Carbon Emission Protocols: A volte-face from SentientMeat

You know what? I’m now convinced we can stop worrying.

We’re talking about such a complex, dynamic system, with so many unknown and practically unknowable forces and feedbacks, that to simply assume only negative consequences from our current actions is nothing but hysterical doom-mongering. My prediction is now wholly optimistic, and will continue to be so in future whatever data reported by the scare story du jour.

That’s right. You heard me.

The economy will be fine, no matter how draconian our measures to reduce emissions!

Friends, join me in laughing loudly at the naked emperor called Kyotogenic Economic Cooling. Think about it: the whole scam is funded by a fossil-fuel lobby designed to silence dissent, and you really don’t want to piss off big business. There’s nothing in their alarmist doomsday book which isn’t already with us today. Their message is “a dollar spent is a dollar lost”, rather than a dollar invested. It is, pure and simple, junk economics through and through.

Emission-reducing measures actually make enterprises more efficient. These twisted-pantied attention whores bang on about Russia’s emissions decreasing as their economy tanked. Carts and horses, dipshits! If some poor schmuck can’t afford to turn on the air-conditioning, it doesn’t mean that a rich dude will lose money by turning his off. And even if the adoption of some emission-reducing measure did undeniably precede an economic slowdown, I challenge anyone to prove that the slowdown couldn’t have been caused by something else. Heck, you couldn’t even prove that the economy wouldn’t be even worse without such economically beneficial measures.

You see, there’s almost literally nothing which is unequivocally bad for everyone, economically speaking. One person’s loss is always another’s gain in such an inter-related and unpredictable system – even literally burning all your money in the back yard raises the value of everyone else’s money slightly. Pacific island nations with nothing to lose might act in their national interests by secretly sending covert special operatives to regularly bomb the world’s 50 busiest airports, and even this is economically beneficial according to Broken Window Economics. (Note also that there is simply no consensus among the world’s leading economists that BWE is demonstrably fallacious – that’s just the opinion of some of them).

So hey, let’s get this party started! We can tax the holy living shit out of everything emission-intensive and use the revenue to subsidise greener alternatives, and nobody can definitively prove that it won’t all work out economically peachy. We can also institute sanctions against anyone who doesn’t do likewise – after all, trade with India and China was much, much smaller in the past and we weren’t reduced to abject poverty then, so we can clearly manage just fine without them. (In fact, I’m very suspicious of people who want their economy to depend upon someone else’s – unpatriotic, traitorous scum if you ask me.)

Here in the UK, gas is disgracefully cheap at $9 per gallon, so let’s do what we can to ramp this baby up, all around the world. And triple that, at least, for aviation fuel – if the Pacific special-ops boys don’t cripple air travel, we can do it economically instead. Bricking the windscreens of sports utility vehicles will, again, be economically beneficial a la Bastiat, and the police can simply pull over any SUV owner who continues to drive with a defective windscreen and force them to publicly fellate passing cyclists. Even one’s own, personal bodily emissions can come within the ambit of new legislation: methane is a more powerful greenhousing gas than carbon dioxide, and so an on the spot fine could be levied on anyone who doesn’t light their own farts.

So thank you, all of those Dopers who have continually told me to stop worrying about the future. You’re quite right, it is a load off my mind not having to care about these consequences any more. Now, if you’ll kindly quit your fucking whining, you shrill and misanthropic friends of misery and Mobil, I’ve got metaphorical windows to break while wearing a cheery, carefree smile.

Relax. It’ll be fine. Seriously.

jshore, old chum, you deserve a frigging medal. If only the amount of bullshit you rake up and dispose of here wasn’t merely figurative, we could power the Boards on such a rich store of biofuel.

I’ll be off on another hiatus soon, but please, please, continue to post your long, technical and fucking correct rebuttals of the ill-informed, single-line half-witticisms trotted out by the economic doom-mongers here on such a depressingly regular basis.

Kudos, my friend.

Awesome rant, I will annoy people and rate it. I rate it a perfect 10.

I am in the tiny minority and I am usually afraid to speak up on this subject. I think it would be great if gasoline prices climbed and stayed higher. When gas hit $3.00+ per gallon in the states, I finally saw a big push from all over to look into gas efficiency, alternate fuels and a big push for hybrids.

I have spoken many times about placing an escalating tax/rebate system on cars and trucks to encourage fuel efficiency.

Jim

That rant way waaaaaay too intelligent, pointed and well constructed, ya fucking commie.

Well done, Meat. (And I’ll second the kudos to jshore for his impressive persistence and calm in delivering such titanic whoopass on the uninformed.)

