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Jisung Park: So the reason why the so-called
hidden costs of climate change are so important are in part
because they're often subtle and
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hard to notice. But the
data increasingly suggests that they're quite pervasive. So
whether that's things like how
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temperature affects worker
productivity, or safety and health on the job, or even
something like cognitive
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performance at work or in
school, there's increasingly evidence to suggest that even a
so-called non-catastrophic
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warming scenario, even a little
bit of warming, can adversely affect the economic machinery of
our day to day lives in
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important ways. Dan Loney: Welcome to the Ripple Effect,
the podcast that takes you on a
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journey through the minds of
Wharton faculty. I'm your host, Dan Loney. And in each episode,
we'll be diving deep into the
00:00:46
inspiration behind the
groundbreaking research that Wharton professors have
conducted, and exploring how
00:00:52
their findings resonate with the world today.
Dan Loney: Well, the focus on climate change has many people
looking at the impacts of global
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warming. And in many instances,
the costs can be somewhat hidden, but can be very
important nonetheless. Many of
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these are everyday implications.
Pleasure to be joined right now by Dr. Jisung Park, who is an
Associate Professor in the
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School of Social Policy and
Practice here at the University of Pennsylvania. Jisung is also
author of the book, <i>Slow Burn:</i>
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<i>The Hidden Costs of a Warming
World.</i> Jisung, great to have you
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with us today. - Dan, it's great to be here. And I hope
to be associate one day, I'm
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still an assistant professor,
but thank you for that vote of confidence. - My apologies. I apologize for
that. And I guess it is that
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component of everyday cause that
you focus on in the book that is very important to this overall
kind of viewing of where we are
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thinking about
global warming. - That's right, Dan. And if I
could just take a quick step
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back. You know, a primary
motivation behind a lot of my research, and certainly the book
has been to help decision makers
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and the public at large develop,
you know, a better familiarity with these, what you're calling
everyday costs of climate
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change. And I think to
understand why that's important, it helps to take a step
back, to think about the
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historical context, right?
Historically, I think many of our viewers, your viewers are
used to thinking about climate
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change, if they were thinking
about climate change at all, as sort of a planetary catastrophe
insurance, right? Like, you've
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heard terms such as
uninhabitable Earth, extinction, rebellion, right? It's not
uncommon for us to think about
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climate change in terms of the
broader framing, as sort of we succeed and we prevent, you
know, planetary collapse. Or
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we don't, and we're just
completely doomed. And I think, you know, it's important,
increasingly, as more and more
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of the public, and more and more
business leaders and decision makers grapple with this issue,
as, you know, not just a
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tangential issue, but
potentially a core issue to our decision making, to really
become more familiar with, okay,
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what are the -- what does the data
say about the so-called non- catastrophic consequences of
climate change? And that isn't
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because, you know, the framing
of acting on climate change as a form of catastrophe insurance is
incorrect. I think there's a lot
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of evidence to suggest that, to a
first order, that's probably the right framework to use. But just
from a practical perspective, as
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we think about how to sustain
our, you know, engagement with and political will to move
forward, in terms of
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decarbonisation, which, you
know, is -- it's much more of a dial than a switch than I think
most people tend to talk about
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it or think about it as. And as
we think about, you know, adaptation, right? What kinds of
practical decisions need to be
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made, whether you're a mayor or
a principal or a business leader, to help adapt your
organization's operations to
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the effects of climate change
that are already happening. I think that's sort of the
motivation behind really trying
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to focus on the data-driven
implications of the everyday costs. - So give us an example of this.
Because from what you just said,
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you were saying a mayor or a
principal. And those are obviously two important jobs,
but in many cases, they're very
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different jobs. And so it feels
like there's a kind of a wide range of areas we can look at
when you're talking about the
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impact of these costs associated
with climate change. - Absolutely, Dan. And I have to
say, you know, as someone who
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has been working in this area
for several years, actually over a decade now, I continue to be
amazed at what the data tells us,
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or the scope of ways in which
climate change may already be affecting us. So I'm thinking
about research that finds -- let's
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start at the top. So let's -- you
know, we now know that depending on the country you live in,
depending on the industry,
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extreme temperature and extreme
rainfall can have very significant consequences
for manufacturing productivity,
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construction productivity. We
also know that it can affect health in a variety of ways.
Mortality responses to extreme
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heat are among the biggest
drivers of climate-related health disruptions. But it's not
just death. You know, it's other
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dimensions of suffering.
