World feeling the heat as 17 countries experience record temperatures.
9 % of the UN\’s 192 countries have been reporting record temperatures in recent weeks.
This can be many things but proof of global warming isn\’t one of them.
Please note, yes, I am a warmenist, my point is only that this particular fact is not proof of general, global, warming.
So, err, perhaps we don\’t all have to ride busses to save the planet?
Meanwhile, Porsche has signaled it will go ahead with the development of the 918 Spyder supercar, which is—get this—a midengine, gas-electric, plug-in hybrid with a combined output of around 718 horsepower (500 hp gas and 218 hp electric). A successor to the Carrera GT, the 918 Spyder promises unfathomable performance—0-60 mph in about 3 seconds and a top speed of 198 mph—as well ridiculous fuel economy, around 78 mpg, depending on the test cycle. The power pack on board is a liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery.
Although I suspect that there are those slightly deeper greens out there who would only be outraged by the idea that Gaia can be saved without the crushing of crass consumerism.
Judge sends in the actual paper that everyone\’s talking about in the papers this morning.
That one telling us that all of the tropical forests are going to disappear because of climate change a land use changes.
And Judge also notes something quite interesting. Look at the table on pg 7, Table 2.
It tells us how much is going to disappear because of climate change and how much because of land use. And it\’s mostly, in that table, claimate change that makes it all disappear.
Then on page 9 we\’ve got table S1. Which \”parallels\” Table 2 as they tell us. The difference is that here it\’s by country and in the first it was by major region.
But the effects are reversed. In S1 the effects are almost all from land use, not climate change.
So, err, which is it going to be folks? Poor people cutting down trees to grow runty corn? Or rich bastards burning coal?
And yes, it does matter. For their models all run one particular scenario:
World Climate Research Programme’s CMIP3 data driven
by the moderate-high SRES A2 greenhouse gas emission
scenario.
Oh….that\’s the capitalist but non-globalised one isn\’t it? The one where we get 16 billion not very rich people all living in localised and regionalised economies?
What else do we know about forests? Ah, yes, poor people cut them down and rich people plant them. So if we had an A1 world, one which gives us 7 billion much richer people (4 times richer each in fact) in a globalised economy we\’d, umm, have fewer poor people trying to cut down forests, wouldn\’t we?
Which makes it really rather important to understand what you\’re saying about whether it\’s climate change or land use changes which destroy the forests. If it\’s land use then the IPCC can already tell us the answer: save the forests through globalisation.
Sounds good to me.
BTW, if anyone can unscramble that bit about land use and climate change effects both Judge and I would be very grateful.
Yes, I think we know how this one goes:
Climate change and illegal logging could wipe out rainforest wildlife by 2100
Most of the plants and animals found in rainforests today could die out by the end of the century because of climate change and illegal logging, according to a new study
The qualifier of \”logging\” will quickly get dropped and the meme that climate change will wipe out the rain forests will spread.
What would be interesting would be to find out what the report itself actually says about the impact of each different cause but it\’s paywalled unfortunately.
Daniel Nepstad, an ecologist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, said only a cut in greenhouse gases can save the world’s wildlife.
\”This study is the strongest evidence yet that the world\’s natural ecosystems will undergo profound changes — including severe alterations in their species composition — through the combined influence of climate change and land use,\” he said.
“Conservation of the world\’s biota, as we know it, will depend upon rapid, steep declines in greenhouse gas emissions.\”
Oh look, it\’s happening already. And Nepstead was one of those behind the dodgy bits in Amazongate as well.
Did you know that renewables only get a piffling $50 billion a year in subsidies while those bastards over in hte fossil fuel industry get ten times as much?
The report concludes that in 2009 governments provided subsidies worth between $43bn (£27bn) and $46bn to renewable energy and biofuel industries, including support provided through feed-in tariffs, renewable energy credits, tax credits, cash grants and other direct subsidies.
In contrast, estimates from the International Energy Agency (IEA) released in June showed that $557bn was spent by governments during 2008 to subsidise the fossil fuel industry.
Now no, that\’s not the lie. That\’s the true part.
And yes, of course those subsidies to fossil fuels should be done away with. And yes it would have a wonderful effect on CO2 emissions. But that\’s not the reason to do it of course. And it\’s also not where the lie is.
The lie is here:
However, the report will further increase pressure on G20 countries to make good on their recent pledge to phase out fossil fuel subsidies – a move that the IEA believes could single-handedly slash global carbon emissions by up to seven per cent.
