Comments by an unidentified member of the editorial board:
PNAS publishes few letters, selecting only those that "make a significant contribution to the field and help further discussion." I do not believe that the present version of your letter meets that bar. I'll say why below. If you believe you can address my comments constructively and effectively, you are welcome to submit a revised letter.
1) The first third of your letter (paragraphs 1 and 2) is a set of homilies that are not wrong but rather truisms well known to many of us on both the editorial board of PNAS and in our readership. Good editing is hard. Got it. We don't always get it right. But this observation is no more relevant to the present article than it is to most that we publish, especially in the Sustainability Science section. Please remove this section from your comments.
2) Regarding paragraph 3: We are trying to publish papers that advance understanding, not one discipline or another. So expand on the comment about the capital accounts and tell the reader -- who you should not assume to be an economist -- i) what you think is wrong with the accounting in this particular paper, ii) why ; and iii) the significance for the argument the paper is making.
The original note is quite clear: Money is not conversed. It disappears and reappears later.
(Its no good to say 'it is hard to think through the implications...' They have some results. If your concerns do not call those results into questions in particular ways, they don't rate a letter here.
Nonsense models produce nonsense results. I guess the optimization algorithm shifts money from the future to the present, artificially boosting net present welfare. This is more easily done as greenhouse gas emission reduction is stricter, artificially lowering the costs of climate policy.
In revising your text, please keep in mind that the paper was carefully reviewed by economists other than yourself who approved it.
The handling editor of the Bauer et al. paper told me that there were two referees, one economist (me) and someone who is not an economist.
3) On Negishi weigths: Make your case in a way that is accessible and meaningful to our readers. Again, say what you think is wrong, why, and so what for the conclusions. Do so in a way that takes account of the fact that other reviewers -- including economists -- approved the revised version of the paper.
The handling editor of the Bauer et al. paper told me that there were two referees, one economist (me) and someone who is not an economist.
So what you presumably mean in the last line is "I do not know what they computed." If that is the case, say so rather than using a passive construction that obscures who doesn't get it.
I wrote "It is not known what they computed." And that is what I meant. No one knows what they computed. They do not clear the market, however, so that emission reduction is more expensive than needed.
4) "Economic part be published in an economics journal first..." I have two problems with this. First, the authors in their paper and their rebuttal letter cite a number of econ journals where the results were published... including the one cited in your initial review as containing the authoritative conclusions you thought that the authors had ignored. Do you really mean that you believe it should have been published in a specific economics journal, and only in parts of that journal that don't include special features...? That's your prerogative. But the only point that might "advance the field" is if you want to make and convincingly defend a specific claim that the economic journals that did publish this work are not good enough to be taken seriously in serious papers.
My second problem is that I simply reject your contention. Some good work that makes solid contributions to understanding is truly interdisciplinary. One of the reasons we created the Sustainability Science section of PNAS was to give a home to such work, rather than force its arguments about a complex reality to be sliced up into oversimplified disciplinary pieces. Does this make quality control in the process of writing and reviewing papers harder? Of course. But it is what this section of this journal has set out to do. We say that on our masthead. People who want only to read papers produced with your discipline-first model have plenty of other journals they can go to. So again, if you want to offer a specific critique of the understanding that the authors purport to have given us, do so. But don't use a letter about this particular paper to have a general fight with us over our editorial policies.
5) Para 6 ("There is more..."). Your second sentence is a tautology. If you think there is a problem in this paper about a specific bias due to specific assumptions, i) say what, specifically, the authors say that you disagree with; ii) convince the reader that you are more likely to be right than they; and iii) say why it matters for the conclusion.
6) "The main findings are not new..." The other reviewers / editor disagree, and showed they were quite aware of the Weyant paper you cite. So if you want to say something here, make it explicit: what specific findings of this paper do you believe are already well established in what specific prior literature?
Again, there was only one other reviewer.
7) In summary, we will consider a letter that makes a convincing argument that specific points made or methods used in the published paper are sufficiently flawed that they undermine the paper's conclusions. We are not interested in publishing general lectures about what you believe our editorial process is or should be, or about how you think economics works.
-
[letter submitted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences]
Academics live to move the frontier of knowledge and sometimes overlook that there is a large body of shared knowledge. We relish the discussion with our peers but tend to forget that we accept over 99% of their research. An outsider readily observes the disagreements. The agreements are harder to see.The climate problem does not respect disciplinary boundaries. Research that informs climate policy has to include elements of physics, biology, economics, and so on. Quality control in such research is hard. Suppose you are the editor of a paper that combines physics and economics. You send it to a physicist and an economist for review. If the physicist takes issue with the paper, is that because she disagrees on some esoteric points or because something basic is wrong? If the editor is an economist like me, it would be difficult to decide.In a recent paper in this journal (1), basic things go wrong with the economics. Economists are known for their fierce disagreements and spotty forecasting. Economists agree, however, on accounting principles. The balance of payments must be zero. Money is conserved. If you earn more than you spend, you build up savings. If you borrow money, someone has to lend it to you. If a country exports more than it import, it builds up foreign assets. (1) violate this principle. Their capital account is zero by assumption, and their current account is balanced over time rather than at each point in time. Money disappears from Earth and reappears years later. This is bizarre. It is hard to think through the implications for their results.Economists also agree on a few idealized states of the economy that make for useful yardsticks. (1) claim to use “Negishi weights” to balance the current account over time. Negishi weights, however, establish a mathematical equivalence between a hard-to-solve market economy and an easy-to-solve planned economy (2). (1) did not use Negishi weights. They used other weights instead. Therefore, their solution represents neither a market equilibrium nor a social optimum. It is not known what they computed.
