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Food, water, agrotech & climate change: More "NeoMalthusian" charlatans, this time at National Geographic

May 20th, 2009 1 comment

[note: my title has a bit of snark, designed to point out the emptiness of some anti-Enviro scare-mongering.]

A reader of my previous post  –  regarding Ron Bailey`s review of the concerns that “famine-monger” Lester Brown recently wrote about at Scientific American  – points me to a similar article, this time the feature article in the June issue of National Geographic.  The article, entitled “The Global Food Crisis; The End of Plenty”, is worth a read.

I look forward to Ron Bailey`s further comments; in the meanwhile I post a few excerpts below (with emphasis added):

“Agricultural productivity growth is only one to two percent a year,” warned Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C., at the height of the crisis. “This is too low to meet population growth and increased demand.”

…. Such agflation hits the poorest billion people on the planet the hardest, since they typically spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food. Even though prices have fallen with the imploding world economy, they are still near record highs, and the underlying problems of low stockpiles, rising population, and flattening yield growth remain. Climate change—with its hotter growing seasons and increasing water scarcity—is projected to reduce future harvests in much of the world, raising the specter of what some scientists are now calling a perpetual food crisis. [page 2]

Yet with world population spiraling toward nine billion by mid-century, these experts [from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research,  a group of world-renowned agricultural research centers that helped more than double the world’s average yields of corn, rice, and wheat between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s, an achievement so staggering it was dubbed the green revolution] now say we need a repeat performance, doubling current food production by 2030.

In other words, we need another green revolution. And we need it in half the time.

 

Ever since our ancestors gave up hunting and gathering for plowing and planting some 12,000 years ago, our numbers have marched in lock step with our agricultural prowess. [page 3]

The industrial revolution and plowing up of the English commons dramatically increased the amount of food in England, sweeping Malthus into the dustbin of the Victorian era. But it was the green revolution that truly made the reverend the laughingstock of modern economists. From 1950 to today the world has experienced the largest population growth in human history. After Malthus’s time, six billion people were added to the planet’s dinner tables. Yet thanks to improved methods of grain production, most of those people were fed. We’d finally shed Malthusian limits for good.

Or so we thought. [page 4]

Today, though, the miracle of the green revolution is over in Punjab: Yield growth has essentially flattened since the mid-1990s. Overirrigation has led to steep drops in the water table, now tapped by 1.3 million tube wells, while thousands of hectares of productive land have been lost to salinization and waterlogged soils. Forty years of intensive irrigation, fertilization, and pesticides have not been kind to the loamy gray fields of Punjab. Nor, in some cases, to the people themselves. [page 6]

But researchers have found pesticides in the Punjabi farmers’ blood, their water table, their vegetables, even their wives’ breast milk. So many people take the train from the Malwa region to the cancer hospital in Bikaner that it’s now called the Cancer Express. The government is concerned enough to spend millions on reverse-osmosis water-treatment plants for the worst affected villages.[page 7]

Africa is the continent where Homo sapiens was born, and with its worn-out soils, fitful rain, and rising population, it could very well offer a glimpse of our species’ future. For numerous reasons—lack of infrastructure, corruption, inaccessible markets—the green revolution never made it here. Agricultural production per capita actually declined in sub-Saharan Africa between 1970 and 2000, while the population soared, leaving an average ten-million-ton annual food deficit. It’s now home to more than a quarter of the world’s hungriest people.[page 8]

But is a reprise of the green revolution—with the traditional package of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation, supercharged by genetically engineered seeds—really the answer to the world’s food crisis? Last year a massive study called the “International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development” concluded that the immense production increases brought about by science and technology in the past 30 years have failed to improve food access for many of the world’s poor. The six-year study, initiated by the World Bank and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and involving some 400 agricultural experts from around the globe, called for a paradigm shift in agriculture toward more sustainable and ecologically friendly practices that would benefit the world’s 900 million small farmers, not just agribusiness. [page 10]

So far, genetic breakthroughs that would free green revolution crops from their heavy dependence on irrigation and fertilizer have proved elusive. Engineering plants that can fix their own nitrogen or are resistant to drought “has proven a lot harder than they thought,” says Pollan. Monsanto‘s Fraley predicts his company will have drought-tolerant corn in the U.S. market by 2012. But the increased yields promised during drought years are only 6 to 10 percent above those of standard drought-hammered crops.

And so a shift has already begun to small, underfunded projects scattered across Africa and Asia. Some call it agroecology, others sustainable agriculture, but the underlying idea is revolutionary: that we must stop focusing on simply maximizing grain yields at any cost and consider the environmental and social impacts of food production. Vandana Shiva is a nuclear physicist turned agroecologist who is India’s harshest critic of the green revolution. “I call it monocultures of the mind,” she says. “They just look at yields of wheat and rice, but overall the food basket is going down. There were 250 kinds of crops in Punjab before the green revolution.” Shiva argues that small-scale, biologically diverse farms can produce more food with fewer petroleum-based inputs. Her research has shown that using compost instead of natural-gas-derived fertilizer increases organic matter in the soil, sequestering carbon and holding moisture—two key advantages for farmers facing climate change. “If you are talking about solving the food crisis, these are the methods you need,” adds Shiva.

In northern Malawi one project is getting many of the same results as the Millennium Villages project, at a fraction of the cost. [page 11]

Canadian researchers found that after eight years, the children of more than 7,000 families involved in the project showed significant weight increases, making a pretty good case that soil health and community health are connected in Malawi.

Which is why the project’s research coordinator, Rachel Bezner Kerr, is alarmed that big-money foundations are pushing for a new green revolution in Africa. “I find it deeply disturbing,” she says. “It’s getting farmers to rely on expensive inputs produced from afar that are making money for big companies rather than on agroecological methods for using local resources and skills. I don’t think that’s the solution.”

Regardless of which model prevails—agriculture as a diverse ecological art, as a high-tech industry, or some combination of the two—the challenge of putting enough food in nine billion mouths by 2050 is daunting. Two billion people already live in the driest parts of the globe, and climate change is projected to slash yields in these regions even further. No matter how great their yield potential, plants still need water to grow. And in the not too distant future, every year could be a drought year for much of the globe.