No, the IEA says no such damn fool thing.
Because what the lying bastards have done is equated two very different indeed sets of subsidies.
The renewables subsidies are largely the US, Germany and a bit from China (the UK\’s aren\’t really up and running in volume as yet but they will be soon).
When looking at the way they\’ve reported the figures we are expected to conclude that it\’s these same governments which are providing the fossil fuel subsidies that the IEA is complaining about, yes? But not, that\’s not what is happening at all:
Iran was identified as having the highest subsidies at about $101bn, or approximately a third of the country\’s annual budget. \”Chronic under-pricing of domestic energy in Iran has resulted in enormous subsidies and a major burden on the economy that is forcing reliance on imports of refined products,\” the study concluded. \”Steep economic, political and social hurdles will need to be overcome if Iran is to realise lasting reform.\”
I can\’t find the full IEA report but I have found the slides used to illustrate it. Here.
Last page. Who are the subsidisers? In order, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, China, Egypt, Venezuela, Mexico, Indonesia, Argentina, Iraq, Uzbekistan, UAE and so on….
Absolutely none of the advanced industrialised countries are providing sufficient subsidy to even make the list. Only 8 of the G-20 do ….and none of the rich ones.
So, you see what they\’ve done? They\’ve compared what poor countries do to subsidise fossil fuels with what rich countries do to subsidise renewables….and yet left us with the impression that it\’s all rich countries doing both.
Think for a moment: they\’re comparing $50 billion with $550 billion, as if it is therefore obvious that we (the US, UK etc) should therefore both reduce fossil sibsidies and increase renewables. But what on earth does Iran subsidising petrol have to do with how much the UK or Germany should subsidise solar PV?
Quite, nothing.
Now I\’m all in favour of those fossil subsidies being entirely done away with but not for climate change reasons. Rather, WTF is a poor place like Iran doing giving $100 billion to car drivers?
Or, if you prefer, sure, get rid of those subsidies but don\’t think that they\’ve got anything at all to do with us here in the rich world at all.
Yes, the World Is Getting Warmer
Another all-time temperature record:
Jeff Masters: Weather Underground: At 4pm local time today in Moscow, Russia, the temperature surpassed 100°F for the first time in recorded history. The high temperature of 100.8°F (37.8°C) recorded at the Moscow Observatory, the official weather location for Moscow, beat Moscow\’s previous record of 99.5°F (37.5°C), set just three days ago, on July 26. Prior to 2010, Moscow\’s hottest temperature of all-time was 36.6°C (98.2°F), set in August, 1920. Records in Moscow go back to 1879. Baltschug, another official downtown Moscow weather site, hit an astonishing 102.2°F (39.0°C) today. Finland also recorded its hottest temperature in its history today, when the mercury hit 99°F (37.2°C) at Joensuu. The old (undisputed) record was 95°F (35°C) at Jvaskyla on July 9, 1914. There is little relief in sight, as the latest forecast for Moscow predicts continued highs in the 90s for most of the coming week.
No.
The recording of record temperatures does not show that the world is warming*. The longer you measure a variable the larger the variations you measure will become. If you measured annual GDP change (just to get on track with Professor DeLong\’s thought processes) from 1950 ish to 2007 you\’d see at most a few percent either way. Extend that to 1920 to 2009 and you\’d see a couple of 10%, 15% even annual changes. Extend it to a few centuries and you\’d still not really see anything larger than 15% or so. Extend it to a couple of millenia and you\’d see much larger than 15%….the Black Death or the Sack of Rome (well, various of them perhaps) might qualify.
So, the recording of record temperatures in Moscow after 131 years is something we would expect….we\’ve near 50,000 daily measurements and as our measurements of the variable increase in number from 1 to 500 to 5,000 to 50,000 we would expect to see greater highs and lows being recorded.
* That the world is warming is true, but this isn\’t proof of it. What we want to know is what is the trend, not what are the occasional extremes. For example, as the Professor\’s own work shows us, while capitalism/free markets have increased annual variability over the centuries, the general trend has been upwards.
But whilst the rest of the world is pumping cash into research, the UK spends less than one per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) on developing new technologies. In comparison the US spends three times as much of its national income on green energy.
Eh?
Spending on research is not, at all at all, the same as spending upon green energy. So, assuming that this isn\’t just an environment correspondent (again!) getting confused by difficult things like sums, this is not comparing like with like.
1% of UK GDP is, umm, £14 billion. That is actually a very large sum indeed to be spending upon research and development. It\’s also about what the Stern Review said we needed to be spending.
On the other hand, 3% of US GDP is $420 billion….and there\’s no way at all that country is spending that much on research and or development. That\’s the roll out, the installation, of actual generating capacity (and even then that looks too large a sum).
Comparing two very different things there: tsk.
Relying on the ability of future generations to
adapt to climate change instead of asking the present generation to start the
process of mitigating it is a selfish and risky strategy.
Tsk: we\’re talking about economics here, not morals. The question is not which is the selfish strategy but which is the sensible one, the most efficient? Take one very simple example. Stern tells us that the cost of one tonne of CO2-e is $80.
If it costs us $200 per tonne (just to pluck numbers from the air for a moment) to mitigate while only $20 per tonne to adapt then we should leave them to get on with it. If the numbers are reversed then we should be getting on with it.
That some mitigation costs $20 while other $200 and some adaptation $20 while other $200 means, in fact, that we\’re going to do a combination of both mitigation outselves and they\’re going to have to do some adaptation.
The important question therefore is not whether, either mitigation or adaptation, but what?
Even if only the more modest forecasts of
temperature increases are correct, early action to tackle the increase in
greenhouse gas concentrations will be cheaper and less disruptive than more
far reaching measures taken at a later date.
No, this is something you must prove, not something you can merely assert. For example, let us look at solar PV (and we can take any number of other technologies as being similar).
Currently this is about four times more expensive per unit of electricity delivered than coal fired power stations. However, we can also see that the cost of solar PV is falling by some 4% per quarter, compounding up to some 20% a year. It doesn\’t take long to close that sort of price gap with those sorts of rates of technological improvement.
Now we might say that coal doesn\’t currently pay all its costs….this might even be true. But adding carbon costs to coal generation still don\’t make it, at the moment, more expensive than solar PV. They do bring the switchover point closer, but still not yet.
So, we have a technology which we know is more expensive now but which, within a decade (as most inist) will be cheaper. should we take early action therefore and insist that all install solar PV now?
No, of course not, that would be insane. We wait until solar PV really is cheaper (including carbon costs) than coal and then watch as people switch over naturally. Here, later action is cheaper and less disruptive than earlier.
There\’s also the point that throwing away a perfectly good coal plant, one we\’ve got some hundreds of millions of pounds of capital sunk into, now rather than in 10 or 20 years when it wears out in the normal course of things means that early action is more expensive than later.
It\’s partly this that drives the Nordhaus view. That a carbon tax should start out low now (perhaps $10, $20 per tonne) but be credibly promised to rise over the decades to perhaps $240 a tonne. So that we\’re both allowing the development to economic sense of those alternative technologies plus working with, rather than against, the grain of the capital replacement cycle.
All of which means that it\’s cheaper now than later isn\’t only an assumption you have to prove rather than assert, it\’s also an assumption which is wrong.
At the same time personal carbon trading is a progressive
rather than regressive green market instrument with a unique capacity to
engage the whole public in the response to climate change.
Facepalm. He\’s just reintroduced ID cards through the back door, hasn\’t he? Can you prove who you are before you buy petrol sir?
Lord Nicholas Stern’s 2006
landmark Review of the Economics of Climate Change, commissioned by
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, estimated that if steps are not taken to cut
GHG emissions immediately then the overall costs of climate change will be 5
per cent of global GDP each year indefinitely into the future. If a wider range
of risks and impacts is taken into account, Stern warned that the damage
could cost 20 per cent of GDP.1
No, it didn\’t. It said that if something\’s not done over the next few decades then that might be the effect.
The all powerful Communistmachine in the People’s Republic of China has got
the entire population involved in environmental work.
You can hear him drooling, can\’t you? One Nation Toryism at its best. The population will be mobilised to do what I think they should do under my command.
In Europe Germany generates 200 times more solar energy
than Britain and has increased employment in renewable energy industries by
50 per cent in three years.
Fail! Jobs are a cost, not a benefit.
The absence of consensus on precisely how soon the full impact of climate
change will be felt does not make the need for action any less urgent.
Eh? That something might happen in 2300 or 2020 makes no difference to how urgently we treat it?
Are you insane man?
Germanwatch also produces league tables on the countries worst affected by
climate change. They calculate that 600,000 people worldwide lost their lives
between 1990 and 2008 as a direct result of extreme weather events. Total
losses of US$1.7 trillion were incurred over the period surveyed.
Lying toad. Extreme weather events and climate change are not the same thing.
