Comments Michael Tobis has made

Since we've been so far from any legislative action until now, I hadn't thought much about the exact form that action would take. So I'm a novice to this part of the debate, looking for cogent arguments. I am not yet trying to stake out a position; I am just reporting my initial reactions to the positions presented in the Yale article.

All I have heard from cappers so far, other than the argument that cap and trade creates a cap better than a tax does, is counterarguments to the arguments for the tax, and arguments from expediency ("the document already exists") indifference ("it should be quite possible to reach pretty much the same result from either direction") and failure of leadership ("the general population will not tolerate a tax but  may be fooled briefly by a policy that is not called a tax, which raises energy prices and creates federal revenue").

So I have four problems:

1) Frankly, it is dishonest to create a Rube Goldberg contraption that is effectively a tax, call it somehting else, and deny that any taxation is involved. It continues the behaviors that make people distrust politics and politicians and the process that keeps the population confused about cause and effect.

2) It starts from complexity, leaving it impossible to advocate for simplicity and transparency.

3) It is presented as a fait accompli, but I have no idea where it came from. Where was the public consultation? Where was the effort to bring the public on board?

4) It smacks very much of business-as-usual, lobbyists, earmarks, etc. Businesses with Washington insider status get huge giveaways. Startups whose skills are actually in energy technology are placed at a distinct disadvantage.

In short, all the advantages you propose seem tactical rather than substantive. Even presuming those tactical advantages are true, the origins of the tactical advantage are deeply obscure from where I am sitting. It just feels like something elaborate and unclear is being sprung on me, and that most of the people supporting it are more interested in politics than in science.

Kevin Drm's rebuttal to Sachs is typical. It states pretty much that if you put the right ingredients into cap-and-trade it can act a lot like a tax. Your caliing Sachs "head-slappingly false" really doesn't seem to follow from that. If you put the right ingredients into a soup it can taste a whole lot like a chocolate cake, but that is still not what I want you to put my birthday candles in.

So again: it's easy to understand what a simple carbon tax would look like and how it could be tuned to achieve desired objectives. A compelling argument would address the follwoing:

1) What is cap and trade? Is it better in principle than a tax, and if so, why?

2) What exactly is the 700 page bill you are putting up as an alternative? (preferably with a link to the text and another link to a plain-english pointwise summary)

3) Where did it come from? Who drafted it? When? What interests are accounted for?

4) How are new ideas balanced against established interests? Specifically, given that existing interests are given permits, doesn't it systematically promote large institutional and corporate interests while suppressing startups and innovation? This is a clear weakness: what compensates for it?

Again, I am just starting to think about this. Honestly, I am nowhere near committed. Although the "head-slappingly" thing seems contrived to wedge me away, I am not entirely decided yet. Maybe all these questions are answered. All I say is that based on the Yale piece, I am becoming nervous that the answers are not going to be very compelling.

Anti-rationalism won't save us

Well I've been accused of lots of things before but this is the first time anyone has called me a Republican. Even so, that's only the second most irritating part of the article. Consider this:

"The UN Climate Panel released a report on CCS last year and it was unanimously supported by the research community. It's easy to get unanimous support on UN committees. You just throw off the people who disagree."

I am sorry. The kindest word I have for that is "terrible".

Where have we heard that talking point before? Is opposition to CCS reduced to stealing talking points from the climate change denial crowd?

We need all the technical assistance we can muster for this problem. Social change is hard. Saving the world is more important than ideological purity. We shouldn't count on speculative technofixes but that doesn't mean we should ignore technologies that can help. The situation is too serious to be throwing away useful tools based on some gut feeling.

Carbon sequestration in one form or another is the only way to reduce CO2 concentrations to natuiral backgrounds in a reasonable time. If we have already overshot safe limits we need to explore every possible path to retreat to safety.

We have only one planet, and anti-scientific rabble rousing is a threat to it no matter from what quarter it arises. We need to use the information we have, not throw away the parts we find ideologically inconvenient. That counts for non-Republicans too.

mt

Five Points Adding Up to What?

* Adequate technology is not expected to be commercially available until 2030, while leading climate experts say carbon dioxide emissions need to level off by 2015 to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change.

Well, those numbers are pretty arbitrary, but what it means is that the sooner CCS is deployed in a meaningful way the better.

