I would be happy to be educated on arguments supporting this beyond per capita emissions. China is a growing economy, the US not so much. One would think the trend will be to greater increases in per capita emissions in China relative to the US.
I did no such thing and kindly ask you to not imply that I did such. However I have to ask shouldn’t by your first statement the US be left to address their emissions?
Countries in Europe with much lower emissions than U.S., absolutely or per capita, have considered it a duty to lower their emissions (despite that small countries, arguably, could be considered unimportant). It seems wrong for U.S. to play the game of “we’ll reduce when China does.” Since I was addressing You, I might have said “you” to imply you took that stance. Instead, my “as some in this very thread have done” referred to Sam Stone, who introduced (facetiously, I hope) bombing and blockading China as his specific countermeasure for emissions. :smack:
Your post implied that China might attain the same per capita emissions as U.S. This seems unlikely, at least soon, since the high per capita U.S. income is a major contribution to high U.S. per capita emissions.
At present, China’s emissions grow at about the same rate as its GDP. But from my very limited news reading, China does seem to be making some corrective efforts. Here’s a 2010 page that claims “China has already surpassed U.S. as the world’s largest investor in renewable energy.”
Couldn’t resist giving everyone an earworm. 
Conservatives these days clearly regard this as a feature rather than a bug.
First of all, practically any plan to internalize the externalities is going to apportion costs better than one that leaves their costs completely externalized.
Second, cap-and-trade has already demonstrated its workability in a number of different situations, most notably reducing acid rain. (Remember acid rain?) The reason for its utility is obvious: it lets The Magic Of The Market find the cheapest way to reduce the emissions being regulated. There’s no reason why it can’t work with CO2; it’s not like it has some magic properties that render it immune to such a regulatory regime.
Major strawman.
Fully auctionable cap-and-trade certainly acts as a tax, but in terms of regulation, it gets government entirely out of the details of climate reduction, instead letting the market find the cheapest way to reduce CO2 emissions.
I dunno, do you remember laughter?
I agree. I wasn’t playing that game however. I asked a simple question.
When can we address China?
I would not think of arguing against the notion that the US per capita is currently the the greatest contributor. Hell we may even stay that way. This is a huge country without European population densities. But we are making changes. Are they keeping pace with lifestyle changes? At some future point if meaningful reductions are made, per capita becomes a bit of a moot point and total emissions becomes the meaningful measure.
Of course, if the goal is to be punitive rather than corrective in reducing environmental impact, then per capita measurement will remain the standard of measure.
I did not know that, thank you. If you have the numbers handy, what is the US’s present rate of emissions growth?
This statement leads me to wonder if China’s investment in renewable energy is driven chiefly by a desire to reduce emissions, or chiefly by their voracious appetite for energy production making renewables cost competitive with other methods?
True, and it bears pointing out just how pathetically crappy a job they’ve done with it so far. One of the major arguments in favor of AGW as the null hypothesis is the complete lack of plausible, comprehensive, consistent alternative hypotheses put forward to explain the phenomena.
Climate change “skeptics” nitpick and niggle over the details of particular climate models, and throw in a lot of random suggestions about confounding factors or natural cycles, and generally do all they can to foster an impression of uncertainty about the basic AGW hypothesis. But what they haven’t done, despite having had lots of time and lots of funding to get somewhere with it, is come up with a reasonable scientific explanation of climate phenomena that doesn’t involve AGW.
If AGW isn’t happening, what is causing the observed temperature increases? If AGW isn’t happening, why are the anthropogenic increases in atmospheric GHG concentrations not causing significant warming, the way that basic atmospheric physics predicts they should? AGW opponents have failed almost as badly as creationists at putting together a coherent, workable alternative to the scientific consensus that they don’t like.
Yeah, although the solidity of the basic science definitely has an impact on the terms of the economic/political debate about mitigation measures.
None of these items is true. Using Greenslime1951’s numbering (his #3 is the same as Leaffan’s post):
Mind, I’m not saying that chemistry and planetary climate studies are to that level of inerrancy, but there is nothing impossible about showing that something will occur far in the future based on a single snapshot in time. Your assertion is factually incorrect.
Climate change scientists do not predict global warming. They predict a global average of warming. Locally, some places may cool due to changed wind patterns and such.