The top ten most affected countries are all developing nations:
Myanmar, Honduras, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Haiti, India, the Dominican
Republic, the Philippines and China.
Quite. So, whadda we gonna do? Grow the economy so that poor places are less vulnerable, more able to adapt, or spend all the money on mitigation and leave them poor then?
The danger for theWest is that in ten or twenty yearsChinawill
have gained a lead in lowcarbon technology.
What danger? So, they develop lovely new technology, we go and buy it and use it. The world is saved, Hurrah!
Haven\’t you ever heard of trade?
Besides it is in our economic interests to act now. Those countries which
decarbonise their electricity generating industry, transport infrastructure and
built environments will reap a huge financial benefit. Action to cut GHG
emissions is economically smart as well as environmentally responsible.
Err, no. Moving from less expensive to more expensive energy is not known as having either an economic nor financial benefit.
Yes, he does want personal carbon trading. Twat.
Sorry, this is just boring. Man\’s a loon.
They\’ve managed to get the report online now.
The European Union could obtain 92% of its energy from renewable sources such as wind and solar by 2050 while cutting carbon emissions by 95% compared with 1990, according to a report.
Gosh, that\’s nice. So, how do we get there?
claims a mixture of existing technologies plus the widespread adoption of electric cars and demand reduction initiatives would allow a dramatic change in energy requirements without a huge reduction in quality of life.
Aaaah….demand reduction eh? Is this our usual \”if everyone just uses 50% less energy then our sums add up\” thing?
And reduction in quality of life: that\’s determined by whom? The yurt dwellers at Greenpeace?
The report is here.
Already
today, businesses active in resource-efficient and renewable energy
technologies form a significant part of the economy, providing
millions of sustainable jobs in Europe.5
Oooh, my, we\’re only in the introduction and already we find an economic fallacy. Yes, jobs are a cost, not a benefit of such schemes.
But an answer is within reach: energy savings and
renewable energy, with zero fuel costs, zero reliance on scarce
resources, and zero climate damaging emissions, is an increasingly
attractive option.
That, I\’m afraid, is pure bullshit. There are no power generation systems which are zero carbon. Windmills and hydro have emissions: about the same as nuclear actually. And solar is about three times that level. And as for zero reliance upon scarce resources: what the hell are all of these things going to be built out of? Any economic good is by definition a scarce resource. And while I know I often argue that the technological revolution isn\’t going to be derailed by a shortage of the metals (gallium, germanium, neodymium etc) necessary to run it that\’s absolutely not the same as saying they\’re not scarce resources. They have an available supply and a price attached to them: they are scarce resources.
This scenario requires the rapid
phasing out of nuclear power generation and assumes a maximum
lifetime of 20 years for coal-fired power plants, half the technical
lifetime of such plants.
Oh dear again. So we\’re going to make it all more expensive by deliberately throwing away perfectly good, working, plant are we?
Exploitation of the large existing energy efficiency potential will
ensure that primary energy demand is reduced by more than a
third, from the current 73,880 PJ/a (2007) to 46,030 PJ/a in
2050, compared to 75,920 PJ/a in the Reference scenario. This
dramatic reduction is a crucial prerequisite for achieving a
significant share of renewable energy sources in the overall
energy supply system, compensating for the phasing out of
nuclear energy and reducing the consumption of fossil fuels.
No, not a 50% reduction….well, actually, yes, it probably is more than a 50% reduction from a business as usual projection. So we do have \”if everyone just uses 50% less energy then our sums add up\”.
A
significant share of the fluctuating power generation from wind
and solar photovoltaics will be used to supply electricity for
vehicle batteries and produce hydrogen as a secondary fuel in
transport and industry.
Given that I am in favour of that then I must be in favour of that, obviously. But I\’m not yet sure whether the primary generation is going to be cheap enough to make that work. To cover the conversion losses in using H2 as the battery in the system you do have to have really cheap primary electricity generation. Actually, in this next bit, yes, they do say that primary generation will be cheap enough to cover those losses.
Aaaaaah, here\’s what they\’re doing.
The worldwide photovoltaics (PV) market has been growing at over
35% per annum in recent years and the contribution it can make to
electricity generation is starting to become significant. The
importance of photovoltaics comes from its
decentralised/centralised character, its flexibility for use in an urban
environment and huge potential for cost reduction. Development
work is focused on improving existing modules and system
components by increasing their energy efficiency and reducing
material usage. Technologies like PV thin film (using alternative
semiconductor materials) or dye sensitive solar cells are developing
quickly and present a huge potential for cost reduction. The mature
technology crystalline silicon, with a proven lifetime of 30 years, is
continually increasing its cell and module efficiency (by 0.5%
annually), whereas the cell thickness is rapidly decreasing (from
230 to 180 microns over the last five years). Commercial module
efficiency varies from 14 to 21%, depending on silicon quality and
fabrication process.
