… persuade them to stop being rightwingers[1]
I have a piece in Inside Story arguing that the various efforts to “frame” the evidence on climate change, and the policy implications, in a way that will appeal to those on the political right are all doomed. Whether or not it was historically inevitable, anti-science denialism is now a core component of rightwing tribal identity in both Australia and the US. The only hope for sustained progress on climate policy is a combination of demography and defection that will create a pro-science majority.
With my characteristic optimism, I extract a bright side from all of this. This has three components
(a) The intellectual collapse of the right has already proved politically costly, and these costs will increase over time
(b) The cost of climate stabilization has turned out to be so low that even a delay of 5-10 years won’t render it unmanageable.
(c) The benefits in terms of the possibility of implementing progressive policies such as redistribution away from the 1 per cent will more than offset the extra costs of the delay in dealing with climate change.
I expect lots of commenters here will disagree with one or more of these, so feel free to have your say. Please avoid personal attacks (or me or each other), suggestions that only a stupid person would advance the position you want to criticise and so on.
fn1. Or, in the case of young people, not to start.
John Quiggin 
@Fran Barlow
Yes, I agree. What you say is technically correct. In everyday speech and blogging, one can probably be a little less than technically correct. After all, the niceties of such definitions are lost on the anti-science right anyway. They don’t even understand basic science. But as I argue, there is a component of the right-wing, which understands science well enough and is happy to use it for procuring wealth and power. These are the oligarchs and their technical and scientific advisers. They pick and choose which science they accept and endorse and which they deny, mobilising the scientifically illiterate, TEA party loonies, libertarians and other dupes. Inconvenient science is denied and propagandsised against via the MSM they own. Convenient science (e.g. weapons technology, security and surveillance technology, engineered obsolescence, advertising technqiues based on psychology and so on) is utilised to the hilt of course.
By far the largest problem for climate change awareness is religion. Someone who works for me said regarding climate change “my mother does not believe any of that because she is a practicing Catholic”. The problem being that to accept science is to reject the Bible and its teachings. There is a huge bias here despite the fact that our world is driven extensively by applied scientific understanding. This bias is more visible in the “senior” sector of society in whose education science was relatively basic or minimal.
Tony Abbott predominately owes his election victory, I believe, to Maurice Newman and Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch’s role is obvious but Newman’s role less so even though he was reasonably public in his own views
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2010/s2842177.htm
the role he played was in delivering to Abbott 2 years of 1 hour daily coverage for Abbott’s factory visits
See link next comment.
in which Abbott was able to inject the minds of the stay at home public with his twisted “toxic tax” message. In these brain washing sessions Abbott repeated his “toxic tax” line dozens of times a day in a manner that made Bush’s “weapons of mass destruction” delivery seem amateurish. The target of Abbott’s onslaught of alternative reality was, of course, the senior community who might have access to daytime television. On really have to see one of these productions to appreciate power of them and the gift that Newman, in his role as Chairman of the ABC (as I understand it to have been), handed Abbott.
The barrage of repetition was so offensive that I finally had to draft a complaint to the ABC that there was no news content in the daily Abbott coverage and the repetition amounted to pester power. I also phone a number of owners and managers of the businesses to discuss their business problems which were always sheeted home to an as yet installed “Carbon Tax” but which invariably were when challenged due to the high Australian dollar, the cost of oil, and Asian competition. There was nothing at all factually real in any of the content delivered in these daily sessions and yet they went entirely unchallenged by ABC journalists which is difficult to explain as the sessions where aired on ABC News 24 channel.
The consequence of this is that there are a large number of anti climate change awareness poisoned minds, I believe, in our senior population, poisoned at the hand of Maurice Newman and Tony Abbott. The extreme end of the insult to our seniors is that it was Abbott who in early 2005 cancelled the election promised Seniors medical Gold Card offering free medical for the over 75’s.
So how do you undo that measure of public miss information, the degree of which can be seen with visits to the JNova and Catallaxy blogsites? One essential requirement is that the next time we have intelligent and responsible leadership in Canberra they should not leave an anti science red neck lunatic in charge of public television and Radio.
The journalism profession in general needs a complete overhaul. The quality of news reporting is absolutely pathetic in its method, delivery and objectives. For my tastes by far the best news performance at present comes from the French Channel on SBS. I am a huge fan of their style as they give extensive coverage of real people highlighting their skills and talents in daily life, and they do this in a manner that becomes a travelogue show piece of their country. Our television by contrast delivers over 50% full screen face shots of journalists telling the public what to believe, not the news as it is, and generally demeans ordinary people while elevating our ridiculous politicians and undeserving wealthy to an unhealthy status.
Next we need a huge body of improved analytical presentation material perhaps along the lines of Hans Rosling’s “mind the gap” quality, to decontaminate the science delivery from the toxic miss truth worm threads that have infected understanding of the Global Warming message.