I’ll go you one further Meat. The US auto industry has the lowest emission standards in the world and is a financial disaster in recent years. The Japanese auto industry has the highest emissions standards and is thriving. I predict that energy efficiency and reduced pollution will lead to prosperity unparalleled in the history of multi-cellular organisms (with the possible exception of the Age of Untold Goodness on Quaglart 7, although to be fair they did fart gold dust so they had it kinda easy from an economic standpoint).

count me in

me; do you support invading iraq
fundy doc I work with: i support anything that will prevent another 911
me: i support a 20% luxury tax on anything that doesn’t get 25 mpg with the proceeds to develop energy independence

big silence

Nice. doffs hat, bows

Great post, SentientMeat. I also think it is strange that the same people who are unwilling to believe climate models at all are usually very willing to believe the high-end of estimates for costs of reducing emissions that are produced by the macroeconomic models (while using ignoring the lower end estimates or the estimates produced by a more “bottoms-up” approach). This is particularly true when climate models, while admittedly a simplified version of a very complex physical system, are at least based on generally well-understood physical laws whereas the macroeconomic models are based on assumptions that we know are very hokey. For example, they assume that people are already behaving optimally under the given market circumstances, which would force us to believe for example that people find the compact fluorescent bulbs so inferior that they are willing to pay a large premium in order to get the traditional bulbs (which also burn out more quickly). [The huge premium applies at least to those who pay for their electricity; for renters who have utilities included in the rent, the economics are different…although in that case it would be cost-effective for the landlord to provide such bulbs to the tenants.]

And, history also tells us that estimates of the costs of complying with environmental regulations tend to be overestimated not just by the companies who will bear the burden of these regulations but even by others such as the EPA. This is presumably because the market tends to come up with cheaper ways to comply.

Thanks very much…I appreciate all that you have done in this regard too.

Excellent analysis. On another tack, hasn’t anyone noticed that, as expensive as retrofits and so forth will be, someone will be making that money, and a bunch of people will be working in those industries?

Sure it’s costly to build wind power facilities, for example. It’s costly to build anything. But that money isn’t just a burnt offering to Kyoto, God of Climate Change. Some of it is going, for example, to the Gaspé, an otherwise economically depressed and remote region of Quebec, where they’re starting schools to train wind-power engineers and factories to build the turbines and power facility equipment. Those people now have the money to purchase goods and services.

Or how about this? The more fossil fuels we burn now in applications in which more efficient alternatives exist – intracity transportation, overland travel, or power generation, for example – the more expensive the same amount of fuel will be later in applications for which alternatives are less practical, such as constructing the transit or power facilities necessary to replace inefficient use of fossil fuels.

We’ve mobilized the entire economy of this country in under two years to a single goal before – war – because we knew it was an emergency and we knew if we didn’t, we’d have bigger things to worry about. Hopefully this time we don’t put it off until the confederation welcomes the province of Prince Edward Archipelago.

Just one dumb question, if I may. I’m sure this has been thought through, but if energy prices go up substantially, how will the working poor cope? Won’t it cost them even more to go to work? Heat their homes, etc.?

Bravo, bravo, bravo.

To confirm this: I’m currently working on behalf of a UK government programme that promotes resource efficiency leading to waste reduction (rather than emissions reduction), and they’re currently saving UK businesses £10 in efficiency savings, for every £1 of government investment. Similarly, the Carbon Trust claims that “businesses are wasting 15 per cent of total energy spend, which could be cost effectively saved”.

They’re going to go up anyway. By providing non-fossil alternatives via investment today, the price could be moderated downwards to their benefit.

Also, purely in the light some of the comments on the SDMB about home heating in the US vs Europe where our energy prices are already significantly higher, the working poor there might perhaps learn to economize - wear a sweater rather than a T-shirt indoors in the winter; buy insulations; not leave the house at 78F all night long; turn the heating off or to a minimum when away, etc.

Exactly. We do not have the choice not to deal with this. Our choices are dealing with this now or dealing with it later, when it will be more expensive in every way to do so.

Spot on.

Jjimm, could you please ring my wife if I provide you with her mobile number and explain this to her!

As the bill payer, I would describe my economically frugal when it comes to our heating and lighting. My wife however would describe me as being a tight fat bastard!

Cheers.

Well OK but allow me to trot out the old saw that before you price people out of the petrol market you need to provide alternative forms of transport, particularly in rural areas.

Stow to Birmingham (about 50 miles by road) on public transport necessitates a 3 mile drive to the nearest railway station, two trains and a bus at the far end. Repeat in reverse for the return journey. Travelling time is more than doubled.

I’m totally in favour of non-fossil alternatives but the issues need to be addressed in a logical and practical order.

It is not a dumb question and it is why it is hard for an honest green to run for political office. High Gas prices will be unduly difficult for the working poor that commute to work.

I do not have an easy answer for the problem except possibly in the form of a heating tax break for the poor. One more expense to reducing CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions and reducing our dependence on foreign oil.

