Bill,
Mrs. Butcher arranged for for us to have a home energy audit, a program subsidized by all four Connecticut energy suppliers. For $99, an experienced team comes to your home and analyzes every possible source of energy loss/excess utilization, from leaky closets, to improperly drafting hot water heaters to old light bulbs. They make sure the furnace is drafting properly (ours wasn't) and tell you who to call. They weather strip every outside door and external closet. They check your insulation (ours was woefully inadequate) and provide you with a coupon worth 50% or $1300 for whatever extra insulation you need, and provide a referral to a company that will do the work. Your utility will loan you money you need at 0% interest over 24 months, with equal payments added to your bill. The rough estimate is that these improvements, in sum, will cut our annual energy bills by about a third. That means the total cost should pay for itself in about 3 years.
The whole program amazed me. When I asked Mrs B what was in it for the power companies and the state, she sagely replied, "They don't want to build another power plant."
We haven't seen the Paris climate agreement's final form yet. I'm sure you'll hate it. Some of will be onerous no doubt, and some of it will be controversial. But much of it, my guess is, will be as sensible and doable as the carbon reducing steps taken in our audit.
I think I have a healthy respect for just how difficult reducing carbon emissions will prove to be, and how challenging the trade-offs are. Given the nature of our species, the odds are not very good that we'll succeed. But I must ask you Bill, at the risk of sending you into an I-hate-Eli-funk. What if you, and the climate skeptics (no D-word from me) who dominate the Republican Party, are simply wrong about the threat that unmodified climate change presents to our way of life, and all those pointy-headed-grant seeking-anti-capitalist alarmist scientists are right?
Eli
Friday, December 11, 2015
Not All or None
Eli,
Agreed, it's not all or none and yet you and I too often create a straw man all-or-none scenario. When you do it, I get angry and go silent for a few days, or respond with something particularly snotty.
If I understand your position, you view the risks of uncontrolled CO2 emissions as more dire than I do. In your view, if we do nothing, temperatures rise, weather is extreme and people's lives become intolerable at some point in the future, let's call it 2050. Doing something, however, will harm current generations with lower living standards. Not to the level of the Middle Ages, but lower than they would be. In essence you are making today's generation pay a subsidy to the next generation. Social Security in reverse.
But I think doing nothing is a perfectly viable option. China and India and Africa will industrialize lifting billions of people out of poverty. As they become wealthier they will value air quality and shift from coal to natural gas or nuclear, as we did. This will lower SOx, NOx PM25 and carbon emissions faster and more permanently than any government dictated option. Maybe temperatures rise, maybe weather becomes more extreme, but if so we'll be richer and more capable of mitigating that harm.
A moderate carbon tax, which I assume you favor, or a do nothing approach seems reasonable to me. What I can't see is the far reaching policy of substituting wind, solar, and biomas for coal, oil and natural gas. I think that's delusional.
Bill.
Agreed, it's not all or none and yet you and I too often create a straw man all-or-none scenario. When you do it, I get angry and go silent for a few days, or respond with something particularly snotty.
If I understand your position, you view the risks of uncontrolled CO2 emissions as more dire than I do. In your view, if we do nothing, temperatures rise, weather is extreme and people's lives become intolerable at some point in the future, let's call it 2050. Doing something, however, will harm current generations with lower living standards. Not to the level of the Middle Ages, but lower than they would be. In essence you are making today's generation pay a subsidy to the next generation. Social Security in reverse.
But I think doing nothing is a perfectly viable option. China and India and Africa will industrialize lifting billions of people out of poverty. As they become wealthier they will value air quality and shift from coal to natural gas or nuclear, as we did. This will lower SOx, NOx PM25 and carbon emissions faster and more permanently than any government dictated option. Maybe temperatures rise, maybe weather becomes more extreme, but if so we'll be richer and more capable of mitigating that harm.
A moderate carbon tax, which I assume you favor, or a do nothing approach seems reasonable to me. What I can't see is the far reaching policy of substituting wind, solar, and biomas for coal, oil and natural gas. I think that's delusional.
Bill.
It's not All or None
Bill,
With regard to the article behind Paul Ehrlich's quote, the cogency of your critique speaks for itself. So much so that its author, Eduardo Porter strongly supports your argument. He writes:
"Whatever the ethical merits of the case, the proposition of no growth has absolutely no chance to succeed. For all the many hundreds of years humanity survived without growth, modern civilization could not. The trade-offs that are the daily stuff of market-based economies simply could not work in a zero-sum world...
Let’s examine what our fossil-fueled growth has provided us. It has delivered gains in living standards in even the poorest regions of the world. But that’s only the beginning. Economic development was indispensable to end slavery. It was a critical precondition for the empowerment of women. Indeed, democracy would not have survived without it. ....the option for everybody to become better off — where one person’s gain needn’t require another’s loss — was critical for the development and spread of the consensual politics that underpin democratic rule...
Zero growth gave us Genghis Khan and the Middle Ages, conquest and subjugation. It fostered an order in which the only mechanism to get ahead was to plunder one’s neighbor. Economic growth opened up a much better alternative: trade. The Oxford economist Max Roser has some revealing charts that show the deadliness of war across the ages. It was a real killer in the era of no growth. Up to half of all deaths among hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists and other ancient cultures were caused by conflict...
