I'm really crossing my fingers that preventing anthropogenic global warming is as simple as banning CFCs. A lot of the CO2 emission control schemes being considered could seriously stress the economy.
A lot of the CO2 emission control schemes being considered are lame.
The key to reducing CO2 is to commit to a policy that will affect the energy market in a gradual, predictable way: A slow phase in of a carbon tax. Raise the carbon tax the equivalent of $0.25/gallon every year, forever. No increase in the year the tax passes.
That means no economic effect this year. No change at all -- except that everyone now expects gas to be $5/gallon in four years, so if you're buying a car now you better get something with an electric motor on it. If you're investing in energy you better invest in renewables rather than petroleum. And then by the time the gas tax is $1 higher than it is now, the installed base of cars has been replaced with higher efficiency ones, so the burden of the tax is already mitigated because a) you're now buying less gas, and b) so is everyone else, so demand goes down, so the pre-tax price of gas goes down and cancels out a significant portion of the tax.
Meanwhile the government collects a large pile of cash (largely at the expense of oil company profits -- what a shame) that can be used to subsidize the installation of renewable energy generating capacity, which creates jobs etc. etc.
EDIT: sarcasm removed
For example, the problem here is "how can we subsidize renewable energy efficiently." Obviously there are plenty of stupid ways to do that. See: Solyndra. Let me suggest a better alternative: Forget about which companies should get money or qualifications or anything of that nature. Just take the money from the tax and give it to the people generating electricity from non-fossil sources in proportion to the number of kilowatt hours they push into the power grid. No complicated rules, no governments speculating about which companies are going to succeed or fail, just this: you produce a KWh from solar/wind/hydro/whatever, you get a check. The end.
You could structure it as a 95% of payments in go out to renewables producers. But the problem there is it doesn't provide any kind of stable payment structure for the renewables folks to structure their 10-50 year financing on.
If you set $x/kWh that's fine at first blush, but we could easily run into a situation with a big surplus (which goes into general coffers and is probably spent on wars) or a big deficit (which we definitely can't afford).
I like the idea but I can't see any way to implement it that doesn't end in tears in some way or another.
There is a natural law that applies to politics as much as anything: If you think you can't do it, you don't try. And you can't do it if you don't try.
>You could structure it as a 95% of payments in go out to renewables producers. But the problem there is it doesn't provide any kind of stable payment structure for the renewables folks to structure their 10-50 year financing on.
I don't see how the volatility there would be any worse than the normal volatility in the energy market -- if anything it's a hedge against it because the primary method that could cause the subsidy to be reduced would be as a result of renewables rapidly supplanting fossil fuels, and in that scenario the renewables market is booming and the subsidy is less important.
I agree with this. It's absolutely true.
That said, I don't agree that government is necessarily the right place to "try" things as the nature of government is fundamentally VERY different than product design or other entrepreneurial endeavors. If you have a theory about how the business world should be and you fail, the company folds and it's undone. If a law is passed and it's imperfect, bad, or horrible we'll likely have to live with it forever or nearly so. The majority of the laws ever passed are still on the books today. The Patriot Act and the Brady Bill are the only two things I can think of that had an automatic expiration.
In other words, in markets there is virtually no hysteresis. When talking about conglomerates or other big, big businesses there is definitely some. When dealing with the law, hysteresis is the rule not the exception.
It is for that reason I find I am always hesitant to argue that we simply have to pass "A law stating X" and that we can fix things.
Running an electric car on pure coal is more CO2 efficient than any gasoline car out there. And it's easy to switch to cleaner electricity sources.
That claim is contentious. http://elpc.org/plug-ins#4
>Multiple studies have shown that EVs and PHEVs reduce total pollution compared with conventional gasoline or diesel-fueled vehicles, even when batteries are charged with electricity from coal plants.
