How can we convince rightwingers to accept climate science …

Since the Right is the side of power and authority, and since most proposals to deal with the scientific predictions of climate change involve strong exertions of power and authority and do not propose extinction of capitalism and the class system, appealing to the Right ought to be a snap. Maybe it has already happened, but there is more than one Right.

Anarcissie, the Right will oppose any usage of the collective action power of the government to curb corporate action. Their opposition to reform in the face of climate change is not even slightly surprising.

Denial of science is not core to right wing identity. We like our cell phones and penicillin just fine. What we reject is progressive campaigns to remake society on the basis of “science” that just happens to coincide with left wing political goals. How quick you are to forget that prohibition, eugenics, lysenkoism, high rise housing projects, single use zoning, and the many other failed progressive experiments that were also the product of then cutting edge science….

Remember when 97 percent of geneticists were in favor of Lysenkoism?

Clearly, government policy is made by elites — the ruling class — and when it is deemed important, it is then styled to meet the tastes of various segments of the public to get them in line. The fact that different directions, or no direction, have been given to the stylists of the ‘Left’, the ‘Middle-of-the-Road’, and the ‘Right’ indicates that the elites do not think it is necessary, at present anyway, to obtain unanimity, but as with abortion, Gay rights, race, guns, and so on, see culture-related conflict between the proles as more useful. (It distracts the proles from thinking about the economy, for instance.) I assume the r.c. can summon good scientific advice if they want it, so either they don’t believe anything urgently needs to be done at the moment, or they have plans to control and benefit from the predicted catastrophes, or they are thinking ‘in the long run, you’re dead.’ In any case, until the stylists of the ‘Right’ are activated, or the catastrophes actually begin, one cannot expect to change a lot of rightists’ minds.

I assume the r.c. can summon good scientific advice if they want it, so either they don’t believe anything urgently needs to be done at the moment, or they have plans to control and benefit from the predicted catastrophes, or they are thinking ‘in the long run, you’re dead.’

That last one is very prevalent among some people. I’ve tried talking about this to some members of my immediate family; after patiently boring through the shell of scientific denial (these are educated people who are, at least in principle, willing to listen to the merits of the argument) it finally came down to “well, I’ll be long gone when the shit hits the fan.” Oh, well, when you put it that way…

The major problem with getting people to take this seriously is that the change is slow. Fractions of degrees over the course of decades (but accelerating, of course). So no one thinks that they will be the ones to live with the consequences, even though we already are living with them (c.f. the California drought, which my family complains about incessantly). The sad fact is they’re probably right, in a horrible way: the people who really bear the brunt of global warming will be the people who had least to do with it, namely, the bottom third of the world’s population.

It’s actually very easy — or at least straightforward.

All you have to do is convince Rupert Murdoch. Once that’s done, almost everyone else will follow.

Right-wingers place great weight on tribal identification and loyalty. They also have great respect for authority. If you can convince a few key authorities, the ones who control the tribal ID machine, the rest will turn on a *dime*.

(b) The cost of climate stabilization has turned out to be so low that even a delay of 5-10 years won’t render it unmanageable.

What CO2 ppm concentration represents stabilization? From what I’ve read, stabilization requires a CO2 concentration of ~350 ppm, a 50 ppm reduction. This means a near-in-time worldwide end to fossil fuel production & consumption, dairy and beef ranching, wet rice production, and deforestation, plus a massive global CO2 sequestration program. How exactly will this be cheap?

Weird that eugenics is always one of the things trotted out to prove The Eternal Evil of the Left. Even Pinker does it. I mean, ok, Eugenics often had pretty broad-based support, but in what way were the theorists of ‘racial science’ and so forth progressive?

Fun fact: I’ve just learned that occultist, pan-German proto-Nazi chauvinist, Teutonic knight and professional lunatic Lanz von Liebenfels used to argue for what he called ‘men’s rights’, which would make him a pretty fine contender for coining the term.

Insert Debord quote about the loss of historical knowledge in the Spectacle’s ‘eternal present’ leaving even the ruling class incapable of strategic thought.

Bruce has a point, though, in that the people pushing denial are largely insulated from the consequences. This doensn’t necessarily imply malice, but it does mean that (1) feedback leading to policy change will never arrive (until it arrives in the form of many very cross poor people) and (2) plausible agnosticism is easy as well as convenient.

The benefits to any living member of the ruling class from e.g. part-ownership of oil firms are reasonably predicted to be far greater than the disbenefits from climate change that will affect them in their lifetimes. Denialism is sociopathically rational for them.

For right-wingers not in the ruling class, their whole identity is bound up with the desire to punish poor and/or minority people. They want global warming to happen as a means towards this end.

If we first get a cooling episode in line with the Dansgaard-Oescher cycles, that could empower the rightwing denialists to further delay CO2 mitigation, and after that, the return upswing in heat spikes might be more extreme, indeed enough to destroy food crops, and then murderous mayhem would follow immediately.

But on the whole I agree, and I have been arguing for years that the right, and libertarians, never had intellectual coherence on two issues, 1. inequality and 2. complex systems predictability.

On the second one, although they were able to vaguely apprehend the notion of imprecisely-predictable complexity in regard to the market system (via Hayek), they unfortunately were never able to grant the same thing to non-human systems, e.g. to wildlife ecosystems, as well as to a climate system that is mild enough for agricultural civilization. These things are even more fragile than human systems, and deserve the application of the precautionary principle.

I don’t think there’s much point to speculating about what very rich people think. I’ve met a few of them; some were very bright and some were idiots.

As for the general public, I think Doctor Science has it about right: too many reject any sort of environmentalism (or feminism for that matter) because they perceive it as personal criticism. They think of us as nags trying to make them feel guilty and force lifestyle changes upon them.

There’s also a general tendency to treat any question, including scientific issues, as a matter of authority, which is why climate scientists are accused of misbehavior and Al Gore is called a hypocrite. It’s all a matter of opinion, so the legitimacy of the advocates is of paramount importance. For many, the Bible is the only credible reference, and reliance is placed on God’s promise to Noah that He won’t do that again (not that He’s promising we won’t screw things up).

Most of us enjoy having our prejudices confirmed, so I enjoyed John’s point (b) – that fixing the climate will cost us peanuts in the scheme of things. That’s what I’ve long thought, and it’s actually what many economists (including John) who’ve studied the question have told us for years.

OTOH I can see the comment thread is developing into a pile-on against denialist trolls – boooring. The chance of getting a good CTer internecine stoush is being lost (where’s dsquared when you need him? Bloody globetrotting hippy). Let me see now:

Those greenies who preach the apocalypse and who declare that it can only be averted by us all repenting in sackcloth and ashes of our consumerism, rather than by some quick technical fix, may be right about other sustainability problems (though personally I’d not bet on it). They are clearly wrong about carbon emissions. We do not need to radically change our lifestyles to fix this particular environmental issue – which is fortunate, as the political prospects for a voluntary radical change in lifestyles for billions of people are a lot bleaker than those for a carbon price.

A combination of fairly modest conservation and a slow shift to renewable sources for electricity will do the job. Far the least painful way to assure both of these is to put an effective price on emissions. Prices done properly harness human greed to socially useful ends – and greed abideth forever. Regulation and directed investment have their place, and if we were facing immediate catastrophe would have a bigger role, but they really are very expensive. It is the carbon price that will do the heavy lifting in the long run.

Toofunny reminds me of the repeated canard used by online arguers, to wit, that lefties are anti-technology. I point out that wind turbines and funky solar power stations are new modern developing forms of technology, and some lefties are in favour of nuclear power. Usually they move onto a different topic after that.

And of course from a left wing point of view the establishment Democrats aren’t left wing at all, they’re centre right, as for instance is New Labour economic policy.

“If we first get a cooling episode in line with the Dansgaard-Oescher cycles, that could empower the rightwing denialists to further delay CO2 mitigation,”

Ok, let me ask a serious question: If the climate models justifying CO2 mitigation are predicting warming, and instead we get cooling, why would this NOT rationally lead to discrediting the climate models? Are the models supposed to trump actual observations? That’s not my understanding of how science works.

But the left response to the “pause” has been some combination of, “Pause? There isn’t any pause!”, “It’s just noise.”, and “We’ve already fixed the models to account for it, and see no reason to wait another 15-20 years to see if we fixed them correctly.”

Mostly the 1st, actually, outside of real climate scientists.

Now, b), that’s a pretty common observation among ‘deniers’: Technology is improving all the time, it’s reasonable to wait for actual confirmation, for models to actually correctly predict observations, because our power to apply corrective action, or to adapt to what we can’t correct, is getting better all the time.

We don’t see the freaking hurry. Let science work in the NORMAL way, where prediction is king, and “prediction” means you make a prediction concerning things that haven’t happened yet, and then wait to see if the prediction comes true before assuming you’re right.

I’ve always found it quite convincing that some of the biggest corporate advocates behind warming and climate science are the insurance companies. Lloyd’s of London and MunichRe (among others) are big advocates of climate science and have sponsored numerous studies (and not the self serving kind).

Normally we think of insurance companies as the conservative of the conservative, but considering they are the ones that will pay at least some of the bills for failure to act – its interesting that they see their interests as on the side of science and mitigation.

I agree with this approach to start, but add one thing … stop calling them “rightwingers.”

Name-calling just harms the argument you’re trying to make.

“The right,” “the left,” “rightwingers,” “leftwhatevers,” etc… are meaningless to the substance of the argument being made.

Joseph Ratliff 08.22.14 at 12:59 pm @ 35 — I think ‘Left’, ‘Right’, etc., are reasonably meaningful. However, we live in times when most large-scale organized politics is authoritarian, including that of those who call themselves ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’, and the main disagreements in public discourse are about which authority to obey and whether to feel sorry for poor people or just step on them (or both). The social structure is basically unquestioned. So I guess you are correct.

Doctor Science 08.22.14 at 4:20 am @ 19 — Powerful people do not tell the less powerful what they actually think, believe, know, plan, and do, because knowledge is power, and power is not given away freely, or the person who possessed it will possess it no longer. However, bits of truth may be mixed in the prolefeed for flavor; irritatingly, just because Fox News or the The New York Times publishes something, you can’t know for sure that it’s a lie.

Brett Bellmore #32: “Ok, let me ask a serious question: If the climate models justifying CO2 mitigation are predicting warming, and instead we get cooling, why would this NOT rationally lead to discrediting the climate models? Are the models supposed to trump actual observations? That’s not my understanding of how science works.”

The serious answer is, science worked the same way in gravitational theory. Astronomers precdited where the planets should be, but they were a little off. These discrepancies in predicted planetary positions didn’t discredit the Newtonian model. The problem led to the discovery of other, more distant planets that perturb the paths of the inner planets.

Similarly, climatology is on a solid foundation which has not been refuted. The underlying basis of climate science is solid physics and chemistry. It goes this way: As we increase greenhouse gas concentrations, the earth’s “energy flux” increases. What this means is, the amount of time LENGTHENS in which the radiation is bounced around in the atmosphere (because it is bounced around between the additional greenhouse gas molecules), before the energy is re-released to outer space.

So, at any one moment, there is MORE energy than previously. This energy MUST manifest itself in one of several forms: as hotter heat energy, as faster kinetic energy (more or faster wind, then shifting water currents).

The heat energy can be in the air, in the land, or in the oceans. The present “pause” in surface temperatures is matched by an increase in ocean temperatures: for some reason (perhaps a shifting ocean current, going nearer to a heated land mass) more of the heat is going there.

If we have a cooling trend, it will NOT be because the earth’s energy flux from additional greenhouse gases is decreasing, it is just that the energy will be sunk somewhere else for a while — or else, the incoming solar radiation will be deflected by another reason for a while (for example, due to shifts in the polar vortex, caused by shifts in wind patterns, which in turn might cause longer northern winters and increased albedo, or reflectivity from ice).

So that circumstance would be incorporated into the climate models. (It is worth noting that, so far, the present pause is WITHIN the current models’ error bars.)

But a cooling trend wouldn’t eliminate the danger. In fact it would probably make it worse. The heat trend which follows the cooling trend would be further intensified, because it would start out from the higher baseline of additional greenhouse gases.

To restate it, the increase in earth’s energy flux from greenhouse gases would tend to increase the variance and the possible extremes of climate effects, going either way on the thermometer. It may also dampen it for a while, but only for a while. This increase in extremes is a fairly common result observed in other complex systems.

And we also have paleo evidence. We already know that the Dansgaard-Oescher cycles were happening before the brief 12,000-year lull in which our agricultural civilization developed. We know that temperatures swung, very fast: sometimes by as much as 10 degrees C. over ten years. (over 17 degrees F.)

We cannot conduct an agricultural civilization under those conditions, or worse.

But it WILL be possible to adjust the climate models, if there is anyone left to do it !

P.S. However, this doesn’t mean that a cooling trend is about to start. The pause in surface temperatures is not heading downwards, unfortunately. It keeps sticking at around the same level. This is not good at all, because if it starts UPWARD again, it might be in sudden big jumps, and we may start to see annual heat spikes that, combined with droughts, destroy food crops much sooner than anyone has anticipated.

Luke #38: “…free market fundamentalists of any sort cannot accept environmental problems (if they truly think a ‘minimal’ state increases social utility) on pain of becoming apostates. If unrestrained capitalism leads to environmental catastrophe, then clearly it just won’t do.”

It is almost a perfect correlation in the very few scientists who question the dangers of climate change.

Despite the assertions in comment #21, that scientists are usually on the right, we find from the opinion polls that the opposite is true, and that very few scientists self-identify as rightwing conservatives. And the ones that do so, seem to be ignorant of economics.

I keep going back to Richard Lindzen’s assertions, in his speech to the Heartland Institute, that climate change alarmism is a left-wing plot to control our lives. This illustrates a core problem of rightwing scientific acceptance which needs to be properly brought out and identified: that one of the sciences it is ignorant of, is economics.

John Quiggin writes in his Inside Story article, “Carefully demonstrating that the cost of fixing the problem will use a trivially small share of national income goes nowhere.” But note in addition that the right wing also thinks that government can never do things better than the market, and thinks that printing money always leads to inflation. These sentiments seem to be all of a piece: a hard-money, anti-government psychology in which any planning (beyond individual market entrepreneurialism) must be faulty by definition.

If rightwing tribalism is a quasi-religious, “in-group” response to risk perception, then fear of one’s own “apostasy” is exactly the correct description.

So you admit that the system you are suggesting we trust has failed before, yet you insist we should trust it again, because this time we’ve ironed out all the flaws? I would say I was surprised, but I’m not. I expect nothing less from intellectual movement who fell for Communism in the USSR, until it turned bad, and then in china, until it turned bad, and then cuba, and vietnam, and so on. progressives have been singing the song of “this time we’re sure” for more than a century now, completely sure each time, yet continually getting it wrong. what will it take for you to learn that the world is more complicated than your formulas indicate?

What I’m saying, in the simplest possible language, is that you are a fucking idiot who does not understand how science functions. You literally wrote that because someone at some point was wrong about a thing, we shouldn’t trust other people to not be wrong about a totally different thing. That’s how stupid and brazen you are, that you believe this and are unashamed to state so in public. This isn’t even thinking; it’s a sort of facsimile of thought that appears to hang together for just the briefest moment assuming no one with any actual intelligence glances at it for too long.

You don’t care about science, or truth, or history, or anything at all besides coming in here and trolling people who disagree with you. You have not the slightest shred of basic intellectual honesty. You’re the perfect example of someone who can be dismissed out of hand because you don’t even accept the shared metatheoretical principles of scientific enterprise.

Certainly 97% of the scientists in the USSR were in favor of it….

Oh look, you lied again, you worthless fucking liar.

I grew up around Caltech and JPL in the ’70s, and there were a lot of Republican voters then, part of the general Southern California right-wing technocratic wing – the older ones had been big Goldwater boosters and the younger ones liked all the Reagan stuff about unfettering industry to Go Do Stuff. It took decades for the Republican Party to be consistently and vigorously enough anti-science to push them away, but the Republicans managed it.

I would disagree that you can get reasonable information from google on climate change very easily any more. 5 years ago, maybe somewhat. But now you get a lot of disinformation from both sides. Denialists and doomsayers both. The problem is there is a range on both sides from obvious bullshit to people who can actually make a credible sounding argument. And without having expertise it’s difficult to get to credible science. There are just too many people out there writing with an agenda now as opposed to a time when there were some obvious wackos and then a bunch of people who might disagree, but were actually trying to find out the right answer to an important question.

mpowell, when you google climate change the first hits are as follows: EPA, wikipedia, The Guardian, NYT, NASA, IPCC. I don’t see why any reasonable person of good will should find it difficult to find credible climate change information online. And it is simply not true that you need a lot of expertise to understand the underlying mechanisms and judge the plausibility of factual claims – High School physics can get you a long way. The greenhouse effect is quite easy to explain and understand, certainly no more difficult than other scientific theories that we take for granted and rely on every day.

toofunny,

The “intellectuals” of the right work in think-tanks, fancily called Institutes, where they produce reports as required by their rich donors.

The Heartland Institute is the key one in climate change.

A few years ago, Dr Richard Muller of Berkely puled together a team (including a Nobel prizewinner) to re-analyse the temperature records, prompted by “concerns” in blogs like Watts Up With That. Watts even announced, after a visit to Berkely, he would accept Muller’s results “no matter what they were”.

That declaration did not even survive for a few hours after Muller’s announcement that his team’s results confirmed those of NASA and of Britain’s Hadley Centre. In fact, he praised those bodies for their work.

Within days the word was out on the usual blogs, and in the think-tanks, that Muller was no longer “one of us”, but had long since sold out to the scientific establishment. His results were mainly ignored, they received little or no critical evaluation from Muller’s erstwhile allies. He was simply declared non grata, and not a single member of the denial movement even did a moment’s critical self-examination (it seems) over the whole affair.

That is fairly commonplace. Another example was the 2012 Arctic Ice Record Minimum – deniers who had been proclaiming “ice recovery” did not pause for an instant to re-evaluate their assumptions. Now, they are repeating themselves and chorusing “recovery” again.

Scientific?

Interesting here is the critical reception of Nate Silver’s featuring Roger Pielke, Jr.

@ Jerry

>at some point was wrong about a thing, we shouldn’t trust other people to not be wrong

Yes, I would think that this principle is obvious. Produce a person, or a system, that is never wrong, and I will happily trust it. Until then, though, why on earth should I not be skeptical when someone asks me to spend trillions of dollars on his pet project? extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence….

@ Jthomas

>It will teach you about how science works.

Again, you equate “agreeing with the progressive line on climate” to “belief in science.” I have plenty of faith in science, I believe firmly in empiricism. But to accept that because “science” has been going for a long time every present conclusion is has is correct is one of the most unscientific questions i have ever heard. I have no doubt that, over time, climate science will move, in general, towards truth. Of course, science can lose truth, my favorite example is stomach ulcers, which modern medicine forgot were caused by bacteria for several decades, but I suppose you prefer not to think about that. That said, even if you accept everything that climate scientists say at the moment, and I accept most of it, it does not follow that we should therefore spend trillions of dollars remaking the world in ways that progressives just happened to want before climate science became an issue.

@ Toby

>The “intellectuals” of the right work in think-tanks, fancily called Institutes, where they produce reports as required by their rich donors.

And greenpeace is out there encouraging people to write reports saying that climate change isn’t a big deal? is the NAACP encouraging studies that prove that racism is no longer a big deal? Even if I accept the silly notion that there is some nefarious group called “the rich” out to suppress climate science, do you really think that their opposition has no axes to grind?

Yes, I would think that this principle is obvious. Produce a person, or a system, that is never wrong, and I will happily trust it.

I like it when you continue to post things that demonstrate your utter inability to comprehend what science is and how it works.

DaveL #52: “One reason it goes nowhere is that even if true, it ignores all the other nations who also have to decide to fix the problem, and ignores the fact that many of those nations want to develop themselves to first world levels of GDP per capita, and at the moment burning a lot of coal is the easiest way to do that.”

I don’t think this matters. The whole globe doesn’t have to do it all at the same time. If the developed nations, even one or two of them, go to cleaner economies, the rest will soon follow suit. Opinion polls in almost every country show that 70% or more think the climate is a serious problem. If one nation decides not to, a green tariff can be put on its exports.

I also agree with John Quiggin that in fact it looks like it is going to be a lot cheaper than expected (until quite recently), so the other countries will adopt the new technologies for economic reasons. This is due for example to the new results in materials science, where computation and nanotechnology are leading to materials with better properties than anyone expected, including PV cells of much better efficiency and lower cost.

Cassander: “And greenpeace is out there encouraging people to write reports saying that climate change isn’t a big deal? is the NAACP encouraging studies that prove that racism is no longer a big deal? Even if I accept the silly notion that there is some nefarious group called “the rich” out to suppress climate science, do you really think that their opposition has no axes to grind?”

The difference which you seem to miss is that science doesn’t live in such ‘institutes’. Outside of those institutes, global warming denialism is probably as prevalent as clinical schizophrenia, while global warming evidence is as prevalent as caffeine.

“Similarly, climatology is on a solid foundation which has not been refuted.”

Absolutely true, and there is no question that, all else being equal, an increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase temperatures. The only questions are, “How much?”, and “Is all else equal?” THOSE are the important questions, and they’re the open questions. There’s no use pretending they’re settled science.

Look, if I set up a kinematic model of a pendulum, and it doesn’t predict the pendulum swinging back after a period, instead of continuing in a straight line, the model is garbage.

You can’t use climate cycles as a defense of why your model didn’t predict the right temperatures; If you set up a model of climate, and the various climate cycles don’t fall out of it, you haven’t got a good model. A good model should track climate cycles without having to have them patched in, in an ad hoc manner.

The models didn’t predict the pause. It is, barely, within the 95% error bar for many of them. But it’s rather troubling that virtually all of the models are on the same side of the actual climate behavior, rather than being clustered around it. That suggests that they all share some common flaw.

I want to see models that can actually replicate the behavior of the climate, instead of all agreeing on producing something different from what the planet is doing. Apparently I’m a “science denier” for expecting this.

If that makes somebody a “science denier”, I’ll wear the label proudly.

And, of course, there is still no scientific tradition w/ academic economics. My latest way of understanding it is this: Newton famously stood on the shoulders of Tyco Brahe, but economics skipped ahead and went straight to Newton. Within the field, even the strongest critiques point back only as far as Kepler. Nobody, nobody who gets a big professorship anyway, wants to do the dirty work of recording the location of every single celestial body, night after night for a lifetime. A bunch of big headed Newtons with narrow shoulders: not a bad physical description of the Chicago boys.

Can I take it from Bellmore’s series of comments that Rightists are now pushing an outwardly more conciliatory “wait and see before action” line than the vitriolic denialism that has been standard for the last 30 years?

Or you could just read about what actual climatologists are doing! As usual, the horse must be led to the water, though I cannot make him drink: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/12/the-global-temperature-jigsaw/

Which, by the way, let me just say a word about how incorrigibly lazy these people are. It’s like, oh, I have a theory, and it is my theory too, yes it is, about how climate science should work. Did you bother to cross-check that with how it actually does work? Did you bother to compare your spur-of-the-moment conjecture about why global warming is totally fake with the existing literature to see if your “concerns” have been addressed? No, of course you didn’t. It’s all “wicked scientists this” and “socialism that” and you can’t be bothered to spend a fraction of the time you waste complaining about these people on the internet to do just a tiny bit of reading. Protip: lots of smart people are working on these legitimately difficult questions. It’s highly unlikely that the criticism you dug out of your navel this morning has escaped the attention of actual scientists who do this for a living.

Brett,

I want to see models that can actually replicate the behavior of the climate, instead of all agreeing on producing something different from what the planet is doing. Apparently I’m a “science denier” for expecting this.

It’s not about models or predictions. We’ve already seen the damage from pollution and climate change. It’s with us right now.

(I have a post in moderation with several links to prove this, but have probably gone over the link limit.)

Bird migrations have already been seriously altered. Coffee growers have moved to higher elevations to escape the increased heat. Wine growers have moved locations for the same reasons. Our coral reefs are dying. Our rainforests are disappearing. Glaciers are melting at record rates. Farmers are experiencing record droughts, floods, storms and destruction of their crops. The evidence is overwhelming that right now, not in some computer-generated model of the future, pollution has caused irreparable damage, and there is no way to spin that to say none of this matters, or that it won’t get worse. Population growth alone will make it worse, and that’s not even factoring in developing nations increased consumerism and resource usage, etc. etc.

David #69: “Can I take it from Bellmore’s series of comments that Rightists are now pushing an outwardly more conciliatory “wait and see before action” line than the vitriolic denialism that has been standard for the last 30 years?”

It could be, but note that it has always been their fallback position. As Thornton Hall pointed out in #64 and I pointed out in #61, it is related to the ignorance of economics. Now it is easily transmuted into a line about how “we must wait and see, because it could harm the economy”. Listen to their old speeches on YouTube; they usually include an argument about how climate stabilization will harm the economy. Richard Lindzen at the Heartland Institute. For another example, Christopher Monckton, not a scientist, always ends on this. Bjorn Lomborg went on about using the money instead to help the poor people, as if we cannot do both things at once! Rightwing pseudo-economics has been a constant in the climate skeptics’ presentations, going back many years.

ZM at 17,

IPCC 7.4.1: Methane (2007), http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch7s7-4-1.html.

The second largest anthropogenic source of methane emissions (~25%) is rice agriculture. (Ranching is the largest source, at ~45%.) Rice paddies drown weeds and pests, which decay into CO2 and CH4. CH4 is a much more powerful GHG than CO2, but it breaks down after a decade. Unfortunately, it breaks down into CO2.

toofunny @21, you forgot the colon following the words “Pure projection”.

Aside from that, thank you for giving us an insight into how victimized you feel. In order to feel better, I suggest that you stay away from reading this blog – at least until you reach the bargaining stage. Maybe longer.

I have read some suggestions that U.S. rightwingers’ intransigence on global warming results partly from Dominion Theology, a belief based on Genesis 1:26 that God gave man the earth to do with what he likes (and also, God promised there wouldn’t be another Flood).

http://www.pfaw.org/rww-in-focus/the-green-dragon-slayers-how-the-religious-right-and-the-corporate-right-are-joining-fo

I can’t say if this is true and obviously it can’t be the whole story. But just because it sounds totally insane does not mean it’s false.

But just because it sounds totally insane does not mean it’s false.

Sad to think how widely applicable that statement is to developments over the last 15 years.

John B @81,

This article points to related issues regarding Dominionists, and pulls in Austrian Economics, Ron Paul, Gary North and Palin to boot:

Better Dead Than Fed

Ed,
“Reducing industrial activity to even pre-World War II levels implies being unable to adequately feed most people alive today! ”

I think this assertion is wrong, I have not see it asserted anywhere.

pasture should be reforested, land used for grain farming for pasteur animals can be used for additional farming or reforestation if too much, farming should not use artificial fertilisers emitting nitrous oxide, human waste should be treated and used for fertiliser, food and green waste should not be treated as rubbish and should be used to help soil also, agricultural machinery needs to be electrified, more labor in agriculture may be needed.

Transport of food should be lessened where possible (current human geographies mean food couldn’t be produced all locally I think ), and monoculture reduced because it is not good for soil, and cash crops for nutrient poor food like coffee and sugar could also be converted if there was not enough land for food farming.

(b) The cost of climate stabilization has turned out to be so low that even a delay of 5-10 years won’t render it unmanageable.

(c) The benefits in terms of the possibility of implementing progressive policies such as redistribution away from the 1 per cent will more than offset the extra costs of the delay in dealing with climate change.

Could someone, please, attack this optimism head-on?

I’m going to try, but I could use a lot of help.