New climate studies show that extreme heat waves, such as the one that withered crops and killed thousands in western Europe in 2003, are very likely to become common in the tropics and subtropics by century’s end. Himalayan glaciers that now provide water for hundreds of millions of people, livestock, and farmland in China and India are melting faster and could vanish completely by 2035. In the worst-case scenario, yields for some grains could decline by 10 to 15 percent in South Asia by 2030. Projections for southern Africa are even more dire. In a region already racked by water scarcity and food insecurity, the all-important corn harvest could drop by 30 percent—47 percent in the worst-case scenario. All the while the population clock keeps ticking, with a net of 2.5 more mouths to feed born every second. That amounts to 4,500 more mouths in the time it takes you to read this article.

Which leads us, inevitably, back to Malthus. [page 12]

***

Now, can we discuss these issues without calling each other names?

 

More stupid from Tierney; this time on "Kuznets curve" and the dynamics of "wealthier and greener"

May 11th, 2009 No comments

In addressing in a recent post Rob Bradley`s claim to have a “high” level of readers, I was reminded that one of his best and most frequent commenters was a budding conservative, war-supporting “libertarian” who actually, in the past month that I`ve been banned from the blog, has just graduated from high school.  A  “high” level of readership, indeed!

But as this young reader seemed interested in hearing more about libertarian views, I visited his blog (courtesy of Bradley, no longer being able to continue a conversation on MasterResource) and found that he was being led astray by New York Times` in-house “skeptic” science reporter, John Tierney, who had just devoted a long article – “Use Energy, Get Rich and Save the Planet” – to conclusively demonstrate that he had NO CLUE about the dynamics underlying the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC).  

Tierney seems to believe that the Kuznets curve means that greater wealth magically makes for a cleaner environment.  To the contrary, it is the hard work of people, expressing their desires to protect their own property and to realize other preferences regarding shared resources, to increase wealth by finding means (property rights institutions, litigation and government regulation) to end tragedy of the commons-type situtations, who improve their environment.  That is, working to close externalities leads to both wealthier and greener societies.  

(I`ve remarked on the Kuznets curve before; interestingly, conservatives seem to misunderstand it more than liberals.)

So I tried to offer a more libertarian understanding, which I`ve taken the liberty of memorializing here (with typo correction and emphasis and further links added):

  • Andrew, food for thought on enviro Kuznets:

    http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=kuznets
    http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/01/22/poor-countries-need-capitalism-not-climate-change-welfare.aspx
    http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2007/09/27/too-many-or-too-few-people-does-the-market-provide-an-answer.aspx

    Unfortunately, Tierney simply fails to understand that the enviro Kuznets curve does not tell us that problems relating to environmental cost-shifting or to the over-exploitation of unowned commons are best resolved by ignoring them and simply hoping for the best. Rather, it affirms that as people become more wealthy, they care more about protecting the environment and put more elbow grease into achieving improvements – via improved property rights protection, improved information disclosure, greater consumer pressure and even through greater regulation (which is the path the West has largely followed), and reaching agreements with others sharing the relevant resource).

    In other words, the work relating to global, regional and various national commons (atmosphere, seas, forests, water, etc.) is still ahead of us. Libertarians can advocate for property rights (and privatization of public lands) as ways to have a more efficient (and just) path on the curve, or they provide implicit support for powerful and dirty industries by standing by and waiting until citizen pressure groups force government to act in heavy-handed ways.

    TT


  • timetochooseagain

    Tom, I disagree. The way that richer leads to cleaner is through improved technology, not with the government creating artificial markets and new definitions of property. How exactly is it you think that you can extend property rights to the atmosphere? And what would that do? Spawn lawsuits? Why would you want to do that? You would just jack up energy prices. I am trying to understand your suggestions, but they just don’t make sense to me.


  • Andrew. I suggest that you start with this short article by Yandle:http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-commons-tragedy-or-triumph/

    I have plenty more links on my blog to him, Terry Anderson, Mises, Cordato, Block, Rothbard and others on Austrian approaches to environmental issues, fisheries, and climate. Ron Bailey (at Reason) has good posts on fisheries; leading enviro groups all agree that more privatization is desirable:http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/01/15/for-crashing-fisheries-coalition-of-mainline-us-enviro-groups-calls-for-property-rights.aspx

    Commons remain commons either because government ownership prevents privatization (as in the Amazon, US public lands and most fisheries management) or because full privatization is difficult. There are many examples of the latter case that involve semi-privatization and commons management, like traditional forestries, fisheries and water rights. Elinor Ostrom is the expert on commons; I have plenty of links to her too.

    By the way, you really should read Rothbard and Block on the history of air pollution and the undermining of the common law by industrial interests. The result has been and remains, on net, a subsidy to large polluters, particularly utilities, who have a license to pollute and immunity from most suits from injured persons. If coal was paying its true costs it would have been much cleaner years ago. The American Lung Assn said in 2004 that power plant pollution causes 24,000 premature deaths each year (at least 50% more than annual homicides), as well as over 550,000 asthma attacks and 38,000 heart attacks annually.


  • timetochooseagain

    “If coal was paying its true costs it would have been much cleaner years ago.”

    And how would it do that without technological development exactly? There are natural incentives in the market to reduce pollution-one can’t sell electricity to dead people, after all. But if the technology to clean up energy does not exist, how are they helped to find it by being sued by people who use their energy and then complain about the pollution? There is not just the property rights of those with a stake in the commons to consider, but the rights of the energy producer, too. What your suggesting, the way I see it, would be defacto regulation of the right of producers to do what they do best-produce. In the Laissez Faire approach, everyone gets richer, they invest in energy research (of their own free will) to develop cleaner energy. Then pollution goes down. What is wrong with that? It seems anything else added on to that is ad hoc…

  • Easy, Andrew. People and firms invest all the time in doing things in response to incentives, both positive and negative; viz. they also try to reduce costs, including the costs their activities impose on others if those they injured have rights of recourse. The effort to reduce costs is one of the chief factors driving technological advances.

    Surely you`re not suggesting that the best way to encourage wealthier societies is to free people from responsibility for the damages they cause others? That`s hardly a Lockean or libertarian view. A “Laissez Faire approach” leaves government out, in favor of voluntary transactions and enforecment of property rights, including rights not to be injured. The regulatory state has in fact been a boon to the most powerful producers, by giving them rights to pollute, often grandfafthering dirty plants, while forcing the highest costs on more nimble and cleaner producers. If you^re interested in learning about libertarian approaches to the environment, again, I suggest you look at Rothbard, Cordato, Block and others, whom I link to on my blog.

