Is climate science really not a gravy train?
I just came across one of the sadder exercises in self-delusion on the subject that I’ve seen in a while. I’m being charitable when I say self-delusion, because alternative hypotheses would be less flattering to the author.
The piece appears in Ars Technica. John Timmer writes:
One of the more unfortunate memes that makes an appearance whenever climate science is discussed is the accusation that, by hyping their results, climate scientists are ensuring themselves steady paychecks, and may even be enriching themselves.
Sometimes I get weary of explaining the underbelly of political economy to people like Timmer. In fact, I admire writers like Timothy P. Carney who can do it almost every day. Sometimes the task seems Sisyphean, because there are so many unholy alliances in Washington.
In the above title I use Timmer’s reference to the “gravy train.” But Bjorn Lomborg’s trope is much better. It really is a Climate Industrial Complex. A sliver from Lomborg:
U.S. companies and interest groups involved with climate change hired 2,430 lobbyists just last year, up 300% from five years ago. Fifty of the biggest U.S. electric utilities — including Duke — spent $51 million on lobbyists in just six months.
Now, the immediate response to such a quote might be that this is just the way the sausage gets made in America. Rent-seeking behavior is just a part of the system. And companies, climate scientists and lobbyists that stand to benefit directly or indirectly from climate legislation, carbon markets, renewables mandates, tax credits, offsets and subsidies are a necessary evil that will keep us from the precipice of climate catastrophe.
Perhaps. But looks to me like a case of Bootleggers, Baptists and Bureaucrats. When these groups triangulate? They win! Economist Bruce Yandle described it best:
Durable social regulation evolves when it is demanded by both of two distinctly different groups. “Baptists” point to the moral high ground and give vital and vocal endorsement of laudable public benefits promised by a desired regulation. Baptists flourish when their moral message forms a visible foundation for political action. “Bootleggers” are much less visible but no less vital. Bootleggers, who expect to profit from the very regulatory restrictions desired by Baptists, grease the political machinery with some of their expected proceeds. They are simply in it for the money.
Now, Timmer may not be aware of this phenomenon. Or he may not think that climate scientists function as Baptists at all.
Timmer claims that they just don’t get that much remuneration from fudging numbers or jumping up and down. They certainly don’t profit the way the Bootleggers did under prohibition. Timmer:
Since it doesn’t have a lot of commercial appeal, most of the people working in the area, and the vast majority of those publishing the scientific literature, work in academic departments or at government agencies. Penn State, home of noted climatologists Richard Alley and Michael Mann, has a strong geosciences department and, conveniently, makes the department’s salary information available. It’s easy to check, and find that the average tenured professor earned about $120,000 last year, and a new hire a bit less than $70,000.
I guess the question of whether $120K is a lot of money is in the eye of the beholder. But when one considers the career prospects for climate scientists outside of places receiving government largess, this salary range looks pretty darn cushy. (Consider the behavior of teachers in Wisconsin. They’re locking arms in solidarity to keep the Gravy Line open in Madison for less than what Mann makes — though not by much. But I digress.) Maybe Timmer’s point is subtler: i.e. maybe you don’t necessarily have to nudge the numbers to have a decent salary.
Sometimes it’s not so much about the salary. There are a lot of ancillary benefits to being a climate catastrophist. Allow me to list some:
- People know your name. You enjoy fame.
- The New York Times writes about you. TV people interview you on the news.
- You get to wallow in rectitude as you shout your warnings to all of humanity.
- People pay you to speak at events.
- You enjoy higher status in the Guild that is higher education.
- You get more money for your department and your university than the quiet ones.
- Big wigs and corporate rent-seekers take you to lavish dinners (at least).
- Your journal articles provide fodder for the second-hand dealers and activists.
- You gain the veneration of your peers (if they buy your results).
- You’re “important” and you get to belong to elite clubs (like the IPCC).
All of this sounds pretty good to me. Once people get locked into these goodies, they have every incentive to dig in their heals. They have virtually no incentive to admit errors, revise their work or check their biases.
When you consider the above list of benefits, you might start to see how people like MIchael Mann fit into the Climate Industrial Complex. Of course, you can also follow the money. The web of inter-dependence is staggering once you really start looking.
Of course, the mainstream media and all those, like Timmer, who sip from the climate information cascades, want to believe the master narrative. They don’t want to think there are some nefarious forces behind this venal and wasteful web of relationships. Indeed, even if Michael Mann was able through computer models magically to limn our climate future to the last detail, we would still have to look at the Climate Industrial Complex and shudder.
So here we go again, offering the lessons of public choice theory. Climate change like most issues in Washington is an object less in what Nobel Laureate James Buchanan calls “politics without romance:”
If the government is empowered to grant monopoly rights or tariff protection to one group, at the expense of the general public or of designated losers, it follows that potential beneficiaries will compete for the prize. And since only one group can be rewarded, the resources invested by other groups—which could have been used to produce valued goods and services—are wasted. Given this basic insight, much of modern politics can be understood as rent-seeking activity. Pork-barrel politics is only the most obvious example. Much of the growth of the bureaucratic or regulatory sector of government can best be explained in terms of the competition between political agents for constituency support through the use of promises of discriminatory transfers of wealth.
Al Gore notwithstanding, it’s Buchanan’s work that won him the Nobel. We should pay attention.
But Timmer and most like him are unwilling to take such a holistic view. He prefers a narrow, linear explanation instead — one that shows no connection between, say, climatologists and solar energy supplicants:
[T]he industry that seems most likely to benefit from taking climate change seriously produces renewable energy products. However, those companies don’t employ any climatologists. They probably have plenty of space for engineers, materials scientists, and maybe a quantum physicist or two, but there’s not much that a photovoltaic company would do with a climatologist.
And there we are folks. John Timmer has just proven wrong anyone who has every employed the term “gravy train” to describe the state of climate science. There’s just one problem: he didn’t. He set up a straw man that looks vaguely like a climate skeptic and bashed it with a temperature-data hockey stick.
Whether or not climate scientists are right, serious questions remain about the Climate Industrial Complex and its utter dependence on little wizards like Mann standing behind the curtain at the end of the green brick road.
Indeed, even if the scientists are correct, most have hitched their cabooses to a gravy train composed of those who would drive us into an economic ravine. And that’s where the climate scientists are not only not experts, but where they are speaking out of turn. (I’m looking at you, James Hanson.)
Max Borders is a writer living in Austin. He blogs at Ideas Matter.
