Leaper, looks to me like your OP has been pretty categorically answered. If this thread is in any way representative of the spectrum of opinions on the topic, clearly a majority of the self-professed “conservatives” make conscious decisions to support public policy that either ignores or is explicitly antithetical to the preservation of the Earth’s biosphere. From the posts thus far, I gather their reasoning for such is founded either on: a) an intellectually limited or wilfully skewed understanding of the scientific facts; b) an inability to reconcile the acquisitive goals of their elitist lifestyle with the tough, possibly economically damaging decisions necessary to preserve the biosphere; or c) a human-centric worldview lacking in the fundamental understanding of inter-species and resource dependency.
But look on the bright side - we’re due for either a comet from the Oort cloud or a reversal of the magnetosphere any day now, if we don’t manufacture ourselves into oblivion first. Homo sapiens will get wiped out and after a few million years, things will be back to normal. Sadly, neither you nor I will be around to tell Dubya “I told you so!”.
I’d say that a few do…not most. What thoughtful environmentalists worry about is two things:
(1) For pollutants that matter on the local level, there are concerns that cap-and-trade approaches may result in pollution remaining high in certain regions. This could probably be remedied, if necessary, by doing it on a regional rather than national level.
(2) The big question is what the cap ought to be. This is really the big objection to Bush’s “Clear Skies” plan. In order to make it look like it would lower pollutant levels faster than business-as-usual under the Clean Air Act, the Administration found it necessary to radically increase the amounts estimated under the business-as-usual scenarios from estimates they had given to the Edison Electric Institute a few months prior to releasing the policy. [That policy also contained a “straw man” cap-and-trade proposal with considerably lower caps, which gives us some indication what what levels EPA was aiming for before the White House got their hands on it.]
Conservatives tend to mischaracterize this as opposing pollution credits…and I must admit that some in the environmentalist movement have played into their hands by characterizing Bush’s “Clear Skies” program as paying polluters not to pollute, or some such thing. That is unfortunate because it attacks a bad policy for the wrong reason.
By the way, it is worth noting that the McCain-Lieberman proposal on limiting greenhouse gas emissions is a cap-and-trade proposal. I think most of the support for this bill is from the “environmentalists” in Congress.
Sam, the problem with this view here is that it makes it sound like the Clinton Administration had adopted a policy in some sort of vacuum and then Bush came along and said, “We need to take a careful look at the evidence, etc., etc.” The fact of the matter is that the Clinton Administration adopted the policy after considerable study and input including a report by the National Academy of Sciences. Thus, when the Administration put the implementation on hold, the justifiable concern was not that they were doing so because they really were planning more scientific study (as far as I know, they weren’t) but rather because it was felt that they were going to change the decision because of their different political philosophy. Of course, it is their right to do this but it is also the right of those in favor of this policy to raise a stink about it.
Actually, as I understand it, they are. I don’t mean in money spent by the consumer, I mean in natural resources used by the whole system (which is the real measure on a social level). Given sufficient initial investment in recycling machinery, recycling goods should be cheaper than synthesizing the plastic. But the infrastructure to synthesize new plastic is already in place, & plastics manufacture has a built-in constituency of original-material providers which need to be shifted over to waste processors. This requires massive government interference to change, but the industry should be more economical in the long-term.
Then again, I’m not in the industry, so this is half talking out of my ass. But physically, cleaning & reprocessing existing polyethylene seems like it should be at least slightly cheaper than constantly manufacturing new—not to mention all the land taken up by discarded material.
In fact, if we simply hold manufacturers responsible for the expense of disposing of their product, that should put recycling clearly in the lead. As it stands now, we have had landfills closing all over the country, in part due to over-packaging & a failure to recycle, & the companies whose policies are responsible for this are getting a free ride, passing a big bill to the community. Your waste disposal tax dollar subsidizes the overuse of packaging on your products.:mad:
I should add, not only packagers, but the makers of appliances, electronic goods, & clothing, all of which are adding enormous amounts of unrecycled mass to our wastestream. This creates massive inefficiencies in our economy, & actually makes things more expensive.
Well, they may seem persuasive. But, you should keep in mind that this does not mean that they are correct. Cato can be pretty wily and very able to spin facts in ways that reflect their political philosophy and corporate funders. You need to look at critiques of what Cato says.
Well, again, I think that you are being influenced by some erroneous information. I don’t think there is any very serious scientific debate anymore about human contribution to ozone depletion. And, while uncertainties certainly remain over climate change, they are less than some want you to believe. There are many aspects of the science that are well-settled. The latest IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) report, reflecting the current belief in the peer-reviewed scientific literature is that warming seen in the last 30 years or so is likely due mainly to man and that it is even more likely that we will experience considerable anthrogenic warming over the next hundred years. See the “Alaska Glaciers thread” for a discussion of the current state of the science, or better yet, go directly to the IPCC website and read their reports. Avoid websites of people or organizations who are under no guidelines or pressure to present a balanced view of the current state of the peer-reviewed research on this.
