David Brooks’ silly season seems to have found an Indian Summer, as he goes on about his imaginary friends Mr. Bentham and Mr. Hume:
If you put Mr. Bentham in charge of the government, he’d proceed with confidence. If you told him to solve a complicated issue like the global-warming problem, he’d gather the smartest people in the country and he’d figure out how to expand wind, biomass, solar and geothermal sources to reduce CO2 emissions.
“I don’t know the best way to generate clean energy,” [Hume]’d whine, “and I don’t know how technology will advance in the next 20 years. Why don’t we just raise the price on carbon and let everybody else figure out how to innovate our way toward a solution?
Brilliant…except the mechanism to achieve Bentham’s goal is Hume’s tax. Way to find a distinction without a difference.
The debate in government is not between people who want to command every detail of change and those who want to try to use market forces to achieve it. We are not having the debates of 1980s France. The debate is between people who want to encourage change and those who want to resist it.
The status quo has great power. It is what we understand, and it is at least one possible equilibrium from all of the incentives we have known historically.
Maybe there are good reasons for sticking with the way things are. Commercial airplanes could carry a lot more people if they were designed as flying wings (the B-2 design) as opposed to the typical cigar-and-wings design we have used since moving away from biplanes. But the flying wing is more difficult to maintain and hell on passengers – not much room for windows and a nonstop roller-coaster if you are stuck out towards the ends of the wings. We will probably have the current basic design for a while.
The energy system, however, is a fluke of history:
- For the first seventy-five years of its widespread use, oil was an American export, and American firms dominated the globe;
- The Texas Railroad Commission took it upon itself to regulate oil prices, functioning as the original OPEC;
- Mexico nationalized its oil industry at a time when Americans were still sore at the oil companies for monopoly behavior and the government was unwilling to intervene;
- The Cold War and the Arab-Israeli conflicts forced us to play nice with the Gulf states;
- We developed the cultural habit of allowing free (unmetered) access to roads and charging for access to mass transit;
- We did not know about the influence of carbon on the atmosphere;
- We had a cultural norm until fairly recently that littering was acceptable;
- We consider our military an expression of the common interest and pay for it out of general tax revenue, even if it needs to intervene or garrison somewhere for a specific economic interest;
These historical events have created massive stakeholders, from Permian Basin wildcatters and Detroit car manufacturers to defense contractors and the arts institutions sponsored by oil companies. As Paul Krugman has put it, the past has a better lobby than the future.
Any act of changing the status quo therefore requires the radical break of imagining a better future. It could be a world where people are not driven into bankruptcy by medical expenses, or where a beige cloud does not hover over the San Fernando Valley, or where Americans do not regularly return from Iraq in body bags.
It also requires figuring out how to get from here to there, despite all the opposition of people who don’t want to leave here. To take the example of mandating various power plants versus imposing a carbon tax, the main difference is how much leaks out of the system – how much the old way has to be paid to acquiesce to the new way. It would be fantastic to impose a carbon tax and simply let loose innovation. We would likely have the most carbon reduction at the lowest cost. But the high carbon producers who cannot easily ramp down their pollution don’t like that. So what then? Do you try to find a way to accomplish something, even at the cost of paying off the bottleneck, or do you stand on principle?
I’d suggest a little of both. If it is simply a payoff that accomplishes nothing – building an unwanted weapons system because the contractors want to sell one – then yes, try to oppose it by any means. But if the outcome is a perversion of a good program – running student loans through banks as a means of paying off the banks to allow the program – perhaps it’s worth the price to get the program in place. It would be nice, of course, to imagine a country sufficiently free of corruption and unified in national interest that we would not need these games. But that would be a very different country, and how we get from here to there is beyond me.
UPDATE
The climate change discussion in the comments brings to mind the far-right arguments that “well, the Earth was much warmer millions of years ago.”
Suppose we accepted, for argument’s sake, that the earth is warming for reasons completely unrelated to human activity. That doesn’t mean that it will have no impact on human life, or that humans should do nothing to counter it. From time to time cosmic bodies collide, but that doesn’t mean we should view an approaching asteroid with equanimity.
To argue in support of the James Inhofe approach requires denying not only that climate change is manmade but that it is happening. And there isn’t a whole lot of science supporting that perspective.
Global warming is total BS (as temps continue to cool in line with declining sunspots, the greens will look as foolish as they did in the 1970′s fearmongering about global cooling).
However, a carbon tax is a great idea. It acts as a tarrif on imports from countries with loose carbon standards, like China and India with whom the US has dangerous trade deficits. It also helps stop the US dependence on oil imports.
Would you bet the planet on it?
Sadly, many people bet the planet all the time.
I can’t understand why anyone would deny that global warming is an issue (at least privately); the notion that environmentalists don’t fully understand how global warming works actually makes me MORE concerned not less. Obviously the planetary behavior and modeling is very difficult; that doesn’t mean that as a society we do nothing until its completely understood. What if the environmentalists are wrong in that things are worse than even they realize?
To my mind, the reason that people decry environmental issues publicly is short term greed and is frankly unethical.
This response is absurd. It amounts to “you can’t prove we’re not right”. Clearly climate change has been happening for a good long while now (thousands of years). Now the question is how much of it, if any, is due to our actions. I think the conclusions that the IPCC arrived at back in 99 are busted by now.
I agree. First, the IPCC completely failed to predict temps and CO2 output over a 10 year timespan. Why would we listen to them over a 100 year timespan? Second, no statistically significant global warming over the last 10 years — a time when C02 has continued to rise significantly. Third, 800 year C02/warming gap. Fourth, doctored tree ring data from the Russian peninsula.
Look, if we can’t say for certain why the planet is no longer in an ice age then we need to say “we’re not sure, we need more research”. Balanced research: every dollar pro-agw should be matched by a dollar anti-agw. Or maybe, gasp, no bias in awarding research dollars. The whole argument that we can’t wait to do the research because it’s a crisis now is a logical fallacy. If we don’t know what’s causing the warming then what direction should we proceed in? Will we be screwing with the environment for no good reason?
Joe,
I’d love to see some evidence that there was “fearmongering” in the 1970s about global cooling. All I’ve ever seen is one magazine article that quoted a scientist as saying the planet should be cooling . . . if not for human intervention. Needless to say, that last part never gets quoted, and there’s never any effort to show that there was a consensus anyway.
Also, shouldn’t we have a cooling pattern before you confidently talk about the world continuing to cool? Its kinda tough to take a year in the top 10 hottest years on record and claim its proof of cooling . . .
I also don’t see how sunspots could account for the variation. They’re on 11 year cycles, and temperatures have been steadily drifting upwords without substantial lulls since the late 60s.
@ezzie83:
The years 1990-1999 were certainly warm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record
However, 2000-2009 have been pretty flat, according to satellites. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_temperature_measurements
Also there’s a big cooling trend from 1940 to 1960 in the instrumental temp record. If temps were related to CO2 that directly then CO2 would certainly have fallen over this time, but it went up, albeit slowly. http://www.oism.org/pproject/Slides/Presentation/Slide17.png
My opinion is that there’s a big piece of the puzzle missing. How can CO2 increase at a time when world temps went down? Is there some 20 year lag? Why? Etc.
@jwc:
1990 – 1999 did warm at a great rate. Glad we agree on that.
To say the 2000s have been flat in temperature is not right. The only way to do that is to only consider the last data point (2008). But climate change doesn’t argue that every year will be hotter than the last – only that the average temperature will increase over time.
Every year since 2001 has been hotter than any year in the 1990s, except 1998. The nine years of the 2000s include eight of the hottest years on record.
Just take a look at the five year average on the Instrumental Temperature Record you linked to.
In 2000, its around .35 degrees celsius. In 2006, the last year they run the average, its at about .5. Since 2007/2008 will end up with a net loss of a few points, we’re still looking at around a .12 degree increase over eight years- about as much as occurred between 1980 and the early-mid 1990s.
As I understand it, the WWII anomaly is a technology issue. Only American ships tested sea temperatures during early WWII, and they tended to overstate the temperature because they tested near the engine. The spike in temperatures in late 1930s is the outlier, brought back into line when other countries started testing in the early 1940s.
If you have anything to back up that American ships thing, I’d like to see it. I’ve never heard of that. So in 1960 they must have changed how they measured. Fine, but it’s all talk until you produce proof.
According to this article (which cites references) global warming has stopped: “show clearly that the rising trend of global average temperature stopped in 2000-2001. ” http://www.newsminer.com/news/2008/sep/27/global-warming-has-paused/?opinion
So it makes sense that temps in the first decade are warmer than the 90s: it warmed during the 90s then stopped in 2000.
If one wants to contest future warming on the basis of recent history, then it’s useful to keep in mind that climate models predicting future warming are tested against that data. If one wants to contest the dominance of the anthropogenic factor, an alternative hypothesis should be put forward, and discrepancies with the models should, again, be kept in mind. If one wants to contest that there is any warming occurring at all, then there is a wealth of corroborating indicators. The NSF has a nice listing of all of the phenomena that have occurred as a result of warming, many of which are separate from temperature statistics that climate change skeptics frequently contest (on often spurious grounds).
In any case, we all agree that change is necessary in many areas. What is apparent is that we disagree on what form change should take, even when we agree on the problem that we face. The best solution to the problem is often unfair or difficult, which leads us to compromise effectiveness. In other words, we promote the status quo first in order to promote change later. The balance is sometimes tilted so far toward the former that change is delayed indefinitely.
I only wonder what this means for us in a world that is changing rapidly of its own accord. I don’t think we can continue to delay our choices with half-measures until a crisis forces us to act. On the other hand, I don’t think we’ll learn to be thorough and decisive, let alone preempt problems before they arise.
JWC,
I’m glad we can have a mature conversation about this. Too often these things turn into flame wars.
As for that Op-Ed – two things:
First, its simply wrong on the data. Look at the graph you linked to earlier. Average temperatures rose more slowly, but note that they’re still continuing to increase. To give the author the most credit, we’ll use the data from 2001, when he claims global warming stopped.
The red “5-year average” line continues to go up by about what the 1980-2006 average is: about .02C per year. And five of the years are at least .1C hotter than 2001, with one slightly colder and one neutral. That doesn’t sound or look like warming stopped.
Now, I don’t want to overstate the case – warming has slowed from the 1990s. But we think there’s a good handle on why that’s true – we’re in a solar minimum, so the energy coming in is less than normal.
Second, the author should probably disclose his biases. His think tank has picked up about $700K in funding from Exxon, he’s a major player in Alaska Republican politics, and he once talked Sen. Ted Stevens into earmarking him a supercomputer by, as Stevens tells it, making the crazy claim that he could use it to harness aurora energy for use on the ground. (Akasofu denies telling Stevens this, but Stevens said so in front of Congress). So he might have the incentive and willingness to fudge things a bit to get his way.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/01/sarahpalin.climatechange
http://www.wohlforth.net/akasofu.htm
Here’s the link to an article describing the findings (which were published in Nature): I summarized it too quickly earlier (being at work and all that), so I got some details wrong, but the main point is on.
http://www.geotimes.org/june08/article.html?id=WebExtra060608.html