* Coal-fired plant capacity is expanding so rapidly that as much as 70 percent of carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation in 2050 may not be technically suited for carbon capture and storage.

Well, again, we should commercialize CCS as quickly as possible, and thereby avoid this pessimistic scenarios. Having CCS available would make it a lot easier to avoid building old-style coal plants.

* Carbon capture and storage has not been tested at a scale needed for full-sized power plants, and designers of newly proposed plants have failed to integrate the "capture" equipment needed.

Same statement yet a third time. Yes. So we'd better speed this up, not delay it.

* The technology uses between 10 percent and 40 percent of the power plant's energy capacity, meaning that wide-scale adoption would wipe out the efficiency gains of the past 50 years and increase resource consumption by one-third.

It would indeed make a unit of coal produce less output energy, but it would remove essentially all the greenhouse impact of that coal. Energy prices are going up regardless.

* Carbon capture and storage technology could double the operating cost of power plants and lead to electricity price hikes of between 21 percent and 91 percent.

Yup. Energy prices are going up regardless. If you have something that competes with cheap coal, by all means deploy it.

=

So I see only two points being made, one which makes no sense, three times (we shouldn't do this it all because the need is so urgent and it's been going so slowly) and the other, which is conceded by anyone serious about the numbers, twice (energy prices will go up).

Giving the coal people some return on their inventory is a very practical move. Otherwise any sane move will continue to meet immovable opposition to even acknowledging a climate problem. I've had about enough of that. You?

mt

Well, maybe sorta

Joe Romm often argues against comparing progress in energy to progress in IT, e.g. here, with good reason. I wouldn't be surprised if we hear from him here.

I respond to your point in a bit more detail on "In It for the Gold".

mt

Amtrabus

My mother-in-law took the train from Chicago to Austin recently. She was willing to pay a price equal to flying for the convenience of a train. She was scheduled to arrive here in Austin at 7:30 PM.

At 9 PM she called. The train was stalled for some reason short of Dallas. Amtrak did not want to pay their staff overtime. So in Dallas she was transferred, somewhat perfunctorily, to a bus.

Of course, the bus represented a train, so it had to find its way off the highway and into each tiny town to drop folks off at the train station. On one occasion the bus driver wandered all around a town unable to find the train station.

As the bus which wanted to be a train pulled into Austin at around 3 AM, she phoned us to pick her up. Of course, by then we had finally fallen asleep, and we had to rush to get our bearings. <y wife arrived just in time. Had she been late the net result of Amtrak service would havbe been to leave an 85 year old woman standing alone at a deserted train station in an urban core at 3:30 AM.<p> Trains are better than busses for one reason. The capital investment implies a long-term commitment to the route. People can move their homes and workplaces to accommodate the route. Nevertheless, the service has to follow through. Long distance train travel should be a delight, not an ordeal.

Americans' regard of public services is always based on debased service. I don't know how to untangle this in general, but the services should understand what business they are in.

I doubt that my mother in law will take the train next time, since it turns out to be a badly run bus service. She would, in the end, have been more comfortable and safe on the Greyhound.

mt

The point of the article

The article started as an more ordinary blog post about the inevitable meme blaming hunger on Mr Gore. It led me to an insight I wasn't expecting, so I thought it might be important enough to try to reach a broad audience. In retrospect perhaps I should have trimmed it down. Here's the insight, maybe not original to me but new to me anyway.

In a labor constrained market, anyone can trade their services for goods, and so any healthy adult can make do, with enough of a surplus to take care of others nearby. It appears on present evidence that this is no longer true in a resource constrained environment, where inequities seem to be built into the system.

If you assume that the unconstrained economic optimum is always the social optimum, you will find yourself arguing that a rich person with a tank of gas or a slab of steak and ten starving poor people has more utility than the other way around.

The only alternative I can see is to find some way to constrain the rich person from bidding on the steak or the tank of gas until all the poor people are fed. This means that the free market fails to find the optimum.

Again, it seems to me that this sort of thing is inevitable when labor is in surplus and resources are in undersupply. Which means now, and for practical purposes, from now on.

