Before the Flood

If it could be implemented, a carbon tax would probably be phased in over several years. The point of it is to “disrupt” the economy, but all at once? Not that I’m expecting it to happen in a political landscape similar to what we have now.

I’ll just add briefly, the kinds of questions I have been thinking about for a while.

1) What y’all gonna do for Sumatra, Burma, Bangladesh, SS Africa? I think at least, as above, one third of OECD energy production needs to be dedicated to developing nations.

2) What y’all gonna do for Iran/Iraq/Russia/Saudi Arabia/etc extractive economies (ignoring our own) as we transition from oil? They are our problem, because if we ignore them, we will likely eat all our energy savings in drones and cruise missiles.

Well yes, we had a carbon tax (or price) here in Australia, and it was repealed by the conservative government, so it is very difficult politically. However there are a lot of other mechanisms that can also be used.

I was a bit dismayed Ingrid that you said teaching wasn’t going to make much difference, since I have just finished my second round of teaching in a climate change and public health unit, and was thinking that those 60 or so professionals going back into the health system with their new knowledge would make a difference! I accept that’s gradual change and we really need rapid change, but hopefully all these small efforts coming together will add up.

On your larger point, I haven’t seen the film yet, but I have observed that ‘reliance on technology’ approach. I actually wrote about it on my blog back in 2014
http://fairgreenplanet.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/different-responses-to-climate-change.html
– and it provoked some discussion on other blogs. I have also seen this more widely since. I have a hypothesis that this is gendered, in that it seems to be particularly men who think that technology can save us, without having to make substantial changes in our way of life.

Like you, I don’t think that is going to happen, but my belief that renewable technology alone isn’t the answer is also supported by my public health background. There’s no doubt that over-consumption and sedentary lifestyles are now the greatest threat to global health, rather than scarcity and want (although that is still a problem for nearly a billion people). It would be good for us in health and social terms to consume less, to share more, and to be more active, as well as being good for the ecology.

I don’t want to make any grand statements here; my book on this topic, which is coming out next year, is sort of one grand statement after another, backed up (I believe) by evidence. But a few things should be put on the table:

Forestalling a climate catastrophe is fundamentally about curbing the use of fossil fuels, which is not the same as expanding the supply of renewables. (a) Unless we prevent it, nothing prevent us from using both carbon fuels and renewables; up to now, this is the story of Germany’s Energiewende, for instance. (b) The timetable for carbon emission reduction, if we want to stay within the IPCC 2 degree budget, is almost certainly more stringent than any conceivable renewables transition.

Individual consumption choices, while understandable in the current political situation, are not going to save us. (a) In many important contexts it’s impossible to know what the consequences of our choices will be for carbon emissions. This is the problem of economic complexity. (b) Consumption choices come with collective action problems. Are you going to be the only one who doesn’t fly to conferences? (c) Many of the consumption options we need are not available to us on an individual basis and require collective action as well. (d) Climate moralism (my consumption is virtuous, yours is greedy) is presumptuous, divisive and unproductive. It raises the question of whether the goal is to prevent catastrophic climate change or to cleanse our personal consciences.

A carbon permit system is preferable to a carbon tax, but either, to be effective, will need to be stringent enough to reduce fossil fuel consumption in developed countries by something like 8% a year, year after year. Because demand is inelastic within historical experience, this will at least initially involve very large sums of money, contra the OP. I estimate about $1 trillion a year in the US alone. Because carbon revenues will be highly regressive, and in order to sustain living standards and political support over a very dicey transition, most of this money will need to be recycled to the public. I disagree with Mankiw; it would be much better to do this in the form of equal lump-sum rebates than through the tax system. Of course, we would also need an equity fund to assist those most vulnerable to high energy prices, etc.

All of this is documented, along with discussions of why offsets are largely a scam, carbon accounting doesn’t work, the political economy dimension, international strategies, social justice aspects, etc. I expect to annoy a lot of people but in a responsibly argued way.

I wrote the book because I felt a lot of the popular discussion, apparently echoed in the DiCaprio movie, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, and that we won’t have a chance of staying under the 1000 Gt limit unless we get a lot more clarity, fast.

Also, I don’t think it’s too hopeful to think that the cattle methane problem will be solved, at least in first world agriculture. It seems likely that we can manipulate the gut flora in an affordable way to greatly reduce, possibly eliminate the methanogens. Which leaves a lot of issues still with cattle farming as an industry, such as ongoing land clearance, but cheese may be yet saved!

Also, posturing aside, we don’t really care all that much for abstract future generations – the further out they are, the less we care.

I did watch the movie. I thought he did really well. Now, if I can get family members to watch.

I understand the thinking behind asking for lifestyle change. I also think asking for it would be a catastrophic mistake. If we ask the current crop of Americans to do that, they will reject the whole idea of doing anything about climate change, including the science. I really think we are on the cusp of massive technological change wrt. energy. Renewables are getting better, which also means more affordable at a fast pace, and before long even the most hardened greedy people will see that they are far superior, than those fossil fuels so many still think are indispensable. Fear of forced lifestyle change, coupled with camel’s nose arguments have set back the advance of renewables, by creating strong political enemies. I want to avoid repeating that mistake.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’d be fine with lifestyle change for myself, but politically I’ve seen that it is a bridge too far.

I also strongly disagree about Indian coal, renewables are the best choice for India, and they are coming around to that view. In fact the India coal agency has contracted for several hundred megawatts of solar.

Now, China is still part of the problem too. In one sense they are heroes, they are deploying far more wind and far more solar than anyone else. But, they are also building a similar volume of new fossil capability. That has to change.

Air travel is a small enough percentage of overall emissions that you might be able to just mandate that it offset them, either by buying offset credits equal to emissions, using only net-neutral biofuels for planes, or something more exotic (hydrogen fuel cell planes). I would bet on doors #1 and #2, although that would also make air travel more expensive and/or slower.

It’s mostly an implementation problem for everything else, from electric cars to electric furnaces. I’m thinking that will come in bursts, following surges of political concern about climate change in the wake of major disasters and increasing awareness of sea level rise.

@wilful #9

Also, I don’t think it’s too hopeful to think that the cattle methane problem will be solved, at least in first world agriculture. It seems likely that we can manipulate the gut flora in an affordable way to greatly reduce, possibly eliminate the methanogens.

Changing up their feed might do it, or mixing something into it. Cows fed on carbohydrates and fat seem to produce much less emissions of methane than grass fed cows.

It does not matter what the aim of the carbon tax is; it will simply raise revenue (just as a payroll tax reduces employment without it being its aim). If the carbon tax is pitched at the optimal level, the tax revenue will still be considerable. Imagine a tax of €200 per ton CO2 and imagine that it would reduce emissions by 80%. In the Netherlands, taxation of the remaining 20% (about 40 Mton CO2-equivalents) would offer a revenue of about 8 billion Euro per year. On the one hand, that is not very limited and you can use it to lower payroll tax although it will certainly not replace it. On the other hand, you are right that we need money for adaptation. But then a republican may argue that adaptation should be left to individuals and the market and you do not need government expenditure. Government expenditure would take away the incentive for efficient measures to reduce the damage due to climate change like moving to higher places. But even if you would deny the need for the government to spend resources on mitigation and adaptation, there is still a government task for compensation. So I agree that the issue of climate change will increase the need for taxes, even for republicans.

Ingrid,

Thanks for this, I’ve been meaning to watch this and hopefully I’ll have time tonight :-)

Re: “The most powerful scene is when he interviews Sunita Narain…. she adds: “Your [that is, the American] consumption is going to put a hole in the planet. I think this is the conversation we need to have”. …. I was surprised when Di Caprio responded by saying, yes, we need to change our lifestyles, “and it is not going to happen.”

That came as a blow. Di Caprio seems to believe that we need to put all our cards on the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and that if that is accomplished, we can go on living as we have been doing in the last decades. Di Caprio should have acknowledged that in addition to the energy transition it would require massive changes in people’s values and habits and traditions. Carbon emissions also come from all the stuff we buy, and the meat and cheese we eat.”

I volunteer a bit with an Australian non-profit called Less Meat Less Heat which hopes to raise awareness about the impact of diet on climate change and encourage more climate friendly food choices* and from there I know that Leonardo Di Caprio has been active in this field already.

It sounds kind of odd but Di Caprio has been active on this in India actually, working with a group to decrease beef consumption (I think it might be a Hindu group from memory).

I think maybe Di Caprio and other high profile Americans who raise awareness about climate change don’t know how to raise the issue in America where it would be more controversial than in somewhere like India which has cultural traditions about not eating beef, especially as most people who have high profiles like him also have high consumption lifestyles due to their work and wealth. If you look at what happened to Al Gore, his wealth and lifestyle was really used to criticise his work on raising public awareness on climate change.

There’s a group based in California called Wild Aid who do work on the issue of illegal wildlife trade mostly, but they have also got a project with the Chinese government to raise awareness about the impact of the dietary consumption of animal products on ghg emissions and climate change.

The director of Titanic and Avatar, James Cameron, has shot some public service advertisements for Wild Aid for this campaign starring Arnold Schwarzenegger who talks about changing his diet because of climate change.

From talking to international students from China, I think in China there is acceptance of the government interventions like this, whereas if the government in Australia right now started running public service announcements about reducing meat consumption it would be pretty controversial both for consumers and farmers, and I think the same is true in America.

The group I volunteer for is trying to influence consumer behaviour and has crowdfunded an app for people to use to log food choices for a month and see the greenhouse gas emissions of their diet and try to eat in a more climate friendly way called The Climatarian Challenge that’s launching in Melbourne on the 12th of November http://www.facebook.com/LessMeatLessHeat/

I’d be interested if any commenters have any ideas about what sort of things would encourage them and their friends and family to try changing their diets to be more climate friendly?

Gives up.

