Upton on Environment
March 24th, 2010 at 2:00 pm by David FarrarSimon Upton writes:
I am shortly to take up a position at the OECD leading its Environment Directorate. …
The OECD was established to help governments with their thinking. While its origins may have been in the reconstruction of Europe after 1945, it has become a genuinely global policy resource with new members (such as Chile) joining as rising living standards dissolve the boundaries of the old “developed” world.
The OECD is one of the more useful global bodies.
As an economics-based institution, the OECD is dedicated to using economic analysis to highlight the tradeoffs its members face. It is easily caricatured (like Treasuries) as an organisation that seeks to reduce everything to dollars and cents. Clearly, not everything can be reduced to monetary values. But many things can be, and to the extent that the costs of alternatives can be placed on a common footing, decision-making should be improved.
To provide one very simple example: work at the OECD has shown that the costs of alternative CO2 reduction policies can vary by several orders of magnitude. Subsidies to biofuels can, in some instances, mean spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars for each ton of CO2 avoided – way above the sorts of carbon taxes that have been discussed and discounted.
And biofuel subsidies or quotas have been shown to have devastating effect on food supply, as land is converted.
Countries may be able offer good reasons for such outcomes. But it is harder to do so when the costs of alternatives are made transparent. This may explain one of the conundrums surrounding much environmental policy analysis. Consistently, the advice is to place a price on scarce resources. If they carry a price, they need to be measured; if they’re measured, they get managed. We don’t tend to waste things we have to pay for.
And this is why I do support putting a price on carbon – either through a carbon tax, or an ETS. It’s the same reason I don’t like tertiary courses which are “free” to the user – you get huge wastage, and the moment people do have to pay for something, you do have an incentive not to waste it.
There is dispute over the indirect warming effects of greenhouse gas emissions, but there is basically no dispute over the direct warming effects. Hence for me the debate isn’t over whether one should have a price on carbon, to cover externalities, but what that price should be.
Related posts:
- Green policy on carbon credits and debits
- Upton on Mapua
- More on fracking being great for the environment
- Labour adopts National climate change policy
March 24th, 2010 at 2:17 pm
Meanwhile in France…
“The government said its energy tax was being postponed indefinitely in order not to “damage the competitiveness of French companies”, fearing that it would be too risky for France to go it alone without the rest of the EU. Brussels has announced plans for an EU-wide tax, but the initiative already looks doomed.”
But we’re forging ahead with our ETS because appearing virtuous is more important than the competitiveness of NZ companies.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/7507015/France-ditches-carbon-tax-as-social-protests-mount.html
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
“There is dispute over the indirect warming effects of greenhouse gas emissions, but there is basically no dispute over the direct warming effects. ”
DPF – Can you clarify what you mean by this please?
[DPF: AFAIK all scientists agree that everything else being equal, more GGs will trap more heat, and lead to some warming. This is what you call the direct effect. The likely impact is fairly modest - 1.5 degrees or so I think.
Where there is disagreement is over the indirect effects, such as impact on water vapour, and when these indirect effects will lead to greater and greater warming. Most think it will, but not all.]
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
Simon Upton is the lunatic who first signed us up to the Rio Earth Summit / Kyoto / ETS/ carbon tax / Copenhagen nonsense. Remember that when you pay more for petrol, electricity and anything produced with them from 1 July this year.
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 2:26 pm
“And this is why I do support putting a price on carbon – either through a carbon tax, or an ETS.”
Pricing is of course the best policy outcome. The logical leap you make here though is that carbon is bad and therefore needs a price – i.e. you solve for something which may not in fact need solving. You can still get to bad policy answers if you do that.
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
I’m surprised DPF is still one of the deluded. CO2 is not a pollutant and should not be taxed or traded.
[DPF: It is not a pollutant, just as water is not a pollutant. But both can be bad in very high quantities, and both can have a cost]
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 2:33 pm
KiwiGreg – pricing is not the best policy outcome (assuming, as you point out, that you think carbon is a problem). Markets are best for delivering the greatest efficiency and highest utility, but they do so in unpredictable ways – unpredictable ways because markets will always do a better job in deciding what will deliver the greatest efficiency and highest utility that any individual.
But when a government has a clearly defined objective that it wants to achieve no matter what – reach Berlin, invent an atom bomb, land on the moon, reduce the amount of carbon in the air etc etc – then the best way to do it is for the Government to get on and do it – in this case, by investing in agriculture science, planting trees on Crown land and launching geo-engineering projects ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoengineering ).
Don’t get me wrong – AGW is almost certainly nonsense – but if you did want to fix it, you’d have a Manhatten Project not set up markets.
You may ask yourself why Al Gore and other alarmists don’t advocate that but prefer “prices” and “markets” – in one of the few cases where they don’t make sense.
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 2:39 pm
Tried breathing the stuff on its own. Works out pretty well.
My interpretation is that the majority consider that the release of CO2 does raise the average temperature through ‘trapping heat’ i.e. the Venus effect. However his qualification is there is much debate over what this actually means, i.e. is it a bad thing or good thing. Does it lead to climate change or not etc.
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Joh Key promised that NZ would be a fast follower, that we would align ourselves with Australia so why the hell wont he put the ETS on hold. The holes in the science are quite substantial and with public opinion being up ended Key needs to be careful on this one as it will bite him hard and you need to look no further than Abbotts remarkable run in Australia.
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Jeff83 – try breathing oxygen on its own. Eventually that won’t turn out well either. What’s your point?
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Jeff83, then you support labelling Nitrogen and Oxygen as pollutants too then ? Try breathing either in pure form for any length of time; so a fatuous answer.
Where I suggest David is muddled is that there is not a lot of dispute on the effect of CO2 in a laboratory (although Arrhenius did get his calculations wrong initially), however the impact of CO2 in the atmosphere, the real world highly dynamic and chaotic atmosphere, is far less obvious. Although basic physics would suggest that more CO2 means warming, in practice the feedback loops are so poorly understood that providing any sort of theoretical proof is very difficult. What we are left with are empirical proofs based on data; there’s more CO2 now and it’s warming, hence hypothesis proved ?!?
Not so fast, a recent (2009) paper by Beenstock and Reingewertz analysed the relationship between CO2 and temperature, (using the proper statistical tools for the purpose based on the attributes of the actual data) and found that CO2 concentrations were not related to temperature, but the rate of change of CO2 concentration is. Is this a valid result, well, certainly they use more advanced statistics than is usual in climate science, and it is based on the actual data not on some theoretical concept of what the data should be like, but it certainly is possible that although the data does appear to contain “unit roots” (look it up, takes too long to expound), that may be an artifact, and this is a hotly debated point. Although, even if an artifact, the statistics should depend on the actual data attributes, not on the theoretical attributes, IMHO. That said, it does highlight the uncertainties in the real world around the whole anthropogenic climate change debate.
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
Too right, Jeff83. Same with nitrogen, which makes 76% of the air. Let’s try breathing that on its own, watch people drop dead, then “logically” classify it as a “pollutant”. Or even argon at nearly 1% for that matter. The fact some believe a trace gas like C02 that’s less than 0.004% of the atmosphere, vital for photosynthesis and the very foundation of life on this planet is a “pollutant” is absolutely terrifying. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities e.g. supporting biofuel subsidies that cause riots and deaths in the impoverished Third World from spiraling food prices as we’ve already seen. Disgusting and immoral.
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Ed Snack: Bet me to it. Also, I got it wrong. CO2 is 0.04%, not 0.004%.
Altogether now: “Love is hate. War is peace. CO2 is a pollutant.”
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 3:33 pm
Not Gore, but a smattering of environmental orgs, whether they’re ‘alarmists’ or not I don’t know:
http://apolloalliance.org/about/endorsers/
Gore’s been a director of Google and Apple for a decade or so, so that might(?) inform his ‘market’ approach.
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
CO2 is a pollutant.
Who cares. You could call it ‘waffle gas’ and it wouldn’t matter – semantics are a distraction from the science of its effects.
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 3:56 pm
The Science Museum is acknowledging growing scepticism about climate change by changing the name and contents of a new gallery devoted to the subject.
London’s 100-year-old museum is to abandon the name ‘climate change gallery’ in favour of the neutral ‘climate science gallery’, its director has confirmed.
And it will refrain from scaring visitors with apocalyptic predictions of rising sea levels at its £4million gallery by adopting a less bias approach, acknowledging legitimate doubts about the impact to man-made emissions on the climate.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1260191/Science-Museum-change-new-climate-change-museum.html#ixzz0j3iiLtlA
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
“There is dispute over the indirect warming effects of greenhouse gas emissions, but there is basically no dispute over the direct warming effects. ”
DPF – Can you clarify what you mean by this please?
[DPF: AFAIK all scientists agree that everything else being equal, more GGs will trap more heat, and lead to some warming. This is what you call the direct effect. The likely impact is fairly modest - 1.5 degrees or so I think.
Where there is disagreement is over the indirect effects, such as impact on water vapour, and when these indirect effects will lead to greater and greater warming. Most think it will, but not all.]
ok – thanks.
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 4:08 pm
stephen: words have meaning, words have consequences. Sometimes deadly ones. e.g. “Judenfrei”.
CO2. Is. Not. A. Pollutant. We don’t need to tax it or control. Plants love it, and there’s no evidence CO2 in current concentrations will cause runaway catastrophic warming and chaotic weather even if tripled. There are other kinds of real pollution and other issues we generally face as a species we should be focusing on.
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
It appears you can fit historic CO2 levels into any number of models and get much less CO2 into the 21st century, so we still a a long way from understanding.. here’s the latest.
http://tinyurl.com/yzmodve
On a different tack, CO2 is simply a pin left standing after application of a bowling ball. It isn’t a scientific explanation but a process of elimination.. a blunt artifact of correlation and cause.
JC
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
davidp@217pm
Meanwhile in France………Sarky had disastrous local elections results,could that have anything to do with it?Doesn’t want to be seen to be heaping more financial woe on a struggling electorate.
Meanwhile here in LaLa land our power and petrol about to go up…..will the sheeple take it lying down? Does John Key care?
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 6:54 pm
Wake up John key is not a visionary leader but a gambler.
So we will continue to slide further down the slippery slope of mediocrity. More taxes, taxes that like a lot of the rest of the Nats policy is based on false premise.
http://www.nzcpr.com/weekly221.htm
Vote:March 24th, 2010 at 8:02 pm
David, you seem a little to the left lately. Who got to you? John Key? The IPCC emails have been proven to come from IPCC and the stats have been fudged. Everyone except New Zealand is holding off on the ETS. By the way, how much will New Zealand pay in the line of taxes when Ruapehu erupts? David, you should be ashamed of yourself. But wait unitl the sticker shock hits the public when the ETS bill goes into effect except the maori elite who are laughing all the way to the bank. The ETS is the most rediculous bill and will let petrol and electric companies make more money.
Vote:March 25th, 2010 at 7:59 am
Question for you David. When you say you support a price on carbon do you mean real measured carbon dioxide or do you mean the bullshit carbon dioxide equivalents they use. For example. A cow can belch methane and in the process emit huge quantities of these CO2 equivalents. Yet there is not one more molecule of extra CO2 or methane in the atmopshereafterwards. It is phisically impossible for an animal that is part of a process that recycles carbon (real CO2) from the atmopshere and back to the atmopshere to increase by a single molecule any greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
Vote:Yet they assign all these CO2 equivalents which are nothing but a joke and a nonsense to such an activity. What is more neither MAF or NIWA or Nick Smith can explain how livestock emissions can cause global warming. The UN definition of climate change is that it is caused by human activity which alters the composition of the atmopshere. An activity which adds nothing to the composition of the atmosphere can not alter it so an animal belching is outside the definition of climate change. That is nearly one third of NZ’s emissions do not exist except on a piece of paper.
So do you support a tax on these rubbish carbon dioxide equivalents or just the real ones. I would be interested to know.
March 25th, 2010 at 9:47 pm
I cannot believe the complete tossers like Upton that still exist debating the science fiction of global warming.
It does my head in just thinking people can bother with this crap.
Vote: