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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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All of this makes me think of the oil wars going on right now.....pumping it out of the ground as fast as possible. I don't think too many that are seriously debating the right way to go would think this is good policy. It is no policy at all.
I have read quite a bit from Curry over the years......sure am not sure what to think of her. I haven't really followed her lately. Chameleon comes to mind but I want to be fair to her. At least she's somewhere in the middle now.
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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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Therein lies the big problem.
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Splater
climber
Grey Matter
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In the first place, I am just putting a real meaning to curry's words.
(Non capital letters to show that way too much attention is given to 3% of scientists)
We could easily today be using about half as much fossil fuel for transport. In the USA, For 30 years we failed to do anything substantial like a large revenue neutral carbon tax and only now have kooky higher CAFE limits, with all kinds of loopholes like allowing higher fuel use for supposed SUVs/CUVs etc.
Right now in the USA true avg mpg could have been 45 for all vehicles (including used) on the road, instead of 22. Many could be direct injection hybrids. Most driving could have electronic tolls. More people would carpool, take bikes or the bus, and live closer to work.
We set up a system of free roads, and large energy hog single family homes dependent on externalizing the cost of sprawl.
We spend trillions pursuing foreign oil. Yet Raygun cancelled what feeble alternative energy research was happening in the 80s.
We subsidize fuel oil for heat and also all utilities for the poor (which disincentivizes efficiency).
We subsidize all the external costs of coal and fracking.
The issue of completely eliminating fossil fuels is mostly a red herring since we are so far from that it's ridiculous. When I said weaning it does not need to mean over 80% even some years from now. At this time we are at perhaps 10%, maybe 15% in California.
Moving above perhaps 40% green electricity will require storage or modern nuclear. Large Hydro pumping plants are still the best large scale storage method. Batteries getting better for small scale and for 1-3 hour peaks.
Better batteries of new chemistry, more energy, and fast charging will also allow most vehicles to become electric. (I don't get how hydrogen would work since hydrolysis seems way more complicated than a battery)
Heating/cooling will require much more efficient buildings, which can already be done. some cooling can be done by underground fluid loops.
There are all sorts of methods proposed. Most aren't feasible if we allow cheap fossil fuels.
Also, I don't say just the words "carbon tax" to most people who don't get it. You have to say the full phrase of how it should be done: "revenue neutral carbon tax".
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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One more current pic for you Chief. From the upstairs loft area.
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Oh lpok. You're right Frosty its warming up.
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Rosamond
Trad climber
Truckee, CA
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I'm always amazed to see how many dozens of world renowned climatologists show up to pontificate their peer reviewed, groundbreaking knowledge on these types of threads.
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Splater
climber
Grey Matter
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"The list with which you replied was not achievable."
Clearly, You just don't want to do anything. Just like Curry intends - someday in the distant future we'll think about it. She flips and flops and really means we should be doing very little, she was throwing out placations. But if she had meant what she said, my implication is correct.
Most of those things are already achievable. some require a carbon disincentive.
There are all kinds of things we can go IF we want to. My quick list is hardly a treatise on the subject. You could write or read many books on the subject, but you seem to want to dismiss any progress at all.
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Splater
climber
Grey Matter
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No, what is cut and dried is your pat answer to any proposal - blame it on China.
I never said it wasn't a global issue, and in fact a RNCT (rev neut C tax) needs to be global, not long after the USA. A RNCT will completely change the equation of how people calculate their own cost/benefits.
Nor did I ever say it was simple. Any more strawman arguments?
I just said there are reams of books avail on the subject.
Say there is a list of 1000 things we can try. None of which are as ridiculous as spending $2 trillion on the Iraq war.
We have started on about 5% of those things, a very feeble effort,
all because naysayers are afraid it will have some cost, and kooks see a carbon fee as the devil.
Many other things are no harder to get started on than switching to the metric measurement system.
I have posted before that a good way to approach this is iterative, as done with the SALT/START nuclear treaties.
Clearly you neglected to read any of the World Bank study posted some time ago about all the net benefits of more carbon taxes, NOT even including any climate change issues.
"Focus on costs" ???
We also need to focus on the med and long term costs of not doing anything.
The cost of one flood (Katrina, etc) is > $50 billion. "Overall, the Hurricane Sandy Relief Act passed by Congress was for $60 billion." http://www.examiner.com/article/fema-releases-cost-of-hurricane-sandy
What if we had to spend 5 times that every year on all the possible effects of CC? The IPCC last working group is all about such effects. http://ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Well aware of the warm pool in the NE pacific. It's been there since early summer at least. I suspect its water from the west pacific warm pool. Remember the large kelvin wave that disn't make it to the coastal americas because of fizzled trade winds, well it had to go somewhere. That somewhere is changing locations in the north pacific. For a few months it seems to have centered in the gulf of AK. This is not an effect of CO2.
