Though I tremble to do it, I have to agree with John Tierney, in a qualified fashion, contra Mark Kleiman:
1. The point of environmental management isn't to denounce sin, it's to get prices right. The problem with GHG-emitting activities is that they are artificially underpriced due to the lack of a carbon tax (or equivalent mechanism, such as cap-and-trade, for internalizing the external costs of those activities). With the right prices, the cost of conferences with physical attendance will rise, improving the competitive position of alternatives such as high-quality teleconferencing, which allows people to meet virtually rather than physically. But if people want or need to confer in person, and are willing to pay the full price including the price of the environmental damage their travel does, they can do so with a clear conscience.2. Rich people use more goods and services than poor people. That's what "rich" means. Of course multi-millionaires have larger gross GHG footprints than you and I do. So what? If Tierney wants to work on decreasing income gradients, I'm all for it. But of course he's not. He just hates the idea that some rich people use their wealth to promote ideas he dislikes.
3. A large gross carbon footprint doesn't imply a large net carbon footprint. That's what offsets are about. Once GHG contributions are priced appropriately, there won't be any need for private offset purchases. But in the meantime someone who wants to be personally GHG-neutral can get there by writing checks for the activities necessary to offset his or her footprint.
1. We don't have an accurate price. We don't know how much the planet will warm. We don't know how much economic damage this will cause, or upon whom it will fall. We have not settled upon a way to price the interests of future generations in a cooler climate and a ready supply of fossil fuels. We have not even established an irrefutable argument for our status quo bias.
We will almost certainly establish the "correct" price by observation: does it make people do a lot less flying, driving, and power consumption? It therefore seems reasonable to me to evaluate whether your attendance at a conference actually leads to less flying, driving, and power consumption. An academic or journalist who flies for work five or six times a year spews more carbon than an SUV loving Texan who vacations at Grandma's.
2. Many wealthy environmentalists emit not merely much carbon, but tons of moral outrage. If they moralize about other peoples' cars, other people are entitled to moralize about their private jets.
3. Offsets are not the moral equivalent of indulgences--but they are just about as effective. I have no doubt that many who use them devoutly believe that they work, but I don't think many of them care to investigate the matter too closely. In some sense it's a technical question, but as far as I can tell, that technical question is not solveable.
Tree planting is risible unless you commit to keep the land planted forever. Shutting down third world pollution creates a rich market in polluting factories, and also does a lot of things that would have been done anyway. Other projects are even more questionable. None of them, as far as I can tell, attempt to account for rebound effects. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but as far as I can see any cap and trade system that isn't global, and/or includes offsets, will do (to a first approximation) basically nothing to halt global warming.
I'm not saying this makes them wrong about climate change: hypocrites can speak the truth as easily as the virtuous. But I do think that if you are deeply committed to combatting climate change, you have to actually do your best to reduce your carbon footprint, not attempt to offset it. No one in Mark's or my demographic wants to hear this, because we like flying places, and we get to do a lot of it for work. No criticism of Mark implied--I'm just as guilty, or not. But we shouldn't get mad at Tierney for pointing it out, whatever his motives.
The cost of a mess is the amount of money needed to clean it up.
Following that principle, a gallon of gas should have a tax added that corresponds to the amount of money it takes to remove one gallon of gas' worth of CO2 from the air. This money should then actually be used to do this.
Ideally, this would be enforced worldwide, through a series of environmental treaties.
In real life, it probably won't even happen here, since any politician to suggest raising gas prices would instantly be crucified.
If reducing carbon emissions is as imperative as many say, they will surely join me in calling for repeal of all existing taxes in this country, by Constitutional Amendment, and then designating the emission of carbon as the sole taxable event, won't they?
Those of us who favor a consumption tax over the current mess really should call the bluff of those most alarmist about carbon emissions. Let's find out whether they love the current tax code more than they hate carbon emissions.
Kleiman is also wrong to define "rich" as "using more goods and services than poor people". That isn't what "rich" means at all -- that is what "profligate" means. Being rich just means you have the *ability* to consume more resources than poor people.
It is entirely possible to be absolutely filthy rich and have an even smaller carbon footprint than a typical middle-class American. Al Gore's footprint is huge not because he's rich, but because he enjoys living the profligate lifestyle a rich person can afford to live.
The real tell on Gore is that his own office advocates that people reduce their carbon emissions as much as practical, regardless of offsets, while he flys around and uses a huge amount of living space. This has nothing to do with the scientific validity of global warming theories, of course, but it does clearly indicate that he is a complete and utter phony. I would prefer that complete and utter phonies to just hole up in their mansions and shut the hell up.
Don't forget to strike your chest.
Yeah, that Al Gore is a real phony. He should live humbly, like the Dalai Lama and never fly anywhere and talk to large groups of people in auditoriums. Oh....
Well then, like the Pope. Oh.....
Well, then, like a really poor person. And never travel. And never talk to large groups of people.
Whaddaya mean, that's his job? Well then, he should quit.
Isn't that it, Will? Don't you just want him to shut up and not be right anymore?
The cost of a mess is the amount of money needed to clean it up.
False. The cost of a mess is the least of the cost of cleaning it, replacing it, or dealing with it.
We release H2O as well as CO2 when burning hydrocarbons. No one is suggesting we have a water tax, or that we "clean up" the water we are emitting into the atmosphere, because it costs approximately zero to deal with it.
Which is why it's important to determine the cost of CO2.
