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climate change

Paul Krugman on climate change

Well, as you\’d expect from a Nobel Laureate his analysis of the basic economics is good. And as you\’d expect from an economist his understanding of the climate science is less so.

Personally (for whatever trivial value my opinion has) I\’d give the first half of that long piece an A*. And then I\’d argue with three points.

1) There is, as he says, an advantage to cap and trade in that it\’s already in place in the EU and partially so in the US. However, given the monkey\’s arse the politicians have made of placating interest groups a carbon tax would be better.

2) He\’s bought into the much more alarmist screams about climate sensitivity. He;s basing his arguments on a 9 oF rise by 2100. But the figures for climate sensitivity (how much will temperature rise with a doubling of atmospheric CO2-e?) have been falling to a centre value of about 3 oC, not rising to that higher figure. So while emissions themselves are at the higher end of previous estimates the effect of those emissions has been falling from previous higher estimates.

3) He\’s slightly misjudging the difference between the Nordhaus view (low tax now, higher taxes later) and the Stern view (high taxes now). Yes, there are differences in discount rates and so on which lead to these different views. But there\’s more to it than just that. That more being the time lag in the technological cycle.

It takes decades (at the least) to change the technological base of the society. Power plants for example last 20 years (solar installation, windmill, gas plant perhaps) to 50 years (coal and nuclear). Ripping down what we already have, what will happily continue working for a few more decades, and replacing it with some new low carbon technology is a very expensive way of doing things. We\’re destroying hundreds of billions of $ worth of capital investments by doing so. This of course makes us poorer.

Similarly, high tax on something we\’ve already got makes us poorer.

What we actually want is the lowest cost manner of making sure that when the current technological base wears out and is ready to be replaced then it is replaced with the low carbon alternative. Not to either accelerate the destruction of the current infrastructure nor to tax highly what we\’re still going to be using for decades. We just want to make sure that replacement is low carbon when the time comes.

All of which argues for low taxes now but credibly promising to raise them in the future. The Nordhaus view in short.

One further point here. The low carbon technologies aren\’t in fact ready for prime time yet. We can even take Jeremy Leggett\’s own arguments to heart here. Solar PV, just to take one example, currently costs 50 p or so per unit of electricity where coal costs perhaps 8p. If that relationship were always to hold then if the costs of climate change are greater than 42p then we should be changing now. However, that cost relationship isn\’t expected to hold. The basic technology of solar PV is improving like gangbusters. (As one example, First Solar\’s cadium telluride methods, as another the silicon based producers\’ reaction to it.) Leggett himself touts 20% cost reductions per year. Which means that we don\’t want to lock ourselves into this year\’s inefficient technology. We want to wait a few years until solar PV is cheaper than coal at the point of use. Generally thought to be less than a decade away (when we add in the carbon costs of coal that is).

Which again argues for not taxing highly now, but for taxing lightly now and taxing more heavily in the future. Why punish ourselves now unnecessarily?

(And as some of you know my day job involves other such technologies like fuel cells and yes, costs are coming down like gangbusters there as well but they\’re probably a decade to 15 years away from being truly competitive.)

So I end up agreeing with the basic analysis but then end up plumping for the Nordhaus view, not the Stern as Krugman himself does. In short, work with the technological and capital cycle, not attempt to tear down what we already have and replace it with inefficient technology when we know that the new technologies are getting better all the time.

Climate change is solved

I see the cost of [solar] photovoltaics going down and down. Right now it\’s about $4 per watt for full installation. In 10 years\’ time, it will certainly be less than $2. If it\’s $1 or $1.25 then everyone will put it up without subsidy.

That\’s Steven Chu, US Energy Sexcretary.

And he\’s absolutely right. As soon as non fossil energy generation is cheaper than fossil energy generation then the problem goes away.

Yes, even things like cars….if electricty is cheap enough then cracking water to make hydrogen for fuel cells, or battery powered cars, these work.

