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Jim Manzi/Cato: Climate progressives?

August 31st, 2008 No comments

Jim Manzi has just posted the close-out essay in the online forum (at Cato Unbound) that the Cato Institute has devoted recently to the issues of climate change risks and policy.  I alerted readers to the Cato effort and provide comments here, here and here.

My thoughts on Manzi`s final essay?  Briefly, while there`s much here to warm the cockles of any climate hysteric, misanthropic enviro-fascist or their dupes and co-religionists throughout the business and policy world [snark, to those not familiar with me or LvMI], I`m disappointed that Manzi has not tried to seriously explore libertarian approaches – involving serious de-regulation and tax changes – to climate change.

But let me let Jim Manzi speak for himself (emphasis added):

“I’d also like to thank Joseph Romm, Indur Goklany, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus for their extensive efforts in considering and responding to my essay and subsequent comments.  It’s always inspiring to me to see people who’ve devoted so much time, work, and intellect to analyzing hard problems.

“Mr. Romm and I, in particular, have disagreed quite directly about the likely impacts of carbon dioxide emissions, and I’ll just refer interested readers to the series of detailed exchanges between us ….  I’d like to try to establish what I think is common ground between us.  I think that vigorous, but respectful and fact-based, disagreement is almost always a precondition for practical progress on complicated issues, but that ultimately some consensus needs to be achieved to get anything done.

“It seems to me that all contributors believe that anthropogenic global warming is real and poses a serious risk.  We all agree that an R&D program of the type that I have proposed is a component of a solution, and I hope that we all can get behind this idea.  I think that we would all support adaptation to weather problems that may arise as a wise investment of resources.  Most adaptation measures have the advantage that, in comparison with R&D or mitigation efforts, they can be executed in fairly short order and only in response to problems as they become manifest, and hence would likely have very attractive cost-benefit ratios.  Finally, I think that we would all agree that the ongoing efforts to analyze physical and economic trade-offs involved in various proposals through the IPCC and similar bodies are valuable and should be supported.   (In fact, I would like to see such processes incorporate case-by-case analyses of the kinds of incremental R&D/technology-deployment ideas that Messrs. Shellenberger and Nordhaus have proposed).  Improved science, along with increased structure and rigor in the debate of its implications, should enable further progress.”

 

Categories: AGW, Cato, climate change, government, Jim Manzi Tags:

Foreign Affairs: Burden sharing on climate change

August 23rd, 2008 No comments

From Foreign Affairs,
September/October 2008

Categories: Uncategorized Tags:

More on Manzi/Cato on climate

August 22nd, 2008 4 comments

A few days ago I concluded that Jim Manzi’s lead essay in Cato Unbound’s new climate issue exhibited rather weak “libertariarian sinews”.

Allow me to note a few additional remarks on Manzi`s arguments.

1.  It’s clear from Manzi’s essay that (i) he is actually quite concerned about the risks posed by anticipated climate change, even while he dismisses the “scare stories” and the “precautionary principle” and (ii) he believes that the risks warrant even greater investments by government in climate science and carbon sequestration/geo-engineering efforts. 

While I commend Manzi for addressing at close to face value the IPCC’s warnings (even while climate science does not provide a firm basis for precise temperature or climate change prognostications) and the advice offered by economists such as William Nordhaus and Martin Weitzman, it is puzzling that he does not see in climate change concerns the opportunity for a positive agenda of deregulation and tax reform that would liberate our economy and help to spur changes in capital investments.

2.  Manzi has underplayed both the possible degree of climate change under “business as usual”/non-aggressive policy scenarios and the absolute and relative magnitude of the concomitant risks and costs.

Manzi notes that the “current IPCC consensus forecast is that, under fairly reasonable assumptions for world population and economic growth, global temperatures will rise by about 3 °C by the year 2100.” Note that this implies a an AVERAGE global temperature increase of 5.4 °F, with even greater temperature increases in the US and elsewhere the further one gets away from the equator. The IPCC does not make “forecasts”, but has analyzed and released a number of projections based on various scenarios, most of which assume aggressive actions to deploy clean energy technologies.

