I hate this kind of simplistic thinking. I work as an economist and I couldn't disagree with you more. Yes relatively to a business as usual scenario output wont be as high under a carbon constrained economy in the short and medium term. But the difference is between one and two percentage points in growth each year, it is not disastrous.
Factor in our reliance on natural capital for both wealth and welfare and there are very strong economic arguments to address climage change in a thoughtful and methodical manner. Does that mean stopping all emissions and growth immediately? No. It means making carbon intensive production expensive and engineering an economic restructuring. We have done that before. For example, there were loud arguments against abolishing slavery because of our economic growth. Dealing with climate change is not necessarily a moral issue like slavery, infact it's much more important.
In my mind your type of opinion is blind and dangerous. It's this idea that economic growth trumps all considerations in policy debates. Sure growth is important, but so are our natural life support systems like biodiversity.
Western, first world countries, generally, are the most efficient users of energy and, generally, the most stringent in terms of environmental regulatory requirements placed on industry, all occurring while they typically have the highest labour costs.
The least efficient users of energy, the countries with the cheapest labour costs by far and the countries with the least regard for environmental considerations, tend to be emerging economies like India and China.
So, really, the plan here seems to be to reward the biggest polluters with the cheapest cost structures while penalizing the most efficient economies operating with the most stringent environmental regulatory structures but narrowest profit margins.
It's just never going to work on that basis.
No one should be surprised when you have a moment like Copenhagen, where mutual interests are hard to find and compromise yields only a weak, pointless memorandum.
China is now the largest CO2 emmiter on the planet but apparently unwilling to bear the responsibility that record demands.
Unless countries like China and India, in using their natural advantage of cheap labour as a margin buffer, are willing to do their part, then this whole exercise is rather pointless.
Another thing that strikes me . . . . . back in the 60's and 70's, the Thames was essentially dead and the Cuyahoga River running through Cleveland caught fire, among a horde of environmental disasters, massive air pollution was hovering over major cities, etc, etc . . . . .
Those kinds of things spawned a host of environmental regulations in first world countries as the public finally said enough was enough and began electing politicians willing to do something about it.
Meanwhile, the recent picture below shows Shanghai at mid-day and rivers throughout Asia are dying. A big black cloud of air pollution, deadly in scope, swathed Asia just a few years ago for something like three weeks.
It just seems these countries are going to be catching up to the first world in more ways than one, not just in industrial base but also in the human costs associated with it.
As such, we may need to wait for those Cuyahoga River moments in China or India before anything can be done on a global basis.
Cowperson
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Good post, Cowperson. I can verify that you could not see for more than 2 blocks on a clear day in Beijing, and that was after all the anti-pollution measures the Chinese implemented before the Olympics.
I think the only fair to deal with it is to impose a carbon tax on imports - of course, that hurts consumers, but if we are talking about something that would force change...
I hate this kind of simplistic thinking. I work as an economist and I couldn't disagree with you more. Yes relatively to a business as usual scenario output wont be as high under a carbon constrained economy in the short and medium term. But the difference is between one and two percentage points in growth each year, it is not disastrous.
Factor in our reliance on natural capital for both wealth and welfare and there are very strong economic arguments to address climage change in a thoughtful and methodical manner. Does that mean stopping all emissions and growth immediately? No. It means making carbon intensive production expensive and engineering an economic restructuring. We have done that before. For example, there were loud arguments against abolishing slavery because of our economic growth. Dealing with climate change is not necessarily a moral issue like slavery, infact it's much more important.
In my mind your type of opinion is blind and dangerous. It's this idea that economic growth trumps all considerations in policy debates. Sure growth is important, but so are our natural life support systems like biodiversity.
You're an economist? Well no wonder people don't listen to economists anymore.
I don't have time right now to look for the latest data, but in May International Herald Tribune wrote:
The economies of the developed world turned in their worst quarterly showing ever in the first three months of 2009, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said on Monday.
The combined gross domestic products (GDP) of the 30 countries in the organization fell by 2.1% in the January-March period from the previous quarter. If that preliminary estimate holds, it would be the largest drop since 1960, when records were first kept. The GDP of member countries fell 2% in the last quarter of 2008.
Compared with the first three months of 2008, the OECD economies—which accounted for 71% of world GDP in 2007, according to the World Bank—shrank 4.2% in the first quarter. The US contributed 0.9 percentage point of that decline, while Japan contributed 1 percentage point, the 13 largest euro area countries 1.3 percentage points, and the remaining member countries 1 percentage point.
Yet you nonchalantly write about 1 or 2 per cent drop, like it's nothing. Well, for people with productive jobs it's a lot.
OECD as it is is self-restricting as it is (just like Cow said), many countries nearing bankruptcy (Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Spain in a lot of trouble) yet we're supposed to hand out free money just because politicians wants to collect points for "saving the world"?
What they are doing is saving their bank accounts:
Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.
Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's cohead of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade.
The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utahbased firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in greentech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot.
And the crazy thing is that the global carbon trade is in full swing already.