It's not news to most of us that the market is suboptimal in maximizing utility. Only a few people, alas very influential ones, take that seriously. The events of the past few months, though, indicate a bit more than that. The market is increasingly suboptimal in optimizing for human welfare the more it moves from being labor-limited to being resource-limited, and thus from being income driven to being amassed wealth driven.

This seems like a pretty strong conclusion to me.

mt

Present Yields Remain Ample

Aaron, according to the data I referenced, world cereal production has hit records for at least two years running, so we are not presently production constrained. When you look at the numbers, even Australia has not really declined that much.

The concentration of wealth makes most of the grain get diverted for luxury uses.

I am not saying that there will not be trouble maintaining these yields. I suspect there will be eventually, possibly even soon. I am only saying that the current trouble is obviously being misunderstood on all sides. I would like people to face up to the real problem before the ones they are imagining really come home to roost, because otherwise the one we actually already have will only make matters worse.

mt

The Greed Hypothesis and the IPCC

"The existence of the IPCC depends on (a) the identification of anthropogenic climate forcing factors and (b) the projection that the impact of these is likely to be more negative than positive, unless (c) mitigating steps are taken.  

"No anthropogenic forcing with potential for negative impact = no need for IPCC to exist.   Bureaucratic committees do not easily disband voluntarily, so it is a matter of self-preservation to keep a level of alarm alive that AGW could cause serious problems."

Nope.

This hypothesis would work much better were the IPCC actually a bureaucracy.

The idea that scientists serve as advisors to the IPCC for self-interest is very remote from the truth. It is an honor to be invited, but many scientists are compelled to turn it down because it cuts out of their productive time and fundable work.

There's this sense among the doubters that there's a big carpeted air conditioned skyscraper somewhere in Geneva with a fancy IPCC logo in brushed nickel on top, leather chairs everywhere, fancy hors d'oeuvres, and lots of climatologists smoking cigars and eating filet mignon, laughing at the gullible public...

There is no such place. The IPCC directly funds  travel to the meetings, but doesn't pay for the time of attendees. It occupies the full attention only of a few clerical staff who are employed by UNEP and/or WMO. That's it.

The members of the IPCC are the countries with representation in the UN. It's essentially a standing committee of the UN General Assembly.

IPCC is not a big employer or a major funding agency.

mt

Cash as Lubricant

"It's a love affair between corporations, lobbyists. and politicians...a threeway cluster effing lubricated with cash. "

Well, you raise a good question, but I don't know another way to keep an overpopulated planet going than with corporations and politicians.

That's a topic for another thread. The question here is whether you oppose a technology because it doesn't work or whether you oppose it because you wish it didn't work.

Making that distinction isn't easy, but anyone who doesn't make the effort is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

If it works to the scale we need, 1) somebody is going to make a lot of money and 2) some natural systems are going to be disrupted and 3) some people are going to oppose the effort in very emotional terms to protect their competing interests.

This is as true of wind and solar as it is of hydro or nuclear or CCS. If the problem were easy we'd already have solved it. If there were an easy alternative to oil some country would already be using it.

This problem is hard. It is fine to say "local, regional, and national interactive renewable distributed smart grids powered up by wind, solar, water, and biogas energy.  Recharging plugin hybrids and powering electric mass transit with commuter rail and electric buses.  Storing power as heating or cooling employing geo heat exchange heating/cooling of buildings."

I'm all in favor of all of that. If you think that will get us through the crisis of the next 200 years without CCS or nukes, though, you need to show some numbers.

More to the present point, if you think any of that will happen without corporations, government, lobbyists, or lots of lubricating cash, you have a whole lot of 'splainin' to do. It's exactly that sort of vague handwaving that I call romantic.

Don't get me wrong. I wish for a world a lot like the one you wish for. I just distinguish between wishes and plans.

Tell me how we are going to get food and water to ten billion people for hundreds of years and still preserve some shreds of nature and human dignity. I think it will require a lot of compromises.

If your vocabulary doesn't include the word "tradeoff" your "real reality" doesn't impress me as especially realistic.

mt

Chicken and egg

Huh?

The tech can't be scaled up until there is an enormous quantity of CO2 to test the scale. The enormous quantities of CO2 in question are being spilled into the atmosphere, you know, and not captured. THAT"S THE WHOLE PROBLEM, REMEMBER?