Hospitalizations go up when the temperature is hotter. You know,
we know from some of my own
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research with co-authors that
workers in certain occupations and industries, their propensity
to be hurt on the job goes up on
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hotter days. Student learning is
incidentally also affected, albeit in highly varied, and in
many cases, very subtle ways by
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the temperature environment in
which learning happens, I mean, learning is kind of hard enough
as it is. But if you add to the
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mix, you know, especially in
settings where you don't have, you know, complete cooling
infrastructure, or where extreme
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heat is very frequent. You know,
we find that there is a subtle but measurable effect on both
cognitive performance in the
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short run and the accumulation
of human capital, right? Which, as we know, is so important to
economic flourishing, both
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individually, and sort of in a
macro sense in the long run. So, you know, heat can affect
learning. There are also ways in
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which, you know, the climate in
which we live, whether it's, you know, temperature changes, or
air pollution from wildfire
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smoke, can affect your mood, you
know? Can affect -- it can actually affect how much
profanity you see on your
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Twitter feed, you know? So there
are all these many sort of subtle ways in which a changing
climate changes our quality of
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life. That's why I say, you
know, a mayor or principal or leader of a Fortune 500 company.
They're all ways in which your
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operations might be affected. I
can't tell you which ways they are, but I can tell you that
there's a large menu of
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studies that document clear
links between changes in weather patterns, changes in
climate variables, and these
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kinds of economically relevant
outcomes. - So then I would also throw out
the idea that there are probably
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events that occur out there in
our society that end up having a downstream impact on climate.
And I'll just throw one out.
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Recently, we saw in Baltimore,
the Francis Scott Key Bridge, the boat hits the the base
of the structure, knocks the
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bridge down. And obviously, it
has forced a large level of change in that part of the
United States in terms of
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traffic, you know, use, the level --
I mean, there are probably -- there are some impacts from
climate because you have -- you
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don't have this bridge available
now for the next several years. - You mean, in terms of the
knock on effects on emissions from that?
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- Correct, correct. - Absolutely. I
mean, transportation is a large -- obviously a very large source of
our emissions, and anything that
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can affect transportation
patterns in the short or long run, that'll have effects on
emissions. Where I thought you
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were going with that, Dan, is
also that there are hidden effects from climatological
disasters that can affect things
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like bridges, on not only the
infrastructure, but also on, you know, less visible aspects of
the economy. - Well, and
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that too, because I think
there's a larger discussion going on right now about
infrastructure and making sure
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that we have, you know,
structurally sound bridges, roads, etcetera, as well. - 100 percent, right. And I'm
not an engineer, but my cursory
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read of the engineering reports
is that America's infrastructure has many -- let's say, the grades
are, you know, great. But that's
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in a stable climate. If you add,
you know, a changing climate to the mix, you know, chances are
that the -- the need, the
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urgency of revamping the
infrastructure may be may be greater, especially given what
we know about, you know, how
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climate change will affect
things like the propensity of extreme rainfall and flooding,
for instance.
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- Well, and the other thing is we
talk about these issues a lot in the scope of here in
the United States, but this is a
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larger conversation as well,
where these types of events and impacts are occurring all around
the world, maybe with different
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level of impact, but they're
still happening. - 100 percent, right. And I have to say, you
know, the US has obviously been
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a focus of much of our attention
because that's where we live. And in some cases, from a researcher
standpoint, we're guilty of, you
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know, looking for our keys under
the lamppost, in the sense that many cases -- to the extent that
sometimes your research is
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guided by data availability. You
know, places like the US have better data than many other
developing countries. But that
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shouldn't take away
from the very obvious point that, you know, these effects
from climate change that are
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documented are, of course, not
only happening in developed economies like the US, but if
anything, you would -- one
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might expect the magnitude of
the effects to be larger, depending on the hazard, of course.
But in developing countries,
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just to give you sort of one
heuristic that I like to think about, is, you know, for a given
level of warming, how many more
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potentially damagingly hot
days are we talking about from climate change? And, you know,
there are parts of the US where,
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over the next two to three
decades, we're expected to see, say, you know, a dozen or two
dozen more days every summer
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above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, just
to pick a threshold. That number in a place like Thailand or
Brazil can be over 100
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additional days per year above
90 degrees Fahrenheit, and that's already on a very warm base, so
to speak. And so yeah,
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absolutely, there is a sense in
which we can lose sight of the international dimension of
climate damages, and also the
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potential inequality in damages
across countries, given the differences in both the amount
of warming and the underlying
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sort of infrastructure and
economic composition. - So you just use the word
inequality. And that is
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obviously another area that's
very important. It's very much a talking point here in the
US on a variety of different
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fronts. How much do you see
these impacts having an impact on the level of inequality that
we see here in the United States
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and other cultures around the
globe? - Yeah, that's a great question,
Dan. I mean, there are many ways
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one can think about inequality.
