Slashdot Mirror
Tackling Global Warming Cheaper Than Ignoring It
Coryoth writes, "In a report commissioned by the UK government, respected economist Sir Nicholas Stern concludes that mitigating global warming could cost around 1% of global GDP if spent immediately, but ignoring the problem could cost between 5% and 20% of global GDP. The 700-page study represents the first major report on climate change from an economist rather than a scientist. The report calls for the introduction of green taxes and carbon trading schemes as soon as possible, and calls on the international community to sign a new pact on greenhouse emissions by next year rather than in 2010/11. At the very least the UK government is taking the report seriously; both major parties are proposing new green taxes. Stern points out, however, that any action will only be effective if truly global."
Ignoring problems is the new American Way. We're doing the same thing with budget deficits, social security, medicare, and solving the root cause of global terrorism. Since a politician's time in office is typcially short (2-8 years), it's always far less costly during their tenure (politically and economically) to push off problems than to tackle the issue and risk losing voter support.
Unfortunately, global warming is a problem who's impact is even less tangible to Americans than problems like future social security shortfalls. As such, I doubt the government will support action until we're in the midst of cataclysmic environmental impact at a nationwide level.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
I am not an atmospheric scientist, but I have discussed this topic (and this exact issue) with an atmospheric scientist I used to work with when I worked for NASA. The bottom line is that global warming is very real, however we simply don't have good enough models yet to work out the necessary information for making informed policy information - we don't know what the impact on the human race will be if we keep doing what we're doing, because that depends on how well the earth's homeostatic mechanisms will compensate for the additional greenhouse effect. We know it will have a negative effect, that is sure, but we don't know how well cutting greenhouse emissions will help.
Personally I think a long term solution to this will require technology on an unprecidented scale, not merely cutting back emissions. We should be investing in these new technologies and in general scientific and economic progress, and I am concerned that these short-term "band-aid" measures of reducing output could actually increase the amount of time it takes (and thus how bad it gets) before we have the appropriate technology and scientific understanding to regulate the climate of our entire planet.
Of course, if all else fails, there's always controlled stratospheric particulate matter injection, and the US and Russia certainly have enough devices for that...
The only way to correct for something like this is through taxation etc, where the law can be applied and force better behaviour.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What the hell's wrong with you, the government needs those taxes to be proactive about things.
.... well anyhow ..... never mind ..... ok lets try ..... ..... scrap that one.... .... oops, hold on here I'm working on it ..... ..... shit, scratch that .... .....@#@#$#$%%%^
if not for taxes to pay for public education, our kids would be the dubmest in the free world, wiat..... never mind
if not for taxes, our social security and medicare programs would be bankrupt. wait
if not for taxes to fight the war on drugs, we would have drug problems in every inner city, uh
if not for taxes, the government would need to go into debt,
if not for taxes our medical and college education costs would be out of reach,
if not for taxes to pay for war, we'd be loosing the war on terror,
Well, FU! you're just not trying hard enough to see how valuable all these taxs are for everyone. We NEED the government to be "proactive"
That's an interesting assertion. The point of the report is that this precise question was studied in great depth by a well respected economist (Stern was a former chief economist for the World Bank), and that the results of all that detailed anaylsis is that, in fact, it is far more expensive to learn to cope with a warmer planet. I fail to see how you dismiss that result quite so easily - especially given that you have not read the report (it is not officially released till tomorrow).
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed," bin Laden said as the U.S. war on terrorism raged in Afghanistan. "The U.S. government will lead the American people in -- and the West in general -- into an unbearable hell and a choking life." linky
Of course, we should keep in mind that Bush is simply the symbol of this decay. The Administration as a whole is what scares the hell out of me. Add to this the people in Congress who support these shenanigans. And places like the UK have some nasty new laws as well.
I didn't see it mentioned in that article, but what Stern is actually proposing is a shift in taxes rather than a tax increase. Taxes would be increased on polluters, but that would be offset by tax breaks on low emission or energy efficient technology. It's a pretty common idea among the world's Green parties, so it's interesting to see it moving mainstream.
Not true.
The majority of the energy that the world consumes today is from non-renewable sources - coal, oil, uranium and so on. These sources of energy will be depleted eventually. In 100 years oil will be scarce, easily-extractable uranium may be in short supply and coal, although still plentiful, may not be used as widely for energy as it is now.
Even if one believes the most optimistic view (against all available evidence) that increasing the CO2 concentration from the preindustrial level of 280 ppm to a much higher level has no effect on the planet's climate and the ecology, one cannot deny that we will need new sources of renewable energy. If global warming provides us with an opportunity to implement renewable energy, it would provide economic stability for future generations.
Thus, the money would not be wasted. Instead, it should be considered as an insurance policy.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
This is from the article:
The article does not say when that is supposed to happen, and like everybody else here I haven't read the 700-page report that the article refers to, only the article itself. What I do know is that if the current world response to climate change doesn't change for the better soon, then you will start to see real consequences in the next several decades. If you don't plan on being alive 10-30 years from now (depending on the data you're relying on), then, well--I hope your life was successful and fulfilling. For the rest of us, we have a very real global problem on our hands that will become at least partially realized within our lifetimes. And you better believe we will be picking up the tab for it.
Public education is underfunded.
... because the government subsidizes college, and has sent all the low-skill jobs (that used to pay well) to Mexico and Asia, and has looked the other way while corporations imported Mexicans for the jobs that couldn't be moved. College has, therefore, become the new highschool diploma, not that the original ever meant anything in the first place...
Public schools do not educate, according to reformed schoolteachers like John Gatto and John Holt. If they did, the populace wouldn't take the crap that 'we' do - teh masses would know how to recognize tyranny when it happened, and find a way to circumvent it.
The government is in debt because of the tax "cuts" Bush pushed through.
The government has been in debt for a very long time - Johnson started printing money to pay for Vietnam, and there was no turning back. Clinton only balanced the budget by borrowing money from social security. If the government had to abide by the same accounting standards as corporations, there would have never been a 'surplus', and the current deficits would be much, much worse than the numbers they currently put out.
Our medical and college education costs are out of reach because
we're spending our money on things like the War on Drugs(which just makes illegal drugs more expensive)
If not for the war on drugs driving up prices, how could the various black-op agencies finance their nefarious operations? Read something about Clinton being in on cocaine smuggling through Arkansas - seems like a possibility to me...
and the War on Terror(abject failure due to our inability to concentrate on the nation that actually caused the terror).
You are refering to the traitors in the whitehouse, right?
The United States has the lowest tax levels of the Western world. We also have the highest debt and the worst healthcare. There is a connection.
'Highest debt' is because our Feral Government has had free reign to "print" money for its various programs for 35+ years, and no one's had the ability to call them on it. See Ron Paul's The End of Dollar Hegemony.
'Worst healthcare' is because a certain kind of doctor lobbied themselves a monopoly, and the government set the rules such that employers paid their employees' healthcare bills (wage ceilings during WWII led companies to pick up their workers' doctor bills). Medicare was created to pay for retired workers who'd gotten accustomed to the 'health insurance' paradigm, and that program's costs have been spiraling out of control ever since. See 100 Years of Medical Robbery and Real Medical Freedom.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
``Oil replacement first, then reduction.''
I wonder if that reduction is even necessary (though I would say it's a good idea anyway). According to the CIA world factbook, the USA consumes about 4 trillion kWh of electricity each year. According to Wikipedia the energy content of biodiesel is about 35 MJ per liter. For 4 trillion kWh, this works out to about 15 quads (the unit used by the UNH study). To produce that much Biodiesel, according to the UNH study, we would need about 12000 square miles of desert land. This is a very rough approximation; converting Biodiesel to electricity is not 100% efficient, energy consumption has changed since the CIA world factbook was updated, we don't need to go all the way to Biodiesel to generate electricity (just using the oil extracted from the algae, or even the algae themselves, should work), etc. etc.
So, give or take, for transportation and electricity combined, we need about 30000 square miles of desert land. We have that much. And this is for the USA, which, to my knowledge, has the highest energy consumption per capita.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
You are right on both counts. I am a scientist and an engineer, and I work enough with climate modelling to understand the problems and limitations in this area. And from this background, I judge that the esteemed economist is paying more attention to hype than fact.
Global warming is very real. Without natural global warming, this planet would be about 33 C colder than it currently is, so it's an extremely important effect that keeps this planet liveable. The most important greenhouse gas that creates 95% of the greenhouse effect is water vapour (not CO2), and we have no control over the water vapour whatsoever, but we're damn glad it's there.
What's more, there has been a gradual (though erratic) increase of temperature throughout the current interglacial period (18,000 years), which cannot be attributed to "advanced" civilization emissions, and this should be viewed against the backdrop of the longer current glaciation cycle (100,000 years) --- ie. we're at a perfectly normal peak in temperature, and it's not even a high one within the current interglacial.
That's the background. Now let's see where current observations put us.
Man's huge outpouring of CO2 has very significantly increased the CO2 ppm in the atmosphere, to levels unprecedented in recent glacial periods. While CO2 is not a primary controller of global temperature (the long-term paleoclimate record shows almost no correlation whatsoever, the record through the last several glaciations shows a strong correlation between the two.
Of course, graphing CO2 and temperature from the fossil record doesn't tell us which is cause and which is effect, and we are not currently able to model the very complex biosphere nor the chaotic cloud formation processes well enough to make any sound judgements about this. However, that doesn't mean that we can ignore it.
Two things we do know with total certainty:
- Man-made CO2 *does* cause a tiny initial rise in the greenhouse effect (that's just simple physics), even if it turns out that its final effect is not the obvious one expected.
- The climate is in the process of abrupt change, as noted from the extremely rapid melting of Greenland ice flows and polar ice cover, and the very dramatic observed slowdown in the Atlantic overturning that drives the Gulf Stream. And these processes are unstoppable, period, no matter what we do.
So, what do we make of this, in respect of economics and public planning?Firstly, this is what we DON'T do: we don't conclude that the temperature is going to go through the roof. Not only is there no significant temperature excess in the record (the +0.6 C of recent times would be regarded as entirely within natural climate variation if it weren't for the hype), but more importantly, the trend cannot be stopped in the ways suggested because CO2 has a very long lifetime, and all the industrial age CO2 will continue having its effect for a good 800+ years.
Secondly, this is what we DO do: we accept that the North Atlantic and polar melting cannot be stopped and that therefore the sea level will rise enormously in coming decades and centuries. This will have a collosal effect on Man, and we should plan for it, basically through gradual retreat from the shorelines.
That would be economic planning based on scientific facts, rather than hype.
Of course, reducing CO2 while we're at it is a great idea --- we should not polute the planet, FULL STOP, as it's the only one we've got, currently. But to believe that this is going to solve climate change is a complete fiction.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra