Libertarians frequently underweight the long evolution of institutional arrangements that allow us to function without government intervention. And non-local pollution simply hasn't been around long enough for those institutions to evolve. There is no such thing as a free market approach to air quality or water rights.It's worth going back to first principles on markets, property rights, and air pollution. To have a functioning market, you need to have property rights. And property rights need to be defined in some way or other. This includes taking some view of the relationship between property rights and particulate emissions into the air. On one conceivable conception of property rights, the Sierra Club could buy up a field somewhere and then assert that its property rights over the field give it the right to exclude any form of air pollution from wafting into its field. On that definition of property rights, which is the one "the Greens" would favor if we really wanted Stone Age economic conditions, industrial production would swiftly become impossible. You couldn't so much as warm yourself with a fire before neighbors were accusing you of tresspassing for depositing microscopic soot particles in their lawns.
So obviously we don't define the property rights that way.
Another way would be to say the air is just a kind of free-for-all. You just dump however much of whatever you want into it and forget about it. This is, needless to say, convenient for people who are producing a lot of pollution. But it's not so convenient if there's acid rain falling on your roof. Or if smog is wrecking your view. Or if you develop asthma as a result of poor air quality. Or, indeed, if your gets drowned in a flood or your fields go dry or your drinking water vanishes because of climate change. A third way is a find a middle ground. You're allowed to emit some sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere so that industrial production can continue, but an unlimited amount so as to prevent the acid rain situation from getting out of control. The "green" proposal for carbon dioxide is essentially similar to this. It's important, economically, that we allow there to be some carbon emissions. But it's also important that we not have unlimited levels of greenhouse gases making the world hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter with all sorts of deleterious consequences for people's lives.
That doesn't mean we can't have freer market approaches, or that the lessons of markets aren't valuable. But strict property rights simply don't function in those commons.
Liberals like Matt have an affectation for externalities on the natural environment issues, I wonder if they would be willing to apply it to the social environment. Lets say we quantify the economic cost of single parent child rearing as opposed to 1950's TV nuclear family arrangements, and charge the parents of children born out of wedlock, or impacted by divorce, those costs... maybe reducing their social security contributions to minimum wage levels and not allowing them to retire until 72 to defray the costs. Just a modest proposal...
But aren't there laws about poisoning streams going back 4000 years in the Talmud? Not like they solved the problem, but it's not exactly new. Matt will latch onto any solution that gives him and his social class political power. Like the sun rising in the morning.
Like I said in the comments on that post, it's a pretty crazy world when a Matt Yglesias post could have been written by me, a hardcore libertarian.
Ideally, what we would want, is that some more-fundamental property right could lead to a true market price for CO2 emission, as well as any other kind of pollution.
Since that might be a little hard to follow, let me compare it to another case: garbage dumping. Right now, there are various property owners who have many uses of their property to choose between. And there are people who would benefit from being able to legally get rid of their garbage. Further, people who consider selling dumping rights on their property don't want to sell all the rights all at once, because they are forgoing future possibly-higher prices, nor do they want to forgo it all now. These factors combine to result in different people making different decisions, and a "market price" for dumping.
There is no similar mechanism for dumping into the atmosphere. Despite the naivete of people like Bob Murphy, there's no such thing as "charging for a certain amount of CO2 being pumped into your property" because the CO2 disperses to the entire atmosphere. (Yes, he actually suggested that!) And, it causes problems beyond atmosphere composition.
This TokyoTom post summarizes an Edwin Dolan paper on how libertarians should approach the issue, but sadly, haven't been.
I'm a fair libertarian, but I don't think the market has been that successful with even local pollution. It was law that made people in London accept sewers and thereby halt cholera epidemics.
Bob_R, do liberals claim environmental laws (even the most ancient and sensible) because the conservatives deny all claim on them?
If modern conservatives has been alive in the time of John Snow would they have called him a wacko environmentalist?
Geolibertarians, aka Georgist Libertarians, see what to do: Put Pigouvian taxes on pollution where the effects are non-local. (Poisoning a stream with direct impact on identifiable neighbors is a different matter.) We need to consider the proper moral basis of property rights as well as the expediency of how they're defined (although I can accept that questions of expediency also come into it). People have property rights, on a moral basis, to what they produce; everyone has equal rights to the free gifts of nature. So instead of taxing people's earnings, we should tax them based on the value of the land they use, and that includes such "land" (in the political economists' sense) as air. Release suplphur dioxide into the air, and pay more pollution tax to compensate your neighbors who only consume the air that they themselves breathe.
Property Rights In the Defense of Nature
I was born in Rumford, ME, also the birthplace of Ed Muskie, author of both the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Rumford is on the banks of the Androscoggin River. As a child in the 1960's and earlh 70s, it had the dubious distinction of being one of the top-ten most polluted rivers in the US; and the only one of those rivers that didn't flow through a major urban center.
I knew that river well, for my home was on a farm about 20 miles down stream from Rumford, home of a a paper mill, on a dairy farm that stretched for about a mile along its banks.
So this is a topic I take very seriously.
