agriculture. ivy league education is one of the biggest issues. [indiscernible] >> the most pressing issue is public funding. infrastructureor programs or for public employees such as teachers. of states right now, funding is really tight and our state.

>> now we would hear from oren , a former adviser of mitt romney's 2012 presidential campaign. this is 45 minutes. >> thank you very much for coming today. i brian anderson, the editor of city journal. [applause] it is my great pleasure to introduce today's speaker. or and crass a senior fellow at the manhattan institute where he focuses on a range of vital topics, including energy, the environment, and anti-poverty policy.

has become a regular welcome presence in city journal. in fact, we just released a new video featuring oren cass. since posting yesterday, this first video has achieved 300,000 downloads already. it is getting a lot of attention. whatever he is writing or speaking about, he does it with authority and imagination. which else explain why politico calls them one of the 50 thinkers, doers, and visionaries transfor arin policy. his replication will only go with the arrival, this fall, of his brilliant new book.

he was a management consultant for pain and company. ba in political economy from williams college, and a jd from harva. , based on his much discussed paper, will show how faulty assumptions distorted the argument on climate change by dramatically overestimating its potential cost. yesterday about this for leading publications including the wall street journal.

the streejournal's mary ansel describes his work as absolutely brilliant evisceration of climate catastrophism. od afterquestion peri the talk we will have a microphone. i will field the question. identify yourself once the microphone arrives. in other words, no long-winded statements before you ask a question. with that, let me have things over to oren cass. [applause] thank you very much, bryant. that was the official first plug for the book.

thank you all so much for coming. thank you for rescheduling for today and not tomorrow. i want to talk about the paper that came out just over a week ago that looks at the way that climate costs are actually estimated. it is important to distinguish that this is not a talk about climate science. i think most climate sce actuallyte good. if you've read the literature they tend to be fairly conservative. they're doing a lot of important work. peopleblem comes when interested choose to take those findings and translate them into things that sound very scary. that is what i would call climate economics.

you have to start with greenhouse gas emissions, then a translate that to a temperature translate thata to actual changes in our environment. then translate that to actual effect on our society. then translate that to actual cost in dollars. if you want to do this right you have to apply a lens of human progress. climate change happens over whenple centuries, so you're talking about these changes the effect on society, it does not do to imagine they happen tomorrow. the temperature changes gradually over a long period of time.

climate science versus climate economics. i want to talk about climate economics. i want to talk about a particular trend in climate economics, which is to ignore the hard steps in the middle. most of the recent and headline grabbing studies do not actually considered environmental changes are human progress on the effect on society. they simply do what is called a temperature impact correlation study. the idea is essentially lets study today what happens when we see minor variations in temperature from year-to-year, and what the effect is on human mortality, economic growth, and labor productivity. and let's imagine that relationship will hold over a hundred years and multiple degrees of climate change. oneou find a year that has extra very hot day, we see 40 extra deaths in the city. let's assume that sometime in

the future we get 100 such days, then obviously 4000 people will die. if you take that approach you get large numbers. laughably large numbers, in some cases, as we will see. most of the studies will say they assume no adaptation, as if that makes the assumption nok one. the cost extract related -- extrapolated from the exemption -- from the assumption that people do not adapt does not tell us anything. a sweeping study claims rising temperatures will sharply cut economic productivity.

here's what they did. i apologize if this is complicated, but it is important to understand how these studies are actually done. they looked each country over the last 50 years. what they tried to do was established a relationship. if you look down at the bottom, terrace of different countries. they found that cold countries do a little bit better on growth and warmer years. in iceland you see that upward slant. and warmer years slightly better growth. they found that very hot countries to slightly worse and very hot tears. from this they extrapolated a is validch they said for all countries at all times. ideal temperature for

economic growth is 13 degrees celsius. the closer you are to that the better off you will be. the further you are from that you will have less growth every year. gets warmerorld every year, your growth would get lower and lower. this is from their study. i'm not adding anything new here. states, in 2010 we are at optimal growth. our average temperature is about 13 degrees celsius. in 2100 we will before degrees warmer, so how much growth will be lose? about two percentage points of growth every year. if we apply that to forested , as it gets warmer the distance between average growth and climate growth gets

bigger and bigger. by 2100 we are not really growing at all because it is gotten warmer. it produces a change and our per capi income overime. with climate change per capita income flat lines. in the united states it is hard to say about as plausible or wildly implausible. let's take a look at iceland. it starts very cold. as they get warmer growth goes up. instead of having regular developed country growth, become up of the projections that iceland will be growing at more than 5% each year. by 2100 their growth will be accelerated. per capita surges past $1.5 ,illion per person per year making iceland by far the wealthiest country in the world,

next to climate change. this is the outlook for a whole bunch of countries. china and india, because the are very h essentially never there is mongolia. [laughter] been there is iceland. you can go to the website for this study to download the figures and put them in this chart. toave asked to authors respond. i have not heard a response, but hopefully this is the start of a longer conversation about climate economics.

