Category Archives: Climate Change

Steve Jobs, climate quackery and democracy

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If you discovered that you had cancer would you (a) find a doctor who is an expert in treating your disease and follow their advice, or (b) attempt to devise your own treatment by reading about cancer on the internet?

According to some sources, Apple founder Steve Jobs may have shortened his life by relying too heavily on (b). Martina Cartwright at Psychology Today writes, "When Mr. Jobs was first diagnosed in 2003, he chose to pursue alternative therapies, including acupuncture, herbal, diet and fruit juice therapy and spiritual consultations. Many of these therapies he found on the Internet."

In the Weekend Australian Cassandra Wilkinson cites Jobs as an example of the "countless tragic cases of people delaying or denying medical treatment in favour of quackery. Jobs is only a high-profile example of a growing problem." Andrew Bolt concurs: "’alternative medicines’ are not just a danger to our health but an insult to our reason."

Also in the Australian, Brendan O’Neill complains that climate change sceptics can’t get a fair hearing because activists attack their motives rather than engaging with their arguments. This "stinks of intellectual cowardice", says O’Neil. "Instead of taking sceptics up on what they say in public, campaigners dig for dirt behind the scenes."

O’Neill wants a free public debate where "all of us can hear ideas, assess their worth and accept or reject them." What he doesn’t want is activists wasting everybody’s time by uncovering which climate change sceptics are being bankrolled by oil companies.

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Calling bulls**t on China’s global warming rhetoric

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Brian Bahnisch over at Larvatus Prodeo has a useful summary of the state of play (such as it is) at the current Durban climate change talkfest:

China, it seems, wants the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol for the developed countries, and wants them legally bound to deeper cuts in the order of 45% by 2020. Then it has indicated it will come to the party.

Their attitude is based on the ‘legacy concept’ – those who caused the problem should fix it, while the developing countries should continue to place the highest priority on development for the next decade.

India appears to be essentially with China, although they claim to be flexible.

The US will not sign up to anything unless the major emitters sign and won’t start to talk before 2015. The 5 biggest emitters are, in order, China, the US, India, Russia and Japan.

Most of the developing countries want an extension of Kyoto, and desperately want legally binding cuts. They want the major developed countries legally bound, with penalties, and don’t trust anything else.

The EU is willing to continue with a Kyoto phase 2 if everyone signs up to talks leading to an agreement by 2015, to be implemented from 2020. They are supported by a handful of Kyoto Annexe 1 countries like Norway and Sweden and at least 90 developing countries, making about 120 in all. Unfortunately all countries must agree, not just a majority.

I want to focus on the sentence in bold above. I suspect most environmentalists and left-leaning readers would intuitively accept the logic/morality of the Chinese argument.  But they would be wrong, as Nicholas Gruen has argued before here at Troppo.  While it’s certainly true that affluent western countries were not subject to restrictions on their carbon emissions over the century or more in which they developed and became wealthy, that’s only one side of the equation.  The fact that those wealthy countries did the “hard yards” of development, invention, research and development over two centuries means that China and India now have the benefit of a developed world economy into which they can sell their cheaper products and services, along with perfected technologies and production processes they can simply adopt and exploit rather than having to develop them for themselves.  That’s why they’ve been able to develop almost from a standing start into huge industrial economies in just a little over two decades in contrast to western countries which took a hundred years and more to reach that point of development.

Because they’ve benefited at least equally from the industrial development whose side-effects include more and more atmospheric carbon dioxide, it’s entirely reasonable that China and India should be required to sign up to binding emissions targets.

Your Carbon Tax at Work

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I recently decided to install an air conditioner in my study. Naturally, caring about the environment (but not enough to forego my comfort) I chose the most energy efficient model on the market (the only 6 star split system).[1] Got a phone call yesterday – the importer is out of stock until mid-December. Apparently they so misread the demand for this unit that they have none to sell during the peak sales season!

[1] Search on www.energyrating.gov.au if you are interested (and not in a hurry).

The Anarchic Society and the Global Commons

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In light of Paul Frijter’s sketpticism about the possibility of co-ordinated international action on carbon emissions and his recent offer of a wager on the outcome of international action, I thought I’d try to put the economic problem into some of the language of International Relations. After all, the problem is international, and Paul’s wager should extend to specialists therein who are willing to take it. How would the question be framed in IR.

The problem in economics terms is that of a global public good, or tragedy of the global commons. We have a resource that is not privately owned (or can not be owned) such as a village commons, fishery or atmosphere. If we assume homo economicus, or rational self interested agents then the resource will be depleted or polluted. The agents will derive private benefit in doing so, but the costs of their actions are shared amongst everyone and are therefore not taken into account. The aggregate result is not good, but this does not affect the decisions made by each individual. The desire to free ride prevents collective action. To achieve a optimal outcome when agents are homo economicus and the resource cannot be privatised, it is necessary for an external coercive power (i.e the state) to take action and ensure each person takes into account the costs of their decisions.

Now lets move to the international sphere. Instead of individual people as agents, we have sovereign states. When we assume that these states are acting only in regard to their own self interest (as civitas economicus, to coin a barbarism) we get something very similar to the assumptions of Realism. In realism the international system is anarchy because of the absence of a global state to enforce laws. The atmosphere cannot be taken under the ownership of a single sovereign state. Self interested states will free ride, and there is nothing to force them to do otherwise. Thus under the basic assumptions of rational choice/realism, the global commons will be depleted. Continue reading →

Would carbon permits be property rights?

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Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy has a post musing about whether carbon emissions trading permits would be regarded as property rights which would entitle the holder to compensation if abolished by a future federal government. The obvious context is the fact that Tony Abbott has promised that the Coalition would “roll back” Labor’s carbon pricing regime if elected. Apparently there’s been a debate about it in the AFR (to which I don’t subscribe).

Frankly, I think any such debate is misconceived at least to the extent that some (e.g. Labor’s Assistant Climate Change Minister Mark Dreyfus QC) seem to be suggesting that Abbott could not abolish carbon pricing without running the risk of incurring a large compensation bill to emitters whose permits were cancelled. My understanding of Labor’s proposal is that a tradeable carbon permits regime would not commence until at least 2015. The regime to commence next year as an interim measure is simply a carbon tax levied at a fixed price per tonne on particular emitters. It isn’t transferable nor does it set any specific limit on permitted emissions. The designated emitters simply pay the fixed price for whatever they emit. On no sensible view could that be regarded as a property right. It would be like suggesting that one’s income tax liability was a property right!

The carbon permits regime to be introduced in 2015 may well be a different matter, but if Abbott wins the next election (which currently looks long odds-on) it will never see the light of day. As far as I know the legislation to be introduced this year will not itself create the tradeable permits regime. In that situation I don’t see any constitutional impediments to Abbott abolishing Labor’s scheme following a 2013 election win.

Nevertheless, the question of whether carbon permits would be property for constitutional purposes is quite an interesting one in a purely abstract sense. I copy a relevant extract from my constitutional law study guide over the fold, followed by my tentative view about the constitutional status of carbon permits.

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Thread of doom play for the day: Size does matter

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Disappointed Troppo readers everywhere have gradually come to a realisation – upon which I came clean on in a recent thread.  Troppo is really an ‘eyeballs’ play as we say in the trade and things haven’t been this good for eyeballs since Tim Blair sent some brownshirts our way a long while ago.  Anyway, it turns out that economic development has a surprisingly robust relationship with penis size. As this paper shows. Discuss with relation to any rocks you would like to get off. Baseless accusations are encouraged – though participants are reminded about our point of difference here at Club Pony – they’re not compusory.

The clean energy plan: compensation or redistribution?

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A major component of the government’s clean energy plan is a package of assistance measures to compensate households for higher prices. The government will provide assistance through increases in pensions, allowances and family payments, as well as through income tax cuts. From a political and social perspective, the adequacy and credibility of this compensation will be of crucial importance.

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