The only way I can make sense of b) is that we are talking about replacing infrastructure over periods long enough that they coincide with the replacement of the infrastructure, so, arguably the increment to adapt may be a small amount relative to output/income. But, how that analysis is compatible with a delay of a decade, I fail to see. If you pile up the costs of infrastructure renewal over a period as long as a decade, you’re getting into some serious resource requirements, serious enough to reduce current consumption.

In the U.S., at least, we’ve been disinvesting at an accelerating pace for a quite a while; cashing out is what the mega-rich do for a living now, leaving everyone else to eat dirt in what is becoming a third-world country. To go from net disinvestment to major investment on an accelerated schedule to make up for a lost decade would be a considerable shock to the system. It’s maybe what we need to do — I’m only objecting to the minimizing incorporated into the “optimism”: shifting gears on this scale would be an event equivalent in scale to the Great Depression or a World War, maybe bigger.

The entire energy basis of the global economy has to be changed radically and completely by 2050 or so. Even if most infrastructure has a 30-40 year life, so that the increment over replacement wouldn’t be huge, we’ve gotten used to not replacing, taking out a reverse mortgage and spending the money on groceries and cable tv. We’re like the homeowner, who has not maintained his house, because he couldn’t afford the cash outlays, and now he can foresee the day it collapses from termites and water damage and cracked foundations and a furnace that doesn’t work properly, and he still doesn’t have the cash. Mr. Potter up the street has the cash to buy the land and put up a rental shack, and that’s what he’ll do, assuming Jimmy Stewart isn’t resurrected.

Maybe I’m missing the economics (b) and maybe I’m missing the politics (c), but I’m not seeing how either gets done, without enough general panic to, politically, wrest political control from the ruling class of Fox-News Mr. Potters, and motivate a consensus permitting a major investment in (public goods) infrastructure.

I guess most of the CT commentariat is ready to hear a rant against the capitalist Mr. Potters/ David Koch’s. You all know the rhyme: fill in the blank.

It’s a little harder, I expect, to question the economics of b), which aren’t really spelled out explicitly, but seem to be premised on . . . well, I’m not sure what the premises are.

Let me try a couple of possibilities: A modest carbon-price and the rest will take care of itself? Really?!? Any sane person believes that? I’m not sure which leaves me more incredulous — the politics or the economics. Where’s the political coalition to support a meaningful carbon-price and sustain it, when the bills start coming in for Mr. Potter or Mr. Koch? And, on the economics, do we will really credit gross substitution with such magical power? Can a carbon price knock the industrial revolution out of its well-worn groove?

This is taking the economist’s Hayekian fantasy of a market economy near general equilibrium in price, able to adjust allocational efficiency smoothly, way too seriously. The economy has never worked that way — there’s always been huge, purposeful planned efforts to build out public infrastructure and drive down the path of increasing returns, where those can be found. That’s what we need now — a vision of how we’re going to design the infrastructure that replaces the infrastructure we’ve got (at modest incremental cost, of course) and leaves our posterity (or ourselves, for the younger among us) in a place worth being, and able to cope. Optimism of the kind proposed by the OP just seems likely to get in the way of developing a political vision and consensus to guide the build-out of an economy structured around using a lot less energy and getting that energy from other than fossil fuels.

Or, is this techno-optimism? The idea we will never face any hard choices as we run still further toward the open end of the bridge to nowhere that we have cantilevered off the cliff marking the limit of the earth’s carrying capacity? Solar power is going to be cheaper than oil or coal ever were, and those solar breeder farms will be up real soon now. Energy problem solved, then we can worry about to grow enough food in the desert of California’s Central Valley or the Central Plains after the Ogallala goes dry, or harvest fish from acidic oceans, poisoned by our last efforts at drawing oil and natural gas from deep-water wells.

We need to panic, because panic is how we catalyze political choice, particularly political choice at the socialist / public planning for the common good end of the continuum. We need panic, because we need something very like revolution to get what needs to be done, in the long-term process of getting done.

And, if anyone thinks the free rider problem has just gone away on its own . . . well, we need harder, more disciplined thinking than that. Even if the technological options are getting better and more appealing, they still have to become political options, anchored to people’s understanding of their private and common interests, and we are a long way from completing the political process phase change in good order. (Please refer to the disinvestment mania driving income inequality, referenced earlier in this rant.)

OK, tell me why I’m completely wrong, tell me why civilization is not sliding down a rocky, broken cliff into a dark age.

“In the U.S., at least, we’ve been disinvesting at an accelerating pace for a quite a while; cashing out is what the mega-rich do for a living now, leaving everyone else to eat dirt in what is becoming a third-world country.”

The global climate doesn’t care which countries are third-world. “Civilization” isn’t sliding down into a dark age. Only the U.S. is.

It will literally be cheaper for the Chinese to use solar PV than it will be for them to burn coal. They will sell solar panels to everyone else. The U.S. will be as dysfunctional as always but it won’t matter.

and gravity — just a typo, you pedants

Cassander #95: “Changing away from fossil fuels would cost tens of trillions of dollars, full stop. … Every dollar spent making that transition is a dollar that cannot be spent on something else that people would like more. You are asking people to throw away tens of trillions of dollars in accumulated capital and potential future earning…”

Every bit of this is either misdirection or nonsense. You shouldn’t go around costing anything without the benefits; dollars spent on the transition would not disappear, they would then be spent on something else; capital depreciates and needs to be replaced anyway, etc.

@ Lee Arnold

>Every bit of this is either misdirection or nonsense. You shouldn’t go around costing anything without the benefits; dollars spent on the transition would not disappear, they would then be spent on something else; capital depreciates and needs to be replaced anyway, etc.

If you want to phase out carbon powered stuff over the next several decades, I’m onboard. Unfortunately, what I keep hearing is an “apollo program for green energy” and “if we don’t act in the next 5 years, we’ll reach a tipping point.” Perhaps I don’t hang out at the right places, but I don’t see a lot of interest in gradual phase out on the left. I see a desire for massive replacement as soon as possible, which involves enormous short term expense. As for gore, if that was his proposal, good for him, but he seems not to have had much impact on his party.

@John Quiggin

I know nothing about australian politics, but some brief reading on their method does not seem to indicate that there were any offsetting tax cuts to go along with the carbon tax. a brief look at the australian budgets. shows that tax collection increased from about 330 billion to 350, between fy 2012 and 13, though only about 3.6 billion of that increase was the carbon tax. and next year, revenues are expected to be over than 400 billion, despite the repeal of the carbon tax. At only 1% of revenues, I feel safe calling it small beans.

http://www.budget.gov.au/2011-12/content/fbo/html/part_1.htm
http://www.budget.gov.au/2012-13/content/fbo/html/part_1.htm
http://www.budget.gov.au/2014-15/content/overview/html/overview_30.htm

O.K. My $.02 worth. I also don’t understand why the economic problems are cheap or easily resolvable. How effective are mainstream broadly neo-classical economic models at prediction, especially over long time horizons, (though even, as we’ve seen, over quite short horizons)? And what underwrites the expectation of basically “linear” trend growth, which presumably underwrites the assumption that the costs of transformation will be minimal as a % of merely projected future GDP, (especially when a primary input to such growth, exogenous energy, will be rising in cost and decreasing in physical efficiency)? And not only are the economic “shocks” likely to be unpredictable and discontinuous rather than “linear”, but all the more, so the environmental and resource shocks too? So why should we rely on some simplistic “cost/benefit” analysis, when neither the costs, nor the benefits are readily identifiable, let alone quantifiable? ISTM that the insurance argument is much more economically important: that the greater the risks and uncertainties involved, the higher the economic “value” of insurance.

The problem doesn’t simply reduce either to replacing our current sources of energy, (just as AGW is not the only environmental, ecological or resource crisis we confront, only their intensification, rather than their supercession). It’s also a matter of replacing our energy using/consuming capital stocks and infrastructure, which is less a matter of an economics based on “market” transactions, than a matter of production economics, (with fatefully long-lived investments). Further, a large part of our current productive capital and infrastructure will have to have their “value” destroyed, and not just in physical terms, but in terms of the huge pile of financial “asset” claims laid on top of the physical stock and technical know-how. At the same time, a vast amount of new investment will have to occur, (together with a transformation of a lot of our ways of doing business, such as our current fossil fuel and chemical intensive industrialized agriculture), which far exceeds, given the time horizons involved, “normal” rates of economic depreciation. So though a carbon tax-and-rebate scheme is a necessary first step, it is far from sufficient, based on the “magic” of markets. A good deal of public investment, publicly guided indicative industrial policy, and public policy with respect to demand management, employment and income distribution would be required. If one still wants to call that “capitalism” or insist that it is “socialism”, that’s all fine by me, but the functional constraints will make themselves felt willy-nilly, or else we’ll just be running of a cliff.

But then conventional energy sources are already in decline. The EROEI of petroleum is currently put between 20 to 15. For NG it’s 15. Even coal has declined to about 40. (Don’t ask about nukes). So, on the one hand, it’s crucial that we use the remaining reserves of conventional energy, (both in GHG terms and in EROEI terms), to build out a fully renewable system, while, on the other, if we don’t do so, we will be caught in an energy “trap”, whereby declining availability of energy resources will no longer be sufficient to do the “work” of building out any alternative system of production and use. In the meantime, proposals like carbon capture or thorium reactors, are untried or non-existent, likely to prove “vapor-ware”. We should only rely on existing technical means or near reaches. And if we don’t make “wise” investment decisions collectively, but rather continue to rely on business-as-usual, then the result will be vast amounts of stranded, long-lived sunk-cost investments, and global depression and collapse. On the other hand, renewable energy systems, which means largely electricity, (wind, solar, hydro, connected with a “smart grid”), have this common characteristic: high up-front investment costs and low maintenance costs with large long-term pay-offs. Such a “hurdle rate” is something that only governments have the fiscal resources and time-horizons to manage. Capitalist oligopolies, as rent-seeking “organisms”, have neither the incentives, nor the financial capacities, nor the coordination to achieve such investments. Even leaving aside their current “interests”.

I have no idea where Bruce Wilder comes up with his 80% reduction figure. However, it’s worth studying this flow chart of the U.S. energy system:

https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/energy_flow_2013/2013USEnergy.png

Given the size of the U.S. economy, I would guess total global energy production/consumption is prolly between 350-400 quads. But note where the largest proportion of energy waste occurs. In thermal methods of electrical production (fossil fuels and nukes) and in petroleum powered transport. If thermal methods of electricity generation were replaced by non-thermal renewable methods and if land transport were converted to electrical urban mass transit and electric trains, then easily half the waste energy could be eliminated from that picture. (Further, if the number of vehicles annually purchased in the U.S. could be reduced by 12 million, at 270 bn joules per vehicle, that would reduce the embedded energy consumption by 3 quads, not to mention other resource requirements. even if much of the manufacturing occurs abroad, for U.S. consumption demand).

Further, it would surely help if current conventional “Western” systems of energy and resource production and consumption were not simply transferred to the “developing” world, or chained into the current neo-liberal global regime, but rather if systems could be designed and implemented to meet their actual needs and requirements, which leap-frog the “Western” models.

I have no idea what the politics, let alone the political-economy, of all this amounts to, but I wouldn’t be naively optimistic.

John c halasz

” I also don’t understand why the economic problems are cheap or easily resolvable”

I don’t think they really are. The IPCC technical report states the economists’ estimates that say they are low cost :

1. Rely on ‘idealistic’ (ie unrealistic and unlikely) scenarios
2. Rely on ‘optimistic’ (ie unproven and not practicable)
3. Rely on unfair and cruel discounting
4. Assume global consumption over the century grows between 4 and 10 x what it is now (despite current consumption already causing huge environmental problems)
5. Use 450ppm carbon equivalent as the goal rather than 350ppm (the latter is considered safe by many scientists and the former a politically convenient amount leaving action to some time in the future)

Also the Australian Climate Authority report uses General Equilibrium theory in its modelling, which Professor Quiggin has elsewhere said is not realistic /correct – so then this economic modelling is not based on sound assumptions.

Brett Belmore, are there subjects you’re not an expert on? You strike me as a sort of modern Velikovsky…

That rant, for Bruce (a scant excuse.)

It’s getting hotter and hotter
Mr. Potter
What a fucking rotter!

(You all know the rhyme: it’s no capital crime)

The firth’s become a loch
David Koch
Filth! Moloch!

(You all know the rhyme: every man of every clime)

That ice cap, it’ll list
What price, capitalist?
Destroy! Get pissed!

(You all know the rhyme: from ridiculous to sublime)

Raise all yachts on a permanent cruise
The animals perishing in ones and twos
Thanks, Fox News
J’accuse
Thought that you were clever when you lit the fuse

(You all know the rhyme: out of

#93 giovanni da procida

Perhaps I’m missing something, but the issue of the extra carbon dioxide going into biomass seems to me to be a small issue, mostly because it is a very slow process.

Let me first state my big point. I’ll start out with an analogy.

Americans used to believe that any large nuclear war would create enough fallout to kill everybody in the world. But then at one point there was a claim that we could attack the USSR and get away with it. We had many tiny warheads that could hit precisely, we could eliminate the USSR second-strike capability without creating enough radioactivity to hurt the USA at all.

But then some science-types thought that maybe a big nuclear war would burn enough carbon to make so much smoke it would affect world-wide weather for a year or two. A strike on the USSR that burned a lot of cities or forests would affect the USA that way. The generals had not thought about that at all. After considerable effort their think-tanks concluded that there could be such an effect, but depending on what time of year the USA attacked, the effect could be minimized. Therefore it was safe after all for the USA to make a first strike. They hadn’t thought of any other bad result, and the scientists hadn’t thought of any other bad result, so that proved there was no other bad result.

I’m concerned about similar thinking concerning fossil fuels. CO2 in the atmosphere provably results in a greenhouse effect. Too much of that is bad. But then we get the idea that if we can keep the greenhouse effect from being too bad then the problem is solved. We haven’t even thought much about the other problems because we’ve been so focused on this one.

About half of yearly oxygen production (and thus CO2 uptake) occurs in the oceans [….] The other thing to remember, is that oceanic phytoplankton are generally not carbon limited- their access to nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, and silica (for diatoms) is generally what is limiting their growth.

So on first thought we can expect the fraction of CO2 uptake by the oceans to drop, because it’s limited by other things while more of terrestrial plants are not strictly limited by other things.

Or maybe there are a few kinds of rare algae that are limited by CO2, which might become much more common than they are now. It’s hard to predict what tremendously complicated ecosystems will do when you put them into unprecedented circumstances. (You can predict disruptions, but it’s hard to predict just how they’ll go.)

The major effects of CO2 on the ocean lie in the changing acidity and increasing temperatures.

Yes. Ecosystem change that is hard to predict.

I’m not as familiar with terrestrial growth dynamics, but again water, nitrogen, phosphorus, etc. are likely to be limiting growth to a greater degree than CO2 concentrations.

I’m not sure that applies this time. If extra CO2 allows easier photosynthesis, extra energy allows more nitrogen fixation, more water pumping, maybe more phosphorus transport and retention, etc. It can’t completely overcome other limits, but it can push against them. Sometimes limiting factors are hard limits, and sometimes there’s a degree of substitution.

And the plants that have the most use for extra carbon will get a competitive advantage, which would change things.

Perhaps I’m missing your point, and I’d be grateful if you could tell me how I am doing so, but I do think that the potential for turning that fossil carbon into biomass is a much smaller deal than temperature change, and probably on balance a good thing.

You could easily be right. Certainly a 6 degree surface temperature increase would be a great big deal. I can’t prove that extra biomass would be a great big deal, it involves too many unknowns. Possibly on balance it might be a good thing for humans, I don’t know enough to prove it wouldn’t.

I guess I just feel conservative. It seems obviously conservative: Don’t make giant irreversible changes to your only planet’s ecosystem until you’re sure they’ll work out. It bothers me to hear people talk like we can just handle the temperature issue and then the problem is solved. When there are multiple other effects that are likely to have big effects, but that are harder to predict than temperature.

Brett Bellmore #105: “…they’re not heading the same way the CLIMATE is.”

Are you so sure? After this study, another study showed that the HadCRUT4 data greatly underestimates the warming since 1997 due to data gaps in the polar regions and Africa, and it was found, by including satellite measurements for these areas, that there has been almost NO PAUSE in the temperature increase:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2297/abstract

@95 this proves my point that the field of economics bears a lot of the blame for in action on climate:

Changing away from fossil fuels would cost tens of trillions of dollars, full stop. That, by definition, is an economic catastrophe. Every dollar spent making that transition is a dollar that cannot be spent on something else that people would like more.

By definition, if a democracy says something is a good way to spend money, then, by definition, it is a bad way to spend money. Who gave these psychopaths license to dictate moral philosophy? You did, JQ! By failing the test of humility, the entire academy bears the blame.

Goddam blockquotes! Last graf is me.

@118:

Good for you, Lee A., if you are referring to the report/study I think you are, carefully calibrating surface temp. measures with satellite data, equally calibrated, to fill in the gaps. If anyone cares to follow the scientific news on AGW, here is the place to go, rather than randomly searching the tubz:

http://www.realclimate.org/

John C. Halasz — It just occurred to me that if it is verified that there has been no pause in surface temp, and it is also verified that there still has been an increase in the rate of ocean temp, then that means that the planet is warming up a lot FASTER than most people now believe.

#125

I agree with you to the extent that I think it is foolish to just focus on temperature. Ocean acidification is going to be a huge problem. I guess I just don’t see the likelihood of great biomass increases in the system I’m most familiar with (the open ocean) and given the choice between fossil carbon in the air and bound up in biomass, I’d much rather have it in biomass.

You’d rather the devil you don’t know than the devil you do. I tend to agree.

We have strong reason to expect horrible results from lots of fossil carbon in the air, while we have no way to predict the results from lots of extra carbon in biomass except that there would be large effects.

And if it takes hundreds of years for it to happen then we could figure it isn’t our problem. Let future generations worry about it. If we are heading toward ecosystems without much place for humans in them, if it’s slow then we have a long time to find answers and it isn’t our problem this generation at all.

I can’t give you scientific papers predicting how fast biomass would increase or predicting the indirect effects of it. I have no idea how to do that research and I don’t know of anybody else who knows how to do it.

I’m glad to hear that you are confident it won’t be a big problem. Your prediction about that is probably better than mine. What confidence would you give it? Would you say that from what you know you are 90% sure that it will not be much of a problem? 99%? 99.9%?

@129:

Methane is a huge issue and most catastrophic scenarios involve run-a-way methane feed-back loops. Currently about 40% of climate “forcings” are attributed to methane. However, conventionally estimated, only about 1/3 of methane emissions are considered “natural” and 2/3 are considered humanly induced, though interacting with the natural environment. The main source of “natural” methane are wet-lands, though wet-lands contribute essential “environmental services”, aside from their own peculiar ecologies, especially with respect to water cleaning, if not flood control. So rice farming is considered a human source of methane emissions, as a kind of artificial wet-land, (though there are drier forms of rice cultivation, such as what is being promoted in India and elsewhere as the “system of rice intensification” SRI). But by conventional estimates, the main sources of human induced methane emissions are fossil fuel extraction, NG, coal, and oil, which account for 1/3, (though that is probably an underestimate), followed by grass-eating ungulates, cows and sheep, at about 2/7, and so on down the list. Rice farming is about 1/10 of the human induced total.

#129 ZM

Tim Worstall apparently blogged about extra carbon being good for plant growth, but I do not think it so simple. Because there will be extra droughts and changing weather patterns etc that are not good for plant growth, or benefits some plants over others – thus upsetting ecological balances. And also changing temperatures can make trees not be overall storers of carbon but emitters:

Agreed, it isn’t that simple. Sure, we can expect extra CO2 to benefit some plants over others and upset ecological balances. Tropical forests may decline, or some of them might possibly find a way to spread north. Formerly temperate areas may get more growth, and some areas that still seem temperate may also.

People who ignorantly write about this assume it will be good for humans. Like, they assume our crops will grow faster. It’s possible. And if say kudzu grows faster still, we can learn to eat kudzu. And if it’s jimson weed that grows and spreads the fastest? Maybe we can create genetically engineered viruses that will preferentially attack it.

I expect problems in the long run. We didn’t evolve with that much carbon in the ecosystem. There hasn’t been this much carbon for a long time. We might wind up with lots of ecosystems that are not suited for humans to survive in. That’s OK if we maintain our technology and plentiful energy sources, but we don’t have a long history of doing that.

I think John’s (b) is a bit problematic.
Sure, I agree that a significant energy transition wouldn’t cost us the farm, and would indeed have net benefits, but we will still be left with the long term consequences of the slug of caron we added before we finished (or even began at meaningful scale) the transition. Your wording for (b) implies we can fix the mess we created, as well as stop contributing to the mess.

And we have the significant issue of stranded investment in things that produce or consume fossil fuels. This has to be largely written off, and this will create quite a drag on the valuations of equity markets. I don’t think the global economy can easily accomodate this shock.

I really have to take issue with the claim that the costs of carbon policy (when we finally implement it) will be minimal. In every instance I’ve seen costs are estimated for programs that fall *way* short of achieving IPCC targets and take into account the necessity (political and ethical) for developed countries to assume the greater share of the carbon reduction burden. We see all sorts of scenarios for achieving target X in 2050, but this hardly assures meeting an intertemporal CO2 budget constraint that gets close to stabilization at +2º C.

For more discussion, see my series The Road From Carbonville, especially entry 11, Done right, climate policy can be nearly costless.

Science is telling us something very important, outside of climate change. One of the reasons why the right won’t ever be convinced by anything we say is that they very possibly are hard-wired to disbelieve — as we on the left quite possibly have our own hard-wiring in place.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called “Open Peer Commentary”: An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.

That’s a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests, and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).

Of course, I wish they’d stop dealing with just two camps, liberal and conservative, when there are far more political stances than A to B . . . . but that’s a side issue.

” pasture should be reforested, land used for grain farming for pasteur animals can be used for additional farming or reforestation if too much, farming should not use artificial fertilisers emitting nitrous oxide, human waste should be treated and used for fertiliser, food and green waste should not be treated as rubbish and should be used to help soil also, agricultural machinery needs to be electrified, more labor in agriculture may be needed.”

“Transport of food should be lessened where possible (current human geographies mean food couldn’t be produced all locally I think ), and monoculture reduced because it is not good for soil, and cash crops for nutrient poor food like coffee and sugar could also be converted if there was not enough land for food farming.”

As a thought experiment, suppose these things had been done after World War 2, instead of the historical carbon intensive green revolution. Would there still have been a five billion person increase in the world’s population?

@Plume and others.

The main Murdoch scions all believe in GW.
SKY TV is heading for low carbon business practice.

So perhaps if the old fella steps down?

Wallace Stevens: “The facts of climate change play, rhapsodically, to many of the sympathies of the Left…more regulation and planning”

Wallace Stevens: “Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker’s rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”

@146:

:-)

@139 you make a point that I made here in a past thread. In that instance, the tribal response was rather quick.

Wallace Stevens, IMHO, was the greatest American poet of the 20th century, and he deserves his work to be formatted correctly. Since this forum does not have a preview feature, or allow editing once we post, I apologize in advance if this fails:

From The Idea of Order at Key West

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Never mind the right, persuade Piers Corbyn!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Corbyn

I did not say I disputed short term studies on the safety of ge foods for consumption.

My safety concerns are on the long term effects of ge on ecosystems – longitudinal studies have not been done.

I also do not support ge for moral reasons – there is not a natural scarcity of biodiversity meaning humans should intervene to create more biodiversity. Human activity is decreasing existing biodiversity and causing the extinction of species. We should protect existing life forms not genetically engineering new patented life forms for profit.

The issues of inadequate nutrition in poor countries can be resolved through ceasing animal farming and growing more food crops for humans instead, and by ensuring proper fair distribution of foods, less food waste, and less cash crops.

Not that I credit that neo-liberal rag too much, but you might want also to consider this alternative view of the status of corporate science and GMOs:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/10/a-valuable-reputation

JQ @162:

As that particular article illustrates, the funding and the career prospects of legitimate scientists are threatened and lopsided when they go against established corporate interests. IOW the other side of scientific research issues is being intimidated and suppressed, and so, we often, as an informed public, don’t know about the balance at issue. The idea that scientific research is a public good or a common pool resource is being eclipsed, contrary to the rather naive and confused conceptions of scientific “rationality” among some CT commenters. (One of the confusions being between scientific research and technological applications. Gene splicing is a perfectly valid research technique and GMOs is a generic term; but the larger issues both environmentally and economically are obscured by that conflation and the failure to focus on specific technological applications.)

BTW I have no idea who Steve Milloy is, nor how that reference was invoked.

JThomas @ 131

Believe me, I’m not humoring you at all; I’m very much enjoying the discussion. I hope this response isn’t too late.

There is one large issue I didn’t bring up earlier, which is is that in general, across the ocean, algal cells (and marine phytoplankton in general) tend to follow the Redfield ratio: 106 Carbon: 16 Nitrogen : 1 Phosphorus. This does change in specific cases (and can vary greatly, but there is some upper limit: cells need enough P for RNA and DNA after all), but organic matter in the ocean tends to average out at this balance (diatoms tend to have silica in proportion to nitrogen. Iron and other elements are in lower proportion). So in order to fix more carbon your algal cells need more N and P. If nitrogen fixation increases under higher CO2 concentrations (because nitrogen fixation is energetically expensive) then you have your extra N, but you still need more P. This may not be a problem in coastal regions, where upwelling of deep water and runoff from land make these nutrients available, but coastal margins are a small fraction of the ocean. Even though there is less nutrients and less photosynthesis in the open ocean, because they make up such a large proportion of the total ocean, they are responsible for much of ocean carbon fixation, because the sum of lots of small numbers is greater than the sum of a few big numbers. So the regions of the ocean with less life matter a great deal.

But let’s take your iron example for a second: imagine that iron is limiting is some zone of the ocean, and changing climate doubles the dust deposition in that region (As you correctly surmise, iron comes from outside the ocean, as dust blown off of deserts, for example). Let us also assume that iron fits into the Redfield ratio at 160 C: 16N: 1P: 0.1 Fe for this location. Doubling iron can only double carbon if there was (more or less) a double helping of P and of N. Parenthetically, this is why the big oceanographic iron addition experiments done in the past have not led to greater sequestration of carbon, because even when the iron limitation is relaxed, you soon run up against the next limiting nutrient. So again, for the large open ocean regions that drive the biologically mediated cycling of carbon and oxygen (because of their extent, not because the speed of the microbial community metabolism) it’s going to be very hard to add significantly more biomass, because of the difficulty of supplying nutrients. Even if biomass is added, some fraction of biomass in the surface sunlit ocean (say top 100 meters) already sinks to the dark ocean. We know this is so, because that is what feeds the deep ocean. So increased algal biomass -> increased grazer biomass -> more fecal pellets falling through the ocean.

Experiments in labs, using model algal organisms, tend to suggest that increasing CO2 concentrations will increase rates of nitrogen or carbon fixation. But when experiments are conducted at sea, with the entire microbial plankton assemblage, they tend not to show any measurable effect from increased CO2.

“Extra CO2 might result in different algae getting common. From the CO2 available for photosynthesis, and probably more important the acidity, etc. The different small animals that eat the algae might concentrate poisons to make themselves unattractive to larger predators, except for the ones that can handle those poisons. We could get big ecosystem changes even without increased biomass. But those areas of the ocean don’t matter all that much to humans anyway, right? They can get changed around and we won’t much care.
“

I think we’ll absolutely see ecosystem changes in the ocean- we’re seeing them already. The biomass distribution will shift. There’s studies showing increases in salps (jellylike organisms) compared to krill, for example in the southern ocean. This is due to changes in temperature, I think, rather than acidity. There’s also been change in coral cover all across the Pacific- coral is being replaced by (large) algae, likely due to combinations of human impact, changing temperature, and acidity.