    You seem to make reference to the enviro Kuznets curve, and how wealthier societies bring pollution dow, while completely missing the dynamics. Wealthier societies clean up because they insist on bringing an end to tragedy of the commons-type exploitation of resources. A society that focusses on property rights typically has a lower curve than societies that fail to enforce property rights (needed for Coasean bargaining) in favor of government regulatory approaches. Our own curve remains too high, because wealtheir investors prefer to use regulation to shift costs to the rest of society.


  • timetochooseagain

    Alright, Tom, I will look into the things you are talking about more thoroughly. You seem to know a lot about this topic.

Who are the misanthropes – "Malthusians" or those who hate them? Rob Bradley and others resist good faith engagement despite obvious institutional failures/absence of property rights

March 2nd, 2009 4 comments

In a series of posts at the self-declared “free market” blog of the fossil-fuel energy industry funded Institute for Energy Research, energy expert  Rob Bradley (former Ken Lay speechwriter and Enron policy wonk) explores his dark forebodings that the “Malthusian wing” of the Obama administration and the environmentalist Left are actually enjoying and welcoming the present economic predicament.  Says Bradley, putting words in the mouth of his Malthusian stalking strawman:

“The economic recession/depression is good, not bad. It lowers our carbon footprint in countless ways. It saves resources. It throttles back industrial society to sustainable levels that were exceeded long ago. Let the downturn continue to get us out of the growth mentality. Let rising expectations fall! Less is more!”

[From: The Malthusian Wing of the Party in Power: When Will They Speak Up?; see also Beware of the New “Limits to Growth” (and looking for ReaganVision to CarterVision).]  Bradley will apparently be transported by paroxyms of self-satisfied delight/misery if a lefty, particularly one inside the Administration, ventures to say something like this.

Bradley may very well prove to be right that someone on the left may assert that an end to the “growth is good” mentality may be a silver lining in our recession.  But in his focus on prognosticating what plots the “Malthusians” may be hatching, Bradley simply refuses to actually engage the “Malthusians” on either their premises or their proposed solutions – namely, that there are real and serious problems that our societies must address and that more government is needed.  Indeed, Bradley doesn’t even venture to explain why he considers the Malthusians to be wrong, apparently assuming that this is self-evident. 

But as I have noted any number of times, there is indeed a wide range of very real and serious issues to be discussed, both as to problems AND to proposed “solutions”, such as I have noted in these two posts:

Too Many or Too Few People? Does the market provide an answer?

Food shortages: Ron Bailey takes up the cry, are Malthus and “Green fascism” on the march?

As a result, Bradley does not appear to be interested in the slightest in engaging productively with the Obama administration or the Left, and so in effect uses the term “Malthusian” as a type of shibboleth (or even an article of faith?) among supposedly “right-minded” people, and as an ad hom against the left.  In this, Bradley echoes others such as George Will who, in a recent editorial about climate change, warned of “dark green doomsayers”.

While I do not agree with the Left that more government is always the right solution, those on the right cannot win these arguments simply by name-calling or by trotting out – as George Will did in his editorial – the 1980 bet that Paul Ehrlich and others lost to Julian Simon over the future prices of minerals and commodities.   But the Ehrich-Simon bet was well-known; why not use it?   Because those who do so have ignored the reason why the Simon triumphed and Ehrlich lost, which was that because people own mineral resources, markets functioned to both to change demand and to provide incentives for future supply (and Ehrlich was no economist).  But none of this logic holds true for unowned or “public”, open-access resources – like the acidifying oceans, tropical forests and the global atmosphere and the climate it modulates – for which there simply are no effective property rights or functioning markets.  Instead, we continue to see see destructive exploitation (and kleptocracy in the countries where powerful elites elevate their interests over those of citizens). 

So, in the context of the issues that the “Malthusians” are now raising – in this case, the atmosphere – the Simon-Ehrlich bet stands for a propositions whose conditions clearly at present are not fulfilled, and which will not be fulfilled without hard work.  Until that hard work of establishing property rights or other effective governance institutionsis completed, people with legitimate preferences as to such resources and who are concerned about the effects of modern market demands on them have little ways of expressing those preferences other than through pressure on policy makers and attempts at moral suasion.

As an aside, let me note that nowhere does Bradley acknowledge that the Obama administration and Left inherited our economic shambles from freedom- and market-loving Greenspan/Bush/Bernanke/Paulson and the Right.  In this, Bradley resembles NRO commentator Henry Payne, who recently was so quick to lay all of the woes of the US automakers at the foot of the Obama administration and Washington Dems.  It’s sad that what may otherwise be legitimate commentary is so skewed by such transparent partisan bias and inconsistency.  Such reflexive partisanship also ignores not merely the responsibility of the Right, but also ignores what appear to be fairly significantly weaknesses in the structure of Western capitalism, which have been commented on by Michael Lewis, Joe Nocera and James Glassman and William Nolan at the WSJ; viz., weaknesses stemming from the weak governance and moral hazard (and strong rent-seeking) that is encouraged by the state grant of limited liaibility to corporate shareholders.

In other words, there are lots of real issues to discuss, from difficult resource issues that require collective action to address to public choice problems inherent in the use of government.

Those who profess a love of reason should turn to it, and not hobble themselves by a reliance on facile assumption and shallow ad homs.  Unless, of course, the aim is not to resolve underlying issues of appropriate institutions, but either to “win” the argument by wresting control of policy (and of related rents) from perceived competitors or, if winning is not likely, to at least satisfy emotional needs by railing at foes while surrendering the field (and the selection of policies) to them.

Let me close with a note of one small irony:  while Bradley is expecting that the Left will embrace the recession as a way to deliberately slow growth, Bradley’s own associate at IER, Austrian economist Bob Murphy has just put up on his personal blog a “wonderful clip” by comedian Loius C.K., who comments:

“Those were simpler times, I think; I just feel that we may be going back to that, by the way.  In a way, good; because when I read things like, “the foundations of capitalism are shattering,” I’m like, maybe we need that; maybe we need some time where we are walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides.  … Yeah, because everything is amazing right now, and nobody’s happy.”

Seems like even Malthusian-haters will only be happy if we’re all more miserable!

Fat Tails Part Deux: cost-benefit analysis and climate change; Weitzman replies to Nordhaus

February 13th, 2009 No comments

[Note:  Although the giant snakes I mentioned in my preceding post may have fat tails, I didn’t want my description of the discussion between Harvard`s Martin Weitzman and Yale`s William Nordhaus of the limits of cost-benefit analysis to be overlooked, so I have largely copied it below.  I’ve added an introduction, as well as a few links.]

