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New Study Finds Incredibly High Carbon Pollution Costs -- Especially For the US and India (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new study led by UC San Diego's Katharine Ricke published in Nature Climate Change found that not only is the global social cost of carbon dramatically higher than the federal estimate ($37 per ton) -- probably between $177 and $805 per ton, most likely $417 -- but that the cost to America is around $50 per ton. That's the second-highest in the world behind India's $90, and is also higher than the current federal estimate for the global social cost of carbon. That's a remarkable conclusion worth repeating. Ricke's team found that the cost of carbon pollution to just the United States is probably higher than its government's current estimate of costs to the entire world. And the actual global cost is more than 10 times higher than the federal estimate.
[The Guardian's Dana Nuccitelli] asked Ricke to describe her team's approach in this study: To calculate social cost of carbon, you need to answer four questions in sequence:
1. How would the economy change with no climate change (including GHG emissions)?
2. How does the Earth system respond to emissions of carbon dioxide?
3. How does the economy respond to changes in the Earth system?
4. How should we value losses today vs. in (for example) 100 years?
The team answered these questions using four "modules": a socio-economic module to answer the first question, a climate module to address the second, a damages module to investigate the third, and a discounting module to tackle the fourth.
That study detailed the relationship between a country's average temperature and its per capita GDP, finding a sweet spot around 13C (55F). That's the optimal temperature for human economic productivity. Economies in countries with lower average temperatures like Canada and Russia would benefit from additional warming, but it would slow economic growth for nations closer to the equator with hotter temperatures. The United States is currently right near the peak temperature, whereas many European countries like Germany, the UK, and France are 3-5C cooler, and a bit below the ideal economic temperature. So, continued global warming is worse for the US economy than Europe's.
[The Guardian's Dana Nuccitelli] asked Ricke to describe her team's approach in this study: To calculate social cost of carbon, you need to answer four questions in sequence:
1. How would the economy change with no climate change (including GHG emissions)?
2. How does the Earth system respond to emissions of carbon dioxide?
3. How does the economy respond to changes in the Earth system?
4. How should we value losses today vs. in (for example) 100 years?
The team answered these questions using four "modules": a socio-economic module to answer the first question, a climate module to address the second, a damages module to investigate the third, and a discounting module to tackle the fourth.
That study detailed the relationship between a country's average temperature and its per capita GDP, finding a sweet spot around 13C (55F). That's the optimal temperature for human economic productivity. Economies in countries with lower average temperatures like Canada and Russia would benefit from additional warming, but it would slow economic growth for nations closer to the equator with hotter temperatures. The United States is currently right near the peak temperature, whereas many European countries like Germany, the UK, and France are 3-5C cooler, and a bit below the ideal economic temperature. So, continued global warming is worse for the US economy than Europe's.
and I still need gas to get to work. Would I like a public transportation system? You bet. Am I going to get one with the level of corruption in my country? Hell no.
What's frustrating is the folks demanding a "free market" solution to the problem. Maybe there will be one like there was for getting lead out of gas. After decades and decades of damage done to people's health and well being (and if crime statistics are to be believed our entire nation). What I'm saying is the free market is _slow_. I'll be dead before it fixes things. Probably from Lung cancer.
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They are making so many cause and effect assumptions here it is just mind-blowing..
1. The Earth is warming.
2. We are probably the major cause.
3. Our actions are certainly the only knob we can control.
4. It is reckless to change how the only life supporting planet you got works, particularly if you have no viable plan to undo the mess once it gets too far.
5. At minimum we need to compute the cost of action vs the cost of inaction to society, which seems to be what the study does.
Look, I know we've built our societies on CO2 belching cars and CO2 diarrhetic energy production but it's a real problem that we need to fix. We have the technology to build carbon capture systems remove CO2 from the air with 1000x the efficacy of trees (per square meter) but it needs to be built and maintained. Therefore it seems only logical that there be a tax on all the things that produce CO2 so that money can be used to capture it. Obviously, this will make lower and non-polluting products far more attractive as they will be cheaper.
The solution is known and it's extremely frustrating that there is a total lack of will to implement it.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Ask a farmer if temperatures affect yield.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Ask a farmer if temperatures affect yield.
Well here in Australia this so-called climate change is having absolutely no effect on farmers at all! No wait ...
By now we should all be familiar with the Hockey Stick Controversy
Under the "Continuing research" section of the above link, emphasis mine:
Marcott et al. 2013 used seafloor and lake bed sediment proxies to reconstruct global temperatures over the past 11,300 years, the last 1,000 years of which confirmed the original MBH99 hockey stick graph.
In cartoon format:
https://rationalwiki.org/w/ima...
And a free-market reaction to the above, with other considerations: an alternative energy consumption and production paradigm seems to be gaining traction, which seems to be related in some way to recent discussions about melting glaciers and sea level rise.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
Yes, warm countries are on average less economically successful. That doesn't imply that warming will make a country less successful.
Singapore is right in the tropics, sweltering year round, and is extremely successful. So is Hong Kong, which has only a slightly more tolerable climate. So is Israel, which is in a desert region. In the US, ever since the invention of air conditioning it's been the warm areas, not the cool ones, which have the most economic growth. In both the US and China, the cold regions currently form a stagnating "rust belt".
The reasons why, in other places, economic growth is inversely correlated with temperature, are probably due to history and culture, factors that won't suddenly change if a place warms up.
California farmer or flyover state hayseed farmer?
Temperature affects both.
Higher temperatures can put a California almond farmer out of business.
Higher temperatures will extend the growing season and increase yields for a North Dakota wheat farmer.
Temperature matters.
US NUMBERS FOR CO2 HAVE BEEN FALLING FOR MANY YEARS!!!!!!
When do you expect them to hit zero, with things going they way they are ?
Keep in mind that natural gas replacing coal is just a one time picking of low hanging fruit.
If US numbers were climbing then you could maybe argue the US should do its part to cut back. But US numbers are going down. We're doing our part. And that's before you account for all the carbon sink qualities of US territory.
By your reasoning above, a gruesome analogy would be that you would prefer murder by throwing someone off a cliff because it takes orders of magnitude longer to die than simply shooting someone in the head with a gun.
So... Enough. Go whine to China or possibly Europe who's numbers UNLIKE US NUMBERS are not going down.
Look it up.
I looked, and this is what I found:
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
Maybe global climate change is caused by humans, maybe it's not, but regardless, it does seem to be occurring. So slowing down behavior that is known to be environmentally destructive is good, but patting oneself on the back for a reduction that seems to be a drop in the bucket may be a bit premature.
Maybe you can talk Trump into easing economic sanctions in his little trade war with China based on adoption of environmentally friendly policies and products. Oh, wait... nevermind.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
This is a poignant quote from WIndfall which is a book about how people are preparing to make money from climate change:
“It’s a message that says, ‘Yes, forty years from now or a hundred years from now, in 2100, things will be really bad—that’s why you shouldn’t use your energy today.’ If people won’t get that if they have unprotected sex today and it’ll kill you in a few years, why should this other message get across any better? It’s morally bankrupt for the pope to say abstinence only for people to fight HIV—it kills people to say that—and I think that’s a worse sin than fucking."
If global warming from CO2 production is a problem then we need to consider all solutions to reduce CO2 production. As it is right now, today, nuclear power produced the least CO2 for the most energy. As it is right now nuclear power is by far the safest energy source we have.
Cite: http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
Anyone that both desires to reduce CO2 immediately and ban the future development of nuclear power is placing us all into an impossible situation. It's possible to both reduce CO2 and not use nuclear power but that means (as shown by the source I linked to above) much more mining of ores for the production of steel, concrete, glass, copper, aluminum, and so many more raw materials. This comes with costs, in money, lives, and standard of living.
Any problems with nuclear power is local, very local, as in limited to the borders of the power plant and the mines. Releases of material beyond these borders are rare, minute, and can be addressed. Issues of CO2 spreading will be global in nature. Any costs of nuclear power must be balanced with the reduced costs of CO2 output it would produce in replacing coal and natural gas.
Wind and solar involve considerable material costs, far more than nuclear. They also have costs in lives from industrial accidents, far less than any from nuclear power per energy produced. Wind and solar are also unreliable and expensive, which when addressing the unreliability means increasing the costs. There may be places where wind and solar are really cheap, and where pumped hydro storage is also cheap, but these places are rare. Suitable sites for nuclear power, especially fourth generation nuclear, are not rare.
I do not believe global warming to be a problem but I will concede that point if it means we get cheap, reliable, and safe nuclear power.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
if any of them mine bitcoins they should be slapped. If their answer is using less energy to reduce output, then wasting it on useless hash algorithms seems rather hypocritical. Something like a few percent of the entire world consumption is attributed to crytocurrency mining. In one day more KWH are wasted on mining that the entire island of Puerto Rico consumes in a year (pre hurricane levels)
Fracking destroyed those economies. Cheaper natural gas replaced cheap coal. It was the market at work, not Obama.
because from where I'm sitting at it's not. The free market has nothing to do with our transportation system. Our roads were built with tax payer dollars, oil is secured with our military and it's production heavily subsidized. Even the suburbs are heavily subsidized (the expensive part of prepping the land, running gas, water & electric is all done by the gov't. That's the big reason housing isn't affordable anymore, we stopped doing that in the late 90s).
The difference is that public transport isn't nearly as big a cash cow for mega corps as our system of roads.
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Get off the nuclear obsession!
Stop with the global warming alarmism! I'll stop giving the obvious solution when people stop bringing up the problem.
When I'm presented with a problem then I want to offer solutions. I've investigated this problem and given the data presented to me I see one solution coming up again and again, nuclear power. I also see other solutions, such as wind and solar power, but no one seems to be opposed to those but those solutions are going to be insufficient to solve the problem.
By the time you build a new plant -- which takes a decade-- grid batteries will easily work to scale at a lower price
Okay then, problem solved, right? If we have solved the problem then stop bringing it up. If we haven't solved the problem then we need solutions, and those solutions will need to include nuclear power given all information presented to me so far. Leaving out nuclear power means a solution is still at least ten years out. It's possible that even with nuclear power the solution is ten years out but if we put all our eggs in the one basket that is grid scale batteries. What happens if we hit a problem on the batteries? Just delay the Apocalypse? It seems we cannot wait and so we need all solutions on the table right now. If we leave out nuclear power then we are not taking the problem seriously.
If there were ACTUALLY new ideas to use, then build some prototypes already!
If you were paying attention then you'd know that prototypes were being built. The problem was that the Democrats, the Obama administration primarily, killed most every plan on nuclear power development, any means to dispose of the nuclear waste we currently have, and generally set nuclear power development back at least a decade. The Trump administration is moving as quickly as they can, with Democrats tossing wrenches in the works at every opportunity, to solve our energy problems. I've seen it mentioned before over and over that the Republicans have a majority and so what's stopping them? Well, look at the news on getting a justice appointed to SCOTUS as an example on how the Democrats can and do slow things down. Every appointment by Trump that needs a Senate vote gets held up by Democrats that, as it seems to me, don't want problems solved. That includes problems on global warming.
As the rules are now the building of any nuclear reactor prototypes needs approval from the federal government. The people that do these approvals have been put in place by Democrats. The Democrats oppose nuclear power in every form. These appointments come up in rotating 2 year terms. For things to move on this means Trump needs to make appointments, with Senate approvals, which again means the Democrats have an opportunity to throw wrenches in the works.
All this rests on the Democrats. The high costs of nuclear power is because of Democrats. The long building time of a nuclear power plant rests on the Democrats. The money lost on failed nuclear power projects rest in large part on the Democrats. It's as if the Democrats don't want to see the global warming problem solved.
These are the REAL big problems. You can add nuclear into the debate when people are actually making efforts to prevent and solve the problems but instead these side shows serve to fragment, confuse their opposition, and create doubts.
Nuclear power is a good idea even if there is no global warming. That's because nuclear power is safe, cheap, and domestic. You want to keep the USA out of foreign affairs? Such as those in oil rich Middle East? Then we need domestic energy. That means not only drilling for domestic oil and gas but also developing domestic nuclear power. People want jobs, well then put them to work in building not only nuclear power but also wind and solar. We import far too much solar power collectors, it's time we build them here, which is another thing the Democr
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
>"In just 4hours enough NEW bitmining machines are added to the equation to undermine every milliwatt-hour of energy saved over the last decade from my LED bulbs. "
Well, that is not only true, but very frustrating. At least you know you did what you could, and it will help YOUR energy bill to boot. I agree with you that the whole bitmining thing really is a huge mess.... I imagine the only thing that could help deal with it is to make it uneconomical by constantly step-raising the pricing on such users. But how to do that without penalizing those who really need the energy for USEFUL things, like cooling their building, charging their cars, or running production lines that make stuff? Life is complicated. We really need working/safe/plentiful fusion power.