if you think these kind of relationships might hold, you can find very dramatic cost for climate change overall. overall, the economic output will be about 20% lower for climate change. canada's economy will be seven times larger than china's, and a you will be the poorest and shrinking. so, why might this not be true? what assumption i would say is incorrect is that other things are equal. run progression analyses that ifons and assumed other things are equal, what is the effect of this one thing. it would make no sense to run that analysis and use it to

project the effect of a four-year college degree in the year 2100, but that is essentially what we're trying to do here. secondly, it assumes the response to small random changes in weather will be proportionally in response to larger changes. this just assumed that the temperature change will be 40 times bigger, the effect will be 40 times bigger. finally, an extremely weak correlation of strong predictive power. so, when you correlation your starting with is not especially strong one, then you magnify it, you're likely to end up especially far off.

think abouto climate change more constructively, we have to start by thinking about adaptation, and understand adaptation is not something you just throw out there. it is a very real phenomenon we can study. in fact, have implications we should care about. there are a lot of different kinds we know about. there is biophysical adaptation. you feel different after being in a place that is hot for a wild. there is behavioral adaptation. see how atlanta deals with inch of snowfall. [laughter] as you get more accustomed to a given condition, to get better at dealing with it. there is social adaptations. we do not play baseball in the winter. they do play baseball in the winter in florida.

some places have a siesta in the middle of the day. economic is adaptations. things reproduce in different parts of the country. the kinds of jobs people choose to do and where they do them. that is the entire point of the market. if you recognize that the market is going to be active over this recognize itave to will do quite well to respond to some of these changes. you have to recognize that adaptations that are cost-effective for large scale climate shifts may not be in response to much smaller ships. extrapolate that people will not respond to one extra hot day the way they will respond to 40 extra hot days. if i told you next year the average temperature in new york

will be 10 degrees hotter, there are some things you can do differently, but it would not make sense to be configured new york to be a 10 degree hotter place. to aim for your average temperature or expected temperature, known as the changes does it make sense to adapt at all. this has made it into the u.s. government policymaking process as well. i just want to run through a bunch of quick examples. how pervasive the failure to account for adaptation is. this is a recent study that came out a few months ago attempting to highlight potential costs for the u.s.. it found two studies that have been done of all the costs people can think of. one was climate change and the united states.

and one was american climate prospectus. here are the costs they found by 2100. you will see virtually all of the costs are in tse blue shaded boxes. they come from three things. air quality,at, and lost work hours from extreme temperatures. those account for essentially about 80% of costs. the come from the same set of studies. curacao the studies are done. -- here is how these studies are done. these authors did one of the better analyses. the census runs a process of asking people to track what they

do for a day. ounties that have ot days, the people report working fewer hours? they found out that there is very little effect. one thing you could conclude is that we have more 100 degree days people are going to work less. the problem is that something else they found was this. if you actually look in the summer and how much people work in these at-risk industries, people in the warmest third of u.s. counties actually work more than people in the coolest third counties. it is true that on a very hot day they work less, it is not true that once you take into account adaptation to a local climate, you actually find any effect at all that is

discernible. what people would like to study would respond is that there could be other factors that we are not taking into account. the could be other things about these warm counties that make the places where people work more. yes, that is exactly the point. everything is different in all places. might expect is marked variability. these are all things that we cope with. but the evidence here would not as more of the country looks like our warm counties people will actually work less. it is the same with respect to mortality. if you look at what happens on very hot days, or in years with

our more hot days, there is slightly higher mortality. with the office this study did say thanks to fewer colder days we will get fewer deaths, but more hot days will cause more deaths, about 2000 deaths each year by 2100. they also had a second study that said what happens in between 1960 and 2000 when people insult air-conditioning. the people who came up with this chart also cite this study. at the 2004 rate of ac adoption, that therepothesis was no impact on mortality cannot be adapted.