Climate change comes down to basic chemistry (which is well-understood, forms the basis for any number of technologies used from day to day, and can be demonstrated in any laboratory environment) and best effort attempts to model billions of chemical reactions atop a simulated planet. We don’t need to know whether humans did it or not to know whether it is happening.
However, we do have the ability to look at the isotopes of the gasses in the air and to determine whether those are naturally formed chemicals or formed via humans practicing chemistry. For example, if you see a bunch of refined uranium fashioned into rods and lying in the back of a train, even though uranium is a natural element you’re unlikely to think that humans weren’t involved in the production of those rods.
We also have the ability to track CO2 (and other chemical) productions. The Department of Energy, in fact, has a large set of tables that are free on the internet which list by country the total output of various gasses in cubic tons. They know how many energy plants there are in the nation, how many cars there are, etc. and from testing and metrics can estimate the total output for each nation.
While there may be some argument over the cause of all of the trillions of chemical reactions which can occur on the planet given its current and future makeup, there’s no doubt what percentage of the climate’s current makeup is due to humans.
This is an interesting part of the debate that attracts little discussion … yet. I predict that within a few decades, as the bad effects of warming climate are felt, man will take countermeasures.
While a “nuclear winter” caused by thermonuclear bombs constitutes an existence proof that man can increase atmospheric absorption and thereby lower surface temperature, in fact there are simpler, non-radioactive ways. (The price might be very high, but would still be a bargain compared with the costs of flooded coastal cities, etc.)
Unfortunately, these approaches do not restore the benign conditions of last century but make further changes that happen to lead to lower temperatures. For one thing, atmospheric heat absorption would not reduce ocean acidification (in fact lower temperatures exacerbate that problem, no?) which may be an even more pernicious effect of CO2 emissions than rising temperatures are.
I’m aware of that. However, I have seen some designs for giant CO2 scrubbing installations which could probably by stood up strategically around the globe. I’d have to rely on someone else to look up the numbers and see how many of the things would need to be constructed to have any reasonable effect on the atmosphere. (And actually, since the issue is with water in the air, CO2 scrubbing might not be as necessary or beneficial as water scrubbing - which could be collected for drinking and farming.)
The point is, even if that legislation had been passed, the effect on CO2 output would not have been as great as the effects generated by market forces.
I’m letting you know. Carbon emissions ARE falling, and in fact are at a 20-year low. Cite.
All which turned out to be either false or grossly exaggerated by your side. And it’s a good thing your side lost, since as the article explains this big drop in CO2 emissions is largely due to the rapid decline in prices of natural gas because of all the gas coming on line from shale deposits, extracted with fracking.
Um, if natural gas generates half the CO2 per BTU as does coal, then by your logic shouldn’t you actually be subsidizing it, and not taxing it? Isn’t it a good thing to replace coal with natural gas? Doesn’t that cut the cost of externalities dramatically?
Wind and solar are, and will remain for the foreseeable future, a small fraction of U.S. energy output, for reasons that have been explained many times on this board. If you’re willing to sacrifice real reductions in CO2 by opposing natural gas and nuclear, while waiting for the magic of wind and solar power to solve everything, then you’re part of the problem. You’re sacrificing the good while you chase the perfect.
Wind is actually the most feasible today in terms of cost-effectiveness, but it doesn’t scale very well. Once you get past maybe 10% - 15% of total energy production, wind starts running out of good locations and the costs rise dramatically.
Solar is more scalable, but for it to be a real contributor we need solar panels so cheap that they are nearly free, because their energy density is so low. We also need revolutions in packaging so that they can be employed on standard buildings. When the day comes where solar shingles are available that are only incrementally more expensive than regular roof shingles, we’ll see major increases in solar power. When we get solar paint that can be applied to a car and help charge the batteries when parked for very low incremental cost, we’ll see some big gains in efficiency. I have hopes that we’ll eventually see that kind of stuff, and when we do solar will take off, but it’ll be the market driving it - not government.
No, actually a whole bunch of them are failing. Low natural gas prices are hitting all higher-cost energy sources, from coal to nuclear to solar and wind. That doesn’t change the fact that Solyndra was given a big advantage over its competitors.
