Before humans, there were a lot more plants and a lot fewer animals. Because plants absorb carbon dioxide while animals emit it, that helped keep it out of the atmosphere. There’s some evidence that human agricultural practices have been warming the planet since the dawn of agriculture, because even early civilizations may have added carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by draining swamps and burning forests. But agricultural emissions, though exaggerated in some cases, are definitely a significant contributor to global warming.
The reason that train use never took off in the US is because it’s not cost effective. We are too sprawled out. Countries like Japan with a high population density or like France where you can walk from one city to the next (for instance, I have walked from Nice to Monaco) in just a couple of hours make it reasonable for trains to be a standard method of transportation. That same walk from Nice to Monaco only gets me to the suburbs of Seattle.
That is almost certainly incorrect. The number of predators is limited to the number of herbivores, and the number of herbivores is limited to the amount of plant matter. You can’t increase the biomass of animals on the planet without increasing the amount of plant biomass. You can however have an excess of plants.
No food. No live.
Only to the extent that life is unfair: rich people get to buy a whole lot more of just about anything than poor people do.
Or have fully auctionable cap-and-trade, with the government sharing most or all of the money raised with everyone on a per-capita basis. If your lifestyle generates less carbon than the mean (not the median), you come out ahead. And affluence correlates strongly with carbon generation: more stuff, more travel, bigger houses, less use of public transportation for local travel, all of which involve more CO2.
The thing is, market mechanisms generally work in terms of giving people easily comparable choices. Rather than having to figure out how many ration cards I need for this or that, and how I’m going to bring my carbon consumption in under the cap, I simply make choices based on what I can afford. The fact that market failures exist and are sometimes important doesn’t take away from the fact that the vast majority of the time, nothing can beat markets for simplicity and effectiveness.
Public transportation is ineffective in many parts of the US for many reasons including those in my first post. Urban sprawl is an excuse & poor planning should be fixed not excused.
I didn’t say that cutting 40% of emissions would be insubstantial. I just questioned your attribution of “nearly all” emissions to those two categories which add up to less than 40% of the total.
I also questioned your assertion that cutting out that 40% of total emissions would make the “problem solved”. AFAICT, recent studies suggest that the minimum truly effective level of emissions cuts to mitigate expected warming effects is more like 70%.
If you’re going to make sweeping and inaccurate unsupported generalizations, please don’t shift the goalposts when your statements are questioned. I certainly don’t disagree that it would be a great thing to cut out emissions from coal-fired power plants and from private cars, but it is incorrect to state that those two sources account for “nearly all” emissions, or that if we could eliminate them we’d have the “problem solved”.
Let’s say then that this is the majority of everything that can reasonably be cut.
I hope the solution which is effected is along the lines of market-based cap and trade because that will open a new market and create a potential for making money. I’m nervous about placing my personal financial bets now because I don’t think there will be the public will to effect any broad solutions at all. However as soon as I see a reasonably predictable consensus, I will be placing some personal financial bets on that new market even though I am skeptical it will effect any real change. I don’t need to buy into AGW to make money off it, after all…I just need to predict the collective belief accurately and it’s probably early to be shorting Florida coastline.
It seems to me two factors are in play.
The first is that we do not, as a society, have a very good history of acting for the common good if it actually impinges upon our personal lifestyle. We give to the collective good from our excess. We do not easily give up personal luxury, and we define luxury fairly liberally. We usually refer to it as “necessity” as in “I need to live in this size home.”
The second factor is that there is a huge part of the world not yet developed. We can do whatever we want in the West; India and China alone represent a couple billion under-developed populations who are not going to consider shaping up until they catch up. And frankly, they sort of have a point.
I also note that we have already voted with our feet. The economy tanks. Less consumption all across every parameter. What is our response? Rejoicing that AGW has suddenly slowed? No sirree Bob. We pump money as fast as we can to get ourselves back on our consuming feet. We have already come face to face with the choice between consumption and AGW and we voted for consumption.
And as I pointed out in the other thread: we don’t like to be the first guy to limit our personal lifestyle. First class ticket, please. The plane is going to fly regardless, so why wouldn’t I go first class? I would be an idiot to trust that enough people are going to join my first-class ticket boycott to effect a difference. We are all waiting for the other guy. So no one joins the lone Quixote boycotting first.
We still have a draft and rich people are not able to buy their way out.
Pre-emptive clarification: IIRC, Rune is based in Denmark where they still have a mandatory military service requirement for young men.
Rune, Americans tend to think of the military draft as something that ended with the Vietnam War. At that time, the US had instituted draft exemptions for men in college and men serving in the National Guard, both of which were regarded to some extent as “safe havens” more easily accessible to those with wealth and influence. Hence the comment about the rich being able to buy themselves out of the draft.
