be sure to join us july 21st and 22nd. when we feature the visit to alaska. alaska weekend on c spab, c-span.org and listen to the app manhattan institute senior fellow oren cass his study "overheated: how flawed analyses overestimate the costs of climate change." served as a domestic policy advisor to mick romney's 2012 presidential campaign. this is about 45 minutes. your i could have attention, please. thank you. thanks very much, very much for coming today. i'm brian colon anderson, the editor of city journal. [ clapping ] pleasure to reat

introduce today's taker. fellow at is a senior the manhattan institute, where he focuses on a range of vital topics. including energy, the environment is his topic today anti-poverty policy. and he has become a regular and welcome presence in city journalism. we have released a video oren cass discussing environmental policy with john stos ill, the first of several broadcasting city journal films with stos ill tv. since posting yesterday, the has achieved 300,000 downloads already. a lot of ing attention. [ clapping ] now whatever he's writing or speaking about, oren cass does with authority and imagination, we helps flan calls him one of

the 50 thinkers, doers politics.ing american his reputation about grow with the arrival this fall of the this brilliant book, on the future of the american labour how we can g an economy in which workers from will backgrounds flourish, it's the once and future worker that will be publishing him. oren cass arriving was the domestic policy romney's from mitch campaign. he holds a ba in political from williams college, and a j.d. from harvard where an editor of the harvard law review. is based on a much-discussed paper for the manhattan institute will show how faulty assumptions distorted the argument about climate change by dramatically overestimating its potential cost.

topic, itten about the about climate policy in general "the wall street journal," foreign affairs, he's testified before house and committees, he's briefed the e.p.a. white house are. m.i.t. and the university of texas and appeared on m p.r. bbc. he "the wall street journal" describes the work in the area elviseration of kat as rofism. now, for the question period after the talk, i will field please, ask s and, concise questions so we can get them in and identify yourself once the mike arrives. long-winded rds, no statements before you ask a question. with that, let me hand things

cass. to oren >> all right. thank you very much. that was the official first plug for the book. we can get 300,000 downloads of that as well. we'll be off to the races. thank you for coming. especially from a rescheduled event. rescheduling it stood, not tomorrow. the t enough emails from first "your climate talk" was cancelled for weather the. uncement i didn't need a second time. i want to talk about the paper out over a week ago, climate ks at the way costs are estimated. and so it's important to 2000 not a talk about climate science, i think most is good. literature, the they tend to be conservative. to couch the language

well and do a lot of important work. problem comes when peep interested in -- people on agenda in taking area take the finings and translate into what they find scare, that did what i call commiment economics. you o climate economics, have to start with greenhouse it to assion, translate temperature increase, translate that to changes in the environment. and an effect on society, and that to a cost in dollars. only not to say that's the way to measure climate costs, it's the one that economists scary on, and the sounding newspaper headlines and policies proposals focus on. to do itly if you want right you have to ploi a lens human conquest. it happens over sentureies, the changeslk about and effect on society.

it doesn't do to imagine it happened tomorrow. will ave to ask what happen as the temperatures changes over a long period of time. human society evolves independent of climate change and in response to climate that may happen. climate change versus climate change economics. trends, o talk about a which is to ignore the hard steps in the middle. headline he recent grabbing studies that you may passing don't senior changes or human progress. they do a temp tire knack core lings study. today, what study happens when we see minor variations from year to year, human e effect on mortality, economic growth, let's productivity, and

imagine that that relationship for 100 years. it we find that in a year, has one extra hot day. let's assume that at some point in the future you have 100 clues days. obviously 4,000 people will die. take the preach you take numbers. they are not related to reality, they describe a universe in which people don't adapt. we assume no adaptation as if that makes it okay. i could write a study saying assumes martians land on earth and fix climate change, the cost that i extrapolate from that is not good. and the cost extrapolated from people that don't adapt doesn't

tell us anything useful about climate change. this is an example of this, published on nature. "the washington post." studies find economic productivity is cut. forum. world economic bringing fresh air inside to an important topic. they did. at i apologise, this chart is complicated, but it's important to understand how the studies are done. andy looked at each country said how does growth change in years that are hotter than average or colder than for the country. they tried to establish a relationship. bottom. ook at the here is different countries. countries that cold do a little better on growth in warmer years. iceland. the upward slant. warmer years, slightly better growth. they found very hot countries

