Gar, it's not clear who you're arguing against with all these straw men and tangents. I have tons of stuff I need to get to today so I can't go through it all. Suffice to say, this analogy --

Suppose, for example, we handled littering the way Roberts wants to handle carbon emissions. Instead of just fining people when they littered, we rewarded them every time they did not litter.

-- is absurd, as I assume you understand.

Also, I never argued that pricing carbon is the only or even primary form of GHG policy.

Also, there are means of rebating those who have exceeded regulatory GHG targets that don't involve calculating additionality. Sean and his dad have described at least one in some detail.

Also, I'm all for efficiency standards, but the home efficiency market is hopelessly broken. It is virtually impossible for the average homeonwer to find out how much they're paying in aggregate, where the inefficiencies are, which inefficiencies cost what, who can fix them, and how much it will cost. You can mandate higher efficiency, but you could also work to clarify market signals, remove split incentives, institute real-time pricing, etc. etc. This is an area where market forces are not working and could be helped to work.

Also, yes, many European countries are ahead of us in renewables, but at the cost of spending far more per unit of GHG reduction than they might have if they'd instituted smarter policies. It's certainly better than the U.S. nothingburger, but it hardly seems like a model to emulate.

And so on. It seems you're taking out grudges here against some imaginary interlocutor. You could probably make your points better, and more civilly, if you left the phantom guy-who-wants-to-pay-people-for-not-littering out of it.

grist.org

I answered you rather than writing in general because you issued a challenge. If you want impersonal third person writing, don't issue first person challenges. Also I answered what you wrote, not what was in your heart, not being a mindreader. You laid out your argument in provocative terms, and surprise people were provoked. The littering example was taking the principle you outlined to a logical conclusion. You did not mean it, you should not have said it.  I have spent more time than I had on grist last night and this morning, so I think I'll let what I wrote stand on its own a few day.

Is the "logical conclusion" of the principle of carbon pricing that we should follow people around charging them a nickel each time they exhale?

grist.org

Littering is a lousy analogy, because it presumes that CO2 release is done out of spite or disregard for the wants of others.  That simply isn't true.

Every ounce of CO2 that gets released is released in the course of producing something that some other member of society wants - including all of those on this email thread - from electricity to steel to cement to a hot shower.  Or, as David aptly points out, to facilitate our own selfish respiratory needs.  Could those products be made with less CO2?  Of course.  Could we contemplate a world that used less CO2-intensive materials?  Sure.  But we are all partially culpable for the current state of affairs.  

By comparison, I am in no way culpable for the guy in the car ahead of me who throws his beer can out on the highway.  He is simply making my world worse because he's lazy.  In that instance, a punitive stick is all that is needed, and if it were a good analogy to CO2 then that's all we'd need in this case as well.  But it's not.  We may all wish that our electricity was cleaner, but if you are reading this email, you are consciously making a choice to make do with the electricity you've got to satisfy your own desire to blog.  (You selfish bastard!)  Your personal standard of living goes up every time that guy in the El Camino ahead throws another MGD bottle out of his car.  Penalizing him for tossing it also penalizes you, unless you can find a way for him to give you the same benefit without the litter.  That is what a good carrot does - and it is precisely what is absent from most of the carbon policy conversation.

OK David and Sean, but we are not talking about carrots in general. We are talking about carrots specifically as price signals. (That is what the whole "market based democracy" thing means.) And there really is no way to give positive price signals, price signals as a reward for not emitting, as efficiently as charging. You either run it like renewable tax credits, which give a break for the tech you choose to reward. Or pick something Sean Casten's proposal for a regulatory based trading system which is actually similar to the earliest cap & trade proposals before they were implemented in the real world. You set a "command & control" based standard for something, for example emissions  generated per BTU of delivered energy.

