How to think about climate change and "cost-benefit analysis"

Some climate deniers go beyond arguing that climate change isn't real; rather, they argue that adapting to climate change is cheaper than preventing it, and it's a fool's errand to spend money on a Green New Deal, when we could continue to burn fossil fuels and simply relocate everyone who gets flooded out, figure out how to grow crops in new places, come up with medicines to treat new epidemics, etc.

In a wonderful short essay (the first in a series), Synapse Energy Economics economist Frank Ackerman describes the problems with this line of argument.

Ackerman starts with the calculus of insurance: we buy insurance for risks like housefires or accidental death not because they are likely, but because their consequences are more than we can bear without insurance. When the habitability of the only known planet that can sustain our species is at stake, the case for insurance is easy, even if you think the likelihood is low.

But planets aren't like houses: there isn't another planet we can relocate to if ours fails, so no insurer is going to write us a policy. Instead, we have to self-insure (just as someone who can't get fire insurance has to put in extra fire-suppression technology, clear brush, etc): we have to take every credible step to reduce the risk of losing our planetary home.

But then Ackerman takes on the whole idea of cost-benefit when it comes to environmental risks: because these cost-benefit calculations involve literally making up a value for human lives and then calculating whether the "costs" (including other people dying) are less than the "benefits" (that is, profits to the companies whose environmental misdeeds cost other people their lives), these calculations always act as a kind of empirical facewash on an otherwise untenable proposition: that you should be allowed to kill other people if you get rich in the process. Read the rest