The learning factor for PV modules has been fairly constant over the
last 30 years, with a cost reduction of 20% each time the installed
capacity doubles, indicating a high rate of technical learning.
Assuming a globally installed capacity of 1,600 GW by between
2030 and 2040 in the basic Energy [R]evolution scenario, and with
an electricity output of 2,600 TWh, we can expect that generation
costs of around 5-10 cents/kWh (depending on the region) will be
achieved. During the following five to ten years, PV will become
competitive with retail electricity prices in many parts of the world,
and competitive with fossil fuel costs by 2030. The advanced Energy
[R]evolution version shows faster growth, with PV capacity reaching
439 GW by 2020 – ten years ahead of the basic scenario.
Technology will save us after all.
This is really quite lovely. In order to make all their sums about planning everything work out they have assumed (quite rightly to my mind) that the cost/performance increases of recent decades will continue for several more decades.
However, if and when renewables become cheaper than fossil fuels (and in this prediction above they\’re cheaper even without putting a price upon carbon emissions) then of course we don\’t actually need to have a whole lot of planning, do we? We\’ll all naturally switch over to the cheaper form of energy generation as the current capital stock runs out.
So, in order to make the case for their planning they\’ve made an assumption which means that planning isn\’t required.
We can forget the rest of this report then.
Most of you don\’t agree with me.
But this is a good laying out of the climate change thing from the frontline I think.
Note my comment there: I\’m perfectly happy to take the climate science, at this very basic level, as being valid. What pisses me off is the following:
1) Those who would use the IPCC to prove that we should do something are insistent on not listening to what the economists at the IPCC say we should do.
2) Those who would use their credentials as climate scientists to tell us what we should do in economics: no, I don\’t listen to economists trying to explain hydrology to me so why on earth is anyone listening to hydrologists on matters economic?
Hmm, The G\’s CiF won\’t publish this comment to an Andrew Simms piece. Wonderwhy? Other comments have been going through…..
As we try to ensure a world fit for future generations, have a look around and ask yourselves, is this the best that we can do? What would it take, and what could we achieve if we were able to harness our transformative impulse for good?
OK, yes, let\’s ask this. Me, I think the abolition of global poverty would be a good idea. So, how are we going to do that?
Let\’s look at what the IPCC can tell us. Let\’s look at the economic models (in the SRES) which underly everything we know about climate change.
We\’ve basically two things, capitalism and globalisation. We end up with four basic models, Globalised capitalism (A1), not globalised capitalism (A2, and the model the Stern Review uses), globalised not capitalism (B1) and not globalised not capitalism (B2).
Andrew Simms and his mates at the nef argue that we should be striving towards the B2 model. They certainly don\’t like globalisation, they want more local production, less trade and more self sufficiency. They are also not notably cheer leaders for capitalism….or even markets. OK, so that\’s what they\’re after.
Me, I\’d rather have the A1, the globalised capitalism one. For several reasons.
Firstly, the globalised models have lower emissions than the non globalised. Yes, A1 has lower emissions than A2, B1 than B2. So, to beat climate change we do want a globalised economy.
Secondly, Only in the A1 model do we manage to end global poverty. For it\’s the only model which actually generates enough economic growth to lift all (yes, everyone!) out of poverty. No, really, you can go and look it up here:
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_sr/?src=/climate/ipcc/emission/
Thirdly, one of the variants of the A1 model, and the B1 model, have the lowest emissions of all of them. That A1 model is the model with high technology in it, A1T.
So, Andrew Simms argues for a low tech, not globalised and not capitalist world. I argue for a high tech, globalised and capitalist world.
My suggestion leads to a richer, cleaner world and one with lower emissions than the nonsense Simms argues for.
And, get this, we manage to abolish world poverty at the same time.
Pretty good hunh?
The only question left is why Simms argues as he does….well, perhaps we also ought to ask why anyone listens to him.
Well, well, what an interesting idea.
Lord Adair Turner, chairman of the Committee on Climate Change (pictured), has – we are told – written to the energy secretary asking that the Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) competition be extended to include gas as well as coal projects.
The committee is saying that efforts to tackle global warming require reducing emissions from electricity generation to almost zero by 2030, which should rule out new conventional gas-fired power stations after 2020.
