Articles by Gar Lipow

The time to focus on policy is now

With the policy summary of the IPCC WGII report out, this is a good time to concentrate on policy. Any effort to lower emissions has to put a price on carbon and other greenhouse sources. As I think extensive discussion has shown, a carbon tax is the best way to price emissions, and to price the destruction of carbon sinks.

One advantage of carbon taxes (and auctioned permits as well -- close enough to a carbon tax for practical purposes) not often noted is that it they produce revenue that can be directed back to consumers. This is an important contrast to the Kyoto system, where large numbers of permits were given away to big polluters. As with any method of raising the price of carbon, ultimately the cost was passed on to consumers. But with the permit giveaways, the consumer did not recover any of those costs.

On a small scale, this is merely painful and unfair. But suppose this was done with a large-scale rise in emission prices -- one that increased the prices of consumer goods by 25 or 50 percent? Not only would this cause direct suffering, the odds are pretty good that reduced consumer demand would cause at least a recession, with a real risk of world-wide depression. You need to return some the costs to consumers, not only on moral grounds but on Keynesian ones -- to avoid a precipitous drop in overall demand.

I will add that when you talk about a drop in consumption for poor people, you are talking not just suffering but death. Even in the rich nations, there people poor enough that cutting their real income by a third or half will kill some of them. Cut the income of people in poor nations already living on a few dollars a day, and you are talking slaughter.

The biggest factor is still the bottom line

An influential group of CEOs, senior officers and trustees of institutional investors, asset managers, and corporations called for action (PDF) on climate change back on March 19. It's a good thing the rich and powerful in the U.S. are starting to recognize that action must be taken. But as should be expected, what they call for is the minimum they think they can get away with rather than what is needed.

So to speak

No, as far as I know, no baby-food maker ever used rat poison as an ingredient. The point is that we don't have to worry about it; if you have an infant switching off milk, you can shop the baby food counter confident that none of the choices will contain rat poison.

However, as a consumer, buying "green" is not quite so easy. Hastening the end of our civilization is a routine ingredient in most of the things we buy. By spending a little extra time and money, we can sometimes find alternatives that don't contribute to our society's destruction -- though often not.

If baby food routinely contained micro doses of arsenic, of course you would go out of your way to buy uncontaminated versions for your child. But you would also recognize that we should not allow baby food to include anything so toxic in the first place.

Helpful hints for global warming deniers

Many global warming deniers have moved on from denying the existence or human causes of global warming to denying it's worthwhile to do anything to mitigate it. "Burn all the fossil fuels you want", they suggest, "and adapt to the changes. Doing anything to reduce global warming is too expensive."

In a spirit of reconciliation, I thought I'd put forward some specific proposals to implement their approach.

On a planet with unchecked greenhouse warming, we would have a less predictable climate, warmer on average, but with unpredictable frosts and snowstorms -- some of them in places we currently don't get snow. Drought would alternate with floods. Insects would flourish on a warmer planet, and pests of all types would migrate. And of course storms would be worse than at present, as the average wind speed increased.