This may sound a little strange, but when I think about my teenage years, I sometimes associate them with the faint smell of sewage.
You see, when I was in high school, my family lived on the south shore of Long Island, where few homes had sewer connections. Most had septic tanks, and there always seemed to be an overflowing tank somewhere upwind.
Most of Nassau County eventually got it sewered. But many American homes, especially in the Southeast, are not connected to sewers, and more and more septic tanks are overflowing, on a scale far greater than what I remember from my vaguely smelly hometown—which is both disgusting and a threat for public health. Public health.
Cause? Climate change. Along the Gulf and South Atlantic Coasts, The Washington Post reported last week, “sea levels have risen at least six inches since 2010.” This may not sound like much, but it leads to rising groundwater and increased risks of overflowing tanks.
The emerging sewage crisis is just one of many disasters we can expect as the planet continues to warm, and it's nowhere near the top of the list. But it seems to me to be a particularly graphic illustration of two points. First, the damage from climate change will likely be more severe than even pessimists tend to believe. Second, mitigation and adaptation – which will be necessary because we are still headed for major impacts from climate change even if we take immediate action to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions – are likely to be much more difficult from a political perspective. , than it should be.
On the first point, estimating the costs of climate change and, relatedly, the costs polluters impose every time they emit another ton of carbon dioxide, requires bringing together results from two disciplines. On the one hand, we need physical scientists to figure out how much greenhouse gas emissions will warm the planet, how this will change weather patterns, and so on. On the other hand, we need economists to estimate how these physical changes will affect productivity, health care costs, and more.
Actually, there is a third dimension: social and geopolitical risk. For example, how do we deal with millions or tens of millions of climate refugees? But I don't think anyone knows how to quantify those risks.
Regardless, the physical side of this endeavor looks very solid. There has, of course, been a decades-long campaign aimed at discrediting climate research and, in some cases, discrediting climate change. individual climate scientists. But when you step away from the smears, you realize that climatology has been one of history's greatest analytical triumphs. Climate scientists correctly predicted decades in advance that one unprecedented increase at global temperatures. They even seem to have gained size more or less right.
The economics of the effort look weaker. That's not because economists haven't tried. In 2018 indeed William Nordhaus received a Nobel Prize largely for his work on “integrated assessment models” that attempt to bring together climate science and economic analysis.
But with all due respect, Nordhaus happened to be one too my first mentor in economics! — I have long been concerned that these models underestimate the economic costs of climate change, because so many things can go wrong that you didn't think about. The prospect of part of America being flooded with sewage was certainly not on my list.
Recent research shows that there is a trend mark up estimates of damage from climate change. The uncertainty remains high, but it is a good guess that the situation will be even worse than you thought.
So what are we going to do about it? Even if we take drastic steps to reduce emissions now, many of the consequences of past emissions will be far greater sea level rise than we have seen so far are already ingrained, so to speak. So we'll need to take a wide range of steps to limit the damage – including expanding sewer systems to stem the rising tide of, um,. sludge.
But will we take those steps? Climate denial was originally just about fossil fuel interests, and to some extent that is still the case. But it has also become a front in the culture warwith politicians like Ron DeSantis of Florida – who happens to be the governor of one of the states at greatest immediate risk – apparently deciding that even called climate change is awake.
Now imagine the clash between that kind of politics and the urgent need for substantial government spending, on everything from seawalls to sewers, to limit climate damage. Spending on that scale will almost certainly require new tax revenue. How quickly do you think right-wing culture warriors will agree to that?
So I am very concerned about the future of the climate. We probably won't do enough to limit emissions; President Biden has done far more than any of his predecessors, but it is still not enough, and Donald Trump has done so too promised oil executives that if he wins, he will reverse much of what Biden has done. Furthermore, we probably won't do enough to limit the damage.
In short, it is not difficult to see some dire consequences in the not-too-distant future, even before a full-blown global catastrophe occurs. Bad things are coming, and we're already starting to smell it.