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EdwardT
Trad climber
Retired
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Also, I don't say just the words "carbon tax" to most people who don't get it. You have to say the full phrase of how it should be done: "revenue neutral carbon tax".
Revenue neutral carbon tax?
Your comment motivate me to do a little research on the matter. Admittedly, I went looking for info refuting the glowing reviews I've seen about BC's RNCTs.
Aldyen Donnelly offered just what I was looking for. First, he blasted a puff piece on the subject.
Here's the piece:
http://daily.sightline.org/2013/01/30/three-things-everyone-should-know-about-bcs-carbon-tax-in-pictures/
Aldyen's first comments (below the article) were posted February 3, 2013 at 11:28 pm.
He begins:
This report is highly misleading.
BC’s carbon tax was introduced in July, 2008. From Jan 1 2008 through Dec 11, 2011, BC’s real provincial GDP growth rate ranked 10th out of 13 provinces and territories.
He goes on. You can check it out yourself, if interested.
He references an Op-Ed piece he wrote.
Here's the link. http://business.financialpost.com/2013/05/07/carbon-pricing-doesnt-work/
He makes a compelling case against the neutrality and effectiveness of BS's carbon tax.
I get the principle of RNCTs. But reality doesn't seem to gibe with theory.
Maybe I'm wrong about. Maybe Aldyen Donnelly is full of it. I'm just putting it out there.
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Splater
climber
Grey Matter
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"Maybe Aldyen Donnelly is full of it"
That is correct.
I can only spend a limited time refuting all the nonsense people like him write.
Keep in mind that I do not have great hope that we as a society are capable of doing what makes sense when it comes to long term planning. So why I bother to reply at all is really what I should be asking myself.
For instance Bush senior made the best decision for the economy when he raised taxes a little. He was crucified for doing so.
Bush junior made terrible decisions: attacked Iraq for no reason, reduced taxes for the rich for no reason, and was rewarded with a second term.
Here are some of his dubious statements:
"Carbon pricing doesn’t work"
Of course it works. The fundamental principal of all market economics is that every product sold in the world has a supply & demand curve vs price. Some are flatter and some are steep. Some have substitutes only in the long run and some are monopolies. For many items, it can take a long time for consumers and suppliers to react to changes. So 3-5 years in the graphs of that article are irrelevant nothings. It takes 15 years to update most vehicles and upgrade properties. It takes many decades to significantly reverse sprawl. 3-5 year differences in Canadian regions simply reflects which areas are booming or fading due to other causes, such as oil mining or the reduced demand for timber due to the 2008-2011 recession.
You think 50 years is a long time? Well John Anderson proposed a $1 per gallon gas tax in 1980, back when gas cost about $1. It's already been 35 years. Think of the difference large taxes would have made over that period in permanently changing fuel use.
The best time to start phasing in a gas tax (rev neut) is NOW, when oil is cheap.
more from Oct 3 - I posted this referring to the IMF study (not World Bank): it would actually correct our own economy to increase C-taxes to pay for external costs, without even considering other countries and climate change issues.
Read the article Ed posted about the IMF study of carbon taxes on the top 20 countries.
http://blog-imfdirect.imf.org/2014/09/17/carbon-pricing-good-for-you-good-for-the-planet/
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2014/wp14174.pdf
(ii) discusses the external costs - separate IMF study.
Figure 1 is the basic concept of what is gained with a tax.
Figure 6 is one calculation of how much fuels are undertaxed, (not counting GHGs)
China is indeed included, and will need carbon taxes added.
I assume all these suggested taxes would go up proportionally for any amount added for the average external costs of GHGs.
More from Nov 30 post
http://grist.org/climate-energy/yes-the-u-s-can-reduce-emissions-80-by-2050-in-six-graphs/
http://unsdsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/US-Deep-Decarbonization-Report.pdf
More on present day fossil fuel subsidies (the opposite of RNCT) in my posts of Nov 10-11 and Dec 2 6:17pm
Also see Malemute post Sept 2
"paraphrased: he argues against the carbon taxes in Europe being successful"
Basically incorrect. Average carbon emissions per person in Europe are far less than in the USA or Canada. Carbon emissions policy in Europe has had some issues, which are to be expected and all part of the 50 year process to find the best methods.