So yes, of course you have to work that out, and you work that out by doing it, and of course that costs that aren't directly recouped by the utility. Did you think the capture mechanism would be free?

I am absolutely in agreement with Grey on this: "Mandate that if coal plants are to be built that they must have CCS from day 1 of operation." This is absolutely right. It's what Hansen says, it's what Gore says, and so say all of us.

That being the case, opposing the work to scale up CCS on the grounds that it is expensive to prototype makes very little sense. The first iPod probably cost, what, about sixty million dollars or something? So what?

Let me be fair. I don't think the economies of scale will be as dramatic here as in consumer electronics. I have little doubt that CCS will considerably increase the cost of coal energy, much more than the coal interests would like. I have little doubt that it will take a long time to scale this up.

I also have little doubt that those with other horses in the race are underplaying the costs and overplaying the benefits of their particular wedge. I have seen completely implausible claims about solar go unchallenged around here.

The thing to do is more research on all promising fronts. Any wedge that makes a big difference will take some considerable time to scale up. We are talking about a century-time-scale problem, and so a twenty-year ramp-up is well within the spectrum of useful alternatives. Unless we are determined to torch the planet, energy costs will go up whatever we do.

My gripe is that this posting adds nothing to the conversation. The highlighted quote offers no useful information about the prospects of CCS that isn't perfectly obvious. I'm totally baffled by your featuring it.

Sure, there's no advantage to the producer to capturing the carbon unless it's mandated. Why is that even news? It's just the tragedy of the commons restated. I'd figure we were all caught up on that around here by now. The producer won't be able to capture the carbon unless mandated to do so. Yup. It would violate their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. (We can talk about whether this is the right way to set things up, but it isn't changing anytime soon.) We need regulatory action.

What a surprise. Stop the presses.

mt

Unconvinced

Look, the fact that I work in the same building as some of the world experts in sequestration surely affects my perspective. That said, whatever you may think of them, engineers of that caliber don't chase rainbows.

Anything on the scale that is needed to get us out of the pickle we are in is "in the future", pretty clearly. So? Surely by opposing it you aren't expediting it.

Of course we in the west and especially North America need to learn to do more with less, so we can meet the rest of the world at a sustainable level. I'm not arguing against that by any means. The rest of the world needs more, rather than less energy, to get to sustainability though, and it has to come from somewhere.

I don't see anyone here arguing against solar because it takes resources away from wind or vice versa. The finiteness of financial resources is an argument from people who aren't taking matters seriously. We need to hurry up on all fronts as long as they show promise.

The "us vs them" mentality here sure looks ideological to me. What is or isn't more expensive is for the marketplace to decide. The coal people need to try to sell their wares in a form that doesn't drive us off the cliff to a world that is totally out of control. They should be able to pursue that, just as any other approach, and it's a legitimate area for the Department of Energy to pursue.

Now, if you're right that coal with sequestration is certainly and inevitably more expensive than all other options for all applications and offers no advantages over them I will change my mind. However, you need to provide analysis, not hunches. In particular, you need to account for energy storage in evaluating renewables for meeting peak demand, right?

The analogy to hydrogen or corn ethanol is just an analogy until you can back it up with evidence.

However, the fact is that I think ethanol is a fraud and hydrogen is a red herring and sequestration is real based on substantive conversations with the very same folks, especially a group of energy and environment scientists at DOE in whom I have considerable confidence.

As far as I know, the people who actually work the numbers disagree with you, and as a member of both communities I need to expend the credibility I have here on Grist to say that.

Of course they aren't infallible and I'm not either, but until I hear something resembling a substantive and quantitative argument from someone I am just not going to take your opposition as pragmatic. The line between reason and rationalization isn't always easy to discern. Convince me you aren't rationalizing.
On Department of Energy backs away from funding Future posted 1 year, 9 months ago 12 Responses

So, if it's stupid, why so?

Sean, if there's a net positive energy return on investment and zero net emissions, I fail to see the problem. It's a way to have the coal have a net positive value to its owners and a net positive value to society, even in the most extreme case of carbon emissions controls.

It seems like a huge win to me.

Can you explain your opposition please?

I found the Fox snippet very irritating because you are given room to make a statement but no room to defend it. Carbon Capture and Sequestration seems to me a crucial component of a non-catastrophic future.  What do you propose that I am missing?

mt

infinite costs

It's the failure to understand the concept of essentially infinite costs that makes conventional economics so sterile. The value of the economy is trivial compared to the value of the biosphere.

