Greenhouse gas emissions are fundamental both to the world’s energy system and to its food production. The production of CO2, the predominant gas implicated in climate change, is intrinsic to fossil fuel combustion; specifically, thermal energy is generated by breaking the chemical bonds in the carbohydrates oil, coal, and natural gas and oxidizing the components to CO2 and H2O. One cannot have cheap energy without carbon dioxide emissions. Similarly, methane (CH4) emissions, an important greenhouse gas in its own right, are necessary to prevent the build-up of hydrogen in anaerobic digestion and decomposition. One cannot have beef, mutton, dairy, or rice without methane emissions. Climate change is the mother of all externalities: larger, more complex, and more uncertain than any other environmental problem. The sources of greenhouse gas emissions are more diffuse than any other environmental problem. Every company, every farm, every household emits some greenhouse gases. The effects are similarly pervasive. Weather affects agriculture, energy use, health, and many aspects of nature—which in turn affects everything and everyone. The causes and consequences of climate change are very diverse, and those in low-income countries who contribute least to climate change are most vulnerable to its effects. Climate change is also a long-term problem. Some greenhouse gases have an atmospheric life-time measured in tens of thousands of years. The quantities of emissions involved are enormous. In 2000, carbon dioxide emissions alone (and excluding land use change) were 24 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (tCO2).

/pdf/the-economic-effects-of-climate-change-554ikwofp2.pdf

The Economic Effects of Climate Change

The food waste hierarchy as a framework for the management of food surplus and food waste

Cities are key sites where climate change is being addressed. Previous research has largely overlooked the multiplicity of climate change responses emerging outside formal contexts of decision-making and led by actors other than municipal governments. Moreover, existing research has largely focused on case studies of climate change mitigation in developed economies. The objective of this paper is to uncover the heterogeneous mix of actors, settings, governance arrangements and technologies involved in the governance of climate change in cities in different parts of the world.

The paper focuses on urban climate change governance as a process of experimentation. Climate change experiments are presented here as interventions to try out new ideas and methods in the context of future uncertainties. They serve to understand how interventions work in practice, in new contexts where they are thought of as innovative. To study experimentation, the paper presents evidence from the analysis of a database of 627 urban climate change experiments in a sample of 100 global cities.

The analysis suggests that, since 2005, experimentation is a feature of urban responses to climate change across different world regions and multiple sectors. Although experimentation does not appear to be related to particular kinds of urban economic and social conditions, some of its core features are visible. For example, experimentation tends to focus on energy. Also, both social and technical forms of experimentation are visible, but technical experimentation is more common in urban infrastructure systems. While municipal governments have a critical role in climate change experimentation, they often act alongside other actors and in a variety of forms of partnership. These findings point at experimentation as a key tool to open up new political spaces for governing climate change in the city.

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1386297/1/1386297.pdf

A survey of urban climate change experiments in 100 cities

The countries that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol have pledged to limit global warming by reducing the demand for fossil fuels. But what about supply? If suppliers do not react, demand reductions by a subset of countries are ineffective. They simply depress the world price of carbon and induce the environmental sinners to consume what the Kyoto countries have economized on. Even worse, if suppliers feel threatened by a gradual greening of economic policies in the Kyoto countries that would damage their future prices; they will extract their stocks more rapidly, thus accelerating global warming. The paper discusses the remaining policy options against global warming from an intertemporal supply-side perspective.

/pdf/public-policies-against-global-warming-a-supply-side-2nh4lcmsy4.pdf

Public policies against global warming: a supply side approach

(2008). The implications of projected climate change for freshwater resources and their management. Hydrological Sciences Journal: Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 3-10.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1623/hysj.53.1.3

The implications of projected climate change for freshwater resources and their management

The Review's executive summary states that "the Review first examines the evidence on the economic impacts of climate change itself, and explores the economics of stabilizing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The second half of the Review considers the complex policy challenges involved in managing the transition to a low-carbon economy and in ensuring that societies can adapt to the consequences of climate change that can no longer be avoided".

