Yesterday's post on the trade-off between the need to expand use of fossil fuels in Africa and the wish to restrict carbon dioxide emissions seems to have stirred up a bit of a rumpus. Most commenters from the other side of the debate apparently deemed my question over the wisdom of access restrictions as entirely illegitimate, although the reasons why are somewhat unclear to me.
Firstly, as Roger Pielke Jr pointed out, in the real world there are trade-offs that have to be made.
The first of the papers contains this:
...under US Senate Bill S.329 (2013) the Overseas Private Investment Corporation – a federal agency responsible for backstopping U.S. companies which invest in developing countries – is essentially prohibited from investing in energy projects that involve fossil fuels, a policy that may have profound consequences in places like sub-Saharan Africa that are seeking to develop oil and gas resources to help alleviate widespread energy poverty.
I have heard no arguments that there isn't a trade off, so this is presumably not the reason why my questions are being declared off limits.
Ken Rice, of AndThenTheresPhysics says that my framing is malign although his allegation displays his normal attention to facts. Readers may recall that in the early days of his visits here I wrote a long piece explaining why climate science could only rely on physical models because of the difficulty in choosing a statistical model. To this, Rice responded, in effect, that I was an idiot and that climate scientists should be using physical models. Something similar seems to have happened here. I carefully framed my case as how to weigh deaths in the present against deaths, albeit hypothetical ones, in the future. This is the essence of the trade-off that has to be made and which is, according to Pielke Jr's paper, being made in favour of those not yet born and at the expense of those alive today. Rice says my framing is that:
...those who might be concerned about the risks associated with climate change [are not] concerned about the fate of poor people in the developed world.
But I specifically said this was not the case. My words were:
The accusation is not...that greens are callous about deaths in Africa.
As I explained, the choice is between real deaths now or hypothetical deaths later and all points in between. It is the choice that politicians are making right now. And, advised by climatologists and economists of the Stern/Fankhauser genre of the horrors to come and the costs to be borne, they have decided to do what they can to keep fossil fuels out of the hands of Africans. Who knows, it might even be the correct decision.
This is where the computer models of climatologists and the discounting choices of economists bang right up against the real world. The projections and predictions are no longer academic playthings to be bickered over at conferences and seminars, they are the tools with which our leaders make life-or-death decisions.
I hope scientists have the right caveats in place.
Bishop Hill