Life will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no life. Quite a bit better, actually.

An absolutely amazing failure to understand this blazingly obvious fact is at the root of the failure to understand the limits of conventional economic thinking and its ridiculously skewed insertion into arguments about the fate of the biosphere.

It's too strong, I think, to say that conventional economics has nothing to say about our predicament. Still, it is being compulsively applied at scales where it simply doesn't apply. It's interesting how acculturation trumps perception and prevents some people from seeing this.

This confusion isn't new. Witness the myth of King Midas.

mt

Deconstructing Taylor

Mr. Taylor's remarkable display of debating club legerdemain is more deserving of deconstruction than rebuttal.

1. Mr. Taylor calls me "Michael" as if we are friends, but in fact we seem to be deeply disagreed. Thus, use of the personal name is a subtle putdown, I think. That's Dr. Tobis to you, thanks.

2. I have long been at pains to state that I am in favor of capitalism and of corporations with the minimal necessary correction to the system, and I explicitly disavow Marxism in this piece. Yet I am here accused of being "against the market", which is nonsense. This is exactly the accusation of dangerous radicalism that I am trying to avoid. I just want permission to think about these things rationally without accusations of subversion being flung. Apparently this is not allowed.

3. The poor innocent Cato Institute Fellow has no attachment to the growth ethic but merely wants to protect "freedom", a classic short-circuit device if ever there was one. Does this imply that to oppose Cato's positions is to oppose "freedom"?

4. Notwithstanding the claim to be agnostic about growth, there's an explicit claim that the advanced economies will quintuple in "income", based on computer runs "based on" work by IPCC WGII lead author. What that 65K per capita could possibly mean  escapes me, since we are running out of room to be wealthy. Perhaps it means that the same amount of real estate will be in existence but it will cost five times as much to own some of it. Perhaps we will need to pay for breathable air. That would stimulate the economy! Again, this waving around of large dollar amounts seems inclined to short-circuit discussion. Am I actually opposed to things getting better? No, I am opposed to things getting worse, and I am unconvinced that money measures the things that will matter in the future. This is exactly the question I am trying to raise.

5. Throwing Iraq into the conversation certainly isn't a good way to advance reasoned disocurse. It is guaranteed not to bring out the best in a reasonable person. It took me some time to calm down about that particularly nasty herring. How that let's-generously-call-it-a-terrible-mistake got crammed down the throats of a frantic and distracted public is a bleeding mess of an issue that I would rather leave on somebody else's turf. Leave me out of it please.

6. Most important, there is a reasonable sounding claim that "nobody is above criticism" without the slightest attention to actually defending the original question. That question is on what basis he asserts that conventional economics has any useful bearing on the question of our long-term sustainability, or to use the more right-friendly word, our long term security, never mind primacy.  What he presents instead is a mess of distractions and misdirections. See Mamet's Law.

As it stands, it's sort of an unfair battle since Taylor is paid and I'm foolishly and obsessively volunteering.

As is usual in such discussions I am forced to leave the last word to my opponent, unless he is actually willing to take up the topics at hand.

mt

A School of Herring, All Red

I hope to find the time to reply at greater length. I wish to note that Mr Taylor neither renounces nor defends the very strong claim that prompted my essay, specifically:

scientists are in no position to intelligently guide public policy on climate change. Scientists can lay out scenarios, but it is up to economists to weigh the costs and benefits and many of them say the costs of cutting emissions are higher than the benefits.

Let my address the nastiest of the herrings, though.

I think like polar bears, Easter Island provides a very powerful image, and so you will find those who start from defending a position rather than from thinking about our circumstance eager to deflect attention from the main issues at hand. So let me quote directly from the author of the referenced study about Easter Island (Rapa Nui):

"I got those results back and I was sceptical," says Hunt. "I thought, something's wrong with these." When repeated samples yielded the same date, he and Lipo re-examined the existing evidence. After throwing out any studies that lacked replicate samples or had other methodological problems, the 11 studies that remained all pointed to the same date - roughly 1200 AD.