As fellow contributor Joe Romm (undergrad and Ph.D. in physics at MIT, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he writes and maintains the Climate Progress blog, and author of “Hell and High Water: Global Warming–the Solution and the Politics–and What We Should Do” ) argues, Manzi has seriously understated the risks of much higher temperatures by 2100 that the IPCC has noted.  Joe Romm notes that, in fact, the growth of actual global carbon emissions since 2000 has exceeded the IPCC’s most extreme A1F1 scenario, and argues that 

“the latest IPCC report finds that, absent a sharp reversal of BAU trends, we are headed toward atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide far exceeding 1,000 parts per million by 2100. IPCC’s “best estimate” for temperature increase is 5.5°C (10°F), which means that over much of the inland United States, temperatures would be about 15°F higher.” (emphasis in original)

Further, even using a very optimistic projection, Manzi has also seriously understated the impact and costs that the IPCC suggests may be felt in the US. Manzi, assuming that global temperatures rise “only” by 3 °C increase by 2100, refers to an IPCC summary that states that such a temperature increase would cause total estimated economic losses in the low end of a range of 1–5 percent of global GDP (and later uses an estimate of 3% of GDP). This ignores not only the much higher costs that will be faced if warming is even greater, but also ignores:

(1) that as global GDP is expected to substantially grow, the absolute magnitude of the annual GDP loss may be very large, indeed,

(2) that measures of “economic” losses include adaptation costs as a part of GDP but do not cover non-market damages, the risk of potential extreme weather, socially contingent effects, or the potential for longer-term catastrophic events and

(3) that the greatest negative effects of climate change are expected to be felt in developing countries that have a relatively insignificant share of GDP.

3.  Manzi notes that even with the low-ball assumptions, mainstream economists like Yale’s William Nordhaus have long argued on a standard cost-benefit analysis basis that the gains from implementing an escalating carbon tax would outweigh the costs (Nordhaus has for many years been at the low end of the benefits to be gained), but even so Manzi argues that “the real world of geostrategic competition and domestic politics” one leads him to greatly discount the basis for a policy the difficulties with implementing a carbon tax or similar policy.

But it looks like Manzi has put his thumb on the scale again. Manzi asserts that in order to have an effective GHG mitigation policy, we would have to agree to, and enforce, “for hundreds of years” a “global, harmonized tax on all significant uses of carbon and other greenhouse gases in any material form” that “would run directly contrary to the narrow self-interest of most people currently alive on the planet” and that “all the side deals that would be required to get this done would create enough economic drag to more than offset the benefit.” Manzi also points to the ineffectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol, the apparent unwillingness of developing nations to agree to GHG restrictions and the penchant for politicians for loading down climate change legislation with special deals as reasons to think that a globally-coordinated climate policy is not worth while.

But while these are serious concerns, it is relatively easy to counter that:

– the Kyoto Protocol is no failure, but that the Europeans have been waiting for the US to agree to similar action rather than blindly biting any bullet unilaterally;

– it is clear that China, India, Brazil and other developing countries are seriously concerned about climate change, but their initial participation is not needed for the developed nations to commence a meaningful mitigation deal, and there are trade and other levers (including a desire for cleaner energy technologies) to eventually bring them on boar;

– Manzi later acknowledges this in his own plan for an agreement among developed nations to invest in technology that can then be shared with developing ones;and

– effective climate policy can be initiated and implemented domestically without external coordination, such as power market deregulation, allowing immediate depreciation of capital investments, and replacement of income taxes with resource taxes.

Further, it’s clear that Manzi`s assertion that climate policies “run directly contrary to the narrow self-interest of most people currently alive on the planet” is simply an unfounded and unjustifiable conclusion.

All of mankind shares the atmosphere, as an open-access but indispensable commons. We are approaching the point that the costs and risks of inaction (or rather, the costs of continuing free use without responsibility for costs/risks shifted to others) merit the costs of shifting to a system of shared rules (and other investments) with respect to its management – the efforts in which people and firms of many nations are voluntarily engaging in this regard are themselves evidence that even narrow self-interest justifies coordination with our neighbors (even as gamesmanship remains).

4.  Manzi next, rightly, considers the “inherently unquantifiable possibility that our probability distribution itself is wrong,” so that “the case for a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade emissions rationing system is really that it would be a hedge against the risk that actual damages from warming would be much, much worse than current risk-adjusted projections indicate,” with the primary purpose of such a tax or rationing system being “not to encourage conservation per se, but rather to induce the development of new technologies that can de-link economic growth from damaging accumulations of atmospheric carbon dioxide”.