Essentially, whatever it was that we needed to do we\’ve already done. Sure, getting the manufacturing cost of the necessary technologies takes time but we did start doing this a couple of decades ago.

Dealing with climate change causes skid marks

I have a feeling that people have got this story all wrong:

CIVIL servants were furious yesterday after bosses fitted timers to stop them spending longer than 10 minutes on the loo.

The cost-cutting measures were introduced at the Government Office for the West Midlands.

A hidden sensor switches off the toilet light after 10 minutes, forcing people to finish what they are doing and leave – in the dark.

One worker from the Birmingham office said: “This is both humiliating and degrading.”

Given what people in the Government Office of the West Midlands actually do (it\’s part of the EU imposed regionalisation of the country) we\’d all be entirely happy with their taking more time in the loo rather than crapping all over everyone in implementing their dynamic outreach contextualisation programmes for forward onward reliability.

However, this isn\’t about that at all. This is about turning out the lights so as to reduce electricity consumption. Put the toilet lights on a timer thus ensuring that the occasional bulb isn\’t left on. Entirely missing the point of course that many will use the toilet for a minute or two and then turn out the light. In fact, given that wees are rather more common than craps (err, except in Government Offices, OK, I\’ll give you that, possibly) putting a 10 minute timer on the lights could well increase electrcity consumption.

But for those working for the Government Office of the West Midlands who do not follow Government Healthy Eating Guidelines and thus have insufficient roughage in their diet (something we can take to be 100% of said workforce. Look, they know how useless everything they themselves do is and thus are even more cynical about Government Guidelines than the rest of us) this will of course cause problems as they flail about wildly in the dark attempting to wipe off the clarts.

For, as we know, bureaucrats could not find their own arses with both hands in the dark.

And thus the proof of the headline. Dealing with climate change causes skid marks.

No, still not getting it on climate change

To dismiss the implications of climate change based on an error about the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are melting is an act of astonishing intellectual legerdemain. Yet this is what some doubters of climate change are claiming. But the reality is that our understanding of climate change is based on a vast and remarkably sound body of science – and is something we distort and trivialise at our peril.

No, Pachauri is still not getting the point.

The point about climate change is not \”is it happening?\”. It is \”how bad is it going to be?\”.

It is the answer to that second question which determines how much effort we put into stopping/reversing it.

If the entire ecosystem is going to fall over and billions die then quite a lot of effort is justified. If it\’s just going to get a bit warmer and the latitiudes of various temperature bands move a couple of hundred miles north then not much effort is justified.

And the errors found so far in the IPCC reports are all about how bad it\’s going to get. And all those errors are pointing one way: the effects are being over egged. Genuine errors would be pointing both ways, some to worse effects, some to more minor. Thus the suspicion that there\’s a deliberate attempt to make the effects appear worse than they actually are.

That is what the problem is. The IPCC at least gives a damn good appearance of not answering properly the only question we\’re really interested in. How bad is it going to be?

A rather bizzare idea

More than £15 billion could be raised by the imposition of a carbon tax priced at the level of the EU emissions trading scheme,

But why would you do that?

Cap and trade and carbon taxes are alternatives not complements. You only want to have one or the other. Why impose both?

France\’s carbon tax

The government shelved the proposed carbon tax, one of Mr Sarkozy\’s key reforms, a day after the president replaced a top minister in a reshuffle after his UMP party\’s defeat by Left-wing rivals in regional elections.

Good, because they don\’t need this tax at all.

The plan would have made France the first big economy to tax harmful carbon emissions, aiming to encourage French consumers to stop wasting energy. But business lobbies feared it would penalise French industry.

Mr Fillon said the tax would have to work at a European level so as \”not to harm the competitiveness of French companies,\” according several UMP deputies who met with him in parliament.

Quite why anyone thinks that French companies only compete with those in the EU I\’m not sure. But anyway, that \”first big economy\” part is bollocks, pure and simple.