Today, it's clean, you can swim in it. But you can't eat fish; they contain too much mercury. But this comes from the air, from the rain from the eastern seaboard, the midwest, and Canada. The weather patterns collide here. Vacationland, our state motto -- it's on our license plates -- depends on tourism. Hunting, fishing and the "sports" that Maine Guides take to the woods are important parts of our traditional economy. But the loons, otters, trout, and eagles, and painted turtles with mercury-dense bodies might also merit some concern.
We make very little of our own pollution here. We have enough trees to absorb all the CO2 poured out by the eastern seaboard every day. But we can't eat the fish in our own lakes and rivers more then once a year. Now since I happen to own property on a lake, live in a community on a river, I figure someone's stolen my property rights, and done so without a by your leave.
And that's why I'm a liberal. In just a few short decades, and for a measley six billion dollars, Ed Muskie's Clean Water Act brought my river back to life.
Thanks Zic, that was better said than I've done when I've tried to tell the fisherman's view.
I don't self-identify as a liberal (more an independent) but when I talk to my conservative friends (usually after someone said "wacko environmentalists") I try to tell them a story: I start as a libertarian, but recognize certain environmental realities ..."
I am uncharitable towards those strong libertarians who make their philosophy work by actively avoiding environmental realities.
There are two methods to begin specifying property rights to the atmosphere. One simply taxes the emission of all gases and distributes the all the revenue (minus collection/distribution costs) to each individual on a equal basis; or, one could assign the rights to pollute to each individual on an equal basis and allow trading and accumulation of those rights. The first option is more practical for a number of reasons, but, ironically, is less favored by environmentalists, corporations, and politicians.
" ... You're allowed to emit some sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere so that industrial production can continue, but an unlimited amount so as to prevent the acid rain situation from getting out of control. ..." - Yglesias.
I believe it should read "a limited amount" or "not an unlimited amount."
- Mike Ellis
You can regulate any pollutant you want as long as you can release more carbon, because pollution-reduction measures invariably require more energy inputs to implement and/or maintain.
The instant you declare carbon a pollutant and attempt to regulate it on that basis, you have entered the realm of eating your own flesh in order to avoid starvation. You might defer starvation for a spell, but each bite reduces your ability to seek and take advantage of alternatives.
Either we need a fastrack program on large-scale nuclear energy, or these discussions are not serious. Witness the Europeans tripping over their own rhetoric in order to backpedal on their Kyoto obligations during a slow economic period -- they're starting to figure out the real meaning of carbon reductions, and not likeing it so much.
I believe what's being described here is generally called a "negative externality." A negative externality is where you do not bear the full cost of your economic activity: it is borne by another individual, group of individuals, or society as a whole. Environmental issues lend themselves to easy illustrations of this, but noise pollution from a bar could also be classified as a negative externality.
The key point here for libertarians is that markets do not function efficiently in the face of negative externalities. If I'm producing widgets for $5 and selling for $10, but Joe and Bob incur $15 of damage to their property every time I produce a widget, then society is operating at a net loss. If you don't have an efficient market, then you don't have all of the much-touted benefits of capitalism.
In general, there are two ways to deal with negative externalities:
1) You can regulate them. This involves either prohibiting certain activities (NO loud music after 2 a.m., etc) or setting caps (max carbon emissions per year, etc.).
2) You can price them in. In the widget example, this would mean that the gov't imposes a tax on me of $15 to compensate Joe and Bob.
Libertarians and conservatives tend to reflexively act against anything that calls for more government involvement. The problem here is that many confuse a useful tactic (less government regulation) with the strategic goal (an efficient market). If you achieve the former at the expense of the latter, it really doesn't count as a win.
loki: You're making a false argument. Raising a child isn't an "economic activity" per se. Certainly there's a higher probability of certain social costs associated with raising a child out of wedlock, but that cost is not interfering with efficient functioning of the market.
Besides, the argument you're making is a bit like saying "Your solution won't solve all problems, therefore you shouldn't apply it to the problems it can solve." If I can price in negative externalities and as a result ensure an efficient market and make society as a whole better off, why shouldn't I just do that and call it a win? The problem of single mothers can be saved for another day.
There would be no land property on a legal basis, without government. Government grants land title.
Tribal societies don't conceive of land ownership in any individual sense. From Babylon forward the King owned the land and could confer the title to it to others. In America to start nobody owned the land. The original owners were the very first joint stock companies who the King generously gave the title to. Jefferson bought much of the land west of the Mississippi. Well on and on and on.
Government creates titles for land ownership. Government charters the legal fictions that are corporations. All to often Libertarians take these things as like natural phenomenon. Land ownership or corporate existence as some sort of ground upon which the field of markets occur. Instead it is the Government which is the ground upon which the field, the workings of the economic markets occur.
aMouseforallSeasons, a nuclear (and solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric) push might be a good idea ... but I don't think a carbon tax (or cap) implies zero carbon.
There may be some amount that the earth's natural carbon sinks can absorb ... it is just less than we are putting out now, as atmospheric CO2 grows.
Odograph,
If you believe the scientific data, CO2 has been increasing since the 1700s. If this is due to man, then this implies that to stop it will require us to put no more CO2 into the atmosphere than we did prior to the start of the increase.
rapier,
Property can be defended by it's owner against encroachments- this is the fundamental principle that libertarians take for granted, and rightly so. Once a collective agreement (even if it is between two people) is reached to defend each other's property, then we have a government in it's proto form. Minarchists understand this, but I don't think the so-called anarchists do, but then anarchists are a small part of the libertarian movement from my observation.
In other words, I don't think your assertion is really valid. Libertarians rightly attack the fact that governments have become more than the means of protecting and enforcing property rights- have become more than the ground upon which the market functions. Liberals and conservatives both have no problem with this growth in government, just disagree, and slightly at that, on the areas of growth. Libertarians stand pretty much alone in decrying the growth beyond the protection of natural rights.
Rapier: You might want to look up the Basques, who claim to have handed title to their little farms down through the generations since before the Roman Empire.
Hunter-gatherers don't have any concept of individual land ownership because a little individual plot won't support them, but farmers want their own land, and have claimed it whenever possible. Kings may claim to own all the land - but kings have also been overthrown when they changed land titles arbitrarily.
This is off topic and a little crazy, but there is an article on slate that is killing me. The author is probably not going to read this, but if you do, will you please tell me if I am reading between the lines and reaching the wrong conclusion. I do not know what you, or anybody else, wants from me.
Maybe I am touching crazy or maybe everyone is trying to speak to me without actually saying anything. If it is the later, will someone please tell me what they want.
odograph wrote: aMouseforallSeasons, a nuclear (and solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric) push might be a good idea ... but I don't think a carbon tax (or cap) implies zero carbon.
It doesn't have to. There are only two ways known to man to get any amount of power you want, any time, any place: Combust stored carbon, or split atoms. There is always a certain amount of margin for efficiency improvements on the consumption side, but in the end, you have to be willing to unleash more stored carbon or split more atoms in order to harness energy. Without convenient sources of mass energy, there is no reduction of pollutants, or indeed any modern economy whatsoever.
Rapier said: "There would be no land property on a legal basis, without government. Government grants land title."
Wow. Read a little Rousseau and get back to us. Property and family pre-exist government as do a number of other "natural rights" such as the right of self-defense. Government is not a natural institution. It is an institution designed to protect propert rights and to take certain property rights (taxes) and is thus a necessary evil, but nothing more.
P.S. The "problem of the commons" is easily solved by a) taxation for pollution or b) prohibitions against pollution or c) some combination thereof. In colonial times since they lacked the means to determine the precise consumption of individual herds of sheep of the common grass, they simply prohibited private herds from grazing on the commons. It is entirely possible (despite the loud, but unfounded, protests of the polluters) to simple prohibit pollution of all kinds or to apply stringent limits.
aMouseforallSeasons, I don't really know now to discount something like this:
Study: Solar Thermal Power Could Supply Over 90 percent of U.S. Grid Plus Auto Fleet
... but certainly it raises the possibility. I think we need to learn by doing a bit, and see how far we can build such things out. If we can do that will slowing growth on the dirtiest fossil fuels (coal) that is very much to the better.
Nat Gas is a clean, more carbon efficient, and reasonably plentiful interim fuel.
Not as an extension of "tribe?"
When we look at the intense relationship citizens have with their President, I think we are looking at something very biological. We may not have pure alpha-dominance or whatever, but we certainly look very naturally to a leader.
I am a new, but enthusiastic student of the whole discussion on economic solutions to pollution.
Reading Peter's comment on negative externalities --particularly noise pollution-- seems to make so much sense. Noise pollution is a terrible scourge in urban India.
Tell me libertarians, what market-based solutions would you use to eliminate or at least drastically reduce noise pollution from motor traffic in India's crowded cities? Financial incentives? Is noise pollution somehow different, in this debate, from other forms of pollution, which often leave a tangible residue?
Banning car & truck horns will not happen anytime soon (which is what I would do if I were dictator here), and zoning restrictions (ie city laws) prohibiting honking in certain areas are completely ignored. what to do? Has anything been published on economic solutions to noise pollution?
Yancy, this page shows a 17th century dip in CO2, but a climb in the 19th, certainly.
I don't know what the optimum emission level is, but it seems possible that it is non-zero. I think some, like Nassim Taleb, make the argument that we should "not mess with things we don't understand." That would seem to mean a return to natural, pre-industrial, levels. Anything else is a calculation based on our best understandings of benefits and harm.
It would certainly be nice if we could squeak by with some fossil use ... if for no other reason than that we are unlikely to eliminate it all.
Yancey Ward, it greatly saddens me that they've used the shorthand of carbon emissions to talk about the particulate matter we emit as pollutants into the air. Because there may or may not be flaws with carbon in particular that you or anyone else can pick at -- for instance, the trees growing in northern Maine can, in any given day, absorb all the carbon emitted along the eastern seaboard -- that we then don't have to have the very grown-up and responsible discussion about our pollution.
We emit a lot of shit into the air. We are an intelligent species, we ought to be intelligent enough to be responsible for our behaviour at this point. Particularly when it's killing species who don't have a say in the matter -- loons, for instance -- and killing us, who do.
If I were a space alien looking down at planet earth, I'd say we were an infestation. There's too many of us. Like rats, who fight and canabalize when they're overcrowded, we war, we have disease. I hope we're smart enough to opt for other paths. But most of the time I despair of it; we're too damned greedy. Too damned caught up in private property rights to consider a loons rights, a polar bears rights, the rights of a kid in India, the rights of a kid who won't be born for seven generations. Yet to my mind, that's the basis for a moral decision. The only basis for moral decisions.
You may cal it liberal dreaming. We can discuss how the cloud layer forms higher as the atmosphere heats, creating it's own cooling and shielding radiation. We can talk about changing sun spot cycles. We can also discuss how the melting ice caps dilute the salt levels of the ocean, letting them freeze at higher temps, potentially changing ocean currents. But the only real thing we can control is our own actions, and as a species, we have failed to take responsibility for ourselves.
I watch the loons on our pond each summer, last, they failed to raise a chick. This, likely a new pair raised two. As I understand it, the rising mercury level in the water will eventually make it difficult for a shell to form on the egg. It will just be another species lost, one of millions already gone. Humans will go the same road someday. And they're silly birds, really. Their feet are so far back they can't even walk on land. But their courtship ritual is heartrending. Their call haunting. And they mate for life. I'm blessed to have seen them so close.
Here is a republican, pro-market bodybuilder/actor from California and his take on the issue.
tag line: Keeping California Cool
Here is a pro-market, Google CEO and Chairman, on the matter.
tag line: Where Would Google Drill
btw eric@google reckons that the solution to climate change is also the solution to our current financial crisis. interesting.
loki, you've got it all wrong, anyway. It's single fathers that are the problem, not single mothers. My single mother worked herself to the bone. It was my dad who was the problem, he was off raising some other woman's children instead of his own children.
I am a bit surprised that no one has mentioned the Coase theorem. Basically Ronald Coase was worried about the problem of externalities and property rights. Basically (as I understand it, and I am no economist), a polluter has the property right to pollute (in an unregulated country). His pollution imposes a cost on all the people affected by it--say everyone downwind of his factory. That cost can be determined by finding out how much you would have to pay the polluter to stop polluting. Therefore, in a perfect free market society, if you didn't want to breathe polluted air, you would pay a fee to avoid it. The big problem is transaction costs (which is the other big subject of Coase's research). Getting all the victims of pollution together to pay the polluter is extremely expensive. Consequently, you need some kind of organization that can handle the transaction--an organization to which all the pollution victims belong and to whom they give up some of their decision rights in order to allow the organization to have the ability to reduce transaction costs. In this case, I'm talking about the government, which for most people is going to necessarily be the mediating organization between polluters and those affected by pollution.
(Other organizations in which members give up some decision and property rights in order to minimize transaction costs include firms--Coase's work explains why we have firms instead of completely individual independent contractors.)
One value of the Coase theorem is that it gives us a tool for valuing pollution. It also suggests that if the right to pollute can be traded, the most economically efficient outcome will be achieved. This underlies a lot of the thinking behind pollution markets.
On one level we can talk about the economics of a tax versus a trade, etc., but on another we have to guess at how easily national and international systems can be gamed. My gut says that cap & trade will let in some free riders while allowing another sort to escape.
I like a national carbon tax, even if it starts low, for its simplicity and transparency.
Don't let anyone who says that a carbon tax must immediately be high, crippling, or world-ending, scare you.
rwb, where do you live? What are you going to pay me for the right to pollute the air I breath, since I'm down-wind of the rest of the US? I'm setting my price high.
Al Gore suggested dropping employment taxes and replacing them with pollution taxes. Only problem I see with this is becoming dependent on pollution as a source of funding government. Need government, you'd need to grow pollution.
RWB: If you read my earlier post, we're basically talking about almost the same thing -- I just didn't mention Coase by name. I also mentioned that where pricing things in is not feasible due to high transaction cost, explicit government regulation is an alternative.
odograph: Implementing a cap and trade system would be very tricky (if not impossible) were you to allow international players to weigh in. But assuming you get it working properly, cap and trade and a carbon tax pretty much equivalent economically. One of them gives away set quotas and then forces companies to pay each other to get more credits, while the other gives nothing for free and forces companies to pay government directly (you could, of course, say the first "X" emissions are tax free). Both methods create a real cost associated with polluting that will be passed on directly to consumers.
It's like a demand curve: you can set quantity such that the markets determines the price you want, or you can set price knowing that you'll then sell a certain quantity. The problem is if you do the latter, you'll be charged with price fixing. Between a carbon tax and a cap and trade system they both have the same net effect, except that one of them has "tax" in the proposal name while the other sounds like an invention of the free market.
aMouseforallSeasons: Your point on nuclear energy is well taken, and often ignored by environmentalists for reasons that don't seem entirely rational. The bottom line is that we have to use the technology we have available today, while we are waiting for future green technologies to be developed and come online. If we wait until we have the perfect fossil fuel replacement developed, it will likely be too late.
I dislike nuclear power. It's a mild aversion that makes me more neutral than a true opponent. I could accept nuclear if I had to.
The thing is, with things like that "90%" claim about solar above, I'm not sure I have to. It may come down to more than one way to skin a cat.
odograph, when a drug company produces a study, can I count on you to not look askance at the study because it's industry funded?
-dk
Askance, sure, but not with flat disbelief. Those "90%" guys claim peer-review. That's enough for me to ask for more info (or to ask why solar seems to be rejected out of hand, with flat disbelief?).
zic wrote: "rwb, where do you live? What are you going to pay me for the right to pollute the air I breath, since I'm down-wind of the rest of the US? I'm setting my price high.
"Al Gore suggested dropping employment taxes and replacing them with pollution taxes. Only problem I see with this is becoming dependent on pollution as a source of funding government. Need government, you'd need to grow pollution."
My example is pretty much hypothetical, but in this hypothetical example, it's the polluter that sets the price. It's what would make him or her be willing not to pollute.
This is the basic idea behind pollution markets. Any given industry has the right to pollute, which can be securitized in a tradeable credit. If you can make your factory more efficient, you can sell your credits.
Obviously such a system would have to be set up by the government. (Although the exchange could be private--indeed, it would likely be traded on already existing exchanges.) I agree with some who have suggested that there are probably lots of options to game such a system. But we already know there are many opportunities to game taxes. The reason that I prefer cap-and-trade is that it directs capital (in the form of pollution credits) into the firms that will use it best, as decided by the market. But I am not opposed to a Pigovian tax, if that turns out to be the only politically practical solution.
In order to apply a Pigovian tax to CO2, you would need to determine the harm that a particular increment of CO2 would cause. I do not think anyone has a clue how to calculate this given that CO2 is essential for life and is not a pollutant in the traditional sense. We do not even know the optimal level of atmospheric CO2 or do we know the future for other climate forcings such as solar radiation or volcanic activity.
A Pigovian tax would also have to be applied to every living being that expelled CO2. Right now, we give tax credits and deductions for children when we should be charging a tax on their production of CO2. We should also a tax pets. Indeed, if we really want to reduce future CO2 emissions, we should encourage women not to have children.
Of course, this assumes that reducing CO2 will decrease the harm of future warming and that the cost of doing so will be less than the cost of doing nothing.
Peter - If you think raising a child is not an economic activity you must not have children yet. Even limiting our discussion to the public sphere, compare the amount of money spent per pupil by the DC public schools with that spent by the State of NH [the only state with no income and no sales tax], then compare the results, and tell me family structure is not important.
zic - A little projection is taking place here. Go back and read my entry; I said single parents, not single mothers. Actually I tend to agree with you that single fathers are more to blame than single mothers, but as a single father raising four kids I would argue there are exceptions to the rule.
Off topic:
From the absence of any comments mentioning such, I guess I must have the Megan McArdle watch for this weekend.
Turns out, our hostess appeared on Friday's edition of Marketplace: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/episodes/show_rundown.php?show_id=14&start_date=11-28-2008
Could Megan's voice at membership-drive time be next? ;-)
aMouseforallSeasons, I don't really know now to discount something like this: Study: Solar Thermal Power Could Supply Over 90 percent of U.S. Grid Plus Auto Fleet ... but certainly it raises the possibility. I think we need to learn by doing a bit, and see how far we can build such things out. If we can do that will slowing growth on the dirtiest fossil fuels (coal) that is very much to the better. Nat Gas is a clean, more carbon efficient, and reasonably plentiful interim fuel.
IMO that study amounts to a lot of marketing yap. Sunlight reaches the earth at an average energy delivery rate of roughly 100W per square foot (or 1100W per square meter), so assuming you can find a reasonably efficient process for harvesting it, you can claim enormous amounts of energy availability. Unfortunately, sunlight has an interesting habit of turning in for the night, varying its intensity with cloudcover and time-of-day, and being most available in semi-arid and arid climates where dust collection (i.e. reduced efficiency) becomes a problem. Then there's the issue of having to cover large physical areas with equipment in order to capture that energy.
I've got nothing against wise use of solar energy, same as with wind power and other renewables whose technology has come far enough to make them practical. But they aren't going to replace baseload generation in the foreseeable future. For that matter, neither will natural gas, as there are many competing uses for it.
re: stuff about child rearing
Perhaps we should also quantify the economic cost of rearing children in a nuclear family as opposed to the extended family arrangements that most human societies choose as the optimal structure for child rearing. Or maybe we could just stop conflating a valid property rights question with an entirely unrelated issue.
mouse: "I've got nothing against wise use of solar energy, same as with wind power and other renewables whose technology has come far enough to make them practical. But they aren't going to replace baseload generation in the foreseeable future. For that matter, neither will natural gas, as there are many competing uses for it."
