Inkless Wells

Paul Wells on all the latest out of Ottawa—along with the occasional post about jazz. Follow Paul on Twitter: @InklessPW
He also offers his thoughtful perspective of Stephen Harper’s last 10 years in his recent eBook, The Harper Decade.

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Penny for your thoughts or any carbon-intensive activities that result therefrom

by Paul Wells on Sunday, December 28, 2008 6:49pm - 163 Comments

Tom Friedman’s column in the Sunday New York Times begins the way all Tom Friedman columns do — Hi! I’ve got a Big Idea™ and I’m just going to type like a dervish until you catch up with me about halfway down the column! — but eventually it turns out to be… well, poignant, if you’re a Canadian reader. For Friedman is today urging President-Elect Obama “to increase the federal gasoline tax or impose an economy-wide carbon tax.”

Friedman holds out no great hope that Obama will actually do such a thing. Obama didn’t campaign on a carbon-tax promise after all. The Democrat’s preferred choice of mechanism is a cap-and-trade scheme closer to Stephen Harper’s: massively interventionist, cumbersome, harrowingly difficult to design, prone to loopholes and investor confusion, destined to take forever to implement — in a word, French. It’s easy to see why Stephen Harper and John Baird would have cooked up such a plan: they were banking on delay and eventual failure. Massively awful program design was a feature for them, not a bug. It’s also easy to understand why Stéphane Dion preferred cap-and-trade at first, because as we’ve all learned, Canada’s new coalition prime minister has a soft spot for cumbersome solutions that don’t actually work.

It’s less clear why Obama is in the cap-and-trade business, unless some Obama fans are right when they worry that Obama’s “moderation” is actually a prelude to exquisitely even-handed difference-splitting that will produce no real change. Whatever the case, the questions and challenges Friedman puts in this column are also worth putting to anyone who claims to want to address climate change with anything resembling the fierce urgency of now. People like, say, this guy:

Michael Ignatieff, after all, was the first of the 2006-vintage Liberal leadership candidates to propose a carbon tax. I’m not saying that in a blame-y way, and unlike Ryan Sparrow I do not now plan to dismiss everything the Liberal sort-of-leader proposes from now on as the ramblings of a carbon taxer. It’s fair of Ignatieff to say, as Bob Rae and Dominic LeBlanc were saying when they still thought there would be a leadership campaign, that the voters were asked their opinion of carbon taxes in October and they gave a firm answer.

But that leaves a question hanging. If you believe climate change is real and catastrophic; that human agency can inflect its course; that Canada has something to contribute to the search for a solution; and that dawdling is no longer permissible — then what better idea do you have?

Tags: Michael Ignatieff, Permanent Taxes on Everything, Tom Friedman

More by Paul Wells

Paul Wells

That’s why Dan Gardner’s talk of a carbon floor was interesting: Just set a price below which gas would not be allowed to fall. Of course it would be way too easy to campaign against: Vote Liberal and you’ll never catch a break. The Chrétien-Harper way is best: Swear to God you’ll never do what you wind up doing later.
Bill Simpson

Cdn in Europe,
I think we reached the limit of replies…

I am not being polemical, or I am failing in not being loemical, but I really want to challenge the notion that there is a readily achieveable technical solution and that we need government to get on and make it happen.

I was a student of environmentalism and urban planning a long time ago, at a time when I was seduced by the wonderful visions of perfectly arranged human habitats, all people living in harmony etc.. in their regulated, and controlled environment, just the way the planners like.

I recognise the same philosophy underpinning the whole carbon tax and global warming deal.

I think it is fantastical to think that we can devise and plan a complete energy system of the kind you describe and I think it is utopian to think that you can do this by bureaucratic fiat.

I am not interested in any scheme that needs to be enforced by the government, and using taxes is “enforcing” since we cannot chose not to.

Cdn in Europe

Okay, so you reject both price mechanisms and government regulations. You basically seem to believe that governments (the institutional mechanism that citizens use to address common property issues and decide on where to spend pooled wealth raised through taxes) are illegitimate. I wonder if you think countries with governments which raise very little in the way of taxes are the sorts of places you’d want to live? But never mind. Enlighten me: What measures DO you recommend, having ruled out price mechanisms and measures that “need to be enforced by government”? Now that I know what you are against (as far as I can tell, anything that could possibly be effective), what are you FOR, Bill? Or are you a partisan of the idea that since addressing the climate issue would require government intervention, therefore climate science must be a hoax?

Bill Simpson

Paul,
That is the sort of cynical remark that will doom this discussion to futility. If we can’t trust our governments to manage the carbon tax properly, there is no hope.

Paul Wells

Happy to help, Bill.

Bill Simpson

I think the minimum price gambit neatly captures the problem – it doesn’t matter what it is set at, since it must by its nature be arbitrary, and then ever after it can be the subject of politicial debate and distortion. This is the trouble when you use taxes for social engineering.

Cdn in Europe

All taxes are used for “social engineering”, Bill. All of them. That’s the point. Governments are supposed to use tax money to engineer and maintain a well-functioning society. Yet the term “social engineering” seems to be used by people who read Ayn Rand as undergrads (and never got over it) as code for “government spending Rush Limbaugh, Terence Corcoran, and therefore I, do not approve of.”

Hence government spending to send a million soldiers to first destroy Iraq and then attempt to rebuild it (or provide armed patrols while trusting “the market” to rebuild it, a la Paul Bremer and his decrees) is not social engineering. But building low-carbon energy supply infrastructure is unacceptable, “socialist” social engineering.

You know, I think of myself as a small-c conservative, on most issues (and as a progressive on issues it makes sense to seek progress on). I have strong attachments to the fair application of reasonable laws, personal liberty balanced by personal responsibility, a strong entrepreneurial culture that rewards meirt, good governance, family, country, decency, and so on. But I can’t think of anything people who label themselves as “Conservative” these days, and who repeat talking points from the Harperite or Republican canons, are actually interested in conserving. If you’re not even willing to conserve the biophysical environment in which we live, what on Earth motivates you to claim the label “Conservative”?

Radical “free market”-obsessive anti-government ideology is a commitment to plutocracy, not to democracy or conservatism.

Bill Simpson

Hah! Now who’s into polemic :-) ?