We in the UK have a number of carbon taxes, fuel duty, APD and so on. But much more than that all EU countries have the functional equivalent of a carbon tax in the cap and trade system known as the EUTS. And you don\’t need to have both cap and trade and a carbon tax. You need only one or the other.

And, as Richard Tol never tires of pointing out, the current EUTS price of 15-20 euros per tonne is about the right price for carbon emissions anyway. All that really needs to be done is to auction off rather than give those permits and we\’re done.

No, really, that would be problem solved.

Well, yes and no

The Trust, which looks after 200 gardens and collections of plants built up over hundreds of years, said temperature rise could result in gardens more like those found in Portugal with date palms, olive trees and even banana plants.

Well, sorta:

If the temperature goes up by 4C or more than the picture becomes even more extreme with gravel replacing the lawn surrounded by citrus plants, passion flowers and cacti.

Traditional orchards would be replaced by nectarines, oranges and even banana plants.

You can certainly grow banana plants here in SW Portugal….but you need a very special micro-climate for them to actually fruit (I know they\’re not a fruit, they\’re an herb). One little valley about 5 miles away it\’s possible but in general along the Algarve you\’d just get the tree (herb).

The Smoking Gun

Are you saying that the scientific community, through the IPCC, is asking the world to restructure its entire mode of producing and consuming energy and yet hasn’t done a scientific uncertainty analysis?

Yes.

Is it just me?

Or is there something terribly wrong with this idea?

Huge quantities of methane below the Arctic seabed are showing signs of destabilising, according to research conducted in the East Siberian Sea.

Scientists aboard Russian icebreakers have discovered that methane is leaking from the sub-sea permafrost far faster than had been previously estimated, raising concerns that climatic tipping points may have been reached.

As a greenhouse gas, methane is 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide but emissions from subsea permafrost are not included in climate change prediction models.

“The sub-sea permafrost should act as a cap or seal, preventing leakage,” Natalia Shakhova, of the University of Alaska, told The Times. “Beneath it there is methane that has accumulated at high pressure. But the permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap.”

What sub sea permafrost? The deep ocean is above freezing point. Has to be, otherwise life on earth wouldn\’t be possible.

Further, absolutely no one is saying that the deep sea is warming up.

So what is going on here?

Am I, as I suspect I am, missing something?

Cretins, cretins, all around us and not a one to think

As you will know, you well informed people you, the government provides different levels of subsidy for different renewable/non CO2 polluting technologies. What you might not realise is that they are cretins for doing so:

Ms Thompson said: “We are not confident that the [subsidy] regime for what is one of the cheapest forms of renewable energy will support operat- ing the biomass unit at full load. The UK is missing out massively on the potential for renewable energy from biomass. We want to run in a lowcarbon way but policy is against us.”

She accused the Department of Energy and Climate Change of lacking the skills to develop a successful biomass policy and focusing too heavily on expensive and unreliable wind turbines. “I think they simply have not put enough expertise into biomass. Wind is not a silver bullet; its benefits have been overstated.”

Ms Thompson said that the Government was holding back biomass by offering it only a quarter of the subsidy given to offshore wind farms and capping the amount of crops that can be burnt in coal-fired power stations.

She said that it was cheaper for Drax to pay for emissions permits to burn coal, the most polluting fossil fuel, than to switch to biomass.

Here are the subsidies on offer to the different technologies. Tuppence a unit for biomass, 5 to ten pence for large scale wind.

Let us run through the logic here. We have limited resources: as the scale of the government\’s borrowing figures show. Consumers also have limited resources with which to pay for these mandated electricity prices. We also wish to reduce CO2 emissions because, well, we\’d rather not drown or boil Gaia.

So, what have we got imposed upon us? A system which deliberately decides to splurge our scarce resources on hte most expensive manner of reducing CO2 emissions.

Yes, really, those who rule us have decided that we should do things in the most expensive manner possible. Ensuring, as best they are able, that we are made poorer than we need be.