So I am in absolute agreement with you that the extra carbon added to the ocean is going to have a major detrimental effect on the ocean. Community composition will change, but I think you will see the effect mostly as a shift in the biomass distribution, rather than an increase in the amount of total biomass. To go back to your percentage question (@128), the chance that the ocean will be negatively impacted isn’t a chance- it’s already happening. The chance that we will see large amounts of extra biomass added to the ocean? Ballpark and hand-waving guess is that the chance of more than a 10% increase in total biomass in the sunlit ocean: less than 25%. The chance that any added biomass is not detrimental to us? I’m going to say something like 95%. The things I can think of would be if that extra biomass went into greater and more numerous blooms of toxic dinoflagellates, for example. But I think that any added biomass in the ocean is much more likely to be respired my microbes and small grazers or to sink below the sunlit zone, where it will be out of reach of the atmosphere for thousands of years.

Now, a terrestrial ecologist or biogeochemist, or agronomist may have a 180 degree opinion with respect to biomass accretion on land. My expertise (such as it is) is only valid in the ocean. Thanks for the opportunity to think about this stuff out loud. Let me know if I’ve said something that doesn’t make sense or isn’t logical.

On the other hand, what are the “costs” of GM crops? We are told that they cost biodiversity. But is that self-evidently a cost?

We already lost most of the biodiversity when we planted giant tracts of monoculture. The result of that is that every so many years we get a crop failure and prices go up and our agribusiness industry makes more money than usual. The only biodiversity problem I see from GM crops is that wind-pollinated GM crops will pollinate heritage crops too. But that was almost as true of the monocultures that weren’t GM.

Anything else? Well, there’s the Roundup issue. By creating monocultures that are roundup-ready we make it cheaper to spray herbicides that kill weeds. In many cases this probably increases yield because the crops get all the fertilizer etc that weeds don’t get, and all the water, and all the sunlight. It reduces costs because it doesn’t take as much plowing to kill off the weeds that would otherwise grow. (Sometimes extra plants can actually increase yield. But if farmers believed that they would plant the other plants themselves.) So roundup reduces the biodiversity of weeds growing in cropland and near cropland. This is only a problem if we cultivate too much land that the diverse plants could survive in, not leaving them enough space to survive. The herbicides might be causing problems on a large scale. But it isn’t obvious how we can test which of our big environmental issues might be caused by herbicides because we don’t have a control group where we aren’t using them upstream. We do have some lab studies that say it might not be an issue, though.

How many dead humans is a random insect species worth?

You have the question backward. How many extinctions is the 8 billionth child worth?

People don’t like to think on that scale. But try. Each generation the crop of humanity must be replaced. We are a species like other species, throughout our prehistory and history we have created more children than can reproduce before they die, and the surplus dying off allows our continued evolution. We can slow down our evolution if we are willing to control our population and require that mostly each child born has two children in a lifetime. So far we have not been willing to do that at all.

If humanity continues to live in societies that advance in science, eventually we will understand how genomes work, and how they fit into environments. We will be able to read the genomes of species and get a sense of the climates they evolved in. We will learn how to design ecosystems that fit our needs. At that time, each species with proven survival in a real ecosystem will be invaluable. Worth at least trillions of dollars, though monetary value is not really a usable scale for such things.

Against that value, say that for one extinction we could have 50 extra poor children survive in 2015. Their survival makes it that much harder for their neighbors to survive. And then the population will decline (not unlikely during their lives).

A fraction of the rare mainland species were once common in ecosystems that mostly don’t exist today. They are a wealth we don’t know how to use today, but they are the main resource we can hand down to future generations. We are mining away the fossil fuels, the phosphates, the best iron ore. We are releasing large amounts of lead, arsenic, radium, etc into the environment that used to be safely locked up underground. We are damaging the groundwater lots of places. We are ignorantly fucking around with the genomes of our agricultural plants and animals. “Biodiversity” is most of what they’ll have to work with. You want to compare the marginal value of one more surviving species versus the marginal value of one more human? A lot of people were raised wrong, and they would choose the wrong answer on that.

But biodiversity is not particularly a GM question.

You want to compare the marginal value of one more surviving species versus the marginal value of one more human?

No. You do.

I don’t understand what values exist separate from human experience. Were the five or six mass extinctions in earth history morally bad? Is the answer no because they were slow? Because they weren’t caused by organisms (false in some cases), because they were natural? Morality makes no sense absent human agency.

So if morality exists because of humanity, how can it possibly be true that there is some moral good caused by an increase in human suffering that has no human upside?

John Quiggin @161 says: “Among people who are politically active in a significant way, this likelihood is very low, simply because the proportion of all politically active people pushing a strong anti-GM line on food safety grounds is very small.”

First, I was not actually concerned with “people who are politically active,” whether in “a significant way” or not. I was talking about people that I met with whom the topic of climate change or GMO came up. I found, in my admittedly unscientific method, that doubts about GMO and belief climate change seemed to form a set. These were also people that I would classify as being liberal or left.

I myself hesitate to draw any strong conclusions from my “research,” given the biases inherent in my method. But you don’t sound like you are on any firmer ground–even if we focus more narrowly on “politically active people” instead of “folks” (if I can be permitted to sound presidential for a moment) “that Wallace meets.” For example, how are you defining, and then identifying, the “politically active people” that form the denominator of your “very small” proportion? And by what means have you determined that they are not against GM foods? This doesn’t sound like statistically valid survey work, though it wouldn’t surprise me if some exists.

The issue that we are debating is not just a quibble–it is central to the question you raised in the beginning: “How can we get right wingers to accept climate science?” I think that this is bound up with the question of how people–left or right–form opinions under significant time and information constraints.

#170 Thornton Hall

So if morality exists because of humanity, how can it possibly be true that there is some moral good caused by an increase in human suffering that has no human upside?

I guess my comment was too long and you didn’t read it.

I am optimistic that humanity can continue to have a technological civilization.

If that’s so, then we will learn how to manipulate the genetics of other organisms *effectively*. We will learn how to create ecosystems that work well for us.

When that time comes, species that have survived in known environments will be *wealth*. They will be a giant part of the wealth humanity has, considering what we today are doing to our other kinds of wealth.

I am definitely not talking about avoiding extinction for other species as having no human upside. Exploitable species will be worth far more than gold.

Now suppose that we can temporarily increase the human population to 8 billion and it will cost us half the species. Say we can maintain that population size for one generation and then it falls.

How much have we reduced human suffering to have a billion extra people who do not succeed in reproducing themselves?

How many species — the wealth of the future — is that worth permanently losing?

J Thomas,

Except no body does need to die as a consequence of not genetically engineering life forms. Thornton Hall just adds this claim to climate change threads for rhetorical purposes for reasons known only to himself.

People dying from hunger or suffering from inadequate wholesome food is not caused by a lack of genetically engineered plants and animals.

It is caused by people using farm land for animals kept to be eaten or for dairy instead of growing wholesome grains, fruits and vegetables; by growing unwholesome foods or substances like sugar and tobacco; and by inequitably over supplying wealthy countries and demographics with food while undersupplying poor countries and demographics with food.

People are not suffering from hunger because we have inadequate food plants for goodness’ sake, but because of selfish human choices.

I heard a man from the weather bureau talk last year as part of a panel on Australia at 4 degrees if warming. He had to answer a question on whether he thought people would make the choice to limit climate change to a still reasonably safe level. His reply was that people in wealthy countries are selfish and do not presently choose to make changes in their lives and political systems for the sake of the world’s poor and hungry and ill treated people – he said since we do not care enough to act about poor unfortunate people living right now he thought it unlikely we will care enough to make changes to limit climate change for the young and the as yet unborn.

That was certainly a gloomy thing to hear.

Thornton Hall @ 170

“So if morality exists because of humanity, how can it possibly be true that there is some moral good caused by an increase in human suffering that has no human upside?”

This is a very good question, perhaps too good a question. Some humans kill elephants and exchange their tusks for money, effecting a transfer of wealth from richer to poorer and thereby reducing human suffering. Which in your view is moral – that they be permitted to do this, or that they be prevented from doing this? Preventing it will surely increase human suffering and produce no human upside, don’t you agree?

@ZM I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but Wallace Stevens brought up GM crops, not me. So the reasons are known to at least two of us.

“We could feed the world population on less land than we use now, and also keep 4 or 5 years’ stockpile of stored food. It would be a conservative thing to do. In the old sense of conservative meaning “try not to take undue risks”.”

Yes, I think this would be a better approach than genetic engineering.

It’s an approach that’s mostly independent of genetic engineering.

The big problem with genetic engineering in general is that we don’t know the risks. And when we put too much of our efforts into a very few varieties of GM food, the risks are magnified.

Keeping a stockpile of food to deal with the unexpected seems like just plain common sense, it would be true even if we weren’t taking extra GM risks. But it has a cost. If you depend on free markets to do that, they mostly won’t because putting assets into preparation for uncommon problems is not reliable, and also they profit from shortages. The obvious alternative is to buy insurance that will pay in money for food shortages. People who can’t afford food insurance can die, or the government can pay for them.

There’s a possibility that the details of the way GM techniques are done now, might cause some big problem. Small-scale studies have not shown any problems like that, unless you believe the alarmists who say that some problems have been covered up. There’s a possibility that we could get some giant catastrophe from some detail of GM methods that nobody predicted. But I don’t know any theoretical reason to expect that, without knowing the tiny details of how it’s done in practice. If we didn’t have various other catastrophes breathing down our necks I’d say to be cautious about using it large-scale for a few decades while we look for problems. That would be conservative. But we figure we can’t afford to do that.

In the long run we will probably mostly be better off without giant-scale monoculture. We could plant little patches of this and that, and design ways to harvest them efficiently. For some things we might do better without plowing but just sort of punch the seeds we want into the ground. Build more topsoil, and the rewards may be bigger from letting the best-adapted ground cover stay there than trying to keep it dead. That sort of thing needs to be adapted gradually too, in case it has hidden traps.

One good sign — the USA is gradually pricing beef out of reach of the middle class. US beef consumption is down 10% from the high in 2007. Prices are up more like 25% since then. But beef production is only down about 4% because we have doubled exports. We now export nearly 2.6 billion pounds of beef per year, despite international concerns that political pressure has mostly gotten rid of BSE testing of US beef, and physicians are encouraged not to report human cases here.

“Yes, but the part that is immoral is the part concerning humans. It’s immoral to inflict needless suffering on animals because we like animals and it hurts us to see them suffer, or to see them disappear.”

I disagree. Saying that humans can distinguish right from wrong is not the same thing as saying humans invented right and wrong. It is the latter notion which allows humans to invent rationales (e.g. Subhumanity) justifying abuse of others. If the measure of morality is simply whether it makes us feel good or bad, I think we’re in deep trouble. It is wrong to cause needless suffering, but the wrong part is the needless suffering, not how we feel about it.

And, there’s evidence elephants are themselves moral actors, which makes it worse.

Btw, Layman, this is a great discussion to have and I hope my comments are received in a light hearted way.

Now, let’s take this: If the measure of morality is simply whether it makes us feel good or bad, I think we’re in deep trouble.

This is worth some contemplation. I think when we get to the bottom of morality it is precisely about how it makes us feel.

mattski @ 185, 186

“Are those two different things?”

I think so. The former establishes that it is the suffering of others which is to be avoided – that is, the consequences to them – while the latter focuses only on one’s own suffering, the consequences to self. If the inhibition is in the self, then it can be permissible for one to harm others as long as one doesn’t feel badly about it.

“I think when we get to the bottom of morality it is precisely about how it makes us feel.”

‘How it makes us feel’ is a form of self-interest. I’m sure most people function this way – that they are morally governed by their own self-interest – but that doesn’t in practice lead to moral behavior, does it?

Also, have you noticed how post-modern types who usually can’t bring themselves to write the F word, ‘facts’, without scare quotes suddenly go all nineteenth century and positivist when the topic is climate change?

Actually I find the pomo sorts who haven’t moved on are happy to aid the confusionists — some links and discussion here:

http://physicsfocus.org/philip-moriarty-circling-the-square/
http://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/sts-vs-physics/

Judith Curry, Roger Pielke Jr., and Daniel Sarewitz love this stuff. Interestingly, the latter two are associated with the Breakthrough Institute, as is Bruno Latour. Maybe he’s having third thoughts?

J Thomas @ 189

. . . say you torture them slowly to death as so many millions of humans have been tortured over the centuries. You shouldn’t do that. But it isn’t that big a deal in the long run. If you kill ten million humans or fifty million, there are plenty more where those came from.

Lovely to know you have such well-though-out ethical commitments.

“I treat you well because at the deepest level I don’t like suffering and I don’t distinguish between myself and others because my awareness tells me that others experience suffering and joy just like I do. ”

I agree with this, but what you’re saying is not that you treat others well because it makes you feel good; it’s that you treat others well because you know it makes them feel good. You’re aware of their suffering and seek to alleviate it, or at least to avoid causing it.

That argues in favor of my point, that it is the suffering of the other, not our own feelings, which defines whether the behavior is moral. In the elephant example, killing elephants for tusks is wrong because it causes elephants to suffer needlessly, not because we like elephants or have empathy for them. Those things help us know about the suffering, but it’s the suffering itself that is the evil.

By the way, please don’t conflate my views with the self-sealing arguments for ethical egotism. That was my view in high school. Not now.

J Thomas: you need to update your beliefs about nutrition. The food pyramid of the 80s was almost perfectly wrong. Pricing high quality protein high causes obesity. There’s no argument that it doesn’t.

@197 I think this story is largely correct and helps explain why I’ve come to subscribe to moral particularism. Every effort to derive all morality from a set of finite principles leads to absurd results. At some point it’s time to stop searching for the magic set of principles.

This isn’t relativistic however because morality solves practical problems. Therefore we can judge how well they are solved.

#193

“J Thomas: physicians are encouraged not to report human cases here [of BSE]”

You have a cite?

As usual, there’s a degree of interpretation involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy#Practices_in_the_United_States_relating_to_BSE

In the United Kingdom, anyone with possible vCJD symptoms must be reported to the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance Unit. In the United States, the CDC has refused to impose a national requirement that physicians and hospitals report cases of the disease. Instead, the agency relies on other methods, including death certificates and urging physicians to send suspicious cases to the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center (NPDPSC) at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, which is funded by the CDC.

For lots of things we have a legal requirement to report, because without it physicians mostly didn’t. This time they didn’t bother. It’s possible to interpret “urging physicians to send” as not meaning “encouraging physicians not to report”. But in context I think it pretty much does mean that. Experts might disagree.

#198

J Thomas: you need to update your beliefs about nutrition. The food pyramid of the 80s was almost perfectly wrong. Pricing high quality protein high causes obesity. There’s no argument that it doesn’t.

Look up vegetarians and obesity.

Obesity does seem to go with eating a lot of starch and/or a lot of sugar, and maybe HFCS is particularly a problem.

So I don’t think we’d be that much healthier if instead of growing a whole lot of corn and feeding it to cows and eating the beef we instead just ate that much corn ourselves.

But maybe we don’t need that much corn. We could also grow other crops that provide fewer calories but more of our other needs.

To me, boiled down, the range of morality to immorality is basically kindness to cruelty. One can throw in other words and adjectives to intensity or soften that range, but that’s the basic set up, IMO.

Which is why I don’t see how the bible is any kind of guidepost for morality or immorality. Its basic range — and, yes, I’m generalizing here terribly — is obedience to the god of the bible or rebellion against him. And the god of the bible is often in the business of mass slaughter. “Kindness,” for him is rather rare, and generally doubles back on the obedience trope. Obey him, and he may be kind. Disobey him and he will all too often go postal. And, as stories like Job, and Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac show, his wont is to test our levels of obedience in truly despicable ways.

The above, of course, is if one takes the bible literally. Though even as metaphor, it’s likely to have some sort of mass effect. It’s still “out there” in the cultural sea, etc.

So, as others have mentioned. The recognition of suffering, the attempt to reduce it, if not eliminate it. Or something even more proactive than that. That’s “morality.” To cause others to suffer is immorality. I wish the religious tradition that functions as a sort of unifying model for millions was based upon morality.

India did not have much of an obesity problem, without much meat. Then they got plugged into the global food market and now they do. Something like 15% obesity, and possibly 5% morbidly obese.

Eating lots of corn-fed beef is one way to avoid the foods that will make you fat, but it isn’t the only way.

I’m not a vegetarian. I believe it’s a lot easier to stay healthy with at least a few ounces of meat a week.

I remember during a break in physiology class reasoning that the Atkins diet thing should pretty much do what Atkins said it would, but we worked out some plausible side effects that could be pretty bad. Sometimes.

@j Thomas. Re-reading 210 I realize we’re not that far apart.

Well, this thread has been thread-jacked by various commenters from the topic of the OP. Specifically the trope about climate change denial and opposition to GMOs being equivalent, a cliche’, has led away from any serious concentration of the economic problems involved. But that trope is merely a case of false equivalence. For one thing, the science is genetics, which is itself a branch of evolutionary biology and ecology. GMOs is a generic term for a group of potential or actual technologies, which each would have to be specifically evaluated on their own merits. (My own view is that the environmental/ecological and economic/agronomic issues with existing and possible GMOs are far more important than the possible human health effects, though the latter are largely unknown due to corporate suppression of research on their long-term health effects, as the Tyrone Hayes case makes clear, as a “smoking gun”). But climate science is directly science and denying the results of such research is different from issues about the relevant or feasible technological (and economic) response. So there is a basic asymmetry between the two case, which it is fatuous to deny, in the name of being “rational” or “pro-science”.

But with respect to GMOs as actually existing there is what economists like to call a “natural experiment”. Since 1990 how much have average agricultural yields increased in the U.S., where such crops have been extensively deployed, vs. in the EU, where they have been largely banned or disfavored? The answer is that yields have increased at about the same rate, in that time period, so there is likely no general advantage or necessity for pursuing the existing GMO programs, and other agricultural methods are surely possible, and for a number of reasons, far more desirable, generally speaking.

@215:

Despite you namesake, this isn’t a matter of an opinion poll or mere attitudizing, but of reasoned and informed discussion.

I don’t think that’s fair, any more than it would be fair to use the ‘conspiracy theorist’ label for people who are concerned about the long-term effects of poorly reasearched medicines. The same moral hazards apply with GMOs.

Wallace Stevens: . . . we need to think about how people form opinions about very technical questions where they are not experts.

Maybe, we need to think about how evil business corporations choose their messaging strategy:

evil oil company goes to the rolodex to see who they used in the fight over lead in gasoline or asks for references from evil tobacco gians, and funds climate change denialism

OR

evil agro-chemical giant “a sustainable agriculture company” (their own words!) pays to have scientific authority bolster their claims that their GMO plan is safe and sound.

Either way, what people have to work with to form their opinions is a lot of b.s., with few fully trustworthy interpreters.

The fact that the interested business corporation takes a pro-science or anti-science stance in their P.R. strategizing does not create a symmetry or asymmetry between Left and Right. It just creates different problems for partisan argumentation (and for responsible journalists).

I do not think the Science is ever going to crown Left or Right the clear victor on any issue. The facts are more nearly neutral than that, even when the political partisans may be using convenient lies to bolster their own prejudices.

The Left could “accept” the science — as far as it goes — on GMOs and still have an excellent case against the extension of intellectual property claims and a model of agricultural practice that emphasizes pesticides and neglects soil conservation and species diversity.

I do not want to even imagine what comes after climate change denialism for the Right. Nothing decent, I suspect.

@220 every law on the books was written in part by moneyed interests. Somehow it works. And come on, it works.

I really loathe how some commenters – Thornton Hall regularly, and now Wallace Stevens (whose namesake must be turning over in his grave) – jack threads on needing to stop anthropogenic climate change into arguments on needing to support anthropogenic genetic engineering.

This is just another ‘change the topic’ sort of climate change denialism two step.

I also loathe how to do so Thornton Hall professes his great and abiding concern for the world’ spoor and hungry despite not mentioning them at other times. He could help the poor more through donations and supporting economic law changes more than through genetic engineering.

And now their is an attack on vegetarianism on a climate change thread – never mind how the extent of contemporary animal farming is a leading cause of climate change!

Another form of climate denialism by Thornton Hall – “I believe the science – I just don’t see the need for the scientifically suggested solutions that would require me to make any changes in my life other than the genetic engineering of life forms for the sake of all the world’s poor who I care so deeply about’

“Whether or not agriculture was the “worst mistake in the history of the human race,” the choice, once made, was made for good. With a global population of seven billion people, heading rapidly toward eight billion, there’s certainly no turning back now (even if paleo does, in fact, prevent zits). Pound for pound, beef production demands at least ten times as much water as wheat production, and, calorie for calorie, it demands almost twenty times as much energy. Livestock are major sources of greenhouse-gas emissions, not just because of the fuel it takes to raise them but also because they do things like belch out methane and produce lots of shit, which in turn produces lots of nitrous oxide. One analysis, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, concluded that, in terms of emissions, eating a pound of beef is the equivalent of driving forty-five miles. (Grass-fed beef—recommended by many primal enthusiasts—may produce lower emissions than corn-fed, but the evidence on this is shaky.) Eating a pound of whole wheat, by contrast, is like driving less than a mile. All of which is to say that, from an environmental standpoint, paleo’s “Let them eat steak” approach is a disaster.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/28/stone-soup

@ZM my claims about GM crops are wrong because I don’t brag about my career as a public defender?

You said you got a new job in another thread that wasn’t as a public defender and your stated previous job on that thread wasn’t as a public defender either, and your website says you make furniture for a living

Wilder @220: “The Left could “accept” the science — as far as it goes — on GMOs and still have an excellent case against the extension of intellectual property claims and a model of agricultural practice that emphasizes pesticides and neglects soil conservation and species diversity. ”

Yes, I agree completely, there are many ethical and moral questions related to GMO intellectual property claims that are deeply concerning. But for my purposes the issue is the science of GM foods, particularly the safety of GM foods to humans. And there, et tu Wilder, I detect a note of doubt: “The Left could “accept” the science–as far as it goes–.” Ah…”as far as it goes.” Or this: “evil agro-chemical giant…pays to have scientific authority bolster their claims that their GMO plan is safe and sound.”

Quiggin: in a short time we have ZM, Luke, Halasz and Wilder, all apparently firm climate change believers, expressing doubts about the safety of GM foods and alluding to dark conspiracies to distort the scientific truth. Again, this is not a statistically valid sample. But still, I’m starting to think that I may be on to something.

And I don’t think that this is side-tracking the discussion. It is really important to Quiggin’s original question to understand how reasonably well informed people can be so certain about one thing and so doubtful/sceptical about another–even though, as non-experts, they have to rely on the same information sources and authorities to draw their conclusions on both issues.

On the potential, and limits, of production-side changes to reduce anthropogenic GHG emissions.

According to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in 2013 Americans consumed ~103 exajoules of primary energy. Of that total 41 exajoules went to useful energy services and 62 went to waste. The high ratio of waste to services is primarily because fossil fuels are exploited through heat engines, which are limited by the Carnot cycle and engineering limits of materials to relatively low efficiencies. Systems that tap kinetic energy of fluids in motion, such as wind, hydro, and tidal generation, and solar systems that operate on the photoelectric effect, are not operating on the Carnot cycle and waste far less energy as heat. In principle you could eliminate over half of American primary energy consumption without reducing energy services at all, if heat engines are replaced by photovoltaics and/or wind.

Over the full life cycle even PV and wind power generate emissions, via initial manufacturing if not via operation. The life cycle emissions of PV and wind systems are much lower than those of the most efficient fossil fueled systems.

As of 2014 the IPCC estimates that utility scale solar PV has a life cycle CO2 equivalent of 48 grams per kilowatt hour, and onshore wind has CO2-e of 12 grams per kilowatt hour. Compare with the cleanest conventional fossil source, combined cycle gas turbine at 490 grams per kilowatt hour, or coal at 820 grams per kilowatt hour.

How far could a couple of technological wonders take us? If a population of 10 billion consumed energy services at the same rate as Americans, but got it all from utility scale solar PV, that would come to 17 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions-equivalent per year. That’s a big cut on the 36 billion tonnes actually emitted in 2013, but not big enough. If it all came from onshore wind instead that’s only 4.2 billion tonnes, which would meet stabilization targets, but in most nations space constraints for turbines come into play before then. There are two big secondary effects of a large scale change toward renewables: the energy that goes into making renewable energy systems becomes cleaner, so generation N + 1 has a lower life cycle emissions intensity than generation N, but more storage/long distance transmission/overbuilding becomes necessary, increasing the amortized emissions cost per unit of energy services. Solar PV is more scaleable than wind. It also has worse problems with seasonal variability at extreme latitudes, though fortunately most of the world’s population lives at less extreme latitudes than Germans and won’t face such great seasonal challenges.

On energy and employment.

I think that renewables will become cheaper than fossil and nuclear sources, at least as reckoned by instantaneous cost per kilowatt hour, largely because the labor requirements are lower. “Green” PR likes to emphasize how many jobs are created by solar and wind projects, and conservative critics seize on that same PR to prove that renewables are inefficient with the use of labor. I think that the PR and the reaction to the PR are both off base: normalized to units of energy generated, renewables need fewer workers than conventional generating plants. The relatively high number of jobs in renewable energy in developed countries is due to rapid growth rather than higher labor requirements over the full life cycle.

Here’s a recent wind project going forward in Texas: http://hprnnews.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/hockley-county-approves-agreement-with-red-raider-wind-llc/

For 80 MW of nameplate capacity, they expect to have 6-8 permanent employees. There are also going to be about 100 construction workers employed for half a year to build the project initially. If we amortize construction labor over a conservative 20 year life for the project, that’s equivalent to an additional 2.5 full time positions ((100 * 0.5) / 20), e.g. 8.5-10.5 permanent employee equivalents total. If the project achieves the average Texan 33.6% wind capacity factor, it will generate 80 * 24 * 365 * 0.336 = 235,469 MWh per year, or 27,702 – 22,425 MWh per employee-year.

The new AP1000 reactors being installed as Plant Vogtle units 3 and 4 are expected to have about 800 permanent employees, up to 4000 employees at peak during construction. Let’s assume a generous 60 year reactor life and 10,000 worker-years for construction. If the reactors achieve their planned 93% capacity factor, the new AP1000s are going to produce ((1117 * 2 * 24 * 365 * 0.93) / (800 + 10000 / 60)) = 18,823 MWh per employee-year. The only way you could save significantly on labor/wages per megawatt hour building/operating/maintaining a nuclear plant over a Texan wind plant is if nuclear workers are paid considerably less than wind workers. But I think they’re typically paid more. Renewable project developers/operators can innovate faster with automation to further cut labor because they have much faster hardware development cycles, both because they use many small pieces of hardware instead of a few big pieces and because their systems are passively safe in a way that reactor cores, coal ash, and flammable gases aren’t. They don’t wait as long for regulatory reviews as changes to fossil/nuclear systems, because even a bad solar panel design doesn’t spill toxic ash, release radionuclides, or cause explosive fires.

I don’t have detailed numbers for other conventional electricity sources, but I know that coal is more labor-intensive than natural gas which in turn is more labor-intensive than wind. Here is the material basis for broad resistance to cutting coal use. If you cut coal use, in the long term you cut employment to supply an equal quantity of electricity, even under the ridiculously optimistic assumption that a coal plant worker of 20 years experience can just jump to a wind or solar farm after a bit of retraining. This is all well and good if we live in the world of Keynes’ “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” — less pollution, more leisure! — but likely to be ruinous for affected workers and communities in the actual world of 2014. That doesn’t mean I think that coal should be coddled until we live in a more economically just world; if I were planetary dictator I’d wage Total War against thermal coal use. But I’m not going to pretend that everyone will gain equally from the move away from coal, or tell myself comforting lies like “only millionaires will lose anything.”