Their are two problems with regulatory based standards. One is that if set the regulation at the wrong level, you send a lot of "carrots" to people doing stuff they would do anyway. The other is that the regulation is of a means rather than an end. For example, under the example of Sean's proposal a lot of co-gen would be developed in the paper industry. However we have a lot of potential to reduce paper use, which reduces emissions in ways Sean's regulatory thing won't capture. (I'll leave it to Sean or someone to post the links to Sean's proposals.) That doesn't mean there is not room for regulations along the line Sean proposes. But instead of trying force stuff into price signals that does not really fit, the better way is to have a price on carbon, and then have a command & control regulations in area where you know what needs to be done. Again public investment + regulation +price combined is the way to solve. Trying to fit "carrots"  into the price part of the equation won't work. Why did Komanoff get so mad? Its something that has been examined in detail. The theory is well known. The empirical data is well known.  

If all these polluting behaviors (littering, fossil fuel CO2 burning) are indeed "bad" then I fail to see how the polluter in the car ahead of me makes anything "better" for me if I'm on my bicycle, or  not littering... to use the analogies being made above.  In my case, I'm apt to be stopping to pick up their trash and recycle/dispose of it properly.   Would that I could do that so easily with their fossil-combusted CO2.

I don't know about the "1.9 cents a kWh renewable tax credit", but I don't think it exists for households in my state (Ohio), maybe it's only for utilities to take advantage of here?

I view Carrots and sticks as two complementary means of persuasion, the flip sides of a coin that ideally should be played together with some more increasing energy efficiency code rule standards (to move the minimum baseline behavior forward).  To me it seems arbitrary to favor just a carrot, over a stick or vice versa.  The psychology of various market players (individuals or corporations) may be predisposed to react more responsively to either a carrot, or a stick.

From a market perspective, I do like Hansen's proposed "fossil fuel carbon tax and equal per-capita rebate" approach.  I believe it would effectively reduce emissions with a minimum of political bias toward existing (fossil based or other non-green) powers that be.  Make the tax (and rebates) high enough and the learning, innovation, internalized decisionmaking-- and consumer behavior changes-- will follow.  It's the most likely approach that doesn't involve making inefficiently biased winners and losers from existing market players (as I fear doling out carbon credits would do).  It also doesn't presume to predict or limit innovation as some particular technology forcing solution would do.

For the second example of energy conservation retrofitting-- I do tend to agree there's a huge lack of skilled green workers to accurately assess/audit existing buildings and advise/perform the necessary conservation retrofits prioritized in terms of payback time.  There's a readily available free or subsidized service for low-income housing retrofitting which may or may not follow these exact criteria-- but a dearth of affordable consultation and qualified assistance for the rest of us.  

I'm speaking as the resident of a large midwest city whose grid is 90 percent coal fired and 10 percent nuclear.  I've been shopping for energy audit technical assistance for my church building for the past year with nearly zero success...  I find vendors touting their low-e windows, or their insulation... but nobody separate from the sale to accurately assess and advise in a quantitative way for my particular building's energy savings... Nobody with a thermal imaging capability or blower door for anything other than the single family residence, and those are mostly targeting low income (grant funded projects).  DOE's DIY energy auditing tools also don't fit the type of institutional use, they are all geared toward businesses with other types of buildings and uses. [end rant]

Moving toward sustainability with hopefulness, one revolution at a time.

anything else is twisting yourself into pretzels to fit into some market-based system.  And I would argue that it's no longer necessary (or as necessary) to twist yourself into pretzels, what with the financial meltdown and other examples of the inadequacy of markets.

As Gar tried to explain in the original post, the "carrot" is the public investments.  If people want public investments to solve their problems, they elect officials who want to do the same, they use tax money (or print the money at a national level if appropriate), and then they make the nice shiny things that people could get excited about -- like rail.

Then the investors/entrepreneurs make nice shiny trains to try to get government contracts, which they make a profit from.  Or to use the CHP example, the government says that all coal plants that don't have CHP will be shut down by a certain year, and then all the nice CHP people have a market, onaccounta they are attracted by the carrot of profit.  But putting carrots into GHG market-based cap-and-trade or carbon taxes (into taxes?!) doesn't make sense.