dy, theysigning this took thida a sd f we ignore the annotation component and instead only use the view that there is no progress over time? heatu put in the revised deaths based on air-conditioning, you actually find that you save lives to climate change. that is my very rough back of the envelope. that is not a gold standard study, either. what you would do is go back and take all the data and re-analyze it properly. but the no adaptation view is certainly not the right one. one more study i especially enjoyed is the epa's approach to mortality. what they did is look at each individual city. pittsburgh is my favorite example. what happens on extremely hot ?nd extremely cold days to ma

was that, yes, you see increased mortality on those days. as pittsburgh warms you would expect its distribution to look like that. but what if pittsburgh warms and we do not move the dashed lines. now there are many extreme heat days. if you assume that you have many many times more extremely hot days, then you can produce this. expertssay that in 2100 fatality rate from extreme heat will be about 75 times higher than what phoenix, houston, or new orleans experiences today. even though they are hotter today as pittsburgh will be in

2100. interestingly, these guys didn't do a test for adaptation. they said they should also have knowledge the cost by more than two thirds. those of the cost estimates that it should be to our understanding that climate change will be hugely costly in the united states. the last big dark blue box you will see that epa bottles the most important thing about climate change amounts to this. pollutants, ozone and particulate matter. for each one you can see the atmospheric concentration in -- 2013.20,013 the heat causes cause us to bump

up a little bit. those are the boss to epa said were worth 50,000 lives per year and roughly $9 billion per year in costs. the cost of climate change according to the epa. conclusion, i guess what i want to emphasize is that climate costs can be real about being catastrophic. a lot of the things we saw there were actual cost we have to cope with. if everyone is going to adopt air-conditioning in response to heat, we need to take into account we will need a lot more air-conditioning. we may very well have slightly higher pollution levels than we would otherwise have. very well have more hot days that affect manual labor outdoors. but it turns out we know fairly because we do it have built most of western civilization in areas of the world that completely freeze

over every year. there are ifa days, even weeks, or people and places like chicago and boston cannot spend much time outside. would be wonderful if february in the country was like santa barbara, but it is not. so you must recognize that those costs exist, we must understand and cope with them. thank you very much. [applause] there are aure bunch of questions, so let's ask them. oren: there are no questions. >> no questions at all. >> you said you asked the

authors for their response. you did not say what happened. i assume, since the wall street journal published your op-ed about this, they heard about your criticism. the just ignored your request? goingthey said they were to respond. i hope they do. i would love to understand exactly the thinking that went into it. from correspondent with them the process of developing this, i sense is that generally speaking this is what the reah ys. i would certainly like to >> the upfront here. then we would like to get people from the back as well.

>> what is sure assessment of the literature and potential risk? oren: it is interesting because its e of the areas where we have the best data and the worst projections of what that will look like. the seavidence that level has risen and will continue to rise is good. what it will look like in 2100, the gold standard report was about an estimate of a two foot rise. since that came out, several studies have said that is probably on the low side because we think we might do more activity in a place like antarctica than what was encapsulated there. so more like four or five feet of rise over the century. the interesting thing about the

cost of that is it does not tend to show up much. the reason it does not show up is because it is a one-time cost . so, if it is hotter and you get a difference in a number and that happens every year forever, with sea rise you have the value of coastal property but you can only wipe it out once. so whatever sea level rise you might believe will happen, you have to divide it by 100. so, even very large figures, you could say we have trillions of dollars of assets at risk. but when you take into account how much it will depreciate over the course of the century anyway and divide the loss by one year, the actual per year cost does high.me out to be very

it is one of the most important issues to understand from a policy perspective because how we ensure coastal property, those things matter and will continue to matter. waving your hand and yelling "waterworld" there is not enough connection in the united states for the cost. >> what about predictions you hear about wild weather and droughts interfering with food production? oren: a i guess i would keep those as two separate discussions. there is a concern about wild weather and drought and a concern about food production. the reality is, an effect on food production is more the effect of the gradual shift in underlying climate.

so, our farms or in places that might be warmer. you see yields decline when temperature gets above a certain level. as with the sea level problem, what you find when you dignto agcultural estess e framover which we mht adapt is wildly longer than the time we need to adapt. let's say 50% of our agricultural production will have to shift due to climate change. if that is true, if it were even that large, you would say that is adding about a half of a percentage per year. that is significantly smaller than the amount of new capacity we had to our global food system capacity every year. says on his we have an understanding of which places in more and less productive the future, there is no reason to believe that the climate change is going to catch up with

our infrastructure faster than our infrastructure moves relative to climate change. >> thank you. i'm with the atlas network. i wonder these models have been 1950. going back to applying the data and seeing if we are where they thought we'd be. economic mean the models? one of the challenges is, you cannot really test them going have largee we don't swings and climate going back. the models use the data to try to find correlations. but, the nature of the behavior you could measure does not look anything like the behavior we are trying to map it to. the one interesting data point i think that should be more