Such a late arrival date means that the new inhabitants of Easter Island must have begun hacking down trees almost immediately, building the gigantic monuments and stone heads that make the island so distinctive, says Hunt.

And the new civilisation's ecological footprint must have been heavy from the start. "There isn't a period of ecological stability. There was almost immediate impact," says Hunt. "It isn't a two-part story any more. There's really just one chapter."

This may amount to an interesting controversy among archaeologists, but it hardly changes the moral of the story.

For now, I close with this. While I wish I could share in Taylor's optimism I take little solace in predictions of the number of dollars I can expect to spend in the future further-dimished world.

mt

Josh Farley

Someone going by "Tidal" offers this link to an excellent talk by ecological economist Josh Farley which moves the conversation along a considerable distance in the direction we need to go. Many thanks to Tidal for finding it and Josh Farley for giving it.

mt

Is it a Caricature?

Is this a caricature of economics?

We have painted ourselves into this corner where if there isn't growth, there is discomfort. Lacking for a "job" can be disastrous, we can't all have jobs unless there is growth, so we have to spend more.

If we spend less, the terrorists will have won! Remember the president asking us all to loosen our belts after the 9/11 attack?

This tangle is deeply ingrained but it isn't inevitable.

I am sure than not all economists believe the same things, but note that Stern uses the same terms that Lomborg does. I haven't seen a lot of recognized economists saying we need a more cheerful name for "recession".

I propose we use the word "relaxation" instead.

mt

Good job, Grist!

I'm just taking it all in, for the present. I have nothing of substance to add just now.

However, I'd like to congratulate Grist for increasingly being a place where controversies are addressed in an intelligent and mutually respectful way.

This article and, so far, this discussion are fine examples of a very promising trend on this site.

Thanks! Please keep up the good work!

mt

Thanks GreenEngineer

That's the sort of thing I was looking for to make it ring true for me. I stand corrected.

It still seems rather less earth-shaking than Sundalow makes out. You can see how his enthusiasm for corn ethanol didn't leave me inclined to believe him in any case. I still think there's a tendency for politicians to believe scientists and engineers are like movie wizards, and that eventually we will come up with the right incantation and everything will be back to normal and happily ever after.

Weasel words spoken, though, thanks for setting me straight with a substantive argument.

mt

EPRI study

That's interesting, and apparently that is where Sundalow got his info, but I don't get it.

To break even on coal vs petroleum, the coal has to be twice as efficient, since a unit of coal energy releases about twice the CO2 as a unit of petroleum.

Essentially you are comparing using a fixed power plant to burn a dirty fuel, transmit the power, store the power, and retrieve the power vs a moving power plant to burn a clean fuel.

True, in one case you have to move the fuel and the combustion engine so that adds weight, but in a hybrid as opposed to pure electric that advantage goes away; you have to carry those as well as a large battery or battery-like device.

I understand that a hybrid is better than a conventional car. I am questioning that a plug in coal powered hybrid is so much better than today's gasoline powered hybrid that it will somehow constitute even an imporvement, never mind a solution, for greenhouse gas emissions.

What is the magic I am missing here?

Admittedly widespread deployment would would put a dent in oil dependence, but it's not the happily ever after scenario that Sundalow paints.

The idea that we can run air conditioners off our cars was another place where the whole business made no sense to me. Sorry but my BS detector is going off. Somehow running our cars will have enough storage to cover peak demand, after we've driven them around for a while?

You know, if storage were that good, we could move to renewables a lot more effectively. Why bother with the car as middleman?

I've been wrong in the past and I am always happy to be embarassed by good news, but I need some stronger medicine than raw assertions of things policy folks wish were true. We get plenty of those; that's how we got into the corn ethanol mess in the first place, not to mention some other messes I can think of.

mt

Amen

I have used this analogy of an OS upgrade myself. (I haven't read the book or heard of it until now.)

Corporations (and to a lesser extent other economic actors) optimize the quantity we expect them to optimize: shareholder profit.

Upgrading the operating system, to me, at least to some extent means adjusting the marketplace so that benign or neutral activities are favored and destructive behaviors are unprofitable.

Only an involved and highly competent social democracy can achieve this. Most signs point to deteriorating competence of the democratic process; consider that in spite of everything that man was re-elected US president in 2004.

