What are reasonable lifestyle adjustments re: global warming

[Sam_Stone]

@RTFirefly

A cap-and-trade program is industry-agnostic. It just says, “I don’t care what you do, but if you generate carbon, you’ll have to purchase enough carbon permits to cover the externality.”

Have you seen the cap and trade bill? Have you seen how many exemptions are in it? We’re dealing with political reality here, not with some academically pure vision of an enlightened policy.

Yes, carbon taxes can be gamed as well. But it’s harder. It’s a very visible tax, and it won’t be so easy to change it up or down. But cap and trade is a very fiddly, technical system involving all sorts of calculations the public doesn’t understand to set annual carbon caps, and the effect of lower a cap or raising it can dramatically affect the prices of credits. The system is wide open for gaming.

A carbon tax tells you how much it’ll cost you to dump the carbon, but if you can pay the tax, you can dump as much carbon as you like. As time goes along, you have to raise the tax and guess how much that will affect carbon emissions.

Any individual might just buy his or her way out, but we know for certain that adding taxes to carbon will reduce emissions, and we have a pretty good idea of how much they’ll be reduced by.

Cap-and-trade starts with the intended result, X tons of carbon emissions in year 20XX, and lets the market set the price of the permits that will achieve that result.

This is not a feature. Basically, you’re creating ‘peak oil’ in reverse. You’re telling business that this is all the carbon that will ever be available. As the economy grows and demand for carbon inevitably increases, prices for carbon credits could skyrocket on speculation and hoarding. There will be immense pressure on government to raise the caps anyway, and that will likely happen. Which means your cap and trade system is no less predictable than a carbon tax. It just changes the cause of the unpredictabilty to the fickle, feckless nature of today’s body politic. I rather think that’s a bad tradeoff.

Yeah, this sucks, but the suckitude comes from your end of the political spectrum, and we on the left swallowed our manifold objections to this suckitude for the sake of making what progress could be made.

So… you want to turn this into a political fight? Well, good luck with that. You need the buyin of everyone if you’re ever going to be able to make a policy stick that has the effect of costing people in real terms. You aren’t doing this with your buddies on the left, no matter how many politicians you currently have in the Congress. If you don’t have a large percentage of everyone else with you, it ain’t happening. So I suggest you drop the ‘nasty Republicans made us do it’ line of attack.

Besides, we already did this with the ozone hole. What happened?

I don’ think people understand the difference between emissions of things like CFCs and the emission of CO2. One is a pollutant - a byproduct that can be scrubbed or eliminated which still being able to make products cost-effectively.

CO2 is not a pollutant. It is the inevitable byproduct of the conversion of fossil fuels to energy. It’s created in truly gigantic amounts. Even sequestering it looks extremely hard to do.

So you could almost eliminate CFC production without much harm to the economy. Refrigerators and air conditioners went up in price a bit, etc.

With C02, if you need the energy, you’re going to get it. So if you reach a cap on CO2, energy production stops. If you want a growing economy, then either you have to convert to renewable energy fast enough to keep up with economic growth plus enough more to begin to retire the old fossil energy sources. If you can’t, then economic growth stops unless the cap is raised. If you refuse to raise the cap, then as growth in the economy pushes us close to it, havoc will ensue. There will be energy shortages, huge price spikes in carbon credits, etc.

Your way is intrusive, risky, and very liked to be gamed and watered down over time due to its flaws. A straight carbon tax is much easier to apply, and it doesn’t have the effect of causing wild price spikes in energy. It’s simply a cost that is known and absorbed into the price.

We’ve gone through a great deal of volatility with petroleum prices over the past five years. I think we can deal.

So, no problem doubling volatility? That’s awfully glib of you to toss off. We didn’t handle the volatility in energy prices well at all. It caused huge distortions in the economy. It damned near bankrupted California. It caused major swings in the demand for SUVs, which helped bring GM and Chrysler down. It caused over-production of low-energy products, and under-production of high-energy products.

And carbon taxes would have to be raised frequently to reduce carbon output, and the size of those raises would be unpredictable - or ineffective, take your pick. So they’d only be linear between tax hikes.

I didn’t mean carbon tax increases would be linear. What I meant was that the response curve of the market is linear to the price. The response curve of the market as it approaches a hard ceiling will be exponential in terms of the price of energy, until it passes the price of renewables. And if we don’t have enough renwables available, then while we wait for them there will be energy shortages and the economy will get hammered.

Maybe - but your end of the spectrum has turned ‘tax’ into a dirty word. It’ll take a generation to undo that - and we don’t have a generation to spare.

Which is why you need to make it revenue neutral. Then it’s not a tax increase - it’s a restructuring of the tax code. It’s moving my tax from my income to my carbon emissions. People who conserve more than they do now will actually see their taxes go down. People who already have carbon footprints below the median will see their taxes go down immediately.

You can get a tax like that passed. Emphasize that the net effect of the tax is that everyone is starting from the same tax level they already have, but now as they begin to conserve their taxes will decline.

But if you tell everyone you’re going to drop a big tax on them, and use the money to build trains and hire workers to make buildings more efficient, your propsal will be doomed.

Well, take some responsibility here: at least admit that you guys have made carbon taxes politically unfeasible, and admit that, whatever theoretical advantages there are to a carbon tax over a cap-and-trade regime, your team has blocked that road.

No, I’d say government has destroyed the political viability of tax increases because it has repeatedly demonstrated that raising taxes does not fix the problems they were purported to fix, but instead simply grew the size and scope of the government. The government lost the people’s trust. It’s not the Republican’s fault.