I have direct experience with this sort of government ‘help’. I worked in a small chemistry lab after college, and the government here announced a big initiative to ‘foster research and development’ by offering research grants. That grant money went to a handful of big, connected firms. What did they use it for? Well, since they didn’t have to pay for their own R&D from profits from chemical sales, they cut the prices of their products and drove the smaller players out of business. The government tried to build an R&D economy by intervening in the market with targeted subsidies, and the result was the destruction of smaller, more innovative companies and an overall weakening of private R&D.
I’m guessing that you think these kind of snotty rejoinders make you look clever, or make me look worse. In fact, all they do is signal to people that you’re either a lazy debater or don’t have a good answer.
Okay, now we’re getting into an argument with some real meat on it, which hopefully can be debated like adults.
Explain how your tariff regime is supposed to work. I understand that you want to put the tariffs on American purchasers of foreign goods. Do I understand that your idea is to put carbon taxes on domestic producers, then put tariffs on equivalent imported goods to level the playing field? Are these tariffs to be applied to products regardless of what country they come from? What if they come from Europe, and their carbon footprint is already lower than the American one? Shouldn’t you actually be subsidizing those products, perhaps with the tax money extracted from American producers, if your goal is simply to minimize carbon output?
How do carbon credits work into this? What if a product is created in Europe that has a pretty high carbon footprint, but the company that made it bought carbon credits for it on the European carbon market? Do they get a pass on the tariffs?
How are you going to solve the problem of production simply leaving your high tax environment? As I see it, an American factory will have to pay tariffs on all its input goods and machinery. Then it will pay carbon taxes on the energy used to make the product. But an equivalent factory in China will pay no carbon taxes and pay no tariffs on input goods. So why wouldn’t all energy-intensive manufacturing simply leave the country?
Have you considered the consquence of forcing manufacturing out of the U.S., which has relatively high energy efficiency, and relocating it to China, which has poor energy efficiency? Can you see that your attempts could actually result in increasing the carbon footprint of products?
You are attempting to control the direction and destinations of trillions of dollars in goods and services, through an elaborate and complex set of rules that seek to punish some companies and reward others based on their carbon production. Do you understand why a system like that is virtually guaranteed to be captured and corrupted by various state and private actors, and twisted to their own benefit? The kind of money involved guarantees that the big players in the world will be scrambling to exert power over it, and not because they want to save the planet.
If I’m mis-characterizing your plan, please tell me how. I’ll be happy to debate your plan in whatever detail you wish to describe.
No, they’ll slap their own tariffs on U.S. cars, electronics, factory equipment, and all the stuff the U.S. exports to China. GM is making a major play for China, since they’re faltering domestically. China could sink GM by pricing their cars out of the market, and there are a lot of Chinese car companies that would applaud that move.
You don’t think China is capable of playing hardball with the U.S.? China has tremendous leverage in the far east. China can punch back in many ways - supporting North Korea, threatening Taiwan, cutting off trade and aid to other local countries doing business with the U.S., etc.
It does. And the other nations can then impose their own tariffs, or take other retaliatory measures, or shift to other markets. Or they can game the system as is being done now with Europe’s carbon market, or in extreme cases they can go to war against you. Have you forgotten what helped lead Japan in WWII?
Interventionists in markets always think they’re dealing with a static system. Throw a tax or a tariff here and there, and you can model it and tune it and shape it to your whim. But markets are more clever than planners, and money finds a way to flow. Slap tariffs on Chinese products, and perhaps you’ll find that Americans are buying Canadian products instead, but the Canadian products are made in Thailand, and Thailand products have some mysterious origins…
But the obvious result of tariffs is that Americans will pay more for their goods. American manufacturers will have their costs of production increased, while those in other countries do not. Even if China plays ball, the net result will be a reduction in economic output and a shift of production to other, lower-cost countries. And then your efforts will be in vain, because those dastardly producers and their CO2 emitting factories will be outside of your jurisdiction.
Oh, can I? I work in factory production. I think I understand how factories run. And even though you were being condescending, I think it’s you who doesn’t have an appreciation for how energy is consumed in factories. For one thing, various products have vastly different amounts of energy that goes into them. For another, waste and scrappage and efficiency play a big part, and it’s here where U.S. factories still substantially outperform factories in many other countries.
High efficiency motors, modern heating equipment, the transition away from water-cooled air conditioning, electronics made from higher-density ICs, you name it - all contribute to the energy efficiency of a factory. This all costs money, and poorer countries can’t afford it and so often a factory making the same part in Malaysia will have a much higher per-part greenhouse gas footprint than one in America. Your efforts may result in driving manufacturing out of the U.S. and into those countries.
