Comments tidal has made

funny, pathetic - esp. contrasted with...

the congress in Copenhagen next week: "Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions".

Speakers list here.On A look at the non-experts speaking at Heartland Institute's denialist sideshow posted 8 months, 4 weeks ago 23 Responses

hehe...

"Gloom and doom with a sense of humor®." indeed. Great title to the post. rotflmao...
On Study: Common pollutant may lead to obesity posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago 3 Responses

bigger picture...

I don't think we are going to get a coalition government, not now.

But I think there is a much larger issue at play.

In the last Parliament, also a CPC minority, the Tories governed as if they had a majority. They basically sneered and bullied and dared at the opposition, and rammed through the key platforms they had on their mandate from the last election.

The intent of calling the last election (against Harper's own call for fixed date elections... and conveniently just in advance of the US elections...) was to secure a Tory majority. Having failed in that, the agenda was to start governing "as if a majority" again.

This f-up has basically served notice to (a) the Canadian people that the Tories were prepared to govern with disregard to their minority status and (b) the Tories that the opposition is not going to play that game any more.

Again, my bet is that Harper and the Tories are still in power 8 days from now, but that this near-death experience, the legitimacy of a coalition government alternative, and the change of government in the US all contrive to mean that this Parliament is going to be much more, er, flexible than the last on a variety of issues. On Canadian government may fall, bring in greener coalition posted 12 months ago 6 Responses

math a little wonky...

I am not really arguing your broader points, but since you are oversimplifying the "math" of the situation to make a point, I will too... If the market was valuing the corp(se) at $10 billion, and then the government injected $85 billion, the "value" of the corpse was $95 billion. 80% of $95billion is $76 billion. So it is not an overpayment of 10x as per your math.

And it's obviously a lot more complicated than that, but your example overstates things...  On Still trying to make environmental sense of the massive bailout now underway posted 1 year, 2 months ago 23 Responses

Mercifully...

mercifully, one of the commentators eventually pointed to some of Ralph Keeling's pertinent research on the topic...

For anyone interested, this seminar by Ralph, "Understanding Atmospheric Oxygen: The Other Half of the Global Carbon Dioxide Story" will help you "breathe" (oxygen!) a little easier. Specifically, between minutes 33:00 and 35:00. We don't have an oxygen problem. We have a CO2 problem.

This was not one of the Gruaniad's finer moments.

(By the way, Ralph's full presentation is just great, as are many of the other videos at the UCSD - Scripps Institution of Oceanography series here.On Oh good grief posted 1 year, 3 months ago 6 Responses

Wow!

That is definitely the most poignant, persuasive anthem about an impending ecological crisis that I have ever heard. I think we can all agree that as soon as they hear that in China, we will immediately have a pre-emptive breakthrough on the Copenhagen round of the UNFCCC. Did anyone else have visions of Jim Inhofe and Jim Hansen working side-by-side installing a solar panel at Miley's house as they listened to it? There's no way we can fail when we have songs like this!

Way to go Miley!On Popster Miley Cyrus pens 'eco-anthem' posted 1 year, 4 months ago 7 Responses

those linkages/metrics still valid, Sean?

Upthread you ask: "Why isn't this a speculative bubble?  It certainly was when dot coms were being traded based on multiples of revenue rather than earnings, since the latter were negative.  It certainly was when housing prices got way out of whack with annual salaries.  Why shouldn't it also hold when you can no longer predict natural gas prices from demand/reserve ratios, nor rely on the historic linkages between natural gas and #6 oil?"

There is nothing to say that those historic linkages were ever a sound heuristic for valuing various commodities. We may be shifting to a regime where, say, we "value" resources relative to the "lifetime" scarcity of their "stocks", rather than the metrics that focus on the dynamics of their current "flows".

Something else to note. In most historic financial bubbles, part of the "solution" was bringing on more actual supply - railroads, houses, pets.com, etc., until the supply can actually sop up most demand, pricking the speculative aspect of the bubble and sending prices lower. In the case of certain exhaustible resources, we won't be able to get this type of response. Even in past commodity bubbles, we were able to do some of that (boost supply) in the interim - and always assumed that "limits" were well into the future. If the current reality is that any supply boosts are simply temporary "fixes" to an increasingly-recognized long-term supply crunch, then we may not see the same resolution to the price rises.