This could have been avoided if the editor had insisted that the economic part of the model be published in an economics journal first.There is more. Cost estimates of emission reduction are biased downwards if rapid technological progress is assumed for renewables but not for fossil fuels. The main findings are not new (3): Without nuclear, baseline emissions increase and it is harder to meet any particular emissions target. There is one option less to reduce emissions. Climate policy is more expensive.Reference List1. Bauer, N., Brecha, R. J., and Luderer, G. (2012) The economics of nuclear power and the climate change mitigation policies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.2. Negishi, T. (1960) Welfare Economics and Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy. Metroeconomica 12, 92-97.3. Weyant, John P. (1993) Costs of Reducing Global Carbon Emissions. Journal of Economic Perspectives 7, 27-46.0Add a comment
-
BRIGHTON - De overheid zou direct moeten stoppen met het subsidiëren van windenergie. Dat zegt Richard Tol, hoogleraar economie aan de Universiteit van Sussex en hoogleraar klimaateconomie aan de Vrije Universiteit. Windenergie kost volgens hem veel te veel geld en is op grote schaal nooit rendabel te krijgen.Windenergie lijkt goedkoop, maar is stukken duurder dan fossiele energiebronnen. En belangrijker: het zal volgens Tol voorlopig ook duurder blijven. Er zal altijd overheidsgeld bij moeten, hoeveel prijzige windmolens er ook worden bijgebouwd. Fossiele brandstoffen zullen waarschijnlijk ooit opraken, maar de hoogleraar ziet volop mogelijkheden met zonne-energie en bio-energie.Windenergie kost gewoon weg veel te veel geld, zonder dat het wat oplevert. Het rendement per euro is negatief. „Het grote probleem is dat windenergie bijna niet is op te slaan”, zegt hij. „Elke minuut moet de energievraag en het energieaanbod in balans zijn. Maar het probleem met wind is dat je er niet van op aan kunt wanneer het waait. Soms waait het. En soms niet. Dat betekent dat je een backup nodig hebt.”Tol: „Als je de stroomvoorziening bij huishoudens constant wil houden, zul je altijd gascentrales op de achtergrond mee moet laten draaien. Ook al zouden windturbines heel goedkoop zijn, dan nog zou je structureel hoge kosten hebben voor de backup. Eigenlijk is wind dus een hele slechte bron van elektriciteit. Alles zal duurder worden, onze producten, onze exportpositie. In Nederland geldt bovendien ook nog eens dat er weinig wind is, als het koud is. Je kunt wind dus niet gebruiken voor de volgende grote stap, electrificatie van de verwarming.”Ook door het aanbod groter te maken zal de prijs van windenergie niet dalen. „Er zijn geen schaalvoordelen te behalen”, vertelt de hoogleraar. „De technologische voortgang in de branche is momenteel zelfs negatief. Het is oude technologie, grote doorbraken en snelle vooruitgang is moeilijk in te denken. Het enige wat nog kan, is dat we grotere turbines bouwen.”Het is niet voor niks dat landen om ons heen de investeringen in windenergie terugschroeven. Duitsland heeft windenergie jarenlang zwaar gesubsidieerd. Vanaf de jaren zeventig besloot Denemarken scheppen geld aan windenergie gaan uitgeven, maar nooit werd het rendabel. Tot begin jaren negentig de Duitse minister van Milieu ook besloot om windenergie te subsidiëren. Vanaf dat moment is de industrie winstgevend geworden en zijn er veel banen gecreeerd. „Maar dat kwam dus alleen omdat er gemeenschapsgeld, uit de zakken van de Duitse burgers, aan de Denen is gegeven. Het zou natuurlijk mooi zijn als we de Duitse regering zo ver krijgen om gul over te maken naar het bedrijfsleven in Nederland.”Overigens is Tol niet tegen milieuvriendelijke energiebronnen. Maar verkiest dan bijvoorbeeld liever zonne-energie. De energie daarvan is ook duur en bij lange na niet commercieel rendabel, maar biedt in tegenstelling tot windenergie nog veel mogelijkheden om door te ontwikkelen en efficiënter te worden. „Hier komen de kosten heel snel omlaag.”Dit is de geautoriseerde versie van een interview verschenen in de Telegraaf op 6 September 20124View comments
Add a comment