Oh, I understand now. You came in to snipe at me for the window-sticker comments, not the fact that he was operating the car in the way that he was (which I sure hope you aren’t defending). Well, that’s fair - I left myself open to that, no denying it.
Sure, the stickers could have been on there when he bought the car too - they’re sometimes pretty hard to remove. It could have been the parent’s car. It could have been a rental (in theory…). Also, the Mad Sticker Clowns could have come by to put them on late at night.
It was a “random thought” that I had. If I had been thinking about gun control, then I would have commented on the “Gore 2000” and “smilie with AK-47” sticker combination instead. The main point was that the guy was acting like an Energy Asshole.
Now that we’ve established that, are you going to join the discussion here, or was this just a drive-by?
I basically agree with you. To make it work the developed nations do have to bring down their levels and transfer the technology. And IMHO it is these developed nations that should take the first step. I know I’m oversimplifying, but the US more or less said they wouldn’t sign Kyoto because it did nothing to reign in developing countries. And of course the US has not proposed any meaningful alternative.
But the problem is that the US is pumping out 5.38 tons per year per capita, while China is emitting 0.68 tons. That is a gross imbalance.
Like China Guy, color me completely confused by this statement. Anthracite, I thought you were arguing that the Third World countries need to do their part but what you are now proposing is a scenario under which the U.S. would have to cut back way more than Kyoto calls for now while the Europeans might get to not cut back at all and the Third World countries could continue expanding their greenhouse gas output for decades!
I mean I sometimes have noted this as an alternate scenario in response to anti-Kyoto folks when I wanted to argue that it is not clear what is fair…since “fairness” defined by an equal per capita limit would involve way, way, way more sacrifice on the part of the U.S. than Kyoto. But, I never really thought it was practical for various reasons!
I threw out a quick figure as a point of illustration meaning this:
By whatever metric we choose to use, we should (IMO) treat the countries fairly. If it’s by person purely, then we have to treat everyone the same. However, due to other inequities at play, a simple per-person measure isn’t good enough - it would, as you say, require enormous cuts from the US. So per GDP $$ is another method, that some like much better. However, as China Guy points out, this seems unfair to the lesser-developed countries, who fear that they will always be “a day late and a dollar short”, so to speak, in the World economy.
I don’t know the answer, but I feel that GDP, or perhaps by separating out an industrial GDP, might be a better measure.
I’m an odd person. I’m a supply-side arch-conservative who sees environmental and efficiency standards as a challenge, not a hinderance. But I do rail a bit sometimes against what I see to be things that are a bit too much of a challenge, things that seem scientifically and engineering unsound, or things that have too short of a timetable.
My comment on “1-ton” was in haste, as something really bad was happening to me at the time… well, shit, if I told you, you wouldn’t believe it. It was incorrect of me to make it, whatever the case, and it was not what I meant to say.
Another possibility would be to allocate (eg) 1 ton per capita to each country, BUT allow the US to buy extra pollution units from Belize (say). The idea being that if it’s cheaper for a Belizian farmer to cut his methane emissions than it is for a US plant to switch from coal to oil, then the Belizian should go first. With compensation. Ok, so the details have to be worked out.
Personally, I would prefer it if everyone ended their fossil fuel subsidies and put a (minimum) $5+ tax on each ton of carbon emitted, with the proceeds going to general revenues. Hey, I can dream.
Anthracite, my feeling on the issue of fairness is that if one demands absolute fairness on an issue where one can’t even agree on what “fair” would be (and not over a narrow range either!), you are pretty much guaranteeing never getting an international agreement. One has to be willing to have some flexibility.
To me, it is fair enough that Kyoto says roughly, “The developed countries … i.e., those countries that both emit the most per capita and have caused most of the problem up to this point and also can most afford to start dealing with this and have the strongest technological capabilities to start dealing with it … should start limiting their output first with the other nations to follow down the road.”
Being too rigid in a conception of fairness is in practice just equivalent to saying that you don’t want an international agreement because you ain’t going to get one that everyone believes is absolutely fair.
You are certainly not alone in your advocacy of long time tables (as I’m sure you are aware). Still, the existence of the greenhouse effect has been known since the 1970s (although its magnitude is still a matter of debate). It’s a shame that modest steps were not taken in the 1980s, IMO. But that’s water under the bridge.
A word on nomenclature. I’ve seen “Supply Side” economics defined in 2 ways. The first maintains that lowering income taxes from the rates that existed in the US during the 1970s would result in lower budget deficits; in other words, the Laffer Curve is an empirically relevant concept.
That viewpoint was championed by the WSJ editorial page. I am not aware of any academic economist who took it seriously, (Laffer not being an example of an academic). I hasten to add that I am including such conservative economists that were affiliated with the U of Chicago, Minnesota, Rochester, as well as the Hoover Foundation in California. This is fringe stuff: it asserts that certain (dubious) parameter values apply without providing any empirical evidence whatsoever. Never mind peer review.
Since the early 1980s, other definitions have been put forward, eg, supply side “emphasizes individual economic decision-making and how government policies impact those decisions.” The problem with these sorts of definitions is that they don’t exclude any mainstream economists - nobody claims that such factors are not important. (The preceding definition also appears disingenuous, as it is indistinguishable from the term “microeconomics”, as far as I can tell.)