One Equation to Make You Rethink the Climate Crisis
Exploring the elements that argue for progress, not disaster.
A cursory look at the IPCC’s most recent climate assessment, its reception, and subsequent reporting doesn’t paint a very hopeful picture: “Climate Crimes of Humanity: Guilty as Hell” spurns The Guardian; “Climate Change Is a ‘Hammer Hitting Us on the Head’” groans The New York Times; and “code red for humanity” alarms the secretary-general of the UN. The message—unlike our future—is clear: the world is warming, risk is rising, fossil fuels are to blame, and the only solution is to curb all emissions immediately. What more is there to say?
Many will say nothing. (“The debate is over; the time for action is now!”) But there is one minor complication that might, after all, warrant further discourse: two of the four assertions outlined above are false.
While it is true that global warming is real and that man-made energy emissions are the prominent cause, the conclusions that climate risks are on the rise and that the optimal mitigation strategy is radical energy transfer are far from established. In truth, one could do worse than to embrace their immediate inversions: climate risk is falling and fossil fuels are to thank.
This may come as a shock, even an outrage, to those convinced of impending climate catastrophe. To question the overwhelming consensus amongst experts and policy makers is to court both pseudoscience and populism. To argue for fossil fuels is to weather allegations of corruption and outright wickedness.
But these are mistakes. There is no grand conspiracy and those who defy the prevailing narrative are no heretics. The conventional wisdom is simply flawed: mainstream climate discourse is fixated on climate hazards—heat and hurricanes, floods and forest fires—to the detriment of a truly balanced perception of climate risks.
For example: if you had to guess, by how much have natural disaster mortality rates increased over the past century? 10 percent? 50? Or maybe that’s far too optimistic. Perhaps they’ve doubled. A 100 percent increase in climate-related deaths in the same number of years. After all, man-made climate change has been operating for going on two centuries, and hazards have risen proportionally in that time. Right?
If you guessed 100 percent—congratulations! You were close. The true figure hovers around 95 percent… in the opposite direction. In reality, disaster related deaths have actually fallen by a factor of 20 since 1920. A 95 percent decrease in climate mortality over the past century alone.
With the benefit of hindsight, this looks prosaic: of course conditions are better than 100 years prior. We have advanced our medication, sanitation, and irrigation beyond all historical belief. But such parameters are rarely appreciated when considering climate strategies looking forward today. The analysis ends with despondency and not long after “panic!”
I contend that a completed risk profile for the effects of climate change, acting to inform a comprehensive strategy for mitigating climate dangers, requires more than empty prophetics and scare campaigns. It requires a developed understanding of not only the elements of climate, but also of economics, engineering, energy and tech. Of risk, yes, but also its management. Of environmental—but also human—action. (What philosopher and energy analyst Alex Epstein calls “climate mastery”.) And I conjecture that once all these components are broadly understood alongside the dangers, the crisis averts itself. The portrait begins to brighten to reveal a truly hopeful vision of the future ahead.
The Risk Equation
There are three non-hazard features of risk we should consider when analysing climate change. Researchers have conceptualised these into one simple equation.
As displayed above, risk is a function of four components. They are as follows.
Hazard—The dangers. Not to be confused with risk itself, hazards are the physical phenomena or mechanisms that act to damage or harm. In the context of climate change, these include primary hazards like heat and air pollutants, which in turn foster a cascade of secondary hazards including rising sea levels, desertification, acidification, deforestation; cyclones and anticyclones; droughts and downpours; even volcanism. They are the things we are told to fear: the geophysical horseman of the coming apocalypse.
Exposure—Everything we value. Exposure is the measure of all the people and property available to be harmed or destroyed by any given hazard. This includes cities, houses and buses; industries and infrastructures; friends and neighbours; families and—if particularly unfortunate—oneself. It is a measure of what is at risk at any given moment. What we stand to lose.
Vulnerability—Weakness to hazards. Vulnerability is the degree to which a thing is susceptible to harm or damage by any particular hazard. We can think about this as a proportion of the maximum exposure: if everything available to be destroyed by a hazard is in actuality destroyed (if the ratio of exposure to destruction equals one), it can be said that that thing has maximum vulnerability to that hazard. If nothing is damaged or destroyed (if the ratio equals zero), it has zero vulnerability. Following this conception, we can say that any area lying beneath a large and unexpected meteor strike has maximum vulnerability—because everything will be obliterated. And by the same logic we can conclude that the immediate desk space lying in front of me (as well as the book shelves behind it, my cat sitting atop them, and myself typing this now) have effectively zero vulnerability to the light drizzle tapping at my window. We, unlike the dinosaurs long before us, are totally safe from such violent projectiles.
