NewsforDev | News for Development News

Dossiers

ACP-EU

CTA

ICT

ICT4D

S&T

S&T4D

Trade

World News

Submit Source

New User

	Sources:
	Eldis \| Climate change

	New Scientist \| Climate change \| News

	ClimateChangeCorp \| News

	Desertification \| Web log

	The Economist \| Environment

	Reason magazine \| Global warming

	SciDev \| Climate change \| News

	The Independent \| Climate change \| News

	Climate Debate Daily \| Headlines

Eldis / Climate change

Integrating mitigation measures and development goals in South Africa
03 07 2008 Not only does South Africa have an extremely energy-intensive economy based primarily on coal, leading to relatively high emissions, but it simultaneously ...

Tackling the food crisis and climate change: an agenda for rich countries at the G8
03 07 2008 The year 2008 is halfway to the deadline for reaching the Millennium Development Goals. Despite some progress, this article argues that they will not ...

How credible are corporate claims to 'carbon neutrality'?
03 07 2008 As concerns about climate change grow, the concept of “carbon neutrality' has captured the corporate imagination and is being embraced ...

More...

New Scientist / Climate change / News

Greenland ice sheet slams the brakes on
03 07 2008 Fears that meltwater could increase the speed at which glaciers flow into the sea, rapidly destroying the ice sheet, may be unfounded

Which countries would you pick for your climate team?
02 07 2008 A new map shows which countries are doing the most to combat climate change, with Latvia and Slovakia getting top marks

Cleaned up skies explain surprise rate of warming
02 07 2008 A decrease in air pollution may account for half of the warming experienced in Europe over the last 30 years

More...

Desertification / Web log


Desertification and poverty, agriculture and horticulture in the drylands

Who will feed the world? (Google / WelcomEurope)
08 07 2008 Read at : Google Alert - desertificationhttp://www.welcomeurope.com/default.asp?id=1300&idnews=4793Who will feed the world? Towards diverse, sustainable forms of agriculture as drivers of developmentBy 2050, the world’s population will have reached 9 billion. To cope with demographic growth and the consequent increase in food demand, agriculture must double its production in the next 30 years. To meet [...]

Land degradation affects over 20 pc of cultivated areas (Google / The Hindu)
08 07 2008 Read at : Google Alert - desertificationhttp://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/015200807031021.htmLand degradation affects over 20 pc of cultivated areasNew York (PTI): Land degradation is on the rise in many parts of the world and is affecting more than 20 per cent of all cultivated areas, a new United Nations report says. The study involving data taken over a 20-year [...]

ACHIEVING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT (Google / ECOSOC / 7th Space)
08 07 2008 Read at : Google Alert - desertificationhttp://7thspace.com/headlines/285835/economic_and_social_council_opens_high_level_segment_of_substantive_session_at_headquarters_on_theme_achieving_sustainable_development.htmlECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCIL OPENS HIGH-LEVEL SEGMENT OF SUBSTANTIVE SESSION AT HEADQUARTERS ON THEME ‘ACHIEVING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT’President Says Rising Commodity Prices, Deepening Income Disparities,Climate Change ‘Serious Threats to Our Efforts to Lift People Out of Poverty’With soaring commodity prices and the onset of global warming threatening to undo hard-won [...]

More...

The Economist / Environment

A world of troubles to tackle
08 07 2008 The G8 leaders, meeting in Japan, have many challenges but few tools THE leaders of the G8 group of rich countries kicked off three days of annual summitry hosted by Japan in Toyako on the northern island of Hokkaido on Monday July 7th. The remoteness of the venue--a bubble-era resort hotel overlooking Lake Toya--and an overwhelming police presence around the summit and Japan's main cities appear to have prevented the scale of anti-globalisation protests and street violence that have disrupted recent gatherings of the world's self-appointed steering group, including last year's summit at Heiligendamm in Germany. But even without the protests, the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, the United States, Japan and Russia, half of them new to their job, will be aware of how much the world has changed since Heiligendamm. At last year's summit the price of oil was at less than half today's $140 a barrel. The world price of rice and other grains gave few signs of doubling, threatening political stability in Africa and Asia and mocking earlier G8 commitments to reducing global poverty. Meanwhile, mention then of structured investment vehicles or Northern Rock to a G8 leader would have been met with a blank stare. ...

Could do better
04 07 2008 Democrats in the House and the Senate have not been as green as their word WANDER through the marble hallways of Washington's Capitol and look up. Screwed into the sconces and lanterns of one of the city's oldest buildings are the glowing helices of very 21st-century compact fluorescent bulbs. Downstairs, Hill staffers eat off compostable plates. And soon the spotlights that illuminate the Capitol's great dome--so inefficient that their heat requires workmen to wear special suits in order to handle them--will be replaced with more efficient LED bulbs. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker, came into office last year promising a slew of green initiatives, including an overhaul of her House of Representatives itself, which is on track to be carbon-neutral by December. More significant are the legislative achievements the Democratic majority proudly touts, particularly last year's passage of the first increase in car fuel-efficiency standards for three decades. Now Congress is moving to preserve millions of acres of wilderness, far more than it has done in preceding years, setting aside land in states from California to West Virginia. ...