I’d be fully on board with carbon pricing, except that I don’t think the AGW crowd would ever accept it as the final answer, even if the entire world got on board.
Accepted values for the cost of externalities of CO2 range from $20 to as high as $200 per tonne. This is a huge range, which means it’s going to be hard to find agreement.
I have a hard time believing that if we managed to tax carbon at an equitable price, that the AGW lobby would just say, “There! Problem solved. Now we can all stop lobbying and find something else to worry about.”
The other assurance I would want is that the tax is revenue neutral, and not just another excuse to extract money from the private sector and put it in the public sector. I have absolutely zero faith that that would happen.
The Suzuki Institute in Canada says that a $200 per tonne tax on carbon in Canada should be spent on renewable energy ($6.9 billion per year), and on ‘investment in home energy efficiency’ ($24.6 billion per year). The balance would be ‘earmarked for other uses’.
It’s hard to imagine an ongoing investment of 25 billion dollars a year into home energy efficiency wouldn’t rapidly reach a point of diminishing returns. And there’s no evidence that 7 billion dollars a year in Canadian alternative energy investment would be money well spent. I doubt if we have the physical or human resources to absorb that kind of money indefinitely, unless we started doing very expensive things like putting solar panels on every roof. This would be a huge, heavyweight burden on the economy - according to the institute, the taxes required to push Canada’s carbon output down to the recommended level, it would cost $50 billion per year. Or looked at another way, it would shift $50 billion per year out of the private sector and into the public sector.
Before I’d sign on to any kind of tax like that, I would want assurances that this isn’t just backdoor socialism like Van Jones’ “Green Jobs” initiative, which turned out to be just a way to take money from the rich and give it to the poor for makework jobs. I’d want it to be revenue neutral - A $200 carbon tax would raise the equivalent of half of all Canadian income taxes. So sure, put a $200 tax on carbon, but cut income taxes in half at the same time.
Of course, this transparency in cost is why governments are moving away from carbon taxes and towards ‘cap and trade’. And this I won’t support in any form, because cap and trade just becomes a mechanism for government to assert direct control over industry, to choose winners and losers, and to raise huge sums of money through indirect taxation that is not at all transparent.
Along these lines, I would also demand that any carbon pricing scheme be evenly applied to all sources of carbon emission, and that governments do not draft bills riddled with exceptions for favored constituents and industries. Good luck with that. For example, I’d even add in the carbon footprint of the cattle industry from methane emissions. Good luck passing that in Iowa.
But if our carbon pricing scheme is complex and riddled with exemptions, it will distort markets and do a lot of damage outside of the damage caused by the tax itself.
But before the west does any of this, it has to have absolute assurance that China, India, and Russia will play along. Because otherwise, any reductions in fossil fuels here will be an implicit subsidy on fossil fuel burning in those countries, and I have absolutely no desire to subsidize the energy-inefficient lifestyles of the Russians or the Chinese with my tax dollars - especially if it doesn’t have much of an effect on global warming in the first place.
Of course, none of this will ever happen. If we ever do get a treaty, it will be a feel-good document signed by countries with no intent to adhere to it. And it will only pass with so many compromises, exemptions, subsidies and other giveaways that it will be meaningless and irrelevant the day it is passed. Just like Kyoto was.
A better solution needs to be found.
A Better Solution.
So how can the flaws in a global, voluntary reduction treaty be fixed? First of all, don’t rely on the rest of the world. I think it’s folly to believe that China, Russia, and India will act in any way other than in their own interests. And they all have big interests in cheap fossil fuel: Russia sells it, and the Chinese and Indians consume it.
One way to deal with that problem is to simply ignore it. Assume they aren’t going to play along, and decide how much extra you’re willing to spend to reduce your own footprint, then just go ahead and do it.
The fairest way to do that would be for the government to place a tax on carbon, with the money directly going to subsidies for non-carbon producing energy. No favorites, no direct payments to companies for research, or anything like that. Government could simply offer a price for energy, then resell it at a lower price as a broker. Anyone who can manufacture energy at a lower price can sell it to the government, then the government sells it to the utilities at the market price for, say, coal. Even other fossil fuels, only their sales will be taxed for the carbon. The tax makes the fossil fuels more expensive, and non-fossil fuels cheaper. It puts all energy on a level playing field.
Now let the alternative energy market fight it out for the government market price. If nuclear can produce enough energy at the lowest subsidy cost, then it’ll get the market share. If wind can do it, wind wins. More likely, they would also continually jockey for market share like companies in other markets do.