Seriously though, taxes are not all used for social engineering, and in fact a most of them are involved in doing fairly useful things like build roads, schools, hospitals, pay pensions, not to mention armies and other interesting things. Of course, they are much mis-spent and abused, which is why I am not much interested in any new ones.

The carbon tax is not about raising revenue as such, it is about coercing us into a particular type of economic behavior, and this is a bad thing in my estimate. Your complaint about Bush’s use of taxes is instructive in this respect; once you give your money to the government, it turns out that they can do anything they like with it. What if a future government takes your carbon tax revenue and decides to spend it on invading Bermuda? Once imposed, taxes are never given up.

Finally, you need to recognise that your argument is not with Rush Limbaugh or even Terence Corcoran, it is with the average Canadian, who, faced with their credit card bill after christmas and a dodgy economy, is pretty leery of a new tax that is somehow going to solve this climate change problem in whenever.

Cdn in Europe

A price on carbon doesn’t “force” anyone to do anything, Bill. That’s an abuse of the term “force”. It incentivizes people to seek lower-cost solutions. And if one is clever and pays attention to the details, then, in a context where income taxes are lowered in compensation for increases in carbon taxes, then one can adopt a high-quality, lower-carbon lifestyle and come out ahead on a net take-home income basis. Anyway, I asked you: What is your alternative proposal? If you accept that a lower-carbon economy is a necessarily core policy aim of government, how do you propose it be achieved, if you’ve ruled out all mechanisms the rest of us can think of that might be effective (prices and regulations)?

Bill Simpson

I go back to what an earlier poster observed – that our more pressing issue is straightforward air and water pollution. If we look at air-pollution, it is an obvious nuisance that is readily controlled using existing mechanisms. Interstingly, most of the mechanisms that are used to control air-pollution apply pretty well to carbon emissions. I expect that the vigorous prosecution of air-pollution will not only give us cleaner air (a good that anyone can buy into) but will act to reduce carbon emissions as well.

Also, I don’t expect that there will be any particular reduction in the use of fossil fules for a long time. It will be impossible to stop the third world getting their share of its benefits and there is no reasonable alternative. Even if we outlaw its use tomorrow in North America, its use will just move offshore to unregulated areas and there will be no net reduction.

A good thing to do would be for governments to stop subsidizing the oil and gas companies, the car companies, the airlines and so on, start making the costs of using cars and trucks go to car and truck users instead of the general population. In fact, less government would go a long way to fulfilling your own greener goals!

Try all that and then see where we are.
Cdn in Europe

Less government, eh. Did you read the earlier posts where I pointed out what kind of country has “less government” and “lower taxes” than the 40%-to65% GDP share characteristic of all wealthy industrialized economies, without exception? You are rigidly repeating talking points that are standard shibboleths of the CPC catechism, including the stuff about focusing on “air pollution” rather than GHGs. Yet you failed to explain how you were going to reduce air pollution under your no-taxes-no-regulations dogma. Does air pollution magically solve itself? No? So tell me, how are you going to reduce air pollution? As for getting car owners to pay their own costs, do you include the cost of building and maintaining roads? Are you therefore in favour of road taxes and inner-city road congestion charges (like in London UK)? And if so, why are these instruments appropriate use of taxes to incorporate “externalities”, whereas carbon taxes are not?

Sigh. I may have to admit to myself that I’m wasting my time conversing with a guy who hasn’t the stick to go beyond recycling and repeating vague market-god-worshipping Corcoronian/CPC talking points. This schtick is so intellectually bankrupt, yet even in the face of banks collapsing and bubbles bursting in the low-tax, low-regulation USA, your lot just keep blindly repeating the talking points of your sad, simple catechism. Consider the possibility that the ideology you’ve bought into all these years is largely wrong, and no substitute for actually thinking issues through carefully on a pragmatic basis.

Mike T.

What about a results based approach instead of an incentive based approach? We build more commuter transit, then close the roads to commuter vehicles. price of gas stays the same, but if you are driving when you could take the train, there’s no way to get there.

Cdn in Europe

Theoretically could work, but heavy-handed and politically not particularly achievable.

http://ADMS.ca cm

Let’s use whatever bail-out money/bridge loans/’injected liquidity’ for transit, green retrofits, and renewable energy initiatives instead.

http://prairiewrangler.wordpress.com/ Olaf

I was thinking the same thing last week. Since almost everyone is pushing hard for stimulus, stimulus, oh, and also, MORE STIMULUS, why aren’t we stimulating the industries of the future, instead of trying to bailout those decrepit, dirty industries of the 20th century? I mean, I of course know why our politicians aren’t, but it’s sort of a shame that we’re missing out on the once in a generation opportunity to actually encourage the very fundamental shift in our economy that so many agree needs to take place.

Cdn in Europe

Yes indeed. Here’s an idea: Round up two well-informed friends who agree with you about this, and make an appointment to see your MP. Tell him/her what you think. S/he’s in your Riding right now – Parliament is not in session. Don’t assume it will do no good. Face-to-face meetings have a thousand times the effect of letters or emails.

This isn’t a difficult thing to do, by the way. I’ve done it. All it takes is a couple of phone calls to your friends and to his Riding office. They’ll slot you in.

http://prairiewrangler.wordpress.com/ Olaf

Don’t assume it will do no good.

Too late. That very assumption is already registered in my brain. And if you knew who my MP is, you’d probably agree. It would be infinitely more effective to run around downtown naked with a town-crier bell and a sandwich board reading “Invest in green technology or we’re all gonna die”. Fortunately that would only require a rather minor modification to my sandwich board, so I’ll see what I can do.

http://andythesaint.wordpress.com/ andythesaint

If your MP is who I think it is, I’d have to agree.

TobyornotToby

I’d be happy if governments stopped subsidizing fossil fuel dependence as their first contribution to preventing climate disruption.

It’s hard to imagine tax approaches accomplishing ghg reductions when you live in Winnipeg where the city and the province have been co-proponents in almost every sprawl-inducing development, when both treat public transit as if it’s only for old people, kids and losers, and when they invest nearly 100 % of infrastructure in roads, bridges and underpasses designed to alleviate traffic problems they created with their rush to impel our city outward.

The last federal green infrastructure program was invested in a privately owned hockey arena, and all three levels are preparing to do likewise with a new football stadium, and some subsidy of a massive Big Box IKEA development at the epicentre of the sprawl is laos in the works, but we still haven’t broken ground on the first leg of a rapid transit plan that has been 35 years in the making.