A lot more quantitative evidence of how industry and the economy is benefiting from the transition to a carbon reduced (lets be real about this and not talk yet about zero carbon) economy.
Quantitative evidence of how average lives are improved by the use of distributed energy generation, particularly evaluated in the context of zero subsidies. Studies to show how practical application of the upcoming technologies will change the way we live and the impact on our standard and quality of living.
Quantitative studies on the safety of the domestic buildings in the face of climate change. I contend that there is a high probability that most individual freestanding dwellings being built today will not out last their mortgage payments due to the flimsy nature of the thinned out materials and quality of construction as pitched against the prospect of high storm and wind intensity, deluge and hail degree, fire and heat wave exposure.
There is a lot of ground work to be done to back up the science evidence and present a clear understanding that a low carbon future is not just about Global Warming, it is about a better future for every one.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-02/abbott-in-newcastle-for-cbd-revitalisation-talks/4290426
@BilB
I think the seniors’ minds were poisoned by Murdoch and Bolt well before Maurice Newman and Tony Abbott even got to them. But Maurice Newman and Tony Abbott adminsitered the coup de grace no doubt. Technically, I am probably one of the seniors or nearly so. Is 60 a senior? I find myself completely out of step with much of my cohort. I have gone so left wing I feel my most of my cohort are on another planet from me. Their scepticism of hard science is astonishing while their credulity in accepting Bolt and Murdoch propaganda is out of this world.
The endless worship of capitalism asonishes me. I am agnostic but I was pleased to see the new Pope speak out so strongly against capitalism and the worship of money.
“The “preferential option for the poor” is back. The doctrine that so inflamed controversy in the 1970s and 1980, famously wedded to Nicaragua’s Sandinista cause, now has a Papal imprimatur. It is close to becoming official doctrine for the world’s 1.2bn Roman Catholics under “Evangilii Gaudium”, the Pope’s first apostolic exhortation. This will have consequences.
“While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by the happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation,” Pope Francis says.” – Telegraph UK.
I wonder what Phoney Rabbit (Tony Abbott) makes of “Evangelii Gaudium”? Particularly Chapter 2 with headings like;
I. Some challenges of today’s world [52-75]
No to an economy of exclusion [53-54]
No to the new idolatry of money [55-56]
No to a financial system which rules rather than serves [57-58]
No to the inequality which spawns violence [59-60]
I wonder if Phoney Rabbit will eschew neoconservatism and do what his Pope (and thus God by his belief) exhorts?
@Dave Lisle
Arguably so. I thought also of ‘maintainable’, since one can be reasonably confident that the energy sources harvested will endure for as long as humans are around to harvest them, but that’s a little obtuse.
Again, yes. I’m trying to keep the number of words down, but in practice even things said to be abundant are all realtively so. Even salt is only relatively abundant. harvestable solar energy is likely to be temporally more abundant than recoverable FHCs. Non-fossil energy is indeed better but that admits uranium which most don’t usually bracket with renewables. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘whole life-cycles’ in this context.
I’m less bothered about persuading rightwingers on climate science. The Tea Party, predictably, actually likes ‘renewables’ on populist grounds. Renewable energy is seen as more authentic, because it’s local and not necessarily run by ‘big energy’. Ironic really, because the Tea Party was conceived by the Koch Bros to block, inter alia, decarbonisation. Hoist by their own petard it seems.
These last elements (along with intergenerational debt) are the ones I emphasise when talking with rightwingers IRL about decarbonisation.
@Fran
‘Whole life cycles’ simply refers to the fact that, whatever you call these less fossil fuel intensive energy entrapment techniques their deployment still utilizes energy and impacts the biosphere – they are material over their life cycles.
Regarding the persuasion of the right – you might not be bothered about it but it was the original thread and their ideas do rule the world.
@Dave Lisle
Ah I see.
I didn’t say I wasn’t bothered about it. I said I was less bothered about it in the context of discussion over the use of the term, renewable.
In a broad sense, you’re right that the ideas of rightwingers rule the world. That’s because their paradigm comports far better with the defence of property, and since states are configured to defend the property forms and realted advantages of the best organised groups, it’s hardly surprising. However, once one recognises that, one accepts that rational argument is likely to founder on the rock of their basic class interest.
What’s more interesting is the group of people who hold rightwing ideas but are not part of the property-holding group. These folk hold on to rightwing ideas for other reasons — ignorance, misapprehension about their poissibility within the system and their identity, fear of loss consequent upon major system changes and so forth.
Although they don’t grasp it, the alignment of their ideas with those of the powerful allows them the delusion that in some way the property system belongs to them, when those profiting most from it are doing them over in the way they do over everyone else. It’s a Stockholm Syndrome kind of thing. Here rational argument typically won’t work, so appeals to ethics and emotion tend to work better in breaking their existential bonds to the system as a whole.
@Fran Barlow
Hence the almost unbelievable sight of people who are poor and and sick opposing Obamacare.