Also concede that comparisons between the ideal carbon tax and the cap-and-trade bill that actually passed the House are an absurd comparison. If a carbon tax had not been anathema, and the Dems had gone that way, the resulting product would be every bit as complicated and compromised as the Dems’ cap-and-trade was, since (with probably even fewer GOP votes than the 8 it got, given that it would be a tax), the selling price of every Business Dog Dem’s vote would have been even higher than it was this summer.

Again, you’re simply asserting that either bill would inevitably be equally bad, but all the evidence is that cap and trade is likely to wind up substantially worse, simply by its nature.

Here, you might want to read the Carbon Tax Center’s page on this.

And finally, here’s a quote for you, from Robert Shapiro, who was the head of the climate task force:

@Robert Shapiro

The costs and lessons of the financial crisis may effectively swamp the prospects for cap-and-trade. If cap-and-trade has become a dead policy walking, those who care deeply about climate change will find that a carbon tax system has become the last, reasonable policy standing.

The Democrats are pushing hard for Cap and Trade, because they are politicians and they prefer a system they can micromanage, because it will bring a lot of lobbying money and a lot of campaign donations. But it’s a much inferior system, and the very reason they want it is exactly the reason to not give it to them.

Speaking of going off the rails, that’s an interesting approach: take what I said, and just assume it implies a whole bunch of unrelated stuff.

You used to be better than this.

Look, this is what you need to understand: If you price carbon correctly, then you no longer need to worry yourself with light transit or any of the other schemes to reduce carbon. The market will find its own way to whatever future mix of transportation, goods, and services people want. If light rail can’t be competitive in an environment where all its competitors are being taxed for their carbon, then there’s really no good reason to build it.

[RTFirefly]

@Sam_Stone

Have you seen the cap and trade bill? Have you seen how many exemptions are in it? We’re dealing with political reality here, not with some academically pure vision of an enlightened policy.

Yes, carbon taxes can be gamed as well. But it’s harder. It’s a very visible tax, and it won’t be so easy to change it up or down.
[/quotee]
That, sir, is strictly YHO. There’s really no reason to believe that one is more exempt than the other from political fiddling. Other than that cap-and-trade has already been through the political sausage factory, and a carbon tax hasn’t, so it’s easier to do a bogus comparison between a pristine carbon tax and the cap-and-trade bill that the House passed a few months back.

Hell, I’d agree that the carbon tax comes off better in that comparison. But it is a useless comparison.

Also: think you’d have better luck finding 218 votes in the House for a carbon tax? Forget it. We’re in a world where the political pressures are such that Congress isn’t going to raise gas taxes by a dime, even though that’s small compared to monthly fluctuations in gas prices.

Any individual might just buy his or her way out, but we know for certain that adding taxes to carbon will reduce emissions, and we have a pretty good idea of how much they’ll be reduced by.

True, but the costs of being wrong in terms of underestimating the effect of a carbon tax are substantial.

This is not a feature. Basically, you’re creating ‘peak oil’ in reverse. You’re telling business that this is all the carbon that will ever be available.

Well, YEAH. That’s the POINT. That’s what’s REAL. We’re giving business true information here: we can afford to dump no more than this amount of carbon into the atmosphere.

It seems your argument for a tax is that it would make that fact less visible. But it’s the bedrock fact behind the necessity of one or the other. I don’t see the advantage of pretending to business that they can still generate as much carbon as they like, if they really can’t.

As the economy grows and demand for carbon inevitably increases, prices for carbon credits could skyrocket on speculation and hoarding.

My understanding has always been that a carbon permit would be for a particular year, or similar time period. If not, make it so, and there goes the hoarding/speculation problem.

There will be immense pressure on government to raise the caps anyway, and that will likely happen. Which means your cap and trade system is no less predictable than a carbon tax. It just changes the cause of the unpredictabilty to the fickle, feckless nature of today’s body politic. I rather think that’s a bad tradeoff.

There would be immense pressure on government to not raise a carbon tax, too. Potayto, potahto.
[uote]So… you want to turn this into a political fight? Well, good luck with that. You need the buyin of everyone if you’re ever going to be able to make a policy stick that has the effect of costing people in real terms. You aren’t doing this with your buddies on the left, no matter how many politicians you currently have in the Congress. If you don’t have a large percentage of everyone else with you, it ain’t happening. So I suggest you drop the ‘nasty Republicans made us do it’ line of attack.

I’m sorry, but I wasn’t aware that I was directly addressing the American body politic here. I was under the impression that I was debating a fellow from Canada who goes under the handle of Sam Stone, who is of a conservative/libertarian bent, and has overwhelmingly aligned with the Republican side in the debates over American politics that he enjoys participating in.

Anyway, now that the kids are to bed, let’s be honest: the GOP has done their level best, over the past three decades, to make taxes a dirty word. And it’s been a largely successful effort, which can’t be unrolled overnight. Anything that can be done by either tax hike or some equivalent means that’s not technically a tax hike will be done in the latter way, just because it’s one less boulder to roll uphill.

I don’ think people understand the difference between emissions of things like CFCs and the emission of CO2. One is a pollutant - a byproduct that can be scrubbed or eliminated which still being able to make products cost-effectively.

Can’t see why that won’t be true in the case of carbon. Sure, there may be some products that have such a high carbon cost that they’ll be luxury goods or will lose out in the marketplace. But the same thing goes - the market will reward cost-effectiveness wrt carbon and penalize its opposite.

CO2 is not a pollutant. It is the inevitable byproduct of the conversion of fossil fuels to energy. It’s created in truly gigantic amounts. Even sequestering it looks extremely hard to do.

I just don’t see that these distinctions are a difference with respect to the functioning of a cap-and-trade market. At any rate, it’s the best example we have: we really did this, and it worked pretty well.

With C02, if you need the energy, you’re going to get it. So if you reach a cap on CO2, energy production stops. If you want a growing economy, then either you have to convert to renewable energy fast enough to keep up with economic growth plus enough more to begin to retire the old fossil energy sources. If you can’t, then economic growth stops unless the cap is raised. If you refuse to raise the cap, then as growth in the economy pushes us close to it, havoc will ensue. There will be energy shortages, huge price spikes in carbon credits, etc.

I’m missing the part about producing goods and services in a more energy-efficient manner. Right now, we do things in massively inefficient ways, simply because we can afford to. Or in some cases, because the infrastructure isn’t there to do things more efficiently.

So, no problem doubling volatility? That’s awfully glib of you to toss off.

Countervailing volatilities. If carbon prices spike, petroleum prices drop. And vice versa.

We didn’t handle the volatility in energy prices well at all. It caused huge distortions in the economy. It damned near bankrupted California.

Government by corporate interest did that, thanks. Again, that’s what the GOP and Business Dogs try to push on us. It was fundamentally a political result.

It caused major swings in the demand for SUVs, which helped bring GM and Chrysler down.

It was certainly one factor, but the shortsightedness of GM and Chrysler in believing that they could ride a cheap-oil gravy train forever was also part of it. (Like it or not, the free market has to punish stupid management.) And even then, if we’d had single-payer UHC here, they probably would have had the breathing room to survive anyway: employer-based health care puts U.S.-manufactured goods at a consistent competitive disadvantage.

I didn’t mean carbon tax increases would be linear. What I meant was that the response curve of the market is linear to the price. The response curve of the market as it approaches a hard ceiling will be exponential in terms of the price of energy, until it passes the price of renewables. And if we don’t have enough renwables available, then while we wait for them there will be energy shortages and the economy will get hammered.

Again, you’re assuming that there are no energy efficiencies to be realized in our economy. I’d contend that such efficiencies are available, and are pretty massive.

Besides, the actual cap-and-trade bill does little before 2020, which gives everybody plenty of lead time to learn to play in the shallow end of a carbon-scarce economy before swimming for real.

Which is why you need to make it revenue neutral. Then it’s not a tax increase - it’s a restructuring of the tax code. It’s moving my tax from my income to my carbon emissions. People who conserve more than they do now will actually see their taxes go down. People who already have carbon footprints below the median will see their taxes go down immediately.

You can get a tax like that passed.

Maybe you can, but just the fact that it’s a tax makes the selling job harder. That’s the world of your design; I’m just telling you what color you painted the sky.

But if you tell everyone you’re going to drop a big tax on them, and use the money to build trains and hire workers to make buildings more efficient, your propsal will be doomed.

But you really need the trains. Seriously, there are massive inefficiencies that can absorb the carbon reductions. You know those ads where they tell you that railways can move a ton of goods 400 miles on the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline? It’s true: the friction coefficient of steel wheels on steel rails is a wonderfully low thing, which makes this possible. And yet, all over this country, we have freight being transported long distances by 18-wheelers, because we’ve got a freight rail network that needs some serious improvement, even for today’s needs.

And that’s completely aside from passenger rail. Want to save the carbon cost of building more cars? Make it more possible for people to have fewer cars! It should be a no-brainer.

No, I’d say government has destroyed the political viability of tax increases because it has repeatedly demonstrated that raising taxes does not fix the problems they were purported to fix, but instead simply grew the size and scope of the government. The government lost the people’s trust. It’s not the Republican’s fault.

Oh, fuck that shit. Tell me how the government grew during Reagan/Bush, then during Clinton, then during GWBush. We balanced the freakin’ budget during Clinton, and Bush undid all that. Everybody knows who’s to blame.

[Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party]

Can somebody who is proposing to charge businesses (through either taxes or cap-and-trade or some other mechanism) that release carbon into the atmosphere explain how a) a fair price for a tonne of carbon released will be obtained and b) how this reasonably has a chance of decreasing carbon emissions by the necessary 70% (re: Kimstu’s earlier cite).

[Chief_Pedant]

@Kimstu

…
All we need is to put into place appropriate market mechanisms to internalize the costs of greenhouse-gas emissions overall. Then if you personally decide you want to pay the costs of indulging in carbon-intensive activities, you’re free to go on doing so without anybody pestering you about the moral purity of your choices.

In fact, since you are self-confessedly choosing to remain deliberately ignorant of almost all the facts about AGW, it would probably be best for all concerned if you just stopped bothering your pretty head about it altogether. If you’re deliberately refusing to put yourself in a position where you can make informed choices, you might as well just leave the subject alone and let more responsible people handle the policy issues.

Got it.

I’m sure you and your fellow responsible Believers will get right on it figuring out how to create policy that mitigates carbon production–a problem that is nearly exclusively a consequence of consumption (read “the rich” here) while at the same time: 1) Refusing to extend the concept of personal responsibility even to a single specific recommendation for a reasonable lifestyle adjustment and 2)Ignoring the most basic drive 99% of humans have: To live like the rich.

