Arnold Kling also responds to Megan McArdle. In particular, he favors carbon taxes over cap and trade because carbon taxes are easier to reverse if AGW turns out to be overblown:
What is the probability that the United Nations derivation of climate model consensus overstates the problem of man-made global warming? Unless that probability is zero, it seems to me that we should prefer a climate change policy that is reversible to one that it irreversible.
I’m inclined to think a carbon tax should be designed to automatically scale itself to actual events. A simple way to do this would be to index the carbon tax to global average temperature — if the world gets warmer, the tax goes up, but if the past warming trend reverses itself, the tax goes down or goes away completely.
An indexed carbon tax gets hairy when you try to combine it with offsetting tax cuts, though. Offsetting tax cuts are necessary to prevent raising the overall tax burden whenever the carbon tax rises, but what happens to the tax cuts if the indexing reduces or eliminates the carbon tax? You could reinstate the taxes you cut, but having tax rates jump around from year-to-year is not a good thing from an economic perspective.
Kling also has a good discussion of the economic similarities and differences between a carbon tax and cap & trade. It’s worth reading the whole thing.
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It is refreshing to see the conversation move beyond denial of the problem and onto concrete solutions. Frankly I don’t care one way or the other as regards taxes vs caps as long as there are results.
I’ve never been strongly opposed to the AGW hypothesis, and neither have Kling or McArdle. I divide up global warming theory into three seperate claims:
1. There has been a warming trend over the past century or so — I consider this pretty much confirmed. The urban heat island effect was a plausable reason for doubting the data when it was first raised as an objection, but the warming trend doesn’t go away when you correct for urbanization.
2. Human emissions of greenhouse gases are a major contributing factor to the warming trend — I consider this likely, but not yet fully confirmed. There are sound theoretical reasons for blaming the warming trend at least partially on CO2, and human activity has certainly increased atmospheric CO2 levels, but as far as I know there’s no predictive model of the relative importance of CO2 and solar input that has had its predictions confirmed with data collected after the model was developed. The big test for this will be what happens over the next decade or so as solar input goes down while CO2 levels continue to rise.
3. Catastrophic levels of warming are probable if we don’t drastically reduce CO2 emissions — I consider this possible but unlikely; warming predictions are all over the map, and as I mentioned under the second point, there’s a lot of work left before we have a predictive model of climate change which we can trust to produce solid numbers, but most mainstream predictions I’ve seen show a continuation or a very slight accelleration of the mild warming trend of the past century.
Based on this, I’m on board with a precautionarly program of moderate CO2 restrictions now, with the option to tighten or loosen the restrictions later depending on how the science shakes out.
Why focus on CO2?
http://earthsave.org/globalwarming.htm
"Data published by Dr. James Hansen and others show that CO2 emissions are not the main cause of observed atmospheric warming. Though this may sound like the work of global warming skeptics, it isn’t: Hansen is Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies who has been called “a grandfather of the global warming theory.†" The report indicates that non-CO2 sources account for most of the GW we “currently see and will see for the next 50 years.”
{And by the way, the DOE Energy Information Agency points out in annual reports that methane and nitrous oxides come principally from agriculture, with almost none from generation of electrity and little from transporation, unless you ride a horse.}
So apparently vegetariansim is the only potential salvation.Â
Tax meat. Tax food.
(This may be old news, but I just found http://www.petitionproject.org/index.html)
I’d thought that the CH4 and N2O absorbtion spectrums were saturated (i.e. the greenhouse effect from those gasses is maxed out), which means that on the margins there’s little or no effect from increasing or decreasing emissions, while with CO2 there’s potentially large effects from changing CO2 concentrations in either direction because the CO2 absorbtion spectrum isn’t saturated.
I may be misreading the article you linked, but it appears to be talking about the total effect of all the methane and nitrous oxides in the atmosphere, not the marginal effects of humans adding slightly more or slightly less of them to the air. The marginal effects are what matters from a policy perspective.