Chris Bertram,

“the enormous symbolic importance of this issue for Brexiters, Trumpers and the like who are jointly and severally climate deniers, very keen on gas guzzling motoring and hate and despise anyone green, alternative, “libtard” etc”

I think that’s a bit of a generalisation. For example in Australia at the election before this year’s election, we had a new Senator from The Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party, Ricky Muir.

I was actually pretty disappointed when I went to a talk on proposed Senate voting reforms after that election and the Labor Party MP there criticised the election of Ricky Muir and made him one of the main points in her argument that the Senate voting process needed reforms. He did a good job and was a very earnest Senator, the sort of person who would have been possibly chosen as a Labor candidate in the past I think. His background was working in a sawmill.

Even though he was the Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party Senator, he really supported Renewable Energy, and also the Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party lent support to a recent report (August 2016) by the climate change group based in Melbourne Beyond Zero Emissions about transitioning to electric vehicles.

So I think there would be more diverse views than you think about climate change within groups you even disagree with politically on other issues.

Sanche @ 24
Look over there!
Can I suggest you look at the figures? In fact, countries with the highest birth rates have the lowest emission rates. The problem is the consumption levels of wealthy countries and you can’t change that by talking about population growth.

If you really want to do something about population growth, you would focus on the question of how you give people in the poorest countries a reasonable standard of living, without using fossil fuels, and particularly how you ensure that women have human rights including the right to an education. Those are the things that will make a difference to popularion growth.

In the meantime, it is the consumption and emission levels of wealthy countries that are causing the problem, and wealthy countries generally have low (below replacement level) birth rates.

Peter Dorman @ 7 seems right to me, and this in particular resonates:

“Because carbon revenues will be highly regressive, and in order to sustain living standards and political support over a very dicey transition, most of this money will need to be recycled to the public.”

Both the consequences of climate change, and any solution to forestall or mitigate them, strike me as massively regressive, in the sense that it is the masses who will bear the costs in terms of living standards, finances, culture, personal well-being; while the wealthy will be well-positioned to pay those costs while maintaining their own living standards.

The wealthy then have no real incentive to pay the cost of avoidance now rather than paying the cost of mitigation later. As for the rest of us, most have grown up in an era when there is little political will for higher taxes or for expanding transfers from the wealthy to everyone else, and consequently we suspect this state of affairs will continue.

In effect, we’re offered the same kind of choice – we can pay the cost of avoidance now, while the wealthy effectively do not; or we can suffer the consequences later, while the wealthy effectively do not; and in neither case can we expect any help from the wealthy. If nothing changes this state of affairs, you can expect little public support for avoidance measures of any consequence.

This argument of course works at the national level as well. Wealthy nations will be better able to mitigate the consequences than poor ones; and wealthy nations show no signs of willingness to use their wealth to help poorer ones in any substantial way.

From my review of “Before the Flood”:

There are three interviews that epitomize the shortcomings of a Green outlook that is not rooted in a critique of the capitalist system. DiCaprio gives Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw a platform to advocate for a carbon tax that he feels will reduce its use just as cigarette taxes reduce smoking. We assume that the inclusion of Mankiw, a life-long Republican who served in George W. Bush’s economic advisor, is meant to illustrate the possibility of uniting all sides of the political spectrum in a battle against extinction.

The carbon tax is based on the idea that markets can be the solution to climate change after the fashion of Obama’s cap-and-trade that provides incentives for reducing carbon emissions. But as long as the market system prevails, there will be enormous pressures to be cost-effective. This might entail allowing big corporations to offset the expense of a carbon tax by drilling in areas of the world where labor costs are minimal, like South Sudan for example. Indeed, even as China is converting to alternative energy sources within its borders, it is stepping up drilling in the South Sudan.

As it happens, Exxon Mobil is in favor of a carbon tax but this might have something to do with the fact that it would likely benefit more than its competitors from a carbon tax that favors cleaner-burning natural gas over coal. Guess what. ExxonMobil has the largest natural gas reserves of any U.S. company.

https://louisproyect.org/2016/10/22/before-the-flood-the-ivory-game/

The planet is going to solve the problem, because it is not subject to political pressure. Eleven feet of sea level rise may be the first effect noticed by the political world.

I am working my way thru the movie, which I find very useful and stimulating.

In the movie, Leo plays Everyman on his globe-trotting, camera-ready Pilgrimage, and for me, he is effective in the role in part because he keeps his pessimism lurking behind the actor’s pretence, behind his friendly smiles shared with those many well-met. What the movie shows is how we are struggling in a great variety of ways not to understand. The problem of climate change and on-going global environmental catastrophe is inextricably linked to our apparent inability collectively or individually to think it thru.

A comment on a carbon tax

A carbon tax is like the deposit paid on a soda can: just as the deposit finances the expenses of retrieving the discarded can, so carbon taxes will have to go to finance taking the carbon out of the carbon cycle.

Whether there are uses, like air travel, which are still economic remains to be determined. Current IPCC projections indicate that we will need to find ways to finance taking much more carbon out than we put in, by mid-century. The resources needed will generally not be available to production for consumption.

