Value(s) by Mark Carney: Chapter 12 Breaking the Tragedy of the Horizon: Key Takeaways / Analysis / Citations

Chapter 12 Breaking the Tragedy of the Horizon

Key Takeaways

One of James Carville’s Clinton ‘92 campaign slogans was “It’s the economy, stupid”. For Carney is “it’s the transition, stupid!” If you can get private financial institutions to truly back the transition then you can contribute to being a good custodian for generations to come. Carney’s work for Glasgow COP26 centres on organizing the plumbing for these financial institutions. In chapter 15, “Investing for Values” Carney explored this further. In this chapter, Carney argues that there are three technologies: 1) engineering, 2) political and 3) financial that need to be marshalled to address climate change.

Engineering Technology

Driving Scale and Innovation: There will need to be major improvements to these hard to change sectors. Very hard to outlaw fossil fuels (ie. decarbonize) which are cheap and do not have a large upfront CAPEX:

  • Zero-carbon economy, electricity today is 20% green and is projected to be 60% by 2060;
  • Energy creation needs to be moved to a 90% market share with a mix of wind and solar. To what extent do we electrify everything and do it with green electricity depends on storage and loading challenges since solar and wind are intermittent. And we need to look at power efficiency in products we use;
  • Global electricity has to increase 5x by 2050 and needs to be generated by renewables according to Carney;
  • In the UK, off-shore wind farms were expected to generate £140/MWh by 2025 back in 2013 but then in 2014, they revised the number to £107/MWh, in 2016 they revised it down to £57/MWh; In the US, $59/MWh is the cost of coal and now onshore wind-farms are at $26/MWh and solar is $37/MWh….cheaper then coal!

Electric Vehicles (EV)

  • Hard to reduce dependency on fossil fuels (again, the euphemism is “decarbonize”);
  •  Use hydrogen for public transport;
  • Tax breaks for EV;
  • Build the infrastructure for electrical and hybrid vehicles;
  • Car companies build vehicles in 3 year cycles from planning to off the factory floor so planning for more EV now is critical, even if batteries and charging stations are a problem;
  • EV is not appropriate for long-haul trucks according to Carney;

Aviation and Shipping

  • Going to be very challenging to reduce dependence on fossil fuels (i.e. decarbonize);
  • Nothing is currently commercially viable according to Carney;
  • The cost of not using fossil fuels is $115 – $230 USD per ton in aviation and $150 – $350 USD per ton in shipping;

Industrial Sectors

Currently responsible for 32% or 17 GtCO2e annually, cement manufacturing, plastic, aluminum, chemical, fashion, furniture and home appliances. The consumption of energy is massive;

  • A lot of the green technology does not really exist yet;
  • There are four ways to reduce: use hydrogen (the product being H2O), electrifying processes, using biomass and carbon capture technology.
  • Carney places a lot of reliance on carbon capture and sequestration at the point of production which involved pumping CO2 emissions into a saline solution deep underground, which is theoretical since the cost of pumping CO2 under every factory around the world has not been fully explored or whether there would be a centralized CO2 pumping station for a given geography;
  • Carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) are currently about 1% of renewable investments so this is not a hot market;
  • Direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) involves sucking CO2 out of the sky where CO2 is much more diffuse then at the point of production, and therefore the economics right now are between $40 – $400/ton if extrapolated from the small test plants currently testing this technology.
Illustration and Painting

Political Technology

Setting the Right Goals. Carney argues that we need to understand the consequences of our preferences. But he also wants to convince you that his preferences are the best and you should follow him:

  • SDGs He isn’t talking about new means of engagement with the polity but rather focuses on the fact that nations will fall short by the end of the century, hence the need for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which are part of the UN’s collaborative framework. There are 17 goals with 169 targets as part of the SDGs.  
  • Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are determined by each country and easily fall victim of the tragedy of the commons. At the Paris COP 15, the target that was agreed to was actually 2.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.
  • Greta Thunberg and the societal response: Carney was impressed by her. He showed her the Bank of England’s gold reserves. At the UN Climate Action Summit in September 2019….
  • Thunberg said “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!….We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up and change is coming, whether you like it or not.
  • There was a Global Climate Strike in 2019 with 7.6 million people in attendance in 185 countries…the media struggled to tall a compelling narrative, but the 6th Mass Extinction is coming according to Carney.
  • Carney argues that revolutions happen abruptly as Cass Sunstein argues, when a tipping point is met, when it becomes socially acceptable (like wearing masks for example).
  • Values depend on consumer focuses. 

Financial Technology to Ensure That Every Financial Decision Takes Climate Change Into Account

Carney argues that companies must take the race to net-zero seriously. For Carney, the financial system needs to take climate change into account, because that’s where the smart money is headed already. Firms can report their own climate disclosures. COP 26 in Glasgow is going to focus on the financial approach. There is money to be made in the transition. And Mark Carney argues that the smart money is turning green.

  • Harnessing the power of economics to effect change is the most sensible force for good, in Carney’s eyes.
  • Carney points out that the amount of money needed for the low-carbon shift is about $3.5 trillion in the energy sector per year and twice the rate currently invested in the energy sector….
  • Climate-resilient systems are needed at a cost of $90 trillion;
  • Carney argues that the private sector is more then money, we need their innovative drive that is incentivized towards net-zero;

Carney’s 3Rs, these are the three areas needed to make this work: reporting, risk, returns

Reporting: TCFD network: a solution by the market for the market which Carney forcefully argued didn’t work in the 2008 financial crisis….at any rate, their total assets under management is over $170 trillion which includes the largest banks, pension funds asset managers and insurers. The largest AUMs are asking to disclose their carbon footprint in line with the TCFD.

The metrics used are

  • Disclosure of risk, governance and strategy for climate change;
  • Consistent metrics across sectors;
  • Scenario analysis typical in financial modelling and equity research.

The disclosures cannot be static! They should be dynamic such that they reveal financial risks/opportunities. Ask the company to explain how they will reach net zero….

Regulatory Reporting

financial regulators input climate-related financial reporting in their roles.

  1. At the Bank of England, Carney says the Prudential Supervisory Authority are a division of the bank with advice on how insurers should address climate change.
  2. Make the TCFD reporting mandatory at the Federal/National level! IFRS and IOSOCO (which regulate securities) have to agree to make reporting standardized.

 Risk Management

As mentioned in chapter 11, there are physical and transition risks. Climate change differs from most other risks in that:

  • Climate change is unprecedented as they have not fully happened yet;
  • Climate change is massively impactful in every country and globally;
  • Climate change is foreseeable right now using the scientific method;
  • Climate change requires action today for horizons in the future that we cannot be predict accurately.

The Bank of England has stress-tested the UK financial system for various climate pathways, scenarios. Climate stress tests about engaging the developers of the model in the contingencies and factors at play.

