. Neo-Malthusians argued that the world would not be able to grow enough food to keep up with population, but this assertion was simply wrong. In fact, world food production more than doubled between 1960 and 2000, and per capita food production during that period also increased. In 1981, economist Amartya Sen, who later won the Nobel Prize for his research, published a book that flatly and effectively contradicted the idea that famines occur because not enough food is produced. Sen showed that oppression, injustice, and destitution -- breakdowns in distribution, not shortages in production -- cause famines. With such "misleading variables as food output per unit of population, the Malthusian approach profoundly misspecifies the problems facing the poor in the world," Sen wrote, noting that as per capita food production increased, the world was lulled into a false optimism that famines would decrease. "It is often overlooked that what may be called 'Malthusian optimism' has actually killed millions of people." Ecological economists distinguished themselves from neo-Malthusian catastrophists by switching the emphasis from resources to systems. The concern was no longer centered on running out of food, minerals, or energy. Instead, ecological economists drew attention to what they identified as ecological thresholds. The problem lay in overloading systems and causing them to collapse. Costanza and colleagues wrote, "There may be close substitutes for conventional natural resources, such as timber and coal, but not for natural ecological systems." Ecological economists described ecosystems as evolutionary systems: "complex, adaptive systems... characterized by historical dependency, complex dynamics, and multiple basins of attraction." These communities or systems were assumed to evolve and, as a result, achieve an "adaptive" or a "dynamic equilibrium" that could be modeled mathematically. E.P. Odum, whose Fundamentals of Ecology was for decades the leading textbook in the field, pictured the natural world as a great chain or a "levels-of-organizationhierarchy" ascending from smaller to larger, more inclusive systems (e.g., from genes, cells, organs, organisms, populations, communities, to ecosystems). In an influential paper published in Science in 1969, Odum described the natural world as "an orderly process of community development" that is "directed toward achieving as large and diverse an organic structure as is possible within th limits set by the available energy input and the prevailing physical conditions of existence." In their 1967 Theory of Island Biogeography, Robert MacArthur of Princeton University and E. O. Wilson of Harvard presented a similar view of evolution as an orderly progression of natural communities toward a saturation of species. According to this theory, ecosystems exist in a state of equilibrium in which the colonization by a new species is balanced by the extinction of a resident one. Paul Ehrlich later updated the great chain metaphor to that of an airplane. "A dozen rivets, or a dozen species, might never be missed," he wrote with his wife Anne Ehrlich. "On the other hand, a thirteenth rivet popped from a wing flap, or the extinction of a key species involved in the cycling of nitrogen, could lead to a serious accident." Ecological economists drew from thermodynamic theory to supplement the ecological view that nature represents a constrained and constraining adaptive evolutionary system. In 1971, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, a Romanian economist, published The Entropy Law and the Economic Process which argued, "The Law of Entropy is the taproot of economic scarcity." Herman Daly, an early proponent of ecological economics and the leading theoretician of what he called steady-state economics, built on the idea that a growing economy must eventually wear out the energy potential (i.e., the organization and integration) of the natural systems in which it is embedded. Optimism based on the "philosopher's stone of technology," he wrote, requires "suspensions of the laws of thermodynamics." In 1992 two prominent ecological economists argued that standard models of economic growth are problematic because "they ignore the fact  that the human economy is an integral part of a materially closed evolutionary system." 2. Ecological economics also drew on theoretical methods and ideas that emerged at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee after World War II. Starting in the 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission employed scores of ecologists -- about 80 by 1970 -- in dozens of projects that eventually grew into a Big Science approach to computer-based modeling of what were then known as biomes. From 1968 to 1974, various agencies funded the International Biological Program (IBP); the federal government provided nearly $60 million. Th IBP produced little of intellectual interest but created a large class of project managers, many of whom remain active today at governmental agencies funding big think ecosystem research. Surrounded by physicists at Oak Ridge, ecologists adopted computer modeling and other conceptual methods that distinguish mathematical from less theoretical, and thus "softer," sciences. The most influential ecologist of the period, G. E. Hutchinson, insisted that theory was essential to science, declaring, "If we had no theory, there would be nothing to modify, and we should get nowhere." Hutchinson, along with his colleagues, posited what he called "formal analogies" to explain ecosystem structure and function in terms o equations drawn from many sciences, including statistical mechanics, logistic population growth curves, spectral analysis, circuitry, stoichiometry, thermodynamics, cybernetics, and chaos theory. This was make-work for mathematicians. Anyone with some mathematics and a metaphor -- typically borrowed from some other science -- could model the ecosystem. Ecologists of the period assumed "that ecosystems function in accordance to some overarching rules that control structure and/or function," without checking that assumption against evidence. Princeton ecologist Simon Levin wrote, "One must recognize the powerful adaptive and self-organizing forces that shape ecosystems." These forces were modeled in silico (on computers) rather than observed al fresco (in the great outdoors). As ecology became a formal science, it mistook models for empirical evidence. "In studying the logical consequences of assumptions, the theoretician is discovering, not inventing," Levin wrote. "To the theoretician, models are a part of the real world." Theory-based mathematical speculation about ecosystem structure and function appealed to the academic and scientific community of the time. The more abstract and mathematical the theory, the more respect it commanded and the higher, albeit narrower, the threshold it set for professional success. Mathematicians enjoyed prominent academic careers without having to engage in empirical research or gain tenure in a department of mathematics. In 1974, the late Leigh Van Valen, a formidable University of Chicago evolutionary biologist, concluded that mathematical ecologists had formed a "clique" and a "new orthodoxy" that considered gathering facts a "waste of time." 3. Liberated from the need to test their theories empirically, ecosystem ecologists built their mathematical models upon ideas that can be traced back to Charles Darwin's contemporary, the British philosopher and biologist Herbert Spencer. The explicit purpose of the International Biological Program -- to determine "the biological basis of productivity and human welfare" -- was one that Spencer himself might have recognized. Spencer envisioned a theory of systems that would explain the evolution, not just of species, but of ecological communities and of human societies. While Darwin's theory of descent with modification, for which the fossil record offered empirical evidence, explained the properties of species, Spencer's theory postulated a "universal law of evolution" which asserted that any collection of living things over time tends to self-organize in a "dynamic equilibrium" while dissipating energy. This principle became a program for interpreting everything. Spencer's theory of systems provided the critical bridge from 19th century community ecology not only forward to 20th century systems ecology but also backward to 18th century natural theology. As geographer Clarence Glacken has written, "I am convinced that modern ecological theory, so important in our attitudes towards nature and man's interference with it, owes its origin to the design argument. The wisdom of the creator is self-evident... no living thing is useless, and all are related one to the other." In 19th century America, naturalists who came of age at the time of the Civil War were educated in the tradition we associate with "intelligent design," the idea that God's fullness and magnificence is demonstrated in the perfect organization and replete diversity of the natural world. The 18th century English poet Alexander Pope celebrated this idea, "Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed / From Nature's chain whatever link you strike." The scala natura or Great Chain of Being served as the organizing metaphor for what would become community ecology. This approach, according to historian of ideas A.O. Lovejoy, exalted the "sufficient reason" that put every species in its place and attributed self-sufficiency, self-organization, or "quietude" to natural communities -- an ability to arrange and sustain themselves as God made them if left undisturbed. The commonplaces of modern ecology, such as "everything connects" and "save all the parts," recall the neoplatonic view of nature as an integrated mechanism into which every species fits. How were botanists, zoologists, entomologists, and other biologists able to reconcile their education in natural theology with their acceptance of evolutionary biology? Stephen Forbes, who headed the Department of Zoology at the University of Illinois, showed how this could be done. According to historian Sharon Kingsland, Forbes took from Herbert Spencer the belief that evolutionary forces will achieve and maintain adaptive dynamic equilibriums despite ever-changing relationships in ecological communities or systems. In a seminal article written in 1887, Forbes described a glacial lake in Illinois as a "system of organic interactions by which [species] influence and control each other [that] has remained substantially unchanged from a remote geological period." What could cause this system to organize and to maintain itself for thousands or millions of years? Forbes wrote: Out of these hard conditions, an order has been evolved which is the best conceivable... that actually accomplishes for all the parties involved the greatest good which the circumstances will at all permit.... Is there not, in this reflection, solid ground for a belief in the final beneficence of the laws of organic nature? In this paper, indeed, in this paragraph, Forbes performed intellectual feats that remain impressive to this day. First, he assumed that there was an order, a dynamic equilibrium, in the lake he visited. He had no empirical evidence to show that the organisms he observed were ancient and enduring, nor did he consider any necessary. Forbes, like Spencer, relied on deductive argument based in a universal theory of natural history. The best-adapted or (as Forbes wrote) "adjusted" species will organize themselves into sustainable and resilient communities. Second, Forbes, like Spencer, called the dynamic force or universal law that organizes nature in ascending levels or scales of complexity not God, but Evolution. This substitution of nomenclature turned 18th century Great Chain of Being theodicy -- with its emphasis on pattern, scale, process, mechanism, hierarchy, resilience, and plenitude -- into ecology as it was studied throughout the 20th century. Frederic Clements, the most influential plant ecologist of the early 20th century, who was also influenced by Spencer, agreed with Forbes that nature is progressive and beneficent. According to ecologist S. P. Hubbell, Clements believed that the community was literally a 'superorganism,' and that species were its organs and succession its ontogeny. He argued that each species had an essential role to play in preparing the way for the next serial stage in the succession toward the equilibrium or 'climax' plant community. Because Spencer's theory of adaptation applied not just to species, but also to ecological communities, it allowed community ecology to hold on to its theological roots while it embraced a concept of evolution. By assuming that anything God could do, evolution did better, biologists leapt from 18th century natural theology to 20th century community ecology without missing a beat. But for the mantle of mathematics that ecologists had draped over it, mid-20th century community and ecosystems ecology could not be distinguished from the more openly theological framework that Forbes had adapted from Spencer and presented 80 years earlier. 4. Ecological economists drew on the study of ecological systems -- systems ecology -- that developed after World War II in the context of Big Science and postulated that ecological systems or communities are unified or governed by a set of organizing principles. Nature itself, however, seems scandalously indifferent to this philosophy. Ecologists who engaged in empirical research found that the mathematical models devised by community and systems theorists were not supported by observation other than by examples cherry picked for the purpose. Had theoretical ecologists been interested in empirical evidence, according to ecologist John Lawton, they would have easily falsified any principle they tested; there are "painfully few fuzzy generalisations, let alone rules or laws." As early as 1917, however, American botanist Henry Gleason (1882-1975) had challenged the assumption that the living world is organized under enduring principles or by powerful forces. He argued instead that each association of plants and animals is unique, ephemeral, spontaneous, idiosyncratic, extemporaneous, and a law unto itself. The sites that ecologists study, he believed, should be seen as path-dependent histories rather than as rule-governed communities. From this point of view ecosystems do not evolve; they jus change. Gleason argued that no general law, principle, model, or theory gets any predictive traction on the comings and goings of species. In a recent article, Daniel Simberloff, a leading contemporary ecologist, refers to the "longstanding controversy stemming back to Clements Gleason, and their contemporaries, over whether a plant community is anything other than the assemblage of populations co-occurring in a specific place at a specific time: that is, to what extent are communities integrated, discrete entities, and, if they are, what is the nature of the integration?" Underlying this controversy is "the question of whether community ecology itself actually has generalization beyond trivial ones like the laws of thermodynamics, and whether seeking such generalizations advances the study of ecology at the community level." Simberloff concedes that there are no nontrivial laws, principles, or generalizations that predict events at the "system" or the "community" level or that explain the integration these concepts suggest. "Laws and models in community ecology are highly contingent, and their domain is usually very local." William Drury found no emergent properties, governing rules, or integration in the forests he studied. I feel that ecosystems are largely extemporaneous and that most species (in what we often call a community) are superfluous to the operation of those sets of species between which we can clearly identify important interactions.... Once seen, most of the interactions are simple and direct. Complexity seems to be a figment of our imaginations driven by taking the 'holistic' view."  Simply put, the evidence does not support the idea that evolution applies on a system-wide scale. New ecosystems appear all the time; the species found at a place rarely coevolved there. Nearly anywhere one looks one finds species coming and going -- many or most are recent arrivals. A group of 19 ecologists wrote in Nature, "Most human and natural communities now consist both of long-term residents and of new arrivals, and ecosystems are emerging that never existed before." If creatures just show up at sites for their own reasons, which is usually the case, the concept of evolution does not apply even as a useful metaphor at the scale of the community or the ecosystem. As Drury argued, self-organizing adaptive ecological communities or systems that achieve and sustain a dynamic equilibrium are figments of the theoretical imagination driven by taking the holistic view. Just because places change -- nature is continually in flux -- does not mean they evolve. There is no dynamic order, force, or principle of self organization that makes every hodgepodge a system. 5. If the ecological foundations of ecological economics rested upon shaky ground, the economic foundations were no less problematic. Ecological economists have argued that because they cannot guarantee that growth is sustainable -- that new technologies will save the day -- we should (to quote the literature) "degrow" the economy. "Given our high level of uncertainty about this issue, it is irrational t bank on technology's ability to remove resource constraints," insisted Costanza. "This is why ecological economics assumes a prudently skeptical stance on technical progress." Ecological economists argued that what they did not know about the ecological foundations of the economy could hurt us, and that we ignored their uncertainty at our peril. In other words, they appealed to their own ignorance about ecosystem structure and function to empower their "precautionary" position. Mainstream macroeconomists -- those who deal with indicators of economic performance such as employment, inflation, trade, productivity, and national competitiveness -- generally reject this precautionary stance. Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate, spoke for many economists when he opined that if the future is like the past, "there will be prolonged and substantial reductions in natural-resource requirements per unit of real output." He asked, "Why shouldn't the productivity of most natural resources rise more or less steadily through time, like the productivity of labor?" By shifting the content of their warnings from resource exhaustion to system overload, ecological economists convinced few but themselves. Microeconomists swatted away the precautionary principles of ecological economists as easily as they had earlier dismissed the jeremiads of neo-Malthusians like Ehrlich. The answer mainstream economics gave to system overload was the same as its response to resource exhaustion: greater resource productivity and technological innovation. By the 1980s, in response to some of the same challenges and opportunities that had inspired the creation of ecological economics, a group of mainstream welfare economists had founded the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. These neoclassical economists developed the field of mainstream environmental economics to provide their own analysis of and prescription for the environmental crisis. They rejected the thermodynamic theory of value ecological economists proposed -- the idea that the constraint on growth is "negative entropy," meaning "the degree of organization or order of a thing relative to its environment." Instead, environmental economists offered what they called "utility," "welfare," or "willingness to pay" as the central value for environmental analysis and policy. Environmental economists defined and measured welfare or utility in terms of preferences or, practically speaking, the amounts people are 1) willing to pay (WTP) for a good or 2) willing to accept (WTA) to relinquish it. They did not describe pollution and other assaults on the environment in terms of entropic forces wearing down the resilience of holistic and integrated evolutionary systems. They diagnosed environmental problems as market externalities, that is, as uncompensated effects of economic decisions on third parties whose interests -- or whose WTP -- those decisions did not take into account. Economist Robert N. Stavins wrote, "The fundamental theoretical argument for government activity in the environmental realm is that pollution is an externality." Environmental economists had an advantage because they applied a framework that was already familiar in economic thought and therefore in policy analysis and political discourse. During the 1990s, environmental outfits and agencies staffed up with economists to attribute prices to externalities and discover market failures. Dueling cost-benefit analyses and opposing stories about WTP or WTA began to co-opt, infiltrate, and even replace moral argument and political persuasion. In response, many ecological economists, including some who had criticized the framework of neoclassical welfare economics, adopted it. It was easy to argue that people are willing to pay a lot for nature and for the services it provides. Accordingly, ecological economists, rather than continuing to construe economic systems as embedded in ecological systems, reduced their ambitions to tweaking neoclassical cost-benefit models to assign higher existence values to nature and lower discount rates to its use. For example, in the most cited and well-known paper written in ecological economics, Costanza and a dozen colleagues in 1997 applied what they considered to be the concepts of neoclassical utility theory to assign an economic worth of about $33 trillion -- much more than the value of the product of the global economy -- to what they called "The Value of the World's Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital." Ecological economists ended up fully embracing the slogan of mainstream welfare economics that protecting the environment is a matter of getting the prices right. A discipline that just a decade or two earlier had insisted the market was embedded in nature had learned how to embed nature into the market. 6. Having caved in to the normative framework of WTP or cost-benefit utility theory, ecological economists have been unable to confront the reasons that led Herman Daly, among others, to reject the market mechanism as an approach to understanding environmental problems. There are exceptions. A few ecological economists chided their colleagues for "commodity fetishism" and called for "conservation based on aesthetic and ethical arguments." They cited the article, "Selling Out on Nature" by Douglas McCauley in Nature magazine, which argued that "conservation must be framed as a moral issue," because nature has "an intrinsic value that makes it priceless, and this is reason enough to protect it." Costanza wrote in response, "I do not agree that more progress will be made by appealing to people's hearts rather than their wallets." Gretchen Daily, a prominent ecological economist, insisted that only by attributing instrumental or economic value to nature can conservationists influence public policy. "We have to completely rethink how we deal with the environment, and we should put a price on it," she said. Ecological economics, when it embraced cost-benefit and market-based valuation, abandoned the ethos of much of the landmark environmental legislation of the 1970s, which had rejected a market failure theory of pollution. These statutes, such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, were intended to protect public safety and health against toxic wastes and hazardous emissions. This legislation rests on the same principle as common law: the belief that one person should not injure or invade the person or property of others without their consent. Understood in this way, pollution represents an invasion of person and property and therefore is to be enjoined, minimized, or tolerated unwillingly until technology can do better. Environmental law is libertarian, not utilitarian, because it seeks to protect people and property against peril and trespass rather than to maximize utility. One person does not have the right to pollute and thus to trespass on another even when it is socially efficient to do so. Economists Maureen Cropper and Wallace Oates wrote in 1992 that "the cornerstones of federal environmental policy in the United States explicitly prohibited the weighing of benefits against costs in the setting of environmental standards." In response to the Reagan revolution, ecological economists had followed the cost-benefit bandwagon. But in doing so, they unwittingly played into their opponents' hands. By changing the political conversation from the question, "What is a cause of what?" to "What is a cost of what?" ecological economists substituted the technocratic framework of microeconomics for the ethical framework of responsibility. John V. Krutilla, an influential environmental economist and strong environmentalist, demonstrated how pliable the idea of an ecological or environmental externality could become. He observed that people who contribute to environmental causes must (by definition) benefit from them. Therefore, ideological, political, and moral commitments could be factored into the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) that measures social welfare and thus justifies environmental policy. Once political views, ideological principles, and spiritual beliefs were treated as consumer preferences, environmentalism could be reduced to one more interest group battling for its piece of the economic pie -- for example, the aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual benefits of ecosystems. The problem for environmentalists wasn't that they were losing the epic cost-benefit battles that raged through the 1980s and 1990s. They more than held their own in the dark art of creating social welfare functions to justify whatever it is that one wants. But, ironically there is ample reason to believe that CBA has never significantly affected rulemaking or regulation at all. Robert Hahn, an advocate of CBA, conceded, "The relationship between analysis and policy decisions is tenuous." He added, "There is little evidence that economic analysis of regulatory decisions has had a substantial positive impact" and argued that "the poor quality of analysis can help explain some of this ineffectiveness." But the poor quality of much cost-benefit analysis is arguably a function of the fact that cost-benefit arguments are mostly invoked as a kind of "open sesame" to defend or decry any governmental intervention. Advocates and policy makers, to borrow an old saw, use CBA like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination. After Congressional committees, administrative agencies, and the courts tear through them, the political battles that CBA is supposed to inform are settled in terms of liability, responsibility, authority, and legality -- not welfare maximization. If CBA lacks an intellectual and legal basis and has only a tenuous regulatory effect, why is it done? One reason is that so many people can do it. As law professor Duncan Kennedy has explained, CBA or the compensation test it implies is "just as open to alternating liberal and conservative ideological manipulation" as is the political deliberation it is supposed to displace. However bad or mistaken cost benefit accounting may be, it has a centrist effect, "supportive of liberalism and conservatism together, seen as a bloc in opposition to more left and right wing positions." In other words, by engaging in CBA, experts form a scientific "centrist bloc" that agrees on "moderation, statism, and rationalism." When partisans and opponents of environmental causes adopt the discourse of market failure and social externality, they co-opt their political fringes and tamp down the moral fervor of environmentalism, making the political conversation safe for expertise. Ecological economics has evolved into the more pro-environment wing of standard environmental economics. This has depleted the discipline of its initial energy. As long as the vocabulary of microeconomics, including cost-benefit analysis, remains the lingua franca of environmentalism, properly credentialed and preferably academic participants will have the policy debate to themselves. Evidently, this temptation proved to be too much for ecological economists. 7. Ecological economics aimed to be revolutionary, but it is now ignored by the sciences it had hoped to transform. Both ecology and economics have changed, but not because of the rise of ecological economics. The science of ecology could not draw indefinitely on its roots in 18th century theodicy. As contemporary ecologists have abandoned theory for empiricism, ecology has returned to the long suppressed view of Gleason, as Hubbell put it, that species are "largely thrown together by chance, history, and random dispersal." Species come and go. Ecological sites do not have a structure or a function. They have a history. The science of economics has moved on as well. Just when ecological economics caved in to the normative framework of neoclassical welfarism, empirical work in behavioral and experimental economics profoundly undermined that approach. Empirically-minded economists turned to studying the behavior of institutions and individuals, rather than continuing to model abstract utility functions. Ecological economists today try to put prices on ecosystem benefits and services. This effort by environmentalists is self-defeating. If environmental decisions are fundamentally framed as questions of economic welfare, public officials and the public itself will opt nearly every time for whatever policy promises more economic growth, more production, and more jobs. Moreover, in a world where human influence is as ancient as it is pervasive, it may be helpful to recognize that the natural environment where we live is less of an input than an output of economic activity. Ecological economics today, its ambitions greatly diminished, has reached senescence; it provides an academic assisted-living facility for "Great Chain of Being" ecology and cost-benefit economics. A hybrid discipline, ecological economics crosses closet creationism with market fetishism. When ecological economists dispute the relative importance of intrinsic vs. instrumental value, the hybrid reverts to type. The scientific and self-referential controversies in which ecological economists engage drain away the moral power that once sustained environmentalism. This moral power may return if environmentalists employ science not to prescribe goals to society but to help society to achieve goals it already has. Environmentalists may then shape the natural environment of the future rather than model and monetize the environment of the past. (Mark Sagoff)

Is Fashion a "disease of the mind"?

                                                                     

                                            Comments due by Nov. 25, 2018

Fashion revolves around the latest trends but is the industry behind the curve on the only trend that ultimately matters - the need to radically alter our patterns of consumption to ensure the survival of the planet.

The fashion industry produces 20 per cent of global wastewater and 10 per cent of global carbon emissions - more than all international flights and maritime shipping. Textile dyeing is the second largest polluter of water globally and it takes around 2,000 gallons of water to make a typical pair of jeans.

Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned. If nothing changes, by 2050 the fashion industry will use up a quarter of the world’s carbon budget. Washing clothes also releases half a million tonnes of microfibres into the ocean every year.Then there is the human cost: textile workers are often paid derisory wages and forced to work long hours in appalling conditions. But with consumers increasingly demanding change, the fashion world is finally responding with A-listers, like Duchess Meghan Markle, leading the way with their clothing choices and designers looking to break the take-make-waste model.

“Most fashion retailers now are doing something about sustainability and have some initiatives focused on reducing fashion’s negative impact on the environment,” says Patsy Perry, senior lecturer in fashion marketing at the University of Manchester. For example, last year, Britain’s Stella McCartney teamed up with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to launch a report on redesigning fashion’s future.“However, there is still a fundamental problem with the fast fashion business model where revenues are based on selling more products, and therefore retailers must constantly offer new collections. It would be unrealistic to expect consumers to stop shopping on a large scale, so going forward, I would expect to see more development and wider adoption of more sustainable production methods such as waterless dyeing, using waste as a raw material, and development of innovative solutions to the textile waste problem,” she says.

Pioneering solutions to address environmental challenges will be at the heart of the fourth UN Environment Assembly next March. The meeting’s motto is to think beyond prevailing patterns and live within sustainable limits—a message that will resonate with fashion designers and retailers seeking to reform their industry.At the March meeting, UN Environment will formally launch the UN Alliance on Sustainable Fashion to encourage the private sector, governments and non-governmental organizations to create an industry-wide push for action to reduce fashion’s negative social, economic and environmental impact and turn it into a driver for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Across the United Nations, agencies are working to make fashion more sustainable, from the Food and Agricultural Organization protecting arable land, to the Ethical Fashion Initiative set up by the International Trade Centre to the work of UN Environment in fostering sustainable manufacturing practices.

And some entrepreneurs are already designing the fashion of the future:

·         Spain’s Ecoalf creates shoes from algae and recycled plastic as part of its Upcycling the Oceans collection. Founded by Javier Goyeneche in 2012, Ecoalf collects ocean plastics from 33 ports and turns the trash into shoes, clothing and bags.

·         In Amsterdam, GumDrop collects gum and turns it into a new kind of rubber, Gum-tec, which is then used to make shoes in collaboration with marketing group I Amsterdam and fashion company Explicit. GumDrop says around 3.3 million pounds of gum end up on Amsterdam’s paths every year, costing millions of dollars to clean. It takes around 2.2 pounds of gum to make four pairs of sneakers.

·         Outdoor gear retailer Patagonia, based in California, has been producing fleece jackets using polyester from recycled bottles since 1993, working with Polartec, a Massachusetts-based textile designer. Patagonia also encourages shoppers to buy only what they need, and mends and recycles older items.

·         Gothenburg-based Nudie Jeans uses organic cotton for its jeans and offers free repairs for life. Customers also get a discount if they hand in their old jeans.

·         Cambodia-based Tonlé uses surplus fabric from mass clothing manufacturers to create zero-waste fashion collections. It uses more than 97 per cent of the material it receives and turns the rest into paper.  

·         In the Netherlands, Wintervacht turns blankets and curtains into coats and jackets. Designers Yoni van Oorsouw and Manon van Hoeckel find their raw materials in secondhand shops and sorting facilities where donations are processed. San Francisco- and Bali-based Indosole turns discarded tyres in Indonesia into shoes, sandals and flip-flops, while Swiss firm Freitag upcycles tarpaulins, seat belts and bicycle inner tubes to make their bags and backpacks.

·         In New York, Queen of Raw connects designers, architects and textile firms with dead stock of sustainable fabrics from factories, brands and retailers. Queen of Raw says more than US$120 billion worth of unused fabric sits in warehouses, waiting to be burned or buried.

·         Novel Supply, based in Canada, makes clothes from natural and organic fabrics and is developing a take-back programme to find alternative ways to use garments at the end of their life. For founder Kaya Dorey, winner of UN Environment’s Young Champion of the Earth award in 2017, the aim is to create a zero-waste, closed-loop fashion model.

·         Retailer H&M has a successful garment collection scheme and in October, lifestyle brand and jeans manufacturer Guess said it was teaming up with i:Collect, which collects, sorts and recycles clothes and footwear worldwide, to launch a wardrobe recycling programme in the US. Customers who bring in five or more items of clothing or shoes, will receive discounts. Wearable items will be recycled as secondhand goods, while unwearable items will be turned into new products like cleaning cloths or made into fibres for products like insulation.

Some argue that recycling is itself energy intensive and does not address our throwaway culture—the number of times a garment is worn has declined by 36 per cent in 15 years. An alternative might be found in a viable rental market for clothes. Pioneers in this field include Dutch firm Mud Jeans, which leases organic jeans that can be kept, swapped or returned, Rent the Runway, Girl Meets Dress and YCloset in China.

“The rental model is clearly a winner for the higher end of the market where consumers may have no intention of wearing an occasion dress more than once… but at the lower end, it’s all too easy to go online and be able to buy outright any trend or item,” says Perry. “For rental to be a success at this market level, companies need to offer sufficient choice of brands and styles that would engage consumers and tempt them away from outright purchase, and the rental service needs to be smooth and faultless.”

Her best fashion advice? Less is always more.

“Keep your clothing in use for longer to reduce its environmental footprint, as well as reducing the amount of new stuff you need to buy and the consequent use of resources. This also reduces the impact of the disposal of perfectly good but unwanted clothes.”

Economics of Fishing the High Seas

                                                       Comments due by Nov. 5, 2018

 The total fisheries catch from the high seas in 2014 was 4.4 million metric tons, with an aggregate revenue (landed value of the catch in US$) of $7.6 billion. Five countries alone accounted for 64% of the global high-seas fishing revenue: China (21%), Taiwan (13%), Japan (11%), South Korea (11%), and Spain (8%). High-seas catch by country and FAO region significantly and positively increased with rising fishing effort (R² = 0.46, P < 0.001) . Subtracting our estimated costs from the landed value of catch provides the first empirically based estimates of the net economic profit of fishing the high seas.

Globally, our estimates of high-seas fishing profits (without accounting for subsidies) ranged between −$364 million and +$1.4 billion . We estimated that governments subsidized high-seas fishing with $4.2 billion in 2014, far exceeding the net economic benefit of fishing in the high seas. This result suggests that without subsidies, high-seas fishing at the global scale that we currently witness would be unlikely (at the aggregate level), and that most of the negative returns accrue from China, Taiwan, and Russia . Coupling our estimates of profits with country-level subsidies suggests that subsidy-distorted high-seas profits range between $3.8 billion and $5.6 billion.

We conducted these calculations spatially, revealing that, even with subsidies and our lowest estimate of labor costs, 19% of the currently fished high seas cannot be exploited profitably at current rates . Assuming higher labor costs, and the fact that companies still receive subsidies, the area of unprofitability jumps from 19 to 30%. Finally, without subsidies and low wages to labor, the area of unprofitability shoots to 54%, implying that without subsidies and/or low labor compensation, more than half of the currently fished high-seas fishing grounds would be unprofitable at present exploitation rates.

The countries that provided the largest subsidies to their high-seas fishing fleets are Japan (20% of the global subsidies) and Spain (14%), followed by China, South Korea, and the United States . It is remarkable that in these cases, the subsidies far exceed fishing profits, with the extreme being Japan, where subsidies represent more than four times our estimate of their high-seas profits. For 17 countries, contributing 53% of the total high-seas catch, current extraction rates would not be profitable without government subsidies . Among these countries, China and Taiwan alone account for 47% of the total high-seas catch, which is significant. Whether subsidies enable profitability or not, the magnitude of subsidies and the fact that many of these subsidies lower the marginal cost of fishing suggest that high-seas fishing activity could be markedly altered in their absence.

Targeting mainly large mobile, high-value fishes such as tuna and sharks, are the most profitable high-seas fisheries . All other fisheries are either barely profitable or unprofitable. We estimate that deep-sea bottom trawling would not be globally profitable at current rates without government subsidies, with maximum annual losses of $230 million before subsidies. Similarly, squid jiggers would be, on average, very unprofitable without subsidies, with maximum annual losses estimated at $345 million.

By and large, fishing the high seas is artificially propped up by an estimated $4.2 billion in government subsidies (more than twice the value of the most optimistic estimate of economic profit before subsidies are taken into account). The economic benefits vary enormously between fisheries, countries, and distance from port. On aggregate, current high-seas fishing by vessels from China, Taiwan, and Russia would not be profitable without subsidies. This is globally significant since these three countries alone account for 51% of the total high-seas catch. Other countries exhibit annual profits ranging from negligible to $250 million, which were increased substantially by subsidies (for example, Japan, Korea, Spain, and the United States). Surface fisheries for pelagic species such as tuna were profitable, whereas most other fisheries barely broke even, and squid jigging (mostly concerning Chinese and Taiwanese fleets) and deep-sea bottom trawling were generally unprofitable without subsidies. Some national fisheries in specific regions were unprofitable even after government subsidies are taken into account.

Overall, we conjecture that fishing the high seas could become rational for the most unprofitable fisheries due to a combination of factors including the following:

(i)            currently available catch data continue to underrepresent real catches,

(ii)          vessels fish only part of the time in the high seas and make most of the economic benefit from fishing in EEZs,

(iii)         government subsidies not accounted for in this analysis,

(iv)         reduced costs because of unfair wages or forced labor, and

(v)          reduced costs because of transshipment at sea.

 There may be additional market factors that are fishery-specific, that is, squid fishing by Chinese vessels in South America. Our results suggest that this fishery is unprofitable, but over 100 Chinese squid jiggers amass in January at the limit of Argentina’s EEZ to catch small Illex squid, before Argentina opens the season inside its EEZ. The low stock size and high demand for squid may allow Chinese companies fishing early in the season to charge higher prices. To these factors, we could add geostrategic reasons, where countries may fish in some regions as part of their long-term foreign policy strategy, regardless of the economic benefit. Examples of this strategy have been documented for Chinese and Russian fleets fishing in Antarctica. (Science Advances June, 2018)

A Conversation with Nordhaus, the first Nobel for work in Environmental Economics.

                                                         Comments due by  Oct. 29  , 2018

 William D. Nordhaus, the Yale economist who shared the Nobel in economic science this week, has pointed words for some of the experiments so far with his theories on taxing polluters to fight climate change.

“It was a catastrophic failure in the European Union,” he said just days after not only being awarded the Nobel, but also seeing his life’s work embraced in a landmark United Nations assessment of the global threat of climate change. That document, approved by more than 180 nations, described Professor Nordhaus’s ideas as essential for slowing the carbon dioxide emissions that are rapidly warming the atmosphere.

But in other places around the world — notably, parts of Canada and South Korea — politicians have adapted the idea in ways that not only show signs of working, but that also reframe it not as a tax, but as a financial windfall for taxpayers. Other governments, including China and some individual states in the United States, are also testing different ways to force companies to pay to pollute.

In short, the world is becoming a laboratory for theories that Professor Nordhaus developed decades ago, when global warming was an abstract future threat. By contrast, this week’s United Nations report amounts to a stark warning of immediate risk.

The report, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that if greenhouse gas emissions continued unabated, the atmosphere would warm up to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, by 2040, leading to irrevocable damage including severe food shortages, coastal inundations and the displacement of tens of millions of people as soon as 2040. If the planet keeps warming to 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the effects could include devastating floods and droughts and the permanent loss of the world’s coral reefs.

The Nobel, which Professor Nordhaus shared with the New York University economist Paul M. Romer, was widely perceived as a rebuke to President Trump, who has called climate change a hoax and sought to roll back the United States’ existing climate change policies. It is also seen as a broader challenge to powerful Republican political voices in the United States, among them the libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch and the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who have attacked lawmakers who support a carbon tax, making it among the most volatile ideas in American politics.

On Wednesday, Professor Nordhaus discussed his carbon pricing theories and the political landscape. The exchanges have been edited and trimmed.

Why is carbon pricing seen as political poison in the United States?

It’s been caught up in the politics, and it just happens that this particular policy is one that has faced the wrath of a whole group of thinkers. Grover Norquist, energy companies, it’s the Koch brothers and their foundations, it’s people using fair tactics and foul tactics — it’s been caught up as one of the issues in the Great Divide.

This anti-tax movement has been so powerful and so harmful in the United States. There have been a large number of conservative economists in the United States who have endorsed the idea of a carbon tax.

Where has carbon pricing been successful? Where has it failed?

We learned with the European Union that once you go beyond the simple, idealized version of carbon prices and into implementation, it’s a very different thing. One of the things we found out: One of the problems with cap and trade [a system in which governments place a cap on countries’ carbon-dioxide pollution and companies then pay for, and trade, credits that permit them to pollute] is that it is dependent on predicting what future emissions will be. But if those projections are wrong, the system fails.

With the E.U., their projected carbon emissions were high, but the actual carbon emissions were low, and the carbon price fell drastically, from $30 to $40 per ton down to single digits. So the price was so low it did not have an effect in lowering emissions. It was flawed design. If the models had predicted too few emissions, and the price had gone to $1,000 per ton we would have had a different problem.The carbon tax has different problems, but not this one. The price of carbon is independent of the amount of emissions.

When I talk to people about how to design a carbon price, I think the model is British Columbia. You raise electricity prices by $100 a year, but then the government gives back a dividend that lowers internet prices by $100 year. In real terms, you’re raising the price of carbon goods but lowering the prices of non-carbon-intensive goods.

That’s the model of how something like this might work. It would have the right economic effects but politically not be so toxic. The one in British Columbia is not only well designed but has been politically successful.

What went wrong when President Obama tried to implement a carbon price in 2009?

I did not talk to Obama about this directly, but I spoke with many of his advisers over the years. One of my very, very few disappointments in Obama when he was president is that he did not come out in favor of carbon tax. I’m sure he did the political calculus on this. He should have come out and talked not just about climate change and its dangers but how to use a carbon tax to fix it. He was a great speaker a great educator but this is one where he let us down.

How do you think a carbon tax could get bipartisan support? Things change over the long run. What is toxic or opposed in one generation gradually becomes accepted in the next. Social security took a long time. It was opposed for many, many decades but since Reagan is has been widely accepted.

On carbon taxes, people’s views have changed from being very hostile, to conservative economists embracing this, to the I.P.C.C. saying, this is the approach. I have to be hopeful that, if we continue to work on this, the public will get there on the science, and make an exception to the toxicity of taxes. It will help if it’s tied to something popular — if, as a result of the revenue from a carbon tax, you get a check in the mail, or it funds health care.

In terms of implementation, it’s not much more difficult to implement than a gasoline tax. Gasoline taxes are very easy to implement.

But gasoline taxes are also politically toxic. Only in this country! In other countries, people are grown-up, and they can live with taxes. The problem is political, rather than one of economics or feasibility. It’s because it’s used as a weapon. At some point, I’m hopeful that grown-ups will take over and we will do what is necessary. I hope so. If we don’t, then things will just get worse and worse.

Give up meat and dairy : the best thing you can do to help the planet.

                                                Comments due by Oct 21, 2018

Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet.

The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife.

The new analysis shows that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Other recent research shows 86% of all land mammals are now livestock or humans. The scientists also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.

The study, published in the journal Science, created a huge dataset based on almost 40,000 farms in 119 countries and covering 40 food products that represent 90% of all that is eaten. It assessed the full impact of these foods, from farm to fork, on land use, climate change emissions, freshwater use and water pollution (eutrophication) and air pollution (acidification).

“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” said Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions.“Agriculture is a sector that spans all the multitude of environmental problems,” he said. “Really it is animal products that are responsible for so much of this. Avoiding consumption of animal products delivers far better environmental benefits than trying to purchase sustainable meat and dairy.”

The analysis also revealed a huge variability between different ways of producing the same food. For example, beef cattle raised on deforested land result in 12 times more greenhouse gases and use 50 times more land than those grazing rich natural pasture. But the comparison of beef with plant protein such as peas is stark, with even the lowest impact beef responsible for six times more greenhouse gases and 36 times more land.

The large variability in environmental impact from different farms does present an opportunity for reducing the harm, Poore said, without needing the global population to become vegan. If the most harmful half of meat and dairy production was replaced by plant-based food, this still delivers about two-thirds of the benefits of getting rid of all meat and dairy production.

Cutting the environmental impact of farming is not easy, Poore warned: “There are over 570m farms all of which need slightly different ways to reduce their impact. It is an [environmental] challenge like no other sector of the economy.” But he said at least $500bn is spent every year on agricultural subsidies, and probably much more: “There is a lot of money there to do something really good with.”

Labels that reveal the impact of products would be a good start, so consumers could choose the least damaging options, he said, but subsidies for sustainable and healthy foods and taxes on meat and dairy will probably also be necessary.

One surprise from the work was the large impact of freshwater fish farming, which provides two-thirds of such fish in Asia and 96% in Europe, and was thought to be relatively environmentally friendly. “You get all these fish depositing excreta and unconsumed feed down to the bottom of the pond, where there is barely any oxygen, making it the perfect environment for methane production,” a potent greenhouse gas, Poore said.

The research also found grass-fed beef, thought to be relatively low impact, was still responsible for much higher impacts than plant-based food. “Converting grass into [meat] is like converting coal to energy. It comes with an immense cost in emissions,” Poore said.

The new research has received strong praise from other food experts. Prof Gidon Eshel, at Bard College, US, said: “I was awestruck. It is really important, sound, ambitious, revealing and beautifully done.”

He said previous work on quantifying farming’s impacts, including his own, had taken a top-down approach using national level data, but the new work used a bottom-up approach, with farm-by-farm data. “It is very reassuring to see they yieldessentially the same results. But the new work has very many important details that are profoundly revealing.”

Prof Tim Benton, at the University of Leeds, UK, said: “This is an immensely useful study. It brings together a huge amount of data and that makes its conclusions much more robust. The way we produce food, consume and waste food is unsustainable from a planetary perspective. Given the global obesity crisis, changing diets – eating less livestock produce and more vegetables and fruit – has the potential to make both us and the planet healthier.”

Dr Peter Alexander, at the University of Edinburgh, UK, was also impressed but noted: “There may be environmental benefits, eg for biodiversity, from sustainably managed grazing and increasing animal product consumption may improve nutrition for some of the poorest globally. My personal opinion is we should interpret these results not as the need to become vegan overnight, but rather to moderate our [meat] consumption.”