We are no smarter than yeast.
Earth will only support 100 million killer apes.
Tax flying like cigarettes.
Paper or plastic? Bring your own bag made from fiber grown in your backyard.
“Use it up,wear it out.Make do or do without.”
Good luck with that in Murka.

Re ‘we need to cut back’ — I agree, but I think the ‘we’ in question should primarily refer to middle-class people in Western countries. The benchmark should be the median income for your (Western) country—if you’re earning more than that you need to cut your consumption down to that level before you can criticise anyone in the 50% who isn’t. The score should also be cumulative, so middle-class baby boomers may need to stop flying and eating steaks now whereas millennials can still have a few more with a clean conscience….

PS: Let’s not repeat the free trade scams, where we plan on ending the carbon economy, without providing for the workers, industries, and economies displaced by the change. Author above estimates 1.5 billion people directly affected, I think that’s high.

Yes, that’s far too high for direct effects and would take some creativity to reach even with indirect effects. I’ve said before that the decline of mass employment is one of the great political challenges of the century, along with climate change, and this is a prime example. Non-fossil energy systems require much less labor in extractive industries and operation/maintenance work; they may require somewhat more or somewhat less labor in manufacturing, but even if it’s somewhat more it won’t be enough to make up for the labor decline in extraction and O&M.

Coal-fired plant’s closing sends shockwaves in Nucla

…

the local job options could be pretty limited in far-western Montrose County once two of its major employers close their doors, eliminating what are currently 55 jobs at the plant and 28 at the mine.

…

According to the EIA, the Nucla plant generated 416,150 MWh in 2015 for an average annual power of 47.5 megawatts. That’s an abysmal productivity per worker (or a great job source, depending on your perspective): 0.86 real annualized megawatts per employee at the plant ; 0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the mining jobs.

For comparison, the new Vogtle AP1000 reactors are expected to employ 800 people permanently; that’s 2.5 megawatts per plant employee, assuming a reactor capacity factor of 90%.

For another comparison, a well-sited utility scale solar farm like Desert Sunlight can produce an average annualized power of 147 megawatts with just 15 full time employees, for a ratio of 9.8 megawatts per plant employee.

Replacing old coal plants with nuclear and/or solar requires only 9%-34% of the number of plant workers, if Nucla is a typical case for an older coal plant. You can expect more than 2/3 of the plant workers to be unneeded when an old coal plant shuts even if they all have the training to immediately work at the new replacement plants. Whatever electricity sources replace old coal plants, they are going to need far fewer workers at steady-state because the productivity of labor at newer, cleaner plants is much higher.

Even renewable energy sources currently consume coal indirectly, in the form of coking coal used to make steel and silicon. But this demand for mined material and miners is much, much lower than that of an electricity system built on burning steam coal in power plants. It might take a tonne of coke to make a tonne of silicon. That tonne of silicon can be used to make 200 kilowatts-peak of solar modules. If the solar modules operate for 25 years at a 20% capacity factor, they generate 8766 MWh over their lifetime. For comparison, generating 8766 MWh via combustion would be expected to consume 4139 tonnes of steam coal (using numbers from EIA FAQs). Throw in some more coking coal demand for making the steel racking for solar… you’re still looking at hundreds to thousands of times less coal mass that needs to be mined for PV-based electricity vs. electricity from coal combustion.

@Kiwanda #34

Beef is the big killer there, with cattle producing most of livestock’s greenhouse gas emissions. We either need to eat much less beef, or we need to feed them differently -as I pointed out up-thread, moving them over to a carb-heavy diet seems to greatly reduce their methane emissions.

@divelly #38

As Kiwanda pointed out a few posts up, it’s 3.5% of global emissions. That’s like telling people to replace their existing toilets with low-flow toilets – it does save water, but it’s literally tiny compared to actually saving water in the sectors that use the vast majority of it (agriculture). Reducing emissions en masse has to come from electricity generation and automobile use.

A note on carbon taxes, an optimum sized tax is time dependent, in much the same manner that a subsidy meant to incubate a promising technology is time dependent. In order to avoid an economic shock, carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes are usually designed to ramp up slowly. They are meant less to penalize an activity like driving a car, then they are to stimulate changes in the technology and the markets. I.E. instead of giving up owning a driving a car, the consumer is likely to buy a more efficient or eleectric car next time. And the auto companies are going to spend more on R&D of such vehicles. In many cases all the tax needs to do is tip the accounting calculation of cheapest solution from the traditional carbon intensive solution, to the greener alternative. If the tax is ramped up gradually, there may be little obvious change to an inattentive observer will note, LED bulbs (and TVs) replace the older massively less efficient variety -but only the geeks will take notice.