Returns

The creation of green and transition bonds is an important catalyst. Carney believes that helping companies moving from brown to green is a consultative practice. The typical best plans are as follows:

  1. Defining a net-zero objective based on scope 1 (all direct emissions: fuel combustion etc), scope 2 (indirect emissions: electricity purchases) and scope 3 emissions (all other indirect emissions: end products).
  2. Outlining clear milestones and metrics for senior management;
  3. Board of Directors level governance;
  4. Executive compensation based on meeting these metrics……

Green bonds will not be sufficient to pay for the green future. Value will be in identifying the transition. ESG are focused on the s and the g. Investor should be able to calculate the e net present value. “We need 50 shades of green.” (325, Value(s)). Needs to be able to get a sense of how serious a given company is at the senior management level. Embedding metrics in the motivation. The efficacy of transition plans. 

  • Mark Carney says the UK should lead the climate change strategy in Glasgow….hence he is advising Boris Johnson.
  • Decarbonization is going to be a financially viable source of investment; if you are pulling carbon out of the process then the investment will come to you as an additional value proposition.
  • Buying offsets is opaque and only 98 million tons of CO2 were traded at a total market value at $295 million, there is no central market. There are no uniform carbon credits and there is a lot of friction so Carney argues for standardization…
  • The cost of the green tech is high for developing countries but it makes sense to provide that do developing countries as a value added services….how to capture that value once the developing country firm has that technology is not so clear.
  • Climate policies suffer that same challenge that central banks deal with: the temptation to lower interest rates over long-term stability of inflation. We want to prevent short-termism in finance and now on climate.
  • Short term costs are hard for politicians, there is a lack of credibility. 
  • Political parties need to get broad support across the spectrum. 
  • Specific climate polities should be looking at the economics. More transparent tracking of climate policies.
  • Governments should have sustainable growth committees. Carney wants to provide tools for the Bank of Canada and England decision making and targets. The idea is that market will allocate capital and then break the tragedy of the horizon. 
  • Continued growth is not a fairy tale as Thunberg argued.
  • Policies should be focused on technological innovation.
  • Clear and consistent communications.
  • More likely that investment and returns will be made clear.
  • Policy makers and future costs of doing business need to be calculated and part of the solution. 
Introduction: Humanity Distilled Chapter 1 Objective Value
 Chapter 2 Subjective Value Chapter 3 Money & Gold
 Chapter 4 Magna Carta  Chapter 5 Future of Money
 Chapter 6 Market Society Chapter 7 Financial Crisis
 Chapter 8 Safer FinanceChapter 9 Covid Crisis
 Chapter 10 Covid Recovery Chapter 11 Climate Crisis
 Chapter 12 Climate Horizon Chapter 13 Your Values
 Chapter 14 Values in Companies Chapter 15 ESG
  

Analysis of Part 2 Chapter 12

  • Not clear that the private sector would want to take on the opportunity to meet net-zero BEFORE a large global catastrophe that is clearly caused by human-made climate change such that customers demand either the private sector have targets in place or the public sector enforces such practices. It will be a train-wreck to check every single companies manufacturing to ensure they have the carbon capture pipes operating properly. It is so easy to pollute. The fines must mark the cost of violating the rules far more prominent.
  • Ironically, what caused the financial crisis are the individual actors being disassociated with the system level. What Carney hopes is that this be flipped around with climate change. Suddenly, decisions should be made at the system level with a simple boiled down abstraction of 42 +/- 3 GigaTons of CO2 per year must be our pollution cap. However, there is another disassociation that must occur here; namely financial experts in urban centres, far away from the oil fields are talking about transition as if the oil companies are going to just love this whole ‘climate-change agenda’. The consequences of the model make short-term harm very real for the oil industry workers who enjoy their work. I don’t mean we’re wrong about climate change because oil workers might stand to lose economic opportunities due to an imposed legislative or imposed financial capital re-allocation away from fossil fuels, but slave owners in the US lost their economic future because of the threat of legislative decision-making, they were willing to go to war and die in the name of a moral wrong. So, we, including Carney, need to get serious about “Oil Country”. 

Ø  Carney doesn’t necessarily call out who the polluters are…he doesn’t put pen to paper to say that fossil fuel companies are the problem and could be part of the solution. And what to do about Alberta’s transition? Carney doesn’t talk about a way to help Albertans who have driven the Canadian economy forward in terms of GDP should be compensated…and or supported in retaining economic development locally against the back drop of the Rookie Mountains. Think about how Britain settled the slavery questions in 1834 by compensating the owners of slaves? Then think about how the US settled the slavery question between 1861 – 65? Oil is like slavery in some ways as I argued a decade ago.

“When Abraham Lincoln wanted to curb slavery, he was battling the entrenched interests of the Southern US states. Slavery was a moral wrong, but slavery was also central to the Southern US economy. ” – Professor Nerdster

  • Efforts to have a global corporate tax neglects to acknowledge that the best situation is where every other country is paying that tax but you have a loop hole.
  • Just because you can build something doesn’t mean you should. Do people want self-driving cars? Do people want to charge their cars? This is where regulation forces the issue.
  • Carney’s really skates on thin ice in this chapter because industrial processes rely mostly on energy to melt and shape the products that we enjoy, most items in your house have a carbon footprint that you never see but enjoy the fruits of, the cost to create that same product without generating CO2 is likely significant today. Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is pretty much explanation of how this complex set of problems can be solved. Many companies would not exist if it was illegal to pollute….This issue is where the rubber hits the road, unless there is total control of the means of production by some over-arching legal body, there will be an incentive to use fuel…let me think about this further. This is where manufacturing products on the moon becomes more attractive as CO2 there is additive….impractical in my life time but, you know….fun to think about.
  • With what power can Carney achieve having his preferences reflected in the world? What Carney and others are missing is the way to show the end user the consequence of their preferences. While people do tend to seek out like-minded people, and shun polarization, running for public office would be his best route….. What funding model do we have?
  • Carney seems to fail to acknowledge that what Greta Thunberg is ignoring is that the transition could be very painful and as such not materialize as she extrapolates it ought to. She is also a child, probably should be in school. The consequences of climate change are heavy in her mind, the consequences of transition aren’t thought out. Both are subjective, terribly difficult to predict and forecast…even with climate physics firmly in the corner of “2 degrees Celcius is a big deal…”
  • The global climate strike didn’t really move the needle, did it? Is that really how we measure sentiment on climate change being a mainstream concern?
  • Reporting has been tried before, startups were created to create a global standard but then failed; Amee.com. Companies do want to participate in green-washing but not so much on their own accord anything that undermines stakeholder value is a threat to the CEO’s job.
  • TCFD network: a solution by the market for the market….which Carney forcefully argued didn’t work in the 2008 financial crisis….
  • Self-interest trumps the interest of others. That’s what COVID illustrated. The self-interest of profit generation is so strong that you would wonder if Carney lives in a fantasy land…no, he just happens to be correct about the climate physics at play, may need more salesmanship. 
  • You start to wonder if Carney is a heavyweight with all the details, annotations and facts but a lightweight with bandwidth of human nature between self-interest and self-lessness . Maybe he’s got an overly focused vantage point on reality. For example, take a pan for your kitchen. How much did that pan cost? Is it anti stick? $25CAD pan. Now why is that pan so cheap? The material supplier doesn’t have a carbon pollution tax right now. If you impose a carbon pollution plan on that manufacturer because they are in your legislative geography then another kitchen pan producer who doesn’t have that constraint will. Game theory! Learn it a weep. And there are way to game the system further. The temptation to lie about emissions is massive as Volkswagen did it. OPEC oil producers do it. So let’s be serious about human nature too! We are cheeky monkeys!