It would help at least somewhat if you stopped referring to “anti-science” denialism when the evidence shows scientific literacy as such is not the cure all you pretend it to be. Ideology tends to win out, regardless of the level of education, with climate change as with Zionism, or any other fraught political subject.
The constant reference to the irrationality of others, of their capacity for unreason as opposed of our capacity for unreason, makes you a lousy spokesman for reason, even on those occasions when I would agree with you.
@seth edenbaum
I’d call this a non-sequitur. Objectively, “ideology” (used in the lay sense as “cultural paradigm”) manifests as “anti-science denialism” so the term is apt reagdles of whether greater scientific literacy can effect substantial changes in attitude to policy in the direction of evidence based reasoning.
I’d say not. Reason is one of the basic tools — a means by which humans can collaborate effectivly to serve common ends. Doubtless, all of us from time to time decide what to do on other than rational grounds, typically (though not always), when we are information-poor.
Those who recklessly disregard ubiquitous salient data can fairly be derided as irrtional by thoe who don’t behave that way.
Seth, John has no functioning definition of “anti-science.” It is just a stand-in term for “people I disagree with.”
John, this post is altogether too sanguine about the environmental damage the right is doing and the urgent need to stop it, because it has the wrong underlying assumptions about global warming:
1. you assume the effects of warming aren’t being felt yet and are a long way in the future, i.e. you underestimate the pace of change and the risk (this is also evident in a comment on a previous post where you blithely accept a 450ppm threshold)
2. you assume that efforts to mitigate and decarbonize are easily achievable and cheap, against all evidence
3. You assume that as-yet-unproven vapourware like fake trees, and sequestration interventions like reforestation, will be sufficient to cover any shortfall in emission reductions
You are showing the denialist bias of your discipline here. While scientists who actually work in the field are getting desperately worried about what is happening to our ecosystem, economists continue to think of the issue as a minor externality, and continue to assume that we have lots of time and space to fiddle around, and few short-term risks to worry about. This is surely “anti-science” by your own lax definition of the term.
15 years from now when the arctic is ice free and the climate of western Europe, the USA and Canada has gone bonkers, posts like this will look very naive.
Faust, do you agree with me yet that the science, or rather, the engineering, shows that a $2,500 carbon price is definitely sufficient to reduce emissions to zero?
I think there has already been a lot of compromise to the ‘right wing’/wealth and power consolidating agenda in the climate debate already.
Hardly anyone prominent writes of the practical things that need to be done and can be done now with sufficient organisation and co-operation, instead prominent discussion focuses on taxes/prices and not proven or practicable carbon capture and storage technology.
Problems with the prominent approach:
1. There is not evidence that pricing and taxes can achieve the needed physical and social transformations for zero GHG emissions in the requisite time frame <25years (we could reach 450ppm in 25 years on current trends)
2. As I understand it the economic modelling that says this can be done and with minimum cost (?) – such as the Climate Authority's report this year – uses General Equilibrium theory for the modelling – Professor Quiggin states elsewhere that this theory is wrong/inadequate as are other economic theories without sound foundations – therefore relying on this inadequate/wrong economic theory to tell us costs are low is not a sound idea (and also contradictory).
3. The carbon capture and storage technology is not proven or practicable. It would need vast amounts of materials to make so many plastic trees – plastic trees in the outdoors do not last all that long – then you have lots of rubbish for landfill unless it is designed to be recycled in perpetuity. Also insufficient research has been done about the emissions of plastic as it breaks down. Also you need land to put the plastic trees on – how much land would this take? Also – how are the emissions captured going to be preserved forever securely?
4. The economics of the technology is very uncertain. Professor Quiggin, the man in the BBC story you refer Fran to has elsewhere said his technology would cost $1000 a tonne of carbon captured according to another article I read on it, and another group said his technology would cost $600 a tonne. This is a very varying range of estimates.
5. Keeping the prominent public discussion on solutions of prices and non-practicable technology means that many people in the community are not aware of the changes which could be effected right now and in the near term to decrease emissions and get them to zero then negative in a reasonable time frame to get us back to 350ppm carbon equivalent.
6. People who have been grassroots leaders for climate change but are not so prominent as to feature regularly in the papers or television are becoming dispirited and deciding we will have to do geo-engineering after all, or like Clive Hamilton writing premature Requiems which are dispiriting especially to young people.
7. The same people see that the community in general are unfortunately not as well informed as they could be if prominent discussions were more focused on practicable measures and not taxes and unproven technologies – so then they think it would be easier not to engage with the community after all but to engage with elites instead in trying to get a war-time-mobilisation-style-economy imposed from above.
8. War-time-mobilisation-style-economies imposed from above have poor track records and tend to shore up the power of elites over everyday people, engage in violence and killing, use propaganda, send spies/special services out to destabilise other countries etc 😦
@Ronald Brak
If $2500tCO2e were rigorously applied to all sources of carbon-equivalent emissions everywhere in the energy, transport, mining, manufacturing, forestry and agricultural sectors, then plainly, emissions would fall to zero in those sectors.
I’d be surprised if we could have a dairy or meat industry though. I’d be OK with that but I’m betting that a lot wouldn’t be. It wouldn’t be easy to do commercial scale agriculture either — though I suppose biodiesel might finally get a guernsey. You’d probably need some serious off-set programs — which at that price could be very fancy indeed.
@Fran Barlow
People don’t choose to act on reflex. And very few people are ever willing to admit when they’re indulging low information rationality. What do you say when scientists are “anti-science”?
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503
There is no “economic science”; there’s no “political science”; there’s no “philosophical science” or “historical science”. Democracy requires a broadly educated populace with a sense of irony; technocracy is the rule of experts without one. The politics of pedantry is never good.
Fretting over what the right ‘thinks’ on climate science is an unproductive activity. Far right religious lunatics and oligarchs are in control of capital and the media. We can no more change how or what they ‘think’ than fly in the air by flapping our arms. It is necessary to appeal to some measure of rational self preservation amongst their hirelings, of course, and in doing that advancing rationality is an essential project.
In the meantime, however, anyone with a sense of urgency about biodiversity loss, and the psychological trauma of such loss to the young, can engage in creative ways that are far more fulfilling than banging their heads against people whose view of climate science is faith based. The work of Joanna Macy, renowned Buddhist scholar and activist, for example, is inspirational:
http://www.joannamacy.net/
I’d also urge any keyboard warrior within striking distance of Narrabri, NSW, to visit Camp Wando which is the heart of organizing opposition to the Maules Creek coal mine which threatens to totally trash the last great white box forest in NSW:
http://frontlineaction.org/
There you will find people of great heart and great commitment discovering new ways to repossess the planet in the name of all beings.
Fran, whatever emissions remain can be removed from the atmosphere for far less than $2,500 a tonne. And if people want milk and meat from delicious slave animals they can have it. They just need to pay to remove the greenhouse gases released from the atmosphere and that will cost a lot less than $2,500 a tonne. Roughly 15 grams of methane are released from dairy cattle for each liter of milk produced. Using a CO2 equivalent of 25 that comes to 375 grams of CO2. If it costs $100 a tonne to remove CO2 from the atmosphere that will add about 27 cents to the cost of a liter of milk. A simple breeding program could probably cut that to under 20 cents. Since methane production represents inefficiency in ruminant digestion this is the sort of improvement that could pay for itself in reduced feed costs. And I’ll mention that in many places cattle food slaves are kept in feed lots for pretty much their whole lives which makes on site collection and elimination of methane possible.
“Anti-science” is an abstract conceptual term used in political discourse and it essentially means whatever the writer says it means. It is also a rhetorical device befitting the blog format, where people put out thoughts in a less formal manner than an academic paper. Anyone who is reading John in good faith should have a reasonable understanding of how he uses the term.
I happily use the term anti-science for folk who have bought the organic food good/ gm food bad Kool Aid as well as those who deny climate change. I agree with Fran that Seth’s argument is a non-sequitur.
I think a pro-science attitude involves accepting that the institution of science, at least in the hard sciences, is far better at discerning the truth of some matter than outsiders with political agendas or maverick punters.
Of course, science is a human insitution and thus far from perfect, but if you have a pro-science attitude you recognise that the odds of some outsider reliably picking the mistakes is so small that public policy should always be driven by any strong and long held and consensus.
For the catastrophists amongst us:
Easily doable and not that expensive, just like John says.
@Watkin Tench
We humans are traders in risk in most every choice we make, whether we are aware of the risk and its gravity or not. So the question for the thoughtful is “which risks are preferable? Reason plus salient evidence (along with a method for distinguishing the salient from the irrelevant or relatively evaluating them which one can call “a model”) can help us decide which risks we ought to prefer, given our goals, identity, culture and our sensibilities.
I largely agree with your formulation above though if I were quibbling I’d say that public policy in areas where sound research is germane should always be driven by the strong and continuing consensus where the aim of the consensus does not offend the principles of inclusion, equity and social justice.
The purpose of science, IMO, is to empower humanity by facilitating equitable collaboration, enlarging the scope of each of us to understand our possibility and to approach it in the company of those who can best aid us and us them on the same journey. The closer we get to that condition, the better science will be.
@Ronald Brak
But if you have $1000, and you walk into your local supermarket, will you be able to buy an icecream?
@John Brookes
John Brookes, very roughly it takes half a liter of milk to make a liter of ice cream so going by the last ice cream I bought which was $6 a liter, a $100 carbon price would raise its price by about 2%, which is probably not enough to destroy the ice cream industry.
… and not enough to promote change either.
Watkin, noone is saying it’s difficult or expensive. Some of us are saying it will require more than a mere tax. Some of us are saying that Ronald and John’s pie-in-the-sky plastic trees/replace all the forests that were destroyed in the last 100 years /we have enough land to sequester all our carbon with buried trees and feed 9billion people solutions aren’t going to work.