Oddly, though, Manzi simply concludes, with no analysis, that any carbon pricing program would be “insanely expensive” and yet even then “would very likely not be high enough to successfully incentivize the creation of the desired technologies.” One would like to know on what basis he concludes that markets do not respond to incremental changes in prices – so that the governments of developed nations ought to directly make certain climate change technology investments (or incentivize them via prizes, etc.)

5.  It is also odd that Manzi then turns immediately from the dismissal of a gradualist pricing approach to a focus on “rapid, aggressive emissions abatement” that would only be justified if “the outer edge of the probability distribution of our predictions for global-warming impacts is enormously conservative, and disaster looms if we don’t change our ways radically and this instant,” in which case Manzi agrees that “we really should start shutting down power plants and confiscating cars tomorrow morning.”

Manzi seems to be as alarmist as many enviros, and to have even less faith in the market than they do.

Manzi then briefly addresses – and conflates with the table-pounding of Al Gore and others – the more sophisticated argument (advanced by Harvard’s Marty Weitzman) that “the risk that actual damages from warming would be much, much worse than current risk-adjusted projections indicate” is quite large. Says Manzi, “any rationale for rapid emissions abatement that confronts the facts in evidence is really a more or less sophisticated restatement of the precautionary principle: the somewhat grandiosely named idea that the downside possibilities are so bad that we should pay almost any price to avoid almost any chance of their occurrence.” 

Manzi believes that worrying too much about climate change is “to get lost in the hothouse world of single-issue advocates, and become myopic about risk,” while ignoring “lots of other unquantifiable threats of at least comparable realism and severity”. Well, I beg to disagree. While we can certainly deal with more than one risk at a time, why is it that conservatives like throwing trillions at “defense” and can focus on bird flu, but need to write off climate change? Could it have anything to do with what industries are in favor with Republicans and the White House?

Climate change differs from the other risks Manzi raises in that it is a risk that our own activities generate (not an “external” threat) – and one that we can manage by focussing on who is generating risk and asking them to bear some of the cost. Like the others, though, action is in some ways a collective choice problem, but unlike blowing trillions unilaterally on “defense”, climate change is a risk that other developed nations have shown they are willing to co-invest in heading off.

So why is continuing to be the spoiler in our national self-interest? Manzi provides the answer with a strawman:

“The loss of economic and technological development that would be required to eliminate literally all theorized climate change risk would cripple our ability to deal with virtually every other foreseeable and unforeseeable risk.”

Those who are concerned about climate change have long concluded that we are already facing ongoing climate change, with further unavoidable change in the pipeline, so simply nobody is talking about “eliminate[ing] literally all theorized climate change risk”.

6.  Finally, Manzi trots out his own proposal, after against dismissing any carbon pricing policies (and ignoring all others, like deregulation) with un-established suppositions:

“IF there is a real, though unquantifiably small, possibility of catastrophic climate change, and IF we would ideally want some technological hedges as insurance against this unlikely scenario, and IF raising the price of carbon to induce private economic actors to develop the technologies would be an enormously more expensive means of accomplishing this than would be advisable, then what, if anything, should we do about the danger?”

Apparently, Manzi has introduced these suppositions to tone down the much firmer and more extensive proposals he has made and justified elsewhere:

“There is, however, massive uncertainty (rather than mere risk) in our ability to predict the impacts of AGW, and recognizing this reality should lead us to take at least two actions: (1) improve the science to better-specify these extreme risks, and (2) hedge this uncertainty by making “insurance-type” investments today that would provide protection if an extreme AGW scenario ends up happening.”

Manzi`s proposals? To avoid the “failed game of industrial policy” by creating a climate change DARPA with a “a very high-IQ staff” to make many small (but collectively substantial) investments related to “detecting or ameliorating the effects of global warming” that “serve a public rather than a private need” (viz., that provide “no obvious potential source of profit to investors if successful”). Manzi thinks investments of the following types are merited: “improved global climate prediction capability, visionary biotechnology to capture and recycle carbon dioxide emissions, or geo-engineering projects to change the albedo of the earth’s surface or atmosphere”. Does Manzi not see that carbon pricing, if structured to allow offsets, would encourage private investments in all of these areas?

Ironically, Manzi concludes that “attempt[ing] to use the government to control the evolution of the energy sector of the economy” is not a “prudent reaction” to risk, but “the opposite: an impractical, panicky reaction unworthy of a serious government”.

Well, Jim, nice try, and thanks for your impractical, imprudent and panicky reaction.

Cato … takes climate change seriously, and devotes latest online issue to it

August 19th, 2008 No comments

The Cato Institute has dedicated its entire current monthly issue of Cato Unbound, its online forum, to discussing policy responses to ongoing climate change. 

The issue, entitled “Keeping Our Cool: What to Do about Global Warming“, contains four relatively balanced essays from a wide range of authors and perspectives.  Here are excerpts from their lead in:

“While virtually no one doubts the reality of climate change, assessing its extent and crafting a prudent and proportional response raises problems of its own. …

“Which approaches offer the best value in terms of protecting property and natural resources, while generating the fewest risks and side effects of their own? In short: How much would we or should we pay today for a future without global warming?

“The problem grows more difficult when we realize that proposed global warming solutions have often been victims of the domestic political process — rightly or wrongly — or else have been unacceptable to developing nations. …

“To discuss the way forward on this complex and truly global issue, we have invited Jim Manzi, statistician and Chief Executive Officer of Applied Predictive Technologies, whose proposals to conservatives on the issue have generated significant discussion. In response to his essay, we have invited environmental expert and frequent Cato Institute author Indur Goklany; climate scientist Joseph J. Romm, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress; and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, the co-founders of The Breakthrough Institute, a think tank whose mission includes encouraging an ‘equitable and accelerated transition to the clean energy economy.'”

Unfortunately, Cato has no online blog.  Feel free to leave comments here; I will also try to post my thoughts on the essays.

Categories: adaptation, AGW, Cato, climate change, mitigation Tags:

Jim Manzi/Cato on climate: with flabby "libertariarian sinews", he advocates no panic, but domestic climate science and technology investments

August 18th, 2008 4 comments

[UPDATE:  See my follow-up post.]

Cato Unbound’s new climate issue features a lead essay by Jim Manzi, who is an MIT- and Wharton-trained statistician and CEO of Applied Predictive Technologies (which uses pattern recognition and optimization models for sales and marketing).

Manzi is a newcomer to the climate commentary scene, but has made a splash in conservatives circles over the past year or so through a series of articles in the National Review and The American Scene.  Manzi’s bio at Cato states that Manzi’s position is that “global warming, while real, is a problem of limited magnitude, deserving a proportional response, not overreaction“.

Manzi’s essay at Cato is a polished rehashing of points that he has made elsewhere, tweaked shamelessly to appeal to libertarians, as in this lead-off paragraph:

“The danger of potentially catastrophic global warming is an almost paradigmatic case of decisionmaking under conditions of extreme uncertainty.  Of course, this is just another way of saying that many of the intellectual sinews of libertarianism are central to thinking through this problem.” (emphasis added)

While the essay is worth consideration, aside from this initial mention, it is painfully evident that Manzi’s “libertarian sinews” are rather flimsy; indeed, Manzi:

  •  makes no mention of basic Lockean-based libertarian principles (rights to property in one’s own person, in the fruits of one’s own labor, and in resources taken from nature when mixed with one’s own labor; and duties to abstain from harming others, from taking property of others, and to leave enough and as good for others when taking from the commons) that are relevant to environmental and public policy issues (see Rothbard; Edwin Dolan has laid an application of Lockean principles to climate change here; );

  • fails to acknowledge “environmental” problems as cases where resources are not clearly or effectively owned, either individually or on a community basis, so that some economic actors do not bear the costs or risks of their actions, which costs or risks are shifted to others against their will (see Cordato; Jon Adler makes similar points here); and

  • provides only a rudimentary discussion of public choice issues that, while noting both the difficulties of reaching a global agreement and that government policies to prepare for climate change may be both inefficient and hijacked special interests, disregards the possibilities that effective international steps can be taken by just a few countries and completely fails to consider the role that special interests have played to date in manipulating government policies and in protecting the “GHG emissions/risk-shifting is free” status quo.