Do you have any idea how hard that is? One factory I was just in had over 50,000 parts in its supply chain. Their suppliers change constantly, sometimes in the middle of a production run. And each one of those suppliers has long supply chains that go into their own products. Then you’d have to track the carbon footprint due to shipping and storage and rework and all sorts of other things. You’d bury businesses in a mountain of paperwork, and you’d need armies of accountants in the government to manage the tariff system. The prices would be changing constantly, making it harder to plan production.
There are a lot of ideas that look simple and obvious from 10,000 feet. Come down into the real world of day-to-day production and see how easy it is.
You treat the world as if it’s a static thing. The U.S. may be the world’s largest export market today, but everything you want to do would begin to shift that. America’s status is not due to divine intervention, but because it has retained a capitalist system that drives down costs and drives up efficiency. You want to slap a whole new level of input and output costs on the economy, yet you expect this to have no effect on America’s status with respect to the rest of the world’s productive economies.
You’re going to have to explain this in more detail - how does putting tariffs on American imports and taxes on American production prevent companies from shifting production to other countries? I suppose you could freeze their capital or arrest their owners if they try to leave. So they’ll go bankrupt because they can’t compete against China on the global market, and the production moves anyway.
I’m not preventing it - the laws of supply and demand are. You think you can control the flows of capital through the world through ‘smart interventions’. I think the world economy is far more complex and driven by much more powerful fundamental forces that you’re more likely to just make a mess of it and cause disruptions and diversions - while achieving little.
No they won’t, because they won’t think it’s their fault. They’ve victims of the tragedy of the commons. Wouldn’t they feel even more foolish if they spent their wealth contributing to a ‘fix’, only to find that they’re still running out of water, and their money, instead of going to a ‘fix’, wound up in the pockets of state capitalists in China, or petty bureaucrats in India, or crony capitalists in Washington?
Callback to this pertinent point. I don’t smell a rat, but population is the third rail that no politician or pundit of any stripe dares to touch. No worthwhile calculation is complete unless the miserable consequences of unfettered population growth are acknowledged.
The comforting meme is that world population will plateau at 9 billion within the next few decades. This prediction is both true and scary. The planet cannot sustain such a burden.
A) The super wealthy who fly their own jet are such a statistical anomaly that you’re being silly by calling them “the problem”. The middle class of wealthy nations, on the other hand, you’ve got a point.
B) That said, if your solution to technological progress is to cut back on technological progress or remove humans, then you’re being silly. At least until such a point as the oceans are literally boiling, you’re not going to convince individual humans to change or lower their standard of living. If you can’t come up with a technological solution which allows the standard of living of the whole planet to grow, then your solution is unworkable.
Sam-
What solution would you suggest?
I don’t think I have much in common with conservatives, and if Mr Gore wants fewer people, I support him 100%.
Like Mr Gore, I love to live lavishly. I like my big house; I like my first class jets; I like new golf clubs.
And I think my Tanzanian friends do, too.
I’m not raising a straw man that the AGW enthusiasts are opposed to population control. I’m saying that focusing on anthropogenic carbon emissions utterly misses the real problem. I see 100 articles on AGW for every article I see on the fundamental underlying problem: Too many people consuming.
It just stupid, Gb, and it frustrates me. And because our burgeoning population will wreck the earth’s ecosystem even if we solved AGW, I really just don’t get it. So that’s why I consider AGW to be the big-government cause du jour. There isn’t another good explanation of why it’s become so popular.
It cannot be that we are simply concerned about the world’s ecosystem. If that were the case, we’d rank priorities, and population control would be far and away the first thing to fix. In a few decades 9 billion people eating, sewaging, paving, building and recreating to anything close to the level which the west is doing now will completely overrun the ecosystem. The only thing that keeps it going now is that all the developing countries have such crappy subsystems they can’t consume at a decent level. But they are getting there as fast as they can. They all want bluefin sushi too, and they all want SUVs and decent golf courses.
As I pointed out when Mr Gore got his Nobel, it was like giving an altruism award to a spouse abuser who establishes shelters for battered women. As humans we are extraordinary consumers, and Mr Gore is the archetype of those of us who love causes but don’t personally intend to be the ones who actually live with the consequences of what we are preaching. And I think almost all of us are Mr Gore. Because of that, we need fewer of us.