On population.

In percentage terms world population growth peaked in 1963. In terms of absolute numbers of humans added, it peaked in 1989. More than half the world’s nations are already below replacement fertility, and rates are falling in almost every nation still above replacement rate. I think that human population expansion is a problem already well on track to being solved; the challenge is to avoid big reversals and to make it through the late-century peak before the relief of the decline comes.

Less data and more opinion.

Climate change is a problem that just goes on and on into future history, in the absence of active interventions to draw CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequester it in stable form. The IPCC looks decades ahead but the change will continue for thousands of years even if humans stopped emitting tomorrow. I think some interventions are too high-risk and morally hazardous to to endorse, but I think that some forms of active drawdown will be better than waiting 100,000 years for Earth to draw down the excess on its own schedule. See David Archer’s The Long Thaw for a view of AGC that follows consequences well beyond the IPCC planning horizon into deep time.

My personal favorite candidate for sequestration is accelerated silicate weathering, basically crushing basalt and dumping it in shallow coastal waters where wave action will keep the weathering rate from slowing. Arguing for it: it’s energetically efficient, it reverses ocean acidification as well as radiative forcing, it can scale up to high rates of sequestration, the carbon stays sequestered into deep time, and it deals with distributed emissions just as well as point sources. Arguing against it: the intervention needs to be vast to work (but so would any intervention, as befits the vast scale of the problem), and it can’t do anything significant on a time scale less than decades. I think the slowness of it isn’t a serious drawback, because it’s still much faster than the unaided recovery of the oceans and atmosphere, but it is an impairment to understanding. Humans aren’t very good at intuiting time and length scales at extremes, and most aren’t careful to do the arithmetic when intuition breaks down.

Biochar from woody waste that’s worked back into the soil could also turn the carbon dioxide emission pulse into a wider, lower hump that drives less feedback, plus increase soil fertility with reduced inputs of artificial fertilizers. The achievable sequestration rate of biochar approaches is pretty low, so deep emissions cuts are needed before biochar can make much of a dent in the residual emissions.

The New Yorker article on Tyrone Hayes is over-long, in the style of that magazine and full of extraneous detail for “human interest”, but it is a case in point about how “science” under neo-liberalism has become increasingly corrupted and dysfunctional, no longer a public trust, but increasingly an expropriated private property. And yes, the long-term health effects of Round-up/glysophate, (or similar systems) are unknown, since the research isn’t done and attempting to do independent research is not just difficult in terms of funding, but threatens your scientific reputation and career. Read the article, before you accuse anyone, other than yourself, of fantasizing. (Simple question: how much glyphosate/Round-up actually enters the human food system? That should be easy to find out at low cost and would condition further investigation. But there is no answer, though the potential for damages should be differentiated between agricultural workers and ordinary consumers).

I refer you back to @ 216. Your “contributions” here have been fatuous and hollow.

@234. Very helpful. I choose to be optimistic about how technological advancement will impact employment, but also argue for a generous universal basic income. I also choose to be optimistic that cheap solar, cheap wind and significantly more efficient transmission will not be the full story. A high school
science teacher gave me a book on nanotechnology in 1991, but I think the potential there is about to be realized in dramatic and unpredictable ways, including power storage and transmission. But that’s pure speculation

Oh god, it gets worse after that!

#214 John Halasz

But with respect to GMOs as actually existing there is what economists like to call a “natural experiment”. Since 1990 how much have average agricultural yields increased in the U.S., where such crops have been extensively deployed, vs. in the EU, where they have been largely banned or disfavored? The answer is that yields have increased at about the same rate, in that time period

Is that yield per acre?

Would it be worthwhile to also consider yield per dollar?

@237:

Transgenetic contamination is not any real concern. Infra-specific contamination, as with “race corn” (maize) in southern Mexico, is a real concern. With respect to Glyphosate/Round-up, there is real concern that, just as it kills weeds, it disrupts beneficial bacterial cultures in the soil, though that isn’t fully scientifically “proven”. (Though from the perspective of manufacturers of agricultural chemicals, that’s all good, eh?) Most suspicions of health effects from glyphosate/Round-up involve similar disruptions of bacteria in the human digestive tract, which is cutting edge medical science, so far from any sort of proof. Anecdotal reports from. e.g., Danish pig farmers have GMO feed producing noticably higher rates of piglet deaths and distended stomachs in slaughtered pigs. But, as I said, the human health effects are a tertiary issue, since the stuff obviously isn’t arsenic. The environmental rebound effects were obvious to begin with, and mirabile dictu, they are occurring. And the quasi-monopolistic rent-extraction strategy should be equally obvious. There is no obvious reason to believe that GMOs are either necessary or especially beneficial to improved agricultural output.

Differentiating the issues involved is important. Muddling them helps no one.

Actually the Left ought to be suspicious of mainstream science, since it is mostly funded and governed by elite-driven, classist, authoritarian institutions like governments, universities, and corporations, and serves the interests and desires of their masters. What is revealed to the proles is seldom anything like a whole story: for example, the supposed cheapness and safety of nuclear energy. That whole campaign greatly resembled the present one for GMOs. Before Three Mile Island, skeptics were on the fringe, as the more elderly will recall. The anthropogenic climate change thing arising to public consciousness, then, is something of an outlier.

my last comment was a response to mattski @ 223 (8.24 11:53 pm) I forget to include that little indication of context. He had linked to a Krugman article, from which I took quotations. I think mattski misread Thornton Hall’s complaint about the way neoliberal liberals sometimes frame their arguments for regulatory policy, as involving a minimal cost, which is nevertheless a cost compared to the conservative alternative policy, thinking “minimal” is persuasive, but not even seeing how they concede the conservative case by their framing.

@244 (and to partially prove to j Thomas that I am for real) the connection between RoundUp and gut bacteria gets my attention. I am dubious for reasons that are, somewhat ironically, a precise mirror image of the anti-GM dubiousness: pedigree. Just as many believe everything Monsanto does is for-profit, non-science, I am dubious that anti-Monsanto claims are anti-corporate non-science.

But talk gut bacteria and I’ll listen. Because it’s something doctors have quite arrogantly ignored (in the same way they ignored the dangers of carbs).

So I’m for real: I think GM crops will be one of the ways we mitigate the consequences of antropomorphic climate change, which I very much believe in and expect to cause unnecessary human suffering (which I am consistently against). I am also not a fan of bad anti-science (really more a-science than anti-science) that blames eggs for heart disease and obesity when the consumption of wheat is what has skyrocketed. Which then leads me back to sympathy to anti-Round-Up claims based on the importance of gut bacteria (which both me and science increasingly believe in).

John Quiggin,

Saying you think someone is a representative minority is not the same thing as properly countering their arguments should they be wrong.

You said up thread my comment was full of errors, then when I quoted the IPCC technical summary which I based my comment on you were subsequently unable or unwilling to point out what exactly was was erroneous about my comment.

#249 Thornton Hall

I mean that virtually every single medication on the market today, literally every single one, is backed by almost exclusively corporate research.

Yes.

…. But whether it’s heartburn or heart transplants, someone you love is alive because corporate funded research is not entirely worthless.

?? And someone I love is dead because corporate-funded research is not entirely honest.

How do we decide the proportions?

Perhaps we can look at how well we were doing 30 years ago, and 20 years ago, and 10 years ago. What percentage of the medications promoted 30 years ago by corporate research are still considered both safe and effective? Would you care to guess at that?

@254 Dude, attack straw men much? My claim is not that corporate research is good or sufficient. It’s that it is non-worthless.

I don’t “trust” Monsanto. They were more trustworthy before Milton Friedman’s theory of the firm became dogma, but not much. But I do trust UC Davis scientists. Even when they are partially funded by corporate interests. I trust them to act in good faith. I expect them to be human. And when they make errors, as humans do, I expect the direction of those errors to be influenced by their funding sources. But far more important than the direction of their occasional errors (for the significance of which, cf, that bizarre “scandal” about climate and emails) is the direction of their good faith. And that points in the direction of empirical truth and feeding people.

Thornton Hall,

I am sorry I doubted you were once a public defender, but that does not really justify you bringing in genetic engineering and anti-vegetarianism to a climate change thread.

Re: trusting UC Davis scientists I think here in Australia funding for research determines what research is done. Companies can pay for research or governments can give grants for research.

It would be interesting to see what research priorities would be if scientists determined them more than governments and companies. I think some scientists are not so scrupulous as others unfortunately, hopefully this is rare. I read an influential food company scientist say that earning a high income was more important to his work priorities than morals (he did the science behind making junk food taste appealing).

Our government here is now de-funding our premiere public science organisation.

By the by, for those interested in the science. There is the possibility that while dietary saturated fat and cholesterol have exactly nothing to do with heart disease, it is possible that a diet high in beef could be genuinely related to heart disease while chicken and other animals are not. And the hypothesized reason is gut bacteria and beef’s impact on it.

Similarly, I am anti-anti-biotics as growth stimulants in farms (regardless of the quantity of animals or the real estate they are allowed to roam). This is based on speculation that the research on the safety of anti-biotics, both corporate and non-corporate, is clouded by a failure to understand the importance of gut bacteria.

Of course this leads me to the pro-corporate and anti-regulation position that we should loosen restrictions on bio-engineered replacement bacteria. Did you know that your propensity to develop cavities had almost nothing to do with the genetics encoding the instructions for tooth enamel and everything to do with the genetics of your mouth bacteria ecosystem? The biodiversity of bacteria means that some produce teeth eating by-products while others produce gum eating by-products.

Following the science turns out not to lead to consistent views vis a vis the moral value corporations.

@ZM I know that you are arguing in good faith and did not take your doubting my pro-poor people bona fides personally. Thanks for acknowledging it, though.

#256 TH

My claim is not that corporate research is good or sufficient. It’s that it is non-worthless.

Look, if you do statistics and you settle for p=.05, it says that about one time in twenty when you actually do not have any results, it will look like you do. People sometimes mis-state that to say that of all the research that gets positive results at p=.05, one in twenty of them is entirely bogus for statistical reasons. We can’t tell how many of them are bogus that way. But the fact that some of them are, makes us feel justified to ignore results that sound wrong until they are repeated many times.

What if corporate-funded research was wrong half the time? Would that be enough to make it worthless to you? It would be worthless to me.

Can you see any better way to estimate how much of it is wrong, than to look at how fast it gets discredited as more research is done? If the pharma research of 30 years ago has been partly discredited now, would you expect that less of todays research will be discredited within 30 years?

What evidence are you using to test your faith in them?

#257 BS

Meanwhile, just since your 235, we can now add J Thomas, Anarcissie, and, maybe (?) MPA Victoria to my list!

You have no right to make a list with my name on it. Desist at once. This is your first warning.

Why do you continue in your folly when you have heard multiple explanations that show you are full of shit?

You have not given any credible explanation why you might fail to understand that your reasoning is worthless.

It’s about a quite large group of people who believe (perhaps wrongly, but in good faith) that if you take science seriously, you will, necessarily believe that climate change is a very serious threat to human welfare and that the development of GM crops is not a threat.

Do you have any justification for this?

Some people doubt the climate change science because it looks at complex interactions among complicated entities, and they say it can’t handle that stuff well enough to make good predictions. (There is some truth to that. Then they go on to say that if climate change models aren’t precise, that proves there is no climate change. This is bullshit.)

I doubt the GMO research because it makes no attempt to look at complex interactions among complicated entities, when it in fact does affect complex interactions among complicated entities. Why would we say it’s safe when there has been no attempt at all to study the questions we would need to study to decide whether it’s safe?

Deciding that climate change is probably unsafe, and deciding that GMOs are definitely safe, are two very, very different questions.

The devil is in the details.

Thornton Hall,

My primary concern with genetic engineering is moral – I think it is wrong. I think we should protect life as it exists.

In terms of environmental safety of genetic engineering I think scientists and industrialists have gone gung-ho ahead without significant long term testing. Although I think it is wrong, if farmers in my area began growing ge crops as it was made legal some time ago (with some constraints I can’t remember off the top if my head) I would be concerned about the seeds crossing with other similar plants and impacting the environment. You see many more canola plants springing up as weeds than you did when I was a child because of the increase in canola farming – if there are a lot of ge crops grown I expect ge plants will spring up as weeds in ecosystems.

It is not a matter of being pro or anti science. There are some scientific endeavours I support such as medicine and health and palliative care, research into safety etc

Other scientific endeavours I do not support – such as torture devices, nuclear weapons, drones, making junk food more appetizing, eugenics, cloning etc

I am under no obligation to support every scientific endeavour under the sun because I think we should act to prevent climate change.

The people who invented the coal powered electricity engines that have with other inventions caused anthropogenic climate change were not Luddites – they were applied scientists.

The effect of carbon causing warming was theorized in the 19th c – not enough research went into this concern – and now here we are with the effects and a hard transition to make.

#267 TH

You lost me at statistical significance.

It figures. [sigh]

This is worth learning about. It is a scientific revolution that mostly spread starting in the 1910-1930 timespan. Statistical mechanics is a vitally important part of physical chemistry, and it would be hard to understand quantum mechanics without it.

Statistics gives us ways to deal with imprecision, with tracking how much we don’t know. It can give you a handle on known unknowns, though not so much on unknown unknowns. It’s still evolving, with modern computing power we can do nonparametric statistics. We can run a simulation with many repetitions and vary the parameters among whatever ranges we think reasonable, and look back to see which ranges of which parameters give strange results.

Deming applied the ideas to industrial production. He found that if you make the production extremely precise and repeatable, you get rewards that are bigger than you’d expect. It costs, but the costs are worth it. His followers have explained some of the statistical ideas in particularly accessible ways, attempting to make it easy for businessmen to understand quickly.

If you can find the time to learn about probability and statistics, it will change your life! And your faith in science will take a different form.

BTW thanks Matt @234. It’s the kind of informed comment that makes for fruitful discussion, rather than uninformed insult. Though I did link to the same chart above, as expressed in quad(rillions of BTU)s above.

“Across campus, David Williams, a cellular biologist who specializes in vision, has the opposite complaint. “A lot of naive science has been involved in pushing this technology,” he says. “Thirty years ago we didn’t know that when you throw any gene into a different genome, the genome reacts to it. But now anyone in this field knows the genome is not a static environment. Inserted genes can be transformed by several different means, and it can happen generations later.” The result, he insists, could very well be potentially toxic plants slipping through testing.
Williams concedes that he is among a tiny minority of biologists raising sharp questions about the safety of GM crops. But he says this is only because the field of plant molecular biology is protecting its interests. Funding, much of it from the companies that sell GM seeds, heavily favors researchers who are exploring ways to further the use of genetic modification in agriculture. He says that biologists who point out health or other risks associated with GM crops—who merely report or defend experimental findings that imply there may be risks—find themselves the focus of vicious attacks on their credibility, which leads scientists who see problems with GM foods to keep quiet.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-genetically-modified-food/

“Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.
To purchase genetically modified seeds, a customer must sign an agreement that limits what can be done with them. (If you have installed software recently, you will recognize the concept of the end-user agreement.) Agreements are considered necessary to protect a company’s intellectual property, and they justifiably preclude the replication of the genetic enhancements that make the seeds unique. But agritech companies such as Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta go further. For a decade their user agreements have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails. They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-seed-companies-control-gm-crop-research/

there’s two kinds of anti-GM crop people. The Michael Pollan crowd frequently believe things that, if true, would more or less overturn Darwin.

OK, let’s ignore them.

Then there’s the John C. and John Q crowd that make scientifically valid claims. The problem there is more complicated, because it’s not a case of ignorance and arrogance like Pollan. It’s logical errors involving arguments that are not-GM specific.

Not entirely. There could be risks we haven’t thought of to test. You were all “It’s completely safe, it’s scientifically proven safe” and then somebody says “intestinal bacteria” and you’re already to think maybe it isn’t safe after all. But that was just the one you were ready to think about. There could be lots of other issues that will be cutting-edge science sometime later.

For each individual GM organism, I’d want to know about the extra sequences that were transferred along with the ones people wanted. Are they “junk DNA” which usually means DNA that we don’t know the function of? Do they contain transposable elements? Small viruses? That sort of thing could matter.

It really makes sense to be cautious, to try things on a small scale first. The FDA got a lot of public acceptance because of thalidomide, but people forget and now they want to get quick approval of all the new wonder drugs they know will have wonderful results, more important to get those miracles quick instead of waiting for testing. And then there was diethylstilbestrol.

We need some caution. But people are claiming science has proven there are no risks.

And there’s nothing at all about the nature of GM crops that make them more likely to promote industrial farming or monoculture or pesticide use or irrigation or anything. All those things are associated with short term profit motivation.

Yes? And crops that make herbicides safer aren’t supposed to get more herbicides?

Brand new products, maybe new risks, and we want to plant them in monoculture across vast tracts and if they affect groundwater or runoff or whatever, we’ll deal with it later.

In biology we know a lot of cool stuff and we know the causal chain between the source of the DNA and the effect of the protein it encodes and we know that doesn’t uniquely cause harm.

Accidents tend to happen when multiple things go wrong. Like, I knew a man who liked to go caving. He was rappelling into a pit that he’d done before. Somebody had cut down the tree he had tied off to, so he used a different tree. He attached a rappelling rack to the rope and started down. He had a problem with his light, and while he was fixing it his long hair got caught in the rappel rack. That pulled his head right up to the rack. Now he didn’t have a light and he was in an awkward position. He started to take out his knife to cut his hair, but he wisely remembered that the rope was under considerable tension and it would cut easily. Normally if he had a problem he would tie off and fix it, but his head caught in the rack kept him from doing that. So he figured he’d fix things when he reached the ground. But because of the new tie-off point, his rope was too short and he had not put a knot in the end of it because he knew his rope normally reached the ground. He slid off and fell 15 feet onto a rockpile. He broke an arm, a leg, and his back. It took more than 20 hours to get him out of the pit and up to the EMTs.

Multiple failures. The tie-off. The light. The hair. The missing knot. If any one of them had worked out he probably would have been OK.

Did the scientific testing cover all the possible combinations of failure modes? Probably not. They are far more likely to happen in large-scale monoculture. If the result is that an occasional corn plant dies, it’s no big deal. But: “Fail-safe systems fail, by failing to fail safe.”

I can’t promise there will be any problems. I just want to be cautious with things we don’t understand.

In biology we know a lot of cool stuff and we know the causal chain between the source of the DNA and the effect of the protein it encodes and we know that doesn’t uniquely cause harm.

We sort of know how things go usually when they’re working normally. We don’t understand all the details of all the variations from 3 billion years of evolution. We don’t know all the ways it can fail without failing safe.

@276 I’m sorry, but it’s this sort of intellectual dishonesty that is literally killing Greek people as we speak.

Thornton Hall @ 195

“I think the issue gets wildly confused the second you start talking about the suffering of individual animals. I think a perfectly workable moral system can say that animal suffering is to be avoided without ascribing animals the same rights as moral agents.”

Does this work as well if you substitute ‘people’ for ‘animal(s)’ in the above?

I chose elephants specifically, btw. I don’t saw that all animals are moral actors.

Thornton Hall and Layman,

Amartya Sen has quite a good article on environmental issues for an economist, if you gave not yet read it it touches on our responsibility to other creatures:

“Consider our responsibility toward the species that are threatened with destruction. We may attach importance to the preservation of these species not merely because the presence of these species in the world may sometimes enhance our own living standards. A person may judge that we ought to do what we can to ensure the preservation of some threatened animal species, say, the Himalayan Quail, and there would be no contradiction if the person were to say: “My living standards would be largely, indeed completely, unaffected by the presence or absence of Himalayan Quails. I have in fact never even seen one. But I do strongly believe that we should not let those quails become extinct, for reasons that go much beyond maintaining human living standards.”
This is where Gautama Buddha’s argument, presented in Sutta Nipata, becomes directly and immediately relevant. He argued that a mother has a responsibility toward her child not merely because she has generated her, but also because she can do many things for the child that the child cannot itself do. It is this “power to make a difference,” Buddha argued, that generates a corresponding responsibility, and the need to ask: what should we do? Buddha went on to argue that human beings, for these reasons, have some responsibility toward animals precisely because we have such power over their lives.
In the environmental context it can be argued that since we are enormously more powerful than other species, we have some responsibility toward these species that links closely with this asymmetry of power. We can have many reasons for our conservation efforts, not all of which need be parasitic on our own living standards (or need-fulfillment), and some of which may turn precisely on our sense of values and on our acknowledgment of our reasons for taking fiduciary responsibility for other creatures on whose lives we can have a powerful influence.”

http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2014/08/environmentalists-must-stop-ignoring-needs-poor-nations-when-combating-global

But your rabbit example shows the dangers of interfering with natural ecosystems. And all the cascading problems that follow. Genetic engineering is quite likely to have some similar sort of impact. It us not good to kill rabbits, but I don’t know what else can be done , you could maybe capture them, but there would be such a great number of captured rabbits then.

In Werribee Gardens Mansion, Parks Victoria runs a good program for refugees, mostly from Burma, where they do kitchen gardening on the grounds and take home half the produce. There was a great problem with rabbits, and the men and boys asked if they could catch them with ferrets like they did in the Thai-Burma refugee camps and then take them home for cooking, and Parks Victoria agreed.

@284 Actually, I do agree with you that we different responsibility to different animals. And you’re right, all the information we have suggests that elephants have a moral sense that we should respect.

But at the same time, I’m pretty sure my dog has a moral sense. So I do have a background fear that enlarging the moral universe along these lines will ultimately include too many animals and will lead to conflicts between the right of humans to self preservation and the right of, I dunno, white tailed deer.

And when it gets taken to that point I just have to admit that I am a chauvanist with respect to species. Which isn’t crazy, really. I’m opposed to all sorts of tribalism as maladaptive in the modern world, but if your tribe includes all humans, seems ok to me. If aliens attacked I’d have no problem killing them. (A commitment to non-pacifism that’s as weak as they get;))

“And when it gets taken to that point I just have to admit that I am a chauvanist with respect to species. Which isn’t crazy, really. I’m opposed to all sorts of tribalism as maladaptive in the modern world, but if your tribe includes all humans, seems ok to me. If aliens attacked I’d have no problem killing them. (A commitment to non-pacifism that’s as weak as they get;))”

I think these feelings are natural, by which I mean ‘an expression of our genetic material’. We’re programmed to defend our genetic heritage in the face of a perceived threat from the ‘other’. Speciesism is just a more expansive form of tribalism, as you say. But your alien attack example is what makes me think it may still be too narrow. It seems unlikely we’ll ever meet any aliens, but increasingly likely that we’ll make them, in the form of thinking machines and (perhaps) augmented animals. I’d like to think that we’ll recognize them as moral actors deserving of respect and compassion, but that proposition doesn’t seem promising.

As to alien (or human!) attacks, self-defense seems the right response, so I’ve got no argument with you there. I’m talking about how we behave when our safety isn’t threatened.

J Thomas @291: “We can’t proceed on climate issues today because the GOP stops us. ”

It’s worth remembering that JQ wrote this post to explicitly address both Australia and the U.S. So it’s not “the GOP”. That aside, it’s also not a matter of right-wing tribal identity more broadly outside the countries of the Anglosphere — other countries in general don’t have this kind of identity as an important factor in their politics.

The U.S. has used what remains of its imperial power to make sure that no broad solution to the problem of global warming can be negotiated. But it’s going to be more and more important to look at the internal politics of the countries who have the power to actually do something about the problem. (China, India, Germany, France are my guesses about which the most important of those countries are). The U.S. no longer has the power to fix the problem even if some segments of the elite wanted to because our internal politics will cripple us for the foreseeable future, so international leadership is going to have to come from somewhere else. In particular, I think that the hold that austerity politics has on Europe is now more important than the right-wingers in the Anglosphere.

Rich Puchalsky @ 294

Germany, because of its early lead in the development and deployment of photovoltaic systems, seems a likely bellwether. (I first became aware of the work in Germany back in the 90s, when I did some translations of primary sources for an author acquaintance of mine who was writing a book on the history of solar power.)

Reading the German popular press available on the Web, however, has not helped me understand as much as I’d like about how it’s been going since the Energiewende was announced, particularly with regard to the competition of solar and wind power for investment, the reduction of tax subsidies, the struggles over who pays the cost of decommissioning nuclear power facilities, competition (or the lack of it) amongst residential and commercial providers, and so forth.

In the American press, we see the occasional scare story about German electricity rates being among the highest in the world, and little else. When the subject comes up on CT, as it does occasionally, self-identified Germans in the comments section seem to line up passionately on one side or the other. The government has screwed everything up, and we’re hurting, being one side, and the other, Despite the difficulties, Germany is taking its global responsibilities seriously, and gladly paying the price. The rest of the world should do likewise.

I’m not in a position to dispute the facts which underlie either of these positions, so it’s difficult to peer behind the partisanship. I do think, though, that an accessible analysis of the social and economic stresses at work in Germany would be helpful in arguments here in the U.S. Abstract cost-benefit analyses are one thing; how the transition is being perceived by people who are actually going through is another, and might be equally valuable. So far, though, I’ve only been able to find bits and pieces, most of them driven by this or that vested interest. Maybe that’s all there is, but it’s more likely that I’m just looking in the wrong places. Can anyone here point me in the right direction?

Brett,

No. That’s not the left’s doctrine. That’s your cartoon version of something not even in existence. “The left” is far too diverse to have “a doctrine.” If the expression “herding cats” means anything, it applies really, really well to the left.

My own view is that we could do without most regulation if we did the smart thing upfront: Seriously vett, via democratic processes, all products and services before they come online. Rather than let millions of different products enter the market place without that vetting, hoping that we can regulate at least 1% of them, give or take . . . . we shouldn’t allow anything to get to the market that isn’t safe, sound or as advertized. Make regulation virtually unnecessary by doing the work before hand.

What conservatives and propertarians can’t grasp is that our government supports, props up, funds and endlessly bails out capitalism, and this massive support actually requires “Big Gubmint.” It’s the capitalist system itself that will always require a massive government apparatus in order to keep it afloat, while doing minimal things to offset some of its destructiveness. If you really, truly wanted minarchy, or at least “smaller government,” you’d want a different economic system, one that wasn’t dependent upon endless government supports, protections, R and D, courts, police, trade agreements, currency supports and bailouts, etc. etc.

That said, if we go with the person we already took to the dance, then it’s much, much smarter to do the necessary work before market to make sure we don’t need so much after-market regulations.

You can make amazing new chemicals that save the earth, but oversight is impossible.

Thanks to JQ @ 276.

Bruce,

Environmental regulation reduces costs, overall. Otherwise, why we would do it? So why not say, “environmental regulation reduces costs, improves welfare.” It is presumably what Krugman believes. Why adopt a phrasing that implies the opposite of what he believes?

Sure, but “costs” come in different shapes and sizes. Some are easier to measure than others. Many are impossible to measure because they are stretched out over time and we simply don’t know what the future will bring.

AND, it is sometimes (oftentimes?) necessary to speak the conventional language because if you don’t you’re not in the conversation. You can’t persuade me that Krugman is unaware of your concerns. Of course he is. But he’s speaking the language of essentially short term costs, and even if incomplete, it’s an important aspect of the situation.

That’s not fair. Sodoku puzzles and some good rules for kidney donations that come from game theory. Can’t forget the great real world success story of economics in action.

mattski @ 302

I think you are right, mattski, that Krugman is referring to some subset of costs, without making it particularly clear what defines that subset. You suggest “short-term” as the class, but I don’t see that. I think it might be that he should have said, “expenses” rather than “costs”. What he seems to be saying is that the cash outlays (or the hit to profits) inflicted on interested parties by proposed regulation would be minimal, so it is hard to see why the political opposition is so fierce. Those costs, and the outlays by government for regulatory administration as well, are properly termed, “expenses”, an accounting term of art.

