Articles by Gar Lipow

Book shows we can meet hard targets in stopping climate change

As the climate crisis grows worse, many people question whether we can phase out human greenhouse-gas emissions before an irreversible feedback cycle begins. As a belated New Year's present for 2008, I want to offer for free the full text of my book Cooling It! No Hair Shirt Solutions to Global Warming, to increase optimism.

We not only have the technical capability to phase out fossil fuels over the course of 30 years, we can eliminate 94 percent of emissions within 20. The cost is close to zero: between savings from efficiency and renewable sources that are more expensive than fossil fuels (but not that much more expensive), the market cost will balance out to around what we pay now. That is before we gain benefits from less pollution and less climate chaos.

A lot of people worry (and rightfully so) not about the technical solutions, but about the politics of implementing them. They are right to do so; but the fact that we are missing huge opportunities for efficiency gains -- even at current prices -- shows that there is a political opportunity as well as a political danger. Let the people of the U.S. and the world understand the great opportunities green technology offers for better living and real wealth creation for the vast majority.

The old story that the Chinese character for "crisis" is composed of the characters for "danger" and "opportunity" is false -- but the metaphor is too good to drop.

You can download the entire book as a single file (or chapter by chapter) here.

Nobel winner explains why markets can’t replace public goods

From Reuters:

Societies should not rely on market forces to protect the environment or provide quality health care for all citizens, a winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for economics said on Monday. ... "The market doesn't work very well when it comes to public goods," said [Professor Eric] Maskin ...

Mechanism Design Theory is one explanation for why even a well-regulated market with external costs priced via Pigovian or green taxes is inadequate in areas like environmental performance or health care.

Certain types of goods -- public goods -- simply cannot be allocated efficiently through market mechanisms alone. This was known long before Mechanism Design Theory came along.

For example, the U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other nation, and gets worse results. There are various reasons for this, but one is that a competitive market in health insurance tends to provide more insurance and less healthcare than public insurance mechanisms.

Peter Barnes looks at carbon-capping methods

Peter Barnes has a guest post on the Step It Up blog giving a good brief description of how a Sky Trust would work:

Human-powered irrigation can increase harvests for farmers

Recently, I wrote about treadle pumps that let human power replace diesel power for irrigation. As a one-to-one replacement it sounded pretty oppressive. But it turns out that it is not a one-to-one replacement.

Poor farmers who only earn a dollar or so, per person per day, can afford to do a lot more irrigation with treadles than they can renting diesel pumps from rich farmers and buying diesel fuel to run it. So they multiply the size of their harvests by two or three, their incomes by even more. Even in a formal efficiency analysis, you are probably increasing rather than decreasing the output per unit of labor. In human terms, you are increasing the amount of fresh vegetables the family can eat, and paying for things like school fees in areas where education is not necessarily completely tax-paid. So you are making life better for the farmers, and even slightly increasing their autonomy from richer neighbors.