I've run the numbers myself several times (simply Google for 1. coal's CO2 output per KWH, 2. miles/KWH, 3. CO2 output per gallon of gasoline), and coal-EV has always come out as a super CO2 efficient way to travel, the equivalent of a 50-60 MPG/car, if I recall correctly.
Do you have any sources of contention for that?
Your proposition is example of exactly the extremist control scheme I was talking about.
Nonsense. There is in any event finitely much petroleum in the ground. Even if CO2-caused global warming is complete rubbish, it is still preferable to transition to renewable energy in a gradual fashion rather than hitting a global price spike that would induce an enormous economic catastrophe when a supply panic occurs at a time when all the world's infrastructure is still tooled for fossil fuels.
Again, this is not a certainty. Prices may very likely rise gradually on their own, allowing market forces to dictate a shift towards renewables. No reason to get incompetent bureaucrats involved
The 'invisible hand of the market' will have no problem in directing a transition. The recent increase in oil production due to fracking and horizontal drilling is a perfect example of the market directing investment in response to an increase in price.
You need to understand that many - a minority perhaps, but many - of the supporters of emission controls are opposed to industry per se, not the effects of same.
Leaving that aside, my point to the OP was that he was being naive in assuming that calls to limit industry would cease if CFCs were proved to be the sole agent of AGW.
Terms like "denier" or "warmist" are only useful if you want to shut down reasoned debate.
If there were substantial numbers of people going from evidence to the conclusion that climate change is not real, then I could see not labeling them all with the same term, but there isn't.
It's very clearly meant to be pejorative and to up the political rhetoric level. It's taken directly from "holocaust deniers", and that's a shameful association to be making.
I can't take anyone who uses the term seriously on the issue, it's just too much of political hack word.
Addresses a couple of your impressions rather directly:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/04/23/1909881/debunkin...
But like a lot of propaganda it continues being spread after being killed. Zombie propaganda.
The snarky response of What's the weather like on your planet? has never seemed more appropriate.
BTW, I heard that evolution is just a 'theory', and many experts seriously doubt that it can be true.
Between this and your last comment, your "scientific" arguments aren't very persuasive, they sound more like daily kos talking points.
"Consensus" may not give us proof, but in the absence of compelling evidence against it, it's fairly strong.
Yep, they could be wrong. But it's not the way to bet.
I don't know man I just threw that down as a hypothetical. Look at the sibling comment next to mine for a more well-thought-out refutation :)
Scientific consensus is a valid argument in the same sense that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof"; the probability that mainstream science is wrong and you are right is low, proportionally to the amount of science at either end.
The fact that the Earth is round was known by the Greeks and has been acknowledged ever since, not least following several circumnavigations by people such as Magellan. The notion that people (scientists and laymen alike) believed in a flat earth is really a popular myth perpetrated, probably, to make the Columbus story more interesting. Columbus knew perfectly well that the Earth was round.
The fact that Earth and the universe are very old was pretty much agreed upon since the 18th century with the arrival of geology as a branch of science. Aristotle thought the universe was infinite in age. The Hindus thought it was billions of years old. The 6000 year thing is a very recent Christian idea.
If we're going to nit-pick, this was the scientific "consensus" until a Catholic priest postulated the big bang.
[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100409-black...
Actually, the educated (still pre-scientific, as the scientific method wasn't really established as a thing) consensus had turned against the former before the latter was even a thing, much less a consensus (which it never really was, either the first time, ~AD 500 with biblically-based -- from the Septuagint -- estimates of the date of creation ~5500 BC, or the second time ~AD 2000 with biblically-based -- from the Masoretic texr -- estimates of the date of creation ~4000 BC.)
Note that I'm not saying I believe any specific theories are correct or incorrect. I'm just trying to make a general statement that appeals to consensus are themselves not that useful and are certainly not "science." Also note that I am well aware that opposing political groups might purposefully publicize articles disagreeing with the consensus in order to make it seem like there is less of a consensus than there actually is.