Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Two separate studies have appeared recently claiming that climate will increase income inequality. In my opinion, both studies contradict readily observable evidence.
The first press release;
Study: Climate change damages US economy, increases inequality
Unmitigated climate change will make the United States poorer and more unequal, according to a new study published in the journal Science. The poorest third of counties could sustain economic damages costing as much as 20 percent of their income if warming proceeds unabated.
States in the South and lower Midwest, which tend to be poor and hot already, will lose the most, with economic opportunity traveling northward and westward. Colder and richer counties along the northern border and in the Rockies could benefit the most as health, agriculture and energy costs are projected to improve.
Overall, the study—led by Solomon Hsiang of the University of California, Berkeley, Robert Kopp of Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Amir Jina of the University of Chicago, and James Rising, also of UC Berkeley—projects losses, economic restructuring and widening inequality.
“Unmitigated climate change will be very expensive for huge regions of the United States,” said Hsiang, Chancellor’s Associate Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. “If we continue on the current path, our analysis indicates it may result in the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the country’s history.”
…
Read more: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-climate-economy-inequality.html
The second press release;
As the rich move away from disaster zones, the poor are left behind
By Leah Platt Boustan, Maria Lucia Yanguas, Matthew Kahn, and Paul W. Rhode
on Jul 1, 2017 6:00 am
Cross-posted from the Conversation
Every year, major earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes occur. These natural disasters disrupt daily life and, in the worst cases, cause devastation. Events such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy killed thousands of people and generated billions of dollars in losses.
There is also concern that global climate change will increase the frequency and intensity of weather–related disasters.
Our research team wanted to know how disasters affect people’s decisions to move in or out of particular areas. We created a new database that covers disasters in the United States from 1920 to 2010 at the county level, combining data from the American Red Cross as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and its predecessors.
Our work shows that people move away from areas hit by the largest natural disasters, but smaller disasters have little effect on migration. The data also showed that these trends may worsen inequality in the U.S., as the rich move away from disaster-prone areas, while the poor are left behind.
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Read more: http://grist.org/article/as-the-rich-move-away-from-disaster-zones-the-poor-are-left-behind/
The abstract of the first study;
Estimating economic damage from climate change in the United States
Solomon Hsiang, Robert Kopp, Amir Jina, James Rising, Michael Delgado, Shashank Mohan, D. J. Rasmussen, Robert Muir-Wood, Paul Wilson, Michael Oppenheimer, Kate Larsen, Trevor Houser
Estimates of climate change damage are central to the design of climate policies. Here, we develop a flexible architecture for computing damages that integrates climate science, econometric analyses, and process models. We use this approach to construct spatially explicit, probabilistic, and empirically derived estimates of economic damage in the United States from climate change. The combined value of market and nonmarket damage across analyzed sectors—agriculture, crime, coastal storms, energy, human mortality, and labor—increases quadratically in global mean temperature, costing roughly 1.2% of gross domestic product per +1°C on average. Importantly, risk is distributed unequally across locations, generating a large transfer of value northward and westward that increases economic inequality. By the late 21st century, the poorest third of counties are projected to experience damages between 2 and 20% of county income (90% chance) under business-as-usual emissions (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5).
Read more: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6345/1362
The abstract of the second study;
The Effect of Natural Disasters on Economic Activity in US Counties: A Century of Data
Leah Platt Boustan, Matthew E. Kahn, Paul W. Rhode, Maria Lucia Yanguas
NBER Working Paper No. 23410
Issued in May 2017
NBER Program(s): DAE EEE
Major natural disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy cause numerous fatalities, and destroy property and infrastructure. In any year, the U.S experiences dozens of smaller natural disasters as well. We construct a 90 year panel data set that includes the universe of natural disasters in the United States from 1920 to 2010. By exploiting spatial and temporal variation, we study how these shocks affected migration rates, home prices and local poverty rates. The most severe disasters increase out migration rates and lower housing prices, especially in areas at particular risk of disaster activity, but milder disasters have little effect.
Read more (paywalled): http://www.nber.org/papers/w23410
What do I mean when I suggest both studies contradict observable evidence?
Ask one question – how do cities cope with hot weather, sudden deluges and extreme storms, in places where such phenomena are already a regular part of life? Places like the tropical coastal cities of my native Queensland?
The answer of course is the civic infrastructure of tropical cities is built to cope with the scale of events which are expected. The storm drains are built with much larger pipes, to easily cope with deluges on a scale which would severely flood most US cities. This is simply a matter of digging up the old pipes, and replacing them with larger pipes, next time the drains are repaired. The frames, walls and roofs of houses are built to resist cyclones, hail and extreme downpours – most of the roofs of working class houses in my area, including my house, are made of inexpensive heavy duty sheet steel. Such protection can be inexpensively retrofitted to houses at risk from storm damage – steel bracing to strengthen inadequate house frames, cheap steel roofs to increase protection from storm damage. Rich people sometimes choose tile roofs for aesthetic reasons – but they have more money to pay for roof repairs.