I know what you mean. after all, there are still some mainframes and landlines in use. IBM and Hitachi still make some revenues with these things? I even have a VHS vcr lying around somewhere. For certain, power-plants are more difficult to fade out than mainframes.. but after all else fails people tend to turn to reason?
I believe Ausra's study is based on the cost and efficiency of their existing (3rd-4th) generation plants. Not, on that kind of weak claim about total solar insolation.
From National Geographic:
I can pay 20 cents (plus retail margin). In fact that's a pretty good deal if it frees me from worries about maybe-ok nuclear.
(I may be wrong, but I think solar critics are lagging the technology.)
loki, then you have my apologies and a sincere thanks on your childrens behalf. Having grown up in a single-parent household, I know it's not easy. The result, in my case, is a happy, 30-year marriage to a man I still love very much, and two pretty well-adjusted sons who have wide streaks of feminism.
I wrote to the norm, and to another comment down the thread. There are always the exceptions; and since I seem to speak for the down trodden here, you could classify my comment as just another knee-jerk match-girl shout out.
RWB -- Thank you for pointing out the illogic I was trying to get at, and missed. Polluters currently don't have the right to pollute, at least in this country, the apply for the right in a permit from the DEP.
And that pollution isn't just CO2; it's a host of particulate matter in the air, it's water releases, landfill fill. But it's also temperature changes to the water and air. Environmental regulations are very complex because the habitats of living creatures are complex. Trout living downstream of a pipe releasing water can't survive a 10-degree increase in the water temperature; it would likely cause an algea bloom using up all the oxygen in the water. Increases in the temperature at a smokestack I'm not so sure of, other then it causing localized weather.
So part of the problem is libertarians talking about how to protect property rights when they don't understand what the hell they're protecting. The rights of polluters? The rights of loons? The rights of trout? The right of humans downstream (either air or water or land) of residents?
Economists may understand the flow of money, they may understand the behavior of folks with money, but I see little evidence they understand the natural world, and even less that they understand the poor. Economics is an art still in it's infancy, and its influences are lacking real-world impact; too much time on wall st. and in the factory; too little on the Androscoggin River, once one of the most polluted rivers in the country, now a gem of wildlife and recreation because of the Clean Water Act and $6 Billion to clean it up. I'd suggest a canoe trip down it next summer with Jeff Parsons of Bethel Outdoor Adventure, Bethel, Maine.
Global warming/Climate chage is a hoax!!!!
Please stop assisting the totalitarians who are trying to use this fraud to obtain economic control of the means of production.
Thinking people everywhere must begin treating these global warming claims as the laughable fraud that they are, by laughing at them.
P.S. CO2 is not a pollutant. Please go back to ninth grade science class.
Heh, if everything true were taught in ninth grade class the world would be a much simpler place.
Whenever Megan doesn't like something she immediately slaps the word "externality" on it and says we should ban it or tax it to oblivion.
I often wonder how she got through business school knowing just enough to be dangerous about economics. The devil of externalities is determining what the cost of those externalities are. At the micro level it is very easy. Megan's organic free range pig farm stinks and makes my home worth $50K less than it was worth before, so that is a $50K externality. At the macro level it is virtually impossible. What is the external costs of CO2? To determine that you would have to actually know how much man made C02 affects global tempatures and how much that rise would actually cost. Even among believers there is no reliable estimate of those numbers. Without solid reliable science and cost estimates you are just pulling a number out of your ass. A number set too high would do just as much or more damage through lost wealth and earnings than one set too low. Given that, until there are real numbers, the better course is to do nothing.
I can pay 20 cents (plus retail margin). In fact that's a pretty good deal if it frees me from worries about maybe-ok nuclear.
And what will you do at night, or on a cloudy day, or during the winter when exposure is reduced in both intensity and timespan? You're still going to need some sort of actual baseload generation to supply power. Solar generation is, by its own nature, a peaking generation technology (e.g. convert sun to electricity during the day to help support elevated demand from air conditioning).
To those making reductios on the concept of externalities:
Yes, when people complain about "externalities", it's easy to find cases where they're being inconsistent. So, as I proposed in a blog post a while back, I think people use "externality" to mean, "externality that is *also* morally objectionable". In other words, for people to start caring about a particular externality, they must believe that it also counts as an injustice, just as surely as if you stabbed someone.
I think we can all agree that if my family has a long-running, justifiable property title in some coastal land, and then the actions of others causes it to be permanently flooded, then the people who did have committed an injustice against them. At the very least, the displaced are owed compensation in the form of relocation expenses.
It is at that point, they start to worry about the "externalities" of the actioins that caused it.
This is not the same thing as e.g. the "externality" created when someone wears clothes that look ugly. Yes, some people may consider that a minor injustice -- maybe -- but there's just not the same consensus on it that there is on say, the injustice of permanently displacing someone.
So yes, people may use the term "externality" in a way that doesn't precisely match up with what economists use, but it's clear what such complaints are really about.