A balance of risk
04 07 2008 Pesticides keep food edible and cheap. On the other hand they are, by definition, poisonous. Europe's legislators thus face a dilemma WHAT is the difference between risk and hazard? Quite a lot, it seems, if you make or use pesticides. Everybody hates them (dangerous, unnatural things). But everybody likes their benefits (cheap and unblemished food). Sensibly regulating their manufacture and use is thus a minefield--but one that Europe's politicians and bureaucrats are now attempting to cross without getting blown up. The difference between hazard and risk, in this context, is that hazard is something you measure in a laboratory by finding out how much of a substance you need to kill or injure an experimental animal. Risk is something you measure in the real world. Risk depends not just on how toxic a chemical is, but on how it is actually used, how much of it is used and how often it is used. At the moment, Europe's rules on pesticides are based on risk. However, a piece of legislation regulating plant-protection products, which is awaiting its final reading in the European Parliament later this year, will shift the basis of the law towards an assessment of hazard. ...

More...

Reason magazine / Global warming

Four Ways of Looking at Global Warming Policy*
02 07 2008 Assume man-made global warming is a big problem. What should we do about it? The four general policies currently in play are (1) cap-and-trade; (2) carbon taxes; (3) encourage economic growth and allow richer future generations to deal with any problems; and (4) massive government-funded low carbon energy research. Of course, these policies can be mixed and matched in various ways, but all involve the invention and deployment of new low-carbon energy technologies. The first two proposals do it by raising the price of carbon-based energy relative to low-carbon energy technologies. The third one implicitly melds the two-century-long trend toward progressive decarbonization of our energy supplies with a strategy of adaptation. The fourth one aims to accelerate technological innovation by stimulating the research and engineering pipeline. These policy alternatives came into better focus for me this past week after I participated in the Exploring Breakthroughs in Entrepreneurship and Public Policy conference sponsored by the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE) in Bozeman, Montana. The FREE conference concentrated chiefly on the ideas proposed in the book Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (2007) by self-described progressives Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. The FREE conferees included Democratic Party activists, libertarian and conservative think tankers, and academicians spanning the ideological spectrum from right to left. In general, Shellenberger and Nordhaus are proponents of a crash program of government-funded low carbon energy technology research as the chief way to respond to the challenges of man-made global warming. In June, Americans were treated to the spectacle of Congress trying to pass the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, which would have established a cap-and-trade program to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases. Under a cap-and-trade scheme, the government sets an overall limit to the amount of greenhouse gases—chiefly carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels—that can be emitted. Under the Lieberman-Warner proposal the emissions cap would decline 70 percent by 2050. Emissions permits would be divvied up among emitters and those that can more easily reduce their emissions would have leftover permits that they can sell to companies that find it more difficult to cut. The idea is that this "market" in emissions would set a price for carbon dioxide that would encourage entrepreneurs and inventors to develop new low-carbon energy technologies. When climate push comes to shove, politicians prefer cap-and-trade schemes. Why? Because they don't have to explicitly tell voters the bad news that they are raising the prices of electricity, natural gas, and gasoline. Senators and representatives instead cloak this mandated energy price increase in the virtuous language of the market, disguising the fact that cap-and-trade is really a hidden tax. Issuing emissions permits is like coining money. If the denizens of Capitol Hill decide to auction the permits,it will provide a vast new revenue stream with which members of Congress can play. On the other hand, if Congress decides to give away emissions permits, members can reward favored corporate constituencies, producing all of the usual problems associated with campaign-financing and post-government service rewards. In other words, carbon cap-and-trade proposals are a magnet for rent-seekers, groups lobbying government for taxing, spending, and regulatory policies that provide financial benefits at the expense of taxpayers and consumers. Some savvy corporations are already jockeying for Congressional cap-and-trade favors. What about carbon taxes? Many economists regard this option as the most transparent and effective policy. The idea is that such a tax would be ramped up in a predictable way over time to achieve the desired emissions reductions. Ideally, the money raised by the new carbon tax would be used to cut other taxes so as not to increase the overall tax burden. I have generally been in favor of a carbon tax because of its transparency and the possibility of reducing taxes on productive activities. However, during the FREE conference, Shellenberger and Nordhaus very persuasively argued that the very transparency of a carbon tax makes it a political non-starter. It is hard to imagine an American politician telling voters he is going to double the amount they pay for electricity, natural gas, and gasoline. On to the third policy: encourage economic growth and future adaptation to whatever climate change happens. People