As far as the transition being on the back of the poor, versus the wealthy. I think you have got it backwards. Renwables are becoming the cheaper alternative, and the big economic hit is going to be the loss of trillions of dollars of equity in fossil fueled equipment and companies. The stranding of trillions of dollars of past capital investment is the really big hit. And it will be paid by the owners of such capital. Thats why we have so much money flowing into denialist organizations, the owners of this capital have good reason to fear the coming huge losses associated with abandonment.

Val, I’d like to second Zamfir @ 46. I have always heard “lifestyle changes” as being very individualistic.

I’m in favour of a complete restructuring of society starting with the way we understand ownership of land, and ultimately getting rid of all hierarchies of income, wealth and power, but I’m not going into that here because while it’s desirable in the long term, it’s not necessary to get started.

Depends what you mean by ‘get started’—if you mean ‘contribute to a plan that has any chance of eventual success’ then it might be.

the relevant question was a collective one – can Americans (or other wealthy nations) collectively change their ‘lifestyle’? To which Di Caprio regrettably concluded no

Haven’t seen the film but what is ‘their’ lifestyle? How do DiCaprio’s contribution to the probkem compare to eg. the homeless guys I used to see outside Penn Station?

Where did people like Tim Worstall get the idea that carbon taxes are intended to get the right type of emissions, and not to stop them? This is why economists shouldn’t be allowed near this subject.

The goal of our response to global warming is zero emissions. Full stop. We have a deadline to reach zero emissions. The goal of every single strategy is to get to carbon zero – that is, every gram of carbon we emit offset, and as little carbon emitted as possible. There is no “good” or “right” balance of emissions except none. Carbon taxes serve purely the role of reducing emissions as much as possible, so that the only emissions we make are those that cannot be avoided (agriculture, shipping, aviation) and even those are sufficiently small that we can offset them.

That so many people commenting on AGW policy don’t understand this is an embarrassment, after 30 years of debate. How can you still be ignorant of the concept of the carbon budget at this late date?

Carbon taxes will not achieve zero emissions (even in reducable sectors like road transport and energy), no matter how high we are. We know this from our experience of tobacco control: in many countries taxes are between 60-75% of the retail price of tobacco before consumption taxes, that is about 200-300% of the wholesale price of the product, and people still smoke them. It’s trivially easy to show that even huge carbon taxes will barely increase the price of a cab fare or the food on your plate. They are just a tiny, incremental start on the road towards zero emissions.

The alternative, as proposed by Bruce Wilder, is that carbon taxes raise money to be used to sequester carbon. The problem with this is that there is no viable way to sequester the huge amounts of carbon we’re producing. Sure, someone will shortly point to a bunch of pie-in-the-sky programs that don’t work and have no chance of working, but the reality is we don’t have the ability to sequester carbon at the level we need to, and the only alternative – geoengineering – is stupidly dangerous.

Which is why we need concerted action to change our economies, not just a stupid tax.

Ram @12

The purpose of a carbon tax is to internalize the negative externality associated with carbon emissions. It is not to minimize carbon emissions. What does this even mean–reduce them to zero?

I know relatively little about these debates, but this strikes me as bizarre. The point of a carbon tax, however formulated and applied and administered, must be to reduce overall carbon emissions. If doesn’t reduce overall emissions, it’s doing nothing from the standpoint of trying to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

“Internalizing a negative externality” is, afaict, a somewhat fancy way of saying that the person or entity causing harm pays in some way for the harm caused. But that principle, operating in isolation, doesn’t nec. do anything to reduce emissions or ameliorate climate change.

Let’s say a billionaire likes to fly. He or she pays a carbon tax, say $5000, with every plane ticket. But he or she still flies the same amount, b/c this particular billionaire’s demand for flying is price-inelastic to some considerable degree. Unless the money from the tax is put to some emissions-reducing purpose (which is not always guaranteed in all schemes, one supposes), there’s no net reduction in emissions. The negative externality has been somewhat internalized, but to no purpose: the billionaire is a little poorer, but there’s been no impact on emissions, hence no effect on climate.

The point is not to internalize a negative externality for the sake of “internalization”, but rather to reduce the overall size of that negative externality. If “internalization” leads to that reduction, “internalization” is serving a purpose; if it doesn’t, then, in this particular context, it’s serving no purpose.

ZM @ 52

And one collective decision that the government took on behalf of all the people, was to develop a desalination plant, which everyone mostly complained about the waste of money instead of being pleased at that collective decision.

Also when the drought ended, they reverted to stupid neoliberal economic reasoning about how people want to ‘maximise their utility’ – in this case by hosing down their paths, etc. Prior to that though, it went pretty well.

Val @50

Thank you for introducing me to “shonky,” a word that seems to mean exactly what one would guess it means.

At other venues than this, of course, it would not seem surprising that there’s a big difference in attitudes about global warming between left-liberal (or “soft neoliberal) and right-liberal politicians.

Val,

I agree the desalination plant was a bad decision and not popular with the community, but I think it counts as a collective decision in terms of at the moment the elected State/Federal/Local government (within various constraints) is empowered to take collective decisions on behalf of the citizenry.

The desalination plant can’t be called an individual decision or action I don’t think. I could clarify it as State government led collective action maybe?

It’s actually sort of interesting as I think the desal plant was the least popular measure during the Millennium Drought (apart from maybe at the time people didn’t know if the drought was ever going to end, I think it became even more unpopular after the drought broke), and the more popular measures did mostly involve a combination of State or regulatory intervention and public awareness campaigns to spur individual actions.

@ 53:

“Where did people like Tim Worstall get the idea that carbon taxes are intended to get the right type of emissions, and not to stop them? This is why economists shouldn’t be allowed near this subject.”

Well, that’s what the Stern Review says, what JQ says around here, what Mankiw says, William Nordhaus, Marty Weizman and all the rest too. Even seen Paul Krugman alluding to it.

This is the whole point about externalities. And the same logic in reverse applies to public goods too.

An act takes place which does not include the cost (or benefit) to people not involved in that act. Market prices do not therefore contain the information about the effects of that act on the third party. With an externality the solution is to put that cost into the market price – a Pigou Tax.

Now people taking part in the act, the market actors, are facing the true cost of their actions.

And that’s it.

The end result is that those actions which produce greater value than their damage still happen, those that create greater damage then their benefits do not.

Say, emissions from using a litre of gasoline. If that’s me going to get my lunch then perhaps the tax will make me thing about not fresh bread but instead toast yesterday’s. But the litre we use to power the ambulance taking the pregnant woman for a magnesium shot against pre-eclampsia produces rather more value than my fresh bread sandwich.

The damages of a litre of gas used are in the 50 cents to $1 range. We want to stop actions which use a litre for less than a $ in benefit (my lunch) and yet continue with those that produce more value (two lives saved for a buck).

A carbon tax is about having the right amount of emissions (the amount determined by the size of the tax) and of the right sort (where the value created is greater than the costs of the emissions).

That really is what it’s all about.

Tim Worstall,

63. That was excellent.

In the credits for the movie, carbotax.com is cited and a claim is made that the movie’s producers paid a voluntary carbon tax to offset the movie’s impact on climate change. I went to carbotax.com, where they have a calculator where you can get a score indicating your personal climate impact compared to “the average American”. I was below average, until I put in my air travel (which I think is pretty limited, but wdik?). They give visitors a chance to voluntarily cleanse their guilt feelings with a voluntary carbon tax — they suggested ~$30 / month for me — . . . to them, natch.

In the movie itself, as has been noted, Greg Mankiw, Harvard professor and textbook author, Bush II Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, and Republican, is the face of a carbon tax advocacy. Leo, our Everyman, is amazed that a Republican would advocate a (gasp!) tax. Mankiw’s argument as presented in the movie — no one to my knowledge has ever accused Mankiw of being a deep-thinker: his economics textbook has been rightly ridiculed for its ten lessons printed on the flyleaf, ten platitudes with very dubious intellectual support — is simplistic in the extreme and consists of two parts: tax something and you will get less of it is part 1; part 2 is tax shifting; raise revenue from taxing a bad and you can reduce taxes on goods in a socially valuable tax shift — tax carbon and use the revenue to reduce taxes on wages and employment, for example.

The movie, as the OP notes, is focused on using visual images and personal narratives in service of a rhetoric of mobilization. The whole point is, we have to do something to turn away from what we have been doing which has put the earth and humanity on this path to living perdition. A carbon tax is something, one form or means of beginning to turn away.

It is interesting to me that a carbon tax could become a coordinating salient in the politics of climate change, attracting people who see the problem in ethical terms as well as, apparently, people like Mankiw who try to present things in the calculating and expedient pragmatism of technocracy — all can rally ’round. Pay in expiation of sin if you like; explore the wonky intricacies of externalities and the comparative merits of a system of saleable permits, if that’s your inclination.

I don’t doubt that we need some calls to action around which people of various worldviews can rally, without losing their rights to ambivalence and idiosyncratic ways of understanding. It would seem to be easier to act in concert, if we could all adopt a single common ideology for the duration of the crisis, but that may be too tall an order. Convincing everyone to think alike across some broad spectrum of issues cannot be a pre-requisite to mobilization. But, still somehow, while still thinking in many different ways, a persistent majority must form, able to reconcile itself to effective measures. So, maybe the ethicists and the technocrats agree on a carbon tax, coming to it from different points of view and ways of thinking thru social coordination, and are joined by the authoritarians and communitarians, the orthodox and heterodox.

I see the problem of political coordination and mass mobilization. As someone in the movie says, political leaders must often be, in fact, political followers of common sentiment. The kind of policy measures that are necessary need the legitimacy of common consent.

It does seem to me that while we are, at this late date in 2016, trying to bootstrap with hope and prayer and positive thinking, movement in the right direction, we are missing the critical thresholds. It isn’t enough to move in spirit in the putatively right direction.

That’s a subtext that I see in the movie: the dawning realization that we are not going to have done enough when we could have and the change to climate will move ahead. The Flood is coming and the time to repent is passing.