“Fat tails” seem to be the rage these days, as Bill Safire noted last week in the NYT.  But what are “fat tails”?  Notes Safire,

To comprehend what fat tail is in
today’s media wringer, think of a bell curve, the line on a
statistician’s chart that reflects “normal distribution.” It is tall
and wide in the middle — where most people and things being studied
almost always tend to be — and drops and flattens out at the bottom,
where fewer are, making a shape on a graph resembling a bell. The
extremities at the bottom left and right are called the tails; when
they balloon instead of nearly vanishing as expected, the tails have
been designated “heavy” and, more recently, the more pejorative “fat.”
To a credit-agency statistician now living in a world of chagrin, the
alliterative definition of a fat tail is “an abnormal agglomeration of angst.”

In
an eye-popping Times Magazine article last month titled “Risk
Mismanagement
,” Joe Nocera, a business columnist for The Times, focused
on the passionate, prescient warnings of the former options trader
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan” and “Fooled by
Randomness,”
who popularized the phrase now in vogue in its
financial-­statistics sense. Nocera wrote: “What will cause you to lose
billions instead of millions? Something rare, something you’ve never
considered a possibility. Taleb calls these events ‘fat tails
or ‘black swans,’
and he is convinced that they take place far more
frequently than most human beings are willing to contemplate.”

If I make quibble with Safire’s description; “fat” refers not to the probabilty distribution ballooning on either tail, but refers to the case that the tail probability does not decline quickly to zero (viz., probability approaches zero more slowly than exponentially).

*   *   *

The size of the giant snakes and the much higher temperatures (and GHG levels) at their time (60 million years ago) and shortly after during the PETM (a perod 56 million years ago temperatures shot up by 5° Celsius / 9° F in less than 10,000 years) tell us no simply that climate is sensitive
(on geological scales, sometimes rather short-term) to atmospheric
levels of carbon and methane, but  remind us that there is a “fat tail” of uncertain climate change risks
posed by mankind`s ramped up efforts to release as much as possible of
the CO2 that has been stored up in the form of fossil fuels, methane
and limestone over millions years.  

I have mentioned the issue of “fat tails” previously,
in connection with attempts at applying cost – benefit analysis (CBA)
to determine whether to tax CO2 emissions.  While economists like
Yale`s William Nordhaus who have applied CBA to climate policy have been saying for decades that taxing carbon makes sense on a net basis, our own Bob Murphy has criticized Nordhaus`s approach on rather narrow (and decidedly non-Austrian) grounds.

But Nordhaus has also been strongly criticized by economists such as Harvard`s Martin Weitzman,
who basically argue that Nordhaus has UNDERSOLD the case for carbon
pricing or that the results of such CBA imply a greater certainty of
knowledge (and complacency) than is deserved.  Weitzman points out
basic difficulties inherent in applying CBA to policies addressing
climate change, particularly where there seems to be a grave
possibility that we do not understand how drastically the climate might
respond to our influences.  Weitzman`s comments (scheduled to appear in
the February issue of The Review of Economics and Statistics) were the focus of the lead essay by Jim Manzi in Cato Unbound`s August 2008 issue, which I reviewed.

Nordhaus has since responded to Weitzman in a comment that became available in January; this time with Bob Murphy stepped in as a defender of CBA!  I note that Ron Bailey, science correspondent at Reason online, has just published a piece examining Weitzman’s paper last year and Nordhaus’s recent comments.

Weitzman has now replied to Nordhaus, and has kindly permitted me to
quote from a draft of his reply (which he has out for review).  It seems that Weitzman
provides a compelling statement of some the limits of CBA, as applied
to climate change.  (NB:  Weitzman`s draft response is a .pdf file that I cannot upload, though I have uploaded a version converted to .txt format.  I am happy to forward the .pdf to any interested readers.)

Weitzman`s criticisms of the limits of CBA ought to resonate with Austrian concerns about complexity, limits of knowledge and the difficulty of prediction — even as Weitzman (and Nordhaus and, indeed, Bob Murphy) completely fail to consider the fundamental problems of conflicting preferences in the absence of property rights and of the likelihood that rent-seeking with corrupt governmental policy responses.

 

The rest of the post sets those of Weitzman`s key points that I consider most salient to a discussion among laymen:

“there is enormous structural uncertainty about the economics of extreme climate change,
which, if not unique, is pretty rare. I will argue on intuitive grounds
that the way in which this deep structural uncertainty is
conceptualized and formalized should influence substantially the
outcomes of any reasonable CBA (or IAM) of climate change. Further, I
will argue that the seeming fact that this deep structural
uncertainty does not influence substantially outcomes from the
“standard” CBA hints at an implausible treatment of uncertainty.”

“The
pre-industrial-revolution level of atmospheric CO2 (about two centuries
ago) was

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about280 parts per million (ppm). The ice-core data show that
carbon dioxide was within a range roughly between

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180 and

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280 ppm
during the last 800,000 years. Currently, CO2 is at

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385 ppm, and
climbing steeply. Methane was never higher than

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750 parts per billion
(ppb) in 800,000 years, but now this extremely potent GHG, which is
thirty times more powerful than CO2, is at

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1,780 ppb. The sum total of
all carbon-dioxide-equivalent (CO2-e) GHGs is currently at

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435 ppm.
Even more alarming in the 800,000-year record is the rate of change of
GHGs, with increases in CO2 being below (and typically well below)

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40
ppm within any past sub-period of ten thousand years, while now CO2 has
risen by

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40 ppm in just the last quarter century.

Thus, anthropogenic
activity has elevated atmospheric CO2 and CH4 to levels extraordinarily
far outside their natural range – and at a stupendously rapid rate. The
scale and speed of recent GHG increases makes predictions of future
climate change highly uncertain.  There is no analogue for anything
like this happening in the past geological record. Therefore, we do not
really know with much confidence what will happen next.”

“To keep atmospheric CO2 levels at twice pre-industrial-revolution levels would require not just stable but sharply declining emissions within a few decades from now. Forecasting
ahead a century or two, the levels of atmospheric GHGs that may
ultimately be attained (unless drastic measures are undertaken) have
likely not existed for tens of millions of years and the rate of change
will likely be unique on a time scale of hundreds of millions of years.