do slightly worse in hot years. maui, hatter year, lower growth. extrapolated a curve valid for all countries showing that the ideal temperature is 13 degrees celsius. that. are colder than the closer your temperature so 30 degrees celsius, the better you'll be. if you are warmer than that. you have less growth every year. world is warmer. be lower and ill lower. this is from the study. adding anything new. this is how it happens for the united states. look at that in 2010. we are just about at optimal growth. average temperature 30 degrees celsius, let's assume we are growing, hurnz -- 2100 we'll be

four degrees warmer, we'll 2 percentage degrees of growth every year to 2100. is forecasted growth this century without climate change. warmer, the distance between average growth and our climate growth is bigger and bigger. by 2100 we are not really growing at all, because it's warmer. >> that produces a change in the per capita income over time. without climate change, the line goes up. with climate change, the red per capita flat lines. the united states is hard to say. plausible. wildly implausible. let's look at what they did for iceland. iceland starts cold. as they get warmer, growth goes up. panel. middle instead of having regular growth. come up with a projection that ice land will grow at more year by 2100 and

growth accelerating. right. look on the instead of standard growth. capita surges past $1.5 million per person per year. making iceland by far the wealthiest country in the world to climate change. so this is the output for a bunch of countries. china and india - because they are very hot - essentially grow. by 2100 india's economy is contracting at 4% a year. united states gets to maybe capita income. there's mongolia. 400,000 per capita. and there is iceland. now, and again, i want to to hasis martially not take -- partly not to take

credit. i did not take credit. you can down loot the numbers and put it into your chart. i asked the authors to respond. heard a response. hopefully it's the start of a how we nversation about should think about climate economist. these f you think relationships may hold, you can find dramatic costs for climate change. over all, economics out put is lower than it 20% would otherwise be globally, thanks to climate change. to believe that you have believe we are embarking on mongolian century. finland the world's canada's economy seven times bigger than china, which shrinking. est and why may it not be true. at it mportant to laugh but it thing will assumption, not wrong.

one analysis, the way economists do analysis is to regressions saying assuming other things is equal, what is the effect of this one thing. what is the effect of getting a college education on your today.gs sense to run no the analysis with the project in 2100 - but that is what we are trying to do here. it assumes that the response to small random changes in weather from year to year will be comparable to the response for large changes. whatever the effect of a 10th of a degree changes what you may find. assume if the temperatures changes can be 40 will bigger, the effect be bigger. it assumes week correlations of power. you'll not be surprised to learn the statistical significance of proving the warmer years on economic growth is not very good. it, in fact, fails with every

statistical test i'm aware of checking whether you found a significant result. when your correlation is not at bun, and you magnify to this way, you are likely to end far off. if we want to think about climate change instructively, think about adaptation, and to understand that it's not something you adaptation, i e, don't have to think about this. phenomenon that we have to study. that will have policy implications that we should care about. there's a lot of different kinds. biophysical. you feel different in a place that is hot. day than you do on a cold day. there's behaviourural. you look at how atlanta deals with snowfall - i'm a bostonian, you new yorkers don't do great. accustomed to e

giving conditions, you get better at dealing with it. technological. you develop technology yis, adapt stations. we don't play baseball in the do in florida. some places have a siesta in day. iddle of the there's a lot of different ways to cope with climate. there's economics. different things we produce in different parts of the the kinds of jobs that people do, everything changes. of the market.nt if you recognise that the market is going to act over this period. to recognise that one of the things it will do well is respond to some of these changes. so if you believe these things are happening, you have to adaptations that are cost effective may not be cost effective in response to smaller shifts. one reason you can't from a little to a

big change, people will not day ond to one extra hot the way they respond to 40 extra hot days. adaptations that are cost effective in response to permanent changes may not in variation. if i told you next year the average temperature in new york in the summer would be 10 degrees hotter. there are some things you can do. make sense to t reconfigure new york to be a it may beace, because done again. for the to aim expected temperatures. only with the change does it at all.nse to adapt this has made it into the u.s. government making process. i want to run through finding a finding how mples pervasive it is, or the failure adaptation is. >> this is a c.a.o. study that came out. attempting to highlight costs