have been moving from fuels with higher carbon content (wood and coal) to fuels with lower or no carbon content (natural gas or nuclear power) for the past two centuries. However, the pace of decarbonization is not moving fast enough to have much effect on whatever trajectory man-made global warming will take. The International Energy Agency projects that by 2030 overall energy demand will rise by 55 percent and 84 percent of that increase will be supplied by fossil fuels. Greenhouse gas emissions will grow by 57 percent by 2030. How much wealth will people in 2050 have at their disposal for adapting to whatever climate change may happen? A crude estimate derived by calculating a compounded average economic growth rate of 3 percent per year from now until 2050 projects that the world's $47 trillion economy will grow to $163 trillion. Today, the global average income per capita is $7,200. In 2050, assuming 10 billion inhabitants, average income will more than double to $16,300. If efforts to slow global warming reduce economic growth rates by half of a percent, total world product would drop to $133 trillion and average incomes would be $3,000 less. One stab at determining whether or not it is worth slowing down economic growth to prevent climate change is to ask if global warming is expected cause more than $30 trillion in economic damage each year by 2050. Finally, what about fostering an energy technology revolution? Shellenberger and Nordhaus assert that the old "pollution paradigm" of environmentalism is played out because it frames the climate change and energy challenges "as a forced choice between poverty and environmental ruin." What we need now, they argue, is an explicitly pro-growth, pro-prosperity politics for the 21^st Century. So they are advocating a ten-year $300 billion energy research program as the way to address climate change. "The goal of the program," they claim, "is to bring the price of clean energy down to the price of coal and natural gas as quickly as possible." Another advantage is that emissions from rapidly developing economies like China and India could be cut if low carbon energy can be made as cheap as fossil fuels. As models, Shellenberger and Nordhaus pointed to government programs that funded the first transcontinental railroad, the Manhattan Project, the Interstate Highways, massive Defense Department purchases of microchips, and the Apollo moon shot. Shellenberger and Nordhaus favor a modest carbon tax which would both fund the research and encourage companies to adopt the new low carbon energy technologies. Shellenberger and Nordhaus are not alone in pushing this idea. Skeptical environmentalist and head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center Bjorn Lomborg also favors a massive government-funded energy R&D program. At the FREE conference my role was to be the skunk at their energy research garden party by pointing out the poor record of Congress and federal bureaucrats in picking research winners and losers, e.g., the ignominious end of the Synfuels Corporation, various automobile technology fiascos, the bankruptcies of the subsidized transcontinental railroads, and so forth. In addition, I and other conference participants argued that members of Congress would be happy to fritter away $30 billion annually by earmarking it for projects in their states and districts regardless of scientific and commercial merit. Shellenberger and Nordhaus countered that I was discounting the learning that entrepreneurs gained from government-subsidized failures which led to more productive research paths later. Perhaps. Cap-and-trade is a rent-seeking disaster, carbon taxes are a political pipe dream, and furthering economic growth and adaptation doesn't require any specific global warming policy. Is there a way to make government-funded energy research less prone to rent-seeking? American Enterprise Institute fellow Steven Hayward suggested that the bipartisan Base Realignment and Closure Commissions (BRACs) might serve as a model for insulating an energy research program from Congressional and bureaucratic meddling. BRACs were created because whenever the Defense Department wanted to close a military base, the locals would petition their representatives and senators to prevent it. In the 1980s and 1990s, these commissions made recommendations to close nearly 100 military bases as a package on which Congress could vote only yes or no. Similarly, an energy research commission could be set up to devise a package of $30 billion annually in energy research grants for which the Congress could only vote to approve or disapprove as a whole. Would this work? The example of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—which is supposedly insulated from political meddling—suggests caution. The NIH peer review system which annually distributes $15 billion in research grants suffers chiefly from a lack of bureaucratic imagination. Shellenberger and Nordhaus want to dedicate the revenues from a modest carbon tax to funding their low carbon energy research scheme. As an alternative, National Center for Policy Analysis senior fellow Sterling Burnett proposed a twofer—would they support oil drilling on the outer continental shelves? Drilling could supply energy in the short to medium term while leasehold monies and royalties could be committed to low carbon energy research. Let's just say that they took Burnett's proposal under advisement. During one of the breaks, I suggested to Nordhaus that a Machiavellian chief executive might cynically come out in favor of their proposals as a way to derail, at least temporarily, much more expensive cap-and-trade and carbon tax schemes. Which of the four policies is likely to be adopted? Given that both John McCain and Barack Obama favor cap-and-trade, get ready for an orgy of rent-seeking on Capitol Hill in '09. *Apologies to Wallace Stevens. Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