Rather, Manzi:

(1) argues that the estimates for future damages that the IPPC derives from models appear rather modest,

(2) downplays the widespread agreement by economists (like Nordhaus) and others that standard cost-benefit analysis provides ample support for carbon pricing (particularly in the form of carbon taxes) now,

(3) argues that we cannot adequately gauge the “massive uncertainties” regarding the “danger of potentially catastrophic global warming” (addressing but failing to mention Weitzman),

(4) argues that the US should not adopt “insanely expensive” measures to “force massive change in the economy” via “rapid, aggressive emissions reductions”,

(5) lumps climate change in with other, external risks (like pandemics and rogues states, which risks, oddly, we actually try to manage), and

(6) and tones down his earlier pieces by presenting an artificially weakened case that,

if there is a real, though unquantifiably small, possibility of catastrophic climate change, and if we would ideally want some technological hedges as insurance against this unlikely scenario, and if raising the price of carbon to induce private economic actors to develop the technologies would be an enormously more expensive means of accomplishing this than would be advisable,” (emphasis added)

THEN the government might be justified in investing in “improved global climate prediction capability, visionary biotechnology to capture and recycle carbon dioxide emissions, or geo-engineering projects to change the albedo of the earth’s surface or atmosphere”.

Manzi concludes with a mix of a case for a surprisingly large government climate program (even if “rife with inefficiencies”) and a bashing of the worst case, while ignoring the middle ground:

“But consider that its costs would be on the order of 1/100th of the costs of imposing a large U.S. carbon tax. It could be massively inefficient and we would still be far better off in actually developing the long–lead-time technologies that we would want if faced with a currently unanticipated emergency.

Hedging against the risk to future generations of potential unanticipated impacts from global warming is a legitimate job for the U.S. government. Ideally, it would be tackled by the governments of the small number of countries with a sophisticated technology development capability acting in some kind of coordinated fashion. A massive carbon tax, a cap-and-trade rationing system, and the attempt to use the government to control the evolution of the energy sector of the economy are all billed as prudent reactions to this risk, but each is the opposite: an impractical, panicky reaction unworthy of a serious government.

I hope to address later various aspects of Manzi’s piece, but I think it is fair to conclude initially that it is not libertarian nor, ultimately, a balanced discussion, but rather a somewhat strange conservative position that we ought to worry about climate change and so the government should throw even MORE money at it, while refusing to harness markets to accomplish the research tasks Manzi wishes to fund or to ask those who are generating climate risks to internalize or shoulder any of the burden.

While this stance might please fossil fuel interests and their defenders, it’s hard to see what, exactly, in Manzi’s analysis – other than his opposition to “massive” carbon taxes – will appeal to libertarians.

Friedman: Energy taxes have destroyed Denmark – not

August 10th, 2008 4 comments

Thomas Friedman has an op-ed at the New York Times that describes some of Denmark’s energy taxation and alternative energy policies.

No doubt these policies created distortions and in some ways left Denmark less wealthy than if such policies had not been adopted – particularly as high energy prices may discourage domestic industry to invest abroad – but as I have noted previously, a wide range of economists, businessmen and think tanks support carbon taxes in the US, particularly if they are accompanied by reductions in taxes on labor and capital.

My question, in connection with Friedman’s piece, is whether recycled carbon taxes, if coordinated by leading industrial nations (to reduce geographic shifts in capital investment), would decrease welfare globally?

I observe that the difficulties of coordination and enforcement make it highly unlikely that nations, absent dramatic climate change, will agree to very high carbon taxes.

I also observe that policies in the US to keep energy prices low bear some relation to both the health of the US auto industry and to our ruinous military engagements abroad.  Further, Denmark’s investments in energy independence have certainly spared it costly expenditures on foreign wars, and position it to make money as demand for clean energy grows. 

 

Categories: AGW, carbon pricing, climate change, Friedman Tags:

Chris Horner/CEI: Confused or alarmist on Kuznets, China and climate?

August 9th, 2008 No comments

The right-wing Business & Media Institute has published a rather confused piece by Chris Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in which Horner, while noting China’s progress along the environmental Kuznets curve (as I discuss here), prefers to wring his hands that the West, in order to deal with climate change, may feel compelled to adopt the same strong-arm approach that China has taken to trying to partially clear its filthy skies over Beijing during the Olympics. 