This movie is inevitably an update to An Inconvenient Truth. And, it is bad news all around.

Thanks Nick. Terrible waste of money. I’ve heard from experts that the Labor government was advised there were a range of urban water saving measures that could have been just as effective, for less cost, and without using so much energy (and creating emissions) and causing salinity problems. Of course we’ve never had to use it so far, but it was one of those cases where ‘adaptation measures’ make the original problem worse.

Re iron fertilization, see also albedo modification via geoengineering. Desperation moves.

@ 72
I hear how you feel, and I know that in the morning you will probably wake up and say, nup, this is not over, we have to keep fighting for the future, but I just want to say, let’s make the “Berniebros’ “* predictions come true – let’s prove that Trump is the final disruption, last gasp of the old order that leads to the collapse.

It’s really sad that a lot of bad things will happen because of it, but if we watch out for each other and those who are vulnerable, we might be able to minimise the harm till the tide turns.

*Joke ok? Please don’t delete me – I think there actually is something in this theory. In the 90s here, neoliberalism was going nicely, until we had a Premier who took it seriously and tried to privatise hospitals. So I agree extremists can destroy their own cause.

Kiwanda Desperation moves.

Still, moves.

The modeling of climate dynamics seems to have progressed toward increasing sophistication, where it is possible to identify and sort out causes and effects in a careful, nuanced way.

The economic analysis remains, imho, nothing but groundless idle and ill-conceived speculation. This may be a significant source of political paralysis: the economists assigned technocratic roles cannot analyze their way out of a wet paper bag. Carbon taxes may be necessary, but they can be no magic bullet and the deliberate planning of infrastructure systems still must go forward aggressively.

Iron fertilization and albedo enhancements might be cost-effective moves, while curtailing air travel or coal burning may have unintended consequences for warming the atmosphere that we will be ill-prepared to cope with. But we would need a far better economic analysis to sort out, for example, where we might be handicapping the productivity of the economy and where we might eliminate the waste of gross excess to save energy and entropy.

Iron fertilisation isn’t a desperation move at all. It’s something that already happens whenever the wind blows some of that red Sahara dust out to sea. We’d just be doing a bit more of it.

Humans doing stuff that nature already does, but faster/bigger, has a long history of uncovering surprising and not always welcome side effects from scale. For one prominent example, see: burning stuff.

That said, I support iron fertilization experiments of gradually increasing scale to see what effects come about. I think that in the long run accelerated silicate weathering is going to be a significant component of atmospheric CO2 management, assuming that industrial civilization remains intact long enough to be capable of it. I think that sulfate aerosol albedo modification may be used as a stopgap stabilization tool while thermodynamically stable but slower carbon dioxide removal operations take place.

The IPCC was already invoking active carbon dioxide removal measures a few years ago for achieving the lower-range levels of warming. Low-emissions technologies are improving rapidly but not rapidly enough to keep below 2 C of rise sans active measures, even if we weren’t facing a Trump presidency. Global warming is not a 4 year problem, 10 year problem, or 100 year problem; without active countermeasures, it’s a 100,000 year problem. Human-caused emission rates have to fall significantly before active measures can begin to offset what we’ve already emitted, but without active measures effects are going to keep increasing for a very long time even if humans stopped burning fossils and eating ruminants within 10 years.

I believe that climate change is a dire threat to the future of human civilizations. Many posters on CT would probably profess to agree with me. Yet I also see a lot of people on CT and among my usual environmental allies who are stridently and pre-emptively against any active stabilization or carbon dioxide removal measures. They know that the cure will be worse than the disease even before the experiments have been performed. Sometimes these discussions sound like a farce on a farce; “Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics” becomes “Why the Melting Icebergs Mean That We Must Support My Politics.” Christ.

The scale of anthropogenic emissions is absolutely enormous. Any effective response is going to be, likewise, absolutely enormous. It’s not really a contribution to observe that relevant numbers are scary-big and dismiss ideas as “unrealistic” on that basis. If humans didn’t organize to do things on absolutely enormous scales then we wouldn’t be facing this problem in the first place.

Los Angeles air would look like Beijing air if over the past 40 years Angelenos hadn’t had legislation enacted and enforced by hierarchies. Some of that legislation probably was somewhat regressive in economic terms; pollution controls didn’t add a whole lot to the cost of new cars, but rising costs for mass market goods affect the poor more than the rich. All the same I’m glad that legislators didn’t spend another decade dithering about how to mandate pollution controls on new cars and somehow prevent any economic hardship for the bottom two income quintiles of car buyers. (Global action is even easier to stymie with economic justice language: start with some universal proposal for environmental protections, show how it hurts small business millionaires more than big business billionaires, and continue to limit the proposal’s scope by induction until you’ve reached the poorest person in Burundi and found that you can’t change anything. This is basically the Lomborg environmental inaction plan: don’t regulate anything because making something a penny more expensive in the near term will hurt the poorest much more than the richest. But that’s just restating the definitions of poor and rich.)