Citations Worth Noting for Part 2: Chapter 12

  • Ezra Klein, ‘How to decarbonize America’, The Ezra Klein Show, 27 August 2020.
  • Department of Energy and Climate Change, ‘Electricity Generation Costs’ (July 2013).
  • Energy Transitions Roadmap report version 1.5 (2020)
  • Goldman Sachs, ‘Carbonomics: Innovation, Deflation and Affordable De-carbonization’, Equality Research (October 2020).
  • Climate Action Tracker, ‘Warming Projections Global Update’ (December 2019)
  • Cass Sunstein, ‘How Change Happens’ podcast. London School of Economics Public Lecturers and Events, 14 January 2020.
  • Cass Sunstein, How Change Happens (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2019). 
  • UN Environment Programme, ‘Emissions Gap Report, 2019’ (26 November 2019).

Value(s) by Mark Carney: Chapter 11 The Climate Crisis: Key Takeaways / Analysis / Citations

Chapter 11 The Climate Crisis

Key Takeaways

For 11,000 years, the stable Holocene era has afforded humanity the playground to thrive. Now we have created the Anthropocene which is driven by human impacts on the planet. Carney does not go into any counter-arguments to say that the impact of human activity on the planet is correlated 1% with climate change or 99%…for him the data is conclusive. In the 1850s, the Industrial Revolution drove up global temperature averages by 0.07 degrees Celsius per decade. The planet’s average temperature is up by 1 degree Celsius  since the 19th century.

Other climate changes noted

  • The oceans are 30% more acidic since the Industrial Revolution;
  • Sea levels have risen 20 centimeters in the last 100 years;
  • The 5th mass extinction has shifted to the 6th with extinctions at a rate that is a hundred times higher than an average from millions of years; 
  • There has been a 70% drop in mammals, fish, birds, amphibians and reptiles since 1965, assuming evolution is not at play, although how do you define evolution?; 

Now, market prices of assets are being impacted. Climate change is likely creating: 

  • a.            a feedback loop of rising sea levels, 
  • b.            massive human migration away from rising coastal sea levels, 
  • c.             extreme weather events that are damaging insured property, 
  • d.            More impaired assets on the balance sheets of companies, 
  • e.            A reduction work productivity with the lethal heatwaves,
  • f.              Global conflict over scares resources,
  • g.            collapse of coral reefs destroying the livelihood of 500 Million people and ¼ of all biodiversity,
  • h.            Increased regime change,
  • i.              Increased citizen unrest,
  • j.              Increased spread of disease
In Kiribati, an island republic in the Central Pacific, large parts of the village Eita (above) have succumbed to flooding from the sea.

What is the cause? 

Causes: Emissions

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has argued that there is a 95% chance that human activity is CAUSING the global warming / climate change. The release of GhGs (Greenhouse Gases) with the most problematic being CO2 which, during rapid industrialization and growth has meant that over 250 years, humans have burned ½ trillion tons of carbon. Trends suggest another ½ trillion could be released in the next 40 years…¾ of the warming impact of emissions is CO2, with the remainder being methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases. Trees cannot carbon capture to rebalance. Temperature and CO2 emission move roughly together, therefore we know what the carbon budget  ie. the amount of carbon dioxide that be released into the atmosphere before temperature thresholds are surpassed. 

The planet as a system would accelerate into a dangerous feedback loop if average global temperatures go past 1.5 degrees Celsius. The IPCC predicts that if temperatures reach 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels then 1) sea levels could risk 10 centimeters, 2) ¼ of all people could experience severe heat waves, 3) coral reefs will die off almost completely… 4) permafrost could further unlock CO2 and methane accelerating the trends would blow the budget wide open.

622-02757722 © Masterfile Royalty Free Model Release: No Property Release: No Green Number 0 on White Background

Net Zero

Carney advocates a stabilization of temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius. above pre-industrial levels. To do that: 

  1. Emissions have to fall by a minimum of 8 percent for the next 2 decades….
  2. We release about 42 +/- GigaTons of CO2 per year, 
  3. Planetary budget is 420 GigaTons of CO2 remaining before we hit 1.5 degrees Celsius and 1500 GigaTons of CO2 before we hit 2 degrees Celsius..

Children born in 2021 will have to generate ⅛ the amount of CO2 emissions compared to baby boomers into order stay on carbon budget of 420 GigaTons of CO2 remaining before we hit 2 degrees Celcisu. We need to reduce excess carbon from:

  1. Industrial processes are 30%
  2. Buildings 18%
  3. Cars 17%
  4. Energy generation 17%
  5. Agriculture 10% 

To reduce GhG, the solutions must

  1. Change how we create energy (fossil fuels must shift to renewables);
  2. Change energy usage (decarbonizing industrial processes, increased energy efficiency for buildings);
  3. Increase the carbon capture, use and storage (and maybe terra forming, although Carney doesn’t mention this)….

Basically, we need to convert the creation of all industrial process to electric and then shift the source of electric from fossil fuels to renewables. The first step may appear impossible considering the amount of energy needed to manufacturer most items in our homes, however that’s what has to happen. Bill Gates details the technologies needed in his book “How to Solve the Climate Crisis.” 

Geography of Emissions

most pollution is from cities. By region its:

  1. China 28%,
  2. Asia – Other 16%
  3. USA 15%
  4. EU-28 10%
  5. India 7%,
  6. Russia 5%,
  7. Japan 4%,
  8. Europe – Other 3%, 
  9. Africa 3%, Canada 2%, Australia 1%

The Consequence of Climate Change

How much do we value the future? The estimates of the costs of climate change and value of the sustainability contain many uncertainties that enable doubters. The GDP, employment and wage impacts are one way (a 25% reduction in GDP at the tipping point of 3 degree Celsius), the net present value of all future cashflows. What we really value such as the lives of species, livelihood adaptation, birth rate drop aren’t easily monetized. 

How central bankers view climate change? There are two types of risk

  • physical risks
  • transition risks

Risk Type 1: Physical risks =

increased rate of climate and weather related events (storms, fires, floods). The underwriting risk shows that the entire livelihoods buckle as inflation adjusted losses have increased over 8x over the last few years. 

