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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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Every so often, I see a number that strikes me in a particular way. More than once, the way that it strikes me has been in comparison to climate change damage estimates. Yes, yes, there are many many different estimates out there, and they're even presented in different terms, too. Some are in percentage of GDP/GWP; others are dollar figures. One of the numbers that has stuck in my brain, thanks to David Friedman back at the old old old place, comes from one of the early world leaders in trying to produce such estimates, Nobel-winning William Nordhaus. It would take epsilon more effort to find one of his old old old comments at the old old old place, so I just found an example from his substack.

Nordhaus’s final and most important point was based on his own research.

My research shows that there are indeed substantial net benefits from acting now rather than waiting fifty years. A look at Table 5-1 in my study A Question of Balance (2008) shows that the cost of waiting fifty years to begin reducing CO2 emissions is $2.3 trillion in 2005 prices. If we bring that number to today’s economy and prices, the loss from waiting is $4.1 trillion. Wars have been started over smaller sums.

What he does not mention is that his $4.1 trillion is a cost spread over the entire globe and an extended period of time. I initially assumed his calculations of cost were for the rest of the century, making his $4.1 trillion total about $48 billion a year, but in A Question of Balance he appears to be summing over the next 250 years which reduces the annual cost to $16 billion.

It's a quote from Nordhaus' 2012 NYT opinion piece, citing his 2008 book, so yeah, the estimate is quite old. There are many many other estimates out there since then, but this one stuck in my brain. I think he was trying to get it to stick in your brain. "Wars have been started over smaller sums," is meant to do that. It worked.

This morning, Tyler Cowen posted How Much Has Shale Gas Saved U.S. Consumers? It's just quoting an NBER working paper. I'll just reproduce the whole quote, so there's no need to click through:

It may seem like a distant memory now, but as of the mid-2000s, U.S. natural gas production had been flat for a decade, and the U.S. was importing liquefied natural gas (LNG), with plans to import much more. Then shale gas happened. Advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling caused U.S. natural gas production to increase significantly, and the U.S. went from being a net importer of natural gas to being the world’s largest exporter. This paper calculates how much shale gas has saved U.S. natural gas consumers. Using price differences between the United States, Europe and Japan, we calculate that U.S. natural gas consumers have saved $3.1-$4.3 trillion between 2007 and 2025, equivalent to $164-$227 billion annually. Access to low-price U.S. natural gas has been particularly valuable during major supply shocks such as the war in Ukraine, and the benefits of shale gas have been experienced broadly across sectors and states.

It's not a direct analog, but that number, though. It's in my brain. $4.1T is right in that range of $3.1-4.3T. That's a swing in one country over less than 20 years, not 250 years. The dynamics of economic systems can move fast, much faster than climate change. But how big of a swing does that 'feel like'? Sure, life would have been more awful in a variety of ways in the counterfactual without the shale revolution. But, like, cataclysmically bad?! End of the world bad? I kind of doubt it.

I don't really like to focus too much on any particular estimate. There are higher ones; there are lower ones. I actually think the entire endeavor of estimating economic impacts of climate change is probably impossible, but we're stuck in a world where we have the various estimates we have and they matter to people. But I never underestimate how difficult the scale of numbers is to folks, so I appreciate when I occasionally see numbers of roughly similar scale in different contexts.

Fracking won so hard that no one talks about it anymore. It still causes miniquakes when the wastewater is injected underground, and some people will randomly get methane in their water supply, but total US energy dominance outweighs such petty concerns.

You get something greater than the effect of "miniquakes" (magnitude 1 or less) when a large truck drives by. And the stories about methane in water supply were fraudulent; the methane was there before the fracking.

And the stories about methane in water supply were fraudulent

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1100682108

In active gas-extraction areas (one or more gas wells within 1 km), average and maximum methane concentrations in drinking-water wells increased with proximity to the nearest gas well and were 19.2 and 64 mg CH4 L-1 (n = 26), a potential explosion hazard; in contrast, dissolved methane samples in neighboring nonextraction sites (no gas wells within 1 km) within similar geologic formations and hydrogeologic regimes averaged only 1.1 mg

This study seems to suggest that, at least in 2011, there was a real risk.

I expect the wells were placed where there was the most methane.

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