With this kind of consistent anti-urban agenda, bi-partisan NDP and PC by the way, the starting point is to convince our governments to stop subsidizing unsustainable development, and auto-dependence model that seems to be a default. Increasing gas prices on consumers won’t make public transit viable if the city just uses its share of the gas tax to widen more roads, and subsidize more sprawl.

Cdn in Europe

Toby, sad realities, eh. Conventional politicians don’t have the stick for this sort of thing. Maybe it’s time for people who actually care about good policy to get into the game. At the end of the day, the best way to get politicians doing what you know needs to get done, is to become an elected official yourself. Is a bid for Winnipeg city council, for starters, out of the question for you?

Sophie

I actually think that the carbon tax could be repackaged and sold in a different way (This being why i am not a Liberal strategist)
What if it was sold as tax reform, with a significantly higher cut to personal income tax?
Possibly it could be used in conjunction with other methods such as cap and trade.
Maybe larger government subsidies on making homesm ore energy efficient, and charging a fee to collect non-recylcing garbage. The real problem, I suppose, is that to adress the issue we need a massive shift in our values as a society- because the government can only do so much. How about a subsidy for planting trees or leaving land to a conservation trust?
Better yet, lets go ask Farley Mowat and do whatever he tells us to.

Cdn in Europe

We’ve been waiting for a “massive shift in our values as a society” for about forty years, on issues of environmental responsibility. To some degree it has actually occurred. What’s needed now is politicians with the skill and courage to take leadership and do what has to be done. The idea that the economy will collapse if we get serious about shifting to a green infrastructure is complete nonsense: done right, a green-jobs boom will necessariy result from a “green shift”, as we rebuild and retrofit everything. We need politicians who are smart enough not to buy into the false “environment or economy” trade-off and sell the correct proposition that a green economy is a win-win proposition… oh… er… okay, right, Dion tried and failed. But the problem wasn’t the message. It was the messenger – and an electoral system which causes vote-splitting amongst several Progressive parties to result in a government supported by the one-third of voters who buy into the quite literally bankrupt ideology of anti-government market-god.worshipping ranters. Once we have a leader who actually implements the changes we need, it will take no more than a few months for the screams from Albertan oilmen and Uncle Milton’s fan club to die down, as the expected economic meltdown fails to occur and people get on with their well-paid jobs building HVDC transmission lines, setting up wind turbines and retooling car factories for EV production.

Bill D. Cat

Climate disuption ??????

Fer crying out loud at least settle what you’re going to call it , we all know the science is settled .
Bill D. Cat

Sorry , Climate disRuption , was coughing too hard .

TobyornotToby

Bill, I consider climate disruption a more accurate term than either global warming or “climate change” and I’ve been using it since 1990 because it reflects what is happening and will happen at the regional level, with more flooding in some areas, drought in others, wild swings in termperature from extreme heat to extreme cold in other regions, and so on.

The people that negotiated Kyoto didn’t give us the straight goods, didn’t tell us we’d need to reduce atmospheric CO2 by 50% (or more) by 2050 to prevent the destructive effects of ghg buildup and they didn’t give us a term that reflected the urgency either.

My point has always been that we’re talking about a human-induced disruption of the CO2 balance, not the normal variabilty that climate science obfuscators pretend is happening of the “Change? Of course there’s change, there has always been change, etc.” variety.

I laugh bitterly when the IPCC and the proponents of Kytoto are dismissed as alarmist radicals because in my view they’ve been altogether too conservative in their approaches, incorrectly assuming that incremental goals and less alarming terminology would create the impetus for action. Instead it has produced two decades of inaction.

kody

“wrong on all counts”

The broad stroke dismissal. I’m pretty sure you actually didn’t ponder a single of my points – all of which are true.

The very fact that the declarations of “settled[ness]” are themselves folly, goes a long way in explaining the reliance on these attempts to shut down debate, the rush to implement policy based on unreliable/untested, and now proven untrue (recall eight years ago we were supposed to be well on our way to an inferno by now) theory,

and the left’s highjacking the debate for their purposed of justifyiny massive government controls of our resources.

The last point is the crucial one. The death of classic marxism following the collapse of the Soviet Empire the famine in N. Korea and the destitution of Cuba (among some other smaller states that attempted to have a government controlled economy),

has given rise to a new breed of socialism: one founded on the eradication of disaster.

Disaster socialists, who primarily have relied upon the mass hysteria of the faux disaster, that with each passing year looks more and more rediculous as it fails to come to fruition, is now moving from the “Green Movement” to the “the great depression” movement.

One has to wonder how an AP headline which speaks of “sales plunging!!!” over the holiday period based on a drop in….gasp 2-4% sales (yup, after adjusting for the drop in gasoline prices which explained a full half of the drop in ‘spending’ is was a measely 2%), is justified and savoured by the left:

the reason: the new disaster and the correpsonding only solution – massive new government controls (the notion of letting the market settle things itself is almost of the “denier” variety heresy.

Disaster socialists.

Get used to the term. It’s real.

It’s happening now.

And only the true old school journalist will dare to shine the light on it.

Brad

kody, you are just a little off base ascribing the notion of reliance on apocryphal hysteria to the left. It’s an effective sympathy generator for both ends of your theoretical spectrum. The War on _________ was brought to you by the right, using exactly that tactic. Drugs? “Those horrible (choose your ethnic group stereotype according to the drug of choice) are going to seduce our white daughters!” Guns in the home? “Those horrible (choose relevant ethnic group for your local area) are going to intrude and rape our white daughters!” Terrorism? “Those horrible (choose your ethnic group according to circumstance, but, let’s face it, the muslims have been a little scarier than the Irish lately) are going to invade and blow up our white daughters!”

Fear? It’s an equal opportunity sales tactic.
Sisyphus

Ah ! A perverse version of the Shock Doctrine. Naomi has a lawyer, kody.

Bill Simpson

Cdn in Europe
I am all in favor of regulations and laws that prohibit pollution and would like to see moreof them. I have no tolerance for corporations dumping poisons into the air or water. As for US being de-regulated, dream on. It is more regulated than many european countries on certian issues, usually to the benefit of select corporations.

You are making it pretty tough to maintain a debate here when you characterize opponents of carbon taxes as saps who “buy into the quite literally bankrupt ideology of anti-government market-god.worshipping ranters”.

Paul – can I havea ruling here? Is “quite literally bankrupt” an acceptable abuse of the language?

Cdn in Europe

I give up. The trouble is, I’m interested in solutions, not in debating, and you aren’t offering any. You’re “opposing carbon taxes” without offering alternatives. You aren’t nearly as kooky and sad as tin-foil-hatted conspiracy nutter Kody, though, or the denialist JMD who claims it’s now been “proven” that GHGs don’t result in global warming, I’ll give you that.

By the way, it’s incoherent to support regulations prohibiting pollution and to oppose measures to provide disincentives against (or prohibit) dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, because GHGs, now that we have far more than 280 ppm of them in the air, are the most serious form of pollution going.

Bill Simpson

But carbon is not a pollutant, any more than water is (unless there is a tidal wave of it headed your way). I don’t see any workable way to accurately assess the costs of what you propose as against the benefits (aslo unmeasurable) so I think a big tax chnage is rash and should be avoided.

Instead, I propose tidying up concrete sources of pollution, removing subsidies from suspect activities and seeing where that takes us. If your doomsday predictions are correct, we shoiuld see enough bad results shortly to get us motivated in the right direction, or maybe not, in which case my more “conservative” approach seems more prudent.

Mike T.

And I say we end all conflict in the Middle East by invading Qatar. it’s close to Afghanistan and Iraq, after all!
Cdn in Europe

Yes, Bill, CO2 in excess of somewhere around 280 to 300 ppm (the appropriate and safe level) is indeed pollution. Water is nice, but not if you’re drowning. Same with CO2. You need to read more about climate science, you really do. If you did so, you would understand that there is a several-decade delay between increased GHGs and increases in mean global air temperatures over land, because the oceans act as a vast heat sink. It’s like when you go into your house and turn up the thermostat. The house doesn’t instantly heat up to the temperature you chose; it takes a while to heat up. So it is with atmospheric GHGs, except on a different time-scale. We’ve cranked up the planetary thermostat, and it will take decades for the planet to heat up to the level we’ve ALREADY committed to by today’s huge increase in GHG levels (compared to those of the past few million years). Adding EVEN MORE GHGs to the atmosphere will put commit us to planetary temperatures several decades hence with truly extreme consequences (read “Six Degrees” by Mark Lynas for a laypersons’ overview). The upshot, as the IPCC AR4 and a whole slew of prominent mainstream climate scientists have repeatedly said (people who do actual science, Bill, drilling ice cores, building physics models, measuring stuff, and so on — people I personally know and work with), is that we have no time left to “wait and see what happens”. The climate system has enormous momentum – momentum on a planetary scale – and the CO2 we’re pouring gigatonnes of into the air every year is accumulating. If we wait, and keep pouring in more gigatonnes, self-reinforcing spirals of GHG releases from melting permafrost and other sources will keep heating the planet even if we shut down every coal-fired power plant. It’ll be too late. That’s why it isn’t “prudent” to wait and see what happens. There are time lags involved, there is systemic inertia. Just like you can’t turn a supertanker on a dime, you can’t reverse climate change if you wait until every kook in the denialist landscape finally admits to himself that maybe Richard Lindzen is full of shit after all. If you’d done your homework, you would know this. Now stop posting (this is my last post too, you’ll be glad to know), and go spend a few weeks reading up on realclimate.org and other mainstream sources. Try to open the window a bit to new-to-you ways of thinking rather than just repeating Harper’s talking points. Turns out his ideology isn’t as great as you’ve comfortably assumed for all these years. Come back when you know more about the genuine science. And for God’s sake, don’t just go reading rubbish online that only reinforces your existing talking points. This isn’t just entertainment. The raw biophysical conditions of life for your grandkids (if you’re planning on spawning) really are in play. And everyone else’s too. This isn’t some kind of tiresome academic debate about a minor issue on which ideologues can play debating games. This is about reality. Atmospheric chemistry doesn’t give the slightest damn about ConBot hostility to “government intervention”. We need to implement pragmatic, real-world solutions, whatever works, as fast as we frickin’ can, mate. We really do. It’s that bad. You just don’t know enough about the topic to realize this yet, and your ideological blinders are making it hard for folks like you to even listen to what the best experts are telling us about the urgency and magnitude of this problem. We can’t negotiate with Mother Nature, or bully her into changing the laws of physics so we can avoid the consequences of our actions. We need to make a shift to a decarbonised economy, we should have embarked on it twenty years ago. We are very late to the party. Some scientists worry we may already be too late to avoid self-reinforcing spirals of GHG releases. We can no longer afford to indulge crackpots and ideologues. Adults committed to achieving timely real-world results need to take control of the situation. I hope Obama and Ignatieff are up to it.

JMD

Wow, talk about having it bass-ackwards, Euro Canuck. Studies of air trapped in deep Greendland ice cores show that increased atmospheric CO2 LAGS increased temperatures. It therefore cannot be the cause.

Brad

There we go! That’s what I want to see! It’s the pollution, stoopid, as they like to say.

Oh, and for the deniers, I believe that there exists a study done of the 9/11 no fly period that demonstrated that the temporary absence of airplane contrails alone resulted in a net reduction in surface temperatures.

sf

Holy cow, this is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever read. You will believe anything.

Brad

These reply thingies are not always perfect, but in the off chance you were directly referring to my suggestion that contrails effect surface temperature changes as being ridiculous, the NASA scientists who wrote an article for the American Meteorological Society (Volume 17, Issue 8, April 2004) seem credible to me. If you google around, others seem to think so as well, although some are definitely kool aid drinkers on the global warming apocalypse caravan.

So, to be clear, I believe I am fairly discerning in my consumption of information. When I am not certain, I say so. When it is someone else’s work, I don’t claim it as my own thoughts. When it is my anecdotal experience, I say as much, allowing for the fairly high probability that my personal experience may not be the perfect scientific test of the veracity of my observations.

