Comments kayser has made

Nice post

You make a lot of good points very eloquently; however, this is not a fair point:

Remember that the vast majority of contaminated food has come directly out of the industrial food system, not local markets.

This is not fair because what we really want is the percentage of industrially-produced food that has contamination, not the sheer number of incidents. Since everyone is eating industrialized food right now, of course those numbers will be much higher than for organic.

I found an interesting article online which pertains to this issue:
http://ucce.ucdavis.edu/files/datastore/234-208.pdf

It notes:

The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) has not conducted any study that
compares or quantitates the specific risk for
infection with E. coli O157:H7 and eating either
conventionally grown or organic/natural foods.On Contact your legislators and take action on the sorry state of the industrial food system posted 1 year, 7 months ago 1 Response

Possibilities

"Tax carbon. Don't spend alot."

"Use less juice. Burn less stuff. Use the sun."

"Eat puppies. Roasted with garlic demiglaze" (OK, made that one up)On Here's your chance to be the Pollan of climate change posted 1 year, 10 months ago 94 Responses

Re: Jim

Thanks for the reply. The point you are attempting to make would be an important contribution, though in my mind it is not established, due to things like

1. the thickened tail which you seem to be getting ready to write about,
   
2. the potential for bias in pulling so heavily from one study, albeit creditable (Nordhaus),
   
3. the fact that a carbon tax should have less deadweight loss than an income tax (your response to "HCG" on the Am Scene site was interesting but did not dispute his point). In fact, it seems reasonable to say that all conservatives should support a revenue neutral USA carbon tax even if they don't think the environmental savings justify it. I will concede that many proposals direct the revenue to things other than income tax relief.)

A few points

I just realized that my 6 day late response to the Manzi post will never get read, so with apologies I will cut and paste that here:

One critical question I have about the Manzi analysis is whether measuring the impact on "consumption" leaves out too much important stuff. Put it this way: if global warming kills my uncle, the reason I care about it is NOT because aggregate consumption has been reduced. Are non-economic factors (like "the fact that I don't want people to die", "the fact that I don't want my house to flood", "the fact that I don't want to pick up and move inland", "my enjoyment of the outdoors", etc.) being accounted for in the Nordhaus analysis?

Weitzman pointed this out on page 18 of his Stern review-review:

More mundane examples of alternatives to CO2 mitigation from middle-of-the-probability-distribution mild warming might include accumulating air conditioners to counter high temperatures or erecting sea walls to keep the rising ocean out of coastal cities.
Such alternative investments compensate mostly for potential loss of "indoor" consumption and they tend to be a lot less expensive than wholesale abatement of greenhouse gases.

The real problem is in the tails and it mostly concerns "outdoor" consumption. If the definition of consumption is broadened (as it should be) to include non-market enjoyment of the natural environment --like habitats, ecosystems, and species -- then it is difficult to imagine what the compensating investments are for which we should now be saving more as an alternative that might substitute for holding down [temperature increase] directly.

With roughly 3% IPCC-4 probability, we will "consume" a terra incognita biosphere within a hundred years whose mass species extinctions, radical alterations of natural environments, and other extreme outdoor consequences of a different planet will have been triggered by a geologically-instantaneous temperature change that is significantly larger than what separates us now from past ice ages.

What he's saying is, OK, we might be able to fix some consumption-related problems by building big walls to keep out floods, or whatever. But what about the fact that "it just sucks if the environment changes"? There's not a terrific way to measure that economically, although we can think of a lot of reasons why it sucks (like we can't go hiking in the same places, or things like that). Does Jim/Nordhaus account for this?

Weitzman further makes the point that these "outdoor" enjoyments are fairly uncorrelated with "indoor" enjoyments like consuming stuff. So, borrowing from finance the idea that you want your assets spread out among uncorrelated things, it might make sense to spend some extra money to make sure you don't get whomped on non-monetary enjoyments like "having fun outdoors." In other words, not only should we count the "outdoor" costs, we may want to count them extra because they will be so big they will make the "outdoors" more scarce and valuable to us. In other words, you don't know what you've got till it's gone:

So, with the benefit of hindsight, let us now ask: Is there any economic rationale by which greenhouse-warming damages are as much uncorrelated as they are correlated with  aggregate economic activity? The answer, when you think about it, is yes. No one has ever tried to argue that the effects of global warming will be evenly spread among regions of the world or sectors of the economy.

The parts of an economy likely to be most impacted by global warming involve its "outdoor" aspects (broadly defined) like agriculture, coastal recreational areas, and natural landscapes (including the existence value of ecosystems, species, and so forth). Climate-affected "outdoor" activities may be differently impacted by greenhouse warming than "indoor" economic activities constituting the bulk of the economy, which are largely going to be dominated by the unknown future growth rate of labor-augmenting technological progress.

Instances of changes in "outdoor" activities under global warming include what happens to tropical agriculture, losing significant parts of Bangladesh (or Florida) to rising sea levels, the "consumption" of an altered natural world that is a direct argument in the utility function, and so forth. These kinds of changes, which include the existence value of natural environments, are presumably not highly correlated with technological progress in computing power, furniture making, or better pharmaceuticals a century from now.

The relevant share of the "outdoor" subset of the economy in investment-beta calculations might be disproportionately large because it is disproportionately-largely impacted by greenhouse warming. Furthermore, it might plausibly be argued that the high income elasticity of environmental awareness will make for a high existence value of unaltered natural habitats when per-capita incomes have increased ten-fold over the course of a century or more.

Huckabee Misquote

The other commenters are right, but I bet the first draft of this transcript left out the word "oil" leading to the quote that David wrote.

It looks like the transcript is a real rush job. Apparently they didn't proofread (Hillary Clinton: "We cab drastically lower our use of electricity...")On Presidential candidates answer dumb question about global warming posted 1 year, 11 months ago 12 Responses

Way over the top

This is a bad metaphor; crack cocaine and coal are really dissimilar.

Crack has no social value. Coal electrifies cities, which does provide social value. Electricity supports economic activity, growth, health, and a lot of other good things. Like it or not coal is a quick path to electrification.

People get "addicted" to crack because it feels really nice. Developing countries get "addicted" to coal because it is a well-understood technology that can help support economic growth. It's important that we understand the difference in importance between empty physical pleasure and economic growth. For a developing nation, the latter can be the difference between famine and sustenance. Electrification is not an idle pursuit.

It's fine and appropriate to suggest there are better electrification technologies out there, but the crack analogy doesn't seem legitimate to me.

Now by contrast, talk of America's "addiction" to oil (or coal) is more sensible because a lot of these dirty technologies are actually supporting a very wasteful lifestyle. So the social value of marginal electricity/oil is not as high for us well-off folks.On Notable quotable posted 2 years ago 1 Response

Plus

Oh, plus, you are probably partly saying that in the sufficiently long term, abatement costs are negative. That's a great point but don't underestimate how much it will smack of sophistry to tell 100 million voters that their energy prices "are not really going up, because think how much lower your externalities are!"

The point is a good and subtle one, but it will not convince the masses. When people think of energy prices they are thinking of the literal cost, not some relatively inchoate future costs to people they probably don't know.On Everything comes down to whether fighting climate change will hurt ordinary voters posted 2 years ago 12 Responses

Awesome video

If there's one thing you can say about John McCain, it's that he speaks his mind eight years ago.On Politicians and the art of deception posted 2 years ago 7 Responses

The dispute is about what the goal is

You're assuming that the goal is to achieve a particular %age reduction in pollution. Given that goal, I agree cap and trade is more direct. However, I could just as easily say the purpose of a carbon tax is to properly internalize the externality-- i.e. to make people pay for future damages. If that is our goal, then the "scientists" who determine the right setting are now economists. The "market" now determines the appropriate amount of pollution given that everyone is paying their share for damages.

If you believe that 80% reduction is an absolutely necessary goal, cap-and-trade is the preferred approach. If you believe that pollution is damaging but there is nothing really special about 80% reduction versus 90% versus 70% versus whatever-- if you believe that so long as people pay their share for damages the outcome is OK -- then a carbon tax is preferred.

There are reasonable justifications to support cap-and-trade given this choice (for example, "maybe a carbon tax would underestimate the damages of pollution" or "since a carbon tax does not actually commit to redistributing money to the damaged party, it is not fair" or "most damages are outside the U.S. so the government's extra carbon-tax revenue doesn't help those people") but these reasons are not the ones given by Kommareddi.

It would be a mistake to say that these two policies are aiming for exactly the same thing. Similar, but not quite the same.On No carbon reduction program is a silver bullet posted 2 years ago 10 Responses

(No subject)

eh. Reese's peanut butter cups are tasty. Give it a rest for halloween. One day a year is not the end of the world. From a pragmatic standpoint, it's also a really bad way to try to pull people to your cause.On Does this Halloween skepticism make me a curmudgeon? posted 2 years, 1 month ago 7 Responses

Fascinating post

I wonder what is the optimal regulatory environment for utilities? I've always been suspicious of what seems to be a pretty messed up system (from what little I know).

Perhaps Gore's idea of the electranet is one of the ways to chip away at the system..On 'Carbon-friendly' utilities may not necessarily be in the public interest posted 2 years, 2 months ago 7 Responses

Question

Forgive me for questioning orthodoxy, but why is a moratorium on new coal plants part of the optimal policy on climate change?

1. Does it address a market failure besides the externality of CO2 pollution or the spillover effects of renewables R&D investment?
   
2. If not -- if this is simply another way to target CO2 pollution -- can we agree that a moratorium is not part of the optimal policy portfolio, and that instead we need a carbon tax?

David:

1. "Terrapass... claims it does not fund abatement projects that would have been performed anyway."  OK. It sounds like a really devilish problem to me. Do they audit internal financial planning reports? (I guess they can ask for whatever they want since the company is asking them for offset credits). And then disentangle those reports to extract the marginal cost of abatement? What if the company hasn't calculated the cost? Does Terrapass ask the company for the reason they abated? I can see how, if Terrapass can reach deep enough into company-internal memos, presentations, reports and even emails, it would become increasingly hard to knowingly scam them. But it still seems doable... while winking at your compadres in the company meeting, you say "well, our default option is to build Highly Polluting Plant A..." But even if auditing usually works it sounds like a very expensive and time-consuming process. I guess I should read up on what they do...

2. "there's absolutely no reason at all to buy exactly the amount of credits that will compensate for, say, your plane flight." Agreed. The main dispute I had was with the appropriate definition of "carbon neutral" given the (supposed) imperfect auditing of additionality. If credits are, say, 75% likely to be additional due to imperfect auditing, then people should not claim neutrality unless they overbuy.

Agree with the post

Thanks for the post. Something that really shows how true this is, is the fact that so many people today are still not using CFL's.

Advocates (like me!) of market-based solutions like carbon tax or cap-and-trade tend to argue we should give consumers a "pricing signal" so that it is cost-effective to do the right thing. But for CFL's, it already is cheaper. This suggests that the problem is perhaps one of education, or greater consciousness of the effect of small decisions.

Public education is clearly going to have to be a part of the campaign here. (And as a positive, educated citizens will vote for more sensible policies... well, let's hope so.)On Finally some mainstream focus on efficiency posted 2 years, 3 months ago 12 Responses