No, dollared, I'd rather prefer the Pope to just shut the hell up as well. I'm not familiar enough with the Dalai Lama to have opinion about him. I don't consider people to be "right" until they make a good faith effort to adhere to the tenets they espouse for others. A guy who lives in the fashion that Gore does isn't doing so, and I prefer such people to shut the hell up, as opposed to, say, Ed Begeley, who can yammer away for all I care, because he actually says the things he does in evident good faith. Got it?
Golly gee, I didn't know that having multiple large homes, and jet travel, some of it private jet travel, was required for communicating with large groups of people. Do tell!
Of all the damage we (collectively) do to the environment, that is not factored (taxed) financially into the finished cost of a product, C02 is the least of our concerns.
There is a lot of nasty stuff, chemicals, etc out there. I'm least worried about C02.
Puff, wheeze...exhale...
How much do I owe you for that?
I agree with this post 100%. Much, if not most of the "debate" about global warming has been hijacked by individuals high on moral indignation and low on IQ, scientifically speaking. Pointing fingers and calling people names is not a good way to get "conservatives" on board for a unified approach to controlling emissions. Lets face it - at least half of the leftists screaming bloody murder over global warming A. have no idea what they're talking bout and are simply reciting something they heard was true and B. are as guilty as any other carbon producing, carbon-based life form currently wrecking the planet. The bottom line is this problem is going to get far, far far worse before it gets better and no amount of carbon offsets or indulgence selling cap and trade scamming is going to make a bit of difference in the long run. I'd trust the Bush administration to start another war before I'd trust the New Left to solve the global warming crisis.
If the global atmosphere currently contains too much CO2, continuing to add additional CO2 at a reduced rate anywhere on the globe will not resolve the issue. Therefore, Kyoto was/is a sick joke, as is "Kyoto Lite" (McCain-Lieberman and Lieberman-Warner).
If we must stop adding additional CO2 to the global atmosphere, then the only effective global carbon cap is at ZERO carbon emissions; and, the only effective global carbon tax is the tax that drives emissions to ZERO.
Once we stop adding additional CO2 to the atmosphere, perhaps we can begin using the technology which wins the "Branson Prize" to return the atmosphere to its ideal CO2 concentration.
I plan to continue breathing air and exhaling CO2 in the meantime.
I'd trust the Bush administration to start another war before I'd trust the New Left to solve the global warming crisis.
Yes, but would you trust them to finish another war?
I'd be happy if the left (new, old or whatever) would finish the "War on Poverty".
Tree planting is risible unless you commit to keep the land planted forever.
It doesn't have to be forever; it just has to sequester enough carbon now to prevent the Earth's natural carbon sinks from being overwhelmed; once we're past the danger of that, and enjoy lifestyles and technologies with a much lower carbon footprint, we can "let the carbon out" of those trees by, I don't know, making houses out of them. It will probably be several decades before we hit that point but hey, that's almost precisely how long it takes a tree to grow, anyway.
The real tell on Gore is that his own office advocates that people reduce their carbon emissions as much as practical, regardless of offsets, while he flys around and uses a huge amount of living space.
Uh-huh. And what if you found out that none of that was true? That his huge "living space" is actually a working space for more than 70 people, powered entirely by zero-carbon power? That he buys carbon offset credits for 100% of his travel?
That the argument that "Gore is a phony" is itself a phony, used to discredit environmentalism/conservationism by proxy?
If the global atmosphere currently contains too much CO2, continuing to add additional CO2 at a reduced rate anywhere on the globe will not resolve the issue.
Truly, your ignorance is astounding. The Earth's atmosphere is not a static system; it's in dynamic balance. The problem is not that the Earth's atmosphere currently contains too much CO2, although it does; the problem is the rate of production of CO2 has drastically exceeded the rate of reduction of CO2.
Because that's the problem, any reduction of CO2 emissions is a good thing. The optimum outcome is that we reduce CO2 emissions enough that the carbon sinks are able to catch up. You don't have to stop breathing, Ed; you need to start thinking.
Nathan,
If AGW is a crisis; and, if the AGW "crisis" can be solved; then, if will take concerted action by all of the globe's governments and political factions to make it happen. Nothing less than total global commitment has any possibility of success, assuming success is possible.
Fifty years from now, the global warming crisis will be remembered as history's greatest case of navel gazing. Americans, today, want to lynch oil company executives for $4/gallon gas- who takes seriously the idea that these same people will consent to pay even more for gas to combat warming? A warming planet is just something we will have to learn to accomodate since we will continue to add carbon to the atmosphere until we consume the fossil fuels.
Chet,
Tell it to China and India. Our emissions are relatively stable; theirs are growing like gangbusters.
By the bye, what percentage reduction is required to allow the carbon sinks to "catch up", over what period of time? Obviously, you've given that issue a lot of thought. Please share your knowledge.
Chet, you apparently can't comprehend that Gore's office advocates reducing carbon emissions as much as practical, REGARDLESS of offsets. The offsets are a joke, anyways, of course.
Lemme know when the Gores' personal living space is down to about, oh, a couple hundred square feet. Al Gore enjoys a profligate lifestyle while telling others about the benefits of an acetic lifestyle. He's about as interesting as listening to Jimmy Swaggart.
Tell it to China and India. Our emissions are relatively stable; theirs are growing like gangbusters.
All the more reason to focus efforts domestically; we're responsible for the bulk of the problem.
By the bye, what percentage reduction is required to allow the carbon sinks to "catch up", over what period of time?
I have no idea. Only someone who had no idea what they were talking about would assert that it's either 100% reduction or give up completely.
