For advocates of individual liberty it is tempting to believe the skeptics are right because the other side is associated with statist solutions to climate change. Most solutions call for government control over the burning of fossil fuels. No advocate of free markets can be comfortable with a position that entails substantial taxes and subsidies to achieve a political objective -- reduction of carbon emissions -- especially when the solutions promise no more than negligible reductions in temperature. (Temperature, not emissions per se, is supposed to be the believers' cause for concern.)
But picking sides in a scientific debate on the basis of proposed remedies is the wrong way to go about things. A believer in global warming could get the science right but the remedy wrong. That government shouldn't ban smoking doesn't mean smoking isn't bad for you. There is nothing incoherent about favoring free markets and thinking that global warming is a problem.
[Sheldon Richman]
And against cutting emissions:
Although climate scientists are competent to tell us whether the earth is, for the time being, warming, or whether it is warming outside some historically normal parameters, they are not competent to forecast the economic consequences of such warming or to suggest what should be done in response. When they try to do so they are not acting as scientists but as political advocates. Even if it is true that global warming will generate "large-scale disruptions," the consensus among economists -- whose expertise is at evaluating trade-offs -- is that taking the steps necessary to avoid such disruptions will lead to substantially larger disruptions.
[Bruce Johnsen, GMU, via Cafe Hayek]
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patrissimo
Comments
Then they can decide how much to cut back. As of now, we have market failure.
A carbon tax is also justified in this country, because we are fighting a war. If we were not dependent on foreign oil, there is no way we would be in Iraq. Consumers of oil should be paying for the war.
Possibly. Seems unlikely though. More rain in a desert isn't really a good compensation for less rain in a current argicultural location. The dirt in the desert has not spent millenia building up into good soil.
Did you have an another example in mind?
This is why propagandists like Al Gore are so dangerous. They bundle a truth with a lie. A lot of people get suckered in by this, because the true part of what he's saying is true, and it's easy to point to evidence for that. Meanwhile, people assume the lie is true by association.
But it is an eaiser problem to solve now than it will be in the future.
Technology makes cutting emissions easier and cheaper. That's why in modern countries, pollution has gone down over the last 30 years or so without anyone caring about global warming for most of that time. Pollution is wasteful, and businesses don't like to waste if they have the ability to cheaply avoid it.
In fifty years everyone will be telecommuting, using nuclear power, and using other technology we can't even imagine. Carbon emission will have gone way down without anyone even trying to reduce it. And for the carbon emission that is still happening, there will be far cheaper ways to scrub it from smokestacks, remove it from the air, or engage in environmental engineering to offset its effects.
Or to put it a more glib way, what's harder: Plowing nine acres by hand, or ten acres with a tractor?
In general, having poor people pay for things that harm rich people seems like a bad idea, unless it's much cheaper now. The present is poor compared to the future, so I'd want to be convinced that we have to act now or else. The question is, is the problem the building up of CO2, or some irreversible consequences caused by that buildup? If the former, then it should be easier for the future to solve.
When do you expect this not to be true? Or for what categories of problems do you expect it not to be true?
Saying that economists are better at prediciting what will happen than climate scientists begs for a comparison. I can look at a weather forecast for the next week (and complain when they are wrong), I know of no such thing for the stock market.
Patri seems to have near infinite confidence in the abaility of the market to solve the problem of of dwindling oil supplies (whenever that occurs), I am puzzled by his lack of faith in the same market to solve the problem of excess emissions.
There is a current carbon sequestering system at $50/ton of CO2; doesn't sound so disrupting to me.
It could be that people are waiting for the price to reach some kind of low level at which they expect it to stabilize, if they see a falling trend.
Remember how wind power was going to save the planet, until people noticed it kills thousands of birds? Sequestration has no history, so it looks good. As soon as it is used on a massive scale, the problems will become evident.
The 'bird problem' is now a red herring used by NIMBYs.
Therefore the market will have more trouble dealing with the latter - if some countries tax CO2 emission, CO2-heavy industries will tend to shift jurisdictions rather than disappearing.
If there is oil under my land, and they drill from my neighbors land, do I get compensated?
We should not make the sate of assuming that only state-enforced action is a real means of changing society-wide behaviors.
Inquiring minds want to know.
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/12/br
USC's ISE 550, "The Political Process in Systems Architecture Design", now uses the space station as one of the case studies instead of the Shuttle.