So, if I am correct, and you think my comments were ill considered and “ridiculous”, say you’re sorry. If it is a simple case of mixed up reply buttons, then please accept my apologies for being so touchy.
sf

No, you understood me correctly. What you have said is ridiculous. While I believe you that there may have been a study out there about contrails and surface temperatures, what you said was completely different.
What you said is that the temporary absence of planes in the sky will reduce temperatures on earth. You suggested that the 9/11 no-fly period demonstated this. This is complete hogwash.
Firstly, even the climate people will admit that the climate does not change in a matter of days. You are talking about weather, not climate. Secondly, the impact of all the planes over the United States cannot possibly change the atmospheric composition. You would need a billion planes to make any measurable impact whatsoever.
Brad

referencing our exchange, I will take a small hit in exchange for a major return slam. I recalled the details incorrectly, but the effect of the 9/11 no-fly experience was, apparently, nothing short of dramatic. Please go read the easy-reader version at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/08/020808075457.htm

In short, the absence of contrails led to the largest 3-day range of temperatures in a 30 year period. The article and analysis leave absolutely no doubt about the direct correlation between the contrails and surface temperatures.

“We show that there was an anomalous increase in the average diurnal temperature range for the period Sept. 11-14, 2001,”

“Sept. 11-14, 2001, had the biggest diurnal temperature range of any three-day period in the past 30 years,”

“The fact that the three jetless days were in the late summer should suggest that there was less of an effect than would have occurred during a cooler time of the year when more contrails occur,”

My error was in incorrectly recalling that the daytime temperatures dropped – they in fact increased, while night time temperature averages dropped. However, to me the important point is that human activity can be clearly demonstrated to be having an effect on our climate and that, therefore, you, sf, are wrong. Wrong to suggest that my anecdote was ridiculous and wrong to say “the impact of all the planes over the United States cannot possibly change the atmospheric composition. You would need a billion planes to make any measurable impact whatsoever.”

I see, too, later on in this string, that you take this self-evident conviction of yours to other arguments. You make assertions of your own, based on pickle-barrel, common sense calculations of your own concoction and try to pass them off as valuable pieces of the conversational puzzle. So, I guess my response is:

“Holy Cow! This is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever read. You will make anything up to make your point.”

Cdn in Europe

No: a net increase in land temperatures, if I remember right. Less air pollution of certain kinds (sulfates, reflective of sunlight) mean more sunlight gets down to the Earth’s surface. Scientists estimate that existing pollution is masking the equivalent of about 50 ppm of carbon dioxide — in other words, warming will actually get a lot worse once we stop certain kinds of air polluting. Catchphrase is “global dimming”.

sf

Maybe if there was a problem I’d be interested in a solution.

There are enough envirpnmental problems already, I’m not interested in these false and fabricated AGW theories that are not problems at all, rather they are speculations in the process of being debunked by reality, as it unfolds.

Cdn in Europe

You’re a crackpot.

http://macleans.ca kc

No he’s not. He just doesn’t like yr speculation interferring with his certainty of what reality is. Simple really. Don’t see what all the fuss was about.
sf

Sigh… sometimes I wonder why I bother with apocalyptic-religious folks like you. Here is reality: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/uah_may_08.png
sf

Now, in case you don’t quite understand, here is another view:
http://www.fightglobalwarminglies.com/images/screenshot_01.jpg
sf

Now, in case you are having trouble wrapping your head around this, take a look at this picture, and tell me why most global warming fanatics like to show us temperature graphs that start with the year 1860.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/wp-images/loehle_fig2.JPG
sf

Now, Mr. Canadian in Europe, you can go crawling back to your European church of fantasy.

catherine

The GE CEO wants the government to impose carbon pricing in the USA because he hopes to make gobs of money by developing green technology and exporting it to India and China. Bill, do you think you have a better handle on how carbon pricing affects business than Immelt? By the way, Immelt is pushing for cap and trade because he doesn’t think politicians can sell a carbon tax.

At The Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics conference earlier this month, several speakers, including General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, suggested that although a carbon tax might make sense, the word “tax” is too polarizing to be politically acceptable. [from GreenTech Media]

Mike T.

There’s probably a big market for carbon-reducing technology, but it’s unlikely to be in China.

catherine

Immelt argues that as China’s middle class expands they will demand an alternative to burning coal because they will demand a cleaner environment.
China has already bought a lot of wind energy technology and infrastructure from Sweden (which has had a carbon tax for decades, by the way.)

Mike T.

But Canada is an almost entirely middle class country with a free media, and even we don’t demand that of our politicians.

Bill Simpson

Any time a large corporation supports a new tax, you had better hang onto your wallet. Why you would invoke GE (which is practically an arm of government it is so big) is beyond me. Even Milton Friedman was frightened of these guys and he was the arch-capitalist!

catherine

Bill, Immelt’s arguments on carbon pricing and how it effects US companies makes more sense to me than yours.

Bill Simpson

Catherine,
How do you think GE sees this? You don’t suppose that they expect to be on the receiving end of the new grants and tax breaks do you? There is one corporation in the states that is lobbying ofr a huge subsidy to build a massive windfarm in Arizona. When large corporations and government collude together, you should be very afraid, because it is the tax payer who is getting screwed.

Bill Simpson

So there you have it , Paul. You have three categories of thought here:

1. Carbon tax
2. Cap and trade
3. Deniers

Enjoy!

Brad

4. And Kody
sf

1. Carbon tax for no reason
2. Cap and trade for no reason
3. Intelligent people who believe in doing something for a reason

http://macleans.ca kc

whatch out the deniers are back!

John.K

That’s 2 categories of thought and 1 of thoughtlessness.

sf

Maybe if the world were actually getting warmer, then there would be a sliver of a possibility that AGW was correct, and the argument for a carbon tax or cap and trade would be a little more persuasive.

But with the world cooling for the last 10 years, the empty rhetoric is getting more and more tiring.

There are real environmental problems such as biodiversity loss and the loss of arable land that are actually and truly deserving of attention.
Brad

I decided to noodle around on the interwebby thing the idea that the deniers might be on to something. Then I noodled those ideas around to see if they held up. The big one seems to be that the sun is in a bad mood and is the natural cause of all this so called warming. But then I stumbled across this:

“There is considerable evidence for solar influence on the Earth’s pre-industrial climate
and the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial climate change in the first half
of the last century. Here we show that over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun
that could have had an influence on the Earth’s climate have been in the opposite
direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.”

This is an abstract from the highly suspect Royal Society, whose report on the subject may be found at www dot publishing.royalsociety.org/media/proceedings_a/rspa20071880.pdf (I hate the delay of instant gratification of seeing my words online that is instanced by the autocensor of all web links).