Chet, you apparently can't comprehend that Gore's office advocates reducing carbon emissions as much as practical, REGARDLESS of offsets.
I would say that combining one's living space with a 70-person office workspace is a pretty practical reduction in carbon emissions.
The offsets are a joke, anyways, of course.
I'm not convinced that this is true. Megan's objections to tree planting are spurious and indicate her failure to understand the problem. Offsets incentivize the extraction and sequestration of carbon, and as such, they're useful.
Al Gore enjoys a profligate lifestyle while telling others about the benefits of an acetic lifestyle.
That's just nonsense. The lifestyle he promotes is not at all ascetic; his targets are primarily the industries that needlessly contribute the bulk of greenhouse gases. The charge of hypocrisy simply doesn't stick; it's a manufactured outrage to direct attention away from the problem.
Chet: It doesn't have to be forever; it just has to sequester enough carbon now to prevent the Earth's natural carbon sinks from being overwhelmed; once we're past the danger of that, and enjoy lifestyles and technologies with a much lower carbon footprint, we can "let the carbon out" of those trees by, I don't know, making houses out of them. It will probably be several decades before we hit that point but hey, that's almost precisely how long it takes a tree to grow, anyway.
You have the processes backwards.
An increase in atmospheric CO2 will increase, not decrease, atmospheric CO2 uptake. This is a simple consequence of equilibrium concentration laws. If you increase the concentration of one input (CO2) in a system in equilibrium, you get an higher rate of the conversion process, resulting in a new equilibrium.
When you build a house out of a tree, the carbon stays *in* the tree. If you want to let the carbon "out" of the tree, you have to combine it with oxygen, generally through combustion. Setting a house on fire or letting wood rot would do that.
Since most of our problems come from taking underground dead plant matter stored over millions of years and burning it over hundreds of years, if you're worried about carbon neutrality you ought to be advocating shrink-wrapping compressed trees and dropping them into the ocean.
Ed Reid,
You may not be aware of this, but the earth has the capacity to naturaly remove CO2 from the atmosphere(To give one example, C02 reacts with water to create Carbonic acid, which them reacts with the seabed and sequesters itself with rocks). This is the reason that CO2 concentrations have stayed pretty constant over the last couple millennia.
The extra C02 we have in the atmosphere will eventually take itself out without too much damage, provided we stop pumping even more in.
Faced with that, I think it's very clear that the best way to cut down emissions is a Cap and Trade Scheme(Coase's Theorem is wonderful).
And if we allocate credits internationally for individual governments to auction, and do so on the basis of population, developing countries would profit more from complying with the regulation, and then selling massive amounts of credits to the developed world.
And as for the Gore thing: Producing carbon in the current economic environment, has the same moral weight as driving in traffic. It's just over-consumption of mis-priced resource. Anyone, of either political volition, who tries to argue otherwise is a jackass. This applies to condemnations of both SUV owners and Al Gore.
Why is CO2 such a bad thing? It isn't as if the earth hasn't had more than ten times the amount of CO2 in the past without turning the planet into an inferno. In fact, higher CO2 is good for plants, and AIUI greenhouses run at much higher ppm concentrations than we have today to improve plant yields. In a world that is starting to worry about food production, higher CO2 levels might be a Good Thing, and that ought to count for something. Add to it the fact that CO2 warming effects are nonlinear (each unit of additional CO2 results in much less warming than the previous unit), and it isn't at all clear that CO2 is the planet killer Warmers claim.
"Uh-huh. And what if you found out that none of that was true? That his huge "living space" is actually a working space for more than 70 people, powered entirely by zero-carbon power? That he buys carbon offset credits for 100% of his travel?"
My workspace doesn't include a pool heated by natural gas. Does yours?
That's just nonsense. The lifestyle he promotes is not at all ascetic; his targets are primarily the industries that needlessly contribute the bulk of greenhouse gases. The charge of hypocrisy simply doesn't stick; it's a manufactured outrage to direct attention away from the problem.
An 80% reduction in carbon emissions, which many enviros are calling for by 2050, would require a lifestyle most Americans would consider ascetic, and asserting that Gore's not primarily targeting individual behavior but rather the behavior of big, bad corporations is simply disingenuous. It is on behalf of us consumers that these industries discharge massive amounts of greenhouse gases: meeting our demand produces the gases, and we benefit, directly or indirectly, from that production. Targeting those industries - any industry - will, one way or another, raise costs and lower living standards for those same consumers. Raise those costs high enough, lower living standards low enough and, voila, there's your ascetic lifestyle.
It's comments like Chet's that make me wonder in what fantasyland folks on the left live? Do they think that industry just spews out greenhouse gases for the sheer joy of it? That consumers don't benefit at all from such behavior? Even granting that Al Gore doesn't care whether I drive my car daily, targeting the oil companies that make the gas with which I fill my car in such a way that will promote an 80% reduction in the greenhouse gases we emit will, barring some miracle, either force me to drive a lot less or make me pay a hell of a lot more money (whether for higher-priced gas or more-expensive alternatives) to do so. Either way, it's me, not the reified "industry" that's affected. Same for just about any other carbon-emitting business you folks can think of, unless you've identified some massive carbon-spewing conglomerate run by gremlins that has no relationship whatsoever to consumer demands.
And to think that one with this level of understanding of the economy - yes, Obama, I'm looking at you - is likely to be president next January. Though by the time they've cured cancer, hired the entire US prison population, and done all those other wonderful things Obama's set out for "industry" to do, it's doubtful they'll have the money to buy carbon offsets...