To those making reductios on the concept of externalities:
Yes, when people complain about "externalities", it's easy to find cases where they're being inconsistent. So, as I proposed in a blog post a while back, I think people use "externality" to mean, "externality that is *also* morally objectionable". In other words, for people to start caring about a particular externality, they must believe that it also counts as an injustice, just as surely as if you stabbed someone.
I think we can all agree that if my family has a long-running, justifiable property title in some coastal land, and then the actions of others causes it to be permanently flooded, then the people who did have committed an injustice against them. At the very least, the displaced are owed compensation in the form of relocation expenses.
It is at that point, they start to worry about the "externalities" of the actioins that caused it.
This is not the same thing as e.g. the "externality" created when someone wears clothes that look ugly. Yes, some people may consider that a minor injustice -- maybe -- but there's just not the same consensus on it that there is on say, the injustice of permanently displacing someone.
So yes, people may use the term "externality" in a way that doesn't precisely match up with what economists use, but it's clear what such complaints are really about.
"I think we can all agree that if my family has a long-running, justifiable property title in some coastal land, and then the actions of others causes it to be permanently flooded, then the people who did have committed an injustice against them."
That is just begging the question. Of course if my actions cause your land to flood, you have a case against me. The problem is did my actions actually cause your land to flood. It is a whole lot different to try to pin your land flooding on my coal fired power plant than it is my dam that burst. Currently, the science on global warming is entirely too primitive and based with too much speculation, hype and wishful thinking to even begin to acurately price the externality of CO2 if there even is such a thing.
There's a big problem with regulating carbon as an externality - the prime source of man-made carbon, fossil fuels, are a fungible, globally traded resource.
That means if we tax our own citizens to reduce their use of of fossil fuels, this just lowers demand on the fuel and stimulates the use of it in countries which aren't so regulated. In the end, you accomplish very little. Perhaps the new equilibrium global consumption rate is lower than it was before, but perhaps not. So all you wind up doing is punishing your own citizens and subsidizing others.
The same problem exists when you don't have global regulations for ocean fishing. Let's say you decide that global cod stocks are declining. The natural result of that would be the increased cost of catching cod, higher prices for cod, and eventually a smaller cod fishing industry chasing after ever-fewer cod. But now let's say that one country decides to do something about the problem by setting cod quotas on its own fisherman. What's the result? Cod stocks grow, which lowers the price of cod, which in turn stimulates demand for cod. So now the cod industry grows everywhere but the country that has quotas, and the cod inventory declines back to what it was before, except now with the quota country having less market share.
It's a tough problem. If you can't get a global CO2 framework in place (and you can't), it's not clear at all that local carbon taxes or cap and trade do anything except put an additional burden on your country's industry.
"It's a tough problem. If you can't get a global CO2 framework in place (and you can't), it's not clear at all that local carbon taxes or cap and trade do anything except put an additional burden on your country's industry."
But it makes people like Megan feel better. That is the point of this stuff. It is not to stop warming it is to make people feel better and like something is being done and most importantly that we are paying for our sinful lifestyles.
When high transaction costs or difficulty of collection prevent pricing in negative externalities, then it becomes time to step away from a free market approach and implement explicit regulation. Capitalism's greatest claim, the efficient market, isn't a gift of God and doesn't happen on its own like some sort of natural phenomenon. In many cases, it may not be a stable outcome (barring outside interference). Just look at Microsoft: over the past 20 years the PC operating system business has progressed further and further from the model of an efficient market.
In the case of greenhouse gases and many other forms of pollution, it's cost prohibitive to come to a sollution using a free market model that involves polluters paying their victims. Rather, the problem is best solved by government regulation designed to limit emissions to an acceptable level. Once we agree on that, we can begin the debate on what's "acceptable."
Silas Barta (formerly Person): There's a difference between positive externalities and negative externalities. When people speak about pollution, they're generally referring to a negative externality. An example of a positive externality would be painting my house and fixing up my property in preparation for sale -- home prices in the neighborhood will likely rise as a result.
loki: Just because something involves money doesn't make it an economic activity. Punching someone in the face has a real cost associated with it (possible medical bills, lost work time, etc.) but I don't expect to turn a profit by putting my fist through your nose, therefore it's not an economic activity. In the same way raising a child outside of a nuclear family may cause a real cost to society, but it's not an activity people engage in to turn a profit, it's not intefering with an efficient market, and it has nothing to do with property rights or economic negative externalities. Rather it is a social problem and should be treated as such.
John:
But it makes people like Megan feel better. That is the point of this stuff. It is not to stop warming it is to make people feel better and like something is being done and most importantly that we are paying for our sinful lifestyles.
That's right John -- because global leadership is bad and should be avoided, and taking a principled stand on important issues prevents cowardice and lazyness and should also be avoided at all costs.
Or maybe not. Because not everyone takes defeat as a given.
aMouseforallSeasons, to hit 90% of our needs solar would obviously need to be tied to energy storage. Storage has been demonstrated. It's a cost issue, and one that only becomes critical as we to get to high fractions of solar/wind in our power mix.
In terms of progress though, Robert Rapier (at his R Squared Blog) points to a solar-thermal site which makes these claims:
Again, is public conception of the problem keeping up with the technology?