relevant is we have 50 years of population data. we know people prefer to live in warmer climates. in the united states, the trend is to move out of the northeast which is the area that is sort of supposed to benefit most from climate change, too much, much hotter places. you could say people are doing that against their interests. they do not realize they are going to die and be less productive when they do that. [laughter] new york, i move to get more than the effect of climate change. you can say they are full. you could say the effect is not as big as the worry. or you could say there are so many other things people care about that they wash out the effect. so it is hard to look in the

u.s. at least, to where we see population warming and say things getting warmer is a catastrophe. but one of the ott, all of this is about the united states. the past leave for adaptation looks different if you are talking about an area that has less technology, less infrastructure, is more reliant on agriculture and outdoor labor. one thing i think that is a constructive way to extend is to not take this type of analysis, but to recognize there is important analysis to be done it look at the u.s. and say does not mean there are not also other places where this will unfold. >> why are catastrophe us so

andsted in catastrophes flaws in estimation. what do they have to gain by this? question. is a loaded one argument is it is a matter of political self-interest. i find that does not get as far no of that goes to a question of why that is their agenda and what they have chosen to be an activist about. i've done some research. trying to understand what are the actual differences in how someone like me and someone who might worry more about these costs think about. why are we making the assumptions we are making? what you find most often if you work down the ladder of two things.is one is a very difrent understanding of the future and

how we should think about the future relative to today. a lot of the estimates and fear you hear a sims we are going to apply all the things that happen atf ey happen tomorrow? the second is the same thing we've seen with environmentalism for longtime which is a fundamental discomfort with the effect of human and industrial is a and on the natural environment. the errors an assumption i am talking about are exactly the same on the red to the population bomb in the 60's. the exact ones that led to limits and growth. 70's, peak oil. climate change is in effect the next argument like that. the underlying effects are not always wrong. if you go back to what paul there wrote about how many

people would be born and how much food we would produce, there was a disconnect. if you look at how much oil we work going to have andow we consumed, there was a disconnect. do you at that and say, this is a catastrophe or do look at it and say, everything i know about human society and ingenuity and markets -- they will be problems and create pressure but also people are likely to find a way to cope with it. >> to follow the previous question, what is the one big thing that al gore got right and what is one big thing that al gore got wrong? oren: i will answer and big terms because i do not pay much attention to what al gore says. they that partly

ceaselessly and partly true. al gore has been a very destructive force in the climate debate. the things he says that are inaccurate do a direct disservice to the debate and they encourage people from the other sideo say, client-side science is incorrect. but he is not doing climate science. oddly, al gore and others focus on that motive communication. something they got right, this is a cop-out answer but something is they can be very effective with their climate communication. i mean, the climate industrial marketing complex that has risen up to find ways to make climate change sound scary is very impressive and effective. and, you can go to seminars and

become a certified outdoor climate corps communicator and --rn about the way to and you will see this with your thanksgiving articles, how to talk to your drunk uncle about climate change. this is a real thing. i especially find speaking on college campuses has been very effective. an entire generation of people who are legitimately emotionally distraught. looking at the facts, it is impressive they have been able to do that. i think what he gets from his everything else i've been talking about, which is the idea -- you know -- this goes back to the point about environmentalism. it is not as if al gore discovered climate change and decided to be in environmentalist. he was deeply focused all the

way back to the late 1980's on these narratives. they make for very compelling documentaries, but the math behind it does not usually match up very well with reality. more have time for a few questions. >> thank you. tohink if you look from 1975 1995, there has been a net migration from north to south. in that time, there has been significant increase in average temperature. do we need to conclude that people voluntarily move towards positions where there will be a worse economic climate? >> i think that is a great question and exactly the right way to look historically and try to discern something. i have been exchanging emails with an author who does is kind

of research and he was pushing fairly, to say -- it is fine to criticize the studies as not being constructive but what is constructive? how should we be sing it i said, look, just because economists learn a lot about statistical regressions in graduate school is not the way it is right to study climate change. science side of it is a sociological study. understanding of this country what are the kinds of adaptations people make? how and why do they make them? to see howring manufacturing in singapore compares to manufacturing in germany. what have they done? those kinds of insights would be much more powerful than some of this. >> i'm interested in your