An increase in atmospheric CO2 will increase, not decrease, atmospheric CO2 uptake. This is a simple consequence of equilibrium concentration laws.
I'm aware of equilibrium laws, but they don't apply here. The Earth's carbon sinks don't work by simple diffusion; they're biological systems that are effective only within certain environmental values. For instance, increasing CO2 supports an increasing oceanic algae population - right up to the point where so much CO2 diffuses into the ocean as carbonic acid that all the algae dies off.
It's hard to make generalities about so many different systems, but in general, they're positively stable within a narrow range of variables and negatively stable once you get beyond - sort of like a crater on the top of a hill. Push a ball up the side of the crater, and it rolls back down to the center. Push it up over the edge of the crater, and it rolls down the hillside, instead.
The principle here is more of one where, even though you need heat to live, you can still be burned to death in a fire - rather than a simple first or second-order equation. The Earth's carbon sinks are ecological systems, not simple chemistry experiments. Equilibrium laws aren't particularly relevant.
if you're worried about carbon neutrality you ought to be advocating shrink-wrapping compressed trees and dropping them into the ocean.
That's a little extreme; I think the trees would be just as useful on the surface of the Earth, alive.
An increase in atmospheric CO2 will increase, not decrease, atmospheric CO2 uptake. This is a simple consequence of equilibrium concentration laws.
I'm aware of equilibrium laws, but they don't apply here. The Earth's carbon sinks don't work by simple diffusion; they're biological systems that are effective only within certain environmental values. For instance, increasing CO2 supports an increasing oceanic algae population - right up to the point where so much CO2 diffuses into the ocean as carbonic acid that all the algae dies off.
It's hard to make generalities about so many different systems, but in general, they're positively stable within a narrow range of variables and negatively stable once you get beyond - sort of like a crater on the top of a hill. Push a ball up the side of the crater, and it rolls back down to the center. Push it up over the edge of the crater, and it rolls down the hillside, instead.
The principle here is more of one where, even though you need heat to live, you can still be burned to death in a fire - rather than a simple first or second-order equation. The Earth's carbon sinks are ecological systems, not simple chemistry experiments. Equilibrium laws aren't particularly relevant.
if you're worried about carbon neutrality you ought to be advocating shrink-wrapping compressed trees and dropping them into the ocean.
That's a little extreme; I think the trees would be just as useful on the surface of the Earth, alive.
It isn't as if the earth hasn't had more than ten times the amount of CO2 in the past without turning the planet into an inferno.
Excess CO2 is a bad thing if you like to eat food, or live near the coast. Other than that, yeah, it's not so bad.
In fact, higher CO2 is good for plants
It's really not. Any given plant already has access to far more atmospheric CO2 than it can use, so adding more doesn't help any. And warming the globe means a massive change in the arable portion of the globe - basically, the arable portions move towards the poles where there's less planetary surface and less land - while the middle latitudes become arid deserts.
Arid deserts aren't good for plants.
In a world that is starting to worry about food production, higher CO2 levels might be a Good Thing
No, it won't. As certain as science can be about anything there's abundant certainty that increasing CO2 means a reduction, not a gain, in the world's food supply. Crop failures on an epic scale, mostly due to droughts.
An 80% reduction in carbon emissions, which many enviros are calling for by 2050, would require a lifestyle most Americans would consider ascetic
You don't know that that's true, which is why you provide no evidence, of course. We could easily generate all the electricity we could ever need with solar, if you disregard the startup costs. The human race has a long way to go before our energy needs exceed the power of the sun over even one day. There's no physical reason that a car has to run on fossil fuels, except that fact that we've always done it that way.
Asceticism simply isn't what we're talking about, here. All we're talking about is spending the capital it takes to break industries and manufacturers out of the hidebound ruts they're in.
It is on behalf of us consumers that these industries discharge massive amounts of greenhouse gases: meeting our demand produces the gases, and we benefit, directly or indirectly, from that production.
There's no reason they have to emit the gasses; they're just committed to those technologies. Getting them to change is going to require a change in market incentives, and that's why cap-and-trade schemes sound like a good place to start.
There's absolutely no reason why we can't sustain the same manufacturing output without producing the same levels of CO2. It's not one or the other.
I can't be the only conservationist here. Didn't it ever occur to any of you that ecology was something you could study and learn about? That the atmosphere is a little more complicated than a chemistry project, but something it's possible to get a handle on, nonetheless?
The amount of scientific ignorance I'm seeing here is really surprising.
Yeah, Chet, and the ignorance displayed by someone who thinks that Al Gore's carbon emissions are congruent with his rhetoric, because he has 70 people doing work in the the square footage and amenities he enjoys, is pathetic. Look, Gore speaks in near-apocalyptic terms on this issue. When his behavior matches his rhetoric, let me know.
In any case, I'm quite willing to take extremely drastic steps. Will you join me in supporting a policy which makes, by Constitutional Amendment, the emission of carbon the sole taxable event in the United States?
It's hard to make generalities about so many different systems, but in general, they're positively stable within a narrow range of variables and negatively stable once you get beyond - sort of like a crater on the top of a hill. Push a ball up the side of the crater, and it rolls back down to the center. Push it up over the edge of the crater, and it rolls down the hillside, instead.
The principle here is more of one where, even though you need heat to live, you can still be burned to death in a fire - rather than a simple first or second-order equation. The Earth's carbon sinks are ecological systems, not simple chemistry experiments. Equilibrium laws aren't particularly relevant.