As for the economics of recycling, foolsguinea has hopefully set you straight on believing that the market is infallible in determining things. Markets have failures…failures of information, failures of allocating costs (i.e., when the environmental costs of a good are borne by third parties rather than the buyer or seller), …
This is not to say that all recycling programs are successful and cost-effective. Admittedly, the arguments for recycling some products are stronger than others. For example, as I understand it, the argument for aluminum is quite compelling whereas there are some other materials where the argument is less so.
Here’s something that’s been bugging me for a while with respect to climate change - hysteresis. That is, the lag between changes in temperature and the rise of earth’s feedback mechanisms for maintaining temperature stability.
Now, this is pretty basic stuff, and I’m sure models must take this into account in some way, at least as error bars, but I don’t see much discussion of this in the popular press.
My assumption is that the Earth has developed dynamic systems to maintain reasonable temperature stability in the face of many varying inputs to global temperature. The sun’s output varies substantially over long and shorter cycles. CO2 levels have varied tremendously in the past. Particulate matter in the atmosphere due to volcanic eruptions varies widely over time. Even the Earth’s movement through dusty portions of space have caused changes in the amount of energy reaching the Earth from the sun.
So the Earth clearly has negative feedback systems to keep temperatures under control, or we would never have had a stable environment long enough for man to arise. My understanding is that many of these mechanisms are very poorly understood - the role ocean currents play, the role that carbon sinks like algae play in removing CO2. I just read yesterday that the north pole may become ice-free in the summer if the temperature rises a few degrees, and the added moisture content in the atmosphere will help moderate temperatures.
So is the temperature rise predicted just the temporary gap in the hysteresis curve until the Earth kicks in mechanisms to scrub the carbon and lower temperatures? If so, that puts an upper limit on the economic costs of warming, does it not?
Sam: As I understand it, the lack of understanding of feedbacks in the system are indeed a source of much of the uncertainty (e.g., the IPCC’s wide range of 2.5 to 10 deg F) in regards to the warming that will occur in the next century. There is no guarantee that these feedbacks will be all be negative…i.e., stabilize the system. There are lots of examples of systems that are linearly unstable…that is where the feedbacks are positive. (Of course, eventually, usually nonlinear terms will come in to prevent the system from going way far off. ) There have been fairly large swings in climate in the past, although usually over longer time scales because the processes causing it were over longer time scales, so I think your belief in the overall stability of the earth’s climate system may be too strong. The human-caused rise in CO2 levels that is occurring now is not a trivial forcing.
Anyway, the current belief is generally that the very important feedback due to increased water vapor in the atmosphere will be a positive feedback. A notable exception to this believe is the view of Richard Lindzen that a resulting increase in cloud cover will have a negative feedback (cooling) effect. But, his views have not generally been accepted.
As for the eventual return of CO2 levels to normal: Well, it is believed that if we stop emitting CO2 tomorrow that the rise in these levels will slow and then eventually reverse and CO2 levels will drop back down. The problem, however, is the time scale for this drop back down to occur is on the order of hundreds of years. Thus, a lot of the talk in regards to climate change policy is at what level we can stabilize CO2 levels for a given cost. Of course, the lower the level of stabilization, the more drastic the action needed and the higher the cost.
Now, I suppose a different question would be that if we continued our emissions at current levels or even grew emissions at some rate, what would be the eventual level at which CO2 would stabilize. I don’t know the state of the science on this but I don’t think there is any belief that it would stabilize on its own any time in the near future even if you use the term “near” in the broad sense of the next hundred years or so.
Anyway, I don’t think anyone is really calculating the costs of global warming going out several hundred years from now. In fact, I haven’t even seen anyone trying to go beyond the next century. So, while it is true that the costs may be self-limiting eventually, I think to believe that this hasn’t been factored into the calculations is incorrect. If anything, the fact that we haven’t tried to look out beyond 100 years has limited our estimates of the costs…I.e., we worry about what the temperature will be in 2100 but if we really don’t take action to stop global warming then the warming could be expected to continue well beyond that.
To elaborate a bit on my previous posts, after looking at the IPCC reports :
Along these lines, the IPCC Third Assessment Report “Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis”, Technical Summary (TS) available here states (p. 39):
Again from the Technical summary (p. 49):
You can also read there their discussion of clouds. (I grouped that with water vapor in my mind but they discuss it separately.) They note that clouds represent a considerable source of uncertainty in climate modeling and even the sign of the net cloud feedback is uncertain. (Clouds can absorb and reflect both incoming radiation from the sun and also outgoing radiation from the earth.)
As for rises in CO2 levels under various scenarios, you can see figures on p. 64 and 65 that show on the one hand the assumed emissions vs time under various scenarios and the resulting predicted CO2 concentrations vs time. Note that even for the scenarios with the most dramatic leveling off and eventual decline of emissions, CO2 levels are still rising, although leveling off, by 2100.
They also have a table on p. 38 that lists the atmospheric lifetime of CO2 as ranging from 5-200 years, stating that one can’t define a single lifetime because of the very different rates of reuptake for different processes.