Of course, one should never over/underestimate the madness-of-crowds phenomenon, but I think this is going to be a little more tricky than pointing to "everything must be out of whack because historically whenever the XYZ indicator got to level Q, we've had a pullback in the price of commodity A." It might be that various indicators XYZ are now as relevant as the number of horses is to present-day US economic output. On Cornucopian thinking about oil posted 1 year, 5 months ago 58 Responses

Martin Weitzman on "fat-tails" and CBA

And I guess I second Jason and David's comments. It's hard to imagine what other framework we would use.

However, with respect to Jason's third point and specifically dealing with some of the attributes of the climate change issue, I think it's important to consider the recent paper by Harvard's Martin Weitzman: On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change, which discusses the almost  unique "fat-tail" problems w.r.t. low-probability high-cost catastrophic outcomes, and how that dilemma leads to conclusions that include:

At least potentially, the influence on cost-benefit analysis of fat-tailed structural uncertainty about climate change, coupled with great unsureness about high-temperature damages, can outweigh the influence of discounting or anything else..... (3) all of this translates into placing severe limitations on the reliability of policy advice coming from standard cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of climate change; (4) the conventional economic advice of spending modestly on abatement now but gradually ramping up expenditures over time is an extreme lower bound on what is reasonable rather than a best estimate of what is reasonable; (5) removing the artificial limitations on conventional CBAs that comes from excluding very-high-impact disasters is capable of shifting a more inclusive economic-welfare analysis strongly away from the gradualism of a climate-change policy ramp.

The analysis shows that traditional cost-benefit calculations are getting it wrong, but it does so only by proving that extreme events dominate the costs when included in the calculations. It cannot put a figure on how much should be spent now, unlike the old techniques. "The big picture is not as clear as economists had thought," says Weitzman. "This probably means we should spend more money now, but it doesn't tell us how much."

The prophetic words of Garrett Hardin-

"you can't do just one thing"... or was it Barry Commoner?...  On Sunscreen-slathered swimmers contributing to coral bleaching, says study posted 1 year, 9 months ago 5 Responses

And then... a miracle occurs!

To see my answers on the question "Where will biomass come from" and "what will it do to water, biodiversity and soil carbon" please come back next week.

Is it the cartoons from pages 11-21 here?

Think of all the new farms on the Canadian Shield and in Siberia! The new beaches everywhere! The speeded up hydrological cycle! It's an economicological miracle!!

And then a miracle occurs!

:(On Hybrids and biofuels: The road ahead posted 1 year, 10 months ago 44 Responses

oh, thanks so much...

And now the temperature has backslid to the lowest level since 2008?

Ya know...

At some point I was going to post some links to Vaclav Smil's papers on energy... so I am kind of sorry that this particular post first reminds me to do so... but I happened to first read about the "liposuction" lunacy earlier in this rather good (and more comprehensive) speech:

bioenergy promoters are advancing preposterous claims about phytomass as the solution the world's energy problems, and are moving beyond phytomass to advocate the use of animal lipids. There is now actually a proposal to use biofuel from salmon oil (Reyes and Sepúlveda 2006). For the benefit of those who know nothing about salmonid fishes I should explain that (a) wild salmons
have been largely decimated by overfishing and hence any additional salmon catch for fuel oil would spell the final death toll for the precariously suriving species; and (b) the farmed salmon requires roughly 3.1-3.9 units of fishmeal and fishoil (which must be obtained by catching massive amounts of such wild species as sardines, anchovies and shrimp) in order to produce a unit of edible tissue (Tacon 2004). Consequently, one could not think about more insane way to either completely destroy once super-abundant marine species or to produce
a hugely negative energy outcome than producing salmon oil fuel.

Regrettably, these kinds of delusions are publicly funded, some to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Among the most bizarre ideas is (this is not a joke) an IEA program that evaluates "the risk of using animal tallow derived from specified risk materials, dead stock, and downer animals as feedstock for the production of biodiesel" (IEA 2005:39). Just imagine: relying on biofuel from "risk material": read BSE (mad) cows! How far would that go?