Resilience—Revivability. Not to be mistaken for a simple lack of vulnerability, resilience is the ability of a system to return to original conditions or better. It is a response to inflicted damage from hazards, and thus requires a degree of susceptibility to that hazard in the outset. Following this, a system might only have a degree of resilience if it first has some vulnerability: if nothing is destroyed in the first place, there is nothing to rebuild. A simple example of high vulnerability paired with high resilience is a building burning down in a fire whose insurance policy covers the cost of repairs. The flames are destructive, but the process of renewal is both cheap and effective, rendering them non-fatal. The hazard remains, but the risk is reduced.
Finally, risk itself.
Risk—Harmful problems. Risk is the likelihood of harm or damage occurring. The magnitude of any particular risk is a function of the above elements: increasing with increases in hazard, exposure and vulnerability; and decreasing with greater resilience. If any of the positive variables are reduced to zero—if there is no hazard to begin with, if there is nothing of worth to destroy, or if the hazard itself poses no danger—the risk is also zero. And if resilience is sufficiently high, the possibility of harm is similarly reduced.
Paved With Good Intentions
The question becomes clear: how best do we balance the above equation to minimise risk? There are broadly four options:
Neutralise hazard
Minimise exposure
Reduce vulnerability
Build resilience
At the moment, the vast majority of climate strategy, spearheaded by the UN and its multinational Paris Agreement, turns on option 1.: neutralising hazard by means of cutting emissions. It also lends itself to minimising exposure through economic deceleration and eventual degrowth, as summarised in the IPCC’s “Shared Socioeconomic Pathways” scenario 1:
(SSP1) Sustainability—Taking the Green Road
“The world shifts toward a more sustainable path. Management of the global commons slowly improves, educational and health investments accelerate. Consumption is oriented toward low material growth and lower resource and energy intensity.”
This proposed strategy might look something like this:
Granted, this scenario does also imply gradual reduction of vulnerability and greater resilience in the form of minor social investments. But the focus is clearly placed on low-emission, low-intensity energy technologies and low material consumption. On a low-warming (hazard), low-capital (exposure) future society. This has percolated far enough into the popular psyche for many people (especially in the West) to alter their diets, switch their bank accounts—even forgo children in the name of a reduced footprint. The world appears increasingly convinced that a smaller, gentler future is the one worth pursuing.
But the Green Road scenario highlights a central flaw lying at the heart of all degrowth narratives. There exists an inescapable trade-off at the centre of low-hazard, low-exposure climate strategies: between limiting emissions and challenging poverty.
The trouble with the risk equation is that none of the variables, while conceptually distinct, stand alone in reality. Strategies to affect one will invariably affect another, or many. This is true in the case of the Green Road narrative.
The Paris Agreement has inspired a slurry of net-zero pledges by nations and companies all across the world, transitioning from as much as 80 percent fossil fuel consumption to low-emission practices by as soon as 2030. This is only feasible thanks to the considerable wealth created in the West over the past 200 years; wealth afforded to us in large part by the plentiful, reliable and affordable energy supplied by coal and other hydrocarbons, propelling us throughout the Industrial Revolution and acting to confer a measure of financial resilience to the costs of innovating, implementing and subsidising a multitude of experimental energy alternatives today. But we are the exception.
Poorer, developing nations have been put under similar pressures by the UN to transfer towards low-emission energy programs. Whereas unlike their more affluent neighbours, these nations do not have the resources to waste. Their inhabitants do not have the luxury of reliable energy as a standard, and denying them the opportunity to create it for themselves is nothing short of fatal. Over a billion people burn wood and faeces as their primary source of energy, resulting in 3.5 million premature deaths every year from the resulting noxious gases. (This makes indoor home pollution the largest environmental hazard in the modern world—a direct result of energy poverty.) A further three billion use less electricity per year than an average American refrigerator.
So, what is the alternative? At the moment, most if not all low-emission energy sources are sub-optimal relative to fossil fuels: wind and solar are unreliable; hydroelectric and geothermal are region-specific; nuclear is perhaps the most promising for wealthy areas but too costly for developing nations. By demanding net-zero immediately and without a viable energy alternative, we deny literally billions of people cheap and plentiful power. We deny them the opportunity to breathe clean air in their homes, eat fresh food in their kitchens, feel cooled in their workplaces. We deny them the basic freedoms from everyday vulnerabilities we have forgotten—from hazards we ignore—with energy systems we invented, and then condemned.
As Bill Gates writes in his refreshingly balanced book HOW TO AVOID CLIMATE DISASTER:
“I didn’t think it was fair for anyone to tell Indians that their children couldn’t have lights to study by, or that thousands of Indians should die in heat waves because installing air conditioners is bad for the environment. The only solution I could imagine was to make clean energy so cheap that every country would choose it over fossil fuels.”
Gates understands not to sacrifice human vulnerability and resilience in the name of reducing hazard. He argues both passionately and convincingly for a net-zero future while recognising the trade-off between poverty and emissions. He even goes so far as to posit a solution: innovate green technologies to compete with fossil fuels. This could take the form of better battery storage for wind and solar (ensuring that supply isn’t limited by the elements); cheaper, portable modular fission reactors built on production lines; even viable fusion in the decades to come. Plentiful, reliable and affordable energy for everyone. Not at all where the Green Road leads.
In reality, degrowth strategies might look something closer to this:
Let us assume for a moment that climate hazard is successfully reduced to natural boundaries by limiting emissions; and exposure is lessened as consumption declines, growth decelerates and population plateaus. Meanwhile the hurried transition towards relatively expensive low-emission energy paralyses the fight against global destitution. Billions of people remain vulnerable to indoor air pollution, malnutrition, infection and disease. They remain unable to defend themselves from their immediate environment—from existing heat, cold, rain and fire. From the very hazards we aimed to eliminate, but could barely restrain beneath pre-industrial levels.
And herein lies the second problem. Inherent to all degrowth arguments is the increasingly fashionable idea that the world is naturally safe, and that only through human interference has the balance been knocked into violent chaos. The Green Road scenario paints a curiously pleasant existence from a world containing fewer people, fewer resources, and fewer impacts. A world with “low material growth and lower resource and energy intensity” as its defining feature.
Let me repeat that: low material growth, energy and resources. Such an existence will sound chillingly familiar to any who have witnessed real hardship in society. Such deficits are preconditions for suffering, not safety. They are the conditions for billions of people alive today, and countless more throughout history, who have lived and worked and died for nothing. For the vast majority of human existence, our impact on the world has been functionally zero; and yet, throughout all these drifting millennia, hazards have remained, looming, magnified in their relative potency against populations incapable of feeding themselves (let alone erecting hurricane shelters). Populations with minimal exposure and yet massive vulnerability. Is this really a world worth returning to?
Everyday Astronauts
Consider again the rain outside my window. I said before that, thanks to my centrally-heated house and its modern double-glazing, I have effectively zero vulnerability to such mild precipitation. But without such considerable technology, and with sufficiently prolonged exposure, I would quickly grow cold, tired, and inevitably succumb to crippling hypothermia. The natural vulnerability to average weather conditions is remarkably high, and it is only thanks to the galvanising innovations of clothing, shelter and fire-building that we have been able to survive and flourish today. Only by people and their pioneering mastery over local environmental pressures have we ensured the safety and comfort of billions of people in everyday life. By engineers and electricians, carpenters and coat makers.
Such examples lead to a simple yet startling realisation: you are already an astronaut. Every night spent inside your home is a night saved from the deadly environment beyond; every walk with an umbrella is a triumph over the elements. And while everybody knows that an unprotected afternoon in the vacuum of space will kill you in seconds, fewer people appreciate the fact that a similarly naked amble in sun-scorched Sudan (or sun-starved Sweden) will have an identical effect in a matter of hours. The difference between a spacesuit and a rain jacket is one of degree, and while it may seem strange to liken items of clothing to hard engineering projects—sandals to sea-walls—both perform the exact same function of protecting from hazardous external conditions for the benefit of human experience. Just ask the over 100 million people currently living below high-tide sea levels (four million in The Netherlands alone and a further two million in world’s-lowest-city Baku, some eight stories beneath the Caspian Sea); or the billions more who live in climates either too hot or too cold to survive naturally. All technologies that reduce vulnerability in this way are qualitatively alike: the singular refuge of knowledge in a hostile universe.
So, the Green Road pathway is misleading for two reasons: 1) attempting to reduce hazards to natural levels is no goal worth pursuing because the world is naturally hazardous; and 2) doing so at the cost of an increased vulnerability is nothing short of suicidal nonsense for everyone (like removing one’s EMU in the middle of a spacewalk). Attempting to neutralise hazards by limiting emissions without a viable energy alternative is both ineffective and harmful. The prevailing climate strategy is fundamentally flawed. What more is there to say?
My Way Is The Highway
The central problem remains: if not by a hazard-centred approach, how do we balance the equation to minimise risk? As it turns out, the IPCC has four alternative socioeconomic pathways alongside the Green Road. The most interesting of the selection for this discussion is SSP5—Taking the Highway.
(SSP5) Fossil-fuelled development—Taking the Highway
“This world places increasing faith in competitive markets, innovation, and participatory societies to produce rapid technological progress. There are strong investments in health, education, and institutions to enhance human and social capital. At the same time, the push for economic and social development is coupled with the exploitation of abundant fossil fuel resources and the adoption of resource and energy intensive lifestyles around the world. Local environmental problems like air pollution are successfully managed.”
Such an approach couldn’t diverge more starkly from SSP1. The Highway narrative is characterised by accelerated growth in place of decline; high energy intensity over moderated consumption; innovation in lieu of stasis; and, most controversial of all, the continued use of fossil fuels to facilitate such development. It aims to build resilience and crush vulnerability—even at the cost of an increased hazard.
We can safely assume that, following this scenario, the 1.5 degree temperature target set out by the Paris Agreement won’t be met. The continued use of fossil fuels over the coming decades by developing nations will accelerate climate warming and all its associated dangers. Sea levels shall rise, storms will gather. For many, this is precisely the disaster we are trying to avoid.
What is perhaps less anticipated, however, is the considerable flourishing associated with such expansion. We are so tunnel-visioned on the hazards that we are blind to everything else. Take GDP, for example.
The above graphs are taken directly from the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways used by the IPCC. The magenta projection represents the fossil-fuelled Highway approach, and shows massive wealth increases in both bulk and per capita GDP leading up to 2100. To be precise: $140,000 median personal income by the end of the century. Globally. That’s half the people in the world earning more than the richest 99th percentile in the US today. As researcher Bjorn Lomborg summarises:
“[T]he higher economic growth in SSP5 actually leads to much greater welfare for humanity. After adjusting for climate damages, SSP5 will on average leave grandchildren of today's poor $48,000 better off every year. It will reduce poverty by 26 million each year until 2050, inequality will be lower, and more than 80 million premature deaths will be avoided.”
Hazards will increase. But so will welfare. Health, wealth, lifespan and healthspan; education and employment; freedom and financial security. And with a richer world comes stronger defences: taller sea-walls, sturdier homes. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that a fossil-fuelled scenario might even offer the fastest route to Gates’s solution. After all, an “[Increased] faith in competitive markets, innovation, and participatory societies to produce rapid technological progress” surely includes zero-emission energy systems. And once “so cheap that every country would choose [them] over fossil fuels” all of my arguments in favour of oil and gas simply disappear. We will have all the benefits of plentiful, reliable and affordable energy without any of the current dangers. Low vulnerability, high resilience, and the tools to neutralise hazards without harming ourselves in the process.
What more is there to say?
Follow me on twitter @tomhyde_
Very good article. Getting your risk equation (risk = hazard x exposure x vulnerability divided by resilience) into public discourse would I think be a good step forward. I fear the article itself might be a bit long for most people to read though unfortunately. I would summarise your main points as follows: 1) The hazards of climate change are real and have been increasing since industrialisation. 2) Despite these increased hazards, climate related deaths have substantially reduced over time due to our increased global resilience and reduced global vulnerability (in other words our increased collective global wealth). 3) Most of the discussion at the moment focusses upon reducing the hazards as opposed to focusing upon reducing the risks by increasing our collective global wealth (i.e. by increasing our resilience and reducing our vulnerability). You also make the important point that “Inherent to all degrowth arguments is the increasingly fashionable idea that the world is naturally safe, and that only through human interference has the balance been knocked into violent chaos” and that the current “Green Road pathway is misleading for two reasons: 1) attempting to reduce hazards to natural levels is no goal worth pursuing because the world is naturally hazardous; and 2) doing so at the cost of an increased vulnerability is nothing short of suicidal nonsense for everyone”. The implication of your article is that we should be thankful and unapologetic for the vast material and social improvements that have been made over the last 200 years, including the role that fossil fuels have made and continue to make in this progress, and that by far the best way forward for the future of humanity is to keep our foot on the accelerator and push forward with the next great global, green, and high growth industrial revolution. Assuming I have understood you correctly then I strongly agree with your thesis.