Naomi Klein, a champion of the leftward fringe newly converted to the environmental cause, gleefully proposes climate change as an opportunity to put an end to capitalism. Were she right, I doubt it would bring about the workers’ utopia she appears to yearn for. In a world economy that does not grow, the powerless and vulnerable are the most likely to lose. Imagine “Blade Runner,” “Mad Max” and “The Hunger Games” brought to real life."
With regard to the article behind Paul Ehrlich's quote, the cogency of your critique speaks for itself. So much so that its author, Eduardo Porter strongly supports your argument. He writes:
"Whatever the ethical merits of the case, the proposition of no growth has absolutely no chance to succeed. For all the many hundreds of years humanity survived without growth, modern civilization could not. The trade-offs that are the daily stuff of market-based economies simply could not work in a zero-sum world...
Let’s examine what our fossil-fueled growth has provided us. It has delivered gains in living standards in even the poorest regions of the world. But that’s only the beginning. Economic development was indispensable to end slavery. It was a critical precondition for the empowerment of women. Indeed, democracy would not have survived without it. ....the option for everybody to become better off — where one person’s gain needn’t require another’s loss — was critical for the development and spread of the consensual politics that underpin democratic rule...
Zero growth gave us Genghis Khan and the Middle Ages, conquest and subjugation. It fostered an order in which the only mechanism to get ahead was to plunder one’s neighbor. Economic growth opened up a much better alternative: trade. The Oxford economist Max Roser has some revealing charts that show the deadliness of war across the ages. It was a real killer in the era of no growth. Up to half of all deaths among hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists and other ancient cultures were caused by conflict...
Naomi Klein, a champion of the leftward fringe newly converted to the environmental cause, gleefully proposes climate change as an opportunity to put an end to capitalism. Were she right, I doubt it would bring about the workers’ utopia she appears to yearn for. In a world economy that does not grow, the powerless and vulnerable are the most likely to lose. Imagine “Blade Runner,” “Mad Max” and “The Hunger Games” brought to real life."
So a trip back to the Stone Age may be what some of the no growth fanatics are advocating, but it's certainly not what Porter is arguing for, or me either.
Eli
Are the Marshall Islands Disappearing?
Eli,
I read with interest, then disappointment the NY Times, The Marshall Islands are Disappearing. I was expecting some statement about the sea level rise resulting in the disappearance of the Marshall Islands. There was a lot in the article about the US obligation towards the Islands and what might happen in 2050, but only this on the evidence to date.
Now maybe the Marshall Islands will disappear. But there's nothing in the evidence to suggest, as the Times states, that the Marshall Islands are disappearing.
Bill
I read with interest, then disappointment the NY Times, The Marshall Islands are Disappearing. I was expecting some statement about the sea level rise resulting in the disappearance of the Marshall Islands. There was a lot in the article about the US obligation towards the Islands and what might happen in 2050, but only this on the evidence to date.
Changing global trade winds have raised sea levels in the South Pacific about a foot over the past 30 years, faster than elsewhere. Scientists are studying whether those changing trade winds have anything to do with climate change.Not a very definitive statement. Whenever I read a story, or hear someone talk about rising temperatures I try to check those statements against Wolfram Alpha, which has a nice feature showing temperature histories. This is the temperature history of the Marshall Islands.
Now maybe the Marshall Islands will disappear. But there's nothing in the evidence to suggest, as the Times states, that the Marshall Islands are disappearing.
Bill
Thursday, December 10, 2015
The New Luddites
Eli,
The story behind your quote on growth, “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” was much more interesting to me than the quote.
I think some (many?) on the global warming/climate change/extreme weather side are really arguing for an anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, de-industrialized society. The New York Times article, "Imagining a World Without Growth," where your quote comes from, supports my assumption.
Proponents of de-carbonization have failed to convince the public of their views because 1) the models are terrible predictors and 2) the solutions proposed to mitigate the harm projected by these terrible models are completely unacceptable.
Bill
The story behind your quote on growth, “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” was much more interesting to me than the quote.
I think some (many?) on the global warming/climate change/extreme weather side are really arguing for an anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, de-industrialized society. The New York Times article, "Imagining a World Without Growth," where your quote comes from, supports my assumption.
Staring at climactic upheaval approaching down the decades, environmental advocates, scientists and even some political leaders have put the proposal on the table: World consumption must stop growing...Of course, this is totally unrealistic.
The proposal that growth must stop appears frequently along the leftward edge of the environmental movement, in publications like Dissent and the writing of the environmental advocate Bill McKibben. It also shows up in academic literature.
For instance, Peter Victor of York University in Canada published a study titled “Growth, degrowth and climate change: A scenario analysis,” in which he compared Canadian carbon emissions under three economic paths to the year 2035.
Limiting growth to zero, he found, had a modest impact on carbon spewed into the air. Only the “de-growth” situation — in which Canadians’ income per person shrank to its level in 1976 and the average working hours of employed Canadians declined by 75 percent — managed to slash emissions in a big way.
Proponents of de-carbonization have failed to convince the public of their views because 1) the models are terrible predictors and 2) the solutions proposed to mitigate the harm projected by these terrible models are completely unacceptable.
Bill
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
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