But Horner has his paradigms all mixed up. Environmental Kuznets curves are discussed with respect to particular countries – and for good reason, as a society’s response to externalities is largely dependent upon the particular mix of property rights and other institutions which such society may rely on to protect its people and their property from harms generated by economic activity.  But despite Horner’s worst nightmares, there is no “world government” (even as growing trade and wealth is gradually bringing different countries together and establishing a very interconnected world, a world that encourages China by allowing it to host the Olympics), much less a red-handed governing elite that can impose its will on the rest of a powerless world.

Indeed, while one might very well conceive of a global Kuznets curve, it’s quite obvious that information and transaction costs, political disunity and differences in wealth and perspective across the nations of the world make it very difficult indeed for self interested countries to reach meaningful and enforceable agreements with respect to shared resources like the atmosphere.  Even so, we are more likely to see such a political agreement or resource-management much earlier than we are to see the establishment of a unified global government that is capable of exercising a monopoly on force the way the Chinese government does.

It’s the very difficulty in reaching such agreements that underlies some of the pessimism among many that man is capable of addressing in a coordinated and meaningful way various global and regional problems, from those relating to unowned or open access resources to those relating to development and poor/kleptocratic governance (from Zimbabwe to the USA).

Further, on climate change discussions, the effort has stumbled not because of strong-arming of the kind that alarms Horner, but because Western nations have tried to craft overly sophisticated and bureaucratized trading mechanisms (based in large part on US insistence and experience) that were intended to reduce costs overall.

 

Accordingly, Horner’s “alarmism” is rather surprising.  One would think that the difficulties that the enviros have encountered in trying to coordinate global climate change policy would hearten Horner, who is a strong climate change skeptic, both on the science and on policy grounds.  Is Horner secretly concerned that maybe the enviros are right, and that delay on the policy front is buying us unavoidable future costs – in which case governments might decide to act with greater alacrity that they have shown to date?  If not, what is he worried about?

We’ve encountered “beam me up” Chris Horner before; as previously, I find his views to be puzzling – unless Horner, like “skeptical” scientists Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger, is becoming a warmer.  As Michaels and Knappenberger wrote in January:

“First off, it will take nothing short of a miracle for the 50% reduction to take place, and secondly, it probably wouldn’t stop the temperature from rising 2ºC above “natural” levels. …

“But the targets won’t come close to being met as a bits-and-pieces solution will not achieve the goal of halving current global CO2 emissions by the year 2100—much less any year before then. In fact, more than likely, these legislative efforts will not, to any noticeable degree, even begin to separate the blue and the red curves for a long time to come—far too long to avoid elevating global temperature 2 degrees above “natural” levels. 

That’s what the future holds in store. Get used to it.”

 

 

 

Open letter response to Gore’s "Alliance for Climate Protection" proposed 10-year transition to "clean" power

August 6th, 2008 No comments

I received the following email today from Cathy Zoi, who is the CEO of Al Gore’s “Alliance for Climate Protection” and sent back the response I note further below;

Dear Tokyo,

Last week, Exxon Mobil announced record profits — at the same time that the rest of us were paying record high prices at the gas pump.

It doesn’t need to be this way. Our energy prices don’t need to be this high.

If we repower America and generate 100% of our electricity from clean sources within ten years, we can bring our energy costs down.

A lot of people are surprised when they find out how quickly we can make this transition. We’ve built a fun quiz to help show the way. How well do you know America’s energy? ou might find the answers surprising.

We can start relying on fuels that are free and abundant right here at home. Fuels like the sun and wind. Once our electricity grid is based on clean sources, we can plug in our cars, use those free energy sources, and stop paying through the nose to the oil companies.

On the day Exxon announced its record profits, I testified before the U.S. Congress. I explained that there are no technical or material impediments to achieving the goal of 100% clean electricity within ten years. The only thing missing is political will. And that’s why the We Campaign exists — to build support for solutions that can revitalize our economy and solve the climate crisis.

The average score of people who’ve taken the quiz is 63% Can you beat that? .

Sincerely,

Cathy Zoi
CEO
www.wecansolveit.org

My response?  As follows:

 

Cathy, I took the quiz and got 100%.  I’ve also blogged on Al Gore’s recent proposal – the important goal of which I fully support – here:
 
 
However, I think that you are making a mistake to not supporting more nuclear power, which has by far the least environmental footprint of our currently available energy options, including solar and wind.  Why aren’t you guys taking the bull by the horns and educating American consumers about nuclear power?  You could really build a cross-party coalition if you did.
 