in the us. they went and found the two done, that were large synthesis of all the costs people could think much. one was climate change in the united states benefits action by the e.p.a. and one was american climate perspective done by a group called rowedium. here are the costs pound by 2100. all the costs are in the buckets and come from three things, from heat quality. cline in air more 's hotter, we have smog related to more deaths. from extreme temperatures, it's so hot people die. much when 't work as it's hot. those are --ing for 80% of come from the same set. small set of studies. here is how the studies are

done. temperature treme on working hours. one e authors did actually of the better analysis. - the ooked at do people sensis asks people to track what they do for a day. with hot day, do people report working fewer hours. found no, there's no effect. if you focus on at risk industries. people doing intensive labour an doors, you can find temperature is 100 degrees, people work an hour less. what you can conclude is if we have more 100 degree days, people will work less. to the be a cost economy. something else they found was look in the u summer how much people work in at risk industries, people

in the warmest work more than in the coolest counties. while it's true that on a hot less, it's not true once you take into account local climbs a you find any effect at all that is discernible. people who like the study respond is, there could be other factor. we are not taking into account. there could be other things places where m people work more. a response. different in all places. in how it looks for 100 years. they'll respond to those. cost could be economic north of the country they have make work on the construction project. the ground is frozen. zero. degrees below it's all we cope with.

evidence does not suggest that work less. similar phenomenon where warmer left.ties, people work you can find if you look on when there's hot cases. there's higher mortality. study said of the thanks to cold days. death.l get fewer hot days cause more deaths. the net effect is 60,000 deaths by 22100 each year. a second study that said i wonder what happened in and 2000. 50

as people installed airconditioning. up with le that came this chart site this study, finding the impacting cases of 80 degrees declined by 75%. rate ofhim despite citing this- despite citing this study they the, what if we only use view that acknowledges no progress over time. if you do that you get a big number. if you put in the revised steps aced on air-conditioning, you find you have saved lives from climate change. back of theough envelope, not a gold standard study. you would want to go overall their data and reanalyze it properly to understand what happens with that adaptation. but the no adaptation view is certainly not the right one.

one study i enjoys the epa approach to mortality. they looked at each individual city and said there is a distribution of days in the city. let's look, pittsburgh would be a favorite example, at what happens on extremely hot and extremely cold days. this is a day with a load tempter of 71 degrees, the temperature- a low of 71 degrees, the hottest 1% of days, and you have a high mortality on those days. what if pittsburgh warms but we don't moved the dashed that we --'t move the dashed lines we don't move the dashed lines. why those lines would never move is never explained but if you manye that by now you have times more hot days, then you can produce this. in 2100, thehat

pittsburgh fatality rate from extreme heat will be 75 times higher than what phoenix or houston or new orleans experiences today, even though phoenix and new orleans are hotter today and pittsburgh will be in 2100. interestingly, these guys didn't adaptation and said we should also acknowledge it reduced the cost by two thirds. but that is not something the epa includes in its cost estimates. those of the cost estimates that contribute to our understanding that climate change will be hugely costly in the united states. box thatbig, dark blue the epa cut was the most important thing about climate change ends up amounting to this. these are two pollutants, ozone and particulate matter.

for each one you can see the atmospheric concentration in 2000 and 2050. we have made a lot of progress, and then you can see if nothing else changed between 2015 and 2100, the effective pollution of heat causing higher pollution concentration causes it to bump up a little bit. bumps, the epae says is worth roughly 50,000 lives are 900 early billion dollars -- $930 billion a year of cost, so this is the cost of climate change according to the epa. want to emphasize climate cost can be real without being catastrophic. a lot of things we saw there were actual costs we have to cope with. if everyone is going to adopt air-conditioning in response to heat, we need to account that we are going to need a lot more air-conditioning. we might have slightly higher pollution levels than we would