Remarkably,
the “standard”CBA of climate change takes essentially no account of the
extraordinary magnitude of the scale and speed of these unprecedented
changes in GHGs – and the extraordinary uncertainties they create for
any believable economic analysis of climate change.
Perhaps even
more astonishing is the fact that the “policy ramp” of gradually
tightening emissions, which emerges from the “standard” CBA, attains
stabilization at levels of CO2-e GHGs that approach

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700 ppm. The
“standard” CBA [of Nordhaus] thus recommends imposing an impulse or
shock to the Earth’s system by geologically-instantaneously jolting
atmospheric stocks of GHGs up to

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21/2 times their highest past level
over the last 800,000 years – without even mentioning what an
unprecedented planetary experiment such an “optimal” policy would
entail.”

“So-called
“climate sensitivity” (hereafter denoted S1) is a key macro-indicator
of the eventual temperature response to GHG changes. Climate
sensitivity is defi…ned as the global average surface warming following
a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations. … the median upper 5%
probability level over all 22 climate-sensitivity studies cited in
IPCC-AR4 (2007) is 6.4° C – and this stylized fact alone is telling.
Glancing at Table 9.3 and Box 10.2 of IPCC-AR4, it is apparent that the
upper tails of these 22 PDFs tend to be sufficiently long and heavy
with probability that one is allowed from a simplistically-aggregated
PDF of these 22 studies the rough approximation P[S1>10° C]

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1%. The
actual empirical reason why these upper tails are long and heavy with
probability dovetails nicely with the theory of my paper: inductive
knowledge is always useful, of course, but simultaneously it is limited
in what it can tell us about extreme events outside the range of
experience – in which case one is forced back onto depending more than
one might wish upon the prior PDF, which of necessity is largely
subjective and relatively diffuse. As a recent Science commentary put
it: “Once the world has warmed by 4° C, conditions will be so
different from anything we can observe today (and still more different
from the last ice age) that it is inherently hard to say where the
warming will stop.”

“Exhibit C” concerns possibly disastrous releases over the long run of bad-feedback components
of the carbon cycle that are currently omitted from most general
circulation models. The chief worry here is a significant supplementary
component that conceptually should be added on to climate sensitivity
S1. This omitted component concerns the potentially powerful
self-amplification potential of greenhouse warming due to heat-induced
releases of sequestered carbon. … Over the long run, a CH4
outgassing-amplifier process could potentially precipitate a
cataclysmic strong-positive-feedback warming
. This real physical
basis for a highly unsure but truly catastrophic scenario is my Exhibit
C in the case that conventional CBAs and IAMs do not adequately cover
the deep structural uncertainties associated with possible
climate-change disasters.  Other examples of an actual real physical
basis for a catastrophic outcome could be cited, but this one will do
here.  The real physical possibility of endogenous heat-triggered
releases at high temperatures of the enormous amounts of
naturally-sequestered GHGs is a good example of indirect carbon-cycle
feedback effects that I think should be included in the abstract
interpretation of a concept of “climate sensitivity” that is relevant
here. What matters for the economics of climate change is the
reduced-form relationship between atmospheric stocks of
anthropogenically-injected CO2-e GHGs and temperature change. … When
fed into an economic analysis, the great open-ended uncertainty about
eventual mean planetary temperature change cascades into
yet-much-greater yet-much-more-open-ended uncertainty about eventual
changes in welfare.”

“Exhibit
D” concerns what I view as an unusually cavalier treatment of damages or
disutilities from extreme temperature changes. The “standard” CBA
treats high-temperature damages by a rather passive extrapolation of
whatever specification is assumed (typically arbitrarily) to be the
low-temperature “damages function.”  … Seemingly minor changes in
the specification of high-temperature damages can dramatically alter
the gradualist policy ramp outcomes recommended by the “standard” CBA.

Such fragility of policy to postulated forms of disutility functions
are my Exhibit D in making the case that the “standard” CBA does not
adequately cope with deep structural uncertainty – here structural
uncertainty about the specification of damages.”

“An
experiment without precedent is being performed on planet Earth by
subjecting the world to the shock of a geologically-instantaneous
injection of massive amounts of GHGs. Yet the “standard” CBA seems
almost oblivious to the extraordinarily uncertain consequences of
catastrophic climate change.”

“Almost
nothing in our world has a probability of exactly zero or exactly one.
What is worrisome is not the fact that extreme tails are long per se
(reflecting
the fact that a meaningful upper bound on disutility does not exist),
but that they are fat (with probability density). The critical
question is how fast does the probability of a catastrophe decline
relative to the welfare impact of the catastrophe. Other things being
equal, a thin-tailed PDF is of less concern because the probability of
the bad event declines exponentially (or faster). A fat-tailed
distribution, where the probability declines polynomially, can be much
more worrisome.
… To put a sharp point on this seemingly abstract issue, the
thin-tailed PDFs that Nordhaus requires implicitly to support his
gradualist “policy ramp” conclusions have some theoretical tendency to
morph into being fat tailed when he admits that he is fuzzy about the
functional forms or structural parameters of his assumed thin-tailed
PDFs
– at least for high temperatures. … When one combines fat
tails in the PDF of the logarithm of welfare-equivalent consumption
with a utility function that is sensitive to high damages from extreme
temperatures, it will tend to make the willingness to pay (WTP) to
avoid extreme climate changes very large.”

“Presumably
the PDF in the bad fat tail is thinned, or even truncated, perhaps from
considerations akin to what lies behind the value of a statistical life
(VSL). (After all, we would not pay an infinite amount to eliminate
altogether the fat tail of climate-change catastrophes.) Alas, in
whatever way the bad fat tail is thinned or truncated, a CBA based upon
it remains highly sensitive to the details of the thinning or
truncation mechanism, because the disutility of extreme climate change
has “essentially” unlimited liability.
In this sense climate change
is unique (or at least very rare) because the conclusions from a CBA
for such an unlimited-liability situation have some built-in tendency
to be non-robust to assumed tail fatness.”

“Reasonable
attempts to constrict the fatness of the “bad” tail can still leave us
with uncomfortably big numbers, whose exact value depends non-robustly
upon artificial constraints, functional forms, or parameters that we
really do not understand. The only legitimate way to avoid this
potential problem is when there exists strong a priori knowledge that
restrains the extent of total damages.
If a particular type of
idiosyncratic uncertainty affects only one small part of an
individual’s or a society’s overall portfolio of assets, exposure is
naturally limited to that specific component and bad-tail fatness is
not such a paramount concern. However, some very few but very
important real-world situations have potentially unlimited exposure due
to structural uncertainty about their potentially open-ended
catastrophic reach. Climate change potentially affects the whole
worldwide portfolio of utility by threatening to drive all of planetary
welfare to disastrously low levels in the most extreme scenarios.”