If I’m snippier than usual, well, I’m pissed off about the elections and this post will probably be lost in today’s flood of Trump-talk.

Oh Jesus Christ, Tim. You obviously don’t understand climate change. The goal of a carbon tax is to reduce emissions, not to prioritize some over others. The goal of climate policy, no matter what specific method we use, has to be electrification of the ambulance in your example, and decarbonization of the electrical generator. It is not, and cannot be the simple reduction of emissions, because that is not enough. If you don’t understand this, please research carbon budgets. We’re fast approaching our carbon budget, and the closer we get, the more rapidly we have to decarbonize that ambulance.

As for “we’re already doing iron fertilization, we’d just be doing a bit more.” Do you understand how dumb this is? The planet is already emitting carbon, we’re just “doing a bit more.” That “bit more” is the problem. This kind of glib answer shows you just don’t understand the problem at all.

Yeah Tim, and a bunch of people have shown that we’re already emitting carbon dioxide, it’s just a little more. The argument is nonsense. Do you have a better one or is that it?

SO “iron fertilization” of the oceans is as yet a experimental idea and not a current live option and there may be severe drawbacks to ocean ecologies, which are not well understood anyway. For instance, toxic algae blooms and anerobic zones if they would drift too close to shores rather than deep ocean. And even if such a tested program were to prove partially viable, at most it could absorb only 1/6 of current carbon emissions.

More generally, grandiose schemes for “geo-engineering” miss the point that climate disruptions caused by AGW threaten diverse ecologies because biological systems, which adapt over time-scales of 10,000s years, can’t adapt at the pace of a few centuries. AGW is not somehow the supersession of the rampant environmental crises that traverse our planet, but merely their intensification, such that “heroic” efforts to surmount it scarcely address the full “force” of the problems. (The oceans are not over-fished or filled with plastic micro-particles because of AGW, etc.) A much more resource and energy efficient economy is required across the board if we are to avoid catastrophic collapse. Which would require changes in our institutional political economy and not just technological “fixes”. Engineer Matt rushes toward distant horizons in seeking ways to remove excess CO^2, while ignoring that reforestation and restoring top soil, (which is a carbon sink), from the depredations of industrialized agriculture are more urgent options. (About 5% of fossil fuel energy globally is used up in the Haber-Bosch process to manufacture nitrogen fertilizers, not to mention the nitrous oxide emissions involved, much more potent GHGs, when bacteria, if not killed off by pesticides and large-scale soil erosion, provide their “ecological services” for free). It might be a minor irony that decreasing coal burning will decrease the SO^2 that has been masking the warming effects of CO^2 emissions that have occurred concurrently, but that’s just part of the “price” that needs to be paid. Similarly, simplistic “cost/benefit” analysis, reifying current technologies and institutional arrangements, are scarcely adequate for dealing with the global scope of the issues.

OTOH B.W. is amiss when he derides carbon taxes as merely “neo-liberal”, (when it is rather cap-n-trade systems, which have been tried and largely failed, that have been the preferred neo-liberal “solution”). They are not a “free market” cure-all, but without such prices, curbing demand and shifting investments correspondingly, the task becomes all the more difficult. This doesn’t depend on any mathematical fantasy of perfect markets and price signals and one can readily acknowledge all the “market failures” that stand in the way. And certainly public investment and indicative planning would be required to transform our infrastructure and capital stocks to render carbon (or GHG) pricing effective. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water here. (I actually sat through a meeting in which it was objected that carbon taxes would hurt poor people, despite all the amelioratory features offered, and that stripping out fossil fuels subsidies would be better, despite the obvious fact that a) that would have the same sort of effect in raising prices and b) that is a complementary and not an opposed policy. Coherent thinking is often in short supply amongst the greenies, I guess). And Faustusnotes badly misses the point that it would take a lot of energy to build out the alternatives to a fossil fuel based economy and everything should be done to ensure that our limited budget of remaining fossil fuels is directed toward that end. Otherwise we are in danger of falling into the energy trap of having insufficient energy supplies to effect the required transition, while being forced to continue to rely on legacy systems that require fossil fuel energy, (since the EROEI of fossil fuels has itself been markedly declining anyway).

Engineer Matt rushes toward distant horizons in seeking ways to remove excess CO^2, while ignoring that reforestation and restoring top soil, (which is a carbon sink), from the depredations of industrialized agriculture are more urgent options. (About 5% of fossil fuel energy globally is used up in the Haber-Bosch process to manufacture nitrogen fertilizers, not to mention the nitrous oxide emissions involved, much more potent GHGs, when bacteria, if not killed off by pesticides and large-scale soil erosion, provide their “ecological services” for free).

Increasing soil carbon stocks and promoting tree growth is a large part of what I have in mind for carbon dioxide removal. The largest CDR schemes that seem in the realm of plausibility to me involve changing how agricultural soil is pH-balanced and has its fertility maintained.

The horizons I’m looking to are no more distant than, say, a change in global institutional political economy sufficient to end over-fishing or plastic trash reaching the oceans.