The report's main conclusion is that the benefits of strong, early action on climate change considerably outweigh the costs.

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc13733/m2/1/high_res_d/stern%20report.pdf

Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change

Here we revisit the decline of Indigenous populations of North America by using the concept of perceived risk. We argue that the root cause behind Indigenous depopulation in North America was not the lack of immunological defenses against novel pathogens introduced to the New World from the Old World, a hypothesis known as “Virgin Soil.” Certainly many Indigenous people died of disease, but so did many Euro-American colonizers. The populations of colonizers rebounded, as most populations do, but Indigenous populations could not recover because of colonizer violence and the persistent marginalization perpetrated against them. We show that European settlers promoted and practiced an ideology of domination based on an exaggerated perception of risk against Indigenous communities. On the basis of colonial prejudices, they created a distorted perception of Native Americans that depicted them as dangerous savages, un-Christian, and untrustworthy. Native Americans were seen as capable of damaging the life and property of the colonists and as incapable of being assimilated by them. Colonists assessed the Indigenous groups as an unacceptable and intolerable risk that had to be eliminated, irrespective of the financial cost of waging war on them. This ideology of risk has continued to impact the lives and well-being of Indigenous people for more than five hundred years as demonstrated by the elevated deaths from COVID-19 for Native Americans and other persons of color. Structural inequalities derived from the ideology of risk are behind the deaths of Indigenous people even today. Risk can be approached as the probability of occurrence of a hazardous event and its consequences (risk = probability of loss/gain * danger * exposure * vulnerability). Specialists in the social sciences know that risk involves a balance between profit and loss, and there is risk associated with every aspect of life (Douglas 1985; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982). Indeed, risk-aversion behaviors may bring high opportunity costs, such as the loss of income to individuals or groups, and may be irrational from the point of view of classical economic theory (Blaikie et al. 1994). High risk, high returns is at the core of modern financial and insurance markets, on which the modern economy relies. Nevertheless, the public approaches risk based on the negative consequences and threats to human life, on bodily injury, or on loss of welfare due to external dangers outside their control. Risk assessment by most laypeople tends to be based on perception, and it is easily manipulated by propagation of irrational fear. We argue that the fear of the “other” by American colonists created a colonial ideology that drove and justified policies of exclusion, violence, and marginalization toward Native Americans and other groups who did not comply with the racial and religious ideals of the colonists. As Thomas Jefferson said, “the two principles on which our Conduct towards the Indians should be founded, are justice and fear” (Conn 2004, 3). Although he referred to the need to create fear among Native Americans, in fact, this reflects an exaggerated perception of risk based on the fear that Europeans felt for Indigenous people. Beginning with the first European explorers, Indigenous people were seen as exploitable resources like the minerals, animals, and plants Europeans also desired. As part of the process of exploitation, Europeans defined them not only as less than human but as dangerous and requiring control. Soon after Columbus returned with news of a New World, Spanish rulers began to wrestle with the question of whether the newly discovered Indigenous populations could rightfully be enslaved. Enslavement of Indians was banned in the early 1500s by the Spanish Crown, but with exceptions: “cannibals” could be enslaved, natives could be taken in “just wars,” and people who had been slaves in Indigenous societies but were taken by the Spanish could remain slaves with new Spanish masters (Reséndez 2016, 41–42). Almost anyone could be easily slotted into one of these categories. The “othering” of Indigenous people had begun. Brutal treatment of Indigenous Americans began with the first two large expeditions through North America, led by Spaniards Hernando de Soto and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. During de Soto's 1538–42 expedition through the American Southeast, his chroniclers reported that his men attacked and killed Indigenous people, pillaged their goods, took many captives to carry the goods they had stolen, and took young women as sexual partners. Coronado's vast expedition from 1540 to 1542 traveled from Mexico City through what is now the southwestern United States and eventually out to the Great Plains. Along this route, his men killed any Indigenous people who resisted demands for food and supplies, took many prisoners, and sexually molested Indigenous women. Seventy years later, the