Krugman is a conservative economist and a political liberal. I think Krugman comes from a place, where he has traditionally believed that combination was a source of strength and persuasiveness. I agree with Thornton Hall, though, that he’s often wrong about that — the conservative economics is often a trap, that undermines the quality of his political argument. Whether his argument in the essay mattski linked to was influenced in that way seems more ambiguous to me, now, though Thornton’s comment that this was the third in a series of essays in which his position was migrating lends support to the idea that the tension between conservative economics and liberal desiderata played a part.

Just as a footnote, my own economics are conventional, rather than conservative. Some of the commitments to conservative economics Krugman admits to, when he’s getting wonky or talking about the philosophy he applied in writing his textbook, appall me. But, I don’t know, independent of the essay you linked to, that Krugman is committed to the Friedmanite idea that the cost of regulation is a deadweight loss, such that no regulatory response to externalities may be preferable to always imperfect and costly government regulation.

JQ @ 276 informs us that economists think about choice in terms of costs and benefits. Most of us think about choice in terms of costs and benefits, when it’s appropriate. Economists distinguish themselves from the rest of us, by thinking in terms of costs and benefits, when it is not appropriate.

… global consumption losses of 1% to 4% in 2030, 2% to 6% in 2050, and 2% to 12% in 2100 relative to what would happen without mitigation….

How do they estimate what will happen without mitigation? Doesn’t that require an estimate of the effects of climate change? And shouldn’t we assume that fossil fuels are much harder to get by them? Why would they expect consumption to be less in 2100 if we’ve actually been fixing the problems, compared to leaving the problems unchecked?

@JQ from the Inside Story:
Carefully demonstrating that the cost of fixing the problem will use a trivially small share of national income goes nowhere.
Or @302
Governments doing the right thing may raise GDP or may lower it.

I realize there is a reading of the word cost that renders these consistent But it’s not the meaning that the word has in the popular press, which it is where it is used.

I think the focus on the economics (which I think relies on unwarranted assumptions as I already noted) ignores that we are not looking at (solely?) an economic challenge – we are looking at a pretty big transformation of the physical infrastructure of cities and regions to get to zero ghg emissions, then draw emissions down – and in a very limited time frame.

While economies might have kept growing, and economists want to extrapolate from this that they will grow four to ten fold over the next century (not including inflation because then it would be stagflation not growth) – and therefore economics can solve any challenge – if you look at urban plans they have been hard to get implemented over the last forty odd years, particularly if they call for transformations – like more density, 20min neighbourhoods etc

So if you decide this is an economic challenge maybe you would be inclined to say – look at our success with economic challenges- we’ve kept having all this growth – this will be just the same – a nice easy challenge,, just a few market measures and we’re all set :)

But if you look at how urban plans fail to get implemented despite their planning and intentions in advance – then you are more inclined to think – this is a difficult physical challenge – we’ve not had much luck with getting urban plan goals implemented for quite some time – how on earth can we implement the needed changes since all our efforts at implementation keep going astray :(

@307 and @138 Is it just me, or does all of this assume that someone spending money can go one of two ways. He can spend it on what he wants or he can spend it on what the government wants. If he’s forced to do the second, that’s a cost. Right?

And now you’re telling me that it’s silly to say that Neoliberalism is committed to the belief that government doing the right thing always costs more than doing the wrong thing?

Say I spend more at the pump for gas than I would have without a carbon tax as the more coherent part of Dornan’s post describes. What does the word “cost” mean? What if I wanted to buy expensive gas and pay to solve climate change, but there was no “free” market way to do it? What if the only way to get the exchange that gives both parties the most value is to have government solve the collective action problem so I can buy the kind of gas I want? Somehow my desires one way or the other are what determines whether a carbon tax is a “cost” or not? I think that’s the claim.

I don’t get it either. But WWII didn’t exist only in the hypotheticals of economists. So it’s not real.

There have been a few academic papers on the ww2 economy as a model for a climate change response. I don’t have time now, but I can post some later.

The situations are different – by the time USA actually entered ww2 the population mostly supported this out of fear etc – I think military and strategic planning was done beforehand – but you would need popular support for this sort of intervention to stop climate change to be higher than it is now. 350.org are doing this – there is an international day of action on September 21

Another problem is the impact of ww2 and it’s aftermath on USA business – key businesses worked with govt in ww2 – but I think you got the military-industrial complex as a result, and then you had the Cold War, and CIA-business interventions in other countries etc

So you would need to work out something better for a similar comprehensive response to climate change that didn’t further certain business and CIA type people’s interests, because that has been a very bad influence and caused all sorts of problems in the world

quote
The intellectual collapse of the right has already proved politically costly, and these costs will increase over time
unquote

uh, aren’t they predicted to take back the senate this year ?
and don’t they control a substantial number of governors mansions and state houses ?
not to mention the elected Supreme Court in WVa

wikipedia “The following is a list of incumbent governors of the states, and territories of the United States. There are currently 29 Republicans and 21 Democrats that hold the office of governor in the states.”
again, wikipedia
28 Republican-controlled legislatures
17 Democratic-controlled legislatures
5 Split legislatures
50 Total

this idea that the right is intellectually bankrupt and in desperate straights seems to be contrary to the electoral data.

Yes, much of micro can be derived rigorously from individual maximization plus equilibrium;…

What I call Sudoku.

J Thomas,

“What assumptions do they need to make about “business as usual” in the year 2100? ”

The ipcc technical summary on mitigation outlines the assumptions of the scenario making. I already mentioned this, but I will quote what I think is the most relevant passage (the technical summary on mitigation is not too long you could probably read the whole thing quite quickly if you are a fast reader, the proper full report would have more detail I think but is very lengthy ):

““Estimates of the aggregate economic costs of mitigation vary widely, but increase with stringency of mitigation (high confidence). Most scenario studies collected for this assessment that are based on the assumptions that all countries of the world begin mitigation immediately, there is a single global carbon price applied to well‐functioning markets, and key technologies are available, estimate that reaching 430–480 ppm CO2eq by 2100 would entail global consumption losses of 1% to 4% in 2030, 2% to 6% in 2050, and 2% to 12% in 2100 relative to what would happen without mitigation [Figure TS.12, Box TS.9, Box TS.10]. These consumption losses do not consider the benefits of mitigation, including the reduction in climate impacts.
To put these losses in context, studies assume increases in consumption from four‐fold to over ten‐fold over the century without mitigation . Costs for maintaining concentrations in the range of 530‐650 ppm CO2eq are estimated to be roughly one‐ third to two‐thirds lower than for associated 430‐530 ppm CO2eq scenarios. Cost estimates from scenarios can vary substantially across regions.
Substantially higher cost estimates have been obtained based on assumptions about less idealized policy implementations and limits on technology availability as discussed below. Both higher and lower estimates have been obtained based on interactions with pre‐existing distortions, non‐climate market failures, or complementary policies.”

Already strong economies have never tried command and control, at least not beyond emergencies like the already noted WWII period. We have no idea how they would be perform, but it’s logical that there would be far less waste, far less duplication, far less pollution, etc. if planning was carried out wisely and based upon sound science, need, fairness, etc.

I’m leery of that. Traditional unplanned economies have been extremely wasteful and inefficient, but surprisingly robust. Everybody walked around in a fog of uncertainty. The data they had was unreliable and there wasn’t very much of it. So managers planned for all contingencies, or at least for all the ones they could actually survive.

We had lots of redundancy. If one manage made a bad decision there were lots of others who did otherwise. So he hurt himself, but not the whole economy.

If we did careful planning in a command-and-control economy, we could eliminate a lot of the waste and duplication. And the result would be a more brittle system. Easier for mistakes to turn into catastrophes. We could grow much faster if it worked, but the consequences of failure could be far more appalling.

As we get better information, that will change things. I’m not sure how. Fast communication allows JIT which has implications I haven’t worked out yet.

I doubt that it helps to load too many decisions onto a few central people. I like your idea of lots of local/community planning that somehow coordinates with other communities. We might make better decisions without businessmen trying to hide their knowledge and intentions from each other. Then again, we might not.

“I doubt that it helps to load too many decisions onto a few central people.”

I think this is true. We need more coordination but not more centralization beyond some international and national goal making , appropriate laws, and assistance with co-ordination. We had a centralizing Prime Minister recently, he centralized too much, got overloaded with work he couldn’t keep on top off, wasn’t very pleasant, then the party deposed him by counting votes in a restaurant instead of properly in parliament. Then he wanted to be prime minister again, and now we have the most awful government in my life and the prime minister writes letters back to you saying he won’t be guided by ‘false compassion’. People who like to centralize too much cause problems.

I doubt that it helps to load too many decisions onto a few central people. I like your idea of lots of local/community planning that somehow coordinates with other communities. We might make better decisions without businessmen trying to hide their knowledge and intentions from each other. Then again, we might not.

As you know, I don’t want it loaded onto a few central people, but spread out as far as possible. Democratizing the economy is the opposite of centralizing it. The capitalist system is “command and control” already at the corporate level, and each corporate fiefdom withholds knowledge and intention from each, which stifles information flow. They have to in the system as is. So you not only get a ton of waste and duplication, you bottle up or at least slow down knowledge dissemination throughout the economy. Businesses want to corner markets and information. If looked at from the point of view of the economy overall, and for citizens, that’s horribly inefficient, and basically means we’re flying blind as a nation.

Bumper cars. Oars rowing against one another, etc. etc.

I know it won’t get to the WSDE stage for eons, if it ever does, or to my other suggestions from the other thread. But if we could go to (even under the capitalist system) community command and control (democratically), coordinated with other communities and outward from there, that would be far more efficient, far less wasteful, and potentially as close to a “fix” as we can get when it comes to the likely ecological disaster ahead.

“this idea that the right is intellectually bankrupt and in desperate straights seems to be contrary to the electoral data.”

The idea is that the right is intellectually bankrupt and using diabolical mind control rays to succeed politically anyway. But demographics will kick in Any Moment Now.

I guess planned economies are like communism: Since it would of course work out wonderfully if tried, it can’t really have been tried yet.

Communism is a red herring.

The use of ‘communism’ for ‘command economy’ is propaganda.

Intellectual bankruptcy is not an immediate hindrance to electoral success.

Some kinds of production and distribution seem to work better when centralized, like the traditional approach to the generation of electricity. At some point the production might be widely dispersed (photoelectric roof shingles) but one might still want to coordinate the grid centrally. Or maybe not; distributed coordination may be practical.

“The use of ‘communism’ for ‘command economy’ is propaganda.”

It might occur to you that the phrase, “planned economies are like communism” clearly implies that they are different things. You don’t compare a thing to itself, after all, or point out how a thing is similar in some respect to itself.

Bruce Wilder @ 347

Although I didn’t refer to it in my musings about Germany, carbon sequestration seems to be one of the big remaining technical and political problems for the German plan, and it’s fallen far short of early estimates. I suspect, though, that sequestration wasn’t seen to as immediate a problem initially, before they decided that they’d cover the gap between current energy production and the coming on line of major renewable capacity with lignite-burning plants instead of nuclear ones.

The problem with polar concepts like centralization-decentralization or cooperation-conflict is that that the human tendency to begin analytical thinking with dichotomies — dividing into two, into opposing tendencies — leads away from recognizing the essential unity of the phenomenon. We intuitively imagine heat and cold or light and dark as opposites, but there’s only heat and only light.

“Communism” is obsolete propaganda. “Market economy” is still operative propaganda. Whatever the world has in the organization of its political economy, it is not a “market economy” and thinking about it as if it is, is going to get us into trouble. Even, or especially, if we think we can move away from whatever we have, to some putative opposite, without any understanding, we will put ourselves into trouble. We’re not going to invent a society where there is cooperation without conflict, organization without centralization (or without decentralization), benefits without costs, energy without entropy, knowledge without ignorance, or action without risk.

“. That is, we have to invent some kind of global institutional and technological system, which can sequester carbon geologically on a very large scale, and do that invention by 2050, so that it can be scaled up in the subsequent decades.”

People have already done a great deal of work looking into the impact of the carbon cycle – you can read reports and books of possible scenarios at different levels of co2 and other GHGs. Sequestration technology is not practicable and there is not sound evidence it will be. Plus you need land for the sequestration technology, and a way of keeping all the sequestered GHG a somewhere securely in perpetuity , plus the technology uses materials. The best way is reforestation – because sheep and cows (maybe horses?) emit a lot of methane people need to stop farming them – then we can reforest all the grazing land. But this only is capable of drawing down a certain amount.

The proper response is not to think some magic solution will appear to be practicable in 2050. But we need to decrease emissions as soon as possible.
Just about everyone except homeless or extremely poor people in advanced economies is quite capable of reducing their GHG emissions fairly substantially right away (since the government is determined to dither) by their choices in food and goods consumption (which is the highest proportion of emissions except for people who fly) like not eating meat and dairy and not buying many goods, by not flying or rarely flying (one climate scientist now goes to all necessary conferences by train even if they are in china and he lives in England), by walking and cycling and taking public transport, by not driving cars or rarely driving if need be at present, by composting food and plant waste, etc. there are books on how best to do this, although the one I have is English and it doesn’t quite fit Australian conditions it is good enough.

This will not get to zero personal emissions, but you might be able to halve your emissions or decrease them even more. It is quite hard, so you will probably make mistakes but you should keep trying to minimize your emissions nonetheless since the governments are worse than useless at present and we only have about 25 years after such a lot of tardiness the last several decades.

You will not get to zero GHG emissions unless you become a hermit so far as I can tell – and even then you would still have your share of the public emissions (MIT did a study and a homeless American person’s emissions are about 8 tonnes if you count their share of public emissions [i am not sure this is a fair way of accounting homeless people’s emissions myself] which is more than average people’s emissions in many other countries).

So therefore laws and land uses need to be substantially reformed ASAP for the emissions that can’t be cut by choice (also those very selfish people who won’t try need to be regulated not to be so selfish and destructive to the climate, like we regulate burglars and malicious glass breakers)

I am fairly sure if individuals all reduced their emissions in the ways I outlined but books detail more fully – without government making proper laws to co-ordinate everything and having proper provisions for eventualities – we would have a recession. Professor Ross Garnaut said to my question on this matter of a recession (from the paradox of thrift) that people can buy books (e-books to save trees) and healthcare so we won’t have a recession – I am a bit dubious of this economy built on books and healthcare , especially because some people don’t like books and then they would only have healthcare, but hopefully he will think of some more things for the sustainable non-GHG emitting economy when he has more time to think about it and is not put on the spot by a question.

climate change cannot not exist.

Cannot exist. I don’t know how that extra word crept in.

Bruce @350,

It’s not really about opposites, IMO. Ironically, perhaps even paradoxically, you seem to be arguing against them and for them at the same time, as if they will always be with us no matter what we do.

We’re not going to invent a society where there is cooperation without conflict, organization without centralization (or without decentralization), benefits without costs, energy without entropy, knowledge without ignorance, or action without risk

I don’t think “opposites” actually exist when it comes to the political spectrum, though I sometimes get lazy and use the term in discussions. It’s all relative. True opposites would involve some sort of neutrally derived geography of thought, some actual “center,” some no-spot that we can plot on a graph. Again, I fall into the trap all too often, but it’s really metaphor, not something that exists, spatially.

That said, I think we can definitely develop and implement systems that do more of this or less of that. The mathematical is more applicable than the geography of opposites. We can implement systems that discourage competition and conflict, encourage and reward cooperation, discourage waste and duplication, reward the sharing of knowledge and resources. We will obviously never get to some sort of pure cooperative and conflict-free nirvana. But we can get closer to that than we are now. Mathematically. We can alter the landscape in terms of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of things.

More or less, rather than opposites.

I already pointed out several times now that the IPCC report itself said the 900 mitigation scenarios they reviewed largely relied on ‘idealistic’ policy settings and ‘optimistic’ future technology prospects among other unfounded assumptions and cruel discount rates.

I pointed out on John Quiggin’s blog thread of the OP that the IPCC does not recommend 450ppm – this was a setting originally suggested by Nordhaus in the 1970s and taken up by policy makers and politicians without any scientific basis. The cites are there.

ZM@338
Yes, thank you, ducky, I did read the link I posted. If you had read it with average intelligence you would have noted that:

1) The Groundnuts Scheme wasn’t a corporate scheme. It was run by a democratic, socialist British government, with all the supposed advantages of central planning that Plume supposes should exist.The fact that the original idea of growing peanuts in Tanganyika came from a man from Unilever – but was not implemented by anyone from Unilever – only discredits it if you suppose that all corporations are evil, and any idea coming from anyone involved with a corporation must be wrong and will be badly implemented.

For all I know, you may believe that. Look up Port Sunlight some time.

2) The scheme was indeed implemented, or rather centrally planned and spectacularly failed to be implemented, in a colony: the title of the url I gave should have indicated that. For all I know, you may believe that anything done in a colony must be wrong and will be badly implemented. If so, please check that with Australian and US contributors to CT.

If you are on the saner side of the choices above, you will accept that the groundnuts scheme is a classic example of central planning failing to produce the benefits Plume believes are inevitable.

Note that I am not arguing that central planning is always counterproductive. Only that it can be: and that in the event of failure, central planning is less robust than decentralised capitalism.

BTW if you want another example, look up R101 Airship.

Plume @ 356

Yes, more or less . . . of one unified thing. You cannot get cooperation without conflict, because the more cooperation, the more conflict. You cannot get more organization without more centralization and more decentralization.

My point is not to play word games, or to turn attempts to understand political economy into word games. I want to avoid substituting word games for thought. I wouldn’t say we cannot improve, nor would I ridicule the concept of progress. I do not like authoritarianism and I favor democracy. I don’t think statements like, “Democratizing the economy is the opposite of centralizing it.” help.

I look at your statement:

The capitalist system is “command and control” already at the corporate level, and each corporate fiefdom withholds knowledge and intention from each, which stifles information flow. They have to in the system as is. So you not only get a ton of waste and duplication, you bottle up or at least slow down knowledge dissemination throughout the economy.

And, I see abysmal ignorance. Without any intention to defend the status quo, I can say without equivocation that you are simply ignorant and mistaken about how the existing economy works. I’m not offering to argue the point with you. I’m telling you, you simply do not know what you are talking about.

Your moral intentions are admirable, but your self-regard, in relation to your own understanding of how the economy works, is unfounded. Just on this one small point — information flows among large companies and the economy at large — simply observing what goes on, the massive exchange of information on a daily basis, the enormous resources devoted to communications ought to give you pause. These companies depend on communicating information to vast networks of employees, contractors, customers, vendors, suppliers, the financial sector and the numerous others their products or services are embedded into. They are communicating their intentions constantly, strategically and operationally. Just look! You don’t have to endorse it. Without judging it, just look.

Stephen,

Britain has never had a socialist government. It has always had some mix, with the overwhelming majority of things still owned by private entities. The people have never owned the means of production in Britain — or anywhere else in the modern age. And it’s never had a democratized workplace, much less a democratized economy overall.

Command and control would have enormously positive benefits if it were handled at the community level, with communities working together with other communities, within regions and nationally . . . . coordinating what they do, sharing knowledge with one another. An escape from bumper-car economics, from rowing-at-cross-purposes economics, from feudal-fiefdoms economics.

That’s far from saying (or advocating for) some monstrous government apparatus, run by a political party, controlling all. That’s not democracy and the people don’t own the means of production in that set up. It’s basically just concentrating the segregated command and control of corporations (feudal fiefdoms) into one fiefdom. The goal should be dispersal and cooperation among equals, not the concentration and accumulation of feudal powers into one source, the ruling class.

Plume 08.26.14 at 6:56 pm @ 361 — The problem for me and my fellow wet communist hippie types is that nobody outside our little set is proposing a deal. Constant growth is necessary in a capitalist society to keep the proles with the program, because then today’s losers (most people) can be told they will ‘win’ tomorrow. The great metaphorical pie will be larger and each slice will be bigger. Once it becomes plain that the great metaphorical pie is shrinking, (further) coercion will be necessary to keep the proles in line — rather energetic coercion, I would imagine. And lots of surveillance. Maybe a war or two. (You can see that the ruling class has the whole business well in hand, and we need not worry about what right-wingers think — when the time comes, they’ll be told what to think.)

Regarding voluntarism and systemic change: we’ve had decades, now, to pick the low-hanging fruit in dealing with CO2, and the effort, for whatever reason, has been not only pathetic but criminally negligent.

I’m a firm believer in the power of demands. If we could get a strong public position along the lines of “global warming MUST be addressed, not tomorrow but yesterday, and with whichever blunt instrument is ready to hand”, then the systemic implications will simply have to be worked out. Give the wonks an imperative to chew on. Completely changing the system in order to effect your demands is putting the cart before the horse.

Bruce @362,

And, I see abysmal ignorance. Without any intention to defend the status quo, I can say without equivocation that you are simply ignorant and mistaken about how the existing economy works. I’m not offering to argue the point with you. I’m telling you, you simply do not know what you are talking about.

Of course you’re not offering to argue the point with me. You can’t. You don’t know how. Judging from your long-winded, pompous posts, your ego is such that you don’t believe you even need to prove your points — so you don’t even try. For instance, you think that corporate communications being what they are somehow (and self-evidently) disproves the contention that they withhold information. An educated person, a person who actually knows something about the economy, a person who has sat in on corporate meetings, would see that the two things are not mutually exclusive. Yes, companies communicate with those networks you talk about to get things done. I never said they didn’t. I said they withhold information. Just look around you!! You don’t have to endorse it, but just look!! People communicate and withhold information all the time, and this occurs every single day on the individual, corporate and systems levels.

You seem strangely trapped in an either/or mode, which is ironic for someone who argues against binary thinking –while saying there is no escape from it.

Oh, well.

If this is a sentence that get’s written, then it’s time to start with more basic words that say exactly what you mean:

Britain has never had a socialist government.
Assuming the goal is communication, and not simply rhetoric.

Bruce @362,

My response is in moderation, so will try to reword it to get it through.

Companies, like people, do indeed withhold information, and they communicate with others, with those networks you mentioned and so on. Both/and. They withhold information and they communicate. This isn’t rocket science. And it’s not debatable. Anyone who has ever worked in a private company — I have for more than forty years — knows this is true. We know it if we’ve ever been in a corporate meeting, or read through employee manuals (which actually say the information contained within is confidential), or worked in management. Companies withhold information, daily. And, on a daily basis, they also communicate with other companies, supply chains, etc. etc.

And it is patently, observably false to say the more cooperation, the more conflict. As if there is some law making this so. Again, you’re falling for the idea that some natural law of equilibrium exists outside of theoretical models. It doesn’t. We actually do see more of this, less of that, depending upon inputs and systems. It happens. Look around!

Anyway, to answer the question originally posed: How can you convince rightwingers to accept climate science?

Successfully predict climate, without excuses, in a transparent manner. Where “predict” has it’s normal meaning of forecasting future events BEFORE they happen. Without excuses like, “We can’t let them see the raw data or methodology, they’d just use it to impugn the results!” Where “successfully” means the predictions were clustered around what actually happened, instead of all off to one side of the actual data, and barely within the 95% confidence level. Where a transparent manner means that you don’t get to restrict access to data sets or models, don’t get to correct actual instrument readings, and then dispose of the original readings.

What is needed for rightwingers to accept climate science? It has to become normal science. No excuses, no fudging, textbook science, that can be replicated from publicly available data, by publicly available means.

How can you convince rightwingers to accept climate science?

Successfully predict climate, without excuses, in a transparent manner. Where “predict” has it’s normal meaning of forecasting future events BEFORE they happen.

There’s absolutely no reason to expect that would work. Judging from past behavior, no reason at all.

Consider economics. Many right-wingers believe in Austrian economics. Do Austrian economists forecast the economy and get future events before they happen? Mostly not. They determine in general terms what to expect by praxeology, and don’t forecast specific results at all. A few Austrian economists claimed after the fact that they had predicted the 2007 collapse, but their predictions were mostly off by at a minimum months. Usually they did not even predict the month to expect the collapse, and ones who got the year right had also predicted the collapse repeatedly for years before when it did not happen.

But many right-wingers believe them without successful predictions. Successful prediction is not the key to success at being believed by right-wingers.

Consider gun control. Many right-wingers believe studies that show gun control increases crime. In every case I have looked at in detail, the statistics were woefully faulty. But they were believed regardless. I have never ever heard of a gun-control study that correctly predicted how much crime would increase after a change in gun control, or when it would increase. The studies were always about past events. But they were believed.

Where “successfully” means the predictions were clustered around what actually happened, instead of all off to one side of the actual data, and barely within the 95% confidence level.

Many right-wingers display this degree of woeful misunderstanding of statistics. There is no reason to think that statistical results will sway them — as this example demonstrates they can’t tell the difference anyway. They will consistently make up excuses to deny results they don’t want to believe.

What is needed for rightwingers to accept climate science? It has to become normal science. No excuses, no fudging, textbook science, that can be replicated from publicly available data, by publicly available means.

This is clearly wrong. When we look at examples of right-wing science they do believe, it does not meet these standards.

A more plausible answer is that if you want right-wingers to accept climate science, you need to find a way to get them to want it to be true. Once they *want* to believe it, then it’s easy. As long as they *don’t* want to believe it, the task is impossible.

. . . you need to find a way to get them to want it to be true.

But, isn’t that true of everyone?

“Adjusting primary instrument measures is common in many sciences. It doesn’t follow that doing this in a rigorous manner invalidates all subsequent analyses.”

It doesn’t follow from this that climate research is doing it in a rigorous manner. You have to permit sufficient access to raw data and methodology to allow others to establish that.

See, that’s the problem: The rightwing don’t TRUST climate scientists. That doesn’t mean we can’t be persuaded. It means we can’t be persuaded without a lot more transparency than has been seen up to date. Somebody you don’t trust can be right. But you’re not going to take their word for it.

Take just the issue of adjusting readings from weather stations. At least half the warming in the US seems to be due to well sited stations’ readings being adjusted up to be consistent with badly sited stations’ readings. Spuriously exporting the urban heat island into the countryside.

Why? Because, last I heard, climate scientists weren’t doing these adjustments based on site surveys, but just by semi-automated statistical routines. Which just happen to only adjust temperatures up in the near term, and down in the past.

Or, how about Mann’s efforts to keep his statistical methodology secret. And when it gets out, it turns out to generate a hockey stick from random data…

To be clear, I’m not at all sure, based on some recent scandals, whether climate science is actually worse in this respect than the rest of science. But to persuade rightwingers, it needs to be better.

John c halasz,

“Hydro-electric power has long been a bug-bear of environmentalists, and there are real environmental damages involved. ” “pick your poison”

I agree that we are now is a position where we have to make choices about things that maybe we would rather not consider if not for climate change. Hydro is still I think the largest contributor to renewable energy in Australia (63% of all renewables according to Wikipedia) despite its small proportion overall now and in future 100% renewable energy scenarios for Australia.

I think energy use needs to be more conservative, manufacturing and highly intensive energy using sectors are going to need to be more flexible around the possible energy supply capability (this is one of the reasons why I favour a coordinated approach rather than a market approach – there are risks that the changes to businesses are unaffordable for some of the individual businesses themselves so they couldn’t reform even if changes are affordable whole economy wide, and potential hiccups in the transition could cause individual businesses to fail, if a great many fail at once the economy would be very chaotic – coordination can try to see foreseeable problems and make contingency plans etc). Efficiency should increase too.