So, from deniers I would like to see a refutation of the above that is not a) an ad hominem attack on pommy scientists or b) a recitation of the list of television weathermen and astrologers who are not in consensus with the “other” scientists on climate junk, just as I would like the Warmers to stop leading with their chins and using “consensus” among scientists all the time.

http://macleans.ca kc

The pt you made earlier re: the GW crowd making strategic errors in getting their message to sound plausible is spot on. One of the first rules of effective communication is consider yr audience. That most of us aren’t boffins seems to have ,understanderably perhaps, escaped their attention. If yr thesis is that the world is quite likely going to end in some ghastly manner, maybe you should not sa so in so many words. People, unfortunately being people, they need to be coaxed downstairs [ or whereever] one step ata time. Elementary communication, surely? Just what were those guys thinking?
sf

The quote “all the trends in the sun that could have had influence” says it all. More junk.

The Earth’s climate is driven almost completely by the energy produced by the sun. All other effects are minimal in comparison. To actually claim to have quantified “all the trends in the sun that could have had influence” instantly identifies the study as bunk.

http://macleans.ca kc

Like all true hypocrites you’re completely blind to the fact. You castigate us for believing all those unproven, biased assertions of GW’s, fair enough as far as that goes. But then you insult our intelligence by pleading yr case as f it too were holy writ, only this time of course, it’s yours so that makes it all right. Since you don’t claim any expertise re: CC i’m forced to assume yr certitudes aren’t in fact based on original research, but are in fact the regurgitated 2nd hand opinion of a keen amateur; much like the rest of us in fact. Convince me otherwise.
Brad

“more junk”. From the Royal Society. Yet you reference the equivalent of the National Inquirererererer to “support” your nonsense. I came into this string less convinced of GW and man’s role in it than I am coming out. For that, I am thnkful to you and yours.

Happy New Year.

A.Cherson

So far I’ve heard an argument about whether its getting hotter and whether we have anything to do with that, but very little argument about whether the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are much higher than they have ever been in the last 100,000 years. So why don’t we just agree that we are putting too much CO2 in the atmosphere and that we’re not sure, but this could do something harmful to the way we like the planet, so just to be on the safe side we’ll bring those levels down before things go too far. I agree that a carbon tax is a faster way to make carbon emissions more expensive, but based on what we have just seen happen in the financial sector, if you can cook the books than you can also cook the climate. You just have to figure corruption and looking out for number 1 into your policy models. So my view is that we start taking these funds that we are calling ‘bail outs’ and ‘economic stimuli’ and start targeting a healthy chunk of them towards carbon free industries. This is I believe going to be the task of the new Climate Change minister, Carol Browner, in the US. We all just need to let go of the idea that by simply tweaking the ‘free’ market with a tax here or a credit trade there you are going to get this done at the scale that’s necessary. My apologies to all the economists and thanks for the memories.
kody

Brad,

except that the war on…..drugs (drugs actually kills many, many people). The use of the term war? You’re right is probably not the best term, but misplaced fear it is not.

The war on……terrorism? Many, many people have been killed by radical terrorists (in this generation primarily of the radical islamic variety), and many more intentionally threatened. Again, not really fictional. The level and manner of response is debateable. That radical terrorists exists and seek to do us harm is not debateable.

Yet not a single person on this planet has died because of “global warming”, because, in fact, the globe has not warmed as predicted.

Recall the dire threats almost a decade ago now of middle North America turning into a hot dust bowl, the coastal cities flooding (ice levels – contrary to dishonest media reports of the single ice berg variety – have seasonally fluctuated on normal levels), massive crop failures due to excessive heat ect, ect.

Ironically what may be more real, and far more damaging to us from a climate perspective, given how many people live on the threshold of livibility of cold climates, is the mondar minimum returning. And folks studying the sun have very real concerns about it. It’s not theory, in fact we know its already happened. And it is indeed getting cooler, in the last two years dramatically so.

Yes a cold snap in any given location cannot say much. But continental cold snaps, and all all of the continents over a multi-year period and directly in line with solar scientist predictions is real.

Watch over the next several years, Canadians deal with ever increasing coldness while the likes of Al Gore tell us its getting hotter and hotter.

Chris Sastre

Hi kody – hope you had a merry Christmas out in your neck of the woods.

You are right, drugs do kill many people – legal ones (such as alcohol and tobacco) far more than the others combined and then squared – heck, maybe cubed. Even amongst the illegal ones that kill, oftimes the death results because it was mixed and mashed with mean Mr. Alcohol hisself. There have, of course, been many more lives _wrecked_ because of the War on Some Drugs, but that’s a whole different ball of wax.

Deaths from terrorism are, sadly, far too real. It is somewhat curious, though, how there has now been more Americans lives lost _bringing peace_ to Iraq, than were lost on that grim and terrible September day. Doubling down on the bet, so to speak.

Now, I’m certainly no expert on this whole Global Warming (aka Glow-Bull, aka Glo-Bull, aka Pinko Lefty Shrillbot Lies) thing, but I believe that the deaths are predicted to come well into the future, when that so-called point of no return has been passed, and the sweating planet starts paying back her tormentors in spades….or something like that. Waterworld, Cropsmoke, and that kind of thing.

Cheers
Brad

But kody, the point is that on topics all over the place, where people on the stereotypically right end of the spectrum differ vehemently from those on the left, the right use the same fear mongering you ascribe to the left. You just happen to believe, in your gut, that the right is, well, right. Not for any really good rational reason, but because your life expereience, worldview, whatever, takes you there. The leftards are no different from you in that regard.

Contradicting my satirical response with “except that drugs really are bad” just proves my point. Sure, drugs are bad, you shouldn’t take drugs. But in Canada, the reason half of the drugs are on the naughty list isn’t because anyone “proved” they were bad. They were there because they convinced – which is different from proved – everyone that the chinese or the negroes were using their drugs to seduce our stalwart young men into lives of decadence and our virginal white women into lives of lascivious, wanton carnal relations – with those same ethnic groups.

In other words, the opponents of drugs used fear, not reason, to develop a prohibition regime, not a public health response. Same goes for suspending basic human rights in the war on terror.

kody

A cherson,

the problem with “playing it safe” is very often the “cure” is much worse than the purported malady. The eradication of DDT for instance caused nearly a million people their lives in deaths by malaria.

Carbon, contrary to the popular press mythology, is not a noxious substance. It’s emitted by all living things, and emitted pretty much every time anyone does anything. Lowering carbon means lowering economic development.

While we’re chasing these ghosts with our swords, we’re slashing real people.

Lost jobs for the middle class. Lost lives for those in devoloping countries on the brink of destitution. While we sip cappucino in Toronto (feeling good about ourselves that we’re ‘playing it safe’ ….for the good of all mankined no less!!) there’s a small business owner in Turkey who’s right now contemplating laying off his staff because he can’t afford the high carbon tariffs, and theres those in the developing world shuddering at the notion of the rich Western powers saying “the developmental party’s over for you…you’ll just have to stay starving…..we need to save mankind after all.”

All the while the planet cools (just as it did in the middle ages).

Austin So

Lowering carbon means lowering economic development.

That is the most preposterous thing I’ve heard in my life.

Austin

madeyoulook

Cap-and-trade is a complicated mess that is open to corruption and perversion at just about every step. But it might have had a snowball’s chance above the Arctic Circle if the global-warming chicken-littles could have converted the majority of us to their cult. That has failed. And I join many in hoping that the Tories are all talk, no walk, on this one.

A carbon tax is simple and draconian, and would be politically popular if the global-warming chicken-littles could have converted the majority of us to their cult. That has failed.

As mentioned above: AIR QUALITY could have scored politically, big time. But this was surrendered for some bizarre reason. Put up highway tolls in major congested urban centres. Tax the gas sold within an hour’s drive of major urban centres. Special levies on pollution-belching industries. None of these are political best-sellers, but MIGHT have had a chance if air quality was the selling feature instead of the allegedly-extinct (not!) polar bears and allegedly drowning (not!) coastal cities.

Lead counts are way down since legislated unleaded gas. Acid rain and air quality have improved somewhat with legislated emissions reduction of the foul nasties that created these clearly identifiable problems.

Global warming, when the planet is cooling even as carbon output rises? Bah…

http://macleans.ca kc

For god’s sake, make up your mind! Is it warming, or is it cooling. Why should i believe yr assertion than theirs?
sf

“AIR QUALITY could have scored politically, big time. But this was surrendered for some bizarre reason”

It was surrended because of ridicule from the opposition in a minority parliament that required the cooperations of one of the opposition parties to pass legislation.

I do agree with you though, that it would have been well-received by the Canadian public if they could have found a way to push ahead.

kody

“air quality”

Madeyoulook is bang on.

Harper tried to stake this out, but bowed to political expediency. I believe he failed to foresee the drop in Green support (or like many, bought the overhyped purported AGW belief among the populace, and the eqating AGW with real environmental controls).

Unlike AGW, pollution is real. It costs real lives, creates real sick children, and in the end wreaks havoc on our economy (sick people are far more expensive than healthy productive ones). How ironic that the natural substance of CO2 has become the enemy, while we ignore carbon monoxide, and other dangerous pollutants.

That the left has highjacked the Green movement for the sake of massive government control, and in the end actually caused pollution to be ignored under the guise of saving the planet from computer modeled ghosts, is the great untold story of our generation.

This is why the founder of Greenpeace is one of the biggest opponents of the AGW theory. He is also correct.

http://macleans.ca kc

If yr talking about patrick moore, he’s a sell-out a- hole. I personally know people he screwed over enviro issues on the coast. Kody why is it ok for just you to cheery pick your supporting facts and personalities.

Austin So

I love it!

AGW “deniers” like to show graphs. Only, like the good researchers they are, they don’t have labelled y-axes. They don’t give any information about what the data points are and how they are derived. But by golly it just all proves agw is a hoax!

And what is it with those guys talking ’bout carbon? Why that’s the most natural stuff you can have! How the heck is it a pollutant? Oh…except it is really “carbon-dioxide equivalents”, a way to standardize all the sources of pollution and GHGs to a common scale.

Austin

P.S. And yes…it is true, carbon (the soild that it is) is emitted to varying degrees by all living things. But as can be witnessed by the comments here, clearly some emit way way more than others…
scissorpaws

I jumped aboard the Liberal bandwagon with Dion and the Carbon Tax, and Ignatieff has done nothing yet to cause me to want to jump ship. Even if it isn’t The issue in the next election, I think the Liberals would be fools to take it off the table. Harper declared with his 2¢ per litre reduction of the taxes on diesel fuel that they are the anti-environment party. Lines have rarely been so clearly drawn. The only question is, are their environmentalists in the West and do they want in too?

And even if Global Warming is a hoax, who’s going to argue that shifting taxes from income – work – to pollution is a bad thing? Tax the coal fired – mercury spewing (all you thimerosol mercury conspiracy advocates) – power generators out of existence, while encouraging research into more efficient wind machines and photovoltaics?
A reader

I’m coming to dislike the offshoot reply feature of WordPress that you’ve implemented here at Macleans.ca. It actually makes the conversation harder to follow, and I find I’m giving up on following it earlier and earlier. Sorry, just my honest .02. And I did try for awhile before complaining.

John.K

Agreed.

Brad Sallows

>I do not know a single climate scientist who thinks warming is not being caused by release of anthropogenic GHGs

The community of climate scientists is deeply vested in its views for political and social reasons as well as what they hold to be their scientific reasons, and they are obtaining all of the limelight. It would be very helpful to focus some attention on what is being measured and reported by astronomers who study our sun.

No offence to Cdn in Europe, but:
- the data available to climate scientists are irregularly and haphazardly gathered, sparse when compared to the volume of information which could be gathered, and subject to other influences which impact the data in amounts at which climate scientists can only guess.
- the models are not in any proper sense of the word “validated”, nor have they any predictive value. If the case is otherwise, I am very interested to learn of a model which has predictive value given a set of historical initial conditions.
- climate science is still in its infancy. Relative to the layman, a climate scientist knows much of his subject; relative to the breadth and complexity of the subject, a climate scientist knows very little.

If the measures of AGW turn out to be noise in the data or the artefacts of selective bias, and the models continue to be accurate only when retrofitted with additional assumptions to match historically observed performance as it unwinds, and most importantly if changes in solar activity turn out to be the primary climate driver by several orders of magnitude, then adaptation and not prevention will be the only affordable course of action.

Resources expended on pointless measures are resources unavailable to deal with other crises. This is the essential point of Bjorn Lomborg’s criticism. It is a standalone statement of economic reality.

Carbon taxes can be justified purely on the basis of “internalizing” some economic externalities. However, there will be negative as well as economic impacts. Availability and affordability of energy correlate well with prosperity and human well-being, and we can not assume there will be a green economic revolution to offset the ill effects of policies which cause productivity to contract. I believe a strong argument can be made that a warmer climate is better than a colder one.

This is a good time to keep our powder dry. Chicken Littlism aside, the first point of concensus should be that we do not know enough about which way the overall climate is trending – warmer or cooler. Before we commit massively to programs to deal with climate change, we should first invest in a massive program to measure and be reasonable certain of the sign (plus or minus) of the change.

http://macleans.ca kc

if is true that advocates of GW theory are assuming to many unknowables, then at least as strong a case for wishful thinking can be made for those who assert that a warmer climate is better than a colder one. The fact is no-one knows – whatever we do or don’t, we will still be throwing the dice on our future.

Brad Sallows

During cooler periods of history agricultural output was reduced; during periods of reduced agricultural output famine was more prevalent; where famine was present, disease soon followed (poorly fed people are not as resistant to illness). The recent problems with rice and grain harvests are just a hint of possible outcomes if slightly cooler average global temperatures knock off a fraction of agricultural output, particularly in the poorer nations with less technological leverage to supercharge their harvests.

http://macleans.ca kc

Granted, but if the GW theory is correct there’s no guarantee that the warming will be controlled, gradual or in the places we most want it. Indeed, as i undestand GW theory the climate will become extreme in ways that are at least as dangerous as too much cooling. My pt is that with CC of any extreme sort the rapidity and unpedictability of change is the real elephant in the room.

deepslope

Thank you, Brad Sallows, for a thoughtful contribution to this sordid debate. I hope Cdn in Europe reads it.

I drafted a detailed addition but lost it by mistake, while cutting and pasting references. There are alternatives to following the IPCC dogma espoused by Cdn in Europe and most politically-correct folk. One web site that contrasts realclimate.org has already been mentioned in this thread: “Watts up with that”. On the true climate science front, I can recommend Roger A Pielke, Sr: http://www.climatesci.org. Dr. Pielke is a respected scientist who has been publishing in peer-reviewed journals on many aspects of the climate debate for decades.

His recent overview should be required reading for all policy advisers that influence politicians on carbon taxes and Cap-and-Trade follies:

Pielke Sr., R.A., 2008: A broader view of the role of humans in the climate system. Physics Today, 61, Vol. 11, 54-55.

http://www.climatesci.org/publications/pdf/R-334.pdf

This is my two pennies worth to the thread – happy New Year!

Ulrich Lobsiger

Brad

Thank you, Ulrich, for bringing this fellow to our attention. He certainly appears to be a bona fide respected scientist, as opposed the list of tv weather men and astrologers others like to tropt out.

From a quick, preliminary review of his work, he appears to conclude that the IPCC stresses the CO2 side of things too much, while not adequately recognizing other human impacts on the environment; that global models are not as useful as local/regional models; and that global warming should not be the focus because it is not as important in evaluating overall climate change as is the evaluation of temperature changes in the oceans. Is that about right?

He also seems to feel that current modeling is not sufficiently sophisticated to accurately predict the full range of impacts of not acting versus the different options of acting. I suppose he would agree that it would be like choosing from among a range of neurosurgery options without having witnessed the range of accompanying outcomes or withour accurate imaging equipment. Many choices will have to be made on educated guesses based on what he would hope are more robust models than currently exist – do no harm.

If it is true that IPCC is cherry picking stats to create an alarmist view, then shame on them. However, my impression is that Dr. Pielke is neither an alarmist nor a denier. Instead, he appears to be struggling amid both orthodoxies in favour of greater scientific rigour. I can certainly get behind that.

Finally, while Dr Pielke is certainly no fan of the IPCC or its conclusions, he is also unequivocal about his opinion that humans are impacting the climate and that serious mitigation efforts need to be devised. So, while he may believe carbon impact is overstated, he probably would still agree, from what little I have read, that carbon based ghgs should be mitigated, although he would say that a radical action that would seriously impact in a negative way other sectors, such as the economy, are not yet justified by the science.

What I don’t think Dr Pielke represents is a drop dead life line for those who believe nothing needs to be done and that we should all just “move along, nothing to see, nothing happening here…”

catherine

So a few more Republicans have come out of the carbon tax closet. Congressman Bob Inglis of South Carolina and supply-side economist Arthur Laffer, unequivocally endorsed a revenue neutral carbon tax. Many of the lines of these Republicans sound a lot like that lefty Dion:

“We need to impose a tax on the thing we want less of (carbon dioxide) and reduce taxes on the things we want more of (income and jobs).”

Dion always said he was a fiscal conservative, and this is how the Republicans put it:

“Conservatives don’t support tax increases that are veiled as “cap and trade” schemes for pollution permits. But offer us a tax swap, and we could become the new administration’s best allies on climate change. …. Fiscal conservatives would gladly trade a carbon tax for a reduction in payroll or income taxes, but we can’t go along with an overall tax increase.”

Of course, no sane person would ever mistake Harper for a “fiscal conservative”. Neo-conservative Charles Krauthammer has also endorsed a revenue neutral gas tax. A few Democrats have been pushing revenue-neutral carbon taxes for years. Perhaps something will come of this, now that more Republicans are coming out of the carbon tax closet too.

Brad Sallows

Dion’s “Green Shift” was not – unless it was poorly explained by everyone who attempted to do so – revenue neutral. It appeared to be in part engineered to increase revenues in order to increase spending. If that was not intended, then a lesson has been learned: articulate clearly how taxes from column A are moved dollar for dollar into column B and include a mechanism which prevents new spending from being slipped in (ie. commit overages to buying out debt).

Along with C02, one of the things we will have less of (if we tax C02 output) is energy. That will mean, in turn, “less of” many other things. Unfortunately, we don’t track the national “energy budget” (from where the ergs come, and to where they go) with the same level of attention as the national fiscal budget. If more people understood the relative magnitude of some of the sources and sinks, the quality of the debate would improve. We would at least begin to share an understanding of which alternatives are practical and which are not.