Comments on: Adjusting to global warming

By: RightPundit » Blog Archive » World Bank and Global Warming

RightPundit » Blog Archive » World Bank and Global Warming — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 19:27:25 +0000

[...] This is not such good news, however, for those of use who prefer to base policy on science, not myth. Implementing Kyoto Protocols is likely to prevent poor countries from developing, perhaps leading to a world-wide depression. Whether or not it is good science (aside: it’s not), Kyoto is simply not good economics. Imposing Kyoto Protocols through the stealth method of World Bank loan conditions is counter-productive to the World Bank’s overall objective of bringing the poor out of their poverty. [...]

By: paul

paul — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:58:03 +0000

A correction to my earlier post: vehicle and aviation emissions are not included in the national Kyoto allowances. Therefore, although switching to more efficient cars will reduce CO2 emissions, it won’t help to meet the Kyoto objectives.

By: Chan MacVeagh

Chan MacVeagh — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 14:31:56 +0000

The great problem with the Kyoto accords is niether the cost nor the small impact. It is an intellectual excercise that pretends to make 100 year predictions. That is impossible. Hubbert’s peak (maximum oil production) may not actually be today but even the most extreme anti-enviromentalist can not believe that we will continue to find enough oil to match the 100 year projections. Somewhere between 2030 (worst case) and 2070 (best case) will all stop burning oil because shortages will end the viability of “found oil” energy. How smoothly we make this transition is a political question but whether or not we make it can not be ini doubt.

By: paul

paul — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 11:25:36 +0000

Andrew, as far as I know the Kyoto limits do not take population changes into account. Each developed country or “Annex I” signatory commits to keep total emissions at 1990 levels (with internal variations allowed within blocs such as the EU).

By: Ken Miles

Ken Miles — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 06:50:18 +0000

The costs of Kyoto have come up a few times in this thread, so I should throw in my two cents. A recent literature review (Barker and Ekins The Cost of Kyoto for the US Economy The Energy Journal 2004 page 53) of the costs for the US economy has found that the non-climate costs are “gradual and well designed… the net costs for the US of mitigation are likely to be insignificant, that is within the range +/-1% of GDP“.

By: Michael Blowhard

Michael Blowhard — Sun, 14 Nov 2004 23:58:12 +0000

Jackmormon—I’m with you on that. True conservatives should be very concerned. But part of Lomborg’s point is that—according to most studies—climate change is coming anyway. (I doubt Lomborg is a “conservative,” by the way.) Preventing it from happening entirely isn’t an option. So the question becomes: what then do we do? What then can we do? Another part of his argument is that Kyoto will at best—and using figures Lomborg didn’t come up with, but that the advocates of Kyoto came up with—postpone the inevitable by five years, over a span of about a century. In other words, at the cost of (if I remember right) $500 billion, we can, with luck, achieve this result: that the average temperature will have risen by 2 degrees not in 2100, but in 2105. A five year delay in the inevitable over the course of a century, achieved at immense cost. (I may be a little off in these figures, but but I don’t think I’m off by much.) Is that the best environmental use we can make of that $500 billion? I dunno, I think it’s a pretty good question myself.

By: Jackmormon

Jackmormon — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 22:06:47 +0000

The fact is that we have no idea what climate change is going to bring. The sea rising is one of the more probable, and that’s the one we’re arguing about in costs and benefits here. But what I’m hearing from my friends who work in this area is that the effects will be extreme weather everywhere. “The storm of the century” will happen every five years, or “the longest drought since 1850” will happen every twenty years. Some rivers will flood; others will go dry. Maybe the gulf stream will shift, making Europe a heckuva a lot colder and less fertile. The point is that we just don’t know what the effects will be, but that they’ll probably suck and will probably cost a lot of money to deal with. At a basic level, a conversative should be very concerned about this: almost all scientists agree that human activities are having a real impact on global weather patterns, and the nature of that impact is difficult to predict. Shouldn’t a real conversative want to protect the future against possibly catastropic change?

By: Antoni Jaume

Antoni Jaume — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 20:30:12 +0000

“The US issues that where not addressed where the equal inclussion of all countries (specificly China and India) and a full emission trading policy. China and India are not under the same restrictions as say Italy.” In other word, then, those who live at the limit of existence must decrease their consumption of necessary energy so that the people who mispend in a day as much energy most people use in a fortnight can keep doing so. DSW

By: digamma

digamma — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 20:24:48 +0000

Of course, a modest fuel tax increase- presented, with good reason, as a measure necessary to enhance national security- might well have been acceptable in the crisis atmostphere of September 2001. But we’ll never know now… The Bush administration used that atmosphere to get the policies they had been hoping for all along. I think they were wrong to do so. And I like to think that even if I’d agreed with those policies, I’d still find taking advantage of the crisis atmosphere wrong.

By: bad Jim

bad Jim — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 08:57:49 +0000

In the original French the quote reads, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” which means, literally, “Let them eat rich, expensive, funny-shaped, yellow, eggy buns.”

We won’t run out of fossil fuels for generations. Apart from coal [it’s cool that the current administration thinks it’s fine to level the Appalachians, dumping the overhang into streambeds, poisoning the folks downriver, and thinks power plants deserve a pass on cleaning up their exhaust gas][it’s also wonderful that there’s plenty of coal in America, China and everywhere else] it turns out that oceanic methane hydrates may rival our ground-drilled gaseous methane resources. Better yet, with the Arctic ice-free in the summer, our previously least-accessible resources can easily be shippped world-wide! It’s a bummer that the thawing of the permafrost undermines the siting of drilling platforms and access roads. It may result in additional methane releases as well, which might accelerate the process of climate change. Nobody ever said that progress was free.

By: Andrew Boucher

Andrew Boucher — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 07:17:48 +0000

Maybe my question wasn’t clear… Suppose Kyoto has limits b and c for countries B and C. Population of country B is stable but that of country C goes up. Do b and c change?

By: Andrew Boucher

Andrew Boucher — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 04:25:41 +0000

How does Kyoto take into account the differing demographics of countries? Do the limits vary according to the number of people in the country, or are they fixed per country ?

By: ChrisS

ChrisS — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 03:01:33 +0000

Chris makes my point that the damage to economies by Kyoto would far outweigh the cost done by global warming. Pretty bold statement considering we don't even know the extent of global climate change. But I guess I should defer to your judgement, since you know how the markets will react and how the global weather system will react (including the global ecosystem) and that we should just invest in solar. Easier said than done. And the uproar from lot of scientists re: Lomborg, is that he misrepresents a lot of science in his polemic. If rising sea levels were all we had to worry about, it would be an easier decision to make.

By: Baylelle

Baylelle — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 01:21:03 +0000

If we let quills manage their own brioche-accounts, as the free marketers wish, then porcupine welfare as we know it will end.

By: jet

jet — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 23:58:04 +0000

This arguement will go on until 100 years from now when everyone who lives near the ocean swims to work. The only part of the arguement that each side immediately accepts as valid is that competitive alternative energy sources would solve the problem. We need billions more invested in solar research, that is the tree you should be barking up.