  • Insurers are in the front line of climate change, beach houses aren’t getting insured at the prices they were 10 years ago. 
  • The insurance sector is adjusting and pricing-in some climate change using various projected models, subject to re-writes like any other model…Carney feels that coupling “sophisticated forecasting, forward-looking capital regime and business models built around short-term coverage has left insurers relatively well placed to manage physical risks” (277, Value(s)). 
  • Carney argues that there areas of the economy that will need a public backstop because insurance companies will not insure those areas between $250 Billion and $500 Billion on the US coastal property by 2100. 
  • Insurers and reinsurers are expecting trouble, Lloyd’s of London has a 20cm assumption which coupled with a hurricane would cause Manhattan damage that is 30% more severe than Hurricane Sandy.
  • Coastal flooding is projected to rise by 50% by the end of this century. 
  • Lethal heatwaves are projected to effect 1.2 billion people annually by 2050;
  • The Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) is an 80 central bank strong group that have created representative scenarios to show climate risks may evolve affecting the real and financial economies:
  • Hothouse earth shows that at 3 degrees Celsius, sea levels rise x cm and extreme weather events result in a 25% GDP loss by the end of the century. 

Risk Type 2: Transitional Risk 

The second category of costs of risk. The costs and opportunities are more apparent as the crsis worsens and impositions become more overarching:

There will be stranded assets

  • Tropical deforestation of palm oil, soy, cattle and timber is for commercial use 70% of the time.
  • Automotive industry that will, in Carney’s mind, be disrupted by electric vehicles, driverless vehicles and car-sharing services.
  • Coal producers have gone bankrupt in the US. 
  • Demand and Supply Shocks: demand shocks affect consumption, investment, government spending and net exports in the GDP = C + I + G +(X – M). Demand shocks are short-term usually and therefore don’t effect the productivity of the economy. Supply shocks effect growth, the growth of labour supply, physical capital, human capital and natural capital and the degree of innovation in the economy. So the impact of climate change on GDP is very tough because the sample of prior shocks also contained policy adjustments …

 Calculating the Impact of Climate Change on GDP

  • Feedback loops amplify quickly and suddenly (ice melting off of the antartica rapidly) and the north pole, it’s dynamic and not inherently predictable even if there is no human variable in the atmosphere itself (all chemistry, geology and hard sciences):
  • The relationship between GDP and temperature is not linear; 
  • Do physical climate events actually have a negative effect or simply impact growth (feedback loops and bad social impacts);
  • The degree of adaptation and innovation to mitigate the impact of climate change could be much more significant (i.e humans turn a disaster into a strength leading to more prosperity due to new opportunities that are created). 
  • Factors like the mass climate refugees which could be over 200 million people, the poorest being dislocated.
  • The 6th Mass Extinction: the biodiversity that provides natural capital from the Amazon to the coral reefs will be effected.

For Carney, it is a big deal that the CEO of Shell (Sir Mark Moody-Stuart) says that the probabilities of climate change’s negative impact on humanity is 75% and acknowledges that despite that uncertainty in predicting climate change, Moody-Stuart through the course of his career made larger strategic bets with much lower probabilities…

Causes Incentives

For Carney, climate change is a ‘tragedy of the horizon.’ The worst impacts are beyond the life-span of the decision-makers of today. The horizon is beyond: the business cycle, political cycle and central bank cycles.

  • The horizon of central banks is 2 to 3 years.
  • The horizon of financial stability is about 10 years.  
  • The horizon of political decision-making is about 4 years.

The benefits of mitigating greenhouse gases which stay in the atmosphere for centuries is massive, but for the people who don’t vote today, because they don’t exist yet. “Halving emissions over 30 years is easier than halving them in a decade.” (285, Value(s)) The welfare of future generations should not be discounted as heavily as the financial calculations typically demand.

S-Curve:

The rate of adoption of new technology has three phases; 1) research and development, 2) mass adoption, 3) maturity. The rate of S-Curve over the years has been accelerating. James Watt who invested the stem and in 1769 did not see coal over take peatmoss until 120 years later in the 1900s (technically, Watt died before see that development). So, technology to tackle climate change is emerging at quicker paces. The S-Curve needs a nudge from the market as well as the public sources of capital investment.

Tragedy of the Commons

The original example is the unregulated grazing rights on the common lands of Ireland and England in the 19th century there was a negative externality in which a decision is taken which then effects others who aren’t party or even benefit from that decision, is taken. We, the consumer, and we the producer don’t pay for the CO2 emitted to produce most goods. Other examples:

  • 1)    Overfishing to the point at which that stock of fish is depleted (Cod on East Coast of Canada);
  • 2)    Deforestation to the point where the forest is spoiled (Easter Island…);
  • 3)    Commons grazing to the point where the land was destroyed…

Three solutions to the Tragedy of the Commons:

  1. Pricing the externality: putting a price on carbon. This has only worked well in theory. There is a price of $15 per ton but you would need $50 to $100 per ton to meet the Paris Accord target…
  2. Privatization of the public spheres:  Public grazing lands in the UK to privatization however this created a wealth transfer to those who had the right to charge a fee.
  3. Supply management by the community to cooperate or regulate the scarce resources there in. Popularized by Elinor Ostrom (1933 – 2012) as economic governance. Get political consensus with shared management.

Carney goes on to draw the analogy that COVID is like climate change, it is a global problem. But climate change has no boundaries at all. Now, there are echoes of Bretton Woods style nationalist self-interest, huge debts and new institutions to tackle climate change:

  • 1992 – Rio Earth Summit; a good start..
  • 1997 – COP (conference of the parties) 1 and 3 the Kyoto Protocol: Kyoto was flawed, didn’t have teeth, a more serious call to action;
  • 2009 – COP15 the Copenhagen Accord flawed, advanced countries pledge financial flows to reduce emission in poorer countries;
  • 2015 – COP21 the Paris Accord, more stakeholders, financial firms, turning the agreement into legislative objectives as the UK did (already a low emitter, but limited recycle programs and lots of trash in the streets)

 Our political systems don’t overcome these items. True leaders are stewards of the system. Leadership is about being custodians.

Current Financial Sector

Financial markets aren’t really pricing in a carbon price transaction. There is a low urgency effort that will lead to hot house earth, according to Carney. Most financial energy numbers don’t use a price test for their carbon stress test of capital investment They usually use a static price. Their prices are well below the medium to get to zero. BP has $100 per ton in its internals. Only 4% of banks and insurers think these climate risks are being priced accurately. Only 16% used a dynamic price.

Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI) is a consortium of thirteen + five asset owners/managers that are trying to better understand the transition to low-carbon impacts investment strategies. They also launched the FTSE TPI (Climate Transition Index) to articulate who is on the right side of history in Carney’s mind. Investors are shifting capital away from hydrocarbon investments incrementally suggesting that they are pricing in a transition. In other words, the markets are responding to something akin to inevitability about a low-carbon economy. But these are strategic bets, it doesn’t mean they are certain. Moody’s “recently identified sixteen sectors with $3.7 trillion in debt with the greatest exposure to transition risk” (297, Value(s)).