Unfortunately it is in the details of that policy execution where the devil has chosen to hide, and he plans to continue to live large (read, “lotsa carbon”). Consider the work done by Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative around the idea of a “Personal Carbon Footprint.” Here are a few well-meaning Believers who have worked for quite a bit trying to figure out Actual Policy. Among their most recent notions is that we should assign carbon production responsibility according to individual emitters rather than, say, the world as a whole (I am paraphrasing here because you know this work better than I).

“In our interpretation of fairness, individuals who emit similar amounts of CO2, regardless of where they live, are expected to contribute to fossil-fuel CO2 emission reductions in similar ways.” http://cmi.princeton.edu/research/pdfs/one_billion_emitters.pdf

Fantastic! I say: a personal carbon footprint! Alas; it turns out there is no personal responsibility or behaviour recommendation for the individual high emitters. Essentially, (I think, if I interpret you correctly) they can buy their way out. And they will (following–dare I say it–Mr Gore’s archetype). And while they are buying their way out, the poor will be getting rich as fast as they can, using those riches to consume in utter disregard of the speed at which their personal carbon footprint is growing. If I live in Mumbai, I’m getting my Tata Nano asap in clear conscience because my personal carbon footprint is still well below the Pedant’s.

" The scheme does not specify how any nation meets its responsibilities (to control individual high emitters)."

The sincere but pollyannish details of this approach are the devil’s delight.

The roadblock to success for the AGW realist movement is not skeptical ignoramuses like me smirking at Mr Gore. It’s the utter moral bankruptcy of pretending that we can effect change at a global level without requiring (morally; not legislatively) that we, individually, **be **the change we want to see in the world. I am reminded of Jesus’s words to the rich guy when he wanted to know what else he needed to do: “Sell all your stuff and give it to the poor.” Didn’t happen then and ain’t gonna happen now.

Right now the movement seems to be headed toward a consensus that we buy the change we want to see in the world. This lets the Gore-iest sinners off the hook, because what we’re gonna buy is that Tato Nano and that G5. We all want to be able to define for ourselves what Rich is, and human nature looks at the next guy over and decides we aren’t rich yet, so our current behaviour is just fine.

[RTFirefly]

@Kimstu

In fact, since you are self-confessedly choosing to remain deliberately ignorant of almost all the facts about AGW, it would probably be best for all concerned if you just stopped bothering your pretty head about it altogether. If you’re deliberately refusing to put yourself in a position where you can make informed choices, you might as well just leave the subject alone and let more responsible people handle the policy issues.

:applause:

[RTFirefly]

@Chief_Pedant

The roadblock to success for the AGW realist movement is not skeptical ignoramuses like me smirking at Mr Gore. It’s the utter moral bankruptcy of pretending that we can effect change at a global level without requiring (morally; not legislatively) that we, individually, **be **the change we want to see in the world.

Analogy time.

We’re in a recession, and the fundamental problem, now that we’re here (this isn’t about how we got here, but how we get back out), is that nobody wants to spend. We as a nation, and as a world, can produce a lot more goods and services, and employ a lot more people as a result, than we’re doing. But until people start buying stuff, nobody’s going to put people back to work producing those goods and services, and we stay where we are.

So per your example, everyone who wants to see us get out of the recession has a moral duty to spend more, whether you want to or not, just the way all of us AGW-concerned folks have a duty to make personal sacrifices to reduce global warming, according to your lights.

So: do you agree that everyone who wants to see the U.S. economy recover has a duty to spend on more than they really want to buy, if they can afford to do so?

And if you disagree with that, how do you defend your stance on the necessity of personal sacrifice by those of us concerned with AGW?

[RTFirefly]

@Sam_Stone

Again, you’re simply asserting that either bill would inevitably be equally bad, but all the evidence is that cap and trade is likely to wind up substantially worse, simply by its nature.

Here, you might want to read the Carbon Tax Center’s page on this.

No, if there’s a good argument there, or some important facts not already in this discussion, you quote them.

I’m many years done with “you go to this link and read this, figure out what part of it supports my argument, make your counterargument, and then I’ll tell you I meant some other part of the linked article.” Fuck that shit.

And finally, here’s a quote for you, from Robert Shapiro, who was the head of the climate task force:

*Who?

What* climate task force? ‘the’ climate task force? Which one was ‘the’ climate task force?

Not to mention, a pretty meaningless quote.

The Democrats are pushing hard for Cap and Trade, because they are politicians and they prefer a system they can micromanage, because it will bring a lot of lobbying money and a lot of campaign donations.

Well, why don’t we both mind-read and massively generalize at the same time.

Look, this is what you need to understand: If you price carbon correctly, then you no longer need to worry yourself with light transit or any of the other schemes to reduce carbon. The market will find its own way to whatever future mix of transportation, goods, and services people want. If light rail can’t be competitive in an environment where all its competitors are being taxed for their carbon, then there’s really no good reason to build it.

Its ‘competitors’ are highways built by American tax dollars. It’s hard for the market to compete with what the government is providing at a marginal cost of zero, because the market can’t undercut free. Infrastructure doesn’t just arise like magic from the invisible hand of Adam Smith.

[Kimstu]

@Capt. Ridley

Can somebody who is proposing to charge businesses (through either taxes or cap-and-trade or some other mechanism) that release carbon into the atmosphere explain how a) a fair price for a tonne of carbon released will be obtained and b) how this reasonably has a chance of decreasing carbon emissions by the necessary 70% (re: Kimstu’s earlier cite).