Peter: you are using an unusual definition of economic activity here. There is nothing in economics as commonly defined that requires something to involve money to be an economic activity. For example, the definition of Economy from www.answers.com/economy is "An economy is the system of human activities related to the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of goods and services of a country or other area."
At the university I went to, the Econ 101 class started off with a Robinson Crusoe economy - Robinson Crusoe is alone on his island, how should he allocate his time to produce the goods he needs for survival? No money, no markets, but still food needs to be produced and consumed. Introduce Man Friday and you have the idea of exchange and distribution as a result of specialisation of labour - though still no need for a market or money. Money is a useful way of getting past the problem of bargaining when there are many actors, but there would be no need for money with just two people alone on an island.
Also, when you say that "raising a child outside of a nuclear family may cause a real cost to society, but ... it's not intefering with an efficient market", what do you mean? Say this child-raising approach causes such costs that an extra police officer must be hired to deal with the problems. This means that that extra police-officer's labour is not available elsewhere - this does affect the labour market (I assume that we are talking about a government that does not conscript people into the police force). If a bad child-raising approach requires extra skilled teaching staff, then this again affects the market.
Economics and societal problems are deeply entangled. It's silly to treat them as something easily separated.
odograph: Public perception seems to fall disparately into two primary categories: those who are largely unaware of the technology, and those are aware and enthusiastic about the technology, but have no clue what the scale and land-use problems look like.
AFAIK, the largest solar project presently under construction is the Mojave Solar Park. The drive to build it is not strictly economic, but rather political, since California has a 20% renewables regulatory threshold to be met. It will cover nine square miles and generate 553MW using over 300 miles of piping and some existing abandoned infrastructure from a former coal-fired plant project (add www and 'dot' for the sake of the forum link filter):
cleantech.com/news/1522/pg-e-solel-in-553-mw-solar-deal
That's impressive, and in this case eminently feasible since the land is essentially unusable and uninhabitable, therefore the environmental impact is minimal and there are few, if any, competing economic uses. But perhaps just half of that land area, if it had water available, could support 2000MW of coal-fired or nuclear generation. This doesn't account for the coal or uranium mining and processing, of course, but that can be done elsewhere. You don't have to use all of the effective generation land area at the actual generation site.
And that's why solar may be a nice supplement in the southwestern US, but it will not be able to supply even a major fraction of the 5TW the US consumes, and it is very unlikely that any installations of this scale will be built in the eastern half of the US anytime soon.
Tracey W:
You're absolutely correct. That's why I said "Just because something involves money doesn't make it an economic activity."
I'd also note that while you cited the definition of "economy" I was speaking as to whether a particular activity was an "economic activity" not whether it impacted the broader economy. wiki.answers.com defines economic activity as "the production and distribution of goods and services." I wouldn't put all my trust in a website, but that seems fairly accurate. I'd also add that in the context of capitalism there's an implied intent to turn a profit. Children aren't generally considered goods or services, therefore raising a child is not an economic activity.
Furthermore, an efficient market is simply one where financial instruments are fairly valued and where perfect competition occurs. Yes, there is a social and monetary cost associated with societal ills and yes "economics and societal problems are deeply entangled", but all that was outside the scope of my argument.
Storage has been demonstrated.
This is the one I'd like to see fleshed out. Scale is a huge problem with storage. LiPo works great in toy helicopters, but baseload levels of power would require a pretty outlandish battery pack.
I ran the numbers some time ago here.
I have a comment with lots of links in the queue. If it doesn't pop out I'll repost. In the meantime, you can surf as I did from wikipedia "solar thermal" and "List of solar thermal power stations"
There is a new story on sodium-sulphur batteries at Bloomberg.
I have a comment with lots of links in the queue.
If it ever emerges from "moderation," it will be the first time in the history of this blog or its predecessor.
I'd also add that in the context of capitalism there's an implied intent to turn a profit.
An intent to turn a profit is not necessary to make something an economic activity even in the context of capitalism. Unless you define "profit" very widely to include things like environmental benefits being greater than the economic and environmental costs or warm fuzzie feelings that repay a lot of hard work.
Children aren't generally considered goods or services, therefore raising a child is not an economic activity.
I agree that children are not goods and services. Children however consume goods and services - especially teenage boys, who consume incredible amounts of food. Therefore raising a child is an economic activity as it affects the production and distribution of food. This is not to say that it's only an economic activity. A parent may have all other sorts of reasons for raising a child. But if they don't keep shovelling food in, they're not going to achieve those other reasons.
And food is merely one of the goods and services that most children consume. Healthcare, sewage, clothing, education, etc.
Furthermore, an efficient market is simply one where financial instruments are fairly valued and where perfect competition occurs.
So if you like, assume that in my hypothetical example financial instruments are fairly valued and the labour market is perfectly competitive. Hiring someone as a police officer still means that their labour is not available for other purposes.
Or take your example of raising neighbourhood property values by tidying up your own house. This is still a positive externality even if the housing market is perfectly competitive and financial markets are fairly valued.