A new report confirmed the great insight of economics: There are no solutions, only trade-offs. We are told that weaning the United States off fossil fuels is going to poison the Inuit in Canada. I think the claim is a bit of a stretch, but it is being made.
The connection is that if we don’t burn coal or natural gas, then we need to get our energy from somewhere. If that’s from damming the Canadian rivers, then those vast hydropower lakes produce methylmercury, which then poisons the food chain. The concentration rises as we ascend the food chain, and given that we humans tend to be at the top, we’re the ones who suffer the most.
Despite my skepticism, let us assume that this explanation is correct. The correct answer is, as it almost always is, “How much?” How much of a problem is this particular form of pollution? To how many people? Because absolutely anything we do, and near all of the things we don’t, have an impact upon other people. We are, after all, all in this together.
If we produce our energy from that saved sunshine that is fossil fuels, then we’ll boil the planet. If we produce from current sunshine, then we’ve got to mine for the rare metals that make photovoltaic cells. If we produce from the wind, then we’re going to chop some birds with the blades. Nuclear involves mining again, and that scares the environmentalists. If we produce energy from dams and turbines, then, possibly, we’re going to poison seals and thus disrupt the Inuit lifestyle. We do not have the alternative of not having the energy — without it, nearly all of the 7 billion of us will die.
So, the question is: Which energy production methods give us the most energy at the least cost?
This does not mean cost as in mere money, the usual accusation thrown at economists. I’m not talking about how many dollars it takes to produce the energy one way or the other. We do use the dollar as a measure, but that’s only because we want to be able to do sums. What we’re trying to do is to set these varied costs (mines, seals, birds, boiling) against each other so we can see which is the largest. Then we can avoid that energy generation method and use one or more of those with lower costs. Saying that some part of the environment is priceless doesn’t work either, for that is to say that it’s without price or, the other way of saying the same thing: without a value.
Once we’ve made the decision that we’d like our own species to carry on existing, then there is no solution. There’s only that series of trade-offs. Even when we insist that we must walk more lightly upon Gaia’s corpse, it still becomes how lightly, for we shall never be weightless. So, what is it we’re going to do? The least cost would seem to be to discomfit some few thousand hunter-gatherers and their lifestyle that producing the trade-off of the least cost for the benefit. But even if we disagree with that conclusion, we cannot escape the simple reality that the trade-off is there; the decision has to be made.
There is, after all, no free lunch — even of mercury-free seal.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
