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Let's Remove the Politicians
Supporting my point, Hayek states:
Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, or of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories, be confined to the owner of the property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation.
In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism. But the fact that we have to resort to the substitution of direct regulation by authority where the conditions for the proper working of competition cannot be created, does not prove that we should suppress competition where it can be made to function.
His position on the idea that one can indeed create a price mechanism to mitigate the increasing threat of climate change’s repercussions goes extremely contrary to the American right's opposition of carbon pricing. In a world where pollution is at the top of the political spectrum, I think we owe the world to come to a conclusion - that actions need to be taken.
Insofar as to the power the political elites are able to muster to move forward with planned undertakings, I am very sorry to say that the outlook is very much despairing and I have come to harbor a pessimistic view . It might just be plain ignorance or better said the industrial complex massive amounts of cash that they are willing to front delusively in the name of Hayek's sake.
To quote Peter Thiel: "In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics... The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it."
Next on the list for Climate Change
The next frontier on the global warming front is becoming less and less likely to be the so called cap and trade initiative. The bill died in the Senate recently and the cost of carbon emissions will remain steadily the same in the future. Not many options are left however to raise the cost of carbon emissions and experts are turning to alternatives and pointing towards the past to highlight where similar major initiatives were not left up to the market but materialized by government push.
...history shows that government-directed research can work. The Defense Department created the Internet, as part of a project to build a communications system safe from nuclear attack. The military helped make possible radar, microchips and modern aviation, too. The National Institutes of Health spawned the biotechnology industry. All those investments have turned into engines of job creation, even without any new tax on the technologies they replaced. “We didn’t tax typewriters to get the computer.
We didn’t tax telegraphs to get telephones,” says Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, Calif., which is a sponsor of the proposal with A.E.I. and Brookings. “When you look at the history of technological innovation, you find that state investment is everywhere.”
In an attempt to even start by raising the price of fossil fuels, we are incapable of coming to a potential solution and, consequently, have come to looking to bypass the ordeal. In detail, no one is certain of the effectiveness of cap and trade and neither of the alternatives.
It all comes down to implementing all variants which can reduce green house gas emissions. Research, which can lead to an over-the-top wind mill or super photovoltaic materials, should also be employed. However, state participation is already sufficient - with a planned $4 billion budget in the United States alone. I would proposed a kind of diversification where green energy research can be subsidized by the government and, mainly, philanthropically whereby institutions undertake the initial research initiative due to the perputal rising cost of fossil fuel.
The hockey stick climate change graph
In a review in Prospect, Matt Ridley, who is no slouch as a science writer himself, calls Andrew Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion "one of the best science books in years". Pretty high praise for what Ridley also calls "the biography of a graph". Specifically, this graph:
You may have seen it in An Inconvenient Truth in this form. The graph shows the dramatic rise in temperature in the northern hemisphere over the past 100 years caused, presumably, by humans. But as Montford details in his book, the graph is incorrect.
[The author] had standardised the data by "short-centering" them -- essentially subtracting them from a 20th century average rather than an average of the whole period. This meant that the principal component analysis "mined" the data for anything with a 20th century uptick, and gave it vastly more weight than data indicating, say, a medieval warm spell.
Talk about an inconvenient truth.
Loca-Externalities
Locavores' main argument remain the fact that due to an exuberant amount of energy and costs that are entailed in transporting a tomato across the country, one is held morally to eat locally as it is an environmentally and sustainably sound way of reducing one's greenhouse gas foot print. Steven Landsburg mocks this kind of micro-mindedness as follows:
You should care about all those costs. And here are some other things you should care about: How many grapes were sacrificed by growing that California tomato in a place where there might have been a vineyard? How many morning commutes are increased, and by how much, because that New York greenhouse displaces a conveniently located housing development? What useful tasks could those California workers perform if they weren’t busy growing tomatoes? What about the New York workers? What alternative uses were there for the fertilizers and the farming equipment — or better yet, the resources that went into producing those fertilizers and farming equipment — in each location?