otherwise have. we may need to take into account that we have more hot days that affect manual labor outdoors. but it turns out we know well how to do it and we know how to do it because we have dealt most of western civilization and areas that freeze over every year. this is chicago a couple of years ago. there are days and even weeks when people in cities like chicago and boston can't spend much time outside. s knight ideal. it would be wonderful if radware in the country was like santa barbara, but it's not. [laughter] recognize that those costs exist and we want to cope with them without believing that seeing more of this is somehow the end of the world or it warrants more costly economic interventions that would do more harm than good. thank you very much. [applause]

host: i am sure there are a bunch of questions, so let's ask them. audience member: you said that you asked the authors for response. did they ignore your request? they said they are going to respond. i hope they do. they know these studies better than i do and i would like to understand the thinking that went into it. but both from reading third-party coverage of their studies that they presumably endorsed at the time, and also from corresponding with a lot of them in the process of developing this, my sense is that generally speaking, this is

what the research says, but certainly would like to think what they -- would like to hear what they think about it. to get someld like people from the back as well. audience member: what is your assessment of the literature about sea level rise, and the economics and potential risks? oren: sea level rise is interesting because it is one of the areas where we have the best data that we know something is happening, and the worst projections of what that will ultimately look like. the evidence that sea level has risen and continues to rise is very good. what that will look like in 2100, the gold standard u.n. report estimates about two feet of c-level rise. 2013 isears since then, when it came out, and since then

some studies have said that is on the low side because we might see more activity in a place like antarctica than was encapsulated there. so now you hear people say more like four feet or five feet of a rise over the century. the interesting thing of estimating the cost of that is that it doesn't tend to show up very much in these studies. some of these studies look at sealevel rise and the reason it doesn't show up is that it is a one-time cost. you get thisotter, death number and you say that happens every year forever. rise, you have the value of all the coastal property, but you can only wipe it out once. so whatever sealevel rise you believe might occur between now and 2100, you have to take that and divided by 100. i have to start saying divided by 80 since we are closer to 2020. figure, youry large could say we have trillions of

dollars of assets at risk, but when you take into account how much they are going to depreciate over the course of the century anyway, and you divide the loss out by how much you are going to get in a given year, the actual per-your cost doesn't turn out to be very high. i think it's one of the most important issues to understand well from a policy-planning perspective, because where we make infrastructure investments, how we ensure coastal property, those things will matter and continue to matter. beyond waving your hands and yelling watcher world, -- worldr,",ate there's no sense in making it from an economic standpoint. audience member: what about hearing that wild wever and floods -- wild weather and floods will interfere with food production? oren: there is the concern about wild weather and droughts and

there is concern about food production. the reality is that for the most part, an effect on food production is more the effect of the gradual shift in underlying climate. our farms are in places that might be warmer, and in particular you see yields decline when temperatures get above a certain level. as with the c-level problem, the thing you find when you dig into the agricultural estimates is that the timeframe over which we might adapt is wildly longer than the timeframe we need to adapt. what i mean by that is, let's 50% of our agricultural production is going to have to change,cause of climate if that is true, if there were even that large, you would say that is adding about half a percent a year of new capacity somewhere.

that is significantly smaller than the amount of new capacity we added to our global system every year anyway. so as long as we have an understanding as we are heading capacity of which places are likely to be less productive in the future, there is no reason to believe that climate change is going to catch up with our infrastructure, faster than our infrastructure moves relative to climate change. here?over thank you. wonderingember: i'm if these models have been tested going back in time, let's say 1950, applying the data and seeing if where we are now, given what those models predicted then? the economic models. host: -- oren: one of the challenges with economic models is that you can't really test them going back because you don't have large swings in climate going back. with the models do is use the data from over the years to find

the nature ofbut that behavior that you can measure doesn't look anything like the behavior you are trying to map it to. one data point i think should be more relevant than it is is that we have 50 years of population data and we know people prefer to live in warmer climates, and in the united states, the trend is to move out of the northeast, the area that is supposed to benefit most from climate change from a climate perspective, and to much much hotter places. you could say people are doing that against their interests and are going to die and be less productive when they do that, and you do get that big swing. when i moved from new york to arizona i'm getting more than the full effect of climate change. they you could say that they are just full.