These is probably a pretty inexpensive way to go about this, because some of the alternative sources like nuclear and wind are already approaching the cost of fossil fuels. With the additional competition for a huge market the subsidy would bring, we might see faster advancement and eventually become just as economically efficient.
The long-term answer to climate change is to stop burning fossil fuel, and the only way that’s going to happen is if people stop using voluntarily because better alternatives are available. The best way to do that is to open up markets to alternative energy and allow the forces of the free market to sort out how to supply it.
I would extend this to allow individuals to sell their energy at the government price as well. That opens the door to entrepreneurship. Someone with a local geothermal source or excess power from a farm windmill can sell it to the government at a profit.
Economically, a price ceiling above the market price behaves sort of like ‘prizes’ do in spurring innovation. Think of it this way: When companies are competing to provide the lowest-cost energy, there’s no sense spending money to research or develop and energy source that is less efficient than the one you’ve got. But with a price ceiling, the fact that some companies can produce energy for 4 cents per kwh has no relevance for your own profitability if you can make energy for 7 cents per kwh, so long as both of you can sell as much as you make for 10 cents/kwh. Any energy source cheaper than the government price is now profitable.
Over time, the government price should come down as we converge on the most efficient alternative energies, eventually meeting the price of carbon with a subsidy of zero. That would be the holy grail.
And once we know how to do it, China and India and Russia will be forced to change, because it will be their energy that is now too expensive.
It’s hard to argue with a faith-based argument. And cap-and-trade sets the target for carbon output, and lets the market sort out the price. And you see environmentalists going on about the ozone hole these days? We fixed that puppy with cap and trade, IIRC.
Again, hard to argue against faith. And it seems awfully selfish of you to put the religion of your tribe (low taxes) ahead of doing something about climate catastrophe, anyway.
Seriously, this is “if we don’t save the world from climate catastrophe in a way that matches up with my other axes to grind that have nothing to do with climate, then screw the world” territory.
Do you realize what a morally repugnant stance this is?
How is this priced? What is the cost of dumping a tonne of carbon into the atmosphere, how is it determined, and does it vary from country to country?
Welllllll, on the other hand. I generally concur that Sam Stone is too much of a low-tax absolutist for my taste, and I roll my eyes at his fulminations against government spending programs, but I think there is a case to be made for at least trying to keep the effects of a carbon tax approximately revenue-neutral.
A significant upward shift in total tax levels is definitely going to inspire some large-scale changes in economic behavior, and it doesn’t sound like a great idea to me to stack those changes on top of the changes that are inevitably going to result from the unprecedented concept of marketizing the atmosphere. Let’s try not to rock the boat more than we have to right at the start, at least.
Yes, if the costs of climate change mean that we do need to significantly raise taxes to cope with it, then we’ll have to do that. But AIUI the purpose of a carbon tax at the present moment would be primarily to discourage greenhouse gas emissions via economic disincentives, not to increase tax revenue per se.
Moreover, if we treat a carbon tax as a partial replacement for income tax rather than as an addition to it, we will be effectively shifting our tax structure to some extent from taxing income to taxing consumption (and waste), a move that is favorably viewed by a number of progressive economists, such as Robert Frank. So we’d keep Sam Stone happy and get our “backdoor socialism” too. 
I agree with you that there is a case for making cap-and-trade (or a carbon tax) revenue neutral or close to it. (I’d personally disagree, citing the need to use some of the revenues to finance the creation of intracity and intercity rail infrastructure that would give people less carbon-expensive ways of getting around, but that’s another debate.)
The reason I find Sam’s stance morally repugnant is that he doesn’t just want to make the case; he says that as far as he’s concerned, it’s his way or no way at all. If they’re not revenue neutral, then let the globe fry.
I don’t believe I’m mischaracterizing his words here. I hope, though, that on seeing how they look through other eyes, he might reconsider his position.
It might help a little if we elected a sensible President and Senate Majority Leader instead of Tweedledum and Tweedledumber like we got now.
Regards,
Shodan
I could look at it the other way around… Why are you trying to play games with the planet and using such an important issue to sneak social policy in the back door? Why can’t you commit to agreeing that we’ll tackle climate change without using it as an excuse to grow the size and scope of government?
I’m the one trying to focus on the planet. You’re the one all incensed because I won’t let you hold the planet hostage for ‘progressive’ political causes.
Financing ways to reduce carbon emissions is ‘playing games with the planet’?
I’m not even going to bother to take that seriously.
Who else is going to build subways or light rail networks?
It is to laugh. We’re not even in the same universe, here.
An interesting take on it.