Jim

The lowest emissions standards, in the entire world? Really? Authoritative cite?

Well, the article you linked to, while not entirely accurate, is one of the more fair ones I’ve read, so I’ll reserve nitpicking on it. For one thing, its comments about low-sulfur coal are…not quite right.

I will say it also oversimplies things when talking about cost estimating, but then if written for a general audience you have to, so I won’t damn it. Although the article touches on it, I don’t think it really digs into the serious problems encountered when trying to make a good-faith estimate of employing a new technology. For example, we have several standard price range breakdowns for the cost of estimating costs of new emissions equipment:

+/- 50%: Cost factor 1.0
+/-25%: Cost factor 5.0
+/- 15%: Cost factor 10.0 to 20.0
+/- 10%: Cost factor to be determined on a case-by-case basis

That is, if someone says “Una, I need you to estimate the cost of an SNCR system to +/- 50%”, I charge them $25,000. If they want the estimate to +/- 25%, it costs roughly $125,000. Scale as per the chart above. We have no scale for anything finer than +/- 10%, as there simply is not enough good data and not enough certainty among suppliers and contractors to come up with that estimate. People don’t understand that pretty much every single large-scale emissions control installation is a one-off design. No matter how much you try, how much the client begs, or how much you spend, every installation becomes custom in the end. You call suppliers of parts and they won’t give you a good figure, contractors hem and haw, regulatory agencies are indecisive, nuisance lawsuits unknown, and siting conditions always up in the air. I know of projects where one, single missed shipment of equipment, delayed 2 weeks, cost more than a million dollars. Think about it - one million blown because a rail car was “lost” somewhere in a network, which led to contractors being unavailable, which led to a delay in another installation, which led to a third-party subcontractor installing the wrong parts to “make it work” without any authorization, which led to a safety stop, delays, and lawsuits. That’s the sort of uncertainty risk we deal with.

I’ll also add that in every single one of the more than hundred emissions cost estimates I’ve been involved with, I have never, ever, knowingly come across an artificially inflated estimate or one which was not supported by a factual reference or example. Maybe I just work for an ethical company.

Certainly. We’d need transit alternatives that go where people are going in an efficient manner; convenience beats low ticket prices as an incentive every time. That will take investment, and smart planning (for example, smaller, more fuel-efficient buses on less travelled routes, but also proper urban planning to reduce and redensify wastefully planned areas).

And I’m sure that there will always be journeys that are more efficient to provide for with private than public transportation. Part of systematically replacing private with public transportation in the most trafficked routes is that it frees up carbon use for uses that are more difficult to provide for otherwise. I might well need to borrow a car to go out into the countryside, or to get a bedstead home from IKEA, but that carbon usage can be made up for in other ways (for example, always being able to use transit for my other trips).

Also, if I may say, properly planned transit results in savings for those who must use cars as well: time and energy savings due to reduced traffic and money savings due to reduced demand for fuel, leaving out benefits from reduced health expenses and the like.

Taking into account Una’s eye-opening and very informative post, I’d like to come back again to what the working poor are expected to do while the rest of us brace for the impact of higher prices.

Yes, I did hear it said that the prices will go up anyway, but that’s a given, isn’t it? Prices are always going up, and the working poor are always struggling to keep up. Many of them drive old junkers because they can’t afford more than a few hundred dollars for a car. Old junkers take a lot of gas and oil. But they need these junkers to get to work, even though work barely keeps them away from eviction.

Also, if I may, I think it’s a bit dismissive to say “let them wear sweaters”. Some of them, honestly, can’t afford sweaters. And while it may assuage our conscience to know that they can huddle and shiver together by the woodstove to avoid freezing, I’m not sure that, from their perspective, it is a good solution. I’m also not sure that they don’t already keep their homes cooler than we do. I think it would be expensive to heat them to the 78 degrees that was mentioned.

I’m wondering, at this point, what the central planners are doing, if anything, about the transition, to make it easier on the working poor. Won’t they have to be subsidized in some way? And won’t that then make the prices (or taxes on the prices — same same to the people paying them) even higher yet?

Liberal, I agree “the let them wear sweaters” part is silly. Most working poor either have no control over their heat as they live in apartments where you cannot control or if they have control and they have to pay they are frugal with heating costs.

However, you have hit upon a critical point with the part I bolded. We effectively have **no central planning ** of transitioning to a low emissions, low foreign dependence energy system in the US. The last President to really take this seriously was Carter and this is despite a VP under Clinton that is one of the most recognized proponent of reducing CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions.

We really have no choice and the poor will have to suffer to some degree. We have to reduce CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions or live with catastrophic rises in sea level, a significant increase in hurricanes and many other problems.

Hopefully we start in 2009 to have some real central planning and it includes help for the poor and the lower middle class in the transition.

Jim