Brett Bellmore,

Michael Mann was not guilty, I’ve heard great many say
(sung to the tune of Hiram Hubbard . NB: – I believe this of Mann, I only know the song of Hiram Hubbard and not the case )

Maybe you should read Mann’s book on how his work and others’ was made controversial by vested interests:

“The Hockey Stick became a central icon in the “climate wars,” and well-funded science deniers immediately attacked the chart and the scientists responsible for it. Yet the controversy has had little to do with the depicted temperature rise and much more with the perceived threat the graph posed to those who oppose governmental regulation and other restraints to protect our environment and planet. Michael E. Mann, lead author of the original paper in which the Hockey Stick first appeared, shares the real story of the science and politics behind this controversy. He introduces key figures in the oil and energy industries, and the media front groups who do their bidding in sometimes slick, bare-knuckled ways to cast doubt on the science. Mann concludes with an account of the “Climategate” scandal, the 2009 hacking of climate scientists’ emails. Throughout, Mann reveals the role of science deniers, abetted by an uninformed media, in once again diverting attention away from one of the central scientific and policy issues of our time.”
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/books/hockeystick/

Consider the bandwidth of blog comments. Pretty low, right?

We can’t expect to go into great detail. So, like, John Halasz goes into detail about energy production, and it’s interesting. If somebody who thought they were equally informed tried to dispute some of his facts, how well could I follow the dispute? I probably wouldn’t bother, it’s interesting but not that interesting to me. Besides it’s stuff that changes or becomes irrelevant fairly quickly. (I hope. I hope we keep finding important new things that makes the current pessimistic views obsolete.)

This is inherently a low-bandwidth medium, and so it transmits low-bandwidth data, we paint low-bandwidth pictures. We can’t consider the little details, unless some particular detail is vitally important.

Plume talks low-bandwidth. He presents general ideas, and he can’t talk about the subtle details much. If you want to say that the details prove his ideas can’t work, you might be right or wrong. It depends on the details we can’t determine.

I think the next time when around the world societies get changed around, they are likely to look like Plume describes. Societies with lots of groups communicating well about how to be more productive, are likely to wind up very productive. Societies that don’t have parasites determining their direction, with the parasites’ main goal to prevent the parasites being dislodged, are likely to easily outcompete societies like we have now. I don’t know how the details would work, but if those details do get worked out it will result in something that can hardly lose.

Is there value in discussing things when we can’t look at enough details to be sure they could work? I dunno, but if not then we haven’t got much excuse to be here, right?

“Plume seems like he truly wants to make the world a better place and is trying to figure out how.”

Granted. I would find this less troubling if the ways he comes up with didn’t involve all competing modes of social organization being ruthlessly suppressed.

Brett,

If by “ruthlessly suppressed,” you mean peaceful, democratic assembly, peaceful exchange of ideas and debate, resulting in peaceful voting, with all votes having equal weight, then, yeah. Sure. That’s what it is.

It’s all peaceful until the vote has been held, and then the guys in riot gear are sent in to enforce the outcome of the vote on the people who lost.

Last time I heard of SWAT being deployed to attack a commune was Waco, and that wasn’t over their economics.

Why would it involve force? Because 99% of the population don’t agree on squat. And what happened to burning arrangements you don’t like out of the system forever?

Should have said, humans got along just fine without it for their first 250,000 years.

385: O course you like Plume

Plume, if the liberals and social democrats like you, you are doing it wrong.

Utopian socialism. Analytical Marxism.

Study the fail.

Brett, if and when I can opt out of the capitalist mode of social organisation (i.e. ignore private property in its modern form) without being ‘ruthlessly suppressed’, I’ll concede you have a point.

Matt, well said.

“The day after” I’m going to see if enough people and places I care about are still around to justify my continued existence, or if it’s time for self-euthanasia. I’m a chemist and I have had the materials ready for 12 years. That is my worst-case scenario exit strategy, as opposed to something involving guns, gold, and food stockpiles.

Actually achieving comprehensive nuclear disarmament so we don’t have worry about a “day after?” I donate to the Federation of American Scientists and occasionally write to senators about nuclear disarmament but I’m under no illusions of being anything but one fairly ordinary person among billions. All the permanent members of the UN security council have nuclear weapons. All of them are theoretically committed by treaty to eliminating those weapons but in practice are keeping them forever or until a miracle or disaster, whichever happens first. Here I bump up against the limits of knowledge and belief: I didn’t believe that the big military powers would actually disarm of chemical weapons either, until they actually did, so my pessimism might go too far. Predictions are hard, especially about the future.

Brett Bellmore 08.27.14 at 5:05 pm
“It’s all peaceful until the vote has been held, and then the guys in riot gear are sent in to enforce the outcome of the vote on the people who lost.”

Just like in Ferguson!

“Brett, if and when I can opt out of the capitalist mode of social organisation (i.e. ignore private property in its modern form) without being ‘ruthlessly suppressed’, I’ll concede you have a point.”

The problem, Luke, is that you don’t want to opt out of it. You want to opt other people out of it.

The full quote in context:

” The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself. ”

It seems that there is an allusion to Kant’s “Copernican revolution” at the end there, as well as to traditional Platonic imagery. But it bears more philosophical analysis, which carries on in subsequent philosophical analyses and critiques of phantasy and illusion, than just s sentimental reversion of religious tolerance.

Matt,

I’m not convinced that those health issues can be fully solved even if you make them more obvious by taking away the aspirin, when we’re talking about the pain of consciousness, mortality, and the search for meaning.

Have you seen this?

Isn’t basalt currently crushed and used in making roads? Since it is better to reduce roads and cars to have public transport, walking, and cycling – could we reduce road cover of land (in cities often half or more of the land is covered by roads) and treat the road materials then use the basalt from the roads in the suggestion of basalt based carbon sequestration?

I have not heard of basalt sequestration before so I am not sure how scalable it is or what impacts it might have on ecosystems.

[quibble: rock crushing — my miner cousin assured me — is surprisingly energy intensive, since you have to supply the fracture energy per unit area, and fine-crushed rocks have a lot of area. “Surprising” probably only in comparison to what you think it is, but still]

The numbers I put into my model came from the technical literature of hard rock mining. I didn’t assume it was workable until I had actually checked the energy requirements. One thing I didn’t mention in my already-large comment was that crusher machinery lifetime is determined primarily by quantity of rock processed, as opposed to damage from the surrounding environment or startup/shutdown stresses. This means that the crushing process can run on renewable energy with only a very small energy buffer for short term stability, maybe amounting to a couple of minutes’ worth of storage. When the sun shines or the wind blows you process more rock, and when it doesn’t you wait. That improves the carbon payback ratio of the system by reducing storage system manufacturing emissions. This is predicated on a fair bit of automation; I don’t think it is practicable or likely to be fair to link worker schedules to quickly changing renewable electricity availability.

Crushed olivine or possibly basalt can be applied to agricultural soils. Silicate weathering is also accelerated in environments near plant roots where living and decaying plants produce organic acids and chelating molecules. Olivine would supply mostly magnesium. Basalt would supply smaller quantities of a larger variety of nutrients: magnesium, calcium, potassium, even a little phosphorus. Both would reduce soil acidity, which is useful in many but not all circumstances. The application rates to agricultural soils would be limited but use in soil could be lower-hanging fruit than near-shore ocean weathering, since it provides benefits other than CO2 reduction.

Karl Marx
Denounced the treason of the clerks*.
To make the poor man’s lot seem easier
They doled out not just analgesia
Nor even merely false euphoria
But fully fledged phantasmagoria.

*Spare me your denunciation; it’s UK pronunciation.

My comment was just exegesis.
And though (psst!) I do share that thesis
To bar an alliance
Because ‘anti-science!’
Reeks of IoI/LM faeces.

Philip K Dick thought we’d grow chitinous exoskeletons.

But only after he’d be up for five days straight.

He was just quoting someone called Eric Erickson (son of Erick) who I think must be American because his name rings a bell, but I can’t place him

“Nonetheless, following the careful distinctions and taking the arguments in the spirit they are made, there’s an intuitive problem with the analysis. Obama’s carbon regs basically tell electric companies to engage in economic activity that they would not have otherwise engaged in, i.e., building clean generation capacity to replace coal. Every analysis I have seen takes it as axiomatic that this lowers overall GDP growth. The government intervention is necessarily less efficient.”

When people say this, just point them to a chart of US GDP from 1941 through 1946, and ask them to point to the decline caused by the government intervention, when we told companies to build things they would not otherwise have built…

@409 The central problem is that the field of economics, by it’s nature, does not attract a surplus creative flexible minds. And even the most creative, by the time anyone is willing to listen to them, have invested 7 to 10 years of their lives preparing for a career in the magic emperor garment industry. When this crowd tries to imagine the counterfactual to come up with the opportunity cost of Neoclassical Economics, the best they can muster is SWL disparaging comments about “intelligent guesswork.”

But imagine a PhD economist and a smart liberal arts major in 1981 talking about the debate over dynamic scoring in budget projections.

Laff: We know that cutting taxes on the rich will cause economic growth, the only question is how much.
SciBoy: Really, isn’t it just conservatives like you who think that?
Laff: I’m conservative, but every economist there is, from Paul Krugman to John Cochrane agrees that cutting taxes causes increased growth.
SciBoy: Wow. To be that sure they must have collected a lot of data.
Laff: What?
SciBoy: You know, run experiments, looked at history… data.
Laff: Wait… I remember… data. Well, son, a long time ago we realized that it was impossible to run experiments in economics, so we skipped that part…
SciBoy: (Interrupting) But surely you could look at history?
Laff:…when we realized we could generalize human behavior using math.
SciBoy: I took psychology 1o1, and that doesn’t seem possible. Why not just look at history.
Laff: (Furiously drawing) Behold, the great curve. Isn’t it pretty?
SciBoy: I guess, but there’s nothing left to talk about. You are clearly an idiot. Generalizing human behavior using math? I’ve never heard of something so stupid. Could your math have predicted which taxes would turn into the invention of nuclear power? Could your math predict which taxes would turn into the railroads and the highways? Could your math show you which taxes would become the Hooover Dam?
Laff: You call me an idiot. But which one of us has lifetime job security and rakes in a million dollars a speech?
SciBoy: Got me there.

Magnesium and calcium cations in the ocean form a metastable solution in near-surface waters, at least under normal conditions of e.g. 100 years ago.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-4-2.html

Surface water supersaturation in magnesium/calcium means that the formation of Mg/Ca mineral precipitates is thermodynamically favored, but kinetically hindered, so ions can stay in solution a long time until a marine organism like coral or shellfish, or a favorable crystal surface on a bit of grit, catalyzes the formation of a solid crystal lattice containing the ions. Mg/Ca sediment that falls into the deep ocean, where supersaturation no longer obtains, is technically in an environment where it can spontaneously dissolve again, but that is hindered by the low temperature and the compaction of sediment that limits access to sea water.

Silicate weathering of calcium and magnesium bearing rocks raises pH, which restores ocean surface waters nearer to their historical state of supersaturation and makes shell and precipitate formation easier. As Mg/Ca precipitates form, fall into the deep, and diminish the reserves of magnesium and calcium in solution, the Mg/Ca coming from weathered silicates also replenish the soluble store of cations in solution. The sodium and potassium freed from silicates also help the pH shift, but they can’t replenish the soluble Mg/Ca reserves that are diminished by precipitate formation.

Shale is abundant, and easier to crush than basalt, but it contains higher levels of toxic trace elements. It also has lower concentrations of pH-raising cations.

Here is an analysis of a typical basalt sample: http://crustal.usgs.gov/geochemical_reference_standards/basaltbcr2.html
And one of shale: http://crustal.usgs.gov/geochemical_reference_standards/codyshale.html

The shale has nearly triple the lead content of the basalt, and a substantial amount of arsenic too. There wasn’t enough arsenic in the basalt to even show up in the analysis. Based on the content of calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium, the shale also has a relative pH-raising potential about half of that of the basalt, per kilogram.

I have some concerns about the phosphorus liberated by vast accelerated weathering of basalt. It’s only 0.15 percent P in the sample I’ve linked above, but that adds up when you are processing rock by the gigatonne. Could concentrating too much crushed material in one small ocean area lead to phosphorus-driven destructive algal blooms?

Here’s the paper that originally made me think about aritificial acceleration of silicate weathering: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es0701816
I read it with interest, but I think the energy and capital requirements are too high. The high cost is due to a very rapid, complicated system of weathering using manufactured strong acids. Since I think that there is no chance of reversing atmospheric CO2 increase within a couple of decades any way, I don’t see enough benefit to this very rapid approach that justifies its higher costs.

Targeting throughput, not latency, is key to actually reversing atmospheric CO2 concentrations on a meaningful scale. We made this problem in an obsessive quick-results mindset: By 1960 I must achieve the output targets assigned by the sixth 5 year plan. I need to show results to the voters when I’m up for re-election in 2 years. I need to show results to the market in next quarter’s earnings report. I need to be able to travel 50 kilometers in under an hour, at any time, at a moment’s whim. It’s folly to maintain the same future-discounting, short-term-obsessed mindset while trying to undo an atmospheric change that was centuries in the making.

Here’s a paper about accelerated weathering of olivine, actually a rebuttal of a rebuttal about the original olivine weathering proposal: http://olivijn.info/res/literatuurSchuiling/2010schuiling_de_boercommenthangx.pdf
In my opinion the olivine-weathering proponents have the better arguments, but one question not asked nor answered is where to get all the olivine. As far as I can tell, bulk deposits of pure olivine are relatively rare, known reserves amounting to a few billion tonnes. We need trillions of tonnes to go back to pre-industrial CO2 levels in the atmosphere and pH in ocean surface waters. Maybe more bulk deposits of olivine could be easily located; I don’t know. Instead I tried out the numbers using basalt, quadrillions of tonnes readily available. It looks to me like basalt is a feasible alternative, despite its lower neutralization capacity per mass.

I mentioned “trillions of tonnes” of rock processing in passing. The anthropogenic increase in CO2 is absolutely vast. So will be any process that reverses it: vast in mass and length scales, if accelerated by humans, or vast in time if left up to unaided nature.

I don’t expect accelerated silicate weathering to be pursued on a large scale in my lifetime, because as you say there is no profit in it. It’s a possible damage-reversal path if in 100 years more people have more broadly recognized that market value is a poor way to plan for the deep future. Or if some large nations implement carbon taxes or caps that actually stick and aren’t repealed as soon as different politicians gain the upper hand. And if industrial civilization is still around.

Well, this has been a somewhat disappointing thread, given the substantive importance of the issues involved in the OP. If CT threads are a “low bandwidth” medium, then maybe contributors should consider how they make it so, with various adventitious comments and repetitive “hobby-horse” obsessions, without focusing on the substantive matter at hand. (Not that I have been appointed official censor- far from it).
But I’ll just suggest to anyone interested in the topic, that they read Peter Dorman’s series, which he linked to above. I’m actually about 75% in agreement with his POV, though I don’t think that economists necessarily have the best or most exclusive take on all the issues involved in AGW.

If businesses complain they cannot make a profit/break even undertaking the requisite tasks, that is another reason we should have a co-ordinated sustainable economy, not a market growth based economy.

John Quiggin,

@387 was just quoting someone called Eric Erickson. His comment didn’t make that clear – I only realised by going to the link. I don’t think he supports Eric Ericsson – but I might be wrong?

@John C Halasz What is “the subject matter at hand”?

If it’s how global warming threatens the global poor, then what is there to discuss? What is more substantive than pointing out that Neoclassical Economics–in addition to having close to zero empirically validity–frames the discourse in a way that saving lives is labeled a “cost” and killing people is labeled “efficient”?

When a practitioner of this discourse whines about confused people not following science, what is one two do as one takes to bed rest recovering from the head/wall conflicted induced concussion?

Thornton Hall,

To be fair, John Quiggin is not a practioner of neo-classical economics , I think he practices a version of Keynesian economics

John Quiggin,

Thanks for the reply. I’m not tuned in to the British CC policy apparatus, or that of Australia, so I appreciate this link. It is true that the emissions reduction mandate is in the form of a carbon budget, sort of. It is broken into four-year periods, each of which has its cumulative budget. So far, so good. These budgets have been set through 2027, and then there is white space until the year 2050, which has a target for annual emissions. Thus the approach falls well short of a single cumulative carbon budget.

Moreover, it is clear that the first four budgets, taking us to 2027, are not consistent with a straight line (log linear) path to 2050. Instead they are backloaded. Budgets two and three reduce at an annual rate of about 2%; budget four (2023-2027) then tacks on a much larger cut. Even so, the average rate of emission reductions programmed through 2027 is about 3%, whereas a straight line path to 2050 would require 3.5%. Since it is the area under the curve and not the end point that matters, the short term budgets do not add up to a cumulative budget that has any chance of adhering to the IPCC guideline.

And bear in mind that even a 3.5% straight line reduction path falls short of the 5% I suggested (admittedly in a back of the envelope way) as a baseline for developed country response. Surely developing countries in the aggregate cannot be expected to significantly reduce their use of fossil fuels over the next few decades if they are to achieve an adequate growth in living standards.

Bottom line: the UK approach does not benchmark a single, cumulative budget, and the patchwork of four-year budgets (plus the 2050 target) fall well short of a developed country’s necessary carbon constraint. I don’t know about Australia; perhaps you folks have mapped out a more ambitious program.

Interestingly, the esteemed committee has not looked into the question of capital writeoff, at least insofar as its work is summarized in this progress report. I guess the carbon prices corresponding to the budgets they are trying to achieve pose no threats to anyone’s existing investments. It’s a wonderful world.

As you can imagine, I would love to be wrong about all this. It would be much better in every way if responsible carbon policy were as affordable as this report suggests. But I think lowballing the costs does not prepare us for the political economic hurdles we will have to overcome to get the job done.

One quick-and-dirty way to look at the problem is BTUs per $1 of GDP. The U.S. has made real progress there, from around 9000 to around 7000. Many advanced European economies are at 5000 or less. Red China is around 25000!

This is a delightfully complicated topic. Energy-to-GDP and CO2-to-GDP is affected by the relative size of different sectors in the economy, choices within those sectors, and choices in different but related sectors.

As a concrete example, the UK consumes less energy per capita than Germany, France, Sweden, Switzerland, or Belgium. It also has a heavily services-oriented economy. The financial services sector in particular can generate a high ratio of GDP to energy consumed because office buildings and computers require much less energy per dollar than e.g. aluminum smelters or ammonia plants.

Western exports of relatively low-carbon-intensity services and goods and imports of high-carbon-intensity goods (e.g. export finished airliners, import unprocessed metals and plastics) have led to charges that the West is just outsourcing pollution rather than really operating more efficiently than China. This is half-true. The West is operating more efficiently and outsourcing. If the UK had, say, kept the Anglesey Aluminum smelter open after 2012 instead of replacing its output with imports, the relative energy intensity and CO2 intensity of the UK economy, per dollar, would be slightly worse. The energy and CO2 burdens aren’t just relocated to China when aluminum production moves there: Chinese energy production is much more coal-dominated than that in the UK, Canada, USA, or EU. Moving X units of aluminum production to China from the UK actually makes the global economy less CO2-efficient even if it becomes more dollar-efficient.

I think that if countries impose GHG taxes they also need to impose equivalent tariffs on goods coming from zones without equivalent taxes. If exporters will not make their supply chains transparent enough to assess the emissions from the bottom up, make conservative (high) estimates of the embedded emissions. Otherwise there will be strong incentives to make everything worse by tax-dodge relocation.

I detest the idea that the burden is on individuals to make CO2-limiting choices. That is a recipe for smug finger-wagging plus negligible improvement. When a BP oil rig blows up in the Gulf of Mexico you don’t track down every motorist who bought fuel from BP in the last year and fine them for being “the real source of the problem.” We have regulators for automobile safety, food purity, and so forth so that a billion people don’t have to retain their own experts to avoid injury or fraud on a daily basis. So too should it be with mitigating anthropogenic GHG emissions.

Matt @447:

Yep. The need to impose a carbon-equivalent price on imports is one, though just one, of the reasons I favor a carbon-tax over a cap-n-trade system.

Where I live, if people cut their consumption to 6% of what they now consume, almost all of them will die, which they will not see as conducive to survival. I imagine right-wing polemicists could have fun with the figure, though: ‘Liberals want you to die so Third World can live better.’

When I think about it a little more clearly, there are two reasons we need to reduce consumption.

The first is that things we consume, we need to invest instead. Resources that currently go into consumer products could instead go into creating alternate energy. We can’t put as much glass into solar panels because we instead make glass mayonnaise jars that we throw away and put in landfills. We can’t put as much silicon into solar panels because we instead make chips for game consoles. We can’t put as much energy into manufacturing solar panels because we use too much heating and cooling our houses. My examples are silly but there are some that aren’t so silly.

The second reason is that there are resources that should be left unused. Fossil fuels are a good example, the more of them we use for trivial luxury consumption the worse off we are. When we clearcut a section of forest at 18 years, it might be better for the ecology to let it wait 20 years or 40 years. You get less than twice as much wood from a 40 year forest than from a 20 year forest, but you get bigger pieces. We need to let some forests grow and age and let the individual trees fall over and decay without being used at all.

There’s a whole lot of detail about that stuff. I don’t think the detail can be represented very well by “reduce consumption by 75%” or “reduce consumption by 94%”. We’d have less of some things and more of others. As the new investment starts to pay off that would gradually turn into more more and less less. Almost certainly less beef, maybe quickly not less meat. Probably less fish, possibly a lot more jellyfish. Probably less driving, probably a lot more teleconferencing. Probably less steel, maybe more strong graphite.

It doesn’t have to be a big sacrifice, except for the poor. The more effectively we invest, the more rewards we can expect from that investment. And the alternative is not to maintain our traditional standard of living. The suburban house with the two-car garage and the third car in the driveway, the barbecue grill with thick steaks on it — that will be gone regardless. With the right investments we will have something new to replace it, that we can share as widely as it makes sense to.

#453 Bruce Wilder

Thank you, Bruce! I am not an expert in economics. I try to use common sense which I know is unreliable.

(A great deal of formal macroeconomics is hung up on the idea that the level of activity is governed by institutions struggling to establish and maintain a trade-off in the aggregate between consumption and investment; thinking about this is seriously confused, but we shouldn’t let that distract us.

I understand that there is a big attempt to regulate the level of activity. I didn’t get that the purpose of it was to balance consumption and investment, it seemed more basic than that.

Like, money is a regulator, so when you want more activity you inject more money — like injecting amphetamines. And when you want less activity you take away money — like injecting a sedative.

Normally the economy can sort of regulate itself, but it runs faster with more stimulants. When there’s a shortage of some product, users of that product bid up the price and the makers of the product make more money. They use that money to expand production. They naturally invest in themselves because that’s what they know, and they act against their own interests to reduce the shortage which increased their incomes because they compete for market share. So it all works out.

But when there’s a labor shortage, wages rise because employers compete for employees. And the population won’t rise any time soon. So it’s necessary to slow down the economy to keep wages down. I guess if wages rose too much that would change the balance between consumption (what workers buy with their wages) and investment (the money that employers make).

Anyway, that doesn’t speak to how we can change the economy around to something more sustainable.

Another way of thinking about the economy is to focus on some foundational good, essential for the production of everything else. High productivity in providing the foundational good is essential for freeing resources for incorporation in the production of other goods.

Sure, but that mostly takes care of itself, right? When in every region we have multiple power companies competing to give their customers the best service, and you switch to whichever one does better…. Oh. It doesn’t take care of itself much at all.

[….] The result is that some agricultural and manufactured goods become really, really “cheap” and abundant, and some workers become hugely productive, increasing the incomes of a lot of workers (not just those who have become hugely productive).

I’ve wondered why it follows that the workers who are not more productive have their incomes go up. If a big share of the labor force goes into the new productive work then there are fewer left to do the old stuff, so supply-and-demand. But if it’s only a few that got productive while a lot got thrown out of their jobs, then supply-and-demand would go the other way round. If production is up then there’s more stuff to go around, so everybody who can afford stuff is better off — until the level-of-activity gets adjusted.

It’s come out that way sometimes, but I don’t see that it has to.

Transitioning from a fossil fuel energy system to a sustainable energy system will seriously squeeze the energy surplus, and will force a sharp trade-off between production for investment (in the new energy production and distribution systems) and production for consumption.

If there’s less energy available, production, and therefore consumption and investment together, are constrained in the short-term. Use of energy to produce for investment reduces the amount of energy available to produce for consumption.

Sure. that’s obvious. But if we consume the fossil fuel energy until it’s all gone, that’s like eating the seed corn. You don’t eat your seed corn until you’re starving anyway and you want one last meal. That’s obvious too.

What’s not so obvious, perhaps, at a high-level of abstraction, is that we have to make choices at the margin between the old system of energy production (petroleum, natural gas, coal), and building up the new energy system. As the amount of fossil fuel energy available declines, it “costs” something in energy terms to make the investments in a new energy system to produce enough energy to replace it, and that something is a multiple of what it “costs” to simply top up the fossil fuel system with frakking or tar sands or whatever.

Sure. We have lots of sunk costs in fossil fuels. Pipelines etc. Anything that uses them, costs less than it would if we had to build the whole infrastructure. On the other hand fossil fuel keeps getting more expensive because we used up the cheapest sources first. It takes more work to drain the dregs. And it will keep getting more expensive until it costs more than we can afford. At some point we’ll be reduced to fossil fuels that take more energy to extract than they give us back, and that’s an absolute limit until we develop extraction technology that uses less energy.

Meanwhile the alternative energy methods are improving rapidly, and that’s a big problem. If you invest too early, you wind up with something that’s less efficient than a competitor who invests later. He can outcompete you, and you could have to shut down before you have even gotten your investment back.

This energy trap means a reduction in production for consumption is unavoidable, if we act prudently. There’s no way to make this transition without short-term pain, and without a commitment to avoid relieving that pain with ill-advised dipping further into dirty fossil fuel resources.

Sure, but it’s short-term. And if we don’t do it, we’ll face the same exact problem a few decades later when we’re actually running out of available fossil fuels. The difference is only in doing it a few years early and leave some fossil fuels in the ground. It isn’t less short-term pain, it’s only earlier short-term pain.

It bothers me a lot that I do not see the IPCC focusing more clearly on the economic problem of this energy trap. Making estimates of how much mitigation will reduce consumption in 2100 compared to a no-mitigation scenario is just delusional, even if it is a delusion repeated 900 or 1200 times.

Agreed. Done right, the estimate would involve a guess about how long the fossil fuels would last. The cost would be the difference between what it costs to make the switch earlier instead of later. Depending on your assumptions, that cost could easily turn out negative.

I strongly suspect that any feasible path, which is also environmentally responsible, will lead to an economy that makes due with considerably less energy in total.. I would guestimate something like 20-25% of what Americans use now per capita for production for consumption[….]

Maybe. I don’t know how to guess at that. If we wind up using significant nuclear energy, then the amount of energy we use will depend only on how many nuclear plants we choose to build, and how fast we can switch to other fuels when the plutonium runs out. Some alternate energy sources have obvious limits, for others the limits are not so clear.

But it’s important that we can easily get by with a quarter of the energy we use now. We use the energy we do because it used to be cheap, and we haven’t adjusted.

It bothers me a lot that I do not see the IPCC focusing more clearly on the economic problem of this energy trap.

Is it that they are not consulting the economists, or the wrong economists? I think they should get whatever scientific assistance they can. Get sociologists and anthropologists to figure out how to get a worldwide consensus. Suggest to engineers that low-power designs will become useful, and get their advice how fast we can improve energy efficiency of various sorts. Use whatever technical assistance is available.

Plutonium doesn’t occur in nature to more than a trivial degree. What we have to worry about is *Uranium* running out.