In any case, misrepresentation of information is very much abundant when anyone is trying to advocate one's pride agenda. It is the nature of things. As demonstrated by the guy whom Landsburg ridicules:
It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown that whether it’s grown in California or Maine, or whether it’s organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.
The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far. A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the farmers’ market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil fuel energy. Just running your refrigerator for a week consumes 9,000 calories of energy.
In all fairness, Budiansky, the guy quoted right above, maintains the argument that energy consumption should not be of paramount concern. It is rather the given set of values that the locavores choose to optimize. If they were to have chosen to advocate that families did not need a second or a third refrigerator neither a standalone freezer in their home nor a dishwasher, the locavores' argument could have well worth its case. It is a fine thing to eat locally but this is not a virtue in itself. Rather, when presented with the overall picture, the relative amount of energy spent on farming is of minute pertinence compared to our well-being and in the yield of the land.
The quotable Scott Adams
You know him as the cartoonist behind Dilbert, but my goodness, the guy can write. Here are a few quotes from some of his recent blog posts, filled with ideas that bring the reader closer to understanding the world than many an academic study.
This is also a test of my theory that you should buy stocks in the companies that you hate the most. In general, you hate the companies that have the most power. And BP is the frickin' Death Star of companies. They're in the process of destroying an entire region of the world and there's still no talk of cutting their next dividend. I admire them in the same way I admire the work ethic of serial killers. There's an undeniable awesomeness about BP. I hate BP, but I still want to have their baby.
Humans are obsessed with their weight. I think a big part of that obsession is the simple fact that weight is easy to measure. Scales are relatively cheap, accurate enough, and sitting right on the floor next to your shower when you need them...Generally speaking, we care most about the things we can easily measure, even if we know other things are more important. The measurement bias is one of the problems with selling a concept like global warming to the masses. Individuals can't measure global warming, and it doesn't change much from day to day.
Terror networks are perfect targets for false communications. First, the real orders sound exactly like pranks. It would be hard to sort out the evil mastermind plots from the CIA practical jokes. For example, if you get the order to shove C4 up your ass and yell WALAWALAWALA while running toward a heavily armed American Checkpoint, is that a real one or a prank? It's hard to tell.
I suppose it's the Dilbert cartoonist in me, but I can't help seeing world affairs as essentially a bunch of middle managers sitting around a rectangular table coming up with clever ways to convince the masses that turds are diamonds.
The real problem is that the world has become so complex that simple tasks are nearly impossible...I'd like to have an iPod. It would be great for working out. But I know that heading down that road would be disaster and heartache. Sure, it would be a simple task if it were just me. But the kids have iPods, and share an account, and there are gift cards, and limitations on porting to different devices, and a computer that only works half the time, and lord knows what other problems are lurking. The one thing I know for sure is that I'm not going to plug an iPod into the computer and happily download music with a few keystrokes. It would be more complicated than the Normandy Invasion. Instead, I just live without music. And exercise. So I suppose complexity is actually killing me now.
The bottom line
Isn't this what the global warming debate is actually all about?
The Story of Cap & Trade
Undoubtedly, if all nations were to cooperatively coordinate such an agreement, thus rendering a new global trading scheme while actively promote the idea of pollution as a scarcity with a price; failure of this market would by all means yeild catostrophic consequencies and make last year's crisis look like a minute speck. Just taking a look at the Kyoto Protocol and examining the on going carbon leakage that stills occur under this accord certainly makes the idea of Dr. Hansen's more appealing. He proposes the idea of Carbon Tax and 100% Dividend:
The “Carbon Tax and 100% Dividend” chart warrants discussion. Tax and dividend is the policy complement that must accompany recognition of fossil carbon reservoir sizes for strategic solution of global warming (the physics: reservoir sizes imply the need to phase out coal emissions promptly and quash unconventional fossil fuels).
Tax and 100% dividend can drive innovation and economic growth with a snowballing effect. Carbon emissions will plummet far faster than in top-down or Manhattan projects. A clean environment that supports all life on the planet can be restored.