Here’s what several experts say about choosing between tax and cap-and-trade:

Any law that places a price on carbon must achieve two basic and interrelated goals: discouraging — with increasingly painful economic consequences — the use of oil, coal, and natural gas, and encouraging the development of renewable sources of energy. Two paths to this end have been proposed. The first is a cap-and-trade system, which would place progressively stricter limits on fossil fuel use; require power plants, industries, and other major sources of greenhouse gases, to purchase permits to discharge carbon dioxide; and establish a market in those permits. The second is an outright tax on fossil fuels. Proponents of both methods say the economic hardship created by higher energy prices could be offset by rebates to taxpayers. […]

Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resource Defense Council:
A carbon cap is a more effective approach to solving global warming than a tax. First and most importantly, it sets a clear goal for emissions reductions. […]

Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University:
[…] A straightforward carbon tax has vast advantages. It can be levied upstream at a few dozen places — at the wellhead, the mine face, and the liquid natural gas depot — rather than at thousands or tens of thousands of businesses. A carbon tax covers the entire economy, including automobiles, household use, and other units impossible to reach in cap-and-trade. […]

Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund:
[…] From an environmental point of view, the advantage of an emissions cap over a carbon tax is clear: A cap puts a legal limit on pollution. A tax does not. […]

Roger A. Pielke Jr., professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado:
Cap-and-trade is doomed to failure. […]
Putting a price on carbon, however, makes good sense. A straight carbon tax — at whatever level would be politically acceptable — is a far better place to start than with a fully gamed cap-and-trade system. […]

Robert N. Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at Harvard University and the Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program:
While there are tradeoffs between the two principal market-based instruments targeting CO2 emissions — cap-and-trade and carbon taxes — the best and most likely approach for the short- to medium-term in the U. S. is a well-designed cap-and-trade system.

There are differences between taxes and cap-and-trade that need to be recognized. First, environmental effectiveness: A tax does not guarantee achievement of an emissions target, but it provides greater certainty regarding costs. On the other hand, political and economic forces strongly point to less severe targets if carbon taxes are used, rather than cap-and-trade — this is not an acceptable tradeoff, and this is why environmental NGOs are opposed to the carbon-tax approach. […]

Charles Komanoff, co-director of the Carbon Tax Center:
[…] Only a carbon tax can quickly drive the across-the-board transition from fossil fuels to renewable and efficient energy. […]

Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change:
An economy-wide greenhouse gas cap-and-trade system sets a clear limit on greenhouse gas emissions and minimizes the costs of achieving this target. […]

Baruch Fischhoff, Howard Heinz University Professor of Social and Decision Sciences and Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University:
I favor a well-designed, comprehensive national energy policy, comprised of simple components, such a revenue-neutral energy tax. […]

Next up: how each of these competing strategies would go about assigning a price to a tonne of carbon emissions.

[RTFirefly]

I thought maybe carbon tax v. cap-and-trade deservedits own thread.

[ralph124c]

1. Stop conmen/ex-politicians (e.g.) Al Gore from consuming as much energy as an average town-limit their dwelling size to 5000 sq. feet (no more heated indoor basketbal courts
2. Stop school busing-Boston spend >$77 million/year, hauling kids arund (to achieve"racial balance")
3. Have police turn offtheir engines when siting around at details
4. Lower shopping mall temperatures to 60F (instead of the 75F + temps normally used)
5. Limit politicians trips to ridiculous “Global Warming” conferences (what’s the carbon footprint of the Copenhagen Conference?

[Chief_Pedant]

@RTFirefly

Analogy time.

We’re in a recession, and the fundamental problem, now that we’re here (this isn’t about how we got here, but how we get back out), is that nobody wants to spend. We as a nation, and as a world, can produce a lot more goods and services, and employ a lot more people as a result, than we’re doing. But until people start buying stuff, nobody’s going to put people back to work producing those goods and services, and we stay where we are.

So per your example, everyone who wants to see us get out of the recession has a moral duty to spend more, whether you want to or not, just the way all of us AGW-concerned folks have a duty to make personal sacrifices to reduce global warming, according to your lights.

So: do you agree that everyone who wants to see the U.S. economy recover has a duty to spend on more than they really want to buy, if they can afford to do so?

And if you disagree with that, how do you defend your stance on the necessity of personal sacrifice by those of us concerned with AGW?

I do not agree with your analysis of the economic crisis, but don’t wish to sidetrack the thread debating it.

I don’t think those of you concerned with AGW will personally sacrifice, but what I am really trying to get any AGW realist to do is simply to suggest what they think individuals have a duty to do if they accept AGW is a real crisis. It is possible that they don’t think there is any duty at all; that seems to be the consensus here. While it may be that they actually think this, I think the more likely explanation is that they are worried that should such duty actually be specified, their major spokespersons and supporters would be exposed as frauds or hypocrites.

I think it is a morally bankrupt position to recommend for others what you do not personally do.

In your economic parallel, it would be morally bankrupt to suggest others spend what they cannot afford while you yourself spend conservatively, for example.

[clairobscur]

@Rune

Why should pricing be used as a tool to limit carbon emissions? That just means richer people get to pollute the same, while only poorer people will have to alter their lifestyles.

Because that’s the way everything works?

Dumping carbon in the atmosphere is an externality. It has a cost, but the person doing the dumping is currently shielded from this cost. Like with all externalities, the ideal would be to have this person paying the entire cost of, for instance driving a car.