Personally, I want the government out of green business. Everything they touched turned into a disaster where only a handful of people are rolling in cash (the farce that is biofuel is just one example out of many).
Crippling ourselves economically while pouring subsidies into shady corporations and foreign governements who also refuse to allow control over "green money" given to them at the expense of taxpayers is what's dangerous.
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My point was that economic growth trumpeting all other considerations is hopelessly short-sighted and dangerous. Your ill-tempered and unadvised rant did nothing to address that point.
Okay so the world is in a period of stagnant growth. Sure, but that has nothing to do with cap and trade or anything to do with constraining carbon. Why not in a time of slackened demand implement some of the regulations requried to price carbon so that total economic shock wont be as expensive or apparent?
I was "non-chalant" about a slowed growth rate by one or two percentage points because even if the rate is slowed in 20 years our economy will have still grown by a factor much greater. Some CGE modelling indicates that if we reduce emissions by 20% by 2020 then growth relative to the business as usual economic growth is 8% lower in Alberta. However, Alberta's economy has still grown by over 50% over that same period. Still seems pretty good, especially if you're into risk mitigation and can see that climate change has potentially significant effects on medium and long-term output.
Also, all your stuff about Goldman Sachs and Al Gore is just so tiresome. Guess what, there are business opportunities from constricting carbon. People who get into that game first are going to make hay once an inevitable carbon reducing framework is adopted. That is not evidence of some global conspiracy to bilk, you the good standing tax payer of money. That is a result of incentives we use to most efficiently reduce carbon emissions.
Also, all your stuff about Goldman Sachs and Al Gore is just so tiresome. Guess what, there are business opportunities from constricting carbon. People who get into that game first are going to make hay once an inevitable carbon reducing framework is adopted. That is not evidence of some global conspiracy to bilk, you the good standing tax payer of money. That is a result of incentives we use to most efficiently reduce carbon emissions.
Man thanks for posting that. This articke should be required reading for everyone, eventhough for some it will be just a wall of text.
I can't help myself but to quote the beginning of the article:
The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write.
No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.
Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.
What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.
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The Copenhagen summit achieved its main aim, to maintain the carbon-trading system established by the Kyoto Protocol, says Christopher Booker
The "world summit" on climate change was never really going to be about saving the world from global warming at all. Even if the delegates had got all they wanted, it would no more have had any influence on emissions of CO2 – let alone on the world's climate – than the 1997 Kyoto Protocol before it.
As was argued in 1997 by Tom Wigley, one of Al Gore's trusted allies and formerly head of the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, or CRU (recently at the centre of the Climategate scandal over rigged temperature data), even if the world had implemented Kyoto to the full, it would only have delayed global warming by six years.
Copenhagen was not about global warming but money. The cash that Hillary Clinton so dramatically plonked on the table, rising to $100 billion by 2020, which includes the £1.5 billion offered by Gordon Brown (money which of course he hasn't got) and which like a crazed gambler he last week upped to £6 billion (even more money he hasn't got), was merely a "sweetener" to persuade the developing countries to maintain the money-machine set in motion by Kyoto.
This is the new global industry based on buying and selling the right to emit CO2, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year, which through schemes such as the UN's Clean Development Mechanism and the EU's Emissions Trading System is making a small minority of people, including Al Gore, extremely rich.
and one line I just love:
The part played at Copenhagen by all the tree-huggers, abetted by the BBC and their media allies, was to keep hysteria over warming at fever pitch while the politicians haggled over the real prize, to keep the Kyoto system in place.
The second of two articles by Terence Corcoran appearing in today's NP:
Trouble over tree rings
The Mann technique of aggressive intervention in the peer-review process over Mr. Briffa's work sets the tone for what would become a major strategy, as all the scientists within the IPCC loop waged war on any scientists and papers that contravened or questioned the official view.
Western, first world countries, generally, are the most efficient users of energy and, generally, the most stringent in terms of environmental regulatory requirements placed on industry, all occurring while they typically have the highest labour costs.
The least efficient users of energy, the countries with the cheapest labour costs by far and the countries with the least regard for environmental considerations, tend to be emerging economies like India and China.
So, really, the plan here seems to be to reward the biggest polluters with the cheapest cost structures while penalizing the most efficient economies operating with the most stringent environmental regulatory structures but narrowest profit margins.
It's just never going to work on that basis.
No one should be surprised when you have a moment like Copenhagen, where mutual interests are hard to find and compromise yields only a weak, pointless memorandum.
China is now the largest CO2 emmiter on the planet but apparently unwilling to bear the responsibility that record demands.
Unless countries like China and India, in using their natural advantage of cheap labour as a margin buffer, are willing to do their part, then this whole exercise is rather pointless.
Another thing that strikes me . . . . . back in the 60's and 70's, the Thames was essentially dead and the Cuyahoga River running through Cleveland caught fire, among a horde of environmental disasters, massive air pollution was hovering over major cities, etc, etc . . . . .
Those kinds of things spawned a host of environmental regulations in first world countries as the public finally said enough was enough and began electing politicians willing to do something about it.
Meanwhile, the recent picture below shows Shanghai at mid-day and rivers throughout Asia are dying. A big black cloud of air pollution, deadly in scope, swathed Asia just a few years ago for something like three weeks.
It just seems these countries are going to be catching up to the first world in more ways than one, not just in industrial base but also in the human costs associated with it.
As such, we may need to wait for those Cuyahoga River moments in China or India before anything can be done on a global basis.
Cowperson
There is some much more we can do that would be better for the world than short term Global Warming fixers that will change little.
A former Green Peace Activist lays it all out nicely.
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If this thread has done anything, it was confuse me on where I stand on the issue.
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Originally Posted by henriksedin33
Not at all, as I've said, I would rather start with LA over any of the other WC playoff teams. Bunch of underachievers who look good on paper but don't even deserve to be in the playoffs.
Personally I sit squarely in the middle. I have no trouble with the concept of removing pollutants, cleaning up the environment and giving clean air to the next generation.
I do believe that the most difficult job for the leaders of the worlds countries is balancing their countries economic needs and protecting and promoting wealth which leads to stronger social, medical end educational programs with environmental needs, something that I don't hear discussed by the radical chic environmental groups.
I don't want to see Canada's economy crushed just so that other countries can collect money on an unbalanced environmental deal.
I skeptical about anyone that thinks that a fair and proper deal can be negotiated in a two week meeting.
Hell, its taken me nearly a year to negotiate a deal with one of my major clients.
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Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
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Personally I sit squarely in the middle. I have no trouble with the concept of removing pollutants, cleaning up the environment and giving clean air to the next generation.
I do believe that the most difficult job for the leaders of the worlds countries is balancing their countries economic needs and protecting and promoting wealth which leads to stronger social, medical end educational programs with environmental needs, something that I don't hear discussed by the radical chic environmental groups.
I don't want to see Canada's economy crushed just so that other countries can collect money on an unbalanced environmental deal.
I skeptical about anyone that thinks that a fair and proper deal can be negotiated in a two week meeting.
Hell, its taken me nearly a year to negotiate a deal with one of my major clients.
Cap'n, you're squarely in the middle of a different issue then. I doubt you'll find many people on the board (or any board) that wouldn't be in favor of removing pollutants, cleaning up the environment and giving clean air to the next generation. The real issue is the hypothesis that CO2 is a pollutant and is causing the planet to warm. This thread is about the discovery that the climate scientists behind this hypothesis have been stacking the deck.
In fact, I would say that the obsession with CO2 is distracting from what should arguably higher profile (and proven) environmental issues. It's not like those went away; they just don't warrant a New World Government redistributing wealth.
Cap'n, you're squarely in the middle of a different issue then. I doubt you'll find many people on the board (or any board) that wouldn't be in favor of removing pollutants, cleaning up the environment and giving clean air to the next generation. The real issue is the hypothesis that CO2 is a pollutant and is causing the planet to warm. This thread is about the discovery that the climate scientists behind this hypothesis have been stacking the deck.
In fact, I would say that the obsession with CO2 is distracting from what should arguably higher profile (and proven) environmental issues. It's not like those went away; they just don't warrant a New World Government redistributing wealth.
Soooo instead of spending money on expensive and wastefull summits like Copenhagen (which not only are a waste of time, but certainly a huge pollution factor of their own. Why the hell don't they use live meeting?)
The money should be spent on encouraging countries to create green spaces since plants love CO2.
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My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
I would say that the obsession with CO2 is distracting from what should arguably higher profile (and proven) environmental issues. It's not like those went away; they just don't warrant a New World Government redistributing wealth.
Examples?
Nice to see HOZ quoting Bjorn Lomborg as "laying it out nicely", and now accepting AGW like Lomborg? And being a member is not equal to activism. In fact Lomberg flatly states in the quoted interview he wasn't an active member.
I'm just curious why so many people like FOL are getting hysterically over a non legally binding document, that they would feign disgust at Darfur as a reason to argue against the "suggestions".
And .. CO2 aside, how can the meeting be called useless when the important issue of present, planned and future adaptation measures to "observed happenings" was a siginificant chunk of the meeting.
That picture of Beijing is a good start. Clear cutting rain forests (to make room for corn to produce ethanol - law of unintended consequences), over fishing, salinity issues, pesticide / herbicide / fertilizer runoff (see the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, as an example). Heck, the water quality in the Athabasca River should be of far more concern than the CO2 coming out of the smokestacks in the oil sands. These issues are REAL issues.
Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.
China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait. The failure was "the inevitable result of rich countries refusing adequately and fairly to shoulder their overwhelming responsibility", said Christian Aid. "Rich countries have bullied developing nations," fumed Friends of the Earth International.
I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world.
The US had confirmed the offer of $100bn to developing countries for adaptation, put serious cuts on the table for the first time (17% below 2005 levels by 2020), and was obviously prepared to up its offer.
Thank god for the chinese! It's funny that by cynically playing their game china actually stopped Obama and Merkel from being colossally stupid. For now at least...
And being a member is not equal to activism. In fact Lomberg flatly states in the quoted interview he wasn't an active member. 