And there is also a proposal (thankfully a non-EIA) to "link a biodiesel plant with the cosmetic surgeons." Says a New Zealander Peter Bethune, the founder of Earthrace project aiming to set a new round-the-world powerboat speed record in a boat to be powered by biodiesel fuel partly manufactured from human fat: "In Auckland we produce about 330 pounds of fat per week from liposuction, which would make about 40 gallons of fuel" (Schouten 2005).

been regularly biking to work since '95... tidal...On Boat aims to set speed record ... powered by human fat posted 1 year, 11 months ago 1 Response

weitzman's draft and abstract.

Weitzman's draft paper is here:

Abstract:

Using climate change as a prototype example, this paper analyzes the implications of structural uncertainty for the economics of low-probability high-impact catastrophes. The paper is an application of the idea that having an uncertain multiplicative parameter, which scales or amplies exogenous shocks and is updated by Bayesian learning, induces a critical "tail fattening" of posterior-predictive distributions. These fattened tails can have very strong implications for situations (like climate change) where a catastrophe is theoretically possible because prior knowledge cannot place sufficiently narrow bounds on overall damages. The essence of the problem is the difficulty of learning extreme-impact tail behavior from finite data alone. At least potentially, the influence on cost-benefit analysis of fat-tailed uncertainty about climate change, coupled with extreme unsureness about high-temperature damages, can outweigh the influence of discounting or anything else.

weitzman update

I would agree with Sean, that this thread got a little muddled and tiresome. The "topic" though, has a long way to go.

Desmog points to new research by Martin Weitzman. Richard Tol replies and points to his review of Weitzman's unpublished paper here.

Just before posting some selective quotes from the two articles, I'd like to note a few things in the context of this thread. (1) Economics is  responding to the unique challenges of the climate change problem; (2) Some of the "standard" models, such as the one that  Jerry was using in deriving a $2/ton carbon cost, may be quite lacking (note that Tol has increased his estimated carbon cost from $5/tonne to $50/tonne based on Weitzman's work); (3) we are still talking about a "price on carbon", which means relying primarily on market solutions moreso than command-and-control.

From New Scientist:

When you take into account extreme temperature rises of more than around 6 °C, he says, they dominate all other options and effectively demand that investment aimed at stopping them be made now. "This tells us that we should take the problem much more seriously that normal cost-benefit analyses suggest," says Weitzman, who has submitted his paper to The Review of Economics and Statistics.

Economists have generally ignored extreme events when doing cost-benefit calculations. Such events are theoretically possible, they say, but are so unlikely and lie so far in the future that it is not cost-effective to spend money to prevent them... Weitzman's results are so dramatic that some economists, many of whom argued in favour of caution, are shifting their position.

Environment groups argue that the risk of extreme events justifies large investment now, but other groups, notably industry-orientated think tanks and many Republican politicians, have resisted such calls. "In the United States, cost-benefit analyses have been used to back up questions about whether [investment] is worth much now," says Grubb. "This throws a pretty fundamental spanner in the works."

Richard Tol of the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, is one economist who used to argue for investment levels that fall short of what green groups say is needed...  Before reading Weitzman's paper, Tol had that figure at $5 - now he thinks it should be $50...

Weitzman's study shows...  the potential cost of extreme events is so great that they come to dominate the assessment of risk, whatever method is used to compare the value of present and future generations.

Richard Tol review:

(Weitzman's) "Dismal Theorem" clearly casts doubt on results derived from a cost-benefit approach to climate policy, at least if the equity implications of declining marginal utility are recognized; indeed, it suggests that a warning label be attached to integrated assessment models that rely on the cost-benefit approach - something like "Warning: To be applied only to non-extreme climate change possibilities". The Dismal Theorem marginalizes the debate over the social cost of carbon and the associated discussions about what makes estimates high or low. All of the existing estimates are infinitely too small. It similarly renders the current obsession of the scientific community for reaching consensus on central tendencies of climate change obsolete....

It should now be clear why the scientific community must move beyond trying to nail down consensus about the central baseline tendencies of climate change and embrace (though not exclusively) an organized effort designed to examine the "dark tails" of our possible futures...

We now turn to the warning label that we promised. The Dismal Theorem is derived from taking limits, so it is tempting to take its conclusion to its logical extremes.... One might also apply the generalized precautionary principle to all social issues for which there are unfortunate consequences in the fat tails of the distributions of critical variables because expected marginal damages are infinite for all of them. But then, how should we set priorities for distributing the planet's finite resources in the social interest? The economic tradeoffs would simply be undefined. Thus, we offer a concluding warning label on the Dismal Theorem: "Warning: Not to be taken to its logical extreme in application to real world problems."

re: Pigou Club

This goes back to my point that economics can prescribe policies that will elicit (relatively) predictable behaviours in the market. So, a Pigovian carbon tax (or a cap&trade) should be expected to decrease production of that negative "good" by "x". Or R&D subsidies would ameliorate it by "y", +/-.

Fine. Thanks. Good. Let's use those prescriptions. I am all for that contribution from mainstream economics. Who wouldn't be?

The problem is that we keep (reluctantly) bolting these "solutions" onto a vehicle that seems to be systemically producing ever more "externalities" that need to be dealt with - often alarmingly late in the game (SO2, CFC's, overfishing, etc.).

What's next? Nitrogen tax anyone? At least we will presumably have the "dance" well-rehearsed by then!

There is something wrong with "economics-as-usual" if it's solution is going to be to keep moving the vehicle in the same direction, ever faster, spewing out ever more negative issues to deal with. In a world of finite resources, finite waste sinks and finite regenerative capacity of ecologic services, an economic paradigm that abstracts those realities away with theoretical promises of substitutability, innovation and adaptation (and alchemy!) is deficient.

So, yes to the Pigou Club... Yes to the Montreal Protocol... Yes to SO2 cap&trade... Yes to fishing ITQ's... Thank economics and economists for their contribution to these successes... But don't think that their models of the "world" are "working"... although in the near-term, we've got to work with what is basically the only game in town...On Cato's Jerry Taylor responds to Michael Tobis posted 1 year, 11 months ago 131 Responses

"consideration of costs vs. benefits"

As I have mentioned elsewhere, we need effective policy to deal with the problems. And "effective" means exactly that - policies that elicit behaviours to effectively mitigate/adapt to climate change. And traditional economics has a tremendous amount to offer regarding which incentives, property rights, etc. best work in the real world - i.e. the global market place.

But I do have problems with "economics-as-usual", when it steps beyond behavioural prescriptions and pretends that it is somehow effectively modelling the world.

I.e. The basic thrust of Jerry's original article, which is subtitled "World to Scientists: Zip It!", which then goes on to declare economists pre-eminence in determining the economic costs and benefits. And comments like this from Robert Solow "If it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources.", or Julian Simon "Similarly, the quantity of copper that will ever be available to us is not finite... given the problem of the economic definition of "copper," the possibility of creating copper or its economic equivalent from other materials, and thus the lack of boundaries to the sources from which copper might be drawn."

This is, of course, then extended to the entire classical economic theory which, a priori, does not account for physical throughputs, just capital, labour and technology. Innovation and substitutability are somehow able to abstract resources, ecosystem services and waste sinks right out of consideration (or, in the case of Mr. Simon, suggest that alchemy is now possible - we will "create" copper somehow!).

It is when economics is stepping away from behavioural prescriptions, and into such models about "how the real world works", that it simply is a failed description. (The very idea that we could "substitute" human capital for, say, the ozone layer, beggars belief.)

Economics does, typically after the fact or late in the game, try to retrofit its model so has to impose costs on externalities. But the model itself still does not attempt to explicitly incorporate resource use, etc., into the model.

Nonetheless, the evidence that it "should" be doing so is piling up - fishery collapses, ozone depletion, GHG build-up, etc. These ecological dilemmas seem to be a systemic output from the "economics-as-usual" model. After acid rain, mercury, etc., does anyone actually think that GHG's are going to be the "last" externality that we'll need to account for? Maybe we should check the descriptive elements of the model a bit, or see whether we are missing some parameters? Hmmm?

And who might have some insights for the economists on how our material transformations, etc., interact with the world around us? Scientists, perchance? If not scientists, who?

Back to Jim Manzi's points 5&7, about clear articulations of cost&benefits... well, yeah, I agree. Let's start, for instance with Jerry's rosy A1F1 scenario above.

If I am reading from the same literature I think he is, there is also a B1 scenario which would limit emissions so that the temperature increase in 2085 would be only 2.1C, instead of the 4.0C that A1F1 produces... The difference in "net GDP per capita for developed countries"? $69,500 for A1F1 as Jerry claims, and $65,737 for B1. This despite the fact that "gross" GDP grew by a factor of ~ 7.4x from 1990-2100 under A1F1, but "only" 5.0x for B1... but by 2100 under A1F1, almost 40% of gross GDP is now going to pay for climate change adaptation on an annual basis, thereby cutting the "net" GDP basically back to the B1 scenario...

Leaving aside the wisdom of "preferring" an economy where 40% of its productive efforts is directed toward taming climate, or the bizarre
"precision" of these forecasts, is it even reasonable to try to trade-off an extra 5% net benefit a century from now for a much less certain, riskier environmental outcome? Apparently so, because it says so just upthread!

And again, this gets me back to the point about an abstract model that does not account for physical throughput... Anyway, I gotta go... I am very much enjoying the exchanges the last few days.On Cato's Jerry Taylor responds to Michael Tobis posted 1 year, 11 months ago 131 Responses

No, it is not a moot point.

The US is by far the wealthier nation. Two important points follow.
(1) It has a greater capacity to make sacrifices.
(2) It achieved that wealth by burning fossil fuels, which have - for the forseeable future - debased the atmospheric commons. It has a disproportionate responsibility for this.

This isn't to say that any party to negotiations is going to be happy with the way their "responsibility" for mitigation is defined, but this is not a moot point. On There is no comparison between Chinese and American GHG emissions posted 1 year, 11 months ago 41 Responses

neoclassical growth theory...

Jon,

First, I just wanted to briefly comment on your statement upthread regarding "growth theory" as only having been of interest for short periods, particularly the 1950's and 60's. I suggest that it has continued to be a key area of investigation, by Paul Romer, amongst others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Romer#Dominant_theme
So the theory has actually become more robust and rigorous. I would recommend David Warsh's 2006 book Knowledge and the Wealth Of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery for a (light on math) journey from Adam Smith through Solow to the present, if this is an area of interest - looks like it is.

The reason that I mention this is, again, that it not going to be that easy to simply topple "growth theory" from it current acceptance.

But back to your history and question regarding  Solow's residual. I think I agree with you. For centuries the economists had expected to diminishing returns to capital, labour and resources at the aggregrate- as well as the micro-level. The search for this "dark matter" is much of the story in Warsh's book.

It may seem somewhat underwhelming that Solow determined that it was "technical progress" that explained the "dark matter", but it is germane to the discussion here for two reasons.

First, they regressed the actual performance of the economy with and without proxies for "technical progress", and found that the residual had explanatory value. Pretty powerful stuff, IF true, because it not only frees you up from diminishing returns on theoretically finite labour, capital and resources, but actually suggests that accelerating returns could be possible... Hence the increasing policy emphasis on productivity and technical leadership over the ensuing years...

Second, since the "technical progress" is manifest primarily in the labour and capital, and since it is "technical progress" that is the key to growth, the resource part of the production function is basically dropped right out. The Cobb-Douglas equation itself only accounts for labour and capital, and technical progress. Presumed human ingenuity in resource substitution, resource discovery, etc., basically allows resources themselves to be ignored as required variables in determining economic output. For some, like Julian Simon, that goes as far as to imply "Similarly, the quantity of copper that will ever be available to us is not finite... given the problem of the economic definition of "copper," the possibility of creating copper or its economic equivalent from other materials, and thus the lack of boundaries to the sources from which copper might be drawn." Uh, we are going to create the basic element copper from what exactly??? But I digress... Although that is not all that different to what Paul Romer said in the link above...

To me, there are two glaring problems. First, the complete abstraction of the models so that there is no material throughput (from natural resources to waste), no accounting of increasing entropy, etc., just the labour and capital inputs - it is divorced from reality. But there it is, nonetheless!

But secondly, back to that regression. What if there was another explanation for the "dark matter" effect. In fact, Ayres & Warr have done similar regressions - basically using their concept of "energy" (they refer to it as "exergy", and basically they are distinguishing energy available to perform useful work)... They find that absolute levels of exergy used in the economy is equally capable of explaining the the "excess growth" that Solow explained with "technical progress"... This is not a trivial point of contention. It would imply that the economy has basically been getting a free ride from "exergy", while at least part of the benefit from "technical progress" has been overstated.

So, anyway, I think I am agreeing with you that there are serious problems with neoclassical economic growth theory in dealing with a finite world. I noticed that in Gore's Nobel acceptance speech today he quoted Orwell: "Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." I think that AGW and possibly peak oil are going to force a serious rethink, and you will start seeing energy and entropy start to enter into orthodox economic models. But like I said earlier, we don't have the luxury of waiting for an overthrow of economic thought while we need to get policies implemented in the next few short years.On The only way to a soft landing is down posted 1 year, 11 months ago 54 Responses

re: unbalanced quote

In the original DeSmogBlog post, Murgatroyd was taking the exact quote from the second to last paragraph here: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5imWhKGmZBsBlyG5-14qU25 ...

More interesting, though, is that Jerry Taylor himself showed up to debate the point at DeSmog. I engaged him, and he says some rather interesting things, including: "Privatizing the atmospheric commons is functionally impossible as far as I can tell." and "I do not disagree with you that economists cannot adequately engage in cost-benefit analyses without getting a large amount of underlying information about impact from scientists. And that's exactly what they do. If you read the economic literature on the subject, they all - rather uncritically - accept IPCC predictions about future temperature changes, rainfall patterns, sea level rise, extreme weather events, and so on and then translate that information into economic terms (including the impact on human wellbeing and mortality)."

I just point this out, not to endorse Taylor's prescriptions (I don't), but that he is not quite the "economics uber alles" caricature that he is being made out to be here.
On The only way to a soft landing is down posted 1 year, 11 months ago 54 Responses

thanks for posting this...

I was going to say that this year's Nobel Prize for economics had some crossover interest for grist readers...

I am going to the hockey game in a few minutes, so I am just picking off a decent primer amongst many, but this paper is a good, accessible survey of the types of goods and services most suited to being (pure) market goods or (pure) public goods, with a specific environmental frame of reference...
ABSTRACT

Economics is the science of the allocation of scarce resources among alternative ends. Market forces are efficient at allocating market goods: resources that are both excludable (one person can prevent another from using the resource) and rival (one person's use of a good or service precludes use of the same by another), and produce no negative externalities. However, the growth of the human system relative to the global ecosystem that sustains us is rapidly increasing the scarcity of ecosystem goods and services. Many of these services are non-excludable and/or non-rival, and hence not efficiently allocated by market mechanisms.... Neo-classical economists tell us not to worry, that as a good becomes scarce, its price increases and entrepreneurs develop substitutes. Yet non-market ecosystem services have no price, are predominately non-excludable, and will not be produced by market forces.... This paper will show how a proper analysis of ecosystem goods and services in the context of `rivalness' and excludability can dramatically enhance the rigor of economic analysis and help us develop an economic system compatible with a full planet.

Ref Rep?

So, it's ALL to the market and mispricings then, is it? That's a relief. I thought that the reduced rainfall had something to do with it.

Plus, isn't one of the great thing about markets is that prices can signals for substitutes. So, for instance, if Atlanta runs low on water they can just switch to, say, Coca-Cola. I'm liking this markets uber alles stuff!

Ok, look, resources in general should have a market price that reflects their true scarcity and full externality costs, granted, but the situations in Australia and the southern US, etc., are not just a function of market forces. They are severe droughts, not just water shortages. On 2007: A record-setting U.S. drought year posted 2 years, 1 month ago 22 Responses

Eventually (soon), may mean this too?

Zero emissions needed to avert 'dangerous' warming story here.

In January 2007, the European Commission issued a communication stating that "the European Union's objective is to limit global average temperature increase to less than 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels".

Andrew Weaver and colleagues at the University of Victoria in Canada say this means going well beyond the reduction of industrial emissions discussed in international negotiations.

Weaver's team used a computer model to determine how much emissions must be limited in order to avoid exceeding a 2°C increase. The model is an established tool for analysing future climate change and was used in studies cited in the IPCC's reports on climate change.

They modelled the reduction of industrial emissions below 2006 levels by between 20% and 100% by 2050. Only when emissions were entirely eliminated did the temperature increase remain below 2°C.

Original paper here.
Yikes!

Having said that, can someone elaborate on why Flannery contends that the upcoming data from IPCC is so much worse than what came out in the reports earlier this year?On Level of GHG emissions may be much higher than predicted posted 2 years, 1 month ago 10 Responses

Proof positive against biofuels!

Sure, you can argue for or against biofuels on various arcane points.

But consider these horrific consequences!!!

Germans in a froth as biofuel boom boosts price of 'liquid bread'

Excerpts:

Like most Germans, brewer Helmut Erdmann is all for the fight against global warming. Unless, that is, it drives up the price of his beer.

And that is exactly what is happening to Mr. Erdmann and other German brewers as farmers abandon barley -- the raw material for the national beverage -- to plant other, subsidized crops for sale as environmentally friendly biofuels.

"Beer prices are a very emotional issue in Germany -- people expect it to be as inexpensive as other basic staples like eggs, bread and milk," said Mr. Erdmann...

In the last two years, the price of barley has doubled to $271 (U.S.) a ton as farmers plant more crops such as rapeseed and corn that can be turned into ethanol or biodiesel, a fuel made from vegetable oil. As a result, the price for the key ingredient in beer -- barley malt, or barley that has been allowed to germinate -- has soared by more than 40 per cent, to around €385 or $522 per ton, from around €270 a ton two years ago, according to the Bavarian Brewers' Association.

For Germany's beer drinkers that is scary news: Their beloved beverage -- often dubbed 'liquid bread' because it is a basic ingredient of many Germans' daily diet -- is getting more expensive. While some breweries have already raised prices, many others will follow later this year, brewers say.

Talk about higher beer prices has not gone unnoticed by consumers. Sitting at a long wooden table under leafy chestnut trees at the Prater, one of Berlin's biggest beer gardens, Volker Glutsch, 37, complained bitterly.

"It's absolutely outrageous that beer is getting even more expensive," Mr. Glutsch said, gulping down the last swig of his half-litre dark beer at lunch. "But there's nothing we can do about it -- except drinking less and that's not going to happen."

The horror! The HORROR!!!On Depends on how it's made posted 2 years, 6 months ago 18 Responses

Favour a carbon tax, with one caveat

I definitely favour the carbon tax route, for the reasons discussed here: Addressing the Risks of Climate Change: The Environmental Effectiveness and Economic Efficiency of Emissions Caps and Tradable Permits, Compared to Carbon Taxes and here: The Pigou Club Manifesto .
From the executive summary of Shapiro's first piece, he highlights the pro's to the carbon tax approach:

• Carbon taxes directly raise the price of carbon-based energy, imposing the greatest costs on those firms and economies that produce the most emissions. In this way, they create direct incentives to reduce these energy emissions and substitute cleaner forms of energy, until the cost of doing so is greater than the tax.
  
• Carbon taxes do not create the price volatility and administrative problems
  associated with cap and trade.
  
• Carbon taxes embed or capture the costs of carbon-based pollution in the price of energy, potentially improving the overall efficiency of the economy.
  
• Carbon taxes would offer a more effective way to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions and provide more powerful incentives for the development of new, climate-friendly technologies.
  
• Carbon taxes offer a more attractive policy option for many governments, including those in developing nations, because governments can use the revenues to reduce other taxes or to finance economic development or popular programs.
  

As a previous poster mentioned, each regime can do the job, but they are redundant. The existing tax infrastructure systems globally are, by and large, already in place for a carbon tax as well.

The caveat I mention is for things like "not cutting down the rain forest". In a pure carbon-tax regime, there would be no payback for this kind of conservation behaviour, although the carbon-savings are large (whereas cap-and-trade could easily accommodate it.) The theory is that you would use "negative" taxes for this, but I don't see how that mechanism would work...
  On And if not, why not? posted 2 years, 6 months ago 20 Responses