  • §  For the Goldman Sachs, capital expenditure in oil and gas is being hindered by this transition of asset manager value in oil and gas. Major projects have been mitigated by 60% over the last five years, big oil is moving to big energy. 
  • §  Portfolio managers are engaging and pulling down their oil and gas investment incrementally. Also, in part due to the collapse of prices.
  • §  Transition bonds. In the fullness of time, climate change will incentivize brown companies to raise capital for green innovation.
  • §  Carney argues we cannot diversify away from climate change.
  • §  For Carney he argues that we need financial markets to build a virtuous cycle, better pricing for investors and smoother transition.
  • §  Sustainable financial systems are being built and the next chapter discusses this in more detail. 
Introduction: Humanity Distilled Chapter 1 Objective Value
 Chapter 2 Subjective Value Chapter 3 Money & Gold
 Chapter 4 Magna Carta  Chapter 5 Future of Money
 Chapter 6 Market Society Chapter 7 Financial Crisis
 Chapter 8 Safer FinanceChapter 9 Covid Crisis
 Chapter 10 Covid Recovery Chapter 11 Climate Crisis
 Chapter 12 Climate Horizon Chapter 13 Your Values
 Chapter 14 Values in Companies Chapter 15 ESG
  

Analysis of Part 2 Chapter 11:

  • Sea level a big deal? Just how bad is this going over 2 degrees Celsius? It’s a prediction that seems likely and would result in actually cooking-up Earth, with accelerated feedback loop, to the point where the Antarctic ice sheet completely melts and we’d all have to learn to swim…We might even develop gills…..okay, that’s a stretch…how much of this is probable? The emotional crescendo of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was, in my view, showing major cities around the world being flooded by rising sea levels. This was the easiest and therefore, best way to illustrate the problem(s) which are myriad as Carney has tabulated in Chapter 11. But…..
  • Sea level estimates are being re-evaluated: There is one issue with this description of coastal flooding…it is not so probable as once thought. Carney seems to have ignored the claim that water levels would rise 20 feet i.e. 6 meters for that reason….I wasn’t sure why his book doesn’t mention this often quoted climate catastrophe? He doesn’t address it. I mean, 6-meters-of-water! was probably the most obvious and emotionally powerful visualization as to why climate change should be a concern…. Well, it turns out that it is not as probable in the next 100 years as once thought. Read this page to get the down-low: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise. According to latest projections from the IPCC 6th Assessment Report (2021); the sea level is predicted to rise by 2 – 3 meters if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, 2 – 6 meters at 2 degree Celsius and 19 – 22 meters at 5 degrees Celsius and that’s over the next 2000 years…..Hmm…confused yet? 2000 years as in 4021?…yes….So by 2050, there “will” be 50 million people under the water line using 2010 populations as a benchmark….The prediction of mass migration (1/2 billion people) is slightly overstated….
  • New research suggests that sea levels substantially lag Earth temperature changes, so the probability that sea level rising is a massive problem is much less the central / easy-to-understand threat of climate than originally thought.
  • We don’t trust our audience to get a concept quickly enough therefore we skirt the concept: science is a process of contestation, not an absolute truth system. New information changes old scientific models. The mass migration narrative we thought 15 years ago is not quite the consensus view in 2021. Of course, scientific consensus can change with new research, why is that a problem? I’ve noticed that the default assumption is that the general public is incapable of understanding that nuance….and or the threat that an opponent will exploit “changing” scientific consensus to suggest “X is a hoax!”, X being whatever a partisan wants to discredit for the time being, is greater than the benefit of being honest with people. Carney talks about this with regard to Bank of Canada forecasts being both a ‘certainty’ and obviously ‘not a certainty’….
  • Trust but verify | Calculate the sea level rise yourself: If you do your own calculation of the how much ice needs to melt off of land masses such as land glaciers on North America etc, Greenland and Antarctica, then doing so will help strengthen your understanding. In the case of the total ocean, there is an area of 361 million square kilometers that the new water would have to be evenly distributed on top of. There is 1.338 billion cubic kilometers of total water in the ocean that has to occupy 361 million square kilometers of Earth’s surface. The Antarctic Ice Sheet is 30 million cubic kilometers of ice, which could be added for a total of 1.368 billion kilometers. Depth = volume / length x width i.e. 30 million cubic kilometers / 361 million square kilometers is 0.083 km or 83 meters of additional water across the 361 sq km of ocean. Add 2.9 million cubic kilometers from Greenland and about 170,000 cubic km from mountain and other glacier formations…if you like but that would be a modest increase.
  • 83 meters = 100% of Antarctica’s ice sheet has to melt: So take the 83 meter increase described above…that describes ALL the ice in the Antarctic melting which is more likely if human beings are idiotic (nuclear war, smog everywhere etc) or an extraterrestrial species from a Venus like home world invades and terra forms Earth to a warmer clime…. Even so, there is no where near enough ice on land to get to Waterworld levels, 83 meters = 272 feet….so don’t believe Hollywood, folks.
The level of flooding depicted above is not supported by the math behind how much land-based ice is presently on glaciers, Greenland and Antarctica,. So, yes emotionally, Water World (1996) made you care about the environment, but there is not enough ice on earth to flood as above…unless more water is introduced to Earth.
  • Sense checking the 6 meters concept: So anyway, there are a bunch of assumptions that are required to get that original 6 meters prediction that Al Gore was shocking us with….And here is an example calculation. Basically, a small portion of Antarctic needs to melt for the 6 meter increase to occur, ie 83 meters = 100% therefore 6 meters = 13.8% of the ice sheet to drop into the ocean…but again, IPCC believes that 13.8% of 30 million cubic kms which is 4.14 million cubic kms will take a really long time to melt, the point is it will with our current policies but we’re also talking beyond 2100. So that’s assuming we do nothing which is obviously not the case. Humanity will reach a goal of carbon reduction because current companies will find a way to cost save and there are trillion dollar companies yet to be founded that charge a fee for solving climate change….probably.
  • Bottom line on sea level right now: So if the IPCC report suggests that 1) ice melting will take a lot longer to have an effect than original thought, and 2) the planet has to warm by 5 degrees Celsius over a longer period of time, then the 6 meters isn’t probable (in our lifetimes or the lifetimes of most children born in the 2020s…). And by 2100, there will be multiple generations worrying about climate change so (gov’t & private) solutions will emerge ($$$$$$$).
  • Magicians pivot your attention: So anyway, scientists don’t know for sure but it’s safe to say that the sea level story is no longer the central concern, hence Mark Carney does not lay into it at all in Value(s). Now, it seems plausible that he doesn’t discuss sea level much because he doesn’t want to admit that science is not static or that governor of central bank can’t accurately predict the future because then you won’t trust him or the institution to generally do what’s right… Instead of admitting the truth that science is a journey, in order to persuade us to make personal sacrifices, Carney and others have put more emphasis has been put on the fact that there will be more flooding as humans demand more single-dwelling homes in flood plains….which takes us back to the problem of personal preferences and how the consequences of those preferences are distributed.
  • Smart money / market argument: Over the decade after An Inconvenient Truth (2006), most of the emphasis was on awareness coupled with government intervention. Stephane Dion in Canada led the Liberal Party to massive defeat in 2009, a campaign built on a Green Shift. Of course a myriad of variables determined that election which is why blaming the Green Shift is a political statement that Canadians “don’t really care about climate change” which obviously varies as an opinion per Canadian. Such is our complex voter preferences… However, the lesson taken there is that the idea that government and by extension the civil service and regulation are primary means of driving punitive costs to polluters has consistently been deemed suspect by a significant portion of smart-money folks.
  • Obama was hands off for example because of the coalition he had backing him and the legislative strategy he needed to implement. And in his biography, his mother knew that jobs were more important then environment for poor Indonesians that she worked with for years. Now, financial institutions, which enable the allocation of scarce capital, in as optimal a manner as possible, are being marshalled (by the general investment customer base) to more seriously address climate change + the general investment. Carney does not put the most devastating case forward because it gets harder and harder to know how that would play out in a complex eco-system such as our planet. But basically, after the sea levels rise 10 cm….10 cm or 20cm? So what? We were talking about 20 feet in 2006. Some of the claim by Al Gore on ocean level has since been reevaluated (as mentioned above)….websites are disappearing that used to contain claims of 6 meter sea level rises “guarantee”. So he has to combine weather with flooding to say Hurricane Sandy would have been 30% worse than it was from an insurance perspective. I feel so bad for insurance companies having increase their rates….not! 
  • Reparations: Another point is that the Alberta conversation needs a better answer around some support system, although historically when a sector struggles we do not necessarily intervene, but with climate change, government is intervening to accelerate the transition. There are no easy answers there because living in minus 40 conditions in Edmonton becomes hard to fathom if the human capital with a green tech breakthrough can migrate to Silicon Valley with no dis-incentives.
  • Another question is: what if the scientists are wrong, again? How much punishment should allocated to their grandchildren for the oil & gas careers that are hindered unjustly in this hypothetical? That would be absurd of course but the climate physics is rock solid until new research uncovers better techniques and models as part of the scientific method. It’s an important philosophical question: what is the consequence of getting it wrong? What commitment can Carney truly make if he is wrong? And if / when climate change is mitigated through a combination of human ingenuity and sacrifice, there will be naysayers who point of that it was never real in the first place because all the bad things that were suggested did not transpire! Such is the elephant in the room of all data science: there is not parallel version of Earth where we can control for different approaches to climate change.
  • The Yeah But…a lot of the public still can’t connect this slow moving crisis to their lives, most people see this is a transitionary problem over decades and decades, predictions have been wrong and continue to be wrong, if saving humanity was so lucrative then why haven’t we paid to terra form the planet to prevent sea level rising: there is a funding problem: no one wants to pick up the cheque, where is the global fund to pay for these changes, you are asking people to suffer for an abstraction that isn’t flawlessly defined…
  • Carney fails to address the command economy advocacy imbedded in prescribing with science what every person’s carbon footprint ought to be. Here, there is no invisible hand, the government of the world is most equipped with providing each citizen with their responsibility. The counter by Carney is of course, seatbelts wouldn’t have been imposed without political and regulatory force. It is the use of that force that can spur innovation in concentrated points throughout the economy. 
  • Putting a price on pollution is like putting a price on negative social media comments, the state is imposing a costs for doing something that perceived as bad but has some positive value and making the recipient hopefully tougher for criticism of their instagram post of a really delicious meal.
  • A general rule in life is to identify that if someone is claiming that there is a single cause to a problem, they are trying to convince you of something or sell you something. You are being persuaded into conformity of some kind, like you need to buy X to resolve the Y. A lot of people don’t actually like being talked down to…I’ve found…. The language problem of inexactness of human communication system (language) is slowly being overcome with PowerPoint, Film etc. This problem of debating cause versus correlation is best exemplified with climate change discussions. Human activity has caused climate change immediately sounds misleading because the “climate is always changing” and how does one know to what degree “human activity” is causing climate change. Humans could be contributing 1% or 99% of the factors driving climate change, but some goof will point out that volcano contribution to disrupt the argument. For example, the counter argument that human activity is not causing climate change conflates causing with contributing. If someone says human activity is not contributing to climate change then that’s a sniff test for an intellectual dilettante. To prove that humanity is contributing to changes in the environment simply apply the counterfactual of the no-humans version of Earth. In that version of Earth, on this day, you would now be outside rather than in your home or office where you are reading this article. There would be no roads, etc etc. The very fact that this is obvious, proves that humans impact Earth in a significant way. And secondly, all those human tools and technology that we have been using requires heat energy to produce. That heat energy generates CO2 amongst other gases. So if any one says that humans do not contribute to climate change, they necessarily have to deny that absent humans there would be roads, houses mysteriously populating this no-humans version of Earth. In other words, it’s absurd.
  • Carney neglects to acknowledge that the research cited is subject to grants. If someone is obsessed with derivatives, then they will likely think derivatives are really important. They will have biases that warp their world to the point where their own brain notices patterns elsewhere that relate back to derivatives: this is selection bias. To not acknowledge that any human being, regardless of credentials is subject to the same confirmation and selection bias should they study climate change, is intellectually controlling. I suspect Carney knows there should be some doubt but he may not trust readers with this nuance. 
  • Another interesting sense from this chapter is that Carney doesn’t have an entrepreneurial spirit really, if he did he would understand that extinction is a necessarily part of evolution. If the cause is human habitat encroachments which by definition is going to continue to happen, then we should be sympathetic. However, extinction is not by definition bad. Does anyone miss Pan-American Airlines? Does anyone miss the Dodo Bird? Of course, we all miss these things or would like to see them in the wild but such is life…Dodo Birds were definitely eaten to extinction but they also did not produce enough offspring. Life is cruel and unfair.
  • Measuring the acidity of the oceans: a 30% increase in acidity is significant if the acidity of the acid content is 1 -> 1.3 part per 100 but not if it is 1 0> 1.3 part per 1M….
  • Carney does not mention that there is an increase in human habitats such that extreme weather events like flash flooding are on the rise…in geographies where the events are newsworthy. An analogy might be that coverage of gun violence is only newsworthy when a random citizen is the victim rather than a gang related victim.  
  • Carney does not address terra forming solutions accept for the socially accepted one: carbon capture which involves sucking carbon out of the air or releasing CO2 into the ground.
  • Carney basically tells readers to read Bill Gate’s How to Avoid A Climate Disaster. In other words, friends help friends.
  • Anyway, here are some of my wacky but fun ideas to address the most extreme consequences (such as the 6 meters ocean rise) which as I mentioned above is not that likely in the next 100 years:
  • Notice how any terra forming suggestions are met with derision as they are not a complete solution, not costed and/or seemingly enable current practices? People forget that things do take a long time to implement. People also tend to want a single causal variable to solve all the underlying problems because our brains organized to address single cause circumstances…..there is rarely a single bullet, and change is incremental (we can’t cram for solutions). We tend to need a business case as well.
  • If the 6 meters sea level rise is increasingly less likely, then we will continue to put off any wacky terra-forming ideas, and that’s less fun for me, but definitely not a major loss.