In severe cases, people in low lying areas are evacuated if a cyclone or other extreme event threatens, with well rehearsed evacuation plans. The government steps in to help repair usually very localised extreme storm damage. Even a near miss turns a tropical cyclone into an inconvenience rather than a disaster, if your local infrastructure is built to cope with extreme weather.
I am not suggesting that tropical cities get it right every time. 35 people died in the 2011 Queensland floods, a weather event so extreme it is believed to have caused global sea level to temporarily drop by 7mm. But this is far fewer deaths than the 1245 people who died due to Hurricane Katrina – a disaster which was reportedly exacerbated by poor planning and incompetence.
Incompetence which costs lives only prevails while it remains hidden. Queensland authorities are not inherently more competent than Louisiana authorities. We have our share of public scandals and crooked land planning decisions. But severe weather in Queensland is a regular occurrence. If severe deluges or other weather events were to become more common in the USA, the people would demand solutions – and those solutions are not difficult to implement. If all else failed, the USA would simply hire top civic engineers from tropical cities to help upgrade US infrastructure, to provide US citizens with the same kind of storm resilience as people who live in tropical cities already enjoy today.
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Here is a USGS piece from 1960 showing the tidal flood areas in AC.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/ha/065/plate-1.pdf
Katrina in one photograph –
http://www.hoboes.com/library/graphics/politics/laws/New%20Orleans%20buses.jpg
(AKA – Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool.)
Uh…What?
Gore blamed Katrina on Bush and “CAGW”.
Previous State and local Governments diverted Fed money from maintenance of the levies to other purposes.
What’s the phrase? “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Well, this picture ain’t it.
“Well, this picture ain’t it.”
Huh? It’s antithesis to the very excuses and finger pointing by Gore, Blanco, CNN, etc. that you mention.
That picture represents how the mayor of NO, Ray Nagin, did nothing to evacuate the endangered parts of the city. Meanwhile, while some parts of NO were flooding, other parts were being looted … by the police!
(Did I mention Ray Nagin is currently in jail?)
According to the WSJ (June 9, M1) Austin, Texas median prices for single-family homes “….has increased 48.2% from $250,000 in April 2012 to $370,600 in April 2017.” I do not have the figures but have heard that there are badly increasing property taxes. Texas, proud of its lack of an income tax, has a serious property tax problem, which the current governor is working on along the large power that cities have to annex against the wishes of the property owners. Such an annex just happened down the road. Someday there may be concern that these both are an unconstitutional “takings” of property by the government.
There are many accounts of poorer people losing property, forced to inhabit inferior property and often to places more likely to flood, both inland and along the Texas coast. Developments sometimes further the problem, although there is a lot of work, not always successful, on flood control. A few weeks ago Corpus Christi had a downtown flood problem, submerging cars, from a short intense several inch downpour. It was a low area with a higher berm next to the bay. Climate, as in sea level, although important, is an obfuscation.
Viva Prop 13!
World Ends Tomorrow, Women, Minorities to be Hardest Hit
“Climate Change policies” will hit Poor People harder than Rich People.
Those who have it don’t want anybody else to “get it”. Greed is often what got it for them. (Sometimes they actually earned it.) Envy is what drives one to get what another has got. Pride is what drives both.
Once you’ve got it, you have some extra to devote to pipe dreams.
PS Hey, Leonardo, take a hard look at your motives.
I’m pretty sure that higher energy and food costs (caused by insane “global warming” policies) will hit poor people very hard.
Areas that are the most humid will see the least impact from so called global warming.
As a result, the areas least impacted by CO2 will be the south east.
The idea that poor people will be hit harder by changes in the climate, or by extreme weather events regardless of the cause, is simply true. It is true for the past, true in the present, and will be true in the future.
Disaster prone areas have low property values (exception is highly desirable waterfront properties). The poor can afford these disaster areas and so live there.
In the Dominican Republic, low lying river banks and extremely steep hillsides are covered with the homes of the poor, often built with discarded building materials, flatten oil drums, etc. When the storms come, the rivers rise washing the riverbanks clean of homes and sending the hillside homes sliding down into the valleys. In the aftermath, the government and foreign NGOs provide funds to rebuild the homes in the same disaster prone areas — to be washed away in two or three years time once again.
The poor cannot afford to protect themselves from the weather — neither hot nor cold, nor rain, sleet, snow, or relentless sun and heat. The poor cannot afford to protect themselves from changing weather.
Scoffing at this simple truth is foolish and heartless.
Using this simple truth to promote not-useful climate change disaster stories is despicable.
Everything hurts the poor more than the rich. That is just a fact of life. It won’t matter because the poor will always need the rich and the rich will always provide for the poor until the socialists run out of other people’s money. Nothing changes except the climate and it never stops changing.