Because carbon emissions are a public bad, and all paths to saving the planet go through substantial reduction in air travel, this conference will be hybrid. Those that come by train, bus, or bike -- typcially living closer by Amsterdam -- are welcome to attend the workshop in person. Everyone else is welcome online. The Hybrid Learning Theatre at the University of Amsterdam was developed during COVID, and is designed to facilitate interaction for a mix of in person and online participants. The keynote speakers will come to us online, and we will also try to use the experiences from the online LEG conference from 2021 to stimulate interactions between all participants.
If you have questions about this, or anything else regarding the conference, feel free to email Matthijs van Veelen at c.m.vanveelen@ uva.nl, also if you want to receive a link to attend the conference online.
Hybrid / CO2
The LEG 2023 conference is hybrid. This is done for environmental reasons, so it will be useful to discuss that in some detail. I am enthusiastic about experimenting with ways to move the needle and make a change within the scope of what we can do ourselves, but since there are arguments to be made for a range of different options how to organize a conference in the age of climate change, I will share my perspective. This grew into a bit of a long read, that starts with some reflections on the problem we are facing, and that ends with a bit in which I describe a few more personal things.
Why climate change – and environmental issues in general – are hard to solve.
As economists, we are very familiar with the concept of externalities. We consume things that have an impact on others. Much of our consumption has an effect on the environment, and through that channel, our decisions affect the well-being of others, typically negatively. Travel in general, and air travel in particular, is CO2 intensive. CO2 increases the average temperature on the planet, it affects rainfall patterns, and that makes our consumption carry a negative externality for most inhabitants of planet earth. A core part of our training is that we learn that the presence of externalities implies that, without taxes or other forms of government intervention, the market equilibrium is typically not Pareto efficient; there would be an alternative consumption bundle that would make everyone better off.
An equally useful metaphor, or way to look at this, is that we recognize this as a social dilemma. We could all be happier if all of us would emit less CO2, but if other people reduce their CO2 emissions, we are still better off emitting more, and hence our individual interests are not aligned with our collective interests. The problem is of course more complex than that, as not everyone is equally affected by climate change, but thinking of this as a public goods game does capture one of the main characteristics, even if we tend to think public goods games that are symmetric.
Getting people to play cooperate in social dilemmas is generally not easy, especially without adjusting the incentives, but for many environmental problems there are additional complications. One of these complications is that not everyone that is negatively affected is part of the same nation state, or democracy – and often not even most. This one can see as a problem very akin to what Dani Rodrik (2011) describes as the political trilemma of the world economy; the scope of the government, or the democracy, does not match the scope of the problem. In the general equilibrium models that we teach, depicted in Edgeworth boxes, the producers and consumers involved are all part of the same democracy, that can vote a government into power that adjusts the incentives, so that the general equilibrium moves to a Pareto efficient outcome. If externalities extend across borders – as they tend to do with many environmental problems – this gets complicated. A second complication is that externalities also extend across generations, and these are not represented in elections in the present.
A third complication is the sheer number of people involved. Our moral considerations have evolved for interactions with a limited number of others. We don’t play loud music after 10PM, because we think our neighbours would be bothered by the noise more than we enjoy the extra decibels. Our neighbours limit the volume for the same reasons. This way we end up in a Pareto efficient outcome, just by following a simple calculation of the effects and estimating their aggregated effect. A fancier way of putting it would be to refer to Immanuael Kant’s categorical imperative, which suggests that you should live according to the rule that you would choose also, if you could choose one that everyone should live by. If I would not like to live in a world in which everybody plays music as loud as they want at any time they feel like it, but rather in one with limits on when and how loud, based on how much we would disturb others, I should behave accordingly.