thoughts about the timeframe of that adaptation. given the fact it has been ignored here and we have concluded it, it seems to me the timeframe is important. deciding to live in the deep south versus new england. a little shorter timeframe was the air-conditioning, maybe decades. timeframe forn the climate change. it is going to be 50 years or something like that. highriedman is on his horse now. the problem is things are changing faster and faster. on a shorterapt time. that is why i can't even use my iphone for things like that. how do you distinguish the things that can have adaptation and the timeframe as opposed to the ones where we will be left behind even if we could adapt. oren: that is a perfect question to illustrate how we should be doing climate research and

policy. let's start with a list of all the effects we think climate ange might have. then the kinds of adaptations in the timeframe's of those. what you would find, i have not done the full exercise but some prominent examples, things like adopting air-conditioning is not a big problem. something like sea level rise feels like a bigger problem. if you say you are talking about the actual sort of physical infrastructure of the country. , thateframe like 80 years is an awfully long time for people and cities. how different does manhattan look? subways, not a lot of progress in 80 years. mightblic transportation be an example of something you a lot of confidence

a big city can adapt to, at least not on its own. not, it'sse is impossible, the responses what would it take to have a public transportation system that was abducting on the timeframe -- adapting on the timeframe we need. generally, in terms of economics it comes down to the capital cycle. how long our investments being made for and are we going to the next round of investments in response to what we see on the climate as it is happening or we going to make investments now that are going to be really costly in the future because we don't have incentives now necessarily to get them right. it is important to recognize climate change is not all economic. there are other sorts of ways in which you would say you will have disruptions to social traditions that people value.

yes. from an ecological perspective it is interesting that the u.n. report finds the destruction from climate change should be on par with the disruption humanity has already created from land use change. so we sort of have a sense of what that looks like. it is not the end of the world but there are some real tragedies. i think it is important to not only talk about the dollar context, but also to sort of toce anyone who discusses it know what they're talking about. are you telling me this is expensive and warrants an expensive response or is this one of the million things that is going to change about our society that we should be aware of? >> time for one more question. week four the microphone. the microphone.

>> have you spoken on campuses, and if so what has been the reaction? campusespeak a lot on and it is one of my favorite things to do because their reaction is interesting. in defense of the students on campuses, they are here in one climate communication message and they perceive the other side to be "climate change is not real." they do not hear enough about o'hare to of why there might be something in between those two extremes. i do not think necessarily 12 slidesto these would convince someone they need to stop wearing about climate change, but i do think it forces them to realize there are rational reasons that why what the think is obvious is not answer that is being pursued. the most interesting question i get, and typically it comes with "i am super active

on this or that in campus and what you are telling me is " because given what we are going to do we will see climate change. this is sort of distressin it feels like all of this activist work i am doing, you are telling me i am not going to accomplish anything and i should not doing it. i say, yes, sorry. no one said life is fair. [laughter] oren: people have in their heads that on climate change we can somehow like solve everything. i say, you know what else is a big problem? answer. but you do not create like, a cancer club on campus. if you want to be one of the

people solving cancer, go get molecular biology and be a cancer researcher. we need those. by the same token, we need a earth scientists and urban landowners dedicating their lives to this. you could make a difference that way. this is what it takes. your campus carpal is not going to get it done. carpool is not going to get it done. you very much. >> his study is called -- "overheated co- ." thank you for coming. i know also: season has

washington journal, live it every day with news and policy issues that impact you. morning, talking abouthe week ahead on capitol hill and out the white house. a discussion on redundant federal programs and the cost to american taxpayers. washington watch journal live at 7:00 a.m. eastern this morning. the discussion. >> congress returns this week from its memorial day holiday. the senate returns to debate president trump's judicial nominations. the house is back tuesday with 2019 federal spending on the agenda. this week a take up spending bills for energy and veterans ayers departments -- affairs departments.

then, working on reauthorize sizing isrealtor's reauthorize i -- tonight, on the communicators, amican cle association and telcomnd ceo senior vice resident of corporate affairs talk about issues facing rural and suburban broadband providers. >> 35% of our customers do not have access to a traditional cable provider. very rural and scope. we are the only provider. we work closely with the governme and sec with programs that make investments with companies like ours through the federal service program to bring broadband to customers that did not previously have it. to bring them more rich, robust

broadband. >> i think it is important as the administration, the fcc, and congress considers infrastructure and other concepts, that band has been determined to be a matter of important infrastructure to our countrand national policy. that is a change because we typically think of infrastructure is roads, railways, bridges. >> but you cannot survive today as a business, as an individual, someone working from home without having a robust broadband experience. announcer: watch tonight on c-span2. >> now, a forum on how consumers, corporations, and andrs face a surveillance