An Emergency Cooling System for the Planet
10 06 2008 Last week, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) held a conference that asked if geoengineering was a feasible solution to lower our planet's temperature, at least temporarily. The question is what to do if man-made global warming turns out to be a serious problem? At AEI, climatologist Tom Wigley from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado defined geoengineering as the deliberate modification of the earth's short wave radiation budget in order to reduce the magnitude of climate change. In his presentation, Wigley looked mostly at two possible approaches to geoengineering: injecting sulfate or other aerosols into the stratosphere, and changing the reflectivity of clouds. Why consider geoengineering in the first place? As Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs wrote in Scientific American in April: "[O]ur current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people." So if we don't want to perpetuate poverty in the name of preventing climate change, geoengineering may be our way out. Why? Because geoengineering would provide more time for the world's economy to grow while inventors and entrepreneurs develop and deploy new carbon neutral energy sources to replace fossil fuels. Wigley also noted that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is a tremendous global collective action problem. It seems unlikely that fast-growing poor countries like India and China will agree cut back on their use of fossil fuels any time soon. If that's the case, then emissions reductions in rich countries would have almost no effect on future temperature trends. Geoengineering could give humanity more time to resolve this collective action problem, too. So let's take Wigley's second proposal first—changing the reflectivity of clouds. Researchers know that this can be done because it already happens with ship tracks. Ship exhaust over the oceans injects particles into the atmosphere that serve as cloud condensation nuclei, creating clouds in the wakes of ships. Ship exhaust produces and brightens clouds so that they cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space, but only by a little bit. However, recent modeling research by University of Edinburgh engineer Stephen Salter and his colleagues calculates that doubling the number of cloud condensation nuclei would more than compensate for any warming associated with a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This could be accomplished by having ships deliberately inject seawater into the atmosphere where salt particles would serve as extra cloud condensation nuclei. In 2006, Chemistry Nobelist Paul Crutzen proposed injecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere to reflect some sunlight back into space (an idea discussed by reason contributor Gregory Benford more than ten years ago). This might be done with giant cannons. Crutzen argues that it would cost between $25 and $50 billion per year to shoot enough sulfate particles into the stratosphere to reduce incoming sunlight by 1.8 percent. This would be enough to counter the predicted warming produced by doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide. An earlier study by Yale University economist William Nordhaus estimated that the sulfate injection proposal would cost about $8 billion per year. This compares nicely with the $125 billion per year Nordhaus calculated it would have cost the U.S. to implement the Kyoto Protocol. Wigley spent most of his time at AEI discussing the possible risks involved with the sulfate injection proposal. Wigley argued that sulfates injected into the stratosphere would be equal to only about 10 percent of those humanity already injects into the lower atmosphere, so this wouldn't greatly boost acid rain. In April, a study by some of Wigley's National Center for Atmospheric Research colleagues found that injecting sulfates would further deplete the ozone layer that shields the earth's surface from damaging ultraviolet light. Wigley simply noted in passing that even more recent research suggests that the damage to the ozone layer will be less than the April study estimated. Stratospheric sulfate injection might also change rainfall patterns, perhaps reducing precipitation from the monsoons on which millions of Asian farmers are dependent. In response to these worries, Wigley noted that stratospheric sulfates might reduce the intensity of monsoons by two to three percent which contrasts with a current monsoon variability of 30 percent. But one big problem that sulfate injection would not solve is the continuing acidification of the ocean that is occurring as extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere dissolves into the seas. This acidification could eventually pose problems for creatures such as mollusks and corals that use calcium carbonate to grow their shells and skeletons. What is the safe level at which to stabilize carbon dioxide? The current greenhouse gas concentrations are equivalent to 385 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide, up 100 ppm over pre-industrial levels. In the past some researchers suggested that stabilizing concentrations at 550 ppm would avoid the most serious effects of global warming. Now other researchers are arguing that we have to get back to 350 ppm. Wigley sees no signs that humanity is on a track to stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations at 550 ppm. Consequently, he believes that we will have to resort to geoengineering as a way to buy the time humanity needs to figure out how to cut carbon dioxide emissions. He foresees an effort to ramp up stratospheric sulfate injection over 75 years to counter the climatic effects of rising carbon dioxide concentrations. Stabilization can only be achieved by cutting current carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent. This means implementing highly unpopular policies of carbon rationing and higher energy prices. So some climate change researchers and environmental activists worry that the public and policymakers will see geoengineering as way to avoid making hard decisions. "If humans perceive an easy technological fix to global warming that allows for 'business as usual,' gathering the national (particularly in the United States and China) and international will to change consumption patterns and energy infrastructure will be even more difficult," writes Rutgers University environmental scientist Alan Robock. Perhaps. But that is not an argument against pushing ahead with a vigorous research program on geoengineering responses to climate change. Insisting on cuts in carbon dioxide emissions is like trying to require a healthy diet and exercise regimen to prevent heart disease. But when you have a heart attack, you are happy to have a bypass surgeon handy. Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Carbon: Tax, Trade, or Deregulate?
09 06 2008 On August 11, 2005, Ronald Bailey, reason’s science correspondent and the author of such enviro-skeptic books as Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Environmental Apocalypse, wrote the following words at reason online: “Anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up. All data sets—satellite, surface, and balloon—have been pointing to rising global temperatures. In fact, they all have had upward-pointing arrows for nearly a decade.”

Although there are still plenty of free market thinkers who aren’t yet ready to “hang it up,” the center of the debate has shifted in recent years from contested science to proposed policy. And with the prospect of an anti–global warming crusader—either Barack Obama or John McCain—joining forces with a Democratic Congress carrying years of pent-up environmentalist frustration, significant new global warming regulation isn’t a matter of “if” but “how much.” Assuming that humanity is contributing to the carbon-fueled warming of the planet, what, if anything should governments do? That question, it turns out, is just as contested among skeptics of environmental hysteria as the famous “hockey stick” graphs in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. So we discovered last October, when we matched Bailey on a climate change panel with Lynne Kiesling, a senior economics lecturer at Northwestern University (and former director of economic policy at the Reason Foundation) and Fred L. Smith, president and founder of the pro-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, which in 2002 published a Bailey-edited book entitled Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths.

Bailey painfully concluded that climate change “is a real problem” and reluctantly favored a tax on carbon. Kiesling pointed to the difficulty of assigning property rights to the atmosphere and tentatively came out for a “cap and trade” system of creating a market for pollution credits above a government-imposed ceiling. Smith robustly rejected both ideas in favor of private innovation. The debate, held at a reason-sponsored conference in Washington, D.C., was moderated by Matt Welch.

Click here to watch Lynne Kiesling, Ronald Bailey and Fred L. Smith debate climate change at the at the Reason in DC conference.

Lynne Kiesling: From an economic perspective, the problem of climate change is twofold. First, there are incomplete and uncertain property rights in the air. It’s ludicrous to imagine us each walking around with a bubble over our heads so that we can only breathe and use the privatized air sphere around us. Second, there’s a large number of affected parties. In the limit, some would argue the entire planet is affected.

When a common-pool resource is shared by millions of diverse individuals, defining the use rights over that resource is really hard and costly. This is the kind of situation in which decentralized market processes have trouble even emerging. In this imperfect world, we’re considering two imperfect alternative policies: a carbon tax and cap and trade.

Our experience with common-pool resources, ranging from agreements to share the team of oxen in the medieval village to the development of the sulfur dioxide acid rain program in the 1990s, tells us that effective policy focuses on reducing transaction costs and better defining property rights so that private parties can engage in mutually beneficial exchange. That’s the logic behind the carbon cap-and-trade policy.

Like all policies in such a complex area, it’s got problems itself. How do you allocate carbon permits? There’s the knowledge problem: How do we know how many carbon permits is the right number? Also, as a policy instrument, it’s prone to political manipulation. Electric utilities are already seriously jockeying to make sure they’re playing a part in getting the rules written and that they’re involved in determining the allocation mechanisms if such a policy comes into place.

Another problem is that unlike with sulfur dioxide, the likely participants are really heterogeneous. When we were dealing with sulfur dioxide, it was mostly large-scale central-generation power plants, a pretty homogeneous bunch.

A carbon tax is also prone to some of these problems, particularly the knowledge problem and the political manipulation problem. The benefits to a permit market that have been shown in other situations are that defining property rights and reducing transaction costs does a better job of taking advantage of diffuse private knowledge. It’s also more likely to induce the process that’s at the foundation of economic growth, which is innovation. So I tend to come down on the side of cap and trade, although it’s not a ringing endorsement.

People are already doing this voluntarily. I encourage you to look up a group called the Chicago Climate Exchange, or CCX. CCX is a global carbon permit financial market, and it’s got a nice portfolio of instruments. They’ve got spot permit markets. They’ve starting to do futures now. The entrepreneur behind this, Richard Sandor, has also talked about doing funky derivatives. The participants got together voluntarily and negotiated to determine the number of permits that they were going to have. There were participants on both sides—carbon producers and carbon sinks—so you had this multilateral stakeholder negotiation to determine the number of permits in the market.

Finally, I think most people fail to realize that the abysmal job we do of pricing electricity contributes substantially to our energy use. The only resources that are priced as badly as electricity in our economy are highways and water.

Retail competition and choice for consumers would increase the offering of time-differentiated dynamic pricing, which shifts resource and electricity use across time. Research shows that this promotes conservation and more efficient use of electricity, increases offerings of green power to consumers who want to choose a green power option, and increases the incentives to develop and adopt technologies, such as price-responsive appliances, that enable private individuals to control their own energy use.

So the message from me is this: It’s a complicated, imperfect world, and the policies we can adopt that induce innovation and harness diffuse private knowledge will be the most effective for this long-term problem. Ronald Bailey: Before we began this session, Fred Smith asked me would it be all right if he referred to me as a commie symp. I think that might be a little harsh. I hope I can persuade you of that.

I stand before you as somebody who’s been reporting and writing on environmental issues for over 20 years. To the extent that I’m known at all, I’ve been known as someone very skeptical of all kinds of environmentalist dooms. My first book was called Ecoscam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse. It pains me to have concluded, following the scientific data, that one of the dooms is a real problem.

As Lynne very ably pointed out, one of the problems with global warming is that it exists in a commons—that means the atmosphere is very hard to divide up and make into private property. When you have an environmental commons, we typically have two ways of handling that problem. One is that we privatize it. In many environmental issues, we’re moving in that direction. Fisheries, for example, are being privatized. Forests are being privatized. Water resources can be privatized as well.

The problem with air pollution—and global warming is a form of air pollution—is that I don’t see a good, easy way to privatize it. The transaction costs are too large. And if you can’t privatize it, you have to regulate it. So now the question is: What’s the least bad way to regulate? And that is why I’ve come out in favor of a carbon tax.

As a good libertarian, I thought I would like cap and trade. The problem is I’ve been watching the European attempt to do this, and it’s a complete disaster. The governments, not surprisingly, cheat constantly. Their carbon market collapsed a year ago because the governments allocated more permits for carbon emissions than were necessary to cover what was being emitted, so naturally the price went to zero. And if the Europeans can’t pull this off, how could you expect the world to pull this off?

I understand the diffuse knowledge problem—how markets can and, in fact, do marshal that kind of information in very good ways. The problem is that there’s no baseline for the rest of the world.
Idiotically, the Kyoto Protocol set it at 7 percent below what was emitted in 1990 for the 36 countries that signed the treaty. Well, how are you going to do that for China and India? We don’t know what they’re going to be emitting in 30 years. So I come out in favor of the tax because you have a baseline. You have a way of internationally monitoring that. The baseline is a zero tax and from that, you can build up. You could start the tax low and, as you gain more information about what the atmosphere is likely to do, you could adjust the tax over that time.

For consumers, for inventors, for innovators, a tax offers price stability in a way that the cap-and-trade markets don’t. For example, in the sulfur dioxide market, sulfur permits have ranged in price from $50 a ton to over $1,000 a ton. And for sulfur dioxide, it’s a smaller market. A carbon market would encompass the world.

Fred L. Smith: What’s the best way of addressing whatever risks there are in global warming? Should the risk of catastrophic global warming justify abandoning our general preference for freedom over coercion? Should we free market advocates champion carbon taxes or carbon rationing, some form of suppressing energy use, or should we favor economic liberalization? We’ve been working on that issue for two decades now. In that early period, I noticed that the catastrophists, the global warming alarmists, had to have answers to three questions positively. First: Does the science indicate significant evidence of imminent catastrophe? That is, is the earth warming significantly in a human-relevant way? Is the 0.7 degree centigrade increase over the last century offset or not by the 1,800 percent increase in wealth over that same period? Second: Is the warming impact negative or positive overall? I note in passing that more people seem to retire to Florida and Arizona than Lake Woebegone. Third: Can the political tools now available realistically restrict carbon use? We may endorse economic suicide. Europe may join us, but should we expect India and China to go back to the Stone Age just because of our political elites? Over the last decade, I think the evidence for all those questions has moved against the global warming catastrophists. There is evidence that there has been some warming, moderate amounts, but the idea that we’re facing imminent catastrophe has weakened. Our ability to do anything about CO2 increases for the next half-century is now obviously nonexistent. And the tensions we could create by pushing the world into some form of energy rationing, I think, are underestimated. Recall that in World War II, one of the incidents that pushed the war party into power in Japan was an energy boycott on that Asian nation. We are going to do that again with China. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Shouldn’t we be asking whether the risks of global warming are more or less than the risk of global warming policies? The costs of energy rationing are not trivial. Energy is what makes it possible to have mobility, to have labor-saving technology, to have lives that are comfortable, to have hope for the future. Energy rationing would lead to slower economic and technological growth, a darker, less human-friendly world. The trillions we’re talking about spending over the next generations on global warming could go to much better causes, could save lives and inspire hopes today. But we’ve been told—we’ve heard it from Ron, at least—that we must do something. Perhaps. But why must that something be the expansion of state power over our lives? Why do we limit ourselves to taxes or rationing? There are other alternatives out there. We could do some more R&D. We could mitigate. What about mirrors in space? What about fertilizing the oceans? Those of us who have looked at NASA and so forth are not overly enamored with government’s ability to underwrite those kind of policies, but we should be equally optimistic about government’s attempt to tax in this academic-blackboard economic way. Resiliency is what we should be talking about. Not whether taxes or quotas are the better way to suppress freedom, but how we can use the global warming concerns to advance an agenda of freedom. How do we find ways of accelerating economic and technological progress? How do we liberalize the economies of the world? How do we expand the institutions of liberty even into the air sheds? We can free biotechnology. I’m sure Ron and I both agree with that. If the world is hotter, colder, wetter, drier, we’re going to need the ability to modify our crops much more than we have today. Freeing biotechnology from the regulatory straitjacket it’s in today would be a way of doing that. As Lynne said, we could complete the job of freeing our electricity system, not just for pricing electricity but also for incentivizing the grid to be smarter and more robust so we can free the trapped electricity that sits idle throughout America. Move fire, storm, and other insurance out of the government subsidy range and put it back into the private sector so we can guide people away from living in high-risk areas. Unilateral free trade. Extend property rights to water. Liberalize energy exploration. Cuba can drill off the coast of Florida; why can’t America? Where is nuclear power? Certainly Al Gore hasn’t mentioned it. Eliminate the corporate income tax. Accelerate the turnover of capital goods and equipment. That would mean a much more efficient world to live in. Our agenda is the agenda of freedom, not the agenda of some form of a rational economic suicide pact. It is understandable that many people grow weary. I know people very close to me who have grown weary in this fight. We get a bit depressed when we realize that logic is for losers in the political process. It’s hard to be the dissident at the cocktail parties. Any of you who have had the situation where your friends look at you and shake their heads sadly and walk away know how hard it is, but our challenge remains to speak truth to power, to find ways to make good policy good politics. I chaired a global warming panel in Bucharest earlier this year. There are some European think tanks that have withdrawn from this battle also. It’s too costly, they say. It’s too difficult to resist the consensus. We have to give up a little bit. To them, I’ll argue as I do to you today, that we must fight; we must continue to risk. The loss of freedom in the global warming debate is far too great. That is our duty. That is our challenge. For events of this type have happened before. In August 1914, European nations found themselves trapped in a consensus, a set of entangling treaties that forced them to move in an inexorable way towards disaster, towards World War I. Edward Grey, the British foreign minister, noted, “The lamps are going out all across Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” Today, fears about global warming are pushing the world towards disaster. This time the threat is not just to the lamps of Europe but to the lamps of the world. Energy suppression, if it happens, might last for many lifetimes. Statist intellectuals still dominate the global warming debate. We economic liberals are few, but we few are the thin line resisting those who would return us to the Dark Ages. This is not any time to go wobbly. Matt Welch: Lynne, could you speak to Ron’s critique of cap and trade? Is it basically a great idea in theory that you’re wishing might work someday 20 years in the future? Is Europe really a catastrophe, and what’s keeping it from working? Kiesling: Just because Europe can’t implement this doesn’t mean the idea is bad. The E.U. carbon scheme is a poster child for what can happen when you have too centralized and too politically motivated a process for allocating the permits. The E.U. decided how many permits each country would have, then each country then got to allocate them among their industries as they saw fit. This was the most politicized process imaginable. With a good market design and good testing and good analysis, we could do better.

It does highlight the important fact that political manipulation is going to happen in whatever policy we choose. But I wouldn’t throw the idea out just because the E.U. can’t do it. There’s a lot of stuff the E.U. does really badly.

Smith: I have one strong procedural difference with both Ron and Lynne on this. The argument is that when you have a common property resource, your choices are either to privatize that resource, move towards institutions of liberty, or politicize it in some enlightened way as Lynne and Ron have talked about. But Ronald Coase said there’s always a third option, that the costs of transaction in that area are much higher than the failure to have transaction in that area and therefore we should allow evolution to proceed and see what creative solutions emerge. That is basically what we should be doing in the global warming area.

European taxes are just as bad as European cap and trade, and American taxes aren’t anything to write home about either. The idea that a tax policy will emerge through the political process unsullied is unlikely. Energy taxes in Europe and the United States are already a mess. If we raise them, they’ll be a bigger mess.

Bailey: One of the problems is that the new energy technologies are very unlikely, in my judgment, to arise merely because we ignore carbon dioxide. If it were already easy to create low-carbon energy, inventors would have done it. It would be here now. If you look at the projections from the International Energy Agency, the amount of energy the world will be using in the next 30 years or so is going to get much vaster. China is building one coal-fired plant a week, and they’re probably going to ramp it up to two a week. Those plants are going to be there for 50 years. If you think that carbon dioxide is a problem now—

Smith: And if you think energy rationing—

Bailey: Fred, when we privatize a forest, is that lumber rationing? When we privatize the fisheries, is that fish rationing? We have people pay for what it is that they use. If you could persuade me, which you have failed to do with your rhetoric, that we can in fact repair to markets to get this done, I would be more than happy to do that. I don’t want the lights of the world going out. But I also wonder, by the way—this is a question you’ve never answered when I’ve asked you several times—what temperature rise over the next century would in fact cause you to worry about humanity’s ability to adapt?

Smith: Over 20 degrees, certainly.
Bailey: How about—

Smith: Not 0.7.

Bailey: Not 0.7, but 6.

Welch: Ron, you mentioned at the beginning, sort of in jest, that it pains you to come to the conclusion that global warming is a problem. Is that a scientific approach, to be pained by the results? Has there been a mind-set to debunk when looking at this issue, and has that caused conclusions that were wrong?

Bailey: Yes, in some cases. I did not want this information to go in that direction. And I had good reason, given my career, to expect that it wouldn’t. The environmentalists have been wrong about the population problem. They were wrong about trace exposures to synthetic chemicals causing cancer. They were wrong about running out of natural resources. I’ve happily and joyfully reported this for years and annoyed a lot of people.

I, against my values, have decided that this is a problem. I would really like to be persuaded that classical liberalism and markets and so forth have a way of solving this problem. I’m still waiting for Fred’s proposal. I don’t think it can be done voluntarily around the world. The voluntary carbon markets are tiny—

Kiesling: It’s very unscaled.

Bailey: Right. And if you don’t have an economic incentive to participate in those carbon markets, like a tax or like a cap-and-trade permit, most people aren’t going to do it. Why would they? Why would they spend money that they don’t have to spend?

Kiesling: In this case of Chicago Climate Exchange, the biggest participants are Ford Motor and American Electric Power—the largest coal-fired generation owners in the country. So for them, it’s a strategic action. They’re hoping to forestall regulation but also it’s a P.R. and reputation capital building exercise.

Smith: I think one of the problems our movement has is we’re a think tank movement. We believe that if we just go out and talk to everybody for a few hours they’ll become libertarians. That’s not a wisely thought-through process, and it misses the whole point. Most people are—have to be—rationally ignorant. Our challenge is to make them understand that for their values, freedom is better than coercion. It’s why I think we have to recognize that where there are risks of global warming, there are also risks of global warming policies. I see nothing in Ron that represents any understanding of that balancing.

Welch: Following up on that, Fred, do you see some kind of political market value therefore in, for lack of a better word, Al Gore jokes? Is that a way to get the message across because at some point you realize you just want people to feel that they’re all part of the anti–Al Gore team more than being persuaded by your logic?

Smith: Ridicule is a very important tool. It’s one that has to be wielded very carefully. The difference between ridicule and being mean is very close, and I think sometimes libertarians are far too easily led into being mean. We win the debate and we lose the audience. I think ridicule by other people is damn useful. Every time liberals make fun of Gore, I love it. When we make fun of Al Gore, I get very nervous.

Bailey: And then you make fun of Al Gore.

Audience question: Ron, what entity would collect the carbon tax? Local government? Federal? The United Nations? And what would that money be spent on and how would it reduce actual CO2 usage?

Bailey: No, it would not be a U.N. tax. I’m channeling William Nordhouse, the Yale economist who does a lot of work in this area. Basically it would be a globally harmonized tax, but the money would be collected by each country and spent by the governments in each country.

In the ideal world, you would recycle that money by reducing other taxes, so the overall tax level in the country would not increase. What you would be doing is incentivizing people to conserve energy but also incentivizing people to innovate, to find new ways to produce energy that people would want using low-carbon technologies or carbon-sequestering technologies.

It’s a deep, dark secret, but back in the 1970s, during the glorious era of the Jimmy Carter administration, I was a regulator for three years.

Kiesling: You’ve seen the dark side.

Bailey: I’ve seen the dark side. I worked for the world’s most boring regulatory agency, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Kiesling: I knew he was going to say FERC when he said “boring.”

Bailey: And I think I understand some of the problems that go with regulation. My intellectual disdain for government was honed into a white-hot hatred after that experience. One of the things I got to regulate was the synfuels plant that you may all remember was being built in North Dakota. At the time, it was the world’s largest construction project. It cost $2.1 billion to build. It never produced any natural gas of any sort. That money, by the way, would have grown at 5 percent interest to $6.5 billion had it not been wasted.

Government does not innovate. So by creating a carbon tax you would encourage private people to marshal the information in response. So carbon tax is a price, to figure out better ways to make energy, low-carbon energy. I don’t know what those energies will be. I’m sure the government doesn’t know either, and I don’t want them wasting the money doing it.

Smith: I should point out that we have that experiment going on today. Europe—500 million people—experiences gasoline taxes in England of $8 a gallon. We experiment with $2.50, $3 a gallon. Yet one doesn’t find these new technologies rushing out of Europe. How high does—

Kiesling: Actually, that’s incorrect. All of the new diesel engines—

Smith: Oh, no. Diesel has nothing to do with the economics. Diesel has to do with the low tax of diesel and the fact that the air pollution laws don’t ban diesel in Europe. It’s not the energy taxes. It’s regulatory policy.

Bailey: So, Fred, are you saying that human beings are not clever enough to come up with low-carbon energy?

Smith: I’m saying that technocratic social engineering projects aren’t the best way to free the creative energies of mankind.

Bailey: Unfortunately, Fred, you haven’t shown a path for evolution to this. I’m sorry. I realize that you believe that somehow the invisible hand will take care of a commons problem always, but commons problems are solved by creating property.

Smith: Government.

Bailey: And the government helps create property, defends property. It’s an institution.
It’s not a great institution. Right now all the big emitters are coming to Washington and begging for free permits so they can get tons of money, basically, and extract it from our pockets—which is another reason I don’t like cap-and-trade systems. They want the government to create an asset for them worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Welch: I have to impose my liberty here. The panel will be in the back alley after this, but the rest of us have to go to lunch now, which is next door.

More...

SciDev / Climate change / News

African 'wall of trees' gets underway
07 07 2008 Preparations are rife for Africa's 'Great Green Wall', a measure to prevent desertification, three years after it was first proposed.

India launches climate change action plan
04 07 2008 India has released a national action plan on climate change focusing on renewable energy but without targets to curb emissions.

Chile pushes for high tech biofuel
04 07 2008 Chile is offering US$6 million for projects joining the private-public sectors, to develop and commercialisehigh tech biofuel.

More...

The Independent / Climate change / News

G8 accused of 'failing the world' on carbon cuts
09 07 2008 Leaders of the world's richest nations have kept alive hope of a global agreement to combat climate change by agreeing to cut their carbon emissions by at least 50 per cent by 2050.

G8 plans 50% reduction in greenhouse gases
08 07 2008 G8 nations, papering over deep differences, said today they would work toward a target of at least halving global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 but emphasised they would not be able to do it alone.

Government to slow introduction of biofuels
07 07 2008 The Government today said it would "proceed cautiously" over the introduction of biofuels, after a report found they could be increasing greenhouse gas emissions and contributing to food price rises.

More...

Climate Debate Daily / Headlines


Dissenting voices and calls to action

Call To Action
08 07 2008 Global warming is profoundly altering ecosystems. Fish are being forced into deeper, cooler waters, and on land plants are being pushed up to higher elevations ...

Dissenting Voice
08 07 2008 Global warming promises to become a gushing source of national hypocrisy. It's politically incorrect to question it, and political suicide to do anything about it ...

Call To Action
07 07 2008 When the contributions of El Niño and La Niña are statistically excised from the global temperature record the recent warming trend becomes all the more obvious ...

More...

Latest News | Login: Users

© 2008 CTA | Disclaimer

Website by RISQ Consultancy | Powered by MyHeadlines © 2004 Mike Agar.
Page generation: 1.05 Seconds