“We can’t simply accept the proposition that technology is guilty until proven innocent.”

By Lyle Dunne

I’m a bit over the Global Warming – sorry, Climate Change – debate, to tell you the truth. Not that I’ve come to terms with the Carbon Tax, but it seems the “science” is not the weakest link in the argument.

(I say “science” in quotation marks because I’m not absolutely sure that all that modelling is quite science as most people understand the term – a bit too speculative, maybe a bit light on for falsifiability, if that’s a word. But that’s a story for another day.)

The argument as I understand it runs like this.

1. The earth is warming. (Significantly.)
2. It will continue to warm (significantly) for the foreseeable future.
3. This is due to primarily to human activity – specifically, generating greenhouse gases, primarily through burning fossil fuels.
4. This can be reversed (significantly) through slowing down of this activity, or increasing offsetting activities to trap carbon.
5. A carbon tax will cause people to generate (significantly) less carbon, and/or trap more.
6. It is possible to operate an international trading scheme for carbon credits that can be reasonably free from rorting.
7. There is a reasonable prospect of a carbon tax being adopted internationally.
8. The best way for Australia to encourage the adoption of a carbon tax internationally is to go it alone.
9. This will not in fact be counterproductive through, for example, transferring manufacturing from our reasonably-clean factories to less-clean factories overseas.
10. The price of this noble experiment will not be excessive.

You see why I say the science, which peters out around point two or maybe three of this argument, is not the weakest link. Which is not to say it’s unassailable in any absolute sense.

Weakest link

But I’ve been thinking about the last point, and something called “the Precautionary Principle” that the green movement is particularly fond of.

Broadly speaking, it runs like this:

Don’t do anything unless you’re sure it’s safe.

Sounds reasonable at first blush, doesn’t it?

But often such generalisations do, until tested on specifics. So you try substituting some real-world examples for “anything”: “get out of bed”, say, or “cross the street”.

Then it becomes clear that you need to ask a few questions like “how safe is safe?” and “how sure do we need to be?”

Then you realize it doesn’t take account of the cost of the alternative.

So an argument against GM food, for example, which would say that we shouldn’t adopt it unless we’re sure it’s safe, doesn’t factor in lives that might be saved through its availability.

The case of a Carbon Tax is difficult to fit into the formal structure of the principle: for one thing, no-one has proposed that we demonstrate the tax is safe – rather, the expectation is that the onus of proof is on the status quo.

Nevertheless this kind of thinking shows itself through the ignoring of risks on one side of the ledger. Thus people simply assume the chain of argument above is valid, accepting (at least implicitly) that the risk is so great that it must be addressed at any cost. (Well, any cost short of nuclear reactors: Germany are closing theirs down, at the cost of an extra 300m tonnes of CO₂ by 2020, as George Monbiot has pointed out in The Guardian.

Indeed, we seem to be in the paradoxical position of believing that we face a disaster so great it almost doesn’t matter how likely it is, or whether the evidence for it is valid or not.

A few, if challenged, will admit the possibility of error, but argue that, whether or not it will stop the earth warming, a carbon tax will reduce pollution, preserve non-renewable fossil fuels, staving off peak oil, etcetera, will make it worthwhile.

In fact these are valid considerations, but they too are only considerations, not a trumping argument which relieves us of the need to consider costs.

Cost-benefit

We still have to compare costs and benefits, even though some of these may be uncertain. We cannot simply assume that the current course of action will lead to a disaster so immense and so certain that any suggestion must be adopted immediately.

We can’t, for example, count the additional deaths due to heat without factoring in the reduction in (globally much more numerous) deaths from cold.

We can’t simply accept the proposition that technology is guilty until proven innocent.

We have to make a cool-headed assessment of the magnitude and probability of any impending disaster, and the likelihood of success (and consequences of failure) of any proposed solution, before deciding what resources to devote to it.

Let me run by you the specific example that made me think about this – and gave me the opportunity to write about it, instead of mowing the lawn.

Across the ACT, much of NSW and part of southern Queensland, we’ve had anther round of flooding in recent weeks. The creek behind my house was running a banker.

Remember how, in the depths of the drought of the 90s and early 2000s, doomsayers told us to get used to it: we’d never see rain again like the Good Old Days, it was all down to Climate Change? I certainly do.

(And remember when the drought broke, they all said oh, er, it’s a bit embarrassing but it turns out we were wrong? Me either. No, it turned out floods were in fact more evidence of climate change.)

But where’s the cost in this wrong prediction?

Well, think back to the Brisbane floods – a massive disaster, blamed for a significant setback to the national economy, as well as untold human suffering.

Act of God?

Up to a point. We had flood mitigation measures available. Specifically, we had dams. But the dams were also for water supply – and there’s a tension between these purposes: to simplify, for flood mitigation you need dams empty, for water supply you need them full.

And when the authorities were told a wet summer was predicted, and they should release water – well, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to do it.

There are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that the water represented money-in the-bank for local authorities. Some cynics might argue that no ulterior motive is required to explain bureaucratic inertia: the risks of action are always seen as greater than those of action. The Precautionary Principle again.

But is it not possible that a significant factor was that they’d been told that the drought might be permanent, and big rains would never come again?