To focus almost exclusively on a pipe dream that we’ll replace our current energy grid before we cook ourselves, or that we will suddenly decide to sacrifice for the common good is seriously misguided. That it has become popular so disproportionately to population control leaves me smelling a rat.
There isn’t just one “real problem” or “fundamental underlying problem”. It’s definitely true that at our current stage of sustainability technology and consumerism, excess population is bad not just for climate maintenance but for pretty much all aspects of the environment.
However, even if we magically eliminated an entire 25% of the earth’s population and the corresponding percentage of emissions tomorrow, we’d still have an anthropogenic GHG emissions problem. And the emissions themselves are the direct cause of the climate-change effects, so it makes sense that they are the focus of discussions about climate change.
Sure there is. Human emissions are changing the composition of the atmosphere which causes drastic changes in climate conditions and rising sea levels. You think there has to be some covert ulterior reason why that’s a big story? Nonsense: it’s obviously a big story, right on the face of it.
What steps have you taken to limit or eliminate your own population contribution? (No tu quoques here, I’m descendant-free. ;)) IIRC it’s too late for you to avoid procreation altogether, and of course I wouldn’t recommend going so far as to murder all your descendants to make up for it. But I trust that you have told your children and/or grandchildren, if any (tut tut!), that there will be serious family repercussions if they attempt to procreate (especially given how emissions-heavy the lavish lifestyles of their developed-world descendants would probably be)? You have at least made it a condition of your will that any heirs will forfeit any legacy if they successfully reproduce, right?
No, I rather suspect you haven’t. You may bitch about overpopulation on messageboards and use it as an excuse to dismiss or ignore other environmental problems, and you may perhaps donate some money to organizations trying to get people in distant locations to have fewer children, but I doubt that you’re seriously taking up the cause of stopping population growth right in your own family.
And that right there, that little thought experiment about population control at the individual family level, is the flaw in pretending that population growth is the only environmental problem worth doing anything about. Population growth is not only a serious environmental problem but an intensely personal individual decision that most governments and communities are rightly hesitant to intervene in. Certainly there are lots of steps that we can take, and are taking, to at least make it easier for people not to have any more children than they actually want to have. But the innate intractability of the problem means that it’s futile and dangerously counterproductive to ignore all other approaches to environmental problems until we solve overpopulation.
So no, the public attention given to climate change vis-a-vis overpopulation is not a hypocrisy issue. (And until you can report back that you’ve successfully managed to dead-end your own family tree and thus eliminate the consequences of the potential population growth that you yourself recklessly caused, you have no business lecturing anybody else about hypocrisy, either.)
Yep, Chief Pedant does sound like the fake environmentalists that demand a focus on population as a way to set up a wedge between environmentalists.
As shown before, environmentalists are not the ones that shy away from recommendations on dealing with population issues, in reality virtually the same right wing that opposes doing something about CO2 emissions are also the ones that oppose things like Birth control and better access to education for the poor and and improvements on their economical situation, items that have demonstrated for a long time that they do reduce the number of children a couple has. A better method than just going like the Chinese do.
And as pointed many, many times before, controlling the emission of global warming gasses does not depend wholly on controlling the population, the real rat I smell is just an effort to confuse and continue to seed doubts on the needed efforts to control emissions.
If we can solve the problem of simultaneously having prosperity and solve AGW at the same time, then the population problem will solve itself. Prosperous cultures have fewer average children: developed nations are at or below replacement level.
I hope I’m not accused of being rat, confuser or wedge-artist if I agree with Chief Pedant that high population is the fundamental problem leading to climate change and other bad effects. I have no solution to propose, however.
[Hijack] It’s irrelevant to this thread but I was amazed when I chatted recently with an intelligent(*) American supporter of Ron Paul. He was opposed to the Federal Reserve of course, but his big issue seemed to be the pernicious “New World Order” led by the Bush family and others. And the biggest problem he had with this “New World Order”? Their quest for lower human population! :smack: (I wasn’t interested enough to Google then, but just now I see that Wikipedia is aware of this “thinking.”)
(Some will object to my characterization of him as “intelligent” but he was a successful computer professional and obviously had a 100+ IQ. He didn’t seem to be a religious nut, but maybe he kept that in reserve.)