Will climate adaptation be a commodity distributed on the basis of purchasing power or a human right for all?

At the December 2014 international climate talks in Lima, Peru, melting glaciers in the Andes and recent droughts provided a fitting backdrop for the negotiators’ recognition that it is too late to prevent climate change altogether, no matter how fast we ultimately act to limit it. We now confront an issue that many once hoped to avoid: adaptation.

Adapting to climate change will carry a hefty price tag. Sea walls are needed to protect coastal areas against extreme floods, such as those in the New York area when Superstorm Sandy struck in 2012. We need early-warning and evacuation systems to protect against human tragedies, like those caused by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013 and by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.

Cooling centers and emergency services must be created to cope with heat waves, such as the one that killed 70,000 people in Europe in 2003. Water projects are needed to protect farmers and herders from extreme droughts, like the one that gripped the Horn of Africa in 2011. Large-scale replanting of forests with new species will be needed to keep pace as temperature gradients shift toward the poles.

Because adaptation won't come cheap, we must decide which investments are worth the cost.

A thought experiment illustrates the choices we face. Imagine that without major new investments in adaptation, climate change will cause world incomes to fall in the next two decades by 25 per cent across the board, with everyone's income going down, from the poorest farmworker in Bangladesh to the wealthiest real estate baron in Manhattan. Adaptation can cushion some but not all of these losses. What should be our priority: reduce losses for the farmworker or the property baron?

For the farmworker, and for a billion others in the world who subsist on about $ a day, this 25 per cent income loss will be a disaster, perhaps spelling the difference between life and death. Yet, in dollars, the loss is just 25 cents a day.

For the real estate baron and other ‘one-percenters’ in the United States with average incomes of about $2,000 a day, the 25 per cent income loss would be a matter of regret, but not a threat to survival.

African Americans, Latinos and low-income communities bear outsized pollution burdens in the United States.

America's corporate polluters are not colour-blind. Nor are they oblivious to distinctions of class. Studies of environmental inequality have shown that minorities and low-income communities often bear disproportionate pollution burdens. In other words, rather than being an impersonal ‘externality’ randomly distributed across the population, the distribution of pollution mirrors the distribution of power and wealth.

These disparities result from decisions by firms to site hazardous facilities in the most vulnerable communities and from decisions by government regulators to put lower priority on environmental enforcement in these communities. To some extent, they also may reflect demographic changes as pollution leads affluent people to move out, neighbourhood property values to fall and poorer households to move in. Even after controlling for income differences, however, racial and ethnic minorities typically face higher pollution burdens, a finding that implies that disparities are a result of differences in political power as well as purchasing power.

But the United States is a big country, and it is not homogeneous. Electoral politics, social movements, industrial structure, residential segregation and even laws and regulations differ greatly across the regions. The extent and pattern of environmental inequalities may vary, too.

In a recent study, we examined regional variations to tackle two key questions. First, is minority status or income more important in explaining environmental disparities? Second, is higher income equally protective for whites and minorities in affecting pollution exposure?

In our study we used the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) database called Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators (RSEI). These data can be traced to the demands of environmental advocates for disclosure of information on the hazards faced by communities in the wake of the tragic 1984 accident at a chemical plant owned by a US company in Bhopal, India, in which thousands of nearby residents died and many more were severely injured. In response to this man-made disaster, the US Congress passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, which requires companies to report their releases of dangerous chemicals into our air, water and lands. The EPA makes this information available to the public in its annual Toxics Release Inventory. The RSEI database uses this information to estimate industrial pollution exposures in neighbourhoods throughout the country.

Community benefit funds that channel carbon revenues into environmental investments in disadvantaged communities can promote both equity and efficiency. Based on a memorandum written for the Economics and Allocation Advisory Committee of the California Air Resources Board and California Environmental Protection Agency.

The California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (Assembly Bill 32) mandates that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) should seek to channel investment to the state's most disadvantaged communities:

In addition, the Act mandates that CARB should consider localized impacts of co-pollutants that are emitted along with carbon dioxide when fossil fuels are burned:

Disadvantaged communities often are disproportionately impacted by air pollutants, including co-pollutants generated by the use of fossil fuels. One way to fulfill these mandates is to allocate a share of allowance value (that is, revenue from auctions of carbon emission permits) to these communities for the purpose of environmental improvements.