With a handful of people to keep track of, it is doable to make a collective cost-benefit analysis of the different options of our behaviour. For public goods games involving many people, however, this is much harder. If I emit a ton of CO2, the marginal effect on the global temperature is very small, and so is the marginal disutility that a representative earth dweller experiences as a result of my behaviour. But in order to get the aggregate negative externality, this very small decrease in utility needs to be multiplied by the number of people on the planet, and that is a number that is so large, that we have not evolved to feel the gravity of it. We know from experiments that the same aggregate harm, sliced up and divided over more people, does not weigh as heavily on anyone’s conscience as it does when the same amount of harm is inflicted on one single person (Alós-Ferrer, García-Segarra & Ritschel, 2022). This effect is enhanced even further if we have no sense of how many 7 billion is.
If we want to do the right thing, we therefore would have to aggregate all of these tiny bits of disutility. The simple image that I have in my mind, when thinking about this, is therefore that a plane trip to a weekend in Barcelona might very well amount to putting two Spanish farmers out of business,[1] kill half a Koala in a wildfire, and end the life of one tenth of a polar bear, but then all of that sliced thinly over all inhabitants of planet earth. Plus maybe killing a few citizens of Pakistan in a flood, because we’re not that great with numbers with many digits.
Immanuel Kant and John F. Kennedy
When we think about climate change, we tend to all be against it. When we think about our own responsibility, we also tend to be human, and become more creative in finding reasons why our flying does more good than harm, why the circumstances force us to emit a ton of CO2, why what we do does not matter anyway, or why none of this is our responsibility. Now I wouldn’t want to say that none of those objections can ever be legitimate. President Zelensky should absolutely fly to European capitals to garner support for Ukraine – that clearly serves the common good. Flying is subsidized, and therefore often cheaper than far less CO2 intensive forms of transportation. Totally on point observation. Lawmakers and lobbyists for fossil fuel companies bear more responsibility than consumers do. Sure. But rather than use those reasons as a blanket pardon for ourselves, we could also choose to be a bit more consistent and creative in our thoughts about solutions to the problem. If we want to follow Kant’s categorical imperative, we have to dial down the motivated reasoning and the self-serving biases, and start imagining what it is that would have to change in order to achieve lower CO2 emissions, and who it is that should do the reducing. This is not at all a small task. Much of our society is organized on the basis of the availability of options with large CO2 emissions, and reducing those would require substantial changes, not just in our smaller decisions, but also in how we organize our lives around those. But rather than coming up empty handed for solutions that involve our own behaviour, we could also strive for a little more planetary patriotism, and ask a bit less what the planet can do for us, and a bit more what we can do for the planet. Otherwise nobody does anything, and the Titanic just keeps dipping ever further below Pareto efficiency.
A few simple arguments: low hanging fruit and (not) making it someone else’s problem.
If we want to do something about climate change, it is best to begin with the relatively low hanging fruit. For that, it is worth thinking where else we could save CO2, if not on air travel. I have not made the calculations, but I am pretty sure that I would have to take cold showers or not heat my house in winter for a very long time to compensate for any flight. And not going to a conference that is too far to go to by train, or missing out on a vacation, is a bummer, for sure, but not as much of a bummer as very very many cold showers.
We tend to be pretty OK at finding arguments why it is important for us to emit ton(ne)s of CO2. How else am I going to get to (fill in some far away destination)? By train it is 2 days. My reasoning here is: if I do not value going someplace sufficiently much to be willing to sit in a train for two days, then how much I value it also does not outweigh the harm I am inflicting on others by taking a plane. In other words, it might be nice for me to go, but that does not make it OK to force two Spanish farmers, a Koala and a polar bear to pick up the tab.
The alternative is not that bad.
A conference is great, both for scientific exchange and because it is just nice to meet nice people. And an in-person conference is better, and more fun, than a hybrid conference. There is no doubt about that; it is better to be able to smell the same coffee, at a conference there is a larger chance to bump into someone unexpectedly, and no Zoom chat can ever beat a conversation at a dinner table on a nice piazza in Lucca. But it is important to realize that all of that nice stuff is nice stuff for us. It contributes to how much we enjoy our work, and to our careers. That implies that this fits the description of playing defect in a social dilemma quite well. Sure enough society benefits a little bit from our research, but if I am honest, I cannot think of any of my papers that do much more than please our sense of science. Which is perfectly fine, and healthy, and it does not mean at all that I am not passionate about research (I am), and that a society does not need scientists (it does). But if I think of my best paper, multiply its possible benefits by the number of readers or policy makers that can put them to use, the I do not think that this adds up to an amount of additional utility and joy that the Spanish farmers would be willing to trade their livelihoods for. And it is important that the alternative is not no conference, and no exchange of ideas; the alternative is a less fun, less effective, but still pretty nice and scientifically useful conference. And maybe we can spend the time we do not spend on dinner with colleagues on dinner with other nice people we see way too little.
My own evolution
My own story is not important, but since the choices I made for this conference require explaining, I think some personal details might help understand why I would have a real hard time organizing (another) conference with a high CO2 footprint.
I flew a few times. In 1992 I flew from Amsterdam to Nairobi, and travelled from there to South Africa over land. On the way back, in 1993, I flew from Nairobi to Cairo. I don’t remember if at the time the problem with energy consumption was that we were still thinking that there was too little oil in the ground, and me using it up would go at the expense of future generations, or if global warming was already the main objection. Either way, I was uncomfortable flying from Amsterdam to Johannesburg, but I did not know how to cross the Sahara, so I flew across it. On the way back I reduced the avian mileage a bit more, by also going from Cairo to Amsterdam over land and by boat. I did however feel that I had been making excuses for myself, just because I wanted to enjoy spending a year in a far away place. If I really wanted that so bad, the next time I would have to get more creative and find myself a ride across the Sahara.
This made me decide to stop flying altogether, and I subsequently did not fly for 16 years. This included my undergraduate and graduate studies. It also meant that I did not go on the US job market, because that would have meant flying to the central meeting for interviews, and then, if invited, fly-outs. I consulted my conscience, and it said no. I had a decent publication record at the time, so I think it is reasonable to think that I would have had a decent shot at a job in an at least somewhat fancy place. Sometimes I fantasize what could have happened had I gone on the job market, but I think the alternative worked out pretty OK.
In 2009 Martin Nowak invited me to visit the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. That was very appealing. I looked into boats from Europe to the US and found out that the options were limited to seasons in which I needed to teach. Then I found enough moral wriggle room to allow myself to fly there. Between 2009 and 2016 I flew four more times to Boston, until at some point I realized that I was really doing it for me. With decreasing marginal utility, I had also been lowering the threshold for how great it would have to be for me to justify flying. After 2016, I therefore reinstated my flying ban.
I have in the past also organized two conferences for which I invited guests that came by plane. Also here, I had to be morally creative, and I figured that there is only a limited institutional budget, that, if I would not spend it on my conference on index number theory or evolutionary game theory, would be spent on some other topic, which would also involve a bunch of guests flying in. It did not sit well, though. Much as I enjoyed the conferences, I felt that I had followed my self-interest and tradition, but not my conscience.
I therefore hope that it is clear why I wanted to organize this conference in a hybrid way. I do not want to only get worked up about governments and oil companies (for which there is good reason, and which I do too) but I also want to move myself in the direction we would need to go to combat climate change. Be the change you want to see in the world, you know, that stuff.
(I hope to expand this text a bit more, but rather than postponing putting it on the website, because I feel I need to be more complete and more precise, I should already post this version, otherwise it will take until after the conference.)
References
Alós-Ferrer, C., García-Segarra, J., & Ritschel, A. (2022). Generous with individuals and selfish to the masses. Nature human behaviour, 6(1), 88-96.
Rodrik, D. (2011). The globalization paradox: Democracy and the future of the world economy. WW Norton & Company.
[1] Climate change affects rainfall patterns, and in the Mediterranean, that means less rain on average, with higher variability, to a degree that has large effects on the scope for agriculture.