Sure, and it makes far more sense to run plutonium reactors than U235 ones. But that’s a side issue.

Research in Japan has already demonstrated the capacity to extract Uranium from seawater at a feasible EROI. (22, without assuming use of breeder reactors.)

Well, not yet. But it might happen some day, particularly if the price of uranium (and so the price of electricity) stays very high.

I expect these methods will be useful for purifying uranium from any source, but not particularly for extraction from seawater. About the time (or before) people start using it on a large scale, they will discover things in seawater that eat their adsorbents and their costs will go up. Also things that adsorb and grow living off whatever they find in seawater, so the concentration will not be nearly as much as hoped.

It’s possible the various problems will be worked out eventually. We can get enough uranium and thorium to last us for awhile without using seawater, and that would give time to find better extraction methods. But half a dozen big accidents might be enough to persuade us not to.

No, the concept of cost does not depend on or imply the concept of distinguishing consumption from investment.

Cost is an aspect or consequence of choice. Costs only exist in the context of choice or decision; at base, if you choose to eat your cake, you cannot also continue to have your cake — the cost of eating your cake, is that you no longer have your cake. It is as mundane and plain as that.

We confuse cost with price sometimes, or with expense, but that’s just because we are so used to having the scoring mechanism of money, with which to calculate cost.

I think it is the concept of investment that becomes a bit mystical and gives economics something of the quality of religion. Investment implies that one can sacrifice present consumption for consumption in the future, and possibly increased production in the future. The idea of prudent hoarding and the idea of sacrifice is written deeply into the dna of human social behavior, and call forth powerful, limbic responses. The concept of capital investment adds to that a bit of magic. Capital investment implies that one can get something for nothing, that one can conjure not just delaying consumption by investing, but increased production: one can plant a seed in a field, cultivate the field, the seed grows into a plant, and the plant yields a great harvest. You put one rabbit into the hat, and three rabbits come out of the hat.

The association of investment with the virtue of thrift, with sacrifice to appease the divine, and magic, is bad enough, but investment also involves the future and forecasting the future, the realm of fortune tellers and diviners. The mathematics of intertemporal optimization and of probability and risk are difficult enough to be mesmerizing. It shouldn’t be surprising that it becomes more a bit mystical and religious. Priests have been reading the omens and appeasing the gods with calls for sacrifice, prophets have prescribed redemptive virtue, for millenia.

@Bruce What I’m trying to figure out is how economists describe a future where a power company uses it’s money to buy a transformer or whatever vs. being forced to use their money to buy solar panels. It seems like the latter path is considered a “cost” because of free market religion, even though it’s just taking money from GE and giving that same money to Solar R Us (or whatever). Either way it’s money used to buy something produced in a factory, either way it’s spending that employs people in productive activity.

To be fair, the actual comparison seems to be the choice between stock dividends or solar panels. But isn’t it just free market religion that says the dividends ultimately grow GDP more than the buying of solar panels?

Then there’s the problem of asset bubbles. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why even Dean Baker seems to think central banks have something to do with bubbles. Why not blame choices like dividends instead of solar panels? The former puts money in the hands of people who already own too many goods and have nothing left to buy but more assets, thus bidding up their price. The latter puts money in the hands of workers who buy food.

B.W.:

You might be interested in the following erudite post:

http://ecologicalheadstand.blogspot.com/

Well, obviously people, every day, have to make decisions about what is a “better” or “worse” way of spending their time, money, and efforts. This is unavoidable.

Mandates can either permit people to act on their own decisions, or compel them to act contrary to those decisions. Now, maybe people are generally inclined to make bad decisions, such that mandates could improve their welfare by compelling better ones. But, if we assume that people have this general tendency to make bad decisions, you have to explain why the people empowered to enact mandates are somehow exempt from this tendency, and so not promulgating bad mandates.

Normally we make the contrary assumption, that people are better positioned to make decisions concerning their own lives than they are concerning other people’s lives.

Thus, when a mandate compels somebody to act according to somebody else’s preferences, it is generally viewed as reducing that person’s welfare. Because it is assumed that if a person is better off installing a $25 LED bulb instead of a 50 cent incandescent, they’d do it without being forced to. That’s why mandates are generally regarded as representing costs: Because if they didn’t, you wouldn’t have needed a mandate to make you do it.

And this is the answer to your question: Who am I to judge what’s better? Nobody, if I’m asked about YOUR life. But, if asked about what’s better for my own life, I’m generally regarded as the authority on the subject, and I can appropriately ask, who are YOU to think your judgement is better?

Obvious rebuttals to “individual judgment is better than expert judgment”: homeopathic flu prevention, any activity that largely externalizes harms and internalizes benefits, the multitude of cognitive errors that people easily make unless they follow procedures to neutralize those known errors. Why assume that a person doing something apparently irrational has a deeper rational reason for it? Apparently-irrational behavior is often actually-irrational, at least if “rational” is defined in a falsifiable manner. I can’t tell whether or not cooking meat with milk actually angers any supernatural entity or entities.

More than that, actually. It’s a matter of EROI. You have to spend so many joules to obtain so many joules.

If you have an energy source with a high EROI, almost all of the energy you collect gets used for other things. If you have a really low EROI, almost all of the energy you collect gets used just extracting more energy, with the fraction usable for other purposes fairly low. EROI can be less than 1, in which case every joule you extract actually represents a net energy cost. (But can still be useful, if you spend inconvenient energy to get convenient energy. Batteries have EROI below 1, but they’re still useful.)

Coal has a high EROI. A really, really high EROI. Like, 80 or so. Only 1.3% of the energy you get mining coal has to be spent mining more coal. Almost all of your energy in a coal based economy can be spent on something other than mining coal. Nuclear isn’t as high as coal, but if you’re using current technology, its in the 50-60 range. Still pretty decent, the energy you have to spend to get your nuclear energy is chump change.

Corn ethanol is estimated to have an EROI of about 1.3. (Biodiesel, about the same.) 77% of the energy you get from it has to be spent producing it. An economy run on corn ethanol would be mostly devoted to growing and fermenting corn, with every other economic activity together being a small fraction of the economy.

Another way of putting it is, suppose your car runs on biodiesel. You’re burning 77% of your fuel before you turn the ignition!

Most ‘renewable’ sources of energy have fairly low EROI. Wind, if you build it where the wind actually blows? 18. Photovoltaic? 7. A large fraction of the energy you get from these sources has to be devoted to keeping them running, and is unusable for other purposes.

As EROI falls, energy production becomes an ever larger fraction of the economy, with all the stuff people wanted the energy for relegated to second place. Everybody gets poorer.

It’s kind of like breathing, really. If you’ve got unobstructed air passages, and good air, breathing uses only a tiny fraction of your efforts, and you can almost completely ignore it, and go about doing other things. If somebody duct tapes your mouth shut, and you’ve got a sinus infection going, you’re not going to be running any marathons; The only thing you’ll have energy for is desperately trying to draw your next breath.

Really, renewable energy, (Except for hydro, which comes in a a remarkable 100!) is the energy equivalent of strangling somebody, allowing them barely enough air to avoid dying.

Cost? You bet there’s cost.

“Shorter Brett Bellmore: I post on Econ blogs, follow the news and have ideological views yet somehow have never heard of externalities. ”

Yeah, you can make anybody sound stupid, by condensing what they say into something they never would have said, and assuming they’re oblivious to anything they happened to not mention.

“Why assume that a person doing something apparently irrational has a deeper rational reason for it? ”

Why assume the contrary, without bothering to ask them? Because you automatically assume that anyone who doesn’t do what you’d tell them to do is an idiot?

When I built my home back in ’98, I put compact florescents everywhere in the house, except the closets, attic, and porch. Why? Because those lights either weren’t on enough to every save in energy the extra cost of the more efficient bulbs, or were out in freezing temperatures much of the year, where a compact florescent might not light up for minutes after you hit the switch.

But if you’d seen me at Home Depot picking up a box of incandescents, what would you have seen? A moron who didn’t know better. Because if the reason somebody does something isn’t immediately obvious to you, you just assume they’re a moron, rather than that you’re ignorant.

I don’t assume that people are always making the right decision concerning things in their own lives. But I do assume they probably know more about their lives than I do, and so I need some proof they’re making the wrong decision, before I’d even think about interfering.

Then there’s the problem of asset bubbles. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why even Dean Baker seems to think central banks have something to do with bubbles.

A central bank can “stimulate” the economy by injecting more money into it. Vaguely like stimulating a circulatory system with amphetamines.

If you stimulate your body with amphetamines too long, after awhile you just plain can’t keep up. You have to slow down, and you feel terrible when you do. That’s kind of like a recession after a bubble.

It doesn’t have to be that way. You could wake up in the morning and get wide awake with a nice cup of coffee. Maybe drink a couple more. Then work hard and get your work done, and get a nice, restful sleep. You don’t have to get overstimulated. But when you do, that’s like a bubble.

Why not blame choices like dividends instead of solar panels?

Because central banks don’t get to make that kind of choice. They can only decide whether to apply a stimulant, or a sedative, or neither one. And they don’t particularly get to decide whether applying a stimulant will result in more solar panels or not. They can’t particularly predict whether it will have that result. But it’s pretty clear that applying a strong sedative will result in less solar panels.

Decisions made at that level don’t have the kind of effects we’re looking for. It’s like trying to do open-heart surgery with a baseball bat.

Oops. I meant Brett’s post at 464.

Thank you Barry.

Suppose that US national income is $10 trillion a year (not too far off) and that, in order to decarbonize the economy, it is necessary to spend $500 billion a year (every year from now until 2050) replacing coal fired power stations with renewables, converting the car fleet to electric vehicles etc. That’s $500 billion that could otherwise be spent on schools and hospitals, or on restaurant meals or anything else you care to name.

But converting the cars to electric vehicles has a payoff as soon as the electricity prices fall below the gasoline prices. From that time on, they aren’t a cost but a benefit. That will happen when oil starts to get expensive, which it surely will before 2050. We won’t have today’s cheap oil forever.

In the short run it’s cheaper to run electric generators off fossil fuels — that’s why we do it. There’s a question whether there’s a value in leaving some of that coal in the ground, unburned, forever. If it costs us in climate change, the extra coal we burn to run our air conditioning at 68 instead of 72 will cost us quite a lot in the long run. But that doesn’t have to be paid today. Today it’s cheaper to burn the coal and put part of the cost onto the charge card for future generations to pay. So this is a cost we might choose to pay, that may not get a visible payoff by 2050.

But every middle east war we don’t start before 2050 because we don’t need the oil, is a benefit that subtracts from our guesstimated $500 billion/year. There could be various early payoffs that reduce the cost burden. If the new light bulbs pay off within 8 years, they are a profit from then on. Etc.

But, if we assume that people have this general tendency to make bad decisions, you have to explain why the people empowered to enact mandates are somehow exempt from this tendency, and so not promulgating bad mandates.

Democracy works precisely because people have a general tendency to make good decisions.

Toy example. The chances of rolling a six on one die is one-in-six. If you roll five dice and average them… to get a six average you need to roll five sixes, one in 15625.

But the _average_ result of “five dice averaged” is the same as the _average_ result for “one die”: 3.5. I’m not going to draw a custom graph, but here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_standard_deviations.svg

The six dice averaged resembles the red curve, the one die rolled resembles the blue curve.

So. If we’re in a situation where rolling one-to-five is OK and rolling a six kills a puppy [“people generally make good decisions”]… well, the average is 3.5, yes, either way. On _average_ both cases are OK. But… rolling one dice gives you a one-in-five chance of dead puppy, and rolling five dice and averaging — or, equivalently, getting five people to roll one die each and averaging — gets you a one in 15625 chance of dead puppy. Which is, you know, better.

Thus, we pool decisions to emphasise the “on average fairly good” decision making ability of humans and minimise “but there’s a lot of variation and error”. The collective/pooled decision is the same as the average of the individual decisions, but there’s vastly reduced chances of horrible bad outcomes.

You see?

[Brett: there is nothing wrong with being bad at things. I am bad at many things, some of which I enjoy greatly and partake in regularly.]

Mandates can either permit people to act on their own decisions, or compel them to act contrary to those decisions. Now, maybe people are generally inclined to make bad decisions, such that mandates could improve their welfare by compelling better ones.

Wait a minute! People might be inclined to make decisions that benefit themselves at everybody else’s expense. Then if they are forced not to do that, everybody else is better off.

There are people who assume that if, say, oil industry executives make the decisions which are better for them personally, it will automatically be better for everybody else too. This looks obviously stupid, but sometimes economic realities are counter-intuitive we shouldn’t decide it’s true or false until we see the evidence.

The evidence says it’s wrong more often than not.

Well, there’s another argument. If oil company executives do what’s best for them personally at our expense, they wouldn’t get to do that except the company owners let them. The owners should have the right to do whatever they want with their own property. Nobody else should get any say in it. It isn’t any of your business how the oil industry runs, only the owners should have any say. What, you say that your livelihood depends on what the oil industry does? That was stupid of you, wasn’t it? If you don’t completely trust them to do what’s good for you, you better go rebuild your life so that you don’t depend on oil. Because you don’t deserve any say whatsoever in how the oil markets work.

This is obviously stupid too. But it’s a stupid moral argument, and not a stupid economic argument.

Bah. DKos posted a series with a short-term plan to decarbonize ten years ago. And it died there. We could do it in 5-10 years, it would be exciting and fun.

Don’t care about the technology, the new Groves and Oppenheimer will design and produce it.

Don’t care about the economy, it will be and do whatever the new Galbraith, Keynes and Kalecki command it to be and do.

I do care about the politics and no longer believe that liberals and democracy will ever get us even started before we burn alive. 480 comments:have we made the Kochs irrelevant yet?

#475 Bob Mcmanus

The “costs” of decarbonizing the economy will be spent on commodities and labour, will circulate, and probably have a positive multiplier.

Good! You’re making a macro argument.

Suppose we have a lot of unemployment, and then we decide to build extra stuff using the unemployed people. We don’t have to give up anything else we’re already making to do it due to labor shortages, unless we do so much extra that we get a labor shortage. So the labor costs are essentially zero. That labor would have been wasted otherwise.

Suppose we build the extra stuff out of steel, and without making the extra steel our steel plants have a lot of surplus capacity. We can make all the steel we were going to make anyway for other purposes, and we can also make extra steel for the new projects. The steel costs are kind of zero. What we lose is the opportunity cost of leaving the ore in the ground to mine later. Later ore will be a little harder to extract because we took the best stuff first.

Suppose we use extra coal that we otherwise wouldn’t have used. We have plenty of coal. But we have to burn extra. That will cost us in climate change. We would be better off to leave the coal in the ground, unless the new projects are worth the climate-change cost.

It’s hard to estimate costs this way. But we need to do it, or we can’t guess what’s worth doing.

I don’t even like the discussion of “efficiencies.” We are usually talking about changes in distribution, sectoral spending, etc and some will gain and some will lose. GDP might decline, but the benefits of public goods, gov’t capital, and public investment are usually wildly underestimated in mainstream economics anyway. What is the GDP of a city park?

The value of such things is not measured. We could estimate the value of city parks by charging admission, but we don’t. Just as well.

JQ: To be clear, I honestly don’t claim to know how much of the capital stock, and what portions, would be rendered uneconomic if there were a dramatic change in fossil fuel prices. Obviously much depends on how rapidly and to what extent we can bring online substitute technologies that minimize secondary effects.

Here’s an example. Suppose for the sake of discussion there is no viable way to operate automobiles at scale if gasoline rises quickly to, say, $20/gallon ($5/liter) with corresponding increases in other fossil fuels. That is, electric alternatives are also too expensive due to the difficulty of expanding or even sustaining current levels of electricity output, and sufficiently offsetting fuel efficiency gains are not attainable. I am not predicting this (and I hope it’s not true), just using it as a hypothetical.

In such a case it is not only car producers who would experience capital losses. Much of the housing stock in the US depends for its value on widespread automobility. Many business facilities depend on auto commuting for the availability of their workforce. My own college would probably face a diminished catchment area for its student population. You could go on and on, speculating on investments made in the past under the supposition of continued low fuel costs that could be called into question.

Now this is probably unrealistic. We will most likely see some substitution in personal transportation that will avert these extreme outcomes, and rapid expansion of public transportation could fill some of the gaps. But I think it would be too optimistic to expect seamless substitution such that there are no impacts on the capital stock outside the transportation sector itself. What we ought to have are analyses that provide a range of possible outcomes associated with different substitution scenarios.

My understanding, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is that economists typically assume normal amortization of existing capital investments, such that economic costs arise only on replacement. I think this is extremely optimistic.

@481 well sure, if you get to stipulate what all the words mean, then (surprise, surprise) your conclusions follow deductively from your premises.

But when you write in the popular press, and I take it that Australia’s “Inside Story” is not an academic journal, your words mean what they are popularly determined to mean. A cost is money I don’t have anymore in exchange for something I want. But that is not how you are using it. In your technical use, a cost is something **I still have** in exchange for something I want!!! Because the “cost” doesn’t leave the economy!

Now, I have lots of reasons why the technical use of the word is utterly meaningless, b/c, as Bruce spells out, the set of presuppositions is insane, but that’s not the specific point. The very fine point here is that the academic meaning of “cost” is value neutral in a way that no non-economist understands. But the person who doesn’t understand the word is not me.

@484 I think the way to defeat the Koch’s is better understood as the battle against Pete Peterson. It’s his money that funds all the go to high Broderist nonsense about the need for a grand bargain to solve the non-existent entitlement crisis. In the battle of billionaires, Soros is right, Peterson is Conventional Wisdom and the Koch’s are “conservative”. Kill the Neoclassical model maker with their language of efficiency and rationality, and then Peterson ceases to be wisdom and the Kochs go out the Overton window where they can rot with Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson in the dustbin of anti-government haters.

@494 Really? That’s what this leads to? You’re gonna use a technical term in a highly technical way in an article about how the mass of humanity (99.9% non-economists) won’t do what you think they should do? And I’m the one who doesn’t get it?

“Suppose we have a lot of unemployment, and then we decide to build extra stuff using the unemployed people.”

This isn’t right. If you have a lot of unemployed people, then you could (theoretically) share the total amount of work between them and reduce the lenght of standard work-week for everybody. And then if you add some more work (decarbonizing or whatever), you have to increase the length of their work-week. They probably won’t like that, unless you can convince them that it is useful to them.

Yes Bob, the reason I oppose appointing you dictator of the world is that I want to kill 5 billion people.

/I am also the person who canceled Firefly, directed the fourth Indiana Jones movie and killed the electric car.
// If you were not a crank I would point out that it has been the democratic nations that have made the most progress in protecting the environment and that dictatorships tend to be horribly polluted because they could give a shit about the people living with the toxic waste.

“democratic nations” outsource both their pollution and their authoritarianism

I stand by my statement: you know you are going to let five billion people die for your freedom and narcissism…

…and then say “It’s not my fault! Damn Republicans. Not. My. Fault. I’m still pretty.”

As a temp attorney, I spent three years doing document review. When a big company is getting sued they send their email inboxes to lawyers before it goes to the other side in discovery. Having seen how executives of massively successful companies and banks spend their days, and having worked in Congress, I can honestly tell you that the average decision making process is equally rational. That’s one of the reasons why the language of mainstream economics so frequently sounds like self-parody to me.

…nuclear’s got a great EROI. It’s just the thing to replace coal, if ‘environmentalists’ weren’t so commonly wacked out luddites.

As with all calculations of EROI it’s about what you choose to include as an external costs of using that energy source.

Factoring in the cost of disposing of the fuel seriously crimps that EROI. My advice would be read some of Tainter’s work on the declining returns of investments in complexity – the massive support infrastructure around nuclear (again primarily dealing with the spent fuel and the safety concerns) undercuts the rosy EROI put out by the industry.

But then don’t let a wacked out luddite like me hash your ‘big government energy*’ mellow.

* Unless you want to argue for small scale reactors in every self-organising community?

PS Lars gives you a shout out in post 2., listed. The other 19 might give you some idea of where I get this nonsense.

Lars Syll, the Scandanavian who knows you need Tycho Brahe before Kepler and Newton.
http://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2014/09/02/top-10-blog-posts-2/

John Quiggin,

“Obviously we need to do more, but there’s no reason to suppose that 5 per cent of national income every year (taken out of a growing total) wouldn’t cover the costs.”

Transforming physical environments and buildings to be sustainable and not emit ghg within 25yrs is quite a big task – and we need to mostly replace cars with walking and cycling and public transport, accordingly redesign for less travel to education and work, entirely do away with planes except for emergency purposes like flying doctors and sea rescuing , change farming and waste practices, and reforest – but I have already gone into all this in other comments.

I would now like to take issue with the statement ‘taken out of a growing total’. You can’t just expect growth can continue indefinitely, this is unscientific!

Professor Graham Turner has just published another article (for MSSI instead of the CSIRO this time) looking at The Limits to Growth and how it’s scenarios are tracking with the historical reality since it was published in 1972.

“Nevertheless, the overriding proximate cause of the GFC is evidently financial: excessive levels of debt (relative to gross domestic product (GDP), or more accurately, the actual capacity of the real economy to pay back the debt) (Keen, 2009). Such financial dynamics were not incorporated in the LTG modelling. Das (2011) highlights correlated defaults in high-risk debts, such as sub-prime hous- ing mortgages, as a key trigger of the GFC.The financial models used did not properly account for a high number of defaults occurring simultaneously, being based on statistical analysis from earlier periods which suggest less correlation in defaults. Correlation may be caused by specific aspects of the financial instruments created recently, including for example, adjustments upward in inter- est rates of sub-prime mortgages after an initial “teaser” period of negligible interest rates. Even so, some spread in defaults would be expected in this case.Alternatively, another potential factor could be the price increases in oil and related commodities, which would be experienced by all house- holds simultaneously (but with a disproportionate impact on large numbers of households with low discretionary income) and hence cause the coordinated debt defaults.

Regardless of what role oil constraints and price increases played in the current GFC, a final con- sideration is whether there is scope of a successful transition to alternative transport fuel(s) and renewable energy more generally. Due to the GFC, there may be a lack of credit for funding any coordinated (or spontaneous) transition (Fantazzini et al., 2011). And economic recovery may be interrupted, repeatedly, by increased oil prices associated with any recovery. Additionally, even if a transition is initiated it may take about two decades to properly implement the change over to a new vehicle fleet and distribution infrastructure (Hirsch, 2008, Hirsch et al., 2005).To transition requires introducing a new transport fuel to compensate for possible oil production depletion rates of four per cent (or higher) while also satisfying any additional demand associated with economic growth. It is unclear that these various conditions required for a transition are possible.”

“Unfortunately, scientific evidence of severe environmental or natural resource problems has been met with considerable resistance from powerful societal forces, as the long history of the LTG and international UN initiatives on environmental/climate-change issues clearly demonstrate. Somewhat ironically, the apparent corroboration here of the LTG BAU implies that the scientific and public attention given to climate change, whilst tremendously important in its own right, may have del- eteriously distracted from the issue of resource constraints, particularly that of oil supply. Indeed,
if global collapse occurs as in this LTG scenario then pollution impacts will naturally be resolved— though not in any ideal sense! A challenging lesson from the LTG scenarios is that global environ- mental issues are typically intertwined and should not be treated as isolated problems.Another lesson is the importance of taking pre-emptive action well ahead of problems becoming entrenched. Regrettably, the alignment of data trends with the LTG dynamics indicates that the early stages of collapse could occur within a decade, or might even be underway.This suggests, from a rational risk- based perspective, that we have squandered the past decades, and that preparing for a collapsing global system could be even more important than trying to avoid collapse.”

Turner, G. (2014) ‘Is Global Collapse Imminent?’, MSSI Research Paper No. 4, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute,The University of Melbourne.

http://www.sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/files/mssi/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf

Thornton Hall @ 505: Using the word “cost” to mean “money put to productive use and not in any way lost to society or the economy” [GIVES] rhetorical power to the enemies of good

This assertion doesn’t make much immediate sense to me. Even removing the compound double-negatives doesn’t help to clarify it.

It seems to me, as if it has been deliberately phrased in a way that is likely to provoke a dismissal from an economist, who will immediately suspect a case of money illusion, or some similar confusion.

With considerable sympathy for your point of view, I have to say it makes you sound confused. Maybe because you are confused. Or, it may be that you have a definite and defensible criticism, but the temptation to employ sarcasm and hyperbole has overwhelmed your ability to control your rhetorical expression. (Did I mention the double-negatives?)

Anyway, I offer this as feedback: I want to agree with you, but I don’t understand what you are trying to say.

[…] no one else has had any difficulty with the concept that the cost of stabilizing the climate is the value of the resources we will need to devote to the task.

The opportunity cost of the resources we will need to devote to the task.

Right?

The problem is what we have to give up, that we would do if we didn’t do this.

JQ @ 513 (09.03.14 at 2:17 am): no one else has had any difficulty with the concept that the cost of stabilizing the climate is the value of the resources we will need to devote to the task.

I think lots of people, including some eminent economists, have had considerable difficulty figuring out how one goes about strategically choosing, distinguishing or calculating “the value of the resources we need to devote to the task”. It’s not like there’s a restaurant with a table d’hôte menu, where we can walk in and choose “climate change mitigation” from the prix fixe column.

Both ZM and JQ quoted a paragraph from the 2014 IPCC climate mitigation assessment which went like this:

Most scenario studies collected for this assessment that are based on the assumptions that all countries of the world begin mitigation immediately, there is a single global carbon price applied to well‐functioning markets, and key technologies are available, estimate that reaching 430–480 ppm CO2eq by 2100 would entail global consumption losses of 1% to 4% in 2030, 2% to 6% in 2050, and 2% to 12% in 2100 relative to what would happen without mitigation. These consumption losses do not consider the benefits of mitigation, including the reduction in climate impacts.

To put these losses in context, studies assume increases in consumption from four‐fold to over ten‐fold over the century without mitigation . Costs for maintaining concentrations in the range of 530‐650 ppm CO2eq are estimated to be roughly one‐ third to two‐thirds lower than for associated 430‐530 ppm CO2eq scenarios. Cost estimates from scenarios can vary substantially across regions.

This paragraph — a summary that only a committee of experts could love — is repeated in various summaries and chapters, and so I assume it was carefully considered and vetted. JQ quoted it approvingly, as carrying an indication of the expert consensus concerning the magnitude of costs involved.

Whatever the difference between such stylized projections may represent, I doubt very much that that difference could be defended as a representation consistent with a textbook definition of opportunity cost.

The IPCC discussion in chapters 3 and 6 indicates to me that the foundation of these analyses — or at least the IPCC’s ability to digest and summarize their parameters — rests on some very serious conceptual confusion. If you are worrying about discount rates for investments with a 40-year time horizon, you clearly do not know what a discount rate is for, and should probably seek another line of work. And, if you are projecting a 4x to 10x increase in income over a century, using nothing more analytical than a straightedge, well I’m not sure what to say — that’s a species of insanity.

The point of such analyses ought to be enhanced public understanding, but I’m not sure that is what is accomplished. I don’t blame Thornton Hall for questioning the conventions that stylize the presentation of such estimates in ways that seem designed to prejudice the untutored, public mind.

Nor would I scorn bob mcmanus dismissing the relevance of such scholasticism and mumbo jumbo to practical programs of action.

1) Unshelved my Kalecki books to see if I can understand this. I don’t think in a single period, or in stocks rather than flows, or with static models. Or wages as a cost of production. Wages are a source of production. Gross Profits and investment are functions of aggregate demand Macroeconomics is like ecology, trees use water, water is not a cost to the environment.

2) WWII is my model. There were shifts and changes in production and consumption, but I thought overall the economy didn’t do too bad. I presume very strongly that if we are going green, workers and steel will be moved from making cars to making rails. God no, we should not try to presume decarbonizing while trying to keep the rest of the economy the same and unchanged.

But even that aside

Firms have costs because we isolate a firm from other firms. But when you do macro, I thought you understood that one firm’s expenses are another firm’s sales. The macroeconomy doesn’t have costs. The macroeconomy has politicized distributions.

Of course, there can be real resource constraints and bottlenecks, skilled workers or titanium, that can cause inflation or limit production. We need a surplus to finance imports. Etc.

“fluctuations in production and profits depend on the fluctuations in capitalists’ consumption and investment” …Kalecki

So the only limits on production ( other than those mentioned above) are savings and lack of investment, and gov’t can take care of that under fiat money, virtually without limit.

I mean, that’s the thing, are you trying to save the world without changing the world?

Get radical, already.

That’s “I do think…” not “in do think”

Weird example. How about: making software that works or being Microsoft. Not an arguably democratic choice like the massive spending on NCAA athletics (which, in any case, is not really a trade off at Ohio State. Division III would make more sense. Does Kenyon play football?)

This is something I know about:

Say what? This is precisely what discount rates are for. How else are you going to work out whether it makes sense to spend money now to (for example) give an investment project a working life of 40 years instead of 30 or 50?

As president of a residential co-op I learned about a little corner of professional rent seeking known as the Engineering Reserve Study. You might think that the best way for a 100 year old organization with impeccable archives (a monument to a century of petty bickering that spans several file cabinets) to figure out what we will spend on furnaces and hot water heaters and roofs and such in the future would be to simply look at how often we have replaced them in the past. Add in some inflation and you get a reserve fund. Easy. But that has the flaw of not employing engineers, accountants, and sophisticated thinking about discount rates.

At the end of the day, the engineer gets two-thousand dollars and the co-op gets a number that very precise about what will happen in 50 years. And yet it has a negative value compared to relying on the archives and applying humility about predictions.

“Factoring in the cost of disposing of the fuel seriously crimps that EROI.”

Heck, factoring in the cost of disposing of all those solar panels would seriously crimp the EROI of photovoltaics, and they don’t start with nearly as much EROI to crimp. Nuclear is actually ahead in THAT game, given that the physical volume of the fuel is so low for the amount of power generated.

Here’s the thing, though: The cost of disposing of nuclear ‘waste’, which you properly characterized as disposing of fuel, is being artificially inflated by the demand that it not be reprocessed or bred. That 98% or more of it’s energy be thrown away. It’s kind of like if you junked the solar panels when they got dirty, instead of dusting them, except that nuclear inherently has such a fantastic EROI, that it has a good one even handicapped that way.

Here’s my argument, in a nutshell: For the reasons I’ve explained, any energy source society is going to rely upon as a main source of energy has to have a high EROI. Or else you’re demanding that most people make collecting that energy their primary occupation, and that the vast majority of mankind be dirt poor. (The efforts to raise the cost of energy? Think that’s unrelated to why the economy is doing so poorly?)

Coal, aside from being filthy, has a high EROI, which is why mankind advanced so far while relying on it: It gave us time to do things other than collect energy. But it is filthy, and needs to be replaced regardless of your views of climate sensitivity. Even if you loved coal, it’s going to run out.

There are only two energy sources around right now that have a high EROI, and are reasonably clean: Hydro and nuclear. Hydro is the ideal, but it’s largely tapped out, and people do have an aversion to drowning large areas of land. That leaves nuclear as the only thing available right now that can take coal’s place.

So, I’ll match your question with another question:

“How can we convince leftwingers to accept nuclear power?”

Because, barring pretty speculative developments, it’s either nuclear, or poverty, and that is obvious enough to decision makers that, if you demand solar panels and windmills instead, they’re going to say, to hell with that, and burn coal.

“When you consider that 98+% of the energy is in the plutonium cycle, it doesn’t particularly make sense to bother with the U235 cycle.”

I’m not quite clear on what you mean; You don’t HAVE a plutonum cycle if you’re not bothering with the U235 cycle. Plutonium doesn’t occur naturally, it’s a product of U235 fission reactors.

I see, you’re just refering to breeder reactors fueled with U238 as “plutonium” reactors.

What I think is that we should certainly expect modern nuclear plants to be much safer than an old plant that was about due to be decomissioned, like Fukushima. But we should also take note of the fact that essentially all of the casualties from Fukushima were due to the evacuation, not radiation. Which is generally true of most ‘nuclear’ accidents. They’re induced panics that just happen to have nuclear power plants as their pretext.

Coal, of course, is on a usual day to day basis worse than your average nuclear plant having an accident. But anti-nuclear hysteria relies on not judging other power sources by the same standard applied to nuclear.

@JQ 529 Thanks. Thanks for the generous response. My more extreme comments about self-parody, etc, are wrong. But I do think there is a legitimate question about how the language of economics frames these debates in a way that always puts a thumb on the scale in favor of government inaction.

One part of that is the deep assumption that the free market is better at growing the economy than govt choices. That assumption is explicit in the study that Paul Krugman described commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce. Yes, it arrives at a low “cost” for Obama climate regs. But where will the technology actually come from? Is govt better or worse than free market innovation?

The US government invented nuclear power and developed fracking.
The most important invention of the 20th Century, the transistor, was invented at Bell Labs, a government created and protected monopoly.
The Internet.

If climate change regs are command and control like the way we ran AT&T in the 20th Century, will the “cost” be the invention of the 21st Century transistor?

#534 Brett Bellmore

I see, you’re just refering to breeder reactors fueled with U238 as “plutonium” reactors.

If you mean U235 breeder reactors, then no. There’s nothing to keep us from using plutonium reactors as breeder reactors. Once we have enough plutonium to work with, we don’t need U235 any more for anything. We can use it if we want to, but it probably is not economic to.

What I think is that we should certainly expect modern nuclear plants to be much safer than an old plant that was about due to be decomissioned, like Fukushima.

OK, but if they get more accident-prone as they age, then we are only creating problems for ourselves a decade or three down the road. Anyway, as happens so often, you have been misinformed. Fukushima was not due to be decommissioned. The oldest reactor had just gotten a 10 year extension and they were about to build two more.

But we should also take note of the fact that essentially all of the casualties from Fukushima were due to the evacuation, not radiation.

Is that supposed to be some sort of consolation? If someday we persuade the public that nuclear accidents are harmless and no evacuation is needed, then we can stop chalking up evacuation casualties to nuclear accidents.

Meanwhile consider the monetary costs. The Japanese government has set side 5 trillion yen to compensate the refugees. This is utterly inadequate but it’s something for them. It estimates 5-9 trillion for cleanup and remediation costs, and this is likely to be low.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/08/27/national/fukushima-nuclear-crisis-estimated-to-cost-%C2%A511-trillion-study/

No estimate is given for the cost of 300+ square miles of Japan that’s pretty much lost for all human purposes for a very long time. The reason the land area evacuated is so small is that during the crisis the Japanese government changed the maximum dose from 1 mSv to 20 mSv. By the simplest estimates, that’s about an additional 1% chance to get cancer in 20 years, for each of the people near that limit. That isn’t included in the cost either, and there’s reason to expect the rate to be higher since people will be ingesting and concentrating radioactive stuff. No estimate is given for the reduced fishing in Japanese coastal water, or the contaminated fish that will be eaten.

Will there be long-run effects beyond the loss of land? Genetic damage? People who get high radiation exposures don’t pass on mutations — they are sterilized. People with low doses don’t see much effect in their children. Do they get new recessive mutations that will show up later? Do we get a genetic load that will cost us for hundreds of generations? Theory says yes, but we have no way to get experimental evidence quick enough to affect decisions.

Before we build nuclear power plants, we need to establish the target risk, and then persuade ourselves that accidents won’t be worse than that target. I suggest a target of one Fukushima per 20 years. What target do you suggest?

#539

“I was told by a Belarusian that there have been thousands of deaths in that country attributable to Chernobyl. “

Surprise, surprise: Authoritarian government builds dangerous reactor without containment, then the operators experiment with it after disabling the safeties.

And the managers of Fukushima were no angels either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#1976:_Falsification_of_safety_records

When a nuclear power plant fails, we get tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of damage. Also the electricity it was supposed to produce stops being produced at some unexpected time. And there might be drastic health issues including some that have not been documented yet.

We need nuclear power plants that will run correctly even when mismanaged, because we know from experience both communist and capitalist that they will be mismanaged.

We need nuclear power plants whose designs are so robust that they will work correctly even when they are build incorrectly, because experience says they will be built incorrectly.

And we need designs that are easy to modify, because experience shows that there are usually design details that are susceptible to causing accidents, that must be modified when we find the errors.

We need to decide what accident rate to aim for. If we expect we can’t meet that rate, then we can’t afford to use nuclear power.

And, still, Chernobyl killed fewer people than coal does in a typical year.

You don’t know how many people Chernobyl is killing. Coal typically kills people who work in the coal industry, who volunteered to take that risk. Bullshit red-state estimates about Chernobyl might come out lower, but so what? The risks of nuclear catastrophes are not known — we have so far only had tiny accidents but there is absolutely no reason to think that future accidents will be as small as Fukushima or Chernobyl.

Conservatives should oppose nuclear power because it is not at all a conservative thing to do. We’ve never done this before in our entire evolutionary history and you want to jump in headfirst with both feet and base our entire economy on it, because you assume there will be no bad consequences.

You don’t know how many people Chernobyl is killing. Coal typically kills people who work in the coal industry, who volunteered to take that risk. Bullshit red-state estimates about Chernobyl might come out lower, but so what? The risks of nuclear catastrophes are not known — we have so far only had tiny accidents but there is absolutely no reason to think that future accidents will be as small as Fukushima or Chernobyl.

No, the vast majority of coal related premature deaths are from air pollution, not on-the-job accidents in mines or power plants. The people killed by air pollution are only visible in epidemiology, not as individual human faces, so the deaths are sharply discounted in politics compared to headline-making accidents. Nobody can say with certainty that a particular death was caused by particulates from a nearby power plant, but statistically we can tell that air pollution does in fact cause more heart attacks and asthma attacks, leading to excess hospitalization and deaths.

Focusing on preventing spectacular deaths over preventing easily prevented deaths is sadly an across-the-board consensus in politics. 500 Americans died in car accidents last week? Who cares. Two American journalists are murdered overseas by terrorists? Time for decisive action, damn any consideration of cost!

#541 Brett Bellmore

The easiest way to point that out, is to note that a coal plant releases enough radioactivity that its day to day operations would be considered a “nuclear accident” if it were a nuclear plant.

Is that still true? A whole lot of the radioactivity from coal gets caught in the electrostatic precipitators with the fly ash. It doesn’t stay in the air for people to breathe. It gets baked into bricks, or into concrete, or whatever.

Where did you get your numbers on that?

Are you sure you aren’t comparing radioactivity from coal plants where the ash all goes into the air, versus radioactivity from nuclear plants that don’t have accidents?

While it’s true that most of the radioactive isotopes end up in the fly ash, rendering it a good ore for Uranium and Thorium, the amount of radioactive material in that fly ash is so high, that it is estimated that even at 99% efficiency on fly ash sequestration, you’ve still got the coal plant violating nuclear standards.

Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants

#542 Matt

No, the vast majority of coal related premature deaths are from air pollution, not on-the-job accidents in mines or power plants. The people killed by air pollution are only visible in epidemiology, not as individual human faces, so the deaths are sharply discounted in politics compared to headline-making accidents. Nobody can say with certainty that a particular death was caused by particulates from a nearby power plant, but statistically we can tell that air pollution does in fact cause more heart attacks and asthma attacks, leading to excess hospitalization and deaths.

Ah, you aren’t talking about radioactivity, but things like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. Ideally the power plant smoke goes high into the air where nobody breathes this stuff, and then it turns into acid rain which people handle easily though some plants have a much harder time.

We were well on our way to handling this but the Bush administration tried to stop the regulation of power plants. The result was that coal plants got a much better EROI and better profit margins, while some people died, likely from indirect effects of power plant pollution. Now that the regulation is getting cranked up again there’s some tendency for them to switch to methane-fired plants rather than clean up the coal plants, they assume that methane will stay cheap.

Technically this is not much of a problem. It’s only that coal is not such a good fuel if you have to take care of the pollution. Similarly, nuclear plants are not a good deal if you have to prevent accidents or pay for them, and pay for the waste.

Brett Bellmore 09.03.14 at 10:03 am:

“How can we convince leftwingers to accept nuclear power?”

Start by building a waste-containment system that will survive, unattended and unmaintained – simulating a period during which civilization has abandoned them – for a duration of one half-life of, let’s say Pu-239. Build a few prototypes, test them for one successful cycle and get back to us.

So, has the death rate from this source gone down?

Yes, the death rate from coal plant emissions has gone down for plants that have added pollution controls. Even with state of the art pollution controls, coal plants still emit significantly more mercury, particulates, and acid gases per megawatt hour generated than natural gas plants, though much less than 40 years ago. Natural gas plants in turn emit more acid gases and particulates than any non-fossil source of electricity, though practically no mercury.

As of 2010 the American Lung Association estimated that at least 14,000 Americans per year died prematurely due to air pollution from coal. The rate is much higher in developing nations that have largely eschewed coal pollution controls. I don’t know how much further the deaths could be cut if all coal plants were required to immediately install state of the art pollution controls.

Two points about nuclear reactors and safety, related to my own research into resilience and modular/decentralised organisational structures.

One: France (whatever the fever dreams of libertarians) is hardly an authoritarian state, now is it one with a poor nuclear safety record. Yet the current French proposal for approaching nuclear safety is one which matches my own suggestions for promoting resilience (and which I’ve based on military theories of defence). In a nutshell it is this – that the French accept that accidents will inevitably happen – defence in depth can never match any possibility (the Black Swan if you will) that could occur, and investing so much energy and resources in pretending otherwise is a waste of resources. Period.

Instead what matters is the response time to those accidents. Therefore the French teams looking into this issue propose a modular hardened system at each reactor (with back up energy supplies, water storage, response drones etc) hardened to a ridiculous degree.

If you are interested a good overview is provided by this article in Nature
“‘In France we’re saying imagine the unimaginable’, says Jorel. The current basis of nuclear safety is ‘defense-in-depth’, in which multiple levels of protection and redundancy are intended to guard against a serious accident, he adds. “But at Fukushima, all those lines of defence collapsed. The accident has thrown into question all of our safety rules, our ways of thinking’.

“The bunker concept is different, however, because it short-circuits the traditional approach to safe-guarding against estimated levels of risk. Irrespective of their perceived vulnerability to external threats, plants will need to be equipped with this ‘hard core’ of protected control rooms, generators and pumps, as well as hardened reservoirs of coolant.

This circumvents the delays and compromises inherent in setting new estimates of seismic, flood or other risks, which requires years of discussion between the regulator, industry and expert advisors, says Jorel. Predicting risk is an imperfect art, and the bunker concept should protect against any other unforeseen, low-probability event. ‘It’s far easier to design and build a system of last resort than to try and address every potential problem,’ he says.”

“[t]he new measures are part of a shift in the emphasis of nuclear safety in the wake of Fukushima, from preventing a nuclear accident to stopping one from spiralling out of control – and mitigating the damage should the worst occur…”

It’s the hedgehog defence (modular nodes with their own energy reserves and agency connected to each reactor, rather than centrally organised). Of course this implies redundancy, which implies energy costs. hence the EROI falls.

Now here’s the kicker – accepting that accidents will happen is the sensible, rational way to approach nuclear reactors. The consequences for public opinion of this technology are obvious – but it is not irrational.

Two: Chernobyl is not over. Any basic knowledge of physics will acquaint you with the concept of potential energy, and in the case of Chernobyl and nearby Kiev that potential energy is gravity. The Kiev dam (known colloquially as the Kiev Sea) is heavily silted in radioactive dust from the original fallout and subsequent run off. It sits upstream on the Dnieper from a city of XXX million people. Any failure in that dam will wash away part of Kiev in a radioactive tsunami and then release radioactive material into the Black Sea, and then into the Sea of Marmara (hello Istanbul!) and then in the Mediterranean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev_Reservoir

Safety concerns?

A fake terrorist threat in 2005… oh, and a looming war with Russia.

What’s rational about whistling past the graveyard?

To revisit a much earlier topic, it looks like there is actually field research on the weathering rate of crushed basalt and factors that accelerate it, though this particular researcher is looking at land rather than sea locations: http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/09/25-year-experiment-shows-ants-can-break-down-minerals-sequester-co2/

Who knew that ants would have such a powerful influence? I find it fascinating as research, even apart from possible applications.

Brett Bellmore,

You can use renewable energy. Also funny how you never write if your great heartfelt concern for those suffering poverty right now, but somehow your passion to reduce poverty justifies nuclear energy

1: Nailed it.

2: Not really, I can envision technological developements which would make solar more cost effective than nuclear. Somebody invents a cheap, efficient, durable solar panel that actually has a high EROI. It’s not theoretically impossible, they just don’t exist right now. Or we develop Von Neumann replicators, launch them into space, and cover the Moon with solar panels, and don’t care how much work it took, because robots did the work. There are speculative developements that could make solar better than nuclear for powering civilization. One of them is bound to happen, eventually.

But nuclear is better right now, and for the next few decades. It’s the only thing that can replace coal NOW, without forcing world poverty.

3. Sort of. We know for an absolute fact we won’t run out of nuclear fuel, because even with current, experimental seawater extraction techniques, the oceans are a viable source of fuel. Just not economical compared to mining, yet. But the cost of the fuel is such a small fraction of the cost of nuclear power, that even very expensive sources of fuel are viable if cheaper ones run out.

Government IS responsible for the cost of nuclear, because most of the cost of nuclear is due to regulatory uncertainty, and the threat of a tort system run by government. Price Anderson is really just the government’s way of solving a problem it has created: The uninsurablity of nuclear against accidents which aren’t happening.

And, yes, there’s better evidence for the radiation hormosis theory than the LNT theory that policy is based on.

4. Absolutely.

What do we lose switching to nuclear? Coal is already worse than any realistic concerns about nuclear. And people won’t agree to be poor, so if you don’t go nuclear, by default they’ll burn coal.

“and that profligate disregard of entropy can also bring down civilization.”

Please tell me you’re not one of those “4th law of thermodynamics” cultists…

1: Nailed it.

I think we even agree on more than it would look like at first sight.

And, yes, there’s better evidence for the radiation hormosis theory than the LNT theory that policy is based on.

Hormesis is interesting and it might turn out to be true. I can imagine mechanisms. If you believe the evidence for it is strong you should have no problem with the climate change evidence.

But it’s irrelevant to power plants. If someday we find out that it’s true and we have a lot of nuclear power plants then, we might wind up trying to do controlled tritium releases to give people their hormesis treatments by breathing the air, the way some places we put fluoride into the water. But that will not make anybody any happier with accidental cesium releases. They won’t want to get their hormesis from uncontrolled nuclear accidents. It just doesn’t work that way.

Price Anderson is really just the government’s way of solving a problem it has created: The uninsurablity of nuclear against accidents which aren’t happening.

We don’t have enough nuclear plants to get an adequate track record. If insurance companies had insured a whole lot of nuclear plants on the assumption that Fukushima would not happen, they would be in bankruptcy and the Japanese government would have to take over. Oops! The Japanese government did have to take over! The insurance was not the least bit adequate. And the next accident might be a whole lot worse.

We just haven’t had enough big accidents yet to find out what the insurance rates ought to be. But once we build enough plants that we have several Fukushima-level accidents as year, and maybe occasionally a big one, then I think the insurance companies will get a much better idea what rates they need to charge.

If we have to abandon Tel Aviv one year, and Barcelona the next year, then we can start to quantify things. While the accidents are too rare we just can’t do that.

What do we lose switching to nuclear?

Only the unknown risk. We don’t really know how risky nuclear power is yet, and if we depend on it then we’ll find out.

Coal is already worse than any realistic concerns about nuclear.

We don’t know what concerns are realistic about nuclear power yet. We’re doing it too slow to get an adequate track record. If we give it a lot of time or if we jump in and build a whole lot of nuclear plants quick, either way we’ll find out what concerns are justified.

With coal the consequences are not spectacular. They creep up gradually, and you don’t necessarily even know what caused them. If you’re rich you can build your mansion someplace that’s never downwind of a coal-fired power plant. With nuclear the risks are unknown. Your granddaughter might marry somebody whose grandparents lived in the wrong place, and she has deformed babies. You just don’t know.

I think if I was you, I would be very concerned that if we get a great big nuclear industry we won’t be able to keep government out of it. Isn’t it predictable that government will extensively mis-regulate it, causing tremendous expense? And then the regulation-caused accidents will be used as the justification for more regulation still. We could easily wind up with something that was not at all worth having, regardless how great it would be if it was done correctly.

And people won’t agree to be poor, so if you don’t go nuclear, by default they’ll burn coal.

Yes, they will. And unless nuclear power is cheaper than coal, they’ll burn coal anyway. We still haven’t paid off the nuclear mistakes from the last time around, but the executives who remember it are approaching retirement so now the power companies are ready to try again. And hey, if it doesn’t work out, the government will set the rates so the customers pay for it. Nobody will be held responsible.

One good thing I see about the other alternative energy approaches is that most of them can be done smal-scale. They aren’t all that dangerous or all that expensive. People can try lots of variations and then improve on the approaches that work best. Nuclear is the only one that’s being done by giant power companies and that can only be done by giant power companies.

I’m not real hopeful that nuclear will work out as expected. I have some hope that some of the others will work out significantly better than expected.

But to win they have to come out cheaper than coal, when coal gets its subsidies and its lobbyists are strong. So I’m not real hopeful even if the techie stuff works out.

floopmeister 09.04.14 at 12:03 am:

‘In France we’re saying imagine the unimaginable’, says Jorel.

…of Krypton – that Jor-El? Damn, France is serious about this.

…of Krypton – that Jor-El? Damn, France is serious about this.

:) I totally missed that reference!

Brilliant.

@560
sorry that got a little confused there – I mean of course that electricity is an energy output – whereas the resources used in producing it are of course the resources used in mining, building and operating generators, manufacturing solar panels or windmills, etc

J Thomas,

“I’m unsure how to do effective charity. It’s certainly possible to do it badly. I’ve seen it done well. Surely people usually prefer to be valuable contributors with bargaining power, than charity cases — if that goal is within reach.”

The economies – national and global – are structured for great inequality and to prevent some people from participating who might if they were structured properly. There are billions of very poor people now and Brett Bellmore’s only response is propertarian – but most of these poor people had their ancestral common lands (their shared property) stolen through capitalist enclosures and colonialism. Brett Bellmore always poo poos any suggestion if structural reform to achieve remedy for these grievous injustices whose legacy continues around the world today.

If Brett Bellmore does not like to use renewable energy in a sustainable society we can put aside some land for him and people like him to live like in Little House of the Prairie without electricity in old fashioned libertarian styleand we can visit as tourists to see what it is like .

There is nowhere to put nuclear waste safely and secure it in perpetuity, they always want to put it in indigenous remnant lands not store it in rich people’s back yards and entail it to their families, and we get nuclear disasters more than 1 in 100 years, which means they are regular – since 1 in 100 year floods are not too common floods.

Another thought re. nuclear waste storage…

In which language do we put the signage explaining to future generations that they shouldn’t touch?

Etruscan is only (and in terms of nuclear waste this is truly a case of only) 200 years old yet we still have no complete way of translating of understanding it in any meaningful way.

What sense would future civilisations make of the English phrases ‘keep out’ or ‘danger’ – let alone the international symbol for nuclear waste? Or do we assume that out current civilisation, in contravention of all the evidence of history, will last forever (or at least 25,000 years)?

Thornton Hall,

You can have sufficient energy with renewable energy technologies, lots of people use too much energy now so cutting down is easy. Indigenous people do not want your nuclear waste stored in their lands like Yucca Mountain – so what if they are unemployed? That should give you the right to store toxic energy on their land?!?! Rich people never offer to store nuclear energy in their houses and entail it to their children forever after. Your good self and Brett Bellmore could set an example and offer to store nuclear waste and entail it to your families? I bet you will not pledge to do thus however, even though you are always claiming how safe it is….

The economies national and global disadvantage some and advantage others. We have 5-6% official structural unemployment in Australia because companies do not like the bargaining power full employment gives workers. There are billions of poor people – and the rich and middling people are consuming an unsustainable amount of things – this is very unfair. You yourself noted how unfair the economy was just yesterday when Meredith accused you of sock-puppeting.

Wow, we are up to 576 comments! I’ve been away for a bit and just coming back.

John Quiggin: I’d like to take this back to your original question–a very important question. I don’t think that “the Left” is exhausted by Greenpeace and the Democrats, with the latter outnumbering the former. Opposition to GMO foods is not limited to a fringe like Wilder, J Thomas, Anarcissie, ZM & Co. It is almost an article of faith among left/liberal people in Europe, France in particular. And there is huge opposition in India on the part of people who are anything but free market neo-liberals. But if my points about GMO aren’t convincing, just look at the efforts you have gone through on this thread explaining a simple concept like “cost” (Honestly, you have the patience of Job! I don’t know how you do it!). My point is that irrationality is not unique to the Right–it is a failing of the Left as well. It is a basic human failing I think that transcends the usual political divisions. When we are not experts, when we are not close to a situation or event, we form second, third and fourth hand impressions that we have no choice but to rely on. And often in making decisions we rely as much on what “feels” right as what is factual or demonstrable. I am not defending this, by the way. I am all for working with the best facts provided by the best minds. But it is evident from the quality of discussion on this thread that there is a lot of confusion and uncertainty out there–all understandable–but confusion nevertheless.

I haven’t read Corey Robin’s work on the right wing mind. But I assume that it addresses exactly these kinds of issues. And they must apply to the left as much as the right. How could it be otherwise? The human stain!

578 Wallace Stevens

Opposition to GMO foods is not limited to a fringe like Wilder, J Thomas, Anarcissie, ZM & Co. It is almost an article of faith among left/liberal people in Europe, France in particular.

And not unreasonably.

My point is that irrationality is not unique to the Right–it is a failing of the Left as well.

I get the impression you think that anything but full-out support for GMO food is irrational? What possible basis can there be for such a notion?

Let me put it this way — a corporation produces something, and they don’t reveal how they made it or what they have made. They intend to base an exceptionally important part of the economy on their secret, after strictly limited testing. They say “We know it’s completely safe. Scientists who have never seen the details of how we do it have testified that it is completely safe. We know that genetic engineering is completely safe, therefore every example of genetic engineering also has to be completely safe. Trust us.”

And so you trust them.

If they told you that scientists say that contracts are fair, would you sign a contract with them without reading it first?

At a minimum, GMOs that are going to be released into the environment and not kept in sealed labs, should be open-source. The originators must publish the genetic maps and show what changes they have made. Hardly anybody would know what to do with that information, but how can you or anyone say it’s safe when that’s a secret?

Wallace Stevens,

I supplied links and quotes from articles from Scientific American earlier with scientists criticising how genetic engineering us being carried out, the lack of independent testing, and the pressure applied to scientists not to thoroughly investigate the risks of genetic engineering.

How curious you ducked away then and didn’t make a reply – and now return much later in the thread to reassert your questionable position where (support for measures to mitigate climate change) = (support for genetic engineering). And do so without engaging with the criticism on GMO up thread that you ducked away from…

Brad DeLong sends is to this that says what I just said:

What I will argue here is that the basic framework to which economic theory and, in particular, demand theory was reduced is inappropriate as a model of economic choice, since it depends on assumptions about individual agents derived not from observation but rather from introspection.

http://www.sss.ias.edu/files/papers/econpaper73.pdf

@585 Huh?