“Conclusions
from CBA [are] more fuzzy than we might prefer, because they are
dependent on essentially arbitrary decisions about how the fat tails
are expressed and about how the damages from high temperatures are
specified.
I would make a strong distinction between thin-tailed
CBA, where there is no reason in principle that outcomes should not be
robust, and fat-tailed CBA, where even in principle outcomes are
highly sensitive to functional forms and parameter values. For ordinary
run-of-the-mill limited exposure or thin-tailed situations, there is at
least the underlying theoretical reassurance that finite-cutoff-based
CBA might (at least in principle) be an arbitrarily-close approximation
to something that is accurate and objective. In fat-tailed unlimited
exposure situations, by contrast, there is no such theoretical
assurance underpinning the arbitrary cutoffs or attenuations – and
therefore CBA outcomes have a theoretical tendency to be sensitive to
fragile assumptions about the likelihood of extreme impacts and how
much disutility they cause.”

“My
target is not CBA in general, but the particular false precision
conveyed by the misplaced concreteness of the “standard” CBA of climate
change. By all means plug in tail probabilities, plug in disutilities
of high impacts, plug in rates of pure time preference, and so forth,
and then see what emerges empirically. Only please do not be surprised
when outcomes from fat-tailed CBA are fragile to specifications
concerning catastrophic extremes.  The extraordinary magnitude of the
deep structural uncertainties involved in climate-change CBA, and the
implied limitations that prevent CBA from reaching robust conclusions,
are highly frustrating for most economists, and in my view may even
push some into a state of denial. After all, economists make a living
from plugging rough numbers into simple models and reaching specific
conclusions (more or less) on the basis of these numbers. What are we
supposed to tell policy makers and politicians if our conclusions are
ambiguous and fragile?”

“It is
threatening for economists to have to admit that the structural
uncertainties and unlimited liabilities of climate change run so deep
that gung-ho “can do” economics may be up against limits on the ability of quantitative analysis to give robust advice in such a grey area. But if this is the way things are with the economics of climate change, then this is the way things are – and non-robustness to subjective assumptions is an inconvenient truth to be lived with rather than a fact to be denied or evaded
just because it looks less scientif…cally objective in CBA. In my
opinion, we economists need to admit to the policy makers, the
politicians, and the public that CBA of climate change is unusual
in being especially fuzzy because it depends especially sensitively on
what is subjectively assumed about the high-temperature damages
function, along with subjective judgements about the fatness of the
extreme tails and/or where they have effectively been cut off
.
Policy makers and the public will just have to deal with the idea that
CBA of climate change is less crisp (maybe I should say even less
crisp) than CBAs of more conventional situations.”

“The
moral of the dismal theorem is that under extreme uncertainty,
seemingly casual decisions about functional forms, parameter values,
and tail thickness may be dominant. We economists should not pursue
a narrow, superficially precise, analysis by blowing away the
low-probability high-impact catastrophic scenarios as if this is a
necessary price we must pay for the worthy goal of giving crisp advice.
An artificial infatuation with precision is likely to make our analysis
go seriously askew and to undermine the credibility of what we say by
effectively marginalizing the very possibilities that make climate
change grave in the first place.

“The
issue of how to deal with the deep structural uncertainties in climate
change would be completely different and immensely simpler if systemic
inertias (like the time required for the system to naturally remove
extra atmospheric CO2) were short (as is the case for SO2;
particulates, and many other airborne pollutants). Then an important
part of an optimal strategy would presumably be along the lines of
“wait and see.” With strong reversibility, an optimal
climate-change policy should logically involve (among other elements)
waiting to see how far out on the bad fat tail the planet will end up,
followed by midcourse corrections if we seem to be headed for a
disaster. This is the ultimate backstop rebuttal of DT given by some
critics of fat-tailed reasoning, including Nordhaus. Alas, the problem
of climate change is characterized everywhere by immensely long
inertias – in atmospheric CO2 removal times, in the capacity of the
oceans to absorb heat (as well as CO2), and in many other relevant
physical and biological processes. Therefore, it is an open question
whether or not we could learn enough in sufficient time to make
politically feasible midcourse corrections. When the critics are
gambling on this midcourse-correction learning mechanism to undercut
the message of DT, they are relying more on an article of faith than on
any kind of evidence-based scientific argument.

“I
think the actual scientific facts behind the alleged feasibility of
“wait and see”policies are, if anything, additional evidence for the
importance of fat-tailed irreversible uncertainty about ultimate
climate change.

“The
relevance of “wait and see”policies is an important unresolved issue,
which in principle could decide the debate between me and Nordhaus, but
my own take right now would be that the built-in pipeline inertias
are so great that if and when we detect that we are heading for
unacceptable climate change, it will likely prove too late to do
anything much about it for centuries to come thereafter
(except,
possibly, for lowering temperatures by geoengineering the atmosphere to
reflect back incoming solar radiation). In any event, I see this whole
“wait and see” issue as yet another component of fat-tailed uncertainty
– rather than being a reliable backstop strategy for dealing with
excessive CO2 in the atmosphere.

Nordhaus
states that there are so many low-probability catastrophic-impact
scenarios around that ‘if we accept the Dismal Theorem, we would
probably dissolve in a sea of anxiety at the prospect of the infinity
of infinitely bad outcomes.’ This is rhetorical excess and, more to the
point here, it is fallacious. Most of the examples Nordhaus gives have
such miniscule thin-tailed probabilities that they can be written off.”

Nordhaus
summarizes his critique with the idea there are indeed deep
uncertainties about virtually every aspect of the natural and social
sciences of climate change – but these uncertainties can only be
resolved by continued careful analysis of data and theories. I heartily
endorse his constructive attitude about the necessity of further
research targeted toward a goal of resolving as much of the uncertainty
as it is humanly possible to resolve.
I would just add that we
should also recognize the reality that, for now and perhaps for some
time to come, the sheer magnitude of the deep structural uncertainties,
and the way we express them in our models, will likely dominate
plausible applications of CBA to the economics of climate change
.”

(emphasis added)

[Update 2] Neocons, conservatives, libertarians and Exxon join Jim Hansen in calling for rebated carbon taxes in lieu of massive cap/trade rent-seeking and industrial planning

January 10th, 2009 No comments

[Update at bottom.]

Neocons, conservatives, libertarians and Exxon`s Rex Tillerson have recently joined arch-warmer Jim Hansen in calling for rebated carbon taxes in lieu of massive cap/trade rent-seeking and industrial planning.

I`ve blogged extensively on the reasons why I and others view carbon taxes – particularly if rebated to citizens – as a far better alternative to a domestic cap and trade program.