Poore said: “The reason I started this project was to understand if there were sustainable animal producers out there. But I have stopped consuming animal products over the last four years of this project. These impacts are not necessary to sustain our current way of life. The question is how much can we reduce them and the answer is a lot.” (CNBC Oct. 9, 2018)

Greenhouse gases Must be Scrubbed.

                                                     Comments due by Oct. 14, 2018

SWEDEN’S parliament passed a law in June which obliges the country to have “no net emissions” of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2045. The clue is in the wording. This does not mean that three decades from now Swedes must emit no planet-heating substances; even if all their electricity came from renewables and they only drove Teslas, they would presumably still want to fly in aeroplanes, or use cement and fertiliser, the making of which releases plenty of carbon dioxide. Indeed, the law only requires gross emissions to drop by 85% compared with 1990 levels. But it demands that remaining carbon sources are offset with new carbon sinks. In other words greenhouse gases will need to be extracted from the air.

Sweden’s pledge is among the world’s most ambitious. But if the global temperature is to have a good chance of not rising more than 2ºC above its pre-industrial level, as stipulated in the Paris climate agreement of 2015, worldwide emissions must similarly hit “net zero” no later than 2090. After that, emissions must go “net negative”, with more carbon removed from the stock than is emitted.

This is because what matters to the climate is the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. To keep the temperature below a certain level means keeping within a certain “carbon budget”—allowing only so much to accumulate, and no more. Once you have spent that budget, you have to balance all new emissions with removals. If you overspend it, the fact that the world takes time to warm up means you have a brief opportunity to put things right by taking out more than you are putting in.

Being able to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is, therefore, a crucial element in meeting climate targets. Of the 116 models the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) looks at to chart the economically optimal paths to the Paris goal, 101 assume “negative emissions”. No scenarios are at all likely to keep warming under 1.5ºC without greenhouse-gas removal. “It is built into the assumptions of the Paris agreement,” says Gideon Henderson of Oxford University.

Climate scientists like Mr Henderson have been discussing negative-emissions technologies (NETs) with economists and policy wonks since the 1990s. Their debate has turned livelier since the Paris agreement, the phrasing of which strongly suggests that countries will need to invent new sinks as well as cutting emissions. But so far politicians have largely ignored the issue, preferring to focus on curbing current flows of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. NETs were conspicuous by their absence from the agenda of the annual UN climate jamboree which ended in Bonn on November 17th.

In the short term this makes sense. The marginal cost of reducing emissions is currently far lower than the marginal cost of taking carbon dioxide straight from the atmosphere. But climate is not a short-term game. And in the long term, ignoring the need for negative emissions is complacent at best. The eventual undertaking, after all, will be gargantuan. The median IPCC model assumes sucking up a total of 810bn tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2100, equivalent to roughly 20 years of global emissions at the current rate. To have any hope of doing so, preparations for large-scale extraction ought to begin in the 2020s.

Modellers favour NETs that use plants because they are a tried and true technology. Reforesting logged areas or “afforesting” previously treeless ones presents no great technical challenges. More controversially, they also tend to invoke “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage” (BECCS). In BECCS, power stations fuelled by crops that can be burned to make energy have their carbon-dioxide emissions injected into deep geological strata, rather than released into the atmosphere.

The technology for doing the CCS part of BECCS has been around for a while; some scenarios for future energy generation rely heavily on it. But so far there are only 17 CCS programmes big enough to dispose of around 1m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. Promoting CCS is an uphill struggle, mainly because it doubles the cost of energy from the dirty power plants whose flues it scrubs. Other forms of low-emission electricity are much cheaper. Affixed to bioenergy generation, though, CCS does something that other forms of generation cannot. The carbon which the plants that serve as fuel originally took from the atmosphere above is sent into the rocks below, making it a negative emitter.

The problem with afforestation and BECCS is that the plants involved need a huge amount of land. The area estimated ranges from 3.2m square kilometres (roughly the size of India) to as much as 9.7m square kilometres (roughly the size of Canada). That is the equivalent of between 23% and 68% of the world’s arable land. It may be that future agricultural yields can be increased so dramatically that, even in a world with at least 2bn more mouths to feed, the area of its farms could be halved, and that the farmers involved might be happy with this turn of events. But it seems highly unlikely—and blithely assuming it can be done is plainly reckless.

Negative thinking

Less land-intensive alternatives exist—at least on paper. Some are low tech, like stimulating the soil to store more carbon by limiting or halting deep-ploughing. Others are less so, such as contraptions to seize carbon dioxide directly from the air, or methods that accelerate the natural weathering processes by which minerals in the Earth’s crust bind atmospheric carbon over aeons or that introduce alkaline compounds into the sea to make it absorb more carbon dioxide.

According to Jennifer Wilcox of the Colorado School of Mines, and her colleagues, the technology with the second-highest theoretical potential, after BECCS, is direct air capture (see chart 2). This uses CCS-like technology on the open air, rather than on exhaust gases. The problem is that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air, while very high by historical standards, is very low by chemical-engineering ones: just 0.04%, as opposed to the 10% or more offered by power-plant chimneys and industrial processes such as cement-making.

The technologies that exist today, under development by companies such as Global Thermostat in America, Carbon Engineering in Canada or Climeworks of Switzerland, remain pricey. In 2011 a review by the American Physical Society to which Ms Wilcox contributed put extraction costs above $600 per tonne, compared with an average estimate of $60-250 for BECCS.

Enhanced weathering is at an even earlier stage of development and costs are still harder to assess. Estimates range from $25 per tonne of carbon dioxide to $600. On average, 2-4 tonnes of silicate minerals (olivine, sometimes used in Finnish saunas because it withstands repeated heating and cooling, is a favourite) are needed for every tonne removed. To extract 5bn tonnes of carbon dioxide a year may require up to 20bn tonnes of minerals that must be ground into fine dust. Grinding is energy-intensive. Distributing the powder evenly, on land or sea, would be a logistical challenge to put it mildly.

Ideas abound on a small scale, in labs or in researchers’ heads, but the bigger mechanical schemes in existence today capture a paltry 40m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. Most involve CCS and have prevented more carbon dioxide escaping into the atmosphere from fossil-burning power plants, rather than removing it. Removing 8bn-10bn tonnes by 2050, as the more sanguine scenarios envisage, let alone the 35bn-40bn tonnes in more pessimistic ones, will be a vast undertaking.

Progress will be needed on many fronts. All the more reason to test lots of technologies. For the time being even researchers with a horse in the race are unwilling to bet on a winner. Pete Smith of Aberdeen University speaks for many NETs experts when he says that “none is a silver bullet, and none has a fatal flaw.”

It will also not come cheap. WITCH, constructed by Massimo Tavoni of Politecnico di Milano, is a model which analyses climate scenarios. Unlike most simulations, it also estimates how much research-and-development funding is necessary to achieve roll-out at the sort of scale these models forecast. For all low-carbon technologies, it puts the figure at $65bn a year until 2050, four times the sum that renewables, batteries and the like attract today. Mr Tavoni says a chunk of that would obviously need to go to NETs, which currently get next to nothing.

Even the less speculative technologies need investment right away. Trees take decades to reach their carbon-sucking potential, so large-scale planting needs to start soon, notes Tim Searchinger of Princeton University. Direct air capture in particular looks expensive. Boosters note that a few years ago so did renewables. Before technological progress brought prices down, many countries subsidised renewable-energy sources to the tune of $500 per tonne of carbon dioxide avoided and often spent huge sums on it. Christoph Gebald, co-founder of Climeworks, says that “the first data point on our technological learning curve” is $600, at the lower end of previous estimates. But like the price of solar panels, he expects his costs to drop in the coming years, perhaps to as low as $100 per tonne.

However, the falling price of solar panels was a result of surging production volumes, which NETs will struggle to replicate. As Oliver Geden of the German Institute of International and Security Affairs observes, “You cannot tell the green-growth story with negative emissions.” A market exists for rooftop solar panels and electric vehicles; one for removing an invisible gas from the air to avert disaster decades from now does not.

Much of the gas captured by Climeworks and other pure NETs firms (as opposed to fossil-fuel CCS) is sold to makers of fizzy drinks or greenhouses to help plants grow. It is hard to imagine that market growing far beyond today’s total of 10m tonnes. And in neither case is the gas stored indefinitely. It is either burped out by consumers of carbonated drinks or otherwise exuded by eaters of greenhouse-grown produce.

There may be other markets, though. It is very hard to imagine aircraft operating without liquid fuels. One way to provide them would be to create them chemically using carbon dioxide taken from the atmosphere. It is conceivable that this might be cheaper than alternatives, such as biofuels—especially if the full environmental impact of the biofuels is accounted for. The demand for direct air capture spurred by such a market might drive its costs low enough to make it a more plausible NET.

From thin air

One way to create a market for NETs would be for governments to put a price on carbon. Where they have done so, the technologies have been adopted. Take Norway, which in 1991 told oil firms drilling in the North Sea to capture carbon dioxide from their operations or pay up. This cost is now around $50 per tonne emitted; in one field, called Sleipner, the firms have found ways to pump it back underground for less than that. A broader carbon price—either a tax or tradable emissions permits—would promote negative emissions elsewhere, too.

Then there is the issue of who should foot the bill. Many high-impact negative-emissions schemes make most sense in low-emitting countries, says Ms Wilcox. Brazil could in theory reforest the cerrado (though that would face resistance because of the region’s role in growing soyabeans and beef). Countries of sub-Saharan Africa could do the same in their own tropical savannahs. Spreading olivine in the Amazon and Congo river basins could soak up 2bn tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Developing countries would be understandably loth to bankroll any of this to tackle cumulative emissions, most of which come from the rich world. The latter would doubtless recoil at footing the bill, preferring to concentrate on curbing current emissions in the mistaken belief that once these reach zero, the job is done.

Whether NETs deserve to be lumped in with more outlandish “geoengineering” proposals, such as cooling the Earth with sunlight-reflecting sulphur particles in the stratosphere, is much debated. What they have in common is that they offer ways to deal with the effects of emissions that have already taken place. Proponents of small-scale, low-impact NETs, such as changes to soil management on farms, though, bridle at being considered alongside what they see as high-tech hubris of the most disturbing kind. NETs certainly inspire fewer fears of catastrophic, planetary-scale side-effects than “solar radiation management”.

But they do stoke some when it comes to the consequences of tinkering with the ocean’s alkalinity or injecting large amounts of gas underground. And the direct effects of large-scale BECCS or afforestation projects would be huge. If they don’t take up arable land, they need to take up pasture or wilderness. Either option would be a big deal in terms of both human amenity and biodiversity.

Another concern is the impact on politicians and the dangers of moral hazard. NETs allow politicians to go easy on emission cuts now in the hope that a quick fix will appear in the future. This could prove costly if the technology works—and costlier still if it does not. One study found that following a 2°C mitigation path which takes for granted NETs that fail to materialise would leave the world closer to 3°C warmer. Mr Geden is not alone in fearing that models that increasingly rely on NETs are “a cover for political inaction”.

Everything and the carbon sink

There is some progress. Academics are paying more attention. This year’s edition of “Emissions Gap”, an influential annual report from the UN Environment Programme, devotes a chapter to carbon-dioxide removal. Mr Henderson is leading a study of the subject for Britain’s Royal Society; America’s National Academy of Sciences has commissioned one, too. Both are due next spring. The IPCC will look at the technology in its special report on the 1.5ºC target, due next autumn.

There’s some money, too. Carbon Engineering has attracted backers such as Bill Gates, and now has a pilot plant in Canada. Climeworks has actually sold some carbon-offset credits—to a private investor and a big corporation—on the basis of the carbon dioxide it has squirrelled away at a demonstration plant it recently launched in Iceland. Earlier this year Britain’s government became the first to set aside some cash specifically for NETs research. In October America’s Department of Energy announced a series of grants for “novel and enabling” carbon-capture technologies, some of which could help in the development of schemes for direct air capture. Richard Branson, a British tycoon, has offered $25m to whoever first comes up with a “commercially viable design” that would remove 1bn tonnes of greenhouse gases a year for ten years.

All this is welcome, but not enough. The sums involved are trifling: £8.6m ($11.3m) in Britain and $26m from the Department of Energy. The offset sold by Climeworks was for just 100 tonnes. Mr Branson’s prize has gone unclaimed for a decade.

A carbon price—which is a good idea for other reasons, too, would beef up interest in NETs. But one high enough to encourage pricey moonshots may prove too onerous for the rest of the economy. Any price would promote more established low-carbon technologies first and NETs only much later, thinks Glen Peters of the Centre for International Climate Research in Oslo.

Encouraging CCS for fossil fuels as a stepping stone to NETs appeals to some. The fossil-fuel industry says it is committed to the technology. Total, a French oil giant, has promised to spend a tenth of its $600m research budget on CCS and related technologies. A group of oil majors says it will spend up to $500m on similar projects between now and 2027. But the field’s slow progress to date hardly encourages optimism. Governments’ commitment to CCS has historically proved fickle.

Last year Britain abruptly scrapped a £1bn public grant for an industrial-scale CCS plant which would have helped fine-tune the technology. For this to change, politicians must expand the focus of the 23-year-old UN Framework Convention on Climate Change from cutting emissions of greenhouse gases to controlling their airborne concentrations, suggests Janos Pasztor, a former climate adviser to the UN secretary-general. In other words, they must think about stocks of carbon dioxide, not just flows.

This is all the more true because emissions continue to elude control. After three years of more or less stable emissions, a zippier world economy looks on track to belch 2% more carbon dioxide this year. That amounts once again to borrowing more of the planet’s remaining carbon budget against future removal. It doesn’t take a numerate modeller like Mr Tavoni to grasp that, in his words, “If you create a debt, you must repay it.” The price of default does not bear thinking about. (Economist Nov. 2017)