“Carbon tax and 100% dividend” is spurred by the recent “carbon cap” discussion of Peter Barnes and others. Principles must be crystal clear and adhered to rigorously. A tax on coal, oil and gas is simple. It can be collected at the first point of sale within the country or at the last (e.g., at the gas pump), but it can be collected easily and reliably. You cannot hide coal in your purse; it travels in railroad cars that are easy to spot. “Cap,” in addition, is a euphemism that may do as much harm as good. The public is not stupid.
The entire carbon tax should be returned to the public, with a monthly deposit to their bank accounts, an equal share to each person (if no bank account provided, an annual check — social security number must be provided). No bureaucracy is needed to figure this out. If the initial carbon tax averages $1,200 per person per year, $100 is deposited in each account each month. (Detail: perhaps limit to four shares per family, with child shares being half-size, i.e., no marriage penalty but do not encourage population growth.)
A carbon tax will raise energy prices, but lower and middle income people, especially, will find ways to reduce carbon emissions so as to come out ahead. Product demand will spur economic activity and innovation. The rate of infrastructure replacement, thus economic activity, can be modulated by how fast the carbon tax rate increases. Effects will permeate society. Food requiring lots of carbon emissions to produce and transport will become more expensive and vice versa — it is likely, e.g., that the U.K. will stop importing and exporting 15,000 tons of waffles each year. There will be a growing price incentive for life style changes needed for sustainable living.
The present political approach is to set carbon emission reduction goals for 2025 or 2050. The politicians do not expect the goals to be reached, and they define escape hatches that guarantee they will not. They expect to be retired or become lobbyists before the day of reckoning. The goals are mainly for bragging rights: “Mine is bigger than yours!”
The worst thing about the present inadequate political approach is that it will generate public backlash. Taxes will increase, with no apparent benefit. The reaction would likely delay effective emission reductions, so as to practically guarantee that climate would pass tipping points with devastating consequences for nature and humanity.
Carbon tax and 100% dividend, on the contrary, will be a breath of fresh air, a boon and boom for the economy. The tax is progressive, the poorest benefiting most, with profligate energy users forced to pay for their excesses. Incidentally, it will yield strong incentive for aliens to become legal; otherwise they receive no dividend while paying the same carbon tax rate as everyone.
Special interests and their lobbyists in alligator shoes will fight carbon tax and 100% dividend tooth and nail. They want to determine who gets your tax money in the usual Washington way, Congress allocating money program by program, substituting their judgment for that of the market place. The lobbyists can afford the shoes. Helping Washington figure out how to spend your money is a very lucrative business.
But we can save the planet and alligators by making sure that not one thin dime of the carbon tax is siphoned off by lobbyists for their clients — 100% must be returned to citizens as dividend. Make this your motto: “100% or fight! No alligator shoes!”
Check the position of your congresspersons. If they spout things like “global warming is the greatest hoax in the history of the universe,” check the shoes of the people who visit them or have dinner with them. Changes in Congress are needed if we want our children and grandchildren to win this one.
Because of great benefits to the nation, humanity and nature, this approach soon would be adopted by other nations, providing an obvious path toward international agreements.
loblaws generic packaging design: simple is effective
All of the products are part of the generics at Loblaws a Canadian grocery chain that also includes Atlantic SaveEasy, a chain of grocery stores in the Canadian Maritimes where these photos were taken.
The visual effect of all the stores generics in the same basic yellow color scheme is amazing and makes the products easy to identify for consumers. I love how the packaging looks - esp the white vinegar.
Images via nick haus
climate: the limits of public concern
The Lowy Institute can fill in this gap, at least with regard to Australian opinion. We asked Australians in July 2008, 'If it helped solve climate change, how much extra would you be willing to pay each month on your electricity bill?'
As always, the public wants government to give it something for almost nothing. One suspects that global opinion would not be much different.
And thus the clamour for governments to 'do something' disappears in a puff of smoke. It's really not so surprising — if the public clamour for action implied in the WorldPublicOpinion.org poll was real, then a lot more would already have happened and Copenhagen would look like a cakewalk right now.
via The Interpreter by Sam Roggeveen on 7/30/09