Kyoto is a seriously flawed treaty, and the Senate was right to vote it down 98-0, but I believe it’s possible to craft an anti-global-warming policy that avoids most of Kyoto’s flaws.
I keep hearing about Kyotos flaws, but the argument always boils down to mere assertions thta Kyoto would be DOOM for the economy. I’d like to see someone do a substantive post about why Kyoto was supposedly so terrible. Frankly I think that Kyoto represented an opportunity to invent an entire industry and spur technological progress, entirely analogously to the space race (which was similarly derided at inception and remains a favored target today).
My understanding is that thermal equilibrium has been perturbed, and that the current inventory of green house gasses is the problem;Â if we could magically stabilize at the current concentrations (CO2 2.6 ppm, Methane 1.78 ppm and Nitrous Oxides 0.38 ppm per http://www.livescience.com/environment/ap_060315_carbon_dioxide.html, I don’t know the sources for the numbers) global temperature average would still increase.
Theoretically (I guess), if we could reduce the methane, NOx, aersols, and other pollutants that contribute to GW, we could trade off with an increased CO2. Since CO2 is pretty much tied to a Standard Of Living (i.e., energy and transportation), and since the world is seeking an increase in SOL, it imight be worth considering concentrating on reducing more effective greenhouse gasses and allow CO2 to float until we get other energy sources on line (like nuclear).
The spectral response of energy absorbtion is pretty complicated, and made more so by clouds, moisture & aerosols in particular which aren’t well understood or charactertized, and the dynamics by energy re-emission following absorbtion. A little dated (I think), but a JPL paper ftp://popo.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/docs/workshops/01_docs/2001Green_co2_web.pdf talks about retransmmitted energy, showing decreased re-emission which is correlated by a model to CO2 (and other) energy modes. The CO2 bands (like O2, H2O, CH4, etc.) represent holes in the emission spectrum at spepecific frequencies; it is a continuous spectrum, and the "system" is still achieving equilibrium.
And I should probably say I generally have a conservationist bent, but the hype about GW and the necessity to do something immediately is flawed because it is aimed at changing people’s lives and behaviors in fundamental ways rather drastically by fiat. If we want to reduce electrcity production, we need to convince people to reduce demand, making it palatable and easier.Â
Instead of mandating wind and renewable power generating stations, we should provide enough money to individuals to overcome the price difference between energy hogs and super efficient air conditioners, heaters, and appliances. (Rating them for efficiency is fine, but when they cost SO much more than cheap models, who can afford them?) How about discussing the merits of district heating and cooling instead of individual HVAC units? How about some kind of economical mass transportation for smaller cities?
The flaws I see with Kyoto:
1. The emissions caps were rather arbirary.
2. There were no attempts to control the growth of emissions by developing countries. China and India are rapidly becoming the top greenhouse gas emitters, and Kyoto would not have addressed that.
3. Kyoto mandated cap and trade, which I see as a flawed way of controlling greenhouse gas emissions. Compared with a carbon tax, cap and trade is high-overhead and presents far too many opportunities for political corruption in the allocation of emissions caps. Cap and trade is also too inflexible if it turns out that reducing CO2 emissions is prohibitively expensive after all.
4. The attempted reduction was too extensive given the state of climate science at that time.
I think that Kyoto represented an opportunity to invent an entire industry and spur technological progress, entirely analogously to the space race
That’s the Broken Window Fallacy. The space race produced a lot of useful spinoff technology, but what would have happened if the thousands of engineers and scientists and billions of dollars employed in the space race had been available to work on problems of more direct application? Granted, I’m quite fond of the space race because rockets are awesome, but that’s a different argument.
The leaders pushing for greenhouse gas reductions could try a different tactic. Instead of pushing the consumers of fossil fuels to make sacrifices to reduce their emissions they should talk to the producers. For example, it would be much easier to convince the OPEC leaders to announce they will cap oil production at current levels in the interest of preventing global warming.
