In their regular column in the NYT magazine on Sept. 16, economists Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt insinuate that Jane Fonda is "one of the biggest global warming villains of the past 30 years." I've admired the work of these two men in the past--they're iconoclastic, and I enjoy seeing conventional wisdom shaken up as much as the next guy. In their book Freakonomics they use the conceptual frames and tools of economics to come to some interesting and startlingly original insights, including the conclusion that it wasn't mandatory sentencing laws and other elements of the conservative law-and-order platform that led to the reduction of crime we experienced in the 1990s; a large part of the turn-down can be counted as an unintended positive effect of Roe v. Wade, as fewer unwanted (and poorly parented) male children were born.
But when Dubner and Levitt insinuate that Jane Fonda is to blame for global climate change, they're not thinking clearly at all, let alone thinking as iconoclastic economists. They're pandering to the conservative right, particularly those among them who would distill complex issues into simple scapegoating--something any self-respecting intelligent thinker ought to avoid. And, pandering aside, they're just plain wrong.
The authors are careful never actually to assert that Fonda, through the movie China Syndrome and her ensuing campaigning against nuclear power, is directly responsible for increasing emissions of greenhouse gases; instead, they ask questions. "If you were asked to name the biggest global-warming villains of the past 30 years," Jane Fonda's name wouldn't spring to mind; "But should it?" Later in the piece they allow that "anyone hunting for a global-warming villain...can't help wondering" if she played a major role.
Their argument, such as it is: the U.S. turned away from nuclear power because of the movie that Jane Fonda made dramatizing the dangers of nuclear power. The movie was widely popular; "and so, instead of becoming a nation with clearn and cheap nuclear energy, as once seemed inevitable, the United States kept building power plants that burned coal and other fossil fuels."
This reductive interpretation of historical causality has got to account for one other major event: the accident at Three Mile Island that happened March 28, 1979, twelve days after the movie was put into national release. For Dubner and Levitt, no problem: the accident was inconsequential, and was blown out of proportion only because of the movie. To get there, they have to hide some information. "There was no meltdown through to the other side of the earth--no 'China syndrome,'" they tell their readers, and they report that there was "no...significant damage, except to the plant itself," but they don't report that some of that significant damage was indeed a meltdown of fuel rods. And, in a remarkable denial of what we know about radiation--and of the kinds of statistical methods that have played a major role in their other writing--the authors say "Although some radiation was released," there were no deaths or injuries from the accident. Any release of radiation will produce statistically significant changes in the rates (and probabilities) of cancers downwind; we know that. In this piece, our two iconoclastic economists seem to have disavowed a couple of icons well worth keeping around: a scholar's commitment to truth and accuracy, and the proven truths of physics and statistical analysis.
Dubner and Levitt have an interesting point about the difference between risk and uncertainty: the former can be calculated, the latter cannot. And there may be a grain of truth in their speculation about reasons for renewed interest in nuclear energy: "Could it be that nuclear energy, risks and all, is now seen as preferable to the uncertainties of global warming?" Maybe; maybe, as one of their nice little social-science anecdotes concludes, people are reasonable to prefer the devil they know to the one they don't.
This weighing of risk versus uncertainty is classic cost-benefit analysis, the bread-and-butter of economic thinking. But if Dubner and Levitt wanted to be extend their iconoclastic practice, they would bring a different kind of cost-benefit analysis to bear on this subject: net energy accounting. The relevant question with energy infrastructure (like coal-fired power plants, distribution lines, nuclear plants) isn't: "do we get the most energy for our dollar from this system, or that system?" but this question: "do we get the most calories out per calorie invested from this system or that system?"
Traditional cost-benefit analysis based soly on cost leads to a skewed result, unless the negative and positive externalities of each system are, through public policy, represented as part of the cost. The idea of "negative externality" doesn't enter into Dubner and Levitt's thinking here at all, though they describe a couple of the major ones: there's that annoying tendency of humans to be fallible, even when their technology demands perfection, and failure leads to emission of radiation, a "cost" imposed (in the form of reduced life expectancy) on people nearby; and there's that barbed wire fence that surrounds the bunker-office in which they interview the chief operating officer of the utility that runs the remaining Three Mile Island reactor. Nuclear plants are terrorist magnets; part of the cost of adding nukes to our energy infrastructure is the risk of terrorist attack--and the money (and energy) we spend, and the loss of civil liberties we endure, to reduce that risk.
The mainstream neoclassical tradition will tell you that internalizing externalities improves market efficiency, though in practice most neoclassical economists treat environmental and civil-liberty externalities as if they didn't exist. Our supposedly iconoclastic economists could have scored a few easy points against the failing icons of neoclassical economics if they had pointed this out; but no, they fell in line with the tradition. They could have been even more iconoclastic if they had turned to net energy accounting for their cost-benefit analysis of nuclear plants. That would have been difficult: here there is no generally accepted standard, no generally accepted result for nuclear plants. Difficulty is sometimes an indicator of value: it would have been helpful for them to limn the debate, instead of cheap-shotting Jane Fonda.
From what I've seen, it seems very likely that nukes are a poor energy investment. They may well take as much energy to build, maintain, dissassemble, store, protect, and mine uranium for as they deliver into the electrical grid. Even if the Energy In/Energy Out ratio for nuclear plants is slightly positive, nukes lose on two other considerations:
The definitive element isn't whether the EI/EO ratio is positive, but whether its positive ratio is larger per dollar spent than the EI/EO
ratio of alternative technologies. This is classic marginal utility analysis--another of the powerful tools of neoclassical economics that our iconoclasts don't bring to bear. And here, nukes lose.
Beyond calories, you still have to count externalities, and here nuclear power is also the clear loser. The costs of nuclear power in terms of health risks and security risks are considerable, and are considerably larger than those of renewable and alternative energies. And a final thought: if we build an energy infrastructure that is incompatible with the exercise of the civil liberties we hold as Americans, the cost of that infrastructure includes, as an externality, the loss of our heritage of Constitutional freedoms. How much is that worth?