So, he should pay for the car, gas, etc…but also noise, pollution, extra carbon in the atmosphere, temperature rise, submersion of island countries, mass extinction, making the Earth Venus-like, and of course for the general annoyance of seeing someone driving around in a SUV.

If he’s too poor to pay for the whole cost, then he can’t afford a SUV/ a plane ticket.

The idea is just to have people pay the actual cost of what they do or buy. If you’re too poor to afford diamonds, then you can’t wear a diamond necklace. If you’re too poor to afford dumping carbon in the atmosphere, then you can’t dump carbon in the atmosphere.

[Kimstu]

@Chief Pedant

I don’t think those of you concerned with AGW will personally sacrifice

Well, I reminded you just a few posts ago of specific sacrifices that I voluntarily choose to make to reduce my own carbon footprint, and you appeared to take me at my word:

@Chief Pedant

I am guessing that your personal choices reflect a personal conviction that you should do what you can–that you should do your part.

I think you need to make up your mind here. Do you maintain that I’m not personally sacrificing out of a personal conviction that I should do what I can, or do you accept that I am? You aren’t doing your argument any favors by flopping from one side to the other on this issue, apparently at random.

@Chief Pedant

but what I am really trying to get any AGW realist to do is simply to suggest what they think individuals have a duty to do if they accept AGW is a real crisis.

It should be stunningly obvious by now that AGW realists think that individuals who accept that AGW is a real crisis have a duty to attempt to significantly reduce global carbon emissions.

However, we don’t translate that general duty into a required set of personal emissions-reducing behaviors that must be regarded as a binding obligation upon every right-thinking individual. Because the question of exactly what emissions-reducing behaviors and how much of them and by whom would constitute an optimal (or even a barely adequate) solution to AGW is still wicked complicated and riddled with uncertainties. Only a fool would attempt at this point to lay out any hard-and-fast requirements for any specific actions that every individual must undertake if they regard AGW seriously.

I have absolutely no idea why this eminently rational, common-sense position gets on your tits so much, but evidently it does.

@Chief Pedant

[…] I think the more likely explanation is that they are worried that should such duty actually be specified, their major spokespersons and supporters would be exposed as frauds or hypocrites.

Gosh, this really is all about Al Gore for you, isn’t it? For some reason, you just can’t stand that he has a prominent position in the environmental movement and a Nobel Peace Prize and all like that there, and all the while he has a big house!! and flies first class!!!1!! and does lots of other emissions-intensive things!!! :mad: :mad: :mad: You’re apparently very invested in having him declared an Officially Bad Lifestyle Example for the Great Cause, so that his erstwhile adorers will turn on him and rend him with sustainably manufactured pitchforks.

News flash, Chief: you evidently care a lot more about Al Gore’s position as a “major spokesperson” for the environmental movement than almost anybody who’s actually in the environmental movement does. We don’t judge the merits of our views on climate science and policy based on the size of Gore’s personal carbon footprint. Anybody who would be small-minded or ill-informed enough to think that Gore’s personal lifestyle somehow decides the validity of fundamental scientific and policy positions on climate science is not somebody whose opinion we need to take seriously.

@Chief Pedant

I think it is a morally bankrupt position to recommend for others what you do not personally do.

But what you’ve been bitching and moaning about is the exact opposite of that principle: namely, you’re pissed off because we won’t make recommendations for others, even about things that we do personally do.

In short, you are getting your blood pressure all elevated over the fact that you just can’t manage to bully us into issuing any absolutist decree along the lines that Al Gore should not fly first class, so that you can then pounce victoriously on his deviancy and “expose” him as a “fraud and hypocrite”, in order to triumphantly justify yourself in ignoring his views about AGW.

Dude, this is all so unnecessary. You’re allowed to ignore Al Gore right now, and the whole sustainability movement to boot, if it matters so much to you. Seriously, we honestly don’t care what you think about Al Gore, or about atmospheric CO2 concentrations, or about the merits of carbon taxes versus cap-and-trade.

You have openly declared your adherence to a superficial perspective in which you base your judgements on the PR image presented by environmental celebrities, rather than upon serious science and policy issues, which you explicitly intend to remain ignorant of. Consequently, you are not someone whose opinion should matter to AGW realists.

So if you want to believe that we’re frauds or hypocrites or morally bankrupt, knock yourself out; we don’t care. Frankly, we have much more important things to worry about.

[Chief_Pedant]

Kimstu, While I admire your passion, your assumption that I’m annoyed in any way is unfounded.

I’m a fairly apolitical soul and basically interested in what makes people tick, both as a hobby and a practical way to help me place bets for investments. I’m all OK with AGW realists rolling up their very very serious sleeves and making very very Serious Policy Decisions to help save the world. It really doesn’t annoy me in the least. Neither do I feel any particular compunction about pointing out their glaring inconsistencies.

I believe you personally probably represent an example of the True Believer who translates personal belief into Lifestyle. That’s lovely. You are, in my opinion, a minority and I maintain you will remain a minority. Think Nun.

Perhaps where we disagree the most is this statement of yours:
by Kimstu: “However, we don’t translate that general duty into a required set of personal emissions-reducing behaviors that must be regarded as a binding obligation upon every right-thinking individual. Because the question of exactly what emissions-reducing behaviors and how much of them and by whom would constitute an optimal (or even a barely adequate) solution to AGW is still wicked complicated and riddled with uncertainties. Only a fool would attempt at this point to lay out any hard-and-fast requirements for any specific actions that every individual must undertake if they regard AGW seriously.”