I fear that Richard has missed a little trick here. Yes, of course it\’s insane, yes, of course it\’s economic warfare against us by our own rulers. But there\’s still more to it than that.
For carbon capture from gas is a great deal simpler than carbon capture from coal.
You see, to get the carbon out of coal you\’ve got to first burn it then try to capture the CO2. This isn\’t easy.
However, to capture the carbon out of natural gas you don\’t need to burn it first. What you do is strip the carbon out (natural gas being CH4) and then burn the hydrogen. Or, if you wanted to be sensible, you\’d run your H2 through combined heat and power systems running on solid oxide fuel cells (it really is only a coincidence that my favourite metal, scandium, is used in such fuel cells).You can then, at least I assume you can, burn the C to get CO2 and thus you get a pure stream of CO2, not something you need to capture in any difficult manner. Just a pipe on the outlet of the furnace or turbine.
And, absolutely best of all, it\’s not actually clear that this will cost anything to do. That it might not cost anything is lovely, while the uncertainty over the cost isn\’t of course. And that\’s where I think it gets interesting.
BP (yes, that BP) has been touting a scheme to test this for years. Up at Peterhead (which, purely by chance, is just down the road from St Andrews, the home of Europe\’s leading researcher into scandium based solid oxide fuel cells. Serendipity or what?). Let\’s take natural gas from a N Sea field. We\’ll strip it, burn it and pipe the CO2 down into a near end of life oil field. This gets rid of the CO2. At least, we think it does, but this is something we\’re testing, see?
That CO2 then brings up the last oil in the field….nothing very unusual about the basic idea, all sorts of things are pumped down wells to bring up the last bit. CO2 is novel but then this is an experiment, see?
Now yes, pumping CO2 about has a cost: but getting up oil that we couldn\’t get up any other way is a benefit, a source of income. One covers t\’other. Well, maybe, but this is an experiment, see?
So, why hasn\’t the experiment been done? Well, there\’s that pesky thing called the tax wedge. We\’re almost certain (certain to within the limits that BP is willing to take a flier on it) that the value of the oil coming up plus the electricity generated covers the cost of getting rid of the CO2 (I don\’t know whether this is including a credit for disposing of the CO2 or not, sorry, perhaps I should).
However, BP must pay quite large royalties to The Treasury on each barrel of oil they bring up. This is of course right and proper: Ricardian Rents should be captured by the State, not individual actors. However, oil royalties are high enough that at current levels they mean that the post tax value of the oil does not cover the costs of getting rid of the CO2.
So, what BP asked was, look, this oil that is only going to come up if we bury the CO2….can we pay less tax on that oil please? It\’s not, after all, a loss to The Treasury: if we don\’t get the reduced tax rate then we\’re not going to do the experiment, the oil will stay underground for ever and the Treasury will get nothing.
And what was Gordon Brown\’s answer?
Well, yes, you can guess can\’t you.
No.
So, experiment undone, technology untested, and all because the Laddie loves more tax. Even to the extent of not collecting more tax in aggregate because it would mean lowering a tax rate.
Which brings us back to Adair Turner. It is already possible to test this idea while at the same time increasing revenue to The Treasury. All that has to be done is to offer a lower royalty rate to those already willing to conduct the experiment.
No, I\’ve not gone and looked at his proposals in detail: but I\’d be willing to bet reasonably large sums that he ain\’t. OK, here\’s his letter. I\’m right!
He says that we should \”fund\”, ie spend more of the money we haven\’t got, a gas CCS project. Instead of increase the revenue we get to cover the amount of money we haven\’t got by lowering a marginal tax rate.
Which is, of course, why having Adair Turner poncing about at the head of yet another quango is such a damn bad idea.
Could we please all get with the program? Yes, of course, economics teaches us that free lunches are very rare and precious things indeed: but the most common place to find them is not in getting government to do something, it\’s in getting government to stop what it\’s already doing.
OK, so, first we assume the can opener:
There is huge potential to decrease energy
demand without decreasing the services that
are provided. In zerocarbonbritain2030, energy
demand is decreased by over 50%.
It\’s the only way to make the numbers work of course. In decreasing demand from housing:
Decrease area requiring heat,
Quite how making us all live in rabbit hutches is not decreasing the services are provided isn\’t said.
Decrease the thermostat/air temperature
Similarly, reducing the temperature at which we live not being reducing the services offered by heating the places in which we live isn\’t discussed.
On cars and transport:
Improvements in battery technology are
expected in the future, and concerns about
supply limits on raw materials are unfounded.
Isn\’t that delightful? They\’re entirely willing to use the \”technology will save us\” argument when it suits them: plus wave away any problems over resource availability. If you\’ll allowe me those two let outs I can prove (as Julian Simon did) that we can have an ever rising number of people living ever richer lives for the next 7 billion years.
We use some lignocellulosic
biofuels in the zerocarbonbritain2030 scenario
to power the sectors for which there is
currently no alternative to liquid hydrocarbon
fuels: aviation, shipping, some heavy goods
vehicles and some farm machinery. 1.67
million hectares of land in Great Britain is
devoted to producing the feedstock. We
assume a corresponding reduction in meat
consumption, so that there will be no net
increase in land use.
That\’s, what, 7, 8 % of total land area? Around and about the total land area currently devoted to buildings actually. Most green, don\’t you think?
In the zerocarbonbritain2030 scenario an
absolute reduction in transit is required.
Passenger kilometres travelled domestically
decrease by 20%, spread evenly across all
modes. Domestic aviation is eliminated and
international aviation decreases by two thirds
due to limits on biofuel supply. Some shorthaul
flights can be replaced with trains and
ships but an absolute reduction in transit is
also likely to be required.
Umm, this is a decrease in services provided, isn\’t it?
In the zerocarbonbritain2030 scenario
abundant food for the population is produced
but livestock products are reduced to 20-30%
of their present quantity. Cow and sheep
stocks in particular are much reduced.The
levels of egg, poultry and pig-meat production
are only a little lower than today…
We\’re not going to reduce the services on offer but at least 80% cuts in cows and sheep. Beef, mutton, wool, lamb and leather are more of those services we\’ll not be cutting then, eh?
Plus, of course, we\’ve just fucked organic farming right over as there\’s no shit to keep it going.
Good one really.
Something like 60% of electricity comes from wind. Umm, haven\’t they realised that the wind doesn\’t blow all the time? No, not even over an area as large as gthe UK and offshore areas?
Ooooh, this is a good one! Cement production is going to decline to 10% of current levels. Yes, this is to be done at the same time as we need lots and lots and lots of cement to anchor all those windmills. Good one that….
So, just to sum up: we\’re all to live in colder, smaller, houses, eat no meat and travel less. But there will be no reduction in the services on offer. And to get from here to there we\’re assuming both technology as yet undeveloped and no shortage of resources.
As I said earlier, the New Economics Foundation is involved so of course it was bound to be bollocks.
The UK\’s domestic properties need to be renovated to a high energy efficiency standard at a rate of 700,000 a year in order to have renovated them all by the year 2050. We need to do this because there are 28 million homes in the UK which are responsible for 27% of our greenhouse gas emissions, most of them will still be standing by then, and they need to be treated to make a contribution to meeting our national targets of reducing these emissions by 80% by 2050.
OK, so how much per house?
Neil gave some costs: they are allocating a budget of £120,000 per property for a sustainable renovation.
Err, what?
28,000,000 houses times £120,000, if I\’ve got my zeros right that\’s £3,360,000,000,000.
Erm, £3.3 trillion? Over two year\’s GDP just to spend on the housing stock? £84 billion a year over 40 years?
5% to 6% of GDP each and every year?
This just isn\’t going to work, is it? Those costs are so much vastly higher than whatever the damages from climate change might be that we\’d be better off just putting up with it.
I do hope I have got my zeros wrong there. Otherwise we\’ve serious evidence that people haven\’t been reading their Stern Review. You know, the one that said it will costs us 1-2% of GDP each year in total to solve climate change? Rather than 6% just to retrofit housing?
Here\’s one in the eye for a certain sort of climate campaigner.
Professor Paul Kench, of Auckland University, who co-authored the study with Dr Arthur Webb, a Fiji-based expert on coastal processes, said the study challenged the view that the islands were sinking as a result of global warming.
\”Eighty per cent of the islands we\’ve looked at have either remained about the same or, in fact, got larger.
\”Some have got dramatically larger,\” he said.
\”We\’ve now got evidence the physical foundations of these islands will still be there in 100 years,\” he told New Scientist magazine.
\’Coz they\’re coral see? As the coral of the reef grows, waves bring the broken off bits to add to the island. The islands get larger therefore.
This James Lovelock thing of Gaia as a self regulating organism….amusing that those most likely to agree with the idea have been least likely to grasp the implications of it really.
Researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia and Purdue University in the US said global warming will not stop after 2100, the point where most previous projections have ended.
In fact temperatures may rise by up to 12C (21.6F) within just three centuries making many countries into deserts.
A) No one has ever said that climate change will miraculously stop in 2100.
b) So what?
Projecting out three hundred years is entirely a mug\’s game. What technologies were we using in 1810? What do we use now?
Well, quite, what technologies are we going to be using in 2410?
At a 1% growth rate (lower than anything assumed by the IPCC) they will be 20 times richer than us. At a 3% growth rate (one of the options assumed by the IPCC) they will be 7,000 times richer than us.
Anyone really think that a globe 7,000 times richer is going to have a problem with CO2 in the atmosphere?
Quite….
So what\’s stopping us? Partly cost, says Wolff. Hovering at around 10-20 US cents per kilowatt hour, CSP \”looks a little bit on the expensive side\”, compared with gas at about 5 cents. But this is likely to change when the volumes increase, he says. Indeed, three studies carried out by the German aerospace industry suggest that CSP could eventually become one of the cheapest sources of electricity in Europe. \”Until about 2017, electricity from CSP will probably be more expensive,\” concludes Wolff. But then, as economies of scale kick in, it will become cheaper and increasingly attractive.
As I keep noting, I really don\’t think that, even if we take everything the IPCC is saying as gospel truth, that climate change is going to be as big a problem as everyone else seems to think. As and when non carbon (solar isn\’t non carbon but it is low carbon) electrcity generation is as cheap as fossil fuel including carbon costs then we\’ll all naturally switch to it.
We\’re not far off that point as it is. When we get there then all we have to do is wait as the capital cycle replaces the wearing out fossil fuel systems with the new cheaper non fossil fuel systems. Here in Europe we\’ve already got the carbon taxes/cap and trade permits needed to price carbon properly. The technological advances are creating those non carbon generating systems at the right sort of prices.
We\’re done pretty much. The systems we needed to put into place to generate these technologies have done so: we\’ve already done what we needed to do.
No, I mean it. Once we\’ve got cheap non fossil fuel electricty everything else falls into place.
Yers, I know, I know, I\’ve been saying this for a long time now. But dealing with climate change is going to be a lot less painful than many seem to think. And it\’s also a lot less urgent.
For the technological cycle is taking care of it all for us.
Sure, we need to move from carbon based to non carbon based forms of energy generation. Sure, incentives were needed to get people off their arses to create the technologies that allow this to happen.
But to a large extent we\’ve already managed this. The great lumbering beast that is the capitalist/free market engine of invention and innovation is getting there.
No, not as a result of foolishness like the feed in tariffs which came in two weeks ago. Rather as the effect of research and development decisions that were made 10 and 15 years ago. Leading to numbers like these:
The thing that is most notable about this is how fast the non-silicon costs have been falling – the sequence by quarter is 90c, 86c, 81c, 76c. This is roughly 4c per watt per quarter. It is of course impossible to know how far this will continue to fall – diminishing returns to technology and manufacturing reports will eventually occur. But for the moment we can take 76c and falling fairly fast (roughly 4c per quarter) as the non-silicon costs for various manufacturers.
Between 4% and 6% reduction in costs per quarter for the manufacturing of solar PV cells. That\’s the sort of cost improvement which rapidly transforms a technology from expensive lunacy to shit, gimmie some of that.
I agree, solar PV is only part of it all. We\’ve still not got a battery or storage system (although in my own day job I can see things roaring ahead there as well. I little bit of research I subsidised back in 2004 has now gone mainstream with the raw materials demand indicating production of millions of units in about 2 years (no, no patent or IP on it.). Such a ramp up in consumption of this material that we\’ve got to go and build a new factory to supply it…..or at least someone does.). We\’ve still not got a grid optimised for distributed generation and so on. But all of the pieces are there and visible, all of the technologies required are available, we know they work. All we\’ve got to do now is get them down in price.
And that is something that this mixture of capitalism and free markets is extraordinarily good at. Indeed, it\’s the finest system to do so we\’ve as yet uncovered. And I\’ve been confident all along that it will be falling prices of non carbon generation which will provide the solution. We\’ll get to a point, a point which I\’m increasingly convinced is not that far away, where new installations will be preferentially non carbon simply because they\’re cheaper. At which point the whole problem goes away. The standard turnover of the capital stock will, over the 30-50 year lifespan of that capital stock, move us from carbon based to non carbon based forms of generation.
In short, we\’re done. Finis.