Equilibrium laws seem to be a good first order approximation for a very simple reason:
For the last billion, as in "starts with b", CO2 partial pressure, and for that matter O2 and N2 partial pressure, have stayed within a relatively narrow range - and this after massive comet impacts, plate tectonics moving entire continents in and out sunlight, ice ages, seismic/volcanic activity kicking enough dust into the atmosphere to cause year-long winter, etc.
In spite of a billion years of such shocks, we've got an atmosphere and temperature that's almost identical to that of a billion years ago. Today's life forms, including mammals, could easily find habitats, breathe, etc. in the Earth of a billion years ago. That's pretty amazing, when you think about it.
It's pretty hard for you to argue against a billion years of evidence.
There is nothing mankind can do, including nuclear war, that will cause an impact as marked as the one recorded at the K-T boundary. Nothing.
From the perspective of geologic time, h. sapiens isn't going to do anything but shift the temperature for a couple degrees and the CO2 concentration by a couple of percent for a couple millennia. No big deal.
From the perspective of h. sapiens, on the other hand, we could make live very uncomfortable for us. But that's not nearly as good a selling point.
We're not going to kill the Earth. The Earth is incredibly resilient. We might kill a lot of us though.
However, wealthy activists want to believe they are the self-appointed few, the saviors of the Earth. They're not. It's like wealthy activists going into tough neighborhoods to save the poor darkies from The System (TM). They're not. In reality, us po' darkies are actually pretty resilient, and the activists need The System (TM) to save themselves from us.
Chet: There's absolutely no reason why we can't sustain the same manufacturing output without producing the same levels of CO2. It's not one or the other.
Who's this "we", Kemosabe?
I have no doubt that the United States, with a GDP measured in fourteen digits, half the Nobel Laureates, and endless natural resources can smoothly transition over to a significantly lower-carbon economy. It'll cost a little money and a little inconvenience, but we're rolling in money. I could buy a plug-in hybrid tomorrow. So could you. We can afford the expensive solutions.
We could also put a man on the moon in 1969.
That's not the question though.
Can India afford to make this transition? Cutting carbon in America means that I downsize the Secret Asian Pickup. Cutting carbon in India means forgoing refrigeration, semi-mechanized agriculture, and running water. Biofuel in America means food goes from a few percent of the family budget to a few percent more. Biofuel in India means malnourishment.
Keep in mind that China already emits more CO2 than the US, and India will pass us soon too. India has more schoolchildren than the whole US population.
Look, if combatting global warming merely meant that Al Gore had to trade in the Gulfstream for a lowly Learjet, I'd be for it. I'd even be willing to turn my F-150 into a Tacoma.
I won't be the one paying the price though. If you forgo a labor-saving technology (in this case, fossil fuels) and decide to do something the hard way, the poorest are going to pay the price.
I'm not willing to starve a couple billion Asians quite yet. If the cost of refrigeration and transportation for the BRIC nations is 3 degrees C, well, I'll gladly pay it.
Hell, I'll pay 5.
On a much smaller scale of dispute: I doubt that the statement Megan made is true for all pairwise comparisons of flying academics and SUV-loving Texans who don't fly.
How dare you glibertarians and conservative greedheads accuse us of moralizing!
Megan, you seem to accept without question the notion that Earth is warming up as a result of human activity.
And yet, over the last ten years, the Earth has actually cooled, as the graph at http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/ shows. (CRU is deeply committed to the theory of anthropogenic global warming, which the text accompanying the graph proves, but CRU is honest enough to publish the facts.)
The "settled science" insists that the planet will warm by about 0.3 degrees C per decade unless we knock CO2 levels way, way down.
CO2 levels have increased since 1998, so global air temperature should have risen by at least the forecast 0.3 degrees C...but it has, in fact, fallen considerably.
Before we do anything to solve this "problem," we ought to be certain that the problem actually exists. The evidence suggests it doesn't.
Chet: Any given plant already has access to far more atmospheric CO2 than it can use, so adding more doesn't help any.
That is not really true. The partial pressure of CO2 in an Iowa corn field is 0 on a calm summer afternoon. If there were enough breeze to blow in more CO2, the corn yield would be higher.
Why do you think that green house operators and hydroponics operations pay the expense of bringing in CO2 bottles? Do you think that they just like the smell? When water, fertilizer and light bottlenecks are removed, the only limit to plant growth is often CO2 availability.
secret asian man
Excellent point but I disagree on biofuels.
What we are seeing right now is a transition from the United States and EU dumping agricultural surplus in third world countries in order to keep prices higher in the home countries to the US and EU consuming those agricultural products at home because the high price of oil makes biofuels economically competitive.
Before China and India reformed their economies, we used to see reports from third world countries where farmers could not compete with the free grain being dumped in their markets. Now that they are no longer being underbid (it is tough to compete with free) farmers all over Africa and Asia are increasing production.
In the long term, it will work out to a new stable system. The problem is that people don't eat in the long term so we probably ought to do what we can to ease the transition. My recommendation would be to make subsidized fertilizer available to third world farmers. It might even make some environmentalists happy if it was explained to them in terms of temporarily sequestering a few extra pounds of carbon on the bony frames of the population in Africa and Asia.
ER: "By the bye, what percentage reduction is required to allow the carbon sinks to "catch up", over what period of time?"
CHET: "I have no idea. Only someone who had no idea what they were talking about would assert that it's either 100% reduction or give up completely."