While this may appear on the surface to be quite reasonable, in practice it permits any behaviour at all under the argument that no hard-and-fast requirements can be undertaken. And there I must disagree strongly. There are, in fact reasonable lifestyle adjustments re: global warming. They are simply unpalatable to the vast majority of the planet who will, always, put their own needs and wants–on average–above the greatest good for the world.

In the AGW construct, the problem is quite simple: consumption. The near-term solution is equally simple: less consumption (and to actually solve it, draconian reduction in consumption). The only thing that makes it “wicked complicated” is that we, collectively, have absolutely no intention of consuming less, future-of-the-world be damned. So now we have a problem: How do we solve AGW without any lifestyle adjustments?

I am betting that there will be no draconian reduction in consumption. I am actually betting there will not even be any reasonable lifestyle adjustments. I am observing–arguing–that AGW realists are unwilling to consider them because their spokespersons would be rendered impotent. This is not a crusade against Mr Gore nor a crusade against AGW. It’s just an observation. I am an equal opportunity ridiculer; I can assure you of that.

My observation is that AGW realists behave like believers in any Great Cause, and the propensity of them to be offended and distressed when either their Cause or their Leaders are criticized is indistinguishable from anyone whose Religion is attacked. I have looked over your posts here and find them increasingly inflammatory and shrill toward me. While I admire the passion underlying that, to be considered a Realist it seems to me you need more than rhetorical exaggerations of my positions. You need to be able to take a stand on what reasonable lifestyle adjustments we should be doing if, in fact, we care about the world.

Unfortunately what you have here is a Great Cause with no moral high ground. In your case that’s unfortunate because you already are adjusting your own behaviour and without any moral authority you are unable to call for others to do the same. For AGW realists to refuse any recommendations is like a morbidly obese population whose problem is caused by gluttony calling for a Solution for Obesity without being willing to recommend any dietary restraint at all.

In my opinion such a position bodes poorly for both coherent policy creation and practical policy execution.

[Kimstu]

@Chief Pedant

I am betting that there will be no draconian reduction in consumption. I am actually betting there will not even be any reasonable lifestyle adjustments.

Once again, I don’t have a problem at all with your choosing to believe this. And indeed, it may very well turn out that your bet is right and that human beings as a whole won’t make the changes necessary to mitigate anthropogenic impacts. If so, too bad, but pretending that we’re the boss of everybody won’t solve that problem.

What mystifies me is why you keep insisting that AGW realists should respond to this unavoidable uncertainty by instituting a foolish, irrational and draconian policy of mandating inefficient specific prescriptions for universal behavior under the guise of claiming a “moral high ground”. We don’t need to assert a moral high ground, and we don’t need to recruit Believers in a Cause or impose upon them a uniform set of vows governing their behavior. You’re the one projecting on us all this religious-crusade fantasy.

@Chief Pedant

While this may appear on the surface to be quite reasonable, in practice it permits any behaviour at all under the argument that no hard-and-fast requirements can be undertaken. […]

You need to be able to take a stand on what reasonable lifestyle adjustments we should be doing if, in fact, we care about the world.

Unfortunately what you have here is a Great Cause with no moral high ground.

You say that like it’s a bad thing, and here’s where we completely part company: here, in fact, is where your position seems to me fairly nutty. Yes indeed, I do maintain that any behavior at all should be permitted, to those who are willing to pay for it. As long as we internally capture the costs of our anthropogenic impacts, we will have sufficient incentives for necessary lifestyle adjustments without all your early-Soviet-type melodrama about “taking a stand” and seizing “moral high ground” for our “Great Cause”.

@Chief Pedant

This is not a crusade against Mr Gore nor a crusade against AGW.

Your claims on this score aren’t very convincing, I’m afraid. Al Gore in particular seems to be a real King Charles’ head for you, and you cannot resist continually dwelling on how he would be “rendered impotent” if you could only persuade his “supporters” to take a stand on his “hypocrisy”. :dubious: You keep dragging in this “moral high ground” question, it seems, precisely because you want Gore discredited as immoral.

So fine, call him immoral all you want to. It’s no skin off my nose. But I’m not interested in being conscripted into your fantasy of moral denunciation when I think it’s fundamentally irrelevant to the serious issues of AGW.

[RTFirefly]

@Chief_Pedant

I think it is a morally bankrupt position to recommend for others what you do not personally do.

In your economic parallel, it would be morally bankrupt to suggest others spend what they cannot afford while you yourself spend conservatively, for example.

Well, there’s no way I can ‘personally do’ the choice of living under a legal regimen where carbon emissions are given a cost, by tax or cap-and-trade. So I guess what you’re saying is that it’s morally bankrupt that I recommend that all of us, together, live under such a system, because there’s no way for me to do so as an individual.

How bizarre.

I don’t think those of you concerned with AGW will personally sacrifice

Well, we will sacrifice to the extent that everyone else does, if carbon emissions are costed.

But I don’t want to have to go around through my world, figuring out how to compare the carbon cost of one set of choices v. another, all day, every day. Nor do I want anyone else to have to do those calculations, to decide which ‘sacrifices’ are the important ones to make. *I want the freakin’ **market *to do it for me, and present me with a number at the end, preceded by a $ sign. Just the way, when I’m comparing which microwave oven to buy, I don’t have to ask how many hours of labor went into it, and what different materials it’s constructed of, and how much per ounce each of them is worth - I look at the price tag, and there it all is, wrapped up into a single number.