This use of allowance value primarily involves investment, but it also can be considered a form of compensation in that a community's eligibility to receive benefits rests on its disadvantaged status, including disproportionate pollution exposure. Eligibility for compensation does not require that AB 32 causes an increase in co-pollutants in the localities–an outcome specifically prohibited in the section of the Act quoted above–but rather that disproportionate impacts relative to other localities persist after AB 32 implementation.

Air pollution in the United States is distributed even more unequally than income: an interview with Lynn Parramore of AlterNet.

Lynn Parramore (LP): Why did you decide to look at industrial air pollution and inequality? Why is this research important?

James Boyce (JB): What we wanted to do was look at inequalities in the environmental conditions that people experience here in the United States. Industrial air pollution is just one piece of a much broader set of environmental conditions. In addition to air pollution, for example, there's water pollution. And in addition to air pollution from industrial point sources, there's air pollution from mobile sources like cars and diesel trucks. So what we focused on was really one piece of a larger canvas of differences in pollution exposure across the population in this country.

There were two reasons we chose industrial air pollution to illustrate these disparities. One is that for the communities that are impacted by this sort of pollution, it's a very important piece of their total pollution burden. So it's not that it's the most important piece nationwide, but for communities with particularly high pollution burdens, it's a big deal.

The second reason is that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has developed some very high-quality data on air pollution from these facilities. Back in the mid-1980s there was a terrible disaster at a plant owned by a US corporation called Union Carbide in the city of Bhopal in central India. In response to public concern about whether there might be similar risks at industrial facilities here in the United States, Congress passed legislation called the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know-Act. This created something called the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), which requires any facility in the United States that meets certain criteria to report to the EPA every year its releases of hundreds of toxic chemicals to the air, water and land. So it provides a really detailed database on emissions from industrial facilities.

In the 1990s, the EPA added some additional important pieces to the TRI data. The first is information on the relative toxicities of the chemicals. When inhaled, some of them, for example, pound per pound are 10 million times more toxic than other chemicals. The EPA also looked at how they're distributed in the environment.

Returning carbon revenues to the public as dividends would embody the principle that we all own Earth's resources in equal and common measure. Excerpted from a lecture presented at the University of Pittsburgh in March 2014.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of policies to reduce carbon emissions from fossil-fuel combustion. One set of policies operates on the demand side of the picture to reduce our need for fossil fuels. These include investments in energy efficiency, mass transit and alternative sources of energy–investments that result in lower demand for fossil fuels at any given price.

The other set of policies operates on the supply side. These policies increase the price of fossil fuels by putting a tax on carbon emissions or, alternatively, by putting a cap the amount of fossil fuels we use and hence on emissions. The result is similar to what happens when OPEC restricts supply in order to increase the price of oil.

Why Climate Policies on the Supply Side?

Policies that aim to shift demand–via investments in mass transit, clean and renewable energy, or energy efficiency–often take time, maybe even decades, to be implemented fully. If we want to see significant reductions in fossil-fuel use in the short run, we need policies that operate on the price and reduce consumption today. This is one reason why I think that price-based policies ought to be part of the policy mix.

In addition, price-based policies themselves can be critical in reducing demand over the longer run. When consumers, households, firms and publicsector institutions know that over the next decade or two the price of fossil fuels will rise inexorably due to policies that curtail supply, they will have a powerful incentive to make investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy sources. They will face price signals that push that investment forward.

The easiest way to put a price on carbon emissions is through an upstream system, which means that you apply the price where the carbon enters the economy, not where it comes out the smokestack or tailpipe. So that means at the tanker terminals, the pipelines and the coal-mine heads.

Environmental justice is good for white folks, too.

Is environmental racism good for white folks? The answer isn't as obvious as it might seem.

In the United States, there is plenty of evidence that African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Native Americans typically face greater pollution burdens than whites, with associated health risks. So if the same total amount of pollution was spread more evenly, whites would wind up breathing dirtier air.

But would total pollution remain the same? Or would pollution decline if it was no longer disproportionately inflicted on minorities?

A study by a team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst finds that the quantity of toxic air pollution from industrial facilities is a variable, not a constant, and that the total pollution load is correlated with the extent to which minorities bear higher-than-average pollution impacts.

Our team measured the extent of disparities in US metropolitan areas by comparing the share of minorities in total exposure risks from industrial air toxics, calculated from US Environmental Protection Agency data, to their share of metropolitan population. In Birmingham, Alabama, for example, minorities bear 62 per cent of the exposure risk but comprise only 31 per cent of the population.

In metropolitan areas that rank in the top 5 per cent nationwide in the difference between the share of exposure risk borne by minorities and their share of the population–what we call the ‘minority discrepancy’–the average toxic exposure for all residents is more than double that in metropolitan areas that rank in the lower 75 per cent. In high-discrepancy cities, average exposure for minorities is almost four times more than in low-discrepancy cities, but for whites, too, average exposure is higher by a factor of about 60 per cent.

There are two main ways this striking correlation may be explained. One possibility is that wider discrepancies lead to more pollution. The perception that environmental costs can be shifted onto minorities may translate into weaker environmental regulation at existing facilities and greater willingness to accept new polluting facilities. If so, the fact that whites end up breathing dirtier air, too, implies that they do not fully escape the consequences.

A second possibility is that more pollution leads to wider discrepancies. Some cities may have high levels of industrial pollution for historical reasons, such as proximity to markets or inputs.

In the space of a single century, the passenger pigeon went from being the world's most abundant bird to complete extinction. What happened to it–and to us?

A little more than a hundred years ago, a bird named Martha, the last surviving passenger pigeon, died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Her death was remarkable in the annals of extinction not only because we know its precise date– September 1914–but also because only decades earlier the passenger pigeon had been the most abundant bird on Earth. Martha's demise helped to transform American beliefs about our relationship with nature, and the bird became an icon in the environmental movement, which was emerging just as she died.

Among the many billions of passenger pigeons who predeceased Martha was her cage mate, George, who died in 1910. The pair were named after Martha and George Washington. In the century that separated the first First Lady from the last passenger pigeon, America's economy went through a profound transformation. The country's population increased more than tenfold, and average income more than quadrupled. Only 6 per cent of Americans lived in cities when Martha Washington died, in 1802. In 1914, the number was closer to 50 per cent. The passenger pigeon's extinction was bound up with these changes, and what happened to the bird tells us much about what happened–and is still happening–to us.

Tourists came from near and far to see Martha after George's death. The aerial displays of passenger pigeons had astonished their parents and grandparents, but at the zoo they found a pathetic creature with ‘drooping wings, atremble with the palsy of extreme old age’, in the words of a reporter. To dissuade the public from flinging sand at her to make her move, the zookeepers roped off her cage.

After her death, Martha was frozen in a 300- pound block of ice and shipped to the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington. Her internal organs were removed and preserved in the museum's ‘wet collections’, and her skin was stuffed and mounted for display. In 1977, when the Cincinnati Zoo opened a passenger-pigeon memorial, Martha was flown in for the dedication ceremony. She travelled first class.

Reduced use of fossil fuels brings cleaner air as well as a cooler planet.

There is good news and bad news about the clean energy transition. The good news is that half of the new electric-generating capacity installed worldwide in 2008– 2010 was renewable. The bad news is that half wasn't.

To avoid rapid global warming and its attendant human and economic risks, we need to accelerate the transition. We need to do more than slow the growth in use of fossil fuels: we need to cut their use substantially. This will require significantly ramped-up investments worldwide in energy efficiency and clean energy.

One way to encourage this investment is to base public policies on the full range of benefits from reduced burning of fossil fuels–not only global benefits from reduced greenhouse gas emissions but also local benefits from reduced emissions of particulates, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, mercury, benzene and other toxic pollutants.

In the European Union, research has shown that the clean air benefits alone are sufficient to justify investments in energy efficiency and renewables. ‘The welfare effects of climate policy seem to be positive,’ a 2006 report for the Netherlands Environmental Agency concluded, ‘even when the long-term benefits of avoided climate impacts are not taken into account’ (emphasis added).

The clean air co-benefits of climate policy may be even greater elsewhere, in countries with less stringent air pollution controls than Europe. World Bank data indicate that in the United States the human health damages from particulate emissions are six times higher per ton of carbon dioxide than the average for Germany, France and the United Kingdom. In China, the ratio is more than ten times higher.

It would be ironic if energy policies designed to internalize the external costs of greenhouse gas emissions were to ignore the external costs of copollutants. But there is an important difference between the two. The benefits of reduced greenhouse gas emissions are global, whereas air quality benefits of reduced co-pollutant emissions are local.

The difference matters for three reasons:

Efficiency: From a climate change standpoint, it doesn't matter where emission reductions occur. From an air quality standpoint, it can matter a lot. Co-pollutant damages vary depending on the type of fossil fuel, pollution control technologies and the population density of the surrounding area.