I don’t believe any of this, but this how I think they think. Reducing CO2 emissions is going to be expensive. If you deny “global warming” then you can feel that the cost of emissions reduction is greater than the benefits, and it is not worth doing.
I was around for the first pollution battle, and back then there were tons of people who denied that pollution was a big enough problem to be worth the cost of cleaning up the air. If you are a polluting business you are pushing some of your costs off on society at large, and that makes good business sense. There are plenty of Republicans even today who want to do away with the EPA. There is a powerful lobby for not spending money on cleaning up anything - or advertising how environmental they are is cheaper than actually being environmental.
We also have to factor in risk. If we are wrong and they are right and we clean up the air, they are less profitable for nothing (horrors) though we do have a new business area of cleanup. However if they are wrong and we are right and we don’t clean up the area, the disruption and cost would be horrific. But the people making the decisions will be dead, which is why we need government which thinks in the long term.
You don’t get to ignore the R&D cost. If it will cost the country $100 billion dollars and only be $50 billion cheaper than fossil fuels, that’s $50 billion more expensive.
Of course, you can argue that fossil fuels impose an external cost on society not included in their price, which is a perfectly valid argument. But that cost is very hard to quantify.
And frankly, I get the sense that a lot of environmentalists are opposed to what they deem to be “excess” consumption on a moral basis, regardless of how clean and/or cheap it is, and would prefer that energy prices be much higher in order to discourage consumption, period.
Well I don’t know if I’d quite label myself as a global warming “denier,” but…
My biggest problem with the environmentalist left is that they seem to always be more worried about what I have to change, as opposed to what THEY have to change. There are plenty of the aforementioned types who certainly walk the walk. Yet it seems, on the whole, the movement is continually trying to legislate things that force people to conform to their own views on the earth, and they back up their actions with loads of doomsday arguments, usually ending with, “..and then we’ll die. So if you don’t wag your finger at your neighbor who drives a hummer, then your destroying humanity.”
Now obviously the debate here is more complex than this, but its this sort of emanated sentiment that I think is giving environmentalists the bums rap. For the most part, I can see the value of their goals. However, when trying to achieve their goals via expending time and money, I wish they’d expend it on scientific advances that can actually do something, as opposed to thinking that if they can just guilt enough people into it, then world will see their point of view and so be saved.
This makes no sense. If, for example, the NIF goes live in 2020, energy costs per user will be much lower, and as (a long amount of) time goes on could drop to 0. Forever. There’s no such thing as “$x billion cheaper” when you start thinking about longterm, reusable energy.
My feeling is that environmentalists only oppose excess consumption in as much as it damages the world around them. They would happily leave the lights on all day & night if we had unlimited green energy.
Are you familiar with the concept of the time value of money? You can quantify money saved every year for the next ten thousand years as a specific, finite amount today. If the cost of investment required today is less than that future value, the investment is not worth it. Period.
As for the NIF - the projected cost of energy from the NIF is somewhere between 33 million and 100 billion times the cost of energy from coal (depending on how generous you are with your accounting). That’s if it is successful! I am hopeful, but it will take them a long time to get that number down to 1 (much less 0). It is certainly not going to happen in the next eight years. They will be lucky to get any energy at all by 2020. They’re certainly not going to start selling energy to end-users in that time frame, if that’s what you mean by “go live”.
My feeling is that they oppose anything that damages the world around them, no matter how minimally, and as such will never be satisfied with any level of consumption beyond the bare minimum essential for life.
There will never be unlimited green energy - it will still cost resources and damage the environment to mine the materials needed to build solar cells and wind turbine blades, or whatever you like. Thus there will always be an environmental penalty to consumption of any kind, and environmentalists will never be satisfied.
Earth’s present inhabitants aren’t really adapted to having baseline CO[sub]2[/sub] concentrations over 500ppm. The idea that plants will think it’s food is silly. In the dark they’ll asphyxiate like the rest of us.
Simply untrue. Commercial greenhouses have been using CO2 supplementation to increase plant growth for decades, and the positive effects are dramatic up to around 1,100 - 1,500 ppm. This is not up for debate.
EDIT: And I presume you’re not implying that humans will asphyxiate at levels anywhere near 500 ppm. People start to feel the effects at around 10,000 ppm, but it takes levels of around 100,000 ppm before asphyxiation becomes a real concern. Take a CO2 meter into a busy restaurant and you’ll see levels of around 2,000 ppm.
Anyway, a higher baseline changes things, and makes the overall environment less forgiving. And not every organism has the same tolerances. Can you guarantee that a low of 500 ppm is going to be OK for everything?
The present concern is increased carbonic acid in seawater from dissolved CO[sub]2[/sub]. Then, global warming leading to drought in places like Texas, as rains fail to condense. Then rising sea levels due to expansion with temperature swamping other areas. Then tipping points due to polar melting…
I know, you don’t believe in global warming. Yet you’re willing to quote scientific results for other things. Weird.