There are crucial endemic miscommunications. The blogs are well aware of the failings of conventional journalism, so I won't dwell on those. Another lynchpin is economic theory, which from the point of view of policy makers has somehow ensconced itself as king of the sciences.

I have been reaching toward something like economics that is not merely descriptive but is actually designed.

http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2007/05/economists-vs- ...

The way I see it the world is a system and economics is the controller. You study a system and design a controller. Economists' common and yet bizarre pretense that they are doing science, describing pre-existing facts rather than describing a narrow set of social circumstances, hobbles us terribly. It's capitalist economic theory, not capitalism itself, that is the problem. Capitalism is a tool we cannot, in the dangerous centuries that face us, afford to do without, but we need to think about how to use the tool, not just turn it on, feed it fuel, and refuse to steer it.

I tried to explain this to Paul Baer once and he summarized succinctly. Someone (Herman Daly perhaps?) once observed "You don't predict what you are going to have for breakfast. You decide what you are going to have for breakfast."

mt

Sean's points

Sean, I am entirely agreed with your second point. I am certainly in favor of accounting for externalities. I started by defending sequestration on the grounds of the conventional wisdom that renewables do not seem adequate for the whole energy picture, and then went on to contesting the idea that solar is cheaper than dirty coal which people were advocating with a straight face. Your second point, which I agree with, speaks to neither of these.

Regarding your first point, yes, electricity is a complicated product and not really a pure capitalist marketplace (for all the good and ill that implies). However, that isn't all there is to my argument.

Much energy is generated in situ for large scale industrial processes, though, and a contorted decision making process presents no barriers to converting such sites to solar. Such installations have a huge incentive to save money. Yet there is little sign of solar deployment in such situations. Hence the idea that solar is cheaper than coal at scale is very unlikely to be true to say the very least.

Finally, I am amused to see that someone else pointed a Department of Energy press release presented in answer to my request for a business model. I have a lot of friends in the DOE, and God bless them and keep them in the money, lots of good work gets done there in spite of everything, but the PR departments at the labs are not to be taken too seriously.

The more solar and wind energy there is, the better, but saying that's all we need is wishful thinking of a sort we can't afford right now.

mt

dirty coal cannot already cost more than solar

Sunflower,

How could there be any existing coal business at all if that were true at any significant scale?

And once you explain that, what on earth would be motivating the Chinese?

I am sorry, but I find the most likely explanation by far is that you are incorrect in some way.

mt

are you sure about relative costs?

David, with all due respect, I am not sure I believe you that coal priced at 1.5 to 2 times current prices is not competitive with renewables.

Renewables do not scale smoothly; by their nature they require specific environmental circumstances, and they have huge environmental impacts of their own. (The back and forth on hydro is giving me mental whiplash.)

And as GreyFlcn points out, most renewables operate at the whim of the environment and don't tend to match up well with demand cycles.

I know that coal can scale up. Show me the numbers on renewables. I'm not so stubborn that I can't change my mind, but you will have to make your argument at full scale, not at a few ideal local facilities.

Also, it will have to be a slam dunk. The coal interests are stakeholders, like it or not. We are better off if we can deal them in. That's really the main point. They'll continue to lie and cheat as long as it's in their interests. We want to make it in their interest to cooperate, not to defect.

Also, sequestration (coal or otherwise) is required if we ever have to go so far as an anthropogenic draw-down, a possibility I (and greater minds than mine like Broecker and Hansen) do not find far-fetched.

mt

Well said, with a minor caveat

I don't know that scientists underestimate the risk. I think that to some extent we tend to understate it in public communication rather than underestimate it in our own assessments.

This ties into Hansen's argument about scientific reticence. See:

http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/research/ ...

There is a flip side to the denialist argument that we do what we do for selfish interests. Yes, we are human and can be influenced to say things in the way people funding us want to hear it. The question is which way those pressures act.

In fact, we are mostly funded by governments, and governments do not like big new risks. Our careers are safest if we avoid sticking our necks out.

Some of us, at least, are aware that the sensitivity usually quoted does not include carbon feedbacks, and carbon feedbacks offer a whole new plethora of underconstrained risks.

