With apologies, I find that I started writing replies to Harry’s very good comments on this thread back in March but did not complete them. So here they are.
Harry Marks wrote:you should be ashamed of yourself for giving aid and comfort to the lunatic conspiracy theory.
It is not so simple, and I am not at all giving aid and comfort to any form of climate denial. Sure, on the surface climate denial is insane. I agree with you. What I am saying is that the decarbonisation strategy of emission reduction, let alone the Green New Deal call for 100% renewable energy by 2030, is an equally unrealistic partisan stance that has generated an understandable backlash. It is true the backlash is lunatic considered just from science, but politically the point should not be to say left is good and right is bad, but rather to look for avenues of reconciliation and practical cooperation with prospect of actually stopping dangerous warming.
Decarbonising the economy is not such a practical strategy, whereas mobilising the energy and insurance industries and the military to cool the planet would be.
Harry Marks wrote:
Keeping fossil fuel use artificially cheap has gotten us where we are. You should be ashamed of yourself for advocating for a continuation.
Fossil fuels will remain the dominant energy source for decades to come regardless of what you or I or Bill McKibben might prefer. Emissions are projected to rise by nearly 50% from the current 40 gigatonnes of CO2e to about 60 GT by 2030, with the Paris Accord hoping to shave that increase to 54 GT (NYT, 2017). That cut is marginal, and a recipe for climate failure, even if it was doubled or tripled, reflecting the current economic drivers for energy supply.
The main “artificially cheap” element in fossil fuels is the failure to include climate externalities into pricing. The question how to achieve such climate inclusion has to look at transition strategies. Trying to abolish fossil fuels as fast as possible will cause conflict, instability and dislocation, with high economic risk, and strong pushback causing delay. That risk can be ameliorated by instead getting these companies to invest heavily in methods to remove the carbon pollution from the air, which could well achieve an even better climate result at lower cost and risk. Best to cut the partisan demonization and look for methods of constructive cooperation.
Harry Marks wrote:
This Hayekian distortion of policy on externalities was not convincing to Milton Friedman, or any other responsible conservative. Why would you want to get in bed with the hacks and the paranoiacs?
The issue here is not just about externalities, it is about the shared view of Friedman and Hayek that minimising the size of government is good for both the economy and society, by reducing the dead weight of tax that inhibits private sector activity and encouraging civil society economic initiative. That is a view that I share, on the basis that growth and health of civil society and social capital are inhibited by excessive reliance on government.
So I just don’t buy the dominant climate activist view that government action is the primary task for climate response. Sure government has a key role, but it is to steer, not row, even while saying that fixing the climate needs action on the scale of the Apollo Program. While it is true that taxing carbon sets a technology-neutral approach, my view is that ideally such taxation should be minimised by using investment in climate repair technology as a tax offset so that government facilitates the technology R&D by the private sector.
Friedman said “I think the government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem and very often makes the problem worse.” He also said “I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible. … because I believe the big problem is not taxes, the big problem is spending. I believe our government is too large and intrusive, that we do not get our money's worth for the roughly 40 percent of our income that is spent by government … How can we ever cut government down to size? I believe there is one and only one way: the way parents control spendthrift children, cutting their allowance. For government, that means cutting taxes.”
I don’t see how taxing carbon is compatible with those views, except when major emitters can offset their emissions by major investment in carbon removal and planetary cooling technology.
Harry Marks wrote:
People who interpret the world to conservatives have adopted the rhetoric of anti-elitism while serving their corporate paymasters.
That is too cynical as a generalisation. Concern about the rise of progressive cultural and political elites is reasonable, reflecting the worry about a narrowing and homogenising of policy sources.
Such concern about elites is not simply corrupt as you insinuate. It is true there is a broader conservative “rhetoric of anti-elitism” that is used to prosecute the culture wars against political correctness. That extends well beyond the specific problem I am raising, which is that technocratic elites have a wrong view about climate, with their argument that taxing carbon would be a sufficient response. The Paris Accord is an elitist instrument, cooked up by global governments to pretend to be doing something about climate, when it won’t work, since it is too small and slow compared to the freight train scale of climate change.
For example, some governments would like to force people to switch from petrol to electric cars to help the climate. This is an example of what I call elitist policy that won't work. The basis for mandating the switch has miniscule actual effect on climate, even accepting its strong benefits for innovation and pollution control.
Harry Marks wrote:
Those who sought to be responsible were quite able to separate claims about policy options from "liberal packages" but then got blind-sided by Talk Radio disrupters bankrolled by truly warped, anti-human, anti-culture billionaires.
That is fair comment about the corruption of right wing opposition to climate response, but electing progressive governments is unlikely to be an adequate way to fix the climate, in view of the considerable policy baggage on the left.
Harry Marks wrote:
Rupert Murdoch is no better than Joseph Goebbels - he's just a parasite more effective at maintaining a live host rather than killing it off.
Goebbels was a genocidal warmonger. Much as I find it disgusting that Murdoch promotes climate denial, this comparison is ridiculous. Making such comparisons renders it impossible to engage in civil dialogue with important capitalist constituencies who need to be engaged to reverse climate change.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:The psychology here is a clash of primary assumptions about the world, between the progressive idea that government is central and the conservative idea that government is dangerous. In any event, the conservative idea that government is dangerous and should be limited is powerful enough to severely delay progressive government efforts to decarbonise the world economy.
Only when enabled by determined misrepresentation for profit.
Of course. But the political problem is that such misrepresentation has a large, rich, powerful and somewhat demented constituency. Trying to sideline those social and economic forces appears profoundly unrealistic, in a context where working constructively with them could achieve the main goal of preventing dangerous warming.
Harry Marks wrote: There are certainly reasonable cases to be made that government is dangerous. Milton Friedman ran a television show making that case week after week for many years. That did not stop him from backing taxes or subsidies to rectify externality problems.
My impression is that people today who think highly of Friedman are likely to be worried that addressing climate change via tax on carbon runs too high a risk of increasing the power and intrusion of the state into civil society.
Harry Marks wrote:
When you try to erase the distinction between lying about the facts and disagreeing about policy, you contribute to the perfidy of the manipulators.
. Completely agree. That is a distinction I have certainly never tried to erase, but have rather tried to highlight. The real problem here is that the policy prescription of emission reduction simply will not work to deliver its goal of climate stability. This is a point that many in the Murdock press continually make, based on Lomborg’s accurate analysis quoted by Trump that full implementation of Paris Accord commitments would not reduce temperature rise by more than a fraction of a degree, and would have immense cost.
The problem is that almost no one is willing to bite the geoengineering bullet, recognising that investment in cooling technologies is the only way to stop global warming. As a result the right wing has adopted denial as a sort of policy placeholder, a head in the sand attitude they will adopt until they get convinced by a better story, ie geoengineering.
Harry Marks wrote:You continue to use the Paris Accords as a stand-in for efforts to address emissions, as if no other version of emissions reduction is relevant. At the same time you compare it to an engineering calculation of what might be possible in the way of carbon reduction. This is transparently distortionary, and you should not expect to be taken seriously by policy-makers when your discussion follows such a tendentious rut.
Now I am remembering why I delayed replying. With respect Harry, it is angry and baseless for you to assert that comparing the agreed Paris Accord commitments to what is required to fix the climate is tendentious. It is not tendentious, but rather essential to say that climate stability needs CO2 levels to fall by 50 gigatonnes per year but the best the governments of the world could come up with was an accelerating rate of CO2 increase. This climate gap indicates a basic flaw in the decarbonisation orthodoxy of climate politics, and the need for a paradigm shift to discuss different ways to approach the problem.
Your assertion that there are other versions of emission reduction misses the point on orders of magnitude. Emissions are 10 GTC per year, but the carbon problem of accumulated past emissions is 635 GTC, more than sixty times bigger than the possible limit of annual emission reduction. So even if the world ramped up emission reduction by banning all burning, we would still only have marginal impact on warming, which is driven by the committed radiative forcing from past emissions, which have to be mined out of the air and sea and turned into useful products, ie geoengineering.
Harry Marks wrote:
Nobody seriously believes that incentives for emissions reduction have played no role in the evolution of renewable technology. The corollary is immediate: appropriate incentives would have accelerated that evolution even more. The moon-shot mustering of forces that you frequently argue for is arranged naturally by an appropriate incentive.
Incentives don’t work when there are policy blockages. The current progressive policy framework is war against the fossil fuel sector, so all policies are considered through that lens. I simply think such a war footing is a distorting prism that prevents necessary climate action.
Harry Marks wrote:Robert Tulip wrote:Geoengineering methods are far more efficient and effective,
This may be true, but frankly we don't know that.
Robert Tulip wrote:and can be supported by conservatives while decarbonisation faces entrenched economic opposition.
Not on the basis of sound policy analysis. Conservatives already supported decarbonisation, and the entrenched economic opposition was able to buy off actual policy makers, not because of ideological considerations but from sheer venality. Your argument basically comes down to the notion that no special interests will have a reason to oppose ocean fertilization and biochar production, but of course you know that is not true. I'm not sure what gives you the confidence to claim that the special interest thumb will stay off your scale, but I find it worryingly naive.
My confidence is based on the view that the special interests opposed to ocean fertilization and biochar production can be sidelined, once the major forces of global capital engage in serious analysis of these proposals, and the proposals are removed from their current socialistic climate movement context.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:other approaches should be pursued at the same time.
Sure, but on the basis of sound policy considerations, not as a kind of end run around corruption. The corruption will still be there, and you will have been in the position of linking arms with it.
Again, this debate is about practical strategy to stop global warming. It is sometimes remarked in communist circles that Trotskyism is ideologically pure. The trouble with such imagined purity, disdaining any contact with the corrupt, is that it is utterly marginal from actual policy, and also that its alleged purity involves wilful blindness to reality. I agree that ultimately we should hope to eliminate corruption, but the practical path to this goal does actually involve cooperation with industries that are perceived as corrupt in order to help shift them towards a better future.