And btw, cheap energy can’t last anyway. We’ve burned through most of the accessible petroleum already.
The whole point of the OP was arguments against CO2 emissions not related to global warming. My point is that there aren’t any. That doesn’t mean I’m a global warming denier, far from it. I’ve said so several times already in this thread.
But it doesn’t serve the global warming cause to make unscientific claims about how CO2 is some kind of dangerous, toxic, cancerous pollutant. If not for the greenhouse effect, we wouldn’t give a shit.
We had this conversation before, it is really way out there to propose that we could reach those PPM levels even if we do not have restrictions in the next 200 years.
Other effects like ocean acidification and the warming from the increase of the gas will be bad for humanity in the future, but not the end of the world if we plan ahead properly.
Unfortunately we have leaders that are willing to tell their followers that there is no problem so no planing is necessary.
On edit:
Actually **Absolute **if just by chance CO2 was not a greenhouse gas we would still be stuck with the other evil twin: ocean acidification.
Well, there’s a difference between growers using controlled supplemental CO2 in greenhouses for specific crops and entire ecosystems getting hit with elevated CO2 levels as a permanent condition. Just because it stimulates targeted growth in a greenhouse crop doesn’t mean that we can assume that all its consequences throughout a whole ecosystem will be positive.
10,000 looks somewhat too high as a lower bound for potential problems. Your own cite says that “Levels of 5,000 ppm can cause dizziness or lack of co-ordination to humans.” I agree that levels like that aren’t realistic for atmospheric CO2 in the foreseeable future, however.
Fair enough. I must admit I don’t know enough about the topic to have a discussion about ocean acidification. What are the current projections?
Incidentally - I’d love to continue this discussion immediately, but I’m going to go jump in my gas-guzzling SUV, and do my part to bring gas prices higher and thus hasten the arrival of our clean energy future.
Granted, although you can really only quantify certain aspects when projecting cost. We aren’t just talking $kW/h here. Getting the entire planet hooked up with clean, cheap, abundant, non-proliferate, wasteless energy would have massive socio-economic ramifications. I believe the investment IS worth it.
When I saw Ed Moses give a talk on the subject he said he thought, with funding, it would be able to go live (yes, I mean selling to end-users) by 2020. Now obviously, he has a lot of interest in throwing out an early number to draw interest/financing to his project, but this wasn’t a # pulled out of thin air. And the NIF was just an example, there are lots of different-yet-similar projects. All we need is one to pan out.
My feeling is you don’t know any real environmentalists and are making up a straw man to discredit them. Either that or you are taking the opinions of a handful of individuals and ascribing them to a much wider group than you should. My wife is an environmental lawyer, and as such I spend a fair amount of time with environmentalists. Not one of them engage in the kind of zealotry you are describing. Unless you have some cites to back this up, I suggest you drop this.
This is a typical shoulder-shrugging excuse for avoiding rational engagement with a problem: “well, those complainers are just so unreasonable and will never be satisfied with ANYTHING I do to try to address the problem, so that justifies me in not bothering to do anything at all”.
Well, not quite true. As GIGObuster pointed out, there’s still the issue of ocean acidification from CO2 (RealClimate overview here), which among other things helps destroy coral reefs.
Moreover, as noted above, increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations changes the nutrient cycle for photosynthesizing plants, which has consequences for ecosystems. Even if increased atmospheric CO2 somehow didn’t affect global temperatures, having more of it in the water and the air would still have noticeable environmental effects.
Did I use it an excuse? It was just an observation. I love nature and the outdoors, I want a clean and healthy environment as much as anyone.
I certainly get this vibe from Greenpeace and similar organizations. I admit it is probably unwise to extrapolate from them to environmentalists in general.
Probably, especially since it sounds as though you consider yourself to be an environmentalist, i.e., someone who “wants a clean and healthy environment”.
Sounds as though you may have mixed up “environmentalist” with “fanatical environmentalist extremists”. Who certainly do exist, but who don’t make up the majority of environmentalists.
The problem is that there is not a single figure for savings over the next 10 or 100 years. There is a range of potential benefits, and which you use depends a lot on what you believe in. If you think that we can continue as we are going with little impact, the answer you get differs from what you get if you think the world will end in 200 years. The actual answer lies between these extremes, and we don’t know there.
When I teach this stuff I show a single cost-benefit curve, and then optimistic and pessimistic benefits. Where you invest depends strongly on which of these curves you believe in.
There is also the problem that while the costs are reasonably well understood, the benefits are not. I used to get paid justifying investment in engineering. The benefits we predicted didn’t usually happen, but there were tons of unexpected benefits that made it well worthwhile, in hindsight.