English arrived and colonized eastern North America. They not only appropriated Native land and resources but also saw Natives as savages, largely beyond the redemption of civilization. For example, Pilgrims settling New England were tasked with converting the local Indians to Christianity, but Pilgrims saw themselves as the elect of God. Regardless of their attempts to conform to Christian teachings, Native Americans could never be full members of colonial communities (Thomas 1975). Throughout the seventeenth century, Pilgrim leaders allowed Natives to be attacked, bullied, and robbed by colonists, and when the Natives objected or fought back, they were brutally put down. As in other parts of North America, Anglo-American settlers defined themselves as the rightful owners of New World lands and enslaved, disinherited, killed, and misused Native peoples. There is no doubt that diseases introduced from Europe played a role in the collapse of Indigenous population numbers throughout the New World. The Virgin Soil account (Crosby 1976), pushed by scholars for decades, however, puts all the blame on disease and ignores the myriad factors that prevented Indigenous population numbers from recovering after a pandemic struck. Indigenous people have capable and effective immune systems just like any other population (Jones 2015). But they were not fighting only disease. Europeans enslaved, overworked, and starved them. Their land was appropriated, and they were either forced into marginal desert or mountain regions or herded into mission settlements where disease was even more rampant. Perhaps most devastating was the loss of Indigenous medical knowledge and caregivers. In California, Spanish agricultural and livestock practices quickly degraded the traditional resources that had long sustained Native peoples (Hull 2015). This left Native peoples few options other than to relocate to a mission or labor for a Spaniard on a nearby rancho. The result of these policies was the dispersal and collapse of Native communities, and with them went the social support and caregiving that had long sustained their members. Crowded conditions at missions contributed to the spread of disease, and harsh punishment by missionaries and associated military personnel led to poor health that rendered Natives susceptible to disease and death. Similarly, in Spanish colonial Florida, studies of human remains have shown that Natives forced into missions were overworked and underfed, had parasites, drank contaminated water, and generally suffered from poor health (Larsen 2015). When epidemic disease arrived, they were poorly prepared to fight it. Similar scenarios played out across the continent: As land and resources were appropriated by Europeans, Natives were forced into the bottom social strata of European settlements or retreated into remote and often barren lands where they struggled to survive. Such marginal social positions have ongoing health impacts, and recovering from epidemic disease was extraordinarily difficult for these dispossessed people. The ideology of an exaggerated perception of risk from the “others” created during the colonial period has endured the passage of time. The country's “founders” continued and formalized its practice under the name of Manifest Destiny, beginning with President Washington's policy of purchasing Indian land by forceful means through the Indian Removal Act of President Jackson and through General Sherman's policy to destroy the buffalo—and the Indigenous way of life in the Great Plains. This policy was also applied to Mexicans from Texas to California after the Mexican–American War, since they were mixed-blood people (mestizo), in which European qualities had been diluted by miscegenation with Indian women. In addition, Mexicans practiced Spanish Catholicism and therefore were perceived as participants in fictitious popish plots against Protestantism. Africans imported to the Americas beginning in the sixteenth century joined Native Americans and Hispanic Americans as a marginalized underclass. The effects of the recent COVID-19 pandemic on these minority groups mirror the devastation Native groups have suffered since Europeans arrived. During the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have learned that the death rate is higher for Black American (2.8 times), Hispanic (2.8 times), and Native American (2.6 times) groups than it is for white, non-Hispanic people. This is a reflection of an ideology of risk toward others that has maintained historically constructed inequities in which Native American, Hispanic, and Black communities are poor, forced to live in more densely populated neighborhoods and in smaller houses shared with extended families, afforded less access to healthy diets, and forced to perform jobs with greater health risks and with limited or no access to medical insurance. This colonial ideology of risk created a disaster process that has been unfolding for the last five hundred years in the territories that currently form the United States of America. 

Catherine Cameron

Papers

Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change

Not just disease: Ideology of risk and Indigenous population decline in North America