With my move to Brisbane drawing ever closer, blogging is likely to be terse and sporadic for a while. I’ll briefly note

• Tim Dunlop’s new site Very nice looking and yet another instance of the general exodus from Blogger. I’ll look into the shift as soon as I get time (Ha!) But meanwhile I have to update my links
• Don Arthur and Ken Parish have nice posts on equality of opportunity. I’ll make just one observation here. A highly unequal society like today’s US typically gives the appearance of great social mobility without the reality. The appearance is encouraged by the frequent (but still unusual) observation of individuals going from ‘rags to riches’. One case of this kind is more impressive than 100 instances of transition from working to middle class in a society where few people are either very poor or very rich. But highly unequal outcomes give well-off parents the means and the incentives to buy substantially better life opportunities for their children, thereby ensuring inequality of opportunity.
• Finally, Steven Den Beste is obviously plugged-in to the thinking of the war faction in the US Administration, or maybe, the influence of the blogworld is such that they get their ideas from him. His suggestion that attacks on planes patrolling the no-fly zone could be construed as a material breach and therefore a basis for an invasion has apparently been echoed by some US officials at the UN.
  I dismissed this cursorily, but was apparently premature. To spell out my reasoning let me make the point that the only approach to the interpretation of UNSC resolutions that makes any sense is ‘original intent’. The understanding of the resolution was clearly that it meant that Saddam must accept unfettered inspections or face invasion. In the absence of some court that could interpret the language, using some spurious interpretation of the text as a basis for war is the same as, or worse than, repudiating the resolution and will be seen that way by all parties.
  The whole point of going to the UN was to show that the US was prepared to accept a peaceful settlement leading to Iraqi disarmament and thereby to build support for a war if there was no alternative. Dumping this process and going to war anyway will mean the US has less support than if it had never gone near the UN

This will, I promise, be the last thing I post in relation to Lomborg and Kyoto for some time. I want to explain a bit about the development of my ideas and why I’m so strongly pro-Kyoto and anti-Lomborg. I didn’t, as the Man Without Qualities suggests, reach this position in some kind of green-liberal cocoon. Anyone who knows the ANU economics department, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) or Townsville, to name a few of my formative influences, will find this idea laughable.

Rather, I am an environmentalist for the boringly straightforward reason that I love natural environments and want to see them preserved. My favorite environments, reflecting the places I’ve lived most, are the Australian Alps and the Great Barrier Reef. If we get the kind of global warming that seems likely under ‘business as usual’, both will be destroyed or at least radically transformed.

In this context, I think it’s important to take some modest actions now so as to prepare for the need for more substantial reductions in CO2 emissions once the scientific doubts are resolved. If, as is possible but in my view unlikely, it turns out that the problem has been greatly over-estimated, and we have incurred some small economic losses (less than 3 months economic growth) needlessly, it will in my view have been a worthwhile insurance premium. In this context, Kyoto is far from ideal, but it’s the only game in town. The US Administration has given up pretending it has an alternative – it’s talking about adapting to climate change. This is fine (if potentially costly) for agriculture in the developed world and maybe even in the developing world, but it’s not an option for the Alps or the Reef. So, I’m 100 per cent for Kyoto.

On most other issues, I am, to coin a phrase, a ‘sceptical environmentalist’. That is, I accept the need to take substantial action to control pollution, make agriculture sustainable and so on. But I’ve never believed in the kind of doomsday scenarios postulated in the 1970s by the Club of Rome.

I’m also sceptical in the sense that I try to evaluate each issue on its merits, and to reach my own conclusions, rather than accepting or rejecting environmentalist claims holus-bolus. For example, I’m happy to eat GM food, provided it is properly labelled so I can make my own choices. Similarly, while I doubt that nuclear power is ever going to prove an economically viable energy source, even in the presence of high carbon taxes, I have no problem with mining and exporting uranium, subject to the usual environmental safeguards needed for mining operations in general.

With this background, I began with a very positive attitude towards Lomborg. He seemed to be taking a sensibly optimistic attitude towards environmental problems, pointing to our successes in fixing up pollution problems, the ozone layer and so on, rather than focusing on doomsday scenarios. Then I gradually realised that Lomborg only endorsed past actions to address environmental problems – whenever any issue came up that might involve doing something now, Lomborg always had a reason why we should do nothing. In particular,he came up with an obviously self-contradictory case for doing nothing about global warming, and gave a clearly biased summary of the economic literature on this topic, which I know very well.

After that, I looked at his story about being an environmentalist reluctantly convinced of the truth according to Julian Simon. As I observed a while ago, I first heard this kind of tale in Sunday School, and I’ve heard it many times since. It’s almost invariably bogus, and Lomborg is no exception. You don’t need to look far to find errors in Simon’s work as bad as any of those of the Club of Rome, but Lomborg apparently missed them. Going on, I realised that Lomborg’s professed concern for the third world was nothing more than a debating trick – otherwise he wouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss emissions trading with poor countries as politically infeasible.

There’s nothing I hate more than being conned. Lomborg tried to con me, and, for a while, he succeeded. That’s why I’m far more hostile to him than to a forthright opponent of environmentalism like Simon.

I’m spinning another content-free post out of the Monday Message Board, which is a long way down the page. Please comment asylum seekers, bail, the possible value of an ID card in the comment thread for this post. As before, civilised discussion and no coarse language please. Otherwise, it’s open slather.
Update Another great, if anarchic success. There’s a lengthy and thoughtful discussion of the options for social democracy and the Labor Party, the usual quota of beard-related sniping. The closest we got to asylum seekers was some early discussion of demonstrations, and their frequently counter-productive impact. Read it all, and throw your own thoughts into the mix!

Alan Krueger cites more evidence for the proposition (surprising to some) that the US has less social mobility than most other countries. He concludes “Five or six generations are probably required, on average, to erase the advantages or disadvantages of one’s economic origins.”
This is a complex issue and I plan, as with many other things, to come back to it later

Neither Ken Parish nor the Man Without Qualities is convinced by my claim that Bjorn Lomborg is contradicting himself on the crucial issue of possible responses to global warming. To <a href="http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/johnquiggin/news/Lomborg0204.html&quot;repeat myself

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cites a range of model estimates of the costs of implementing Kyoto using market mechanisms. They show that, with a global system of emission rights trading, the cost of implementing Kyoto would range from 0.1 per cent to 0.2 per cent of GDP.

This is a trivial sum – for Australia it would amount to around $1 billion per year, a fraction of the benefits yielded by environments like the Great Barrier Reef that are threatened by global warming. So how do we get the claim that Kyoto would be too expensive? As I observe:

Lomborg dismisses global emissions trading as politically infeasible because it would involve the redistribution of billions of dollars to developing countries (page 305). But then he turns around and attacks alternative ways of implementing Kyoto by suggesting that the billions required could be better spent – by redistributing them to developing countries.

I can’t think of a way to paraphrase this that would make the inherent contradiction more obvious, so I’ll venture on to the dangerous ground of analogy.

Suppose that, during the 2000 US election, someone calling themselves a ‘skeptical Democrat’ wrote a book arguing that
(a) liberals shouldn’t vote for Nader because he has no chance of winning
(b) liberals shouldn’t vote for Gore because Nader has better policies
(c) Therefore liberals should stay home.
Would you be convinced be this? Would you be surprised to find the author accepting speaking invitations from the Republican National Council?

To come back to the main issue, a system of tradable emissions permits would enable the West to meet Kyoto emissions targets at low cost and generate large payments to poorer countries, which could be used to finance clean drinking water etc. Lomborg says Western countries are too mean to do this, and would prefer more expensive solutions involving reductions in domestic emissions, and he may well be right. But if so, we should compare the cost of Kyoto to alternative things that Western countries might spend the money on at home, not to foreign aid projects that have already been ruled out by hypothesis.

I get really steamed about this, because, as Ken Parish points out, I am a leftist who thinks that we should give more aid to poor countries. I don’t believe Lomborg could have argued the way he did if he was serious about helping poor countries. For him, this is an example of ‘opportunity cost’, to be wheeled in where necessary, then forgotten.

I could easily be proved wrong on this. There are plenty of areas of expenditure in rich countries less deserving than either Kyoto or aid to poor countries. Lomborg’s point is equally applicable here. Can anyone point to an instance where he suggests cutting some area of non-environmental expenditure and giving the money saved to poor countries?

I’ve previously argued that the success or failure of the European Union in integrating Turkey will be the crucial test of relations between Islam and the West. Not surprisingly, I was unimpressed by French ex-president Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s claim that Turkey is not a European country. This response from Peter Preston of the Guardian captures my views pretty well, in a piece reproduced by the Age.
Update Nathan Lott has a lot more on this and on the Turkish election outcome. Well worth reading.

Reading on in USS Clueless, I note a long post criticising European hate speech laws, in which I get a brief mention. Like most of the Australian bloggers who’ve commented on the Tobin case, I’m with Den Beste on this one. The discussion of individual vs group defamation in a recent comments thread on this blog reached the general conclusion that while a group defamation law might be defensible in principle, it could not be implemented in practice without impinging on the freedom of political speech.

These complexities do not arise here. The European laws are clearly aimed at political speech, banning genocide denial in such generic terms as to raise a host of nasty problems. Leaving aside the undeniable case of the Holocaust, European history is full of disputed cases which might be affected by this (the treatment of the Sudeten Germans after WWII for example). While I’m generally found on the European side of transatlantic disputes, the First Amendment to the US constitution is one of the greatest gifts any country has given to itself and the world. We, and the Europeans, would be well advised to adopt something similar.

The NYT reports Baghdad Accepts United Nations Resolution; Weapons Inspectors Leave for Iraq on Monday

As I observed, the Iraqi Parliamentary vote was meaningless. But it impressed Steven Den Beste at USS Clueless leading him to write “I suspect that the UN/Iraq dance is going to end very soon. It’s looking increasingly as if they’re not even going to get past the 7-day deadline.”

Since Den Beste appears to me to be the most intelligent and reasonable of the warbloggers, I’ve been arguing with him for some time. So far, I’d suggest my predictions have been consistently more accurate than his, basically because he doesn’t want to accept that the Administration has been forced to abandon the policy of ‘war no matter what’.

Thus we see him clutching at straws like this:

One of the clauses in the unanimously-passed UNSC resolution says that Iraq

…shall not take or threaten hostile acts directed against any representative or personnel of the United Nations or of any member state taking action to uphold any council resolution,

which brings up the interesting point: Is Iraq’s constant attempts to shoot down American and British jets a “material breach” which would justify war?

The short answer is, “No”.

The Monday Message board has already been a big success. Rather than waiting an entire week to evaluate the experiment, I’m going to intervene and spin one subthread off here. Comments on beards in general, my beard in particular, and general good-humoured discussion of my various peculiarities can be put in the comments thread for this post. Does anyone have any advance on four stars?

MWQ suggests

Professor Quiggin may want to give at least some indication to his readers of what other economists oppose the fixed-proportions models and give at least one cite to one prominent economist who believes some modification of the model structure solves the problems. For example, has Professor Quiggin consulted with, or researched the views of, Robert Solow on this point?

Solow was one of the six Nobel Prize winners who (along with 2000 others) signed the Nobel economists’ statement on global warming on which the Australian economists’ statement was modelled. Lomborg’s preferred source of economic wisdom, William Nordhaus, also signed, so the statement is broad enough to encompass views opposed to Kyoto, but favoring alternative policy responses. But this doesn’t help Lomborg much, since he wants to do nothing at all.

There’s a brief statement of Solow’s view here Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis-The Region- Robert Solow Interview (September 2002), in which he refers to both the Club of Rome and to the global warming problem. I’ll quote a couple of paras.

iI you go back to what I wrote about the Club of Rome and “The Limits to Growth,” that reveals where I really live. The one thing that really annoys me is amateurs making absurd statements about economics, and I thought that the Club of Rome was nonsense. Not because natural resources or environmental necessities might not at some time pose a limit, not on growth, but on the level of economic activity—I didn’t think that was a nonsensical idea—but because the Club of Rome was doing amateur dynamics without a license, without a proper qualification. And they were doing it badly, so I got steamed up about that.

The major practical problem in connection with global warming is how do we deal with the poorer parts of the world? How do we intelligently and equitably deal with the part of the world that is now preindustrial or primitive industrial and is “uppity” enough to think it has every right to live as well as Americans or Europeans? How are we going to tell them we developed economically by burning fossil fuels at a tremendous rate, by partially depleting reserves and by polluting the atmosphere, but then tell them not to?

The Club of Rome ‘Limits to Growth’ model was, of course, the most famous example of a fixed-coefficient model producing glaringly wrong conclusions. It was roundly condemned by economists of all stripes. It represents the mirror-image of Lomborg’s position on global warming. The Club assumed that pollution and energy use were in fixed proportions to economic output and concluded that a drastic reduction in economic growth was vital.
Lomborg implicitly assumes that energy use is proportional to income and hence that a reduction in CO2 emissions sufficient to have any real impact on global warming must bring the economy to a grinding halt. Since Kyoto is only a first step in this process, he suggests not even starting.

As Solow observes, economists tend to get pretty steamed about this kind of thing, especially when it’s done ‘without a license’. Of course, economists are not alone, and Lomborg got this reaction from the real experts in most of the fields in which he claimed to have disproved the conventional wisdom.