Citations Worth Noting for Part 2: Chapter 11:

  • ‘What is Ocean Acidification’, PMEL Carbon Program.
  • IPCC, Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 degree Celsius (2018).
  • Saul Griffith, Rewiring America, e-book (2020).
  • Stockholm Environment Institute, ‘Framing stranded asset risks in an age of disruption’ (March 2018). 
  • Norman Myers, ‘Environmental Refugees: An Emergent Security Issue’, Oxford University (May 2005). 
  • Sandra Batten, ‘Climate Change and the Macro-Economy – A Critical Review’, Bank of England Staff Working Paper No. 706 (January 2018). 
  • IMF, ‘The Economics of Climate’ (December 2019). 
  • Ryan Avent, ‘Greed is good isn’t it?’, American Spirit, 18 April 2020.
https://www.transitionpathwayinitiative.org/

Value(s) by Mark Carney: Chapter 10 Covid Crisis: Fallout, Recovery and Renaissance: Key Takeaways / Analysis / Citations

Chapter 10: Covid Crisis: Fallout, Recovery and Renaissance

Key Takeaways

The reality is that mobility did decline as people accepted the lockdowns. State legitimacy is ensured by containing the virus. A lot of what Carney is saying here is a summary of what is relatively uncontroversial. He discusses the framework for the common good. Is that it is possible to calculate that value of a given person? The solidarity of citizens is important to note here, because the view was that no one should die in this pandemic regardless of age (or rather that folks did not want to contract this virus). 

Other topics: 

  • Perceived fairness of healthcare: you cannot have one set of rules for the rich and another for general citizens.
  • Value of a senior versus other citizens. 
  • The young will have to pay twice in increased taxes and the depression of the moment.
  • Kids with internet had an advantage in home schooling. 
  • Value creation and destruction increased under Covid.
  • R0 as the metric is a useful anchor just as the 1.5 degree Celsius  increase to evade the most harmful effects of climate change. 
  • Managing R0 was the core activity of this pandemic as far as governments were concerned.
  • Carney rationally described how the government that is presented ought to appear competent. 
  • Local businesses will be emphasized over global for years to come.
  • There will be future black swans, no kidding. 
  • We have continued to move towards market society however, in this Covid crisis, we have “acted like Rawlsians and communitarian rather than utilitarians and libertarians.” (260, Value(s)).

Covid and Climate Change

  • Carney predicts that the pandemic’s post active phase will see an increase the societal confidence in science, demands for stakeholder capitalism
  • Carney then draws a parallel between Covid and climate change. Using science to inform decision making for example. Having targets. How no country can isolate for each other in a pandemic or a climate crisis. 
Introduction: Humanity Distilled Chapter 1 Objective Value
 Chapter 2 Subjective Value Chapter 3 Money & Gold
 Chapter 4 Magna Carta  Chapter 5 Future of Money
 Chapter 6 Market Society Chapter 7 Financial Crisis
 Chapter 8 Safer FinanceChapter 9 Covid Crisis
 Chapter 10 Covid Recovery Chapter 11 Climate Crisis
 Chapter 12 Climate Horizon Chapter 13 Your Values
 Chapter 14 Values in Companies Chapter 15 ESG
  

Analysis of Part 2 Chapter 10:

  • Leadership means being a custodian to the long-term. It’s not about you, says Carney.
  • There is a so what to this chapter….it falls short of saying anything about how the issuance of debt what appropriate or not. He didn’t talk about work from home or how the virus works which is a missed opportunity.
  • Carney seems to downplay the fact that the biggest failing of the pandemic is actually that government are operated by people who are focused inwardly in their own self interest within the architecture they have inherited. And such there is a lack of real time data to respond to the real society as it is occurring. There is a high lack information between citizen and government. The government should get out of the way for those who want that and step in for those who need help. Being able to distinguish between complex contradictory people as we all are is critical. It’s a credit card for UBI, it’s an interface to detail ones preferences voluntarily, it’s a relationship that is not simply a marketing blast….
  • Carney makes sweeping claims here that are sufficiently inoffensive to warrant much comment. There are no innovative sliders that he trials in this chapter, there was a lot of spicy behaviour in Covid but Carney manages to keep it very potatoe. 
  • Surprised he doesn’t go after thie no mask wearers and other violators of lockDown. We tend to forget that these regulations were ignored by millions of people as they were ill enforced… 

Citations Worth Noting for Part 1: Chapter 10

  • World Health Organization, ‘Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) Situation Report – 11’, 31 January 2020.
  • Christian von Soest and Julia Grauvogel, ‘Identity, procedures and performance: how authoritarian regimes legitimize their rule’, Contemporary Politics 23 (3) (2017), pp. 287 – 305.
  • Stephanie Hegarty, ‘The Chinese doctor who tried to warn others about coronavirus’, BBC, 6 February 2020.
  • Ruth Igielnik, ‘Most Americans say they regularly wore a mask in stores in the past month; fewer see oher doing it’, Pew Research Center, 23 June 2020.
  • Timothy Besley, ‘State Capacity, Reciprocity, and the Social Contract’, Econometrica 88(4) (July 2020), p. 1309 – 10.
  • Allan Freeman, ‘The unequal toll of Canada’s pandemic’, iPolitics, 29 May 2020.
  • Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Allan Lane, 2011).
  • Timothy Besley and Nicholas Stern, ‘The Economics of Lockdown’, Fiscal Studies 41(3) October 2020), pp. 493 – 513.

Value(s) by Mark Carney: Chapter 9 The Covid Crisis: How We Got Here: Key Takeaways / Analysis / Citations

Chapter 9 The Covid Crisis: How We Got Here

Key Takeaway

This chapter discusses the discovering of COVID and all the other asks of this pandemic that we are all very familiar with. Carney was the governor of the Bank of England until February 2020. Economic and family priorities. 

The Covid crisis emphasized:

  1. Solidarity: companies, bank, society
  2. Responsibility: for each other, employees, supplies, customers.
  3. Sustainability: where the health consequences skew towards seniors while the economics consequences skew towards millennials and Gen Z.
  4. Fairness: sharing the burden, providing access to care.
  5. Dynamism: restoring the economy with massive government intervention and private sector resurgences…..

Duty of the State:

Carney goes through a review of political philosophy from Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) to John Locke (1632 – 1704) to Rousseau (1712 – 1778) to suggest that in exchange for giving up certain freedoms, the state promises to deliver protection to its citizens. Much the same with central banks; that the public gives up the detailed nuanced control of the money supply in exchange the financial system delivers prosperity. 

