Climate Climate & Energy

Washington Post reporter not allowed to say what he knows about climate legislation costs

Steven Mufson’s a good reporter, but I swear to God, something about the conventions of traditional journalism just drives people to do things that might as well be deliberately designed to obscure the truth. Take Mufson’s recent piece on the costs of climate legislation. In particular, look at this bit: Listen to John Engler, former […]

Lieberman-Warner criticism, Part 5

This is the fifth in a five-part series exploring the details of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. See also part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

I close out this series with one small, specific thing that Lieberman-Warner gets wrong -- not necessarily because it's the biggest or most important thing it gets wrong; rather, because it illustrates the challenge faced by big and complicated legislation: it's really hard not to mess up the little stuff. Not out of malice, necessarily, but simply because it's hard to get that much right. And sometimes -- as in this case -- the little things you get wrong can have big consequences.

When all is said and done, good government policy isn't that much different from good human resources policy. If your employer makes it clear to you how your actions convert into your salary, you tend to work well together. On the other hand, if your employer gives you a 10-page incentive compensation plan with individual, department-wide, and corporate-level targets, bonus points for how many team-building sessions you go to, credit for attending various training seminars ... you get my point.

In a nutshell, that's the crux of the problem with Lieberman-Warner. Rather than starting simple and adding on complexity only as needed, it starts really complicated and virtually ensures that lots of those little details are wrong, misdirected, and/or in conflict with one another. In this final post, I'll look at just one of those details: utility decoupling.

More blather about sacrifice from pundits who don’t really care about climate change

I see the pundits are still lobbing up chinstrokers about how addressing climate change is going to require "sacrifice -- serious wartime sacrifice." This sounds Very Serious. The only quibble I have is that it's probably not true. "Going green" in a carbon-constrained economy won't feel like sacrifice to most people. It will feel like shopping.

Meaning, it will feel like all the decisions we make every day, but tilted imperceptibly by the price ramifications of a carbon cap. Studies suggesting that the overall economic effect of climate change legislation will be fairly small just keep piling up. The most recent one was from the environmental radicals at the IMF.

So why all the sacrifice talk? Maybe because it's just plain hard to imagine what a decades-long economic transformation will look like. We tend to extrapolate crudely from where we are now. If you want to cut your individual carbon footprint 80 percent today, you might have to sell your car, give up flying, move into a smaller house, and start foraging for food.

But that's not how this will go down. Fully decarbonizing will take several decades. The process will be unpredictable, creating winners, losers, opportunities, and benefits. Come with me now to Strained Analogy Land. Imagine going back in time to meet your hippie forebear ...

I read a letter to the editor, the other day, I opened, and read it, it said they was suckas

A trio of fine letters in The NYT today, taking Richard Cohen to task for his reflexive praise of sugar-cane ethanol.

Next decade may see rapid warming, not cooling

The Nature article ($ub. req'd) that has caused so much angst about the possibility that we are entering a decade of cooling -- "Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector" -- has been widely misreported. I base this in part on direct communication with the lead author.

In fact, with the caveat from the authors that the study should be viewed as preliminary, and should not be used for year-by-year predictions, it is more accurate to say the Nature study is consistent with the following statements:

• The "coming decade" (2010 to 2020) is poised to be the warmest on record, globally.
• The coming decade is poised to see faster temperature rise than any decade since the authors' calculations began in 1960.
• The fast warming would likely begin early in the next decade -- similar to the 2007 prediction by the Hadley Center in Science (see "Climate forecast: hot -- and then very hot").
• The mean North American temperature for the decade from 2005 to 2015 is projected to be slightly warmer than the actual average temperature of the decade from 1993 to 2003.

Before explaining where the confusion came from -- mostly a misunderstanding of how the Nature authors use the phrase "next decade" -- let's see how the media covered it:

The ghost of link dumps past

So I was thinking to myself, self, you should do a link dump post so you can close out some of this cluttery crap in your browser. I go to start one, and what do I find? An old link dump post that I’d never published! So here’s an old link dump. Watch for a […]

Climate change must be examined over decades, not years

There has been a lot of nonsense written about the lack of much if any warming over the last few years. It's not a new argument -- in fact, I blogged about it here -- but like an axe-wielding psycho from a cheap horror flick, it just keeps coming back.

At times like this, it is always useful to look at the data. The figure below shows the temperature anomalies (relative to the 1961-1991 average) from 1850 to 2007. The data are the Hadley HadCRUT3v analysis.

DeSmogBlog uncovers Heartland lies

The right-wing Heartland Institute has been making a big fuss about "500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares." Five hundred skeptical scientists? Sounds bad! Kevin Grandia at DeSmogBlog had the radical idea of actually contacting the scientists, to see if they are being accurately characterized by Heartland. You see where this is […]

Emission prices don’t reduce consumption sufficiently

Recently, I pointed out that emission prices do in fact get passed along to consumers. However, it's important to add that making low carbon alternatives cheaper won't by itself ensure that they are adopted.

My online book Cooling It! No Hair Shirt Solutions to Global Warming documents numerous profitable-but-overlooked energy-saving alternatives. Numerous other people have pointed out the same thing. The Rocky Mountain Institute produces megabytes of examples. Economists refer to the fact that profitable opportunities to save energy tend to be overlooked as "low demand elasticity." You can find out more about why this tends to occur in an annotated bibliography I put together, currently posted as a Word doc at the Carbon Tax center website.

Just to correct some ambiguities, this is not to say that an emissions price won't accomplish anything or is not needed - simply that it is not sufficient. That if we want the problem solved without absurdly high carbon prices, we need to use other policy tools, and not limit ourselves to putting a price on emission.

The rhetoric of population in the hunger crisis

Perhaps you saw the recent UNESCO report on the future of agriculture. It calls for a major paradigm shift in agriculture away from fossil fuels toward organic agriculture and greater equity of distribution. Wow, I wonder why no one ever thought of that before?

Seriously, this is the largest single report ever to tell us what we already knew: the status quo is not an option. That is, we cannot go into the future as we are. We all know this on some level.