Articles by David Roberts

It is conservatives, not environmentalists, who want to redistribute costs and burdens — to future

In a boilerplate 'winger column on cap-and-trade, the Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel says that Obama's carbon policy, despite all the rhetoric about reducing emissions and preventing climate change, is secretly just an effort to REDISTRIBUTE WEALTH [bwa ha ha, etc.].

In a similarly boilerplate 'winger column on climate change, Dan Gainor (The Boone Pickens Fellow at the Business & Media Institute -- wonder what T. Boone thinks about this) says that no matter what environmentalists say about "science" and "public health" and so forth, their secret agenda is to CONTROL PEOPLE [evil laugh].

These are very, very common conservative charges against environmentalists. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find 'wingers saying anything else on the subject. So it's worth addressing briefly.

Now, as Jason Grument said in response to Strassel's column at the Eco:nomics conference, any government policy redistributes resources: cancer research, invading Iraq, loosening regulations on banks, food stamps, carbon policy, anything. That is the nature of government. The relevant question is whether it's a wise or just redistribution of resources.

But it's important to go beyond that. Lurking behind these attacks is a bedrock conservative faith: that absent government intervention, the market allocates resources with perfect efficiency and those within it are free. Anything government does effectively disturbs a state of grace. Conservatives wouldn't put it so bluntly, but it's the only thing that makes sense of their rhetoric.

So it's worth occasionally reiterating: right now, with respect to climate, we are allocating resources inefficiently and imposing enormous costs and constraints on future generations. We are making them less free -- controlling them, you might say. Environmentalists do not want to control people for the sake of controlling them. They want people to bear the costs and burdens of their own behavior instead of sloughing them off to their kids and grandkids.

Conservatives think running up this enormous ecological and economic debt is "freedom." They think its proper distribution of resources. That's twisted and irresponsible.

Economics malpractice, climate and poverty, oil sands nightmares, and more WSJ dipshittery

• Max Schulz demonstrates how economics is typically used in the energy debate: "There's an unavoidable problem with renewable-energy technologies: From an economic standpoint, they're big losers." As though the "economic standpoint" is some static, univocal thing. Douchebag.

• A nice report from Brookings on a woefully under discussed topic: Double Jeopardy: What the Climate Crisis Means for the Poor.

• National Geographic has an in-depth examination of the horror that is Alberta's oil sands program. Excellent journalism, albeit the stuff of nightmares.

• Shockingly, the oil and gas industry opposes the Obama administration plan to eliminate some taxpayers subsidies for the oil and gas industry.

• A while back, Holman Jenkins, a Wall Street Journal columnist and member of the editorial board, characterized Obama's concern over climate change as a "soppy indulgence," and said of climate science: "We don't really have the slightest idea how an increase in the atmosphere's component of CO2 is impacting our climate, though the most plausible indication is that the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability." Stuart Gaffin, an actual climate scientist at Columbia University, responded in a blog post, pointing to actual science. In turn, Jenkins retrenched in a blog post of his own, with a bunch of absurd harumphing and misdirection. Gaffin responded again, decimating the smoldering remains of Jenkins argument with a torrent of scientific citations.

This is typical of many other exchanges between ideologues and scientists about climate. The galling thing, with this one as with most of them, is that the scientists are correct, by any reasonable assessment, and yet the ideologues can just go on saying whatever they want, in widely read editorials. There simply is no winning here. It's really hard to see what the scientists should do.

Jim Rogers' chutzpah, geothermal's promise, Larson's carbon tax, and efficiency's returns

• Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy and prominent member of USCAP, says that it's a bad idea to refund carbon auction money back to taxpayers. Instead, the vast bulk of the money should be given to public utility regulators. Really, he said that.

• According to a new report from Credit Suisse, geothermal power now has a lower cost-per-kilowatt-hour than coal. ScientificAmerican takes a look at the report and finds that it contains several important caveats (it presumes reasonable interest rate financing, doesn't include explorations costs, etc.). Even with the caveats, though, this is heartening stuff.

• Shell Oil now has a climate change blog. So far, it's surprisingly good and substantive.

• Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) has introduced a carbon tax bill to the House (updating and improving a similar bill from 2007). It would start with a $15/ton tax, which would rise $10 per year, and it would refund all revenue to taxpayers through payroll tax rebates. $10 billion a year in tax credits are also made available to cleantech R&D and investments. The guys at the Carbon Tax Center love it. They say one of the prospective losers is "cynics who said the U.S. could never enact a meaningful carbon tax." But the U.S. won't enact this one either, so ...

• The Berkeley National Laboratory has an interesting report out: "Financial Analysis of Incentive Mechanisms to Promote Energy Efficiency: Case Study of a Prototypical Southwest Utility (PDF)." (I know, sounds fascinating, right?) It runs through scenarios whereby a utility aggressively pursues energy efficiency, based on various policies (decoupling, performance standards, etc.). What does it do to rates? Equity? Shareholder returns? Here are the key conclusions:

Free beer

Now Republicans are framing their total-deregulation, fossil-happy, drill-and-burn energy policies as "no cost stimulus."

Sometimes my powers of snark just fail me.