Furthermore, the focuses on oil company profits, gas pump prices and energy independence are needless distractions.  They not only tacitly support the chief basis for our ruinous War on Terror, but actually add to pressure to produce more environmentally costly coal and to open ANWR and more of the OCS.  Why don’t you, too, stop pandering to uninformed voters and play things more straight?
 
Sincerely,
 
Tom

 

 

 

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Op-ed by nuclear physicist on climate change: questions for "skeptics"

August 5th, 2008 4 comments

John P. Holdren, an MIT and Stanford-trained nuclear physicist who is professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and director of Harvard’s Woods Hole Research Center, former President and Chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and consultant for the past 35 years at the Magnetic Fusion Energy Division of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory [yes, this is an appeal to authority] had a short but interesting op-ed in the August 4 Boston Globe.

I think he’s trying to be sensitive, but Holdren may come off a bit arrogant; he’s certainly insensitive to those who are concerned that government may bungle any climate “solution”.  Given his technical knowledge and experience, I hope readers will understand where he’s coming from and encourage them to read the whole thing – which really isn’t too long.

But since I have you here, allow me to quote liberally:

skeptics about [climate change] tend to move, over time, through three stages. First, they tell you you’re wrong and they can prove it. (In this case, “Climate isn’t changing in unusual ways or, if it is, human activities are not the cause.”)

Then they tell you you’re right but it doesn’t matter. (“OK, it’s changing and humans are playing a role, but it won’t do much harm.”) Finally, they tell you it matters but it’s too late to do anything about it. (“Yes, climate disruption is going to do some real damage, but it’s too late, too difficult, or too costly to avoid that, so we’ll just have to hunker down and suffer.”) …

The few with credentials in climate-change science have nearly all shifted in the past few years from the first category to the second, however, and jumps from the second to the third are becoming more frequent.

Their arguments, such as they are, suffer from two huge deficiencies.

First, they have not come up with any plausible alternative culprit for the disruption of global climate that is being observed, for example, a culprit other than the greenhouse-gas buildups in the atmosphere that have been measured and tied beyond doubt to human activities. (The argument that variations in the sun’s output might be responsible fails a number of elementary scientific tests.)

Second, having not succeeded in finding an alternative, they haven’t even tried to do what would be logically necessary if they had one, which is to explain how it can be that everything modern science tells us about the interactions of greenhouse gases with energy flow in the atmosphere is wrong.

Members of the public who are tempted to be swayed by the denier fringe should ask themselves how it is possible, if human-caused climate change is just a hoax, that:

  • The leaderships of the national academies of sciences of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Russia, China, and India, among others, are on record saying that global climate change is real, caused mainly by humans, and reason for early, concerted action.
  • This is also the overwhelming majority view among the faculty members of the earth sciences departments at every first-rank university in the world.
  • All three of holders of the one Nobel prize in science that has been awarded for studies of the atmosphere (the 1995 chemistry prize to Paul Crutzen, Sherwood Rowland, and Mario Molina, for figuring out what was happening to stratospheric ozone) are leaders in the climate-change scientific mainstream.  …
  • US polls indicate that most of the amateur skeptics are Republicans. These Republican skeptics should wonder how presidential candidate John McCain could have been taken in. He has castigated the Bush administration for wasting eight years in inaction on climate change, and the policies he says he would implement as president include early and deep cuts in US greenhouse-gas emissions. …

    The extent of unfounded skepticism about the disruption of global climate by human-produced greenhouse gases is not just regrettable, it is dangerous. It has delayed – and continues to delay – the development of the political consensus that will be needed if society is to embrace remedies commensurate with the challenge. The science of climate change is telling us that we need to get going. Those who still think this is all a mistake or a hoax need to think again.

    (emphasis added)

    Holdren is focussed on arguments regarding science, and so fails to address questions as to the efficacy of proposed solutions involving government action, which questions are of course important.

    Although Austrian and libertarian observers may have very useful things to add to the policy discussion, it seems fair to say that, except for a few such as Jonathan Adler, Gene Callahan, Edwin Dolan, Sheldon Richman and Bruce Yandle, many have preferred not to discuss policy but to focus either on climate science or on the motives of those self-deluded religious, fascist creeps who think that there may be a problem.