I tend to like to frame it as, you know, how -- what are the
differences in an individual's
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ability to achieve a flourishing --
you know, a flourishing life? And there are many inputs to
that, but you can imagine that,
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you know, some probably
necessary inputs may include things like health, you know,
the ability to secure a
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financial livelihood, you know,
safety of your -- basic safety of your environment. And to the
extent that, you know, research
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now increasingly indicates that
all of those three dimensions that I just mentioned, again,
which are not exhaustive, are
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adversely affected by climate
hazards. You know, and to the extent that we know, both
internationally and
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interpersonally, within
countries, be that developed or developing, we've seen
increasing wage inequality,
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income inequality, and in many
cases, health inequality. That's the backdrop upon which these
impacts of climate change are
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occurring. And so one can
imagine that if things keep going the way they're going in
the sort of social and policy
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systems that we have been living
through, you can imagine that climate change has a
likelihood of increasing those
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inequalities, whether that's in,
you know, livelihoods or health or what have you.
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- What do you think then needs to
be looked at now to improve things? And I guess one of the
things you've also talked about
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is even maybe a path towards
more aggressive cutting, looking, when you're talking about
emissions.
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- Yeah, let me get to the
emissions cutting in a second. Let me -- I would like to actually
say first that one of the
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things that can and should be
done is a shift in the narrative. I really do believe,
Dan, that, you know, the --
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the way we, as individuals and
as a broader public, think about and talk about climate change
and acting on climate change,
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climate policy, is really
important. And getting back to the earlier point at the outset
about, you know, framing
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climate change as less of a
binary, black-white, on-off, and more of a sort of sliding scale.
I think that will be important
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as we move forward in making
collective and individual decisions about what we should
do about it, how much we should
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be investing to do something
about it. Just to give us a concrete example, again, you
know, I think there's a great
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deal of support now for the
inevitability of the transition away from fossil fuels, right?
You hear about the clean energy
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transition, the green transition,
etcetera. But if you look under the hood, there's less consensus
about how quickly, at what cost,
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right? Privileging which
industries over others. And so those conversations take as
essential factual inputs, among
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other things, the damages from
a warmer planet and not just the binary of, hey, you know, five
degrees of warming and we're all
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doomed, versus, you know, pre-
industrial. It's every part every -- every degree on that
spectrum represents either
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damages we avoid, so benefits
from acting, or costs of acting and right -- and reducing
those emissions. So the more, I
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think, as a public, we can
understand that climate change, as with many policy issues, has
a bunch of gray area that we
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need to operate in, and that
increasingly there is the data to support a more quantitatively
nuanced understanding of the
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gray area, I think we can have -- I
think that would allow us to have a more sustained -- a more
constructive and sustained
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debate about how much we should
be reducing emissions, how aggressively how quickly, etcetera.
Just one data point I
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will -- I will note, and I
mention in the book, in terms of the ideal stringency, or
aggressivity of emissions cuts.
00:16:10
So your listeners may be
familiar with the concept called the social cost of carbon. If
they are not, the basic idea,
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right, is it represents the
discounted present value of the total damages to society that
are set in motion by us emitting
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an additional ton of CO2 today.
That number -- of course, there's a lot that goes into that
number, both theoretical and
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empirical. But that number, in
some sense, represents, right, the severity of the climate change
problem. That number, at least
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according to recent EPA updates
that incorporate a lot of the studies that I have mentioned,
although not all of them, is
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around -- is somewhere in the
ballpark of $190 per ton CO2. You know, less than a decade
ago, that number was somewhere
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in the ballpark of $50 per
ton, five zero, CO2. And so just to give you a sense of how
potentially serious the costs of
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climate change are. Another way
to think about that is with some assumptions, right? It's as if
we're putting in motion every
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year, globally, given the amount
of emissions we emit on an average basis, as a world, we're
setting in motion many
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trillions, several trillions of
dollars worth of, right, discounted future damages
because of our emissions. So
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that should give us a -- at least
some sense of how much we should as a society be willing to pay
to cut those emissions, if you
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believe in benefit cost
analysis, which I do, at least as one input to decision making. So
that's a long-winded way of
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saying, you know, I think we -- I
think we can start with changing the narrative a little bit on
how we think about climate
00:17:52
action. The other point, briefly,
that I'll mention is that, right, almost irrespective of how
quickly we're able to reduce
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emissions, there's going to be a
lot of adaptation that needs to happen between now and a stable
climate, whenever that ends up
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being. And I think that the more
we can familiarize ourselves with the everyday cost, the
everyday impacts of a changing
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climate, even in a so-called non-
catastrophic scenario, I think the more nuanced our
interventions can be in helping
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our organizations, our societies
adapt to the climate change that's coming. Sorry for the long
response.
00:18:30
- No, but it's great, because
you've covered all the bases on this. Jisung, great to have you
with us today. Thanks very much
00:18:37
for your time. - Thank you, Dan. It was a pleasure. - You got it. Dr.
Jisung Park, Assistant
00:18:42
Professor in the School of Social
Policy and Practice. - Hopefully not for long.
00:18:47
- Hopefully not for long. At the
University of Pennsylvania. The book is titled <i>Slow Burn: The
Hidden Costs of a Warming World.</i>
00:18:54
It's available in bookstores and
online right now. - Thank you for listening to the Ripple Effect.
We hope you found this episode
00:19:01
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