With the Obama inauguration looming, starting late last month a wide range of voices on the right have started to weigh in – each with their own reasons – in support of carbon or similar taxes, in order to shift the debate away from cap and trade and other extensive industrial policy.  Is it too late?  In any case, it`s worth taking a look at what people are saying recently:

Climate scientist Jim Hansen, who with his wife rather boldly sent to Barack and Michelle Obama a personal letter and background paper (with a discussion draft first made public in November).

Neocon Charles Krauthammer proposed a substantial “net-zero” gas tax in the December 27 (now updated to January 5) Weekly Standard, with intentions in part to cut off the flow of oil money to unfriendly (and Muslim) regimes abroad.

Republican Congressman Bob Inglis and economist Arthur Laffer argued in the December 28 New York Times  for a carbon tax coupled with tax-cut stimulus.

On January 9, the Wall Street Journal reported on ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson`s recent speech in DC calling explicitly for Congress to enact a tax on greenhouse-gas emissions as a “more direct, a more transparent and a more effective approach” than cap and trade.  This is not as new as the WSJ would have it; as I note on an earlier post, ExxonMobil came out rather explicitly in favor of carbon taxes a year ago.

Libertarian and natural resources law prof – and NRO and Volokh Conspiracy blooger – Jonathan Adler applauds and explains these developments for various reasons, noting particularly that a train wreck seems headed our way, and that Congressional action is needed to avoid having the Obama EPA attempt to implement climate change policy via the Clean Air Act (for which a Supreme Court case last year paves the way).

Of course there is reasoned (both reasonable and passionate) disagreement, such as from businessman Jim Manzi at NRO on December 30 and blogger Tony Quain in response to Krauthammer, and by Chris Horner of the Competitve Enterprise Institute on January 7.

All are worth a look.

 

[Update:  Although liberal economists and commentators have tended to diss a carbon tax as a political non-starter, I note that in a December 27 New York Times op-ed, Thomas Friedman voiced support for a revenue-neutral carbon tax or gas tax on roughly the same grounds as Krauthammer.

Friedman and the others noted above join a long list of economists and political commentators on both sides of the political spectrum (including AEIGeorge Will and Barbara Thoring on the right) who strongly prefer carbon taxes over cap and trade.

I note that I do not buy all of the arguments for a carbon tax, particularly the argument that a gas tax would be an effective foreign policy tool.  However, I summarized previously some economists’s discussions of using a domestic tax to limit the flow of revenues to oil-exporting countries.

Dan Rosenblum of the Carbon Tax Center (which is a great complier of information on carbon taxes vs. cap and trade policies) has an excellent summary on recent developments in the December 30 Huffington Post.

My view is that a carbon tax would be much preferable to a cap and trade system and, if rebated or offset by reductions in income or other taxes, may improve incentives for savings and investment.  Further, it would undercut arguments and justifications for other obviously counterproductive market inverventions like the CAFE standards and subsidies for supposedly “green” sources of energy (including ethanol). 

Of course the fact that a carbon tax is much more transparent than a cap and trade and other policies interventions is one of the chief reasons that politicians and rent-seekers prefer more complex and obscure ways to provide favors to various industries and interest groups.]

[Further update: I note that Cato devoted its August 2008 edition of Cato Unbound to a debate over climate change, anchored by an essay by Jim Manzi that specifically advocated substantial government in improved global climate prediction, carbon capture and storage, and  geo-engineering
projects.

In addition, libertarians Ed Dolan, Gene Callahan and Sheldon Richman all feel that climate change deserves serious consideration, Reason online`s Ron Bailey and libertarian/energy expert Lynne Kielsing supports climate change actions,  Bruce Yandle, CEI`s Iain Murray, Cato`s Indur Goklany has advanced a specific climate change-targeted proposal, and AEI`s Steven Hayward and Ken Green have provided relatively balanced analyses.]

Categories: carbon pricing Tags:

Barbarians at the gate? The WSJ wrings its hands over Somali pirates but ignores the failure of property owners to defend themselves

November 26th, 2008 No comments

The Wall Street Journal runs a remarkably whiny and unperceptive piece by weekly “Global View” columnist Bret Stephens about the expanding problem of ocean piracy off of Somali waters in and around the Gulf of Aden.   An unvarnished neocon and former editor of the Jerusalem Post, Stephens rather reflexively reviews the outbreak of piracy as an existential threat by barbarians to a civilized, flabby and impotent West, for which the proper response is a wakening resolve to defend civilization via a “muscular” (i.e., violent) response by the US and other civilized Western states, less hampered by a concern for legal niceties.  The editorial is accompanied by a video clip of an interview of Stephens by WSJ assistant editor James Freeman in which Stephens states his views even more strongly.

Under a headline of “Why Don’t We Hang Pirates Anymore?”, Stephens uses his soap box to decry a “legal exquisiteness” that has left the civilized West apparently impotent to deal with “the most primordial” of the various forms of “barbarism” alive today – the growing number of ragtag but surprisingly effective Somali pirates.  (What are the other forms of barbarism that merit mention by Stephens?  The “suicide bombers on Israeli buses, the stonings of Iranian women, and so on.”)  Stephens argues that a move from the halcyon days when captured pirates could be quickly and harshly dealt with – which treatment he argues was responsible for the elimination of piracy in the late 18th century (“a civilizational achievement no less great than the elimination of smallpox a century later”) – to modern civilized justice is responsible for this outbreak of piracy, and calls for a defense of civilization that keeps in mind the lesson for how such barbarism was defeated in the past (viz., quick and harsh treatment of pirates).  Says Stephens,

our collective inability to deal with it says much about how far we’ve regressed in the pursuit of what is mistakenly thought of as a more humane policy. A society that erases the memory of how it overcame barbarism in the past inevitably loses sight of the meaning of civilization, and the means of sustaining it.

Someone a little more skeptical of the benefits of government action might note that not only do the Somali pirates certainly not threaten civilization (and to date have used very little violence), but that the success of the pirates can be laid at the door of the owners of the vessels and cargo and their insurers, who have to date apparently failed utterly to even try to fend off any of the pirates.  The success of a few pirates has simply invited more piracy attempts – crime is contagious, as Ron Bailey notes today on Reason.  No doubt there are plenty of governments that would love to have their military actual provide some useful services, but why should the failure of property owners to take even minimal precautions and self-defense measures not only not be mentioned, but be rewarded with government stepping into the breach?

Given the lack of self-defense by vessels, it is hardly surprising that Somalis and others view ships as equivalent to common property, to be harvested on a first-come, first-served basis, with a resulting rush of entrepreneurial Somalis entering the new profession.  Sure, we could use a little law and order, but there’s a reason why firms that wish to survive and prosper put a little effort of their own into protecting their own assets (and those of their customers).

Stephens’ own failure to consider the responsibility of property owners to protect their own assets is surprising.  And Stephens strikingly and conveniently fails to note the role of the US in hampering the emergence of a Somali state and perpetuating lawlessness.  But to a neocon, so many problems look existential and seem to require the application of violence by states.  In spying “barbarous” actions by others, neocons (i) never seem to consider how barbarous are our states themselves (look at the many innocent deaths that the US is responsible for, directly or indirectly, in Iraq and Afghanistan), (ii) often ignore the role of government in creating problems, and (iii) frequently overlook the much vaster thefts perpetuated by governments and by corporate insiders who line their own pockets while persuading governments to socialize losses.   Neocons seem to form a part of the “Great Theft Machine”, by which every problem looks like a nail for the hammer of state, and whereby those calling for more hammer blows conveniently forget to call attention to those who benefit most from the use or manufacture of hammers.

It is a shame that the Wall Street Journal sees so many problems just crying out for “strong states” to solve, while ignoring the real and much more pressing problems that such states themselves create.  (We have encountered Stephens before, in an intelligence-insulting piece that dissed the leading National Academies of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Schelling and now Exxon and AEI as “deluded” believers in the “sick-souled religion” of global warming.)

UK jury approves damage to power plant in defense of a commons/ other private property; libertarians and conservatives freak out

September 12th, 2008 6 comments

See this surprising decision in the UK, letting climate-change protesters/trespassers off the hook for damages resulting from spray-painting a coal plant smokestack, on the grounds that a UK law “allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage.”

Why is this single jury verdict supposedly the end of the world (as Iain Murray of CEI, blogging at NRO’s Planet Gore would have it)?  Libertarians (Rothbard, Block, Bratland, Cordato) have long argued that:

– we should move away from the statist regulation of polluters and return to a simpler world of a resort towards common law and courts (permitting injunctions on industrial activity for the slightest damage) to defend property; and that

– the issuance of a license allowing a firm lawfully “to pollute and, hence, invade or damage property of other parties” “entail[s} a fundamental and pervasive violation of property rights”; that

– one “observes that any detectable man-made climate change has occurred during periods of inadequate or nonexistent tort protection from air pollution”; and that

– “A sensible and thoughtful first crucial step in assuring a sustainable atmosphere for future generations is to assure adequate tort protection of the personal property rights for current generations“?

It is clear that I am on firm ground in expecting in response to this decision a rush by “skeptical” libertarians and conservatives to demand MORE action by government, rather than less of it.  After all, the defense offered by the greenies in the UK was based on a statute that can be simply amended, and thereby order restored (with nary a pang of concern for fusty old common-law doctrines).

And if this is what we get from libertarians, is there any wonder that greenies – including radicals like Austrian Ed Dolan and libertarians Jon Adler and Ron Bailey – think that resort to some sort of globally coordinated multi-state action is needed to deal with a global issue?

Oh, and let me add – it seems like a “wrong” decision to me, too.

Solar vs. deserts; or how "public" ownership of resources produces zero-sum political fights over preferences

September 1st, 2008 No comments

Ron Bailey, Science Correspondent of Reason Online, reported recently “how some environmental
groups are fighting the development of utility-scale solar power in the
Mojave Desert.”

As I have posted elsewhere on the role our government plays in compounding our disputes over differing preferences, I copy my comments on Bailey’s thread here:

TokyoTom | August 18, 2008, 6:34am | #

The
real problem with many of these environmental fights is that either
governments own the resources or the economic actor is highly
regulated.
With the deserts privatized and freer markets, we’d see
solar if it made economic sense (including the costs of paying off
nimby-ists).

While we are unlike to see complete privatization of state or federal
lands, we’d see greater citizen enthusiasm if the states and the feds
would be so kind as to rebate a hefty chuck of the land-use royatly
payments to us (with a cut to the related bureacrats
to incentivize
them to get good rates and to make sure proceeds are actually
collected; citizens and public prosecutors would be similarly
ncentivized).

It is the lack of sufficient revenue sharing by a greedy federal
government that has led state governors to block further OCS leasing,
and has given enviros no incentives to agree on ANWR drilling
(as I
note in the linked blog post).

Likewise, a rebated carbon tax would be a million times better than the
ethanol mandates, renewable mandates, the Warner Lieberman pork and the
Pickes’ ad blitz for solar hand-outs. The problem is a government that
wants to have a finger in every pie – citizens ought to be insisting on
a direct cut, instead of letting politicians direct all of the spoils

(which is the REAL cause of the constant deadlock).

(emphasis added)

Categories: AGW, ANWR, federal land, OCS, royalties, solar Tags:

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

 

 

 

Categories: Uncategorized Tags:

More carbon tax advocacy, this time from Jerry Taylor/Cato, in a piece criticizing Pickens’ plan

July 30th, 2008 3 comments

Jerry Taylor, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, published a pithy criticism in last week’s Financial Post of T. Boone Pickens’ plan to get wind subsidies and other favors from Congress;  said Taylor:  “Virtually every claim made by T. Boone Pickens to justify the lavish subsidies he is seeking for his wind energy investments is flat wrong.”

Jerry also had a few interesting things to say about about carbon taxes:

Fourth, if reducing our carbon footprint is the goal, then the most direct and efficient means of reducing that footprint is to impose a tax on carbon emissions and then leave it to the market to sort out how to most efficiently order affairs under those new prices. Maybe it will mean windmills and CNG [compressed natural gas], but maybe not. Perhaps it will mean more nuclear power, new hydrogen-powered fuel cells, “clean” coal, the emergence of cellulosic ethanol, battery-powered cars or hybrids — or a continuation of the existing energy base but less consumption as a consequence.

(emphasis added)

I agree with Jerry, but note that Jerry he has not explicitly accepted that reducing our carbon footprint SHOULD be a goal.  Rather, he has simply concluded that, should such a goal be adopted,  that carbon taxes are the best policy tool.  And that might be as much as we can expect, from the time being, from a long-time advocate of limited government such as Jerry.

Jerry Taylor joins Ron Bailey (Reason), George Will, AEI and a long list of others in favoring carbon taxes over any other AGW-directed policies.