No, I don\’t think that the Boy Dave\’s lot are going to be any better at this: but please, please, I beseech you in the Bowels of Christ, could we at least consider the possibility of having adults doing the thinking for us on such matters?

Andrew Simms and the costs of pollution

Big new report from the UN.

The cost of pollution and other damage to the natural environment caused by the world\’s biggest companies would wipe out more than one-third of their profits if they were held financially accountable, a major unpublished study for the United Nations has found.

OK, they make the usual mistakes: they\’re counting all the pollution in the production processes as if they\’re costs to be carried by the company rather than the consumers of the products made by such companies and processes. But other than that, yes, there are externalities, yes, we\’d like to include them in prices so that they are taken care of:

The report, led by economist Pavan Sukhdev, is likely to argue for abolition of billions of dollars of subsidies to harmful industries like agriculture, energy and transport, tougher regulations and more taxes on companies that cause the damage.

Again, not taxes on the companies, taxes on the activities, so that they are priced properly. Yes, consumers should and rightly will take the hit. But other than that, as a basic piece of logic, fine.

This is a tad silly though:

Trucost did not want to comment before the final report on which sectors incurred the highest \”costs\” of environmental damage, but they are likely to include power companies and heavy energy users like aluminium producers because of the greenhouse gases that result from burning fossil fuels.

Aluminium plants are, by their very nature, heavy enery users, this is true. Which is why the bigger plants, where the energy usage is most intense, tend to be beside hydro plants: the hydro plants and dams often built specifically so as to attract the aluminium plants. Northern Quebec, the Pacific North West, Iceland….the Al plants are in these places so that they can get lots of cheap power from dams.

But OK, at least the report is working along the right lines. There are externalities, they should be internalised, nature should indeed be priced just as with any other scarce resource.

And then here\’s Mr. Andrew Simms:

Yet in exercises like this, we quickly hit the paradox of environmental economics. By putting a price on nature, hopefully it makes it less likely that we will treat the world, and its natural resources, as if it were a business in liquidation. Yet there is a point when it becomes meaningless to treat the ecosystems upon which we depend as mere commodities with a price for trading. For example, what price would you put on the additional tonne of carbon which, when burned, triggers irreversible, catastrophic climate change? Who would have the right to even consider selling off the climate upon which civilisation depends? The avoidance of such damage is literally priceless.

Well, that drives a stake through the heart of carbon cap and trade, carbon taxation, the Stern Review, Kyoto, Copenhagen and all the rest really, doesn\’t it?

For as we all know, something which is priceless has no price. So everything we try to do about pricing nature, internalising the externalities, won\’t work for we cannot assign a price. Strange that someone who has been arguing for so long (however badly) on matters environmental turns out to be so, umm, mental.

Tim Yeo: twat

The environmental audit committee is calling on the government to introduce measures such as a new carbon tax to push the price of carbon from its level of €15 (£13) a tonne to what the MPs see as a more credible price of €100.

Tim Yeo, chairman of the committee, said: \”Emissions trading should be helping us to combat climate change, but at the moment the price of carbon simply isn\’t high enough to make it work. The recession has left many big firms with more carbon allowances than they need and carbon prices have collapsed.

\”If the government wants to kick-start serious green investment, it must step in to stop the price of carbon flatlining,\” the MP added.

Even Bleedin\’ Lord Stern only thoght the price should be $80 a tonne (which for technical reasons is arounf €30-€40 right now).

Don\’t these cretins even bother to read the reports sent to them?

Day release kid at The Observer

And writing the editorials too:

There are many excellent reasons to effect the transition to a low-carbon economy: cleaner air, economic independence from oil-exporting states, cheaper energy….

Jebus, if low carbon energy were in fact cheaper then we wouldn\’t be having a problem, would we? We could do away with cap and trade, carbon taxes, subsidies and feed in tariffs and just stand back as the market covered the country with windmills and the roof space of the nation with solar cells.

It is precisely because low carbon energy is *more expensive* than fossil fuel that we actually have a problem in the first place.

I would ask \”Don\’t These People Have Editors?\” but sadly the editorials are actually written by them.

Geoffrey Lean gets it wrong, again

There are four sides to the debate. At one extreme are those convinced that global warming is a massive hoax, got up by a worldwide conspiracy of scientists and governments. Since nothing will convince them it is real, they are often called deniers. They rightly object to the term, because of its unacceptable connotations with Holocaust denial (though they happily label their opponents “eco-Fascists” and “Nazis”). Instead, why don’t we try calling them rejectionists?

Second, there are many who are genuinely sceptical and questioning of the scientific “consensus”, the only honest starting point for anyone. Third, there are those, like me, who began from that position, but have been convinced by the evidence that climate change really is taking place (though they heartily wish – not least for their children’s sake – that it were not). Lastly, there are fundamentalist greens who gleefully welcome global warming as an overdue judgment on capitalism and industrial society.

You\’ve missed out the fifth group: people like me.

Those who accept that climate change is happening but having actually bothered to read most of the reports reject most of what is suggested that we do about it. You know, those of us who have a modicum of economics under our belt?

All sides condemn waste of the world’s resources.

Sure, but us fifth columnists differ on the meaning of the word \”waste\”. To use is not to waste. To use inefficiently is indeed to waste. To throw hundreds of thousands of tonnes of steel and millions of man hours of labour into erecting windmills which will provide intermittent and hugely expensive electricity is a waste of the world\’s resources.

It is also, as more and more economists and entrepreneurs are realising, an effective way of creating jobs and stimulating new, and sustainable, economic growth.

No, we\’ve read the reports (German and Spanish for example) which show that these renewable energy campaigns destroy more jobs than they create. We\’ve also read our Bastiat you see: look for what is hidden, not just what is in plain sight.

Our argument, the rational one, is not that we should do nothing: it\’s that what is being done is the wrong thing.

Andrew Simms\’ latest nonsense.

Quite simply, we cannot have economic growth because it\’ll cause climate change. Thus we must stop economic growth.

In slightly more detail, economic growth necessarily means that we\’ll go over 2 oC of warming and thus Flipper will boil as the oceans evanesce into the atmosphere.

Thus we should stop economic growth.

I refute it thusly:

The IPCC tells us that there are a number of different paths the economy could take and these have implications for temperature rises. They are handily listed here.

There are six families of SRES Scenarios, and AR4 provides projected temperature and sea level rises (excluding future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow[5])for each scenario family.

  • Scenario B1
    • Best estimate temperature rise of 1.8 °C with a likely range of 1.1 to 2.9 °C (3.2 °F with a likely range of 2.0 to 5.2 °F)
    • Sea level rise likely range [18 to 38 cm] (7 to 15 inches)
  • Scenario A1T
    • Best estimate temperature rise of 2.4 °C with a likely range of 1.4 to 3.8 °C (4.3 °F with a likely range of 2.5 to 6.8 °F)
    • Sea level rise likely range [20 to 45 cm] (8 to 18 inches)
  • Scenario B2
    • Best estimate temperature rise of 2.4 °C with a likely range of 1.4 to 3.8 °C (4.3 °F with a likely range of 2.5 to 6.8 °F)
    • Sea level rise likely range [20 to 43 cm] (8 to 17 inches)
  • Scenario A1B
    • Best estimate temperature rise of 2.8 °C with a likely range of 1.7 to 4.4 °C (5.0 °F with a likely range of 3.1 to 7.9 °F)
    • Sea level rise likely range [21 to 48 cm] (8 to 19 inches)
  • Scenario A2
    • Best estimate temperature rise of 3.4 °C with a likely range of 2.0 to 5.4 °C (6.1 °F with a likely range of 3.6 to 9.7 °F)
    • Sea level rise likely range [23 to 51 cm] (9 to 20 inches)
  • Scenario A1FI
    • Best estimate temperature rise of 4.0 °C with a likely range of 2.4 to 6.4 °C (7.2 °F with a likely range of 4.3 to 11.5 °F)

Excellent. As you can see most of these possible paths for the economy allow for there to be under 2 oC temperature rises. Some of them even have as their central estimate under 2 0C.