I expand a bit on the science of the missing feedback on my blog here:

http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2007/08/missing-feedba ...

mt

Let's not get confrontational

Ashleigh, I am not criticizing, I am trying to understand. Events open to all were attended mostly by boomers, just as boomers would have dominated thirty years ago. I am sure we are exasperating sanctimonious bores (though you should have seen the attitudes of the older generation we had to put up with as young adults) and have many other flaws, but I wasn't trying to make a blanket criticism.

I was trying to determine whether these events were unattractive to younger people, or whether my sample was just unlucky. If it's the former, I'd like to know why. (I'd also like to know what happenned in other countries for comparison, about which I've heard not a peep so far.)

We need to rethink everything that stands in the way of a popular push (not a disgruntled fringe) for change. If there's a new generation gap, I'd like to understand it and fix it.

So far I've not heard from anyone saying "I'm twenty-two, American, went to a party where I knew no-one and had a (great/useful/indifferent/lousy) time". Nor "I'm fifty, and there were lots of enthusiastic people in their teens and twenties at the party I attended."

There is no criticism implied of you or your generation if you didn't attend a party or if you didn't like the idea at all. I'd like to know whether my sample was representative, and if so, why.

mt

At least Scientific American covered it

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?alias=top-scientists-urg ...

So far that's all I've found. They were prompt and appropriate, but I suppose it isn't a moment of greatness when Scientific American pays attention to scientists.

Has anybody seen anything else in the professional press?

mt

It isn't working either

This calumny is the reason my blog is called what it is called. You can see some discussion of the actual trend in climate funding

there.

mt

Maybe, but even so...

I think GtoeOne overstates the problem a bit but I agree that those stark statements are at least partially ture. I don't deny that the analogy does not solve the problem GO describes.

The analogy is intended to make the problem more clear to those who don't see it yet.

I am a committed optimist. I think there's a best path out of any situation and I try to find it. Even if GO's sad analysis is completely correct, we will do better in getting out of it if more people understand it.

That understanding is the purpose of the analogy. Anyone who already gets it is welcome to move on.

Thinking about it this way changed the way I myslef look at the situation. For me, the sustainability problem is going to be modeled as "six acres and shrinking" from now on.

On the other hand, the solar numbers somebody posted seem about right, (I checked) which certainly leaves some room for optimism.

mt

Thanks to the folks with numbers

Special thanks to the folks who have contributed asteroid scale numbers for their own specialties and interests!

Anyone else care to chip in?

More news, good or bad, about the asteroid in small, per-capita numbers would be very welcome.

mt

The "Swindle" Swindle

See also http://www.climateofdenial.net/ for the response of the UK scientific community to that so called documentary.

Is the Australian drought a sign of things to come? More likely than not, but a precise answer as of today has to be statistical and with some uncertainty. Does the nasty "Swindle" swindle have anything to do with it? Absolutely not.

mt

People are not consistent.

A lot of people don't care about consistency. That's all there is to it.

A significant number of people were polled, if I recall correctly, as believing the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago and simultaneously believing that dinosaurs roamed the earth tens of millions of years ago.

I suspect that most people hold opinions as a matter of style rather than of substance.

I like tweed jackets and I like python-themed t-shirts. There is no contradiction there. I tend not to wear them both on the same occasion.

Someone may well wonder why it is any different to prefer both biblical creationism and the Jurassic.

mt

the peculiar graphic

The photo under the big question mark doesn't represent me. (Alas I am not that good-looking.)

I think it is Lomborg; the alternative text says "questioning Lomborg".

I'm not sure it's a useful graphic. I didn't add it, and I am thinking about deleting it, but I'm new around these parts. Opinions?

mt

Science is collaboration; lone scientist is myth

I just noticed that jabailo alleges:

=
They may read others work, or reject it entirely, or use it as the basis of their own.  But their own work is always unique...not simply a building block is some vast edifice such as the IPCC report, but a unique creation.  

Any single scientific paper can form the basis of entirely unique worldview that can be acted upon.  
=

This makes very little sense.

How would anybody know which paper that was in order to act on it?

Interestingly I just spent a good part of today arguing exactly the opposite; that modern science is too vast for anybody's work to be meaningful outside of a social context.

http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2007/04/framing-trust- ...

I conclude that a collaborative network of trust is absolutely necessary both for science and for democracy.
On The innerworkings of it all posted 2 years, 7 months ago 69 Responses