It is possible that they don’t think there is any duty at all; that seems to be the consensus here.

The consensus here is that we feel there’s the duty to pay the market cost of carbon emissions, once mechanisms are instituted that cost those emissions and pass them through to the beneficiaries.

But it’s damned hard to have a good idea of what those costs are, until there’s a market mechanism in place to include it in the costs of our everyday purchases of goods and services.

While it may be that they actually think this, I think the more likely explanation is that they are worried that should such duty actually be specified, their major spokespersons and supporters would be exposed as frauds or hypocrites.

What Kimstu said.

[kanicbird]

@Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party

Basically, if you believe that global warming, and excessive pollution, is a great social ill, what steps should be taken to prevent it? How many restrictions on day-to-day life can be instituted, before we collectively say “that’s enough”?

(I ask this as a firm believer in AGW, not a denier.)

My own take on it is any attempt to try to stop GW overall will hurt us. IMHO humanity is the fetal child of mother earth and Father God, as such we are really powerless to clean up our waste, any attempt will only make us worse and stunt our development and waste resources provided to us.

The poor can not afford it, along with the lower middle class. The rich can only do so at the expense of the poor (IMHO), and there is much guilt laid on people, a burden that many can not bare.

[RTFirefly]

@kanicbird

My own take on it is any attempt to try to stop GW overall will hurt us. IMHO humanity is the fetal child of mother earth and Father God, as such we are really powerless to clean up our waste, any attempt will only make us worse and stunt our development and waste resources provided to us.

The poor can not afford it, along with the lower middle class. The rich can only do so at the expense of the poor (IMHO), and there is much guilt laid on people, a burden that many can not bare.

I assume you’re saying the poor cannot afford the solutions to global warming. Actually, the evidence is that the world’s poor will be the ones hardest hit by global warming itself, as equatorial regions in Africa and Asia go from merely arid to desert.

[Chief_Pedant]

@Kimstu

Al Gore in particular seems to be a real King Charles’ head for you, and you cannot resist continually dwelling on how he would be “rendered impotent” if you could only persuade his “supporters” to take a stand on his “hypocrisy”. :dubious: You keep dragging in this “moral high ground” question, it seems, precisely because you want Gore discredited as immoral.

So fine, call him immoral all you want to. It’s no skin off my nose. But I’m not interested in being conscripted into your fantasy of moral denunciation when I think it’s fundamentally irrelevant to the serious issues of AGW.

I’ll let this thread go for now, but one final comment here:

It’s true I am about as impressed with Mr Gore as a spokesperson as I would be with a wife-beater advocating shelters for women.

But I’m not interested in getting you to dis him; I’m interested in getting you to suggest reasonable lifestyle changes re: AGW. And you are in a pickle because you cannot do so without discrediting the Great Cause promoters and leaders. Like the nun looking the other way at the priest’s private indiscretions, you want to make sure you don’t hurt the Greater Cause.

I’m not after Mr Gore’s head, though. I do admit to being after his lifestyle.

As are most of us. We’d all like to be a little richer and consume a little more (except for you). The already-rich, me in the middle, and the Tanzanians. All of us. And in that regard, Mr Gore should be a sobering archetype for those who want some kind of change. There is no chance any broad changes will be effected by any public policy means that will be able to effect real change in time to thwart the current AGW contributors plus the few billion in the developing world plus the few billion progeny coming on line (all of that growth in the developing world) from from cooking the planet–assuming the AGW construct is correct.

So you can be as serious as you want about the serious issues of AGW. But no one–no one–is going to take you seriously until you (you, the movement) are willing to say, “We must make these lifestyle changes and we must make them now.” Cap and trade; carbon credits; blah blah blah might redistribute income but it is not going to redistribute our inclination to get rich and live richer, AGW consequence be damned. And in that regard, Mr Gore does, in fact, create a mockery of Being Serious.

[Kimstu]

@kanicbird

My own take on it is any attempt to try to stop GW overall will hurt us. IMHO humanity is the fetal child of mother earth and Father God, as such we are really powerless to clean up our waste, any attempt will only make us worse and stunt our development and waste resources provided to us.

Oooh, another gorgeous example of conservative eco-mysticism for my collection!

@Kimstu in linked thread

I collect examples of “conservative eco-mysticism”, and this sounds like a prime specimen. You can easily find examples of nutty enviros on the left making mystical arguments about some sort of transcendental concept of the environment (“Nature”, “Gaia”, the “biosphere”, whatever), irrespective of whether there’s any scientific data to support them. But what many people don’t realize is that lots of people on the right, who often consider themselves more “rational” or “hard-headed” or “scientific”, make the same kind of air-headed hand-waving assertions—just in the opposite direction, as far as policy goes.

This one’s a classic example of what I call the “Puny Humans” subspecies of such arguments. “We human beings are much too weak and trivial to be able to alter God’s Creation in any significant way, and it’s merely arrogant to suggest that we could!” (Implication: we can go on polluting as much as we want however we want, and there won’t be any consequences worth worrying about. Gee, how convenient.) […]

[T]he “Puny Humans” argument has a point if we’re talking about anthropogenic effects on the eventual fate of the universe, or even the eventual fate of the planet. Not likely that there’ll ever be anything Homo sapiens can do that would have a noticeable effect on that scale.

If we’re talking about anthropogenic effects on the environment insofar as it affects us, though, the “Puny Humans” argument is total bullshit.