I’m basing my criticisms of these policies on scientific reports (I previously, for example, cited two separate reports on reforestation) but John and Ronald ignore them. By your “good faith” definition, this is anti-science. In fact John seems to have settled on a 450 ppm target, which is pretty clearly anti-science. Yet John doesn’t think of himself as anti-science. It’s an empty rhetorical device when deployed by people like you and John.
Faustus,
Is there a scientific consensus that 450 ppm is dangerous? My understanding is that there isn’t but I always appreciate someone pointing out my mistakes. In fact learning about my mistakes is one reason why I spend time on blogs.
As far as I can gather, John and the IPCC are in furious agreement that a transistion to non-fossil fuels is the key to dealing with climate change. The price on carbon and fuel efficiency standards recommended by John are the stock standard environmental economics textbook ways of causing such a transistion (and we already know they work from past experience), so I’m utterly mystified by your tantrum.
I’m wondering if your tantrum is based on some misunderstanding of how economies work.
@Ronald Brak
You kind of missed my point! Of course $2500 per tonne is enough, in the same way that $1000 will always buy you an icecream…
Watkin Tench,
the article you link to links to the 2014 IPCC report. It is better to read the technical summary than the policy makers summary, because politicians force more changes in the latter. The technical summary says (I cannot bold, so I will add paragraph breaks before important a bits), I will add my comments in square brackets:
“Estimates of the aggregate economic costs of mitigation vary widely, but increase with stringency of mitigation (high confidence). Most scenario studies collected for this assessment that are based on the assumptions that all countries of the world begin mitigation immediately, there is a single global carbon price applied to well?functioning markets, and key technologies are available, estimate that reaching 430–480 ppm CO2eq by 2100 [this is too high and just used because politicians agreed on it – see James Hansen from NASA and others] would entail global consumption losses of 1% to 4% in 2030, 2% to 6% in 2050, and 2% to 12% in 2100 relative to what would happen without mitigation [Figure TS.12, Box TS.9, Box TS.10]. These consumption losses do not consider the benefits of mitigation, including the reduction in climate impacts.
To put these losses in context, studies assume increases in consumption from four?fold to over ten?fold over the century without mitigation [ how can consumption increase this much – we already have great environmental, biodiversity, and pollution and rubbish and toxicity from current high levels of consumption??? Also lots of consumption goods are made from oil turned into plastic – with peak oil this will be more expensive and scarcer, plus no one has properly researched the ghg emissions over time caused by plastic decomposing] Costs for maintaining concentrations in the range of 530?650 ppm CO2eq are estimated to be roughly one? third to two?thirds lower than for associated 430?530 ppm CO2eq scenarios. Cost estimates from scenarios can vary substantially across regions.
Substantially higher cost estimates have been obtained based on assumptions about less idealized policy implementations [ see ! Low cost estimates are based on unrealistic idealised scenarios!] and limits on technology availability [and on unproven and not practicable technology as I said!] as discussed below. Both higher and lower estimates have been obtained based on interactions with pre?existing distortions, non?climate market failures, or complementary policies.”
…
“The technological options available for mitigation greatly influence mitigation costs and the challenges of reaching atmospheric concentration levels between 430 and 580 ppm CO2eq by 2100 (high confidence). Many models in recent model intercomparisons could not produce scenarios reaching atmospheric concentrations between 430 and 480 ppm CO2eq by 2100 with broadly pessimistic assumptions about key mitigation technologies. [as I said low cost estimates are based on unproven and non practicable technology]”
…
“The studies also showed that reducing energy demand could potentially decrease mitigation costs significantly [as I said conservation of energy and consumption is very important]
…
[economists use unfair and cruel discounting in the sum writing] “The chief reason for social discounting (favouring present people over future people) is that commodities have ‘diminishing marginal benefit’ and per capita income is expected to increase over time. Diminishing marginal benefit means that the value of extra commodities to society declines as people become better off. If economies continue to grow, people who live later in time will on average be better off—possess more commodities—than people who live earlier [there is no proof this will happen – sustainable economies do not constantly grow – unsustainable economies grow and then collapse like a pyramid scheme, economists who say there will always be growth despite environmental and moral constraints are like the people who encourage people to join bad pyramid schemes] . The faster the growth and the greater the degree of diminishing marginal benefit, the greater should be the discount rate on commodities. If per capita growth is expected to be negative (as it is in some countries), the social discount rate may be negative [ I notice they do not do their models with this assumption despite resource limits approaching and so many people to share resources with now]
Some authors have argued, in addition, that the present generation of people should give less weight to later people’s wellbeing just because they are more remote in time [this is very cruel and selfish] . This factor would add to the social discount rate on commodities.”
…
[great comprehensive organised change is needed] “Systemic and cross?sectoral approaches to mitigation are expected to be more cost?effective and more effective in cutting emissions than sector?by?sector policies (medium confidence). Cost? effective mitigation policies need to employ a system perspective in order to account for inter? dependencies among different economic sectors and to maximize synergistic effects. Stabilizing atmospheric CO2eq concentrations at any level will ultimately require deep reductions in emissions and fundamental changes to both the end?use and supply?side of the energy system as well as changes in land?use practices and industrial processes.”
…
[again, conservation is very important] “Demand reductions in the energy end?use sectors are a key mitigation strategy and affect the scale of the mitigation challenge for the energy supply side (high confidence).”
…
“Behaviour, lifestyle, and culture have a considerable influence on energy use and associated emissions, and can have a high mitigation potential through complementing technological and structural change (limited evidence, medium agreement). Emissions can be substantially lowered through: changes in consumption patterns (e.g., mobility demand, energy use in households, choice of longer?lasting products); dietary change and reduction in food wastes; and change of lifestyle (e.g., stabilizing/lowering consumption in some of the most developed countries, sharing economy and other behavioural changes affecting activity) [i don’t know why this is limited evidence, medium agreement, likely it is because people like to think about how in the future people will consume 4-10 times more despite evident constraints , and rely in their sums on unproven non practical technology , but you would have to survey them to see for sure, and they would have to tell the truth in their survey responses]
…
[ a return to comprehensive town planning is needed] “Spatial planning can contribute to managing the development of new infrastructure and increasing system?wide efficiencies across sectors (robust evidence, high agreement). Land use, transport choice, housing, and behaviour are strongly interlinked and shaped by infrastructure and urban form. Spatial and land use planning, such as mixed use zoning, transport?oriented development, increasing density, and co?locating jobs and homes can contribute to mitigation across sectors by a) reducing emissions from travel demand for both work and leisure, and enabling non?motorized transport, b) reducing floor space for housing, and hence c) reducing overall direct and indirect energy use through efficient infrastructure supply. Compact and in?fill development of urban spaces and intelligent densification can save land for agriculture and bioenergy and preserve land carbon stocks.”
…
@Watkin Tench
There’s a scientific consensus that the world began warming from the time atmospheric CO2 exceeded 280ppm and is still accelerating at 400ppm (our present concentration) and will continue to accelerate at 450ppm. The 450ppm stabilisation is a bit of realpolitik rather than science. They hope we can peak there but few want to discuss how to wind concentrations back.
Conceivably, we could geoengineer negative forcings adequate to mimic 240ppm in an attempt to save the world’s snowpack, glaciers and biodiversity and staunch SLR despite 450ppm but as others point out we would still be acidifying the oceans and that CO2 in the upper clines of the world’s oceans would continue to absorb insolation at a higher rate. Eventually the oceans’ ability to act as sinks would decline and marine biodiversity including corals would be lost.
So the plan must not merely focus on carbon emissions abatement but remediation, and quite soon, IMO.
Watkin says
What “past experience” do we have of reaching zero consumption of any product through a carbon price and fuel efficiency standards?
Faustus,
What product must meet zero consumption and by what date? You’re being a little too cryptic.
And please, do not invent your own answer or cherry pick one from some obscure source, instead give us a something with gravitas. If you are even moderately well informed on this topic, it shouldn’t take much more than one minute for you to find a compelling cite.
Hmm, let’s see – ozone chemicals. DDT. lead in petrol. How did we get them to zero by specific dates? What about acid rain? Which of those used a price? Lead in paint. Flammable materials in children’s toys. I can think of one poison that we are attempting to eliminate with taxes – tobacco. HOw’s that going?
I don’t know what you’re talking about with citations. Do you mean the IPCC figures on trees I quoted in the previous thread? Not authoritative enough?
@faustusnotes
Horse drawn carriages were eliminated by cost. No one put a price on them, it just came to be that they were more expensive than cars.
I believe that for a brief period in the late 60’s or early 70’s the record labels tried to charge the Australian radio stations for playing their artists. As a result we got Dear Prudence by Doug Parkinson and Eleanor Rigby by the Zoot.
On a more serious note, sulphur dioxide emissions were substantially reduced by in the US by a price.
And of course when things like CFCs are banned, we are effectively putting a very high price on them.
You you mind showing us that cite again?
Conservatives are not conservative. No the current wave anyway. They are radicals. If there was a word for “Get it. Use it. For me/mine. Now.” that would be the better label (there’s probably a word for it in German).
Further, the modern conservative tends toward free market idealism (this, despite there being so such thing as a “free market” in existence (thankfully!) – so there’s a willful ignorance of reality to begin with). So to accept that Climate Change *exists* is to accept that the Free Market is not always the best solution, and even more shockingly can sometimes yield very bad outcomes. For those people, this is too much to bear, and denial so comforting.
I’m still waiting on your answer Faustus.
I am still waiting for YOUR response Watkin, to my quote from the IPCC technical report from your link @20 that agreed with me and not with you…
@faustusnotes
Umm, tobacco is going quite well, both in total use and especially in younger age groups. There’s several studies that demonstrate both direct measures (smoke free zones, health warnings etc) *and* price increases are statistically significant in terms of driving down usage.
ZM,
Agree with you on what? Try to make sense.
Mel,
The report agrees with me that the economists that make low cost estimates do so by making up ‘idealistic’ (polite euphemism for unreal and unlikely) scenarios and by relying on ‘optimistic’ (euphemism for non-proven and not practicable) technologies, (also by applying cruel discount rates and using 450ppm as the limit rather than 350ppm [and probably by using general equilibrium theory also])
“Faustusnotes” got it right on the button. John Quiggin is conflating “anti-science” and
“someone I disagree with.”
See “The Tragedy of the Risk Perception Commons”, by Dan Kahan et al.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503
The more scientifically literate people are, the more skeptical of Anthropological Global Warming they are. The difference is small, but significant at the 5% level, according to the study.
Alan McIntire,
The abstract says the more important finding was that polarity increased with greater scientific literacy and numeracy to reflect respondents’ values
“More importantly, greater scientific literacy and numeracy were associated with greater cultural polarization: respondents predisposed by their values to dismiss climate change evidence became more dismissive, and those predisposed by their values to credit such evidence more concerned, as science literacy and numeracy increased. We suggest that this evidence reflects a conflict between two levels of rationality: the individual level, which is cha- racterized by the citizens’ effective use of their knowledge and reasoning capacities to form risk percep- tions that express their cultural commitments; and the collective level, which is characterized by citizens’ failure to converge on the best available scientific evidence on how to promote their common welfare. Dispelling this “tragedy of the risk-perception commons,” we argue, should be understood as the central aim of the science of science communication.”
So “Watkin Tench” (so obsessed with me and my website) is “Mel” (who was permanently banned over personal attacks on me)?
John Brookes and Nathan present two interesting examples: SO2 and tobacco. SO2 of course is still emitted in huge amounts despite the existence of a pricing mechanism. Tobacco has been the subject of continuously increasing taxes since the 1980s, and yet still it is used by a sizable minority of the population, and young people still take up smoking. Probably 70% or more of the price of a pack of cigarettes is tax, and yet still people smoke. Hmm. This is why in 2003 the WHO realized that taxes alone weren’t working, and released the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which contains a raft of measures to further reduce smoking, only one of which is taxes, and almost all of the rest of which are advertising, sales and production restrictions.
Tobacco is of course analogous to CO2 in that no amount of it is good, and the goal is to get every individual to zero tobacco as early as possible.
This year the WHO is going to release new targets for 2025, at which point it is expected that people will be smoking, even in developed nations with good anti-smoking campaigns. 45 years of taxes and increasing restrictions, and people will still be smoking. Yet Ronald, John, Watkin et al would have us believe that a carbon tax that hasn’t even started yet will get us to zero carbon within 45 years of its implementation, with no other punitive mechanisms in place?
If that is to be the sole legislative platform we get with people like John in charge, we’re doomed.
Watkin, you asked for my links from the past thread again, so here htey are. First, John Quiggin said this:
and I replied to point out that the IPCC estimates the maximum amount of carbon that can be sequestered in trees is 1.1-1.6Gt/yr, I think that figure is of carbon, so about 4Gt/yr of CO2. That’s the theoretical maximum. Their figures for Chapter 11 show that about 4Gt CO/yr are emitted just from land use changes.
[I split this comment up due to links]
[continuing the links Watkin asked for]
[My previous two links have been binned I guess because I mentioned our host’s name]
I found a report from the journal Bioscience that explains some technologies for sequestration (pdf here). This report says humans emit (nett) 4GT C/yr, and suggests that wood burial (for example) could remove up to 9GT. But this report also says this:
So if we assume that half of all emissions will need to be removed by reforestation, then we need to plant trees on an area of land equal to half of all the forests lost in the last century. Much of those land use changes occurred on prime land, to convert it to agricultural land for feeding a growing population. So it seems unlikely to me that a reforestation program on that scale would be possible without creating greater food insecurity; it also seems impossible that we could plant on that much land under market mechanisms without both a) significantly increasing the price of land and thus reducing the effectiveness of the tax; and b) creating a huge carbon-burial bubble market in land, that will surely end badly.
Plus, of course, there is a huge carbon cost involved in planting trees on a billion ha of land.
So, can we ditch the carbon sequestration madness, please? Yes, it has a part to play, but it is not as big or as cheap as Ronald, John et al are claiming, and as a result this increase in sinks should be reserved for the portion of our carbon budget that cannot be phased out (e.g. jet fuel, coking coal, etc.) In the meantime, we need to find other methods for reaching zero carbon. And as shown by the SO2 and tobacco examples, a carbon tax by itself will not work.
Faust:
1. Reducing net CO2 emissions to zero with a carbon price absolutely does not require that trees, agriculture, or artificial trees be used.
It seems to me that those who advocate pricing policy alone as a means to place downward pressure on demand are engaging in a kind of reasoning error. While price is certainly an important aspect in choice, it’s not the only factor. A modest price impost will produce a less than equivalent negative change in demand. So a 10% increase in the cost of fuel will produce a short run drop in demand of about a quarter of that, and in the longer run, one of about half, assuming there are options within the system to substitute demand which are perceived to be less costly than the price hike.
To do this with FHCs entails offering those good system options as well as price hiking, especially since the politics of price hiking makes it hard to hike with the savagery needed to get gross changes.
Faustus- It is difficult know where to begin with you as you appear to be more interested in point scoring than having a productive exchange of views.
The IPCC talks of 40%-70% reduction in ghg emissions by 2050 and 100% reduction in ghg emissions by 2100. I asked you for your own preferred timeline but you failed to provide it, instead going off on some completely irrelevant frolic about tobacco and such like.
I’ve now checked your blog post on climate change and note you ignore the IPCC and instead reference 350 org:
350 org was formed by a author and the 350ppm goal was inspired by a single paper by James Hansen, one of thousands of climate scientists. The science page on 350 org’s website is sparse to say the least and provides links to the IPCC, which settles on 450ppm rather than 350 ppm.
You also make this false claim:
Yet you know very well that Prof Quiggin and I also support ancilliary measures like fuel efficiency standards for motor vehicles.
It should also be obvious that massive technological advances can be expected between now and 2100, so the toolbox for dealing with GHG will keep getting better.
I must say I don’t find you in the least bit convincing. I also see that you want to criminalise “climate change denial” outside of the science literature. That is seriously spooky. Even the IPCC leaves some room for doubt, with IIRC probability ratings of no more than 95% for its contentions.
I submit that your apocalyptic view of the world, your preference for criminalising dissent from orthodoxy and your preference for centralised and highly prescriptive top-down approaches to problem solving reflects rather badly on you.
ZM- the tech report doesn’t refute the policy makers report. You referencing Hansen in an annotation to the tech report doesn’t make it so.
Megan- Hilarious. Is this another one of your conspiracy theories? I much preferred the one about how international spy agencies have damaged your computer and interefered with your telecommunications, if you don’t mind me saying so. But go on, do tell us more.
Not at all, Mel.
There’s no need for rudeness, Watkins. I am the only person here providing anything resembling evidence, for starters, so before you accuse me of point scoring, why not respond to some of it? Or produce some of your own? I gave the three links you asked for and you have not responded to them at all, either to address the issue of the limit on sequestration or the land use constraints. Which leaves you in the same science-free zone as Ronald, claiming we can achieve even your relatively modest goals without any plan as to how. I note now you have fallen back on nebulous “technology improvements”, devoid of detail. Is this how policy is constructed?
I note that you claimed a pricing mechanism had previously successfully eliminated pollutants, but it was me who gave two counter examples and john and Nathan who gave two beautiful examples of a pricing scheme that failed. Are you going to return to this line of reasoning with some kind of counter argument or summary, or are we going to engage in a Gish gallop? You and Ronald seem eager to throw out claims that are easily debunked but very unwilling to back them up once the evidence is in. I have no idea if my selection of references is adequate, but you are completely unwilling to provide any alternative scientific results, so what should I think?
Here are some points you could start with: how will sequestration deal with land use constraints and food supply conflicts? What should be done if sequestration proves much more limited than you claim? Where is your hard evidence that a price alone will get any pollutant to zero? Given there is strong evidence that prices are not sufficient, can you provide an argument as to why that evidence does not apply to carbon (I mean reasoned arguments with evidence, not mere assertion)? If a price will not work by itself, what additional measures do you consider important and how and when should progress be assessed?
This is how policy is made, not by stuffing your fingers in your ears and yelling “plastic trees”!
Regarding the target threshold, I am willing to cioncede I am more alarmist than the ipcc. This is because the ipcc is a govt document agreed to by the big polluters, and the ipcc is notoriously conservative on the effects of agw. See e.g. It over conservative estimates of risks in the arctic. The ecological effects of warming are well ahead of ipcc predictions, and the only way to square what is happening in the world with the ipcc’s measured estimates is to put a whole bunch of terrible events down to bad luck. Note also the ipcc estimates of future economic damage are heavily dependent on a small number of naive and completely discredited models, that were meta analyzed by an idiot. I am happy to talk about the ipcc targets though. If you want to retain your modern way of life, I still contend that a carbon tax alone will not get you to their limits.
Finally I will point out that there is a carbon tax threshold over which tree planting becomes more profitable than growing wheat or rice. At that point the world really is heading into uncharted waters. You need to think about limits on sequestration and the kind of world you want to build before talking about what “reflects badly” on me!