The financial industry is sitting on trillions of investment dollars that are looking for a home. Wonder who buys all that sovereign debt? That's because there's nothing better out there for all that money. Or at least, that's the financial industries story. We're really looking at the failure of financial institutions to manage investment dollars. They will only lift their game insofar as things like kickstarter forces them to.
Haven't you heard about the consensus. (Before claiming that science is not consensus, that is a different issue, and a way to avoid the point, that the vast majority of scientists disagree with you.)
How can you tell if its a political document rather than a science. First sign is it came from a political organization. The second is that its not peer reviewed.
Oh yeah, there are problems in how the final language of the report is written, which every county pushing their special interests into the language. Don't change the fact that the scientists signed off on the document.
Try reading some of the citations in the report. See how well they match suggested claims in the report.
That's a howler, because I *have* read some of the citations of the report, and it seems very well written to me. If you a referring to some particular controversy in some paragraph (or sentence) of AR5, then you should (1) provide a citation, and (2) admit that the report is larger than one paragraph or sentence.
Yea i know several scientists that where involved with the last IPCC report and vowed never again.
I know of complaints from scientists about how the science gets watered down, and a rosey sheen is painted onto some parts of the problem. Doesn't change the central point that I was making: we can and must move to a carbon neutral economy. Quibbling over semantics won't change that at all.
We are all victims... that's the point. There is a way to side-step these types of cognitive biases, which is a life-long obsession of mine. There are certain red flags which the mind tries to stop itself from paying attention to. I could go on at length about that; however, the linked material raises several red flags. Just something to think about.
The value of all the proven reserves will plummet if the market for oil and coal decreases. That is the source of the disinformation campaign.
We cannot do without coal/oil in 2014, but with the correct incentives, we can change our infrastructure to do with a *lot* less, and emerging markets can skip the coal trap all-together.
According the IPCC AR5 WG3, sustained movements away from carbon over 90 years will do the trick. You can still drive your car, and so can your children.
There is a lot of detail to get into for why we should be introducing economic incentives now -- you can read all about it in the 1700 page report, and 10k references.
We could fix this problem easily with barely any significant change to our style of life. Sure there will be winners and loser, and the losers will be big oil/coal companies -- some of the most powerful institutions in the world -- and that's why nothing is being done. It is really easy to throw mud and claim there is "confusion" on whether AGW is happening. Meanwhile, they tell themselves a story about how CO2 isn't a pollutant, and doing anything would be communism, and therefore morally wrong.
AGW is easy to solve compared to the little lies we tell ourselves about what is moral, in order to protect our little empires.
I'm pretty sure that most people agree on most things, and even policy wonks can find a huge amount of common ground to move forward on. Alas that politics is all about fighting. I heard one GOP insider saying that they push some of the conspiratorial nonsense to distract the base from making up nonsense about the GOP leadership.
If you are a conservative, you may enjoy this 20thC history of economics. The analysis leaves out a few important details (like the role of the OPEC crisis, and Nixon's price and wage controls, as causal factors in stagflation), but I think the general idea is pretty accurate. But no one theory of economics can claim to describe the economy, so it's important to realize that you are looking at a point of view that has blind spots, even if it is mostly true.
fad was pushed by a small minority of climatologists for a very short time.
Even that is overstating the case. Global cooling was *investigated* by a small number of scientists, including Steve Scheider (!). Time magazine and the media pushed it as a good story. Must have sold newspapers.
Cheaper things may or may not be better for the environment though. There can be a paradox, where you end up using more resources because there is more collective demand.
Also, you're ignoring externalities, which is kind-of the whole point.
Most Nobel Prizes for physics go to scientists who demonstrate an existing idea is wrong. There are some problems with Kuhn's analysis, in that at any point of time, you'll find multiple paradigms active in large fields, and you'll also see rather incremental changes in and out of dominate paradigms, for the most part. This is a pretty big flaw in his argument.
This is a rather sad point of view, because it is simply wrong. The strongest incentives are for the status quo. The largest industry in world (the energy sector) is staring down regulation, and they have the most to lose. If you care whether or not your beliefs are true or not, then do yourself a favour, and read "Merchants of Doubt" which chronicles in excruciating detail, the very real history of how companies manipulate the media to protect their interests.
Most scientists could make far more working in industry. (I sure could.) So they aren't chasing money. They are trying to understand cool new things, and leave a footnote in the lineage of human consciousness. You don't get that by being wrong. You get that by being new, innovative, and mostly: demonstrating the status quo is wrong. In fact, you've got the incentive structures completely ass backwards.
The reason for this is because the issue is now politically polarized. That means, roughly 50% of people will tend towards trusting different sources of information on the issue. We're talking tribalism, not argumentation.
Many GOP congress-critters and senators know that global warming is a real and present danger, but cannot hope to speak up in public, because of the super-polarized political dynamics, and the fact that the GOP depends on a rather paranoid and conspiratorial base. (In contrast, the Dems distance themselves from liberal crazies.)
It should be modded "sad". There are ways to green the energy system without raising the out-of-pocket costs to consumers, or having the government take on debt. If you knew something about the economics of the issue, then you'd already know that. Google is your friend. And an open mind.
Maybe. Coal emits a ridiculous amount of radiation... Also, according to the Torch report, 60k people died from Chernobyl, which is a tragedy, but a drop in the bucket compared to coal.
Oh Richy_T, in practice most people don't care if their beliefs are wrong or right -- because examining dis-confirming evidence is confronting. If you actually care if your beliefs are right or wrong, then I recommend reading "Merchants of Doubt" which analyzes (sometimes in laborious depth) the ozone whole, acid rain, and star wars, and the disinformation campaigns around them.
Richy_T, this seems like nitpicking to me. Obviously a cost-benefit analysis of pollution is at the heart of assessing what to do. That means, we first have to identify problems (or potential problems) with compounds, and then see what the cheapest/most effective options (or research/demonstrate there is not problem).
The only real problem with this is corruption. But surprise, it's an imperfect world, and even corruption (esp. corruption) responds to incentive structures.
Right, but how could you tell for yourself if you are in denial? The cognitive mechanisms of denial make it nigh-on-invisible to the afflicted person. As such, deniers really believe science is on their side, and that they are being scientific. Crazy, eh?
2) That little witticism I wrote at the beginning is in direct challenge to the tired old ideologue's soundbite of "ZOMG! EducateYourself!!!111BBQ!1!';)
I appreciate that immensely. To pick an example, every 9/11 truther says "educate yourself", and think that they actually know something about the issue, but they really have some deep knowledge on the issue. It's all madness of course. So can I'm explicitly acknowledging that.
The point is that, no matter how smart one is, you have to find the things that our cognitive defense mechanisms don't want us to find. It's easy to tell -- just find the thing you don't want to hear, that saps your motivation to listen, that makes you feel ungrounded. That's the thing that you are ignorant about, and that is specifically the thing that you need to educate yourself about.
Do you understand the point? I'm saying a 9/11 truther should understand *exactly* what the flaws are in their arguments -- not just search for "sound bite logic" to cover up perceived problems. I've noted that almost nobody can do this in practice, but this is specifically what I study, and have learnt something about how to do it. To have the motivation to do this, first you have to care if your beliefs are true or not. (Most people really don't care that much in practice.) Secondly, I believe you have to be an apostate of some sort.
My background is in (social) psychology and (artificial intelligence) engineering. I'm writing a book on this subject, and believe I know something about it. There is a reasonably good pop-psychology book "Vital Lies, Simple Truths" on the topic. Although not directly related, the real-psychology book "Mistakes were made: but not by me" is a 1st rate introduction into the world of cognitive blinkers.
The RGGI has better documents, but it's in this document. Poor people get rebates. Richer people get assistance winterizing their homes. Factories and businesses get similar investment assistance. It varies by state, and you can see the breakdowns of where the tax gets spent. Businesses get most of it (on average), and the document lists energy savings. The investments create jobs for construction and technology companies that provide measurable energy savings. The document lists (p5) that there have been $240million in saved energy bills to date, and lifetime projections for existing improvements of $2 billion.
This document gives some analysis on actual energy bills with the carbon tax in them, and you can see they hardly change. The analysis has assumptions in it, and this analysis is conservative. I've seen other analysis that shows on average that electricity bills are slightly less. The bill change is so close to zero that it simply fluctuates around zero over time.
This has created 1000s ongoing jobs directly -- far more than keystone will create. The improvement services are provided by the private sector, with individuals and businesses getting the investment money from the raise in their tax bill. (Money raised from the carbon tax.) The financial services industry is supposed to allocate investment dollars to businesses; however, they've failed miserably in doing this, and America's corporations are sitting on $1 trillion of cash looking for good investment opportunities. This program is doing something that the financial services industry has failed to do over the last 20 years.
As renewables come down in price (and solar is now only twice the price of coal, wind cheaper -- I'm talkin levelized cost), expect to see new financial instruments created as a threshold is crossed where it is cheaper for people to borrow money to pay 20 years of electricity bills at once (i.e., install solar). The carbon tax is a way of doing this without anybody borrowing money -- by putting a small price on carbon pollution. The net economic effect is (as demonstrated) less carbon pollution, which is what the world needs.
How could you ever tell if you're a skeptic, or a pseudo-skeptic? After-all, every pseudo-skeptic thinks they have the facts on their side, just like every other crank who ever lived. This is a way to tell for yourself, and it's not easy, and most people go to the grave believing in bullshit.
Not building one aircraft carrier is replaced by growth in the energy and infrastructure sector. It should create more jobs, since it will employ a wider array of low tech workers, who will save less, and in turn demand more goods and services from the economy. All I'm saying is that the government could re-prioritize a small amount of the military budget, and we'd be well on track to rebuilding the energy infrastructure into something more robust that can shuffle around large amounts of renewable energy sources a la what is seen in Europe and China.
In the real world, where economists measure these things, and such taxes have been implemented, carbon taxes reduce power bills for businesses and residents. There are other more ambitious examples. The part you might have missed is that the tax is revenue neutral. Every tax dollar collected goes back to the people paying the electricity bill. So your bill goes up $1 and then goes down $1. It shouldn't take too much thought to work out why such a procedure reduces peoples electricity bills overall -- its just basic high school level economics. Look it up if your interested.
Slashdot Mirror
The financial industry is sitting on trillions of investment dollars that are looking for a home. Wonder who buys all that sovereign debt? That's because there's nothing better out there for all that money. Or at least, that's the financial industries story. We're really looking at the failure of financial institutions to manage investment dollars. They will only lift their game insofar as things like kickstarter forces them to.
Err no.
Haven't you heard about the consensus. (Before claiming that science is not consensus, that is a different issue, and a way to avoid the point, that the vast majority of scientists disagree with you.)
How can you tell if its a political document rather than a science. First sign is it came from a political organization. The second is that its not peer reviewed.
Oh yeah, there are problems in how the final language of the report is written, which every county pushing their special interests into the language. Don't change the fact that the scientists signed off on the document.
Try reading some of the citations in the report. See how well they match suggested claims in the report.
That's a howler, because I *have* read some of the citations of the report, and it seems very well written to me. If you a referring to some particular controversy in some paragraph (or sentence) of AR5, then you should (1) provide a citation, and (2) admit that the report is larger than one paragraph or sentence.
Yea i know several scientists that where involved with the last IPCC report and vowed never again.
I know of complaints from scientists about how the science gets watered down, and a rosey sheen is painted onto some parts of the problem. Doesn't change the central point that I was making: we can and must move to a carbon neutral economy. Quibbling over semantics won't change that at all.
We are all victims... that's the point. There is a way to side-step these types of cognitive biases, which is a life-long obsession of mine. There are certain red flags which the mind tries to stop itself from paying attention to. I could go on at length about that; however, the linked material raises several red flags. Just something to think about.
Haha, sounds like you need to read: why politics makes us stupid.
Well, according to actual scientists, the politicized bullshit is on WUWT et al.
Who is buying all this oil and coal?
The value of all the proven reserves will plummet if the market for oil and coal decreases. That is the source of the disinformation campaign.
We cannot do without coal/oil in 2014, but with the correct incentives, we can change our infrastructure to do with a *lot* less, and emerging markets can skip the coal trap all-together.
According the IPCC AR5 WG3, sustained movements away from carbon over 90 years will do the trick. You can still drive your car, and so can your children.
There is a lot of detail to get into for why we should be introducing economic incentives now -- you can read all about it in the 1700 page report, and 10k references.
The solution *has* been proposed, and big oil is fighting it with a misinformation campaign as to whether AGW is happening at all.
We could fix this problem easily with barely any significant change to our style of life. Sure there will be winners and loser, and the losers will be big oil/coal companies -- some of the most powerful institutions in the world -- and that's why nothing is being done. It is really easy to throw mud and claim there is "confusion" on whether AGW is happening. Meanwhile, they tell themselves a story about how CO2 isn't a pollutant, and doing anything would be communism, and therefore morally wrong.
AGW is easy to solve compared to the little lies we tell ourselves about what is moral, in order to protect our little empires.
I'm pretty sure that most people agree on most things, and even policy wonks can find a huge amount of common ground to move forward on. Alas that politics is all about fighting. I heard one GOP insider saying that they push some of the conspiratorial nonsense to distract the base from making up nonsense about the GOP leadership.
If you are a conservative, you may enjoy this 20thC history of economics. The analysis leaves out a few important details (like the role of the OPEC crisis, and Nixon's price and wage controls, as causal factors in stagflation), but I think the general idea is pretty accurate. But no one theory of economics can claim to describe the economy, so it's important to realize that you are looking at a point of view that has blind spots, even if it is mostly true.
fad was pushed by a small minority of climatologists for a very short time.
Even that is overstating the case. Global cooling was *investigated* by a small number of scientists, including Steve Scheider (!). Time magazine and the media pushed it as a good story. Must have sold newspapers.
Cheaper things may or may not be better for the environment though. There can be a paradox, where you end up using more resources because there is more collective demand.
Also, you're ignoring externalities, which is kind-of the whole point.
Most Nobel Prizes for physics go to scientists who demonstrate an existing idea is wrong. There are some problems with Kuhn's analysis, in that at any point of time, you'll find multiple paradigms active in large fields, and you'll also see rather incremental changes in and out of dominate paradigms, for the most part. This is a pretty big flaw in his argument.
This is a rather sad point of view, because it is simply wrong. The strongest incentives are for the status quo. The largest industry in world (the energy sector) is staring down regulation, and they have the most to lose. If you care whether or not your beliefs are true or not, then do yourself a favour, and read "Merchants of Doubt" which chronicles in excruciating detail, the very real history of how companies manipulate the media to protect their interests.
Most scientists could make far more working in industry. (I sure could.) So they aren't chasing money. They are trying to understand cool new things, and leave a footnote in the lineage of human consciousness. You don't get that by being wrong. You get that by being new, innovative, and mostly: demonstrating the status quo is wrong. In fact, you've got the incentive structures completely ass backwards.
The reason for this is because the issue is now politically polarized. That means, roughly 50% of people will tend towards trusting different sources of information on the issue. We're talking tribalism, not argumentation.
Many GOP congress-critters and senators know that global warming is a real and present danger, but cannot hope to speak up in public, because of the super-polarized political dynamics, and the fact that the GOP depends on a rather paranoid and conspiratorial base. (In contrast, the Dems distance themselves from liberal crazies.)
It should be modded "sad". There are ways to green the energy system without raising the out-of-pocket costs to consumers, or having the government take on debt. If you knew something about the economics of the issue, then you'd already know that. Google is your friend. And an open mind.
Maybe. Coal emits a ridiculous amount of radiation... Also, according to the Torch report, 60k people died from Chernobyl, which is a tragedy, but a drop in the bucket compared to coal.
Oh Richy_T, in practice most people don't care if their beliefs are wrong or right -- because examining dis-confirming evidence is confronting. If you actually care if your beliefs are right or wrong, then I recommend reading "Merchants of Doubt" which analyzes (sometimes in laborious depth) the ozone whole, acid rain, and star wars, and the disinformation campaigns around them.
Nothing is permanent. They earth's climate has 'changed' drastically over several billion years.
This is such a vapid statement. Obviously the rate of change is what is concerning. I assume you know that from the rest of your post, right?
Richy_T, this seems like nitpicking to me. Obviously a cost-benefit analysis of pollution is at the heart of assessing what to do. That means, we first have to identify problems (or potential problems) with compounds, and then see what the cheapest/most effective options (or research/demonstrate there is not problem).
The only real problem with this is corruption. But surprise, it's an imperfect world, and even corruption (esp. corruption) responds to incentive structures.
Right, but how could you tell for yourself if you are in denial? The cognitive mechanisms of denial make it nigh-on-invisible to the afflicted person. As such, deniers really believe science is on their side, and that they are being scientific. Crazy, eh?
2) That little witticism I wrote at the beginning is in direct challenge to the tired old ideologue's soundbite of "ZOMG! EducateYourself!!!111BBQ!1!' ;)
I appreciate that immensely. To pick an example, every 9/11 truther says "educate yourself", and think that they actually know something about the issue, but they really have some deep knowledge on the issue. It's all madness of course. So can I'm explicitly acknowledging that.
The point is that, no matter how smart one is, you have to find the things that our cognitive defense mechanisms don't want us to find. It's easy to tell -- just find the thing you don't want to hear, that saps your motivation to listen, that makes you feel ungrounded. That's the thing that you are ignorant about, and that is specifically the thing that you need to educate yourself about.
Do you understand the point? I'm saying a 9/11 truther should understand *exactly* what the flaws are in their arguments -- not just search for "sound bite logic" to cover up perceived problems. I've noted that almost nobody can do this in practice, but this is specifically what I study, and have learnt something about how to do it. To have the motivation to do this, first you have to care if your beliefs are true or not. (Most people really don't care that much in practice.) Secondly, I believe you have to be an apostate of some sort.
My background is in (social) psychology and (artificial intelligence) engineering. I'm writing a book on this subject, and believe I know something about it. There is a reasonably good pop-psychology book "Vital Lies, Simple Truths" on the topic. Although not directly related, the real-psychology book "Mistakes were made: but not by me" is a 1st rate introduction into the world of cognitive blinkers.
The RGGI has better documents, but it's in this document. Poor people get rebates. Richer people get assistance winterizing their homes. Factories and businesses get similar investment assistance. It varies by state, and you can see the breakdowns of where the tax gets spent. Businesses get most of it (on average), and the document lists energy savings. The investments create jobs for construction and technology companies that provide measurable energy savings. The document lists (p5) that there have been $240million in saved energy bills to date, and lifetime projections for existing improvements of $2 billion.
This document gives some analysis on actual energy bills with the carbon tax in them, and you can see they hardly change. The analysis has assumptions in it, and this analysis is conservative. I've seen other analysis that shows on average that electricity bills are slightly less. The bill change is so close to zero that it simply fluctuates around zero over time.
This has created 1000s ongoing jobs directly -- far more than keystone will create. The improvement services are provided by the private sector, with individuals and businesses getting the investment money from the raise in their tax bill. (Money raised from the carbon tax.) The financial services industry is supposed to allocate investment dollars to businesses; however, they've failed miserably in doing this, and America's corporations are sitting on $1 trillion of cash looking for good investment opportunities. This program is doing something that the financial services industry has failed to do over the last 20 years.
As renewables come down in price (and solar is now only twice the price of coal, wind cheaper -- I'm talkin levelized cost), expect to see new financial instruments created as a threshold is crossed where it is cheaper for people to borrow money to pay 20 years of electricity bills at once (i.e., install solar). The carbon tax is a way of doing this without anybody borrowing money -- by putting a small price on carbon pollution. The net economic effect is (as demonstrated) less carbon pollution, which is what the world needs.
There is no economic catastrophe.
How could you ever tell if you're a skeptic, or a pseudo-skeptic? After-all, every pseudo-skeptic thinks they have the facts on their side, just like every other crank who ever lived. This is a way to tell for yourself, and it's not easy, and most people go to the grave believing in bullshit.
Not building one aircraft carrier is replaced by growth in the energy and infrastructure sector. It should create more jobs, since it will employ a wider array of low tech workers, who will save less, and in turn demand more goods and services from the economy. All I'm saying is that the government could re-prioritize a small amount of the military budget, and we'd be well on track to rebuilding the energy infrastructure into something more robust that can shuffle around large amounts of renewable energy sources a la what is seen in Europe and China.
In the real world, where economists measure these things, and such taxes have been implemented, carbon taxes reduce power bills for businesses and residents. There are other more ambitious examples. The part you might have missed is that the tax is revenue neutral. Every tax dollar collected goes back to the people paying the electricity bill. So your bill goes up $1 and then goes down $1. It shouldn't take too much thought to work out why such a procedure reduces peoples electricity bills overall -- its just basic high school level economics. Look it up if your interested.