the effects aren't as big as we are worried about, and once again, there are so many things that people care about is that they wash out the effect. and in the u.s., where we see the population moving, we don't say, it's getting warmer, is that a catastrophe? the effect and the capacity for adaptation looks different if you are talking about an area of the developing world that has that technology, less government, lest infrastructure and is more reliant on infrastructure and outdoor manual labor one thing i think that is a constructive way to do better research is not to take , but toe of analysis recognize that there is important analysis to be done. and just because you look at the

-- doesn't mean there are other places that this would look different for. audience member: why are some so invested in catastrophe, and resist the flaw that you point out in their estimation? what do they have to gain from this? ? oren: that's a loaded question. one matter is that it's all about self-interest and political agendas. that just begs the question is why that is their agenda and what they have chosen to be activist about. one thing that i have done research about is understanding the actual differences in someone like me, and someone who might worry more about these costs worry about. what are the assumptions where

making and why are we making them? more think what you find often if you worked down what's called the latter of assumption in psychology, is two things. one is a very different understanding of the future, and how we should think about the future relative to today. a lot of the estimates and fear that you hear really does assume we are going to apply all things that happen, like what if they happened tomorrow. that's one effect. the second one is something we have seen in environmentalism for a very long time, which is a discomfort with industrialization and its affect on the environment. the errors in assumption not -- assumption that i am talking about here are the exact same ones that led to fears about the population bomb in the 1960's, the limits to growth and this belief that we didn't have enough resources in the 1970's,

and take oil. climate change is the next argument like that. and like those, the underlying facts under them aren't necessarily wrong. if you go back to what paul ehrlich wrote and how many people are going to be bernanke how muchto be born and food we produce, there is a disconnect between those numbers. weyou look at the oil that produce and the oil we consume, there is a disconnect. these feel like they will be problems and there will be places where they create pressures but they are also likely things that we will find ways to cope with. host: back there. audience member: following up on the previous question, what is

one big thing that al gore got right, and what is one big thing that al gore got wrong? [applause] will answer in vague terms because i don't pay much attention to what al gore says. al gore has been a very destructive force in the climate debate. the things that he says that are an accurate obviously do a direct the service to the debate, but they also encourage people from the other side to say climate science is a joke. i'm sure he knows something about climate science but he is not doing climate science. and folksl gore focused on that kind of climate communication, something they outright, this is a cop answer, but something they got

right is that they can be very effective with their climate communication. [laughter] the climate industrial marketing complex that has risen up to find ways to make climate change sound scary is very impressive and very effective. you can go to seminars and become a certified al gore climate corps communicator, and learn about the way. and you see this with the thanksgiving columns, how to talk to your drunk uncle about climate change. and is a real thing especially find speaking on college campuses has been very effective. you have an entire generation of people who are scared and emotionally distraught. and given what the actual fact look like, it is very impressive that they have been able to do that. what i think he gets wrong is every thing else i have been talking about

[laughter] and this goes back to a point about environmentalism. it's not like al gore discovered science -- discovered climate change and decided to be an environmentalist. focused since the 1980's on these narratives, and they make for compelling documentaries but the map i did doesn't match up very well with reality. few: there is time for a more questions. let's start at the back and move forward. wait for the mike, please. if you lookber: from 1975 to 1995, there has been a net migration in the united states from north to south. a significantbeen increase in average temperature. do we need to conclude people to positionsove

where there will be a worse economic clement -- economic climate? question andgreat a great way to look historically and try to discern something. i was exchanging emails with an author who does this kind of research and he was pushing me to criticizefine the studies as not being constructive, but then what is constructive? if we want to know about climate change, how should we study it? and i said, just because economists learn about statistical regressions in graduate school doesn't mean it is the right way to study climate change. aside from the earth science side of it, it is frankly more of a sociological study. it is understanding in this country, what are the adaptations people make him a how and why do they make them, what is the cost of that? -- it is comparing

across countries and saying how does manufacturing in singapore compared to manufacturing in germany? those insights would be much more powerful than some of this. audience member: i'm interested in your thoughts about the timeframe of that adaptation. has been fact that it a ignored here and we do have two included, it seems to me the timeframe is important. we talked about people deciding to live in the deep south versus living in new england. they have developed economies on that. shorter timeframe is the air-conditioning, maybe decades we are talking about. we have a given timeframe for the climate change. it is going to be 50 years or something like that. and tom friedman is on his high horse now, the problem with our society is that everything is changing faster and faster and we learn how to adapt shorter and shorter, which is why i can't figure out how to use my

iphone and things like that. how do you distinguish the things that can have adaptation in the timeframe we are talking about, as opposed to the ones that we are just going to be left behind even though we could adapt? oren: it's a perfect question to illustrate how we should be doing climate economic research and policy. let's literally start with a list of all the things, all the effects that climate change might have, the time periods, the adaptations and the time periods of those. i haven't done the full exercise but from some prominent examples, things like adopting air-conditioning is not a big problem. something like c-level rise starts to feel like a bigger problem, if you are talking about the physical infrastructure of the country. and a time frame like 80 years on the one hand, that is an awfully long time for cities to be in different places.

on the other hand, how different does manhattan look in a lot of ways from the way it did? subways for instance not a lot of progress in 80 years. [laughter] so public transportation might how we don'te of have a lot of confidence that a big city is going to be able to adapt, at least on its own. it's not impossible. it would be responsible to ask, what would it take to have a public transportation system that was adapting on the timeframe that we need? generally, in terms of economics, it comes down very much to the capital cycle. it is how long are investments being made for? are we going to have time to make the next round of investments in response to what we see in the climate as it is happening? or are we going to make investments now that would be

costly in the future because we don't necessarily get them right? and it's important to recognize climate change isn't all economics. there are all sorts of other ways in which you would say you are going to have disruptions to social traditions that people really value. from an ecological perspective it is actually interesting, at least the u.n. report finds the destruction from climate change withd be roughly on par the destruction humanity has already created from land use change. we are to have a sense of what that looks like. it is not the end of the world but it is also some real tragedies. so i think it's important not to only talk about it in a dollar context, but to also force anyone discussing it to be comfortable what we are talking about. are you telling me this is expensive and warrants an expensive response, or are you telling me this is one of one

million things that is going to change about our society, that we should be aware of? host: time for one more question. at the back of the room, just wait for the mike. have you spoken on campuses, and if so, what has been the reaction? oren: yes, i speak a lot on campuses. one of my favorite things to do because they are actually very interesting. in defense of the students on they are hearing one climate communication message, and they roughly perceive the other side to be, climate change isn't real. they don't hear a coherent explanation of why their might be something in between us two extremes. i don't think necessarily that listening to these 12 slides would necessarily persuade someone to stop thinking about climate change. but my experience has been that

it forces them to realize there are actually rational reasons that what they think is the obvious, we should be blowing up society to save ourselves from climate change answer, isn't the one that is actually being pursued. a most interesting question i preludes with a little on, i am super active in this or that on campus, and what you are telling me is distressing because everything i do and presentations is talk about why climate policy is in effective. we are going to see climate change. it is going to happen. it is sort of distressing, and it feels like all this activist work i am doing and you are telling me it is not going to accomplish anything and i shouldn't be doing it. and i say first of all, yes, sorry. [laughter] no one said life is fair. but secondly, it's very strange that people have in their heads this idea that on climate change we can somehow solve everything

if we feel strongly enough about it. say, cancer, that's a big problem, but you don't create a cancer club on campus to feel like you are solving cancer. if you want to be one of the people solving cancer, go get your degree in the neck killer -- go get your degree in molecular biology and cure cancer. we need those. we need earth science and urban planners to address their lives to these challenges, and you can make a difference that way. but that is what these problems take. your campus carpool is not going to get it done. i don't know if it makes them feel better but at least it is something for them to think about. feel like i have answered their questions. thank you very much. [applause] oren cass, thank you.

thank you all for coming. >> this language of attack, of harm, of damage, that by expressing an opinion that people don't like, you have inflicted an injury. i found that very striking and frankly rather frightening, if the truth be told, and quite emblematic of the way that the left is now responding to any sort of dissent, and especially trenches on identity grievance politics, which of course is everywhere and has infected everything. >> university of pennsylvania law school professor amy wachs