    While concerns about science and motives are perfectly legitimate, let me add a few points that Austrian “skeptics” ought to consider:

    – Austrians tend to view “environmental” problems not as harms to a disembodied “environment”, but as real problems involving conflicts in individual/firm plan formation that arise because of a lack or clear or enforceable property rights in particular resources or large information, transaction or enforcement costs that make contracting difficult

    Are there clear or enforceable property rights with respect to emissions of GHGs, or the atmosphere or climate more generally?

    Is private contracting a practical way for individuals and firms with differing preferences as to climate or GHG emissions to meaningfully express such preferences?

    – What lessons does history teach us about the exploitation of open-access resources that are not protected by accepted rules among the relevant community of users?  If there are problems with such resources, how have such problems been addressed in the past, with what degree of efficacy?

    Climate change AND the Forest Service’s perfect budgetary firestorm

    August 4th, 2008 No comments

    On a Mises blog thread last year, I noted:

    controlled burns might of course be useful in some places, especially along the WUI (wildland-urban interface), but Randal O`Toole at Cato has done a good job showing that generally fuel accumulation is not a major factor in the increasing number and severity of fires, but climate change, and the fuels build-up argument has been one that suits the forest service`s budget desires

    On that post I cited and linked to a very interesting essay by O’Toole:  The Perfect Firestorm; Bringing Forest Service Wildfire Costs under Control (Cato, April 30, 2007); allow me to post here for the interested reader a few excerpts that I consider most pertinent:

    Blessed and cursed by a Congress that gives it a virtual if not literal blank check for fire protection, the Forest Service’s fire spending is out of control. … The Forest Service’s program—which consists of spending close to $300 million per year treating hazardous fuels and as much as $2 billion a year preparing for and suppressing fires—will not restore the national forests to health or end catastrophic fire in most of those forests. In many forests it may do more harm than good.

    Significant structural changes in the Forest Service are essential to control fire costs. … 

    The Forest Service distorts its own research and other scientific information about fire ecology to justify huge budgets for hazardous fuels reduction and fire suppression. As the next section of this paper will show, the claim that a century of fire suppression has left most western forests highly vulnerable to fire is greatly exaggerated, which means that much of the billions of dollars that the Forest Service is spending today on fire is unjustified. …

    If protecting homes and other structures is the goal, only a few million acres need treatment, most of which are nonfederal land.

    If fuels are not the huge problem the Forest Service claims, then what is the explanation for recent large fires and record fire seasons? A recent article in Science concluded that the reason was drought, not fuels. The authors studied fire data since 1970 and found that the greatest increases in fires have been in fire regimes III, IV, and V, “where land-use histories have relatively little effect on fire risks.” Instead of fuels, they found a strong correlation between drought and fire. “Thus, although land-use history is an important factor for wildfire risks in specific forest types (such as some ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests), the broad-scale increase in wildfire frequency across the western United States has been driven primarily by sensitivity of fire regimes to recent changes in climate over a relatively large area.”43  Similar correlations between drought and fire have been found going back to 1931.44

    Another explanation for the large fires in recent years can be found in the changes in firefighting strategies aimed at improving firefighter safety. To fight large fires, incident commanders often backburn tens of thousands of acres in an effort to create large firebreaks that wildfires cannot cross. One study of the Biscuit fire, the largest fire in Oregon history, estimated that 30 percent of the acres were burned by backburns, not the natural fire.45

    All of this research—some of it done by Forest Service scientists—indicates that Forest Service leaders have greatly exaggerated the excess-fuels problem. By concentrating on this issue, they have deftly persuaded Congress to increase funding for hazardous fuel reduction in national forests from less than $8 million in 1992 to nearly $300 million in 2007. Meanwhile, because of the perceived threat of hazardous fuels, Congress has increased funding for presuppression (which the Forest Service now calls preparation) from less than $180 million per year in the early 1990s to more than $650 million per year since 2004.

    (emphasis added)

    FN43: 43. A. L. Westerling et al., “Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity,”
    Science 313 (August 18, 2006): 943, www.tinyurl.com/2e88b9.  [This is the report that I discussed in this previous post.]

    More work by O’Toole (who is also associated with The Thoreau Institute) and other libertarians on wildfires is here: http://ti.org/fire.html.

    More on the climate change connection to Western wildfires is in this previous post.

    Categories: AGW, Cato, climate change, forests, O'Toole, USFS, wildfires Tags: