Articles by David Roberts

One last foray into the economics discussion

The guys at Environmental Economics replied to my post on economics and climate here and here. Read if you like. I would protest that "the extreme position by some environmentalists that economics is evil" has nothing to do with me or what I wrote, and that if there is some war between Environmentalism As Such and Economics As Such I want nothing to do with it, but ... feh.

I just want to make one final point, somewhat abstracted from the details of this oh-so-illuminating back and forth. In the course of decrying the pointlessness of a battle between greens and economists, Ryan Avent defends me from Tim Haab's charge that I'm an idiot:

Roberts is very smart on these issues and has a very sophisticated, and for the most part correct (in my view), outlook on carbon pricing.

First, thanks!

Now, not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but note the evidence offered that I'm not an economic philistine: I respect carbon pricing. I don't want to make too much of a passing comment, but this strikes me as endemic to these debates: the notion that when it comes to environment and energy issues, "economics" means "market-based policy" means "pricing."

This seems like a weirdly constrained use of economics to me -- reflective of the narrow range of economics visible in America's public conversation -- and it's made for a weirdly constrained debate. Economists themselves aren't necessarily guilty -- see here -- but it's true of many people arriving newly to climate/energy policy debates. They discover that Economic Science says one thing and fuzzy headed advocates say something else, so of course they want to be Sensible and side with Economic Science (don't want to get patouli on you!). Thus you get a weird kind of zealotry around pricing from people who know very little about the specifics of environmental history or regulation or technology, whereby they wildly overstate the potential of pricing and proclaim confidently that Economic Science has discredited the alternatives. (*cough*carbon tax advocates*cough)

Seems to me, though, economic thinking could go both more micro and more macro than carbon pricing.

Dutch call on green guru to open up cradle-to-cradle certification

A while back I noted Fast Company's big expose on green guru William McDonough. Despite the hype and promise around McDonough's intellectual work, it hasn't done much to change the business world, for reasons having to do with what his critics characterize as ineptitude and vanity. Specifically, his cradle-to-cradle certification process has remained jealously guarded, run only through his firm, woefully behind on assessing products and responding to requests.

Now author Danielle Sacks has a short follow-up, about a Dutch attorney and several Dutch gov't organizations pleading with McDonough to open up the C2C process, if not completely open source then at least to public-private partnerships.

It's odd. The notion of keeping this stuff jealously guarded, proprietary, and for-profit seems so counter to the spirit of McDonough's work. I can't make sense of it.

New all-liquid battery holds promise of easy scalability and high current capacity

For the tech nerds out there, check out this intriguing article in the new Technology Review.

It's about a new kind of battery in which all the active materials are liquid (molten metals and molten salt) rather than solids. This gives it several advantages over the whole range of solid-state batteries now available. It's cheap and easily scaleable, and most importantly, it can handle very high currents. It looks like an incredibly promising solution for utility-scale storage of intermittent resources like sun and wind.

You can hear this all explained by MIT's Donald Sandoway in the nerdtastic video at the link.

As always, it's all about cost-effective scale. No sense celebrating yet. But every scrap of hopeful news on energy storage is worth sharing.

Carbon policy = tax cut

A final note about cap-and-trade auction revenue in Obama's budget.

I know some folks (see Sean) object to the whole notion that climate policy should be viewed as a means of raising (and spending) revenue. And there are good policy reasons to fear the conflation.

Still, political reality being what it is, I can't help but think this is a stroke of genius. What you've got now is a tax cut for 95% of American workers, paid for by wealthy industries and individuals. It's flipped the "war on the poor" attack on cap-and-trade completely. Now blocking carbon legislation is a war on the poor.

"Mr. Inhofe, why do you oppose a tax cut that will help so many hard-hit Oklahoma families? Whose interests are you defending?"

Heh.