The other big problem with Kyoto is it was designed to destroy the US economy. It was calculated on a per-nation basis, not a per-capita basis, so the US would have had to reduce CO2 emissions by 40% per capita under 1990 levels by 2010 to comply due to population growth. Since this is obviously impossible even if we had signed it when Clinton punted in the late 1990s, it was "dead on arrival".
Of the nations that had actual Kyoto emissions cuts – China, India, and numerous other countries were exempt – none of them has actually met them.
Ultimately, the problem with Kyoto was its reliance on "managed" CO2 reduction, as well as its implicit notion of that successful nations should be "punished" for their "sins" of CO2 emissions.
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The U.S. Gov has mandated that HDTV will happen, all providers will use it by the end of next Feb. The Fed Gov has mandated fleet mileage standards for passenger vehicles.
There is a wide range of efficiencies in power consuming products, with water heating, space heating and air conditioning leading the way in the amount of energy consumed in households; what prevents the Fed Gov from requiring all producers of consumer goods meet efficiency standards in thier products sent to market? My gut feeling is a 10% reduction in projected energy usage for households over the next 10-15 years is the minimum that could reasonably be expected, with 30% more likely as water heaters, AC units, refridgerators, etc. get replaced.
what prevents the Fed Gov from requiring all producers of consumer goods meet efficiency standards in thier products sent to market?
Tradeoffs. If dishwasher manufactures thought they could make more energy efficient dishwashers without increasing costs or reducing performance, they’d be making them already. Major appliances are already labelled with energy efficiency data, and some people do shop on the basis of that data, so improving efficiency without losing anywhere else would be pure win.
That’s part of why I prefer a carbon tax to specific efficiency mandates — it adjusts the price of energy to reflect our best guess as to the environmental cost and lets individuals decide between paying that cost and making efficiency improvements.
Either GW is a problem or it is not. If it is a problem, it needs to be addressed, carbon taxes do not reduce carbon emissions.
Those that cannot afford the more efficient appliances will just end up paying the carbon tax. I would love to drive a hybrid, can’t justify the increased expense. Concidentally, one of the morning news shows this a.m. talked about fuel efficient vehicles and hybrids, pointing out that even with todays gas prices the car will be junked before the savings in gas dents the the higher price. I would love to use a passive goethermal heat sink for my central heating & air unit, which I am about to replace (not by choice); checked into it and the cost is about twice as high as a conventional unit with a payoff at about 7 years. Can’t afford it.
Death and taxes are unavoidable, spending money on something with a long term payoff is a luxury.
And if (as I suspect) there are more people in my situation than not, taxes are more likely to just pull money out of the economy than change how energy is consumed.
carbon taxes do not reduce carbon emissions.
It’s widely accepted among economists that if you tax something, you’ll get less of it. People drive less and buy more fuel-efficient cars when gasoline is expensive. When electricity is more expensive, people will be more motivated to buy energy-efficient light bulbs and appliances — it’s a question of tradeoffs between cost, performance, and efficiency, not a binary "can I afford it" question; in your example, higher energy costs would reduce the payoff time (the geothermal sink would probably still not make sense, but other improvements might). When producing electricity from fossil fuels is more expensive, it will make more economic sense for electricity producers to build renewable and nuclear plants rather than coal, oil, and gas plants.
When there’s a carbon tax, people will make the efficiency improvements that make economic sense, which is not necessarily the improvements that congress would mandate if we went your route.
It’s widely accepted among economists that if you tax something, you’ll get less of it.
In general obviously, but if there is no immediate payback but it’s still a question of managing household expenses; can I afford to pony up a large charge all at once, or is it more realistic given my budget to pay a little more over the long haul. And it isn’t going to make it easier to fork out large sums of money when more of my income is used to purchase the same amount of energy.
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