Chet,
It is your hypothesis (above) that the globe's carbon sinks have fallen behind and must be allowed to "catch up". Mathematically, the carbon sinks would have to have begun falling behind when the atmospheric concentration of CO2 began to rise; and, have continued to fall farther behind ever since. Therefore, it would require at least a reduction in emissions to below the emissions level which was occurring when the CO2 concentration began to rise, to allow the "catch up" to occur.
Regrettably, our direct historical data on CO2 concentrations dates back only to 1958. However, if we accept the current AGW theory, which states that this time (uniquely) CO2 is driving temperature increases, we can then suggest that atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been increasing since somewhat before the current period of increasing temperature, which began with the reversal of the "little ice age" (~1600AD). Adjusting for human and domestic animal populations (CO2 emitters all), the reduction in CO2 emissions would have to approach zero emissions asymptotically to allow the "catch up" to occur.
This assumes, however, that the globe's CO2 sinks are "infinite", or at least extemely large, and thus their capacity as sinks has been unaffected by the additional CO2 they have accumulated. If we accept, instead, the current AGW theory regarding the acidification of the oceans as the result of additional CO2 uptake, that sink at least has been affected and is arguably not infinite. In addition, as the atmospheric CO2 concentration declined, equilibrium considerations would suggest that some of the CO2 previously taken up by the oceans would be released to the atmosphere, slowing the reduction of atmospheric concentration.
However, who am I to question your hypothesis, since I have no idea what I am talking about? I didn't even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
You don't know that that's true, which is why you provide no evidence, of course. We could easily generate all the electricity we could ever need with solar, if you disregard the startup costs. The human race has a long way to go before our energy needs exceed the power of the sun over even one day. There's no physical reason that a car has to run on fossil fuels, except that fact that we've always done it that way.
Sweet.... Chet accuses me of not providing any evidence, then proceeds to assert, as if it were self-evident, that "[w]e could easily generate all the electricity we could ever need with solar," and implies, again without evidence, that the start-up costs would be sufficiently low that they would have only a negligible effect on living standards. Applying these same rigorous standards of proof, I could similarly argue that all our electricity needs could be met by generators tied to exercise wheels powered by hamsters. Theoretically, yes, it's possible, but that's not the question: The question is whether implementing the change - i.e., overcoming the technological and other barriers to realizing the benefits of the technology - would impose downward pressure on our standard of living. Theoretically, we could probably generate all of our electricity from solar power, but if (hypothetically) it required an expenditure equal to half our GDP to develop the technology (1) to create sufficiently efficient solar cells for mass production, (2) to create solar cells that did not produce harmful environmental effects, either in their production, use, or disposal, (3) to locate those solar cells in such a way that NIMBYism (particularly from environmentalists) did not tie down their adoption in expensive litigation for decades, (4) to store the power generated by those solar cells, and (5) to reliably distribute that power to northern locales without sufficient sunshine to generate a reliable supply of electricity - if these obstacles were even susceptible to solution in the next several decades, the expenditure of half our GDP (again, hypothetically) would require a dramatic reduction in our living standards. Chet addresses none of these concerns, preferring to wave the magic wand of vague references to alternative energy technologies that apparently have not been adopted only because we have a perverse tax structure.
I'm all for conservation, and I would love to see our lives become less auto dependent. I really don't like having to drive everywhere. The questions raised by this post and these comments aren't about our conservationist bona fides; my bona fides are just fine, thank you. But I object to pie-in-the-sky discussions of global warming - and preventive or ameliorative technologies - that mislead the American voter by pretending that no reduction in our standard of living will be necessary to solve these problems. We as citizens have a right to know exactly what it is we're signing up for and to weigh the costs and benefits of signing up for it. Assertions - and, again, that's all Chet provides, notwithstanding his chiding of me for providing no evidence - that we have the technological solutions that will enable us to live exactly the lives we've been living (aside from certain undefined, yet undoubtedly massive, startup costs) are disingenuous and should be hounded out of the public square with much mockery.
I also object to pontifications by our much-wealthier betters as to how the rest of us ought to live. Al Gore is no less a hypocrite than, say, Ted Haggard (the evangelical anti-gay preacher found to be involved with a gay hooker). Chet no doubt mocked Haggard for his hypocrisy, and rightly so. It's unclear to me why Al Gore should be treated any differently - he's a moral scold who fails to live up to his own exacting principles. He's equivalent to a conservationist who decries every single incursion into a wetland (or select your habitat of choice) as threatening the viability of said habitat who then proceeds to use 5% of the area of said wetland to build a self-indulgently opulent residence. He may very well be correct about the threat development poses to the wetland, but the only proper response to him is nothing other than mockery; and if he's previously denied others the right to build there, tarring and feathering, before riding him out of town on a rail, might be more appropriate.
Richard,
My calculations suggest the "start up" costs would be on the order of $10-40 trillion over about 40 years, though those numbers are not based on solar electricity. (The higher number asumes a "business as usual" political/legal/regulatory environment with aggressive special interest group obstruction.)
Interestingly, were the US federal government to return to merely providing the functions enumerated for it in the US Constitution, the investment capital would be available over that time frame.
Liklihood approaches zero asymptotically.
Yes!
No!
You understand economics well enough to realize that an initiative in the US to reduce emissions does nothing to prevent China and India from increasing emissions, thus does not stop the global problem. Good, simple enough, and a big step ahead of most people on this issue.
But then you seem to advocate that shrinking the initiative to the individual level will work better? If I use 10 fewer barrels, what stops someone else in the US, or elsewhere in the world, from just getting my 10 barrels at a now-slightly-cheaper price? Offsets seem a pretty dubious approach, but certainly not worse than voluntary individual consumption reduction. At least with offsets you're taking that barrel away from someone else and contributing to the increase in price, then doing something, anything, positive afterwards...
Kleiman is all about the moral outrage. As even a brief perusal of his blog will demonstrate, he's much more interested in finding or manufacturing reasons to call people on the right evil than in policy or data.
You & Tierney seem to be treating the "sins" of Al Gore et. al. as similar to an advocate of vegetarianism being caught eating meat. It's not the same at all, and that's Kleiman's point.
It takes energy to get the message out. When you're given a big megaphone (e.g., because your name is Al Gore), it would be foolish - selfish even - not to take it up for an important cause. The energy used by Al Gore and others to give the GHG problem greater prominence is infinitesimal compared to total human output.
Gore and others concerned about global warming seem to be perfectly willing to devote more of their personal resources to using energy less wastefully. Amory Lovins makes a big point of demonstrating how it's possible to live very comfortably with a much smaller carbon footprint. But he also sees the importance of traveling to conferences to spread the word and talk to other like-minded people about creating the needed changes.
How easy does anyone think it would be to persuade Americans to reduce energy use if the only way the advocates are allowed to do it is by walking everywhere and not using a microphone (because that requires electricity)?
Any given plant already has access to far more atmospheric CO2 than it can use, so adding more doesn't help any.
This is simply wrong. Here, look at this
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/12/021206075233.htm
There is a question about the amount of *increase* in growth with higher CO2 (plus more water, N, and higher temps), but there is no doubt that plants can benefit from additional CO2.
As far as the claim that the mid latitudes will see desertification, that is an unproven assertion. It may, or may not, be true. And we've seen that you assertions can be wrong.
If it is true, would it be more beneficial to sequester CO2 today, or to build water distribution systems in the future? I don't think the answer is obviously sequester CO2 today.
Foster,
It is true that you have to spend money to make money. However, if your point is "love of money is the root of all evil", you should probably make a show of reducing it.
I would point out that Gore makes money doing what he does (no pun on my above metaphor). I have no problem with that personally. In the same way Walmart (for example) serves the common good by providing access to essentials in disaster areas in exchange for a profit (or sometimes not even that). Many people who would agree with you on your points would not give the same courtesy to Walmart.
Also, keep in mind the psychological boost you get from being "that guy" who saved the earth from certain destruction.
Be careful to not fall into the "all or nothing" trap. I wouldn't suggest that Gore merely do nothing in order to gain the moral authority to suggest others do less. You can think a little and say telepresence may cost some energy, but a lot less than transporting Gore's atoms all over the earth. Another for example, do those 70 people really need to transport their bodies to Gore's house, or can they work from home as well?
That's what I would prefer to see from Gore, thinking about how it can be done differently and actually living it. If that means playing for show sometimes, then so be it.
Mark in Texas: What we are seeing right now is a transition from the United States and EU dumping agricultural surplus in third world countries in order to keep prices higher in the home countries to the US and EU consuming those agricultural products at home because the high price of oil makes biofuels economically competitive
...
In the long term, it will work out to a new stable system. The problem is that people don't eat in the long term so we probably ought to do what we can to ease the transition. My recommendation would be to make subsidized fertilizer available to third world farmers. It might even make some environmentalists happy if it was explained to them in terms of temporarily sequestering a few extra pounds of carbon on the bony frames of the population in Africa and Asia.
That's certainly got a lot to do with it on the Africa end of the equation. Free food has pretty much kicked the bottom out from under the African farmer. Food is the core of any subsistence economy, and food aid means that the warlord, not the farmer, is the key player.
On the Mexico end, America sells much less corn to Mexico now, resulting in Mexicans being short on their staple crop that they bought on the open market. America can afford it. We have arable land, water, and high technology in abundance.
Mexico? Not so much.
The Gore-enviros would hate subsidized fertilizer. After all, it's not organic, and organic-ness is close to godlines. Besides, it's "authentic" for po' little darkies such as myself to toil in summer and shovel turds to fertilize our fields. Why if we got fertilizer and mechanized agriculture, us po' little darkies wouldn't be "authentic" anymore, and all the eco-tourists would have to fly their Gulfstreams elsewhere to visit.
Which shows yet another angle of this:
I could afford to buy nothing but organic food, on my middle-income salary. I could also buy cigars made of the finest tobacco and rolled on a virgin's thigh. On the other hand, if Indians cut out fertilizer, that means a whole lot of dead Indians.
OK, now that we have some facts, let's sum up:
>Al Gore, backed by abundant scientific proof of global warming, advocates aggressive, market-based solution to reduce global warming to a rate that minimizes human disruption and negative effects on economic activity. BTW, these solutions would also reduce our dependence on foreign oil, reduce other forms of pollution, more rationally price externalities of fossil fuel usage, reduce our massive trade deficit and reduce our funding of islamic terrorism.
>Conclusion - he is a hypocritical, delusional hack.
>Our many naysayers on this thread, backed by their unshakeable belief set, deny that there is global warming, deny that the US has the highest per-capita consumption of fossil fuels, deny that a market-based solution would work, express frustration that the externalities cannot be perfectly priced, express indignation that unilateral action on our part would not force a similar action by both India and China, and go back to watching Fox and Friends.
>Conclusion: they are wise, pragmatic souls who recognize that if the global market framework collapses from the stress of food and fuel shortages due to climate change, at least we white folks have our nukes to protect us and our cheap Mexican labor to keep us comfortable. After all, government is powerless to ensure the common well being, so it would be wrong to try to prevent disaster. Better to take it like a man - that worked so well for Churchill and the British Empire....
dollared, I think you forgot one.
>Dollared, unimpeded by a reading ability that exceeds that common among fourth graders (or among the criminally obtsue), casually impugns the intellectual integrity of every commenter on this thread, even though, by my recollection, only one of us expressed any doubt about the reality of AGW, and instead focused on the questions of (a) whether Al Gore lived in a manner consistent with his dire warnings of a coming apocalypse and (b) whether following St. Gore's teaching on a nationwide basis would in fact be painless or would require us to acquiesce to unacceptably low living standards.
>Conclusion: Dollared is a logician of high order, and that rare specimen who combines a scintillating mind with unbounded compassion and open-mindedness toward his fellow human beings.
When his behavior matches his rhetoric, let me know.
I did let you know, already. As I predicted it had no effect on your attitude about Al Gore, who you see as a proxy for the entire debate.
In spite of a billion years of such shocks, we've got an atmosphere and temperature that's almost identical to that of a billion years ago.
No, that's not even remotely true (except perhaps for arbitrarily large values of "almost.) We just recently learned that we have the highest levels of CO2 in 650,000 years. The Earth's atmosphere can and does undergo changes that are highly significant to its ecology; significant in ways that are not compatible with human agriculture on the scale needed to support a population of billions.
From the perspective of geologic time, h. sapiens isn't going to do anything but shift the temperature for a couple degrees and the CO2 concentration by a couple of percent for a couple millennia. No big deal.
I imagine we're going to find it a pretty big deal. I'm well aware that anthropogenic climate change is not likely to effect the same devastation as a cometary collision. I don't see the relevance of that comparison, honestly. The damage we would need to inflict to result in mass famines and flooding of coastal areas is far short of the K-T boundary.
We might kill a lot of us though.
I think that's a fate worth avoiding, but I guess I'm biased towards my own species. What's your problem?
Why do you think that green house operators and hydroponics operations pay the expense of bringing in CO2 bottles?
I've worked in greenhouses for years, and I've never heard of a single one doing this.
Why would they, when applying CO2 to your crops is as simple as cracking a window or turning on a fan?
I think maybe you're confusing CO2 for N2; it's not uncommon to gas soils with nitrogen as fertilizer.
Sweet.... Chet accuses me of not providing any evidence, then proceeds to assert, as if it were self-evident, that "[w]e could easily generate all the electricity we could ever need with solar,"
Look, the figures for "the amount of energy absorbed by the Earth's surface, from the Sun, per day" and "the amount of energy consumed by human civilization" can be easily looked up on the web. If you're not smart enough to compare two numbers, and see that one is about a thousand times greater than the other, nothing I can say can help you.
There is a question about the amount of *increase* in growth with higher CO2 (plus more water, N, and higher temps), but there is no doubt that plants can benefit from additional CO2.
That's a pretty big "plus" there, John. That's like the way Lucky Charms is part of a balanced breakfast, plus milk, juice, toast and butter, and all the other stuff that is a balanced breakfast all on its own.
All things being equal, plants typically don't benefit from additional CO2. If you give them additional CO2 plus the stuff they need to take advantage of it, yes, obviously they can benefit. Soil nitrogen is almost always the limiting resource on plant growth, which is why there's so much of it in Miracle Gro and no CO2 at all. These are years of greenhouse experience talking.
The Gore-enviros would hate subsidized fertilizer. After all, it's not organic, and organic-ness is close to godlines.
Wrong again. I decry organic farming as an anti-environmental waste. It's a scam designed to separate you from your money and expose you to food-borne illness and natural plant toxins, all by exploiting scientific ignorance.
Chet -
Re: CO2 concentrations improving plant growth.
The problem is that there's about 380ppm CO2 in the atmosphere and 21% Oxygen. RUBISCO, the enzyme involved in carbon fixation in plants, is easily oxidized in most plants, to the detriment of the plant. (Many desert plants have adaptations that avoid oxidation of RUBISCO by extracting the CO2 before using it, probably as an adaptation to conserve water.)
Fixing oxizided RUBISCO is a significant portion of a plant's energy budget. Increasing CO2 concentrations frees up this energy.
see
3. Regulation by carbon dioxide.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RUBISCO#Enzymatic_activity
Look, the figures for "the amount of energy absorbed by the Earth's surface, from the Sun, per day" and "the amount of energy consumed by human civilization" can be easily looked up on the web.
Granted, and I'm all for solar. but we also have to consider the energy costs associated with covering the earth's surface (or near earth orbit) with solar cells. By this I mean not just making the cells but all the economic costs to install and maintain them. And since oil will be used to make these cells, the costs will be artificially cheap.
Solar is a great supplement, but in the short term we absolutely need nuclear, at least to see us to some better energy source. Noone who honestly believes that global warming is an imminent threat can sanely oppose nuclear power. And frankly, I just don't buy into the notion that refining plutonium for breeder reactors is an unacceptable security risk.
The amount of cancer from carcinogens in exhaust fumes and mercury released into the atmosphere from coal is, invariably, huge. The harm caused by nuclear radiation in America is, as far as anyone can demonstrate, non-existant outside of our nuclear tests in the American Southwest.
Fixing oxizided RUBISCO is a significant portion of a plant's energy budget.
This would probably be clearer if I said 'regenerating' or 'recycling' oxidized RUBISCO is a significant portion of a plant's energy budget.
dabfj glzkj aifnvplke zkpyadtuo renfpg gjtfpm naxujm