Two further things we need to note.

The first is that all of these are business as usual projections. They all assume that we do not take any attempt whatsoever to limit emissions. We do not scramble to build windmills, we do not carbon capture with coal, we do not tax airline flights or petrol, we just sail on merrily and allow everything to work out just as it would like to.

You will have noted that we are already taking such steps and intend to take many such more. So, absent politicians doing something entirely stupid and counter-productive (well ,we can hope, even if they are politicians) we can at least hope, if not entirely determine, that temperature rises from any of the economic paths will be lower than the above estimates.

The second thing we have to note is that all of the above economic paths assume substantial economic growth. When these economic models were first put together global GDP was around $50 trillion (in the 1990s). The A1 family assumes that global GDP in 2100 will be $550 trillion. B1 $350 trillion, B2 $250 trillion (from memory but that\’s about right).

So, the IPCC, that fount of the scientific consensus on climate change, tells us that not only are economic growth and temperature rises of under 2 oC compatible with each other, they are so even if we do absolutely nothing about climate change. Further, that really quite large amounts of economic growth, from 5 times to 11 times the 1990s economy, are still compatible with temperature rises under 2 oC. And that\’s still without doing anything about it.

And as we\’ve noted we are already taking steps to reduce emissions below the assumptions made by the IPCC.

Thus Simms is refuted.

It is also possible to go further and refute Simms and his crew of Noddies in more detail (as one example, it\’s terribly bad form to reference yourself as an unbiased source of a fact that you wish to assert, as Simms does, as another the observation that higher levels of economic income seem not to lead to higher levels of happiness ignores the question of whether economic growth itself, a rising standard of living, contributes to happiness or not) but I\’ll leave that for someone else to do.

This global warming thing

At the back of my mind has always been the thought that technology will make the whole low carbon thing entirely redundant. We\’ll move away from fossil fuels because we find something better, not because we want to stop emitting CO2.

No doubt this is the result of too much science fiction consumed as an adolescent.

Or maybe not.

Engineers plan to put satellites into orbit around the planet that can gather energy from the sun, concentrate it into powerful laser beams and transmit the energy back to the Earth where it can be used to generate electricity.

While harvesting solar energy in space has been discussed by scientists for more than 30 years, engineers at EADS Astrium, Europe\’s largest space company, now believe the technology is available to allow them to start building a working prototype.

They hope to have a small demonstrator of a full sized space-based power station, capable of beaming back 10-20kW of power, ready for launch in the next five years.

Quite why they\’re using lasers I\’m not sure:

But Astrium claims that its approach of using infrared lasers will make the system safer than other proposals which have suggested using microwaves to transmit the energy. If misdirected, microwaves could cause widespread damage, effectively cooking anything in their path.

That\’s not actually true. The concentration of energy would be too low to do that. Plus people have already tested transferring energy via microwave (they did it between two Pacific islands, fortuitously the right distance apart to mimic the depth of the atmosphere) and it works.

The real point about all of this though is that we know that it works. We\’ve the satellite technology, the transmission technology and the energy comes to Earth in a form that is easy to feed into our current grid systems. Oh, and yes, the available energy is vastly greater than the amount that civilisation already uses. By several orders of magnitude actually.

What we don\’t have and the thing that we need to have to make it all economic is a cheap way of getting into orbit. Which leads to a though. The Stern Review says we should be spending perhaps 2% of GDP to adjust for emissions and climate change. That\’s around $1 trillion a year globally.

Do I think that spending $1 trillion on researching a cheap way into space (say, a space elevator) would enable us to actually construct one? Yes, I do. And given that constructing such a cheap method of getting into space would be a total and final solution to climate change I would rather wish that we did do so actually.