Capacity of the State must have: 

1) legal capacity: ability to create regulations, enforce contracts and protect property rights: these include social distancing regulations that aimed to reduce transmission of COVID 19; 

2) collective capacity delivering services;

3) fiscal capacity: power to tax and spend: state capacity has moved from 10% of GDP to 25% to 50% of GDP with corresponding services to protect citizens from COVID 19.

Other Points:

  • Poor compliance in democratic societies;
  • Stock piles were not restocked;
  • Bill Gates Ted Talk from 2015 was not actioned by any one actor;
  • Many countries didn’t have PPE and depended on China’s production initially; 
  • No country is really prepared for this particular kind of pandemic;
  • South Korea had a pandemic in 2015 and Carney repeats the often mentioned success of South Korea through contact tracing and geo-targeting of users;
  • Governments need to be better at coordinating: there were departmental territoriality;
  • In simulations for pandemics this was very evident.

Cost-Benefit Analysis for Hard Choices:

  • There was a weighting of variables to decide whether to lockdown or otherwise.
  • The effects of lockdown: domestic abuse were hard to do that. 

Calculating the value of a human life: is hard to do. But there is actuaries to put the intrinsic versus investment value of a life or the net present value of all future cashflows that person is predicted to generate. Life is priceless. Sometimes the calculation is about the productivity of the person in life…..

Schelling’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” points out that the value of a life principally the concern of the person living it. Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) became the industry standard. The example Carney provides is the a risk of death in a high-risk job might be 1 in 10,000 and employees receive $300 of danger pay, therefore the VSL is $3,000,000. There are several other methods: 1) stated-preference, 2)hedonic-wage, 3) contingent etc. And different countries use different metrics in similar circumstances. In Canada, the estimated range of a human life is $3.4M to $9.9M CAD meanwhile in the US, the estimated range of a human life is $1M to $10M USD. Healthcare looks at quality-adjusted life year (QALY) and cost-utility versus cost-benefit analysis. Schelling’s assumption about how a person can evaluate the value of their life. VSL usage is a moral choice. Wealthcare many not be measured properly according to Carney. Another model is the VSLY Value of a Statistical Life Year. The question remains: do all lives have an equal value or is it the number of life years should be treated as equal? 

Introduction: Humanity Distilled Chapter 1 Objective Value
 Chapter 2 Subjective Value Chapter 3 Money & Gold
 Chapter 4 Magna Carta  Chapter 5 Future of Money
 Chapter 6 Market Society Chapter 7 Financial Crisis
 Chapter 8 Safer FinanceChapter 9 Covid Crisis
 Chapter 10 Covid Recovery Chapter 11 Climate Crisis
 Chapter 12 Climate Horizon Chapter 13 Your Values
 Chapter 14 Values in Companies Chapter 15 ESG
  

Analysis of Value(s) Part 2 Chapter 9 

  • While it is complicated, I would have liked Carney to have explained the system of money creation in simple terms as it pertains to the pandemic. The level of government issuance of support has been massive. It is imperative folks understand how stimulus money is created.
  • The perception that money is created out of thin air, subject to political pressures is not true. Zeitgeist and other explanations of the money system are warped thinking. There friends and family going around saying that central banks ‘just print money’ whenever it suits them…
  • Here is a good explanation of how the central bank enables money creation:   To support small businesses and citizens out of work: Is the government increasing tax or are they printing money during the pandemic? The stimulus money was not coming from new taxes so here the government raises through borrowing. The government issues treasury bills to three groups of savers: 

(1) public sector (other parts of the government, 

(2) the private sector (people and companies), 

(3) foreign entities.

The government agrees to pay those savers back with interest at a future date. In the short-term the government uses that cash sucked out of the economy in exchange for the treasury bills to issue stimulus cheques back into the economy. Keynesian economics says that the more stimulus there is, the more economic activity which enables more private savings which then fuels more transactions for bonds. The government can borrow, unlike an individual, through this system as long as the economy is growing at the same or greater rate then that of the debt. The economy is growing at the same rate as debt then the debt to GDP ratio will be stable. If the debt to GDP ratio is stable, then the government can argue for continued investment in its debt securities (ie. bonds).

An additional layer of complexity is that: (4) the source which is the Mint in Canada and the Federal Reserve in the US does not print actual paper money much any more but does indeed ‘print out of thin air’: electronic money, that is credited in the treasury department’s account. In exchange, the Fed then holds treasury bills. The key consequence of issuing too much money with this source (4) is inflation whereby more money in circulation is chasing the same limited number of goods available thus driving the price upward of the individual goods. The 10 year Treasury Note then starts to go up and inflation creeps in. In this case, the Fed needs to increase interest rates to counteract/dampen the purchasing of the demand side….. 

  • The fines for violating COVID rules have an earned media dynamic: we know that the virus is spread through gatherings where one ore more participants has the virus. When someone gets an ‘arbitrary fine’ it effectively markets better than other forms of advertising such as digital. The injustice of the fine is earned media.
  • There are Canadians under the false impression that government at the federal, provincial and municipal level are not allowed to make rules that ‘violate’ the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Well, a constitution has to be enforced, my friend… 
  • This time will be different which was Carney’s number one lie in finance seems to be fillable here to say, why would you think that in a future pandemic in say 2055, that our children will be able to respond better then this time?
  • Just are Carney fails to explain how the central bank manages the money supply, he too here fails to give a basic description of the “obvious’ nature of the COVID 19 virus. Its unique gestation period in which it sheds without the host having any symptoms for T+7 days is very novel unlike other viruses that are initially extremely aggressive, for example, ebola or SARS.
  • The threat of future pandemics is very real until it isn’t at all. If COVID had the immune effects of HIV then the response would have been more severe in North America. However COVID can be contracted and the likelihood of death is 1 – 5% based on comorbidities. We’ve literally spent the last year talking about this virus. The next virus if it were HIV but airborne, the human race would be in full black plaque mode. Freedom loving + scientific illiteracy are a potent weapon.
  • Lack of understanding the characteristics of the virus.
  • In ability to connect barriers that create friction such as laws, walls and masks have the underlying same logic; they do not prevent all the negatives from happening but laws, walls and masks make the unwanted thing from happening, obviously.

Citations Worth Noting for Part 1: Chapter 9:

  • John Locke, A Third Concerning Toleration, in Ian Shapiro (ed.), Two Treaties of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, 1689.
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract.
  • Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).
  • Derek Thompson, ‘What’s Behind South Korea’s COVID-19 Exceptionalism?’, Atlantic, 6 May 2020.
  • A.E. Hofflander, ‘The Human Life Value: An Historical Perspective’, Journal of Risk and Insurance 33(1) (1966).
  • Cass Sunstein, The Cost-Benefit Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018): OECD (2012).

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