However it is true that Unilateral carbon taxes will punish your own economy (which is a problem with California's new carbon tax that just raised gas tax by 10 cents.) That is why we will have to insist that these taxes in other places, even China and India, can only lag behind ours by a few years. If they do not comply, we will start imposing big enough taxes on imports from them. All goods found to have been run through a fake 3rd party middleman country will be confiscated.
"BC’s CTax is NOT “revenue nuetral”, as BC’s Finance ministry directly acknowledges in BC’s Fiscal Plan. The CTax started taking more disposable income away from low income families than it was costing them roughly 18 months after the tax was introduced."
This is an meaningless argument to say that it means anything about a RNCT (rev neut C tax) in general. It only says that BC did not adjust the payouts properly in adjusting progressive income tax rates and whatever equivalent they have to an EIT.
All that says is that each year you adjust where you want to reduce income taxes to keep the system fair and revenue neutral. In the US federal tax system the first page is all that is needed to describe the 5 earned income brackets and 2 unearned so an adjustment is not really complicated. Throw in another page if you want to include Medicare and Soc Sec tax rates. The other 50000 pages of crap in the tax code are regardless of the first page.
"The Canada 2020 model for dialogue has slammed the door on any consideration of the only pollution reduction policy model that has worked well, and often, in the past."
No it hasn't. All government policy and incentives / rules can be updated yearly as needed. Any carbon reductions methods will certainly be improved over the years.
"Increasing "pumped storage" enables the grid to use both coal-fired and low impact renewable power more efficiently. While these investments reduce the cost of accessing renewables over the longer-term, they do so by enabling the utilities to burn more coal when power demand is low. So GHGs go up, not down."
Obviously wrong. Why would a utility burn taxed coal if it has enough green power being generated enough to supply most needs in combination with storage?
"There is no long-term evidence that building transit results in density increases." Clearly he has never seen the increased density that has developed around the dozens of transit stops built in recent decades in the Washington DC area. Only NIMBY zoning can stop it.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Climate Change’s Instructive Past
Alarmists urging curtailments of liberty to correct the climate should consider two new books.
By George Will
We know, because they often say so, that those who think catastrophic global warming is probable and perhaps imminent are exemplary empiricists. They say those who disagree with them are “climate change deniers” disrespectful of science.
Actually, however, something about which everyone can agree is that of course the climate is changing — it always is. And if climate Cassandras are as conscientious as they claim to be about weighing evidence, how do they accommodate historical evidence of enormously consequential episodes of climate change not produced by human activity? Before wagering vast wealth and curtailments of liberty on correcting the climate, two recent books should be considered.
In The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century, William Rosen explains how Europe’s “most widespread and destructive famine” was the result of “an almost incomprehensibly complicated mixture of climate, commerce, and conflict, four centuries in gestation.” Early in that century, 10 percent of the population from the Atlantic to the Urals died, partly because of the effect of climate change on “the incredible amalgam of molecules that comprises a few inches of soil that produces the world’s food.”
In the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), from the end of the ninth century to the beginning of the 14th, the Northern Hemisphere was warmer than at any time in the last 8,000 years — for reasons concerning which there is no consensus. Warming increased the amount of arable land — there were vineyards in northern England — leading, Rosen says, to Europe’s “first sustained population increase since the fall of the Roman Empire.” The need for land on which to grow cereals drove deforestation. The MWP population explosion gave rise to towns, textile manufacturing, and new wealthy classes.
Then, near the end of the MWP, came the severe winters of 1309–1312, when polar bears could walk from Greenland to Iceland on pack ice. In 1315 there was rain for perhaps 155 consecutive days, washing away topsoil. Upwards of half the arable land in much of Europe was gone; cannibalism arrived as parents ate children. Corpses hanging from gallows were devoured.
Human behavior did not cause this climate change. Instead, climate warming caused behavioral change (10 million mouths to feed became 30 million). Then climate cooling caused social changes (rebelliousness and bellicosity) that amplified the consequences of climate, a pattern repeated four centuries later.
In Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, Geoffrey Parker, a history professor at Ohio State, explains how a “fatal synergy” between climatological and political factors produced turmoil from Europe to China. What he calls “the placenta of the crisis” of that century included “the Little Ice Age” (LIA) between the 1640s and the 1690s. Unusual weather, protracted enough to qualify as a change in climate, correlated so strongly with political upheavals as to constitute causation.
Whatever caused the LIA — decreased sunspot activity and increased seismic activity were important factors — it caused, among other horrific things, “stunting” that, Parker says, “reduced the average height of those born in 1675, the ‘year without a summer,’ or during the years of cold and famine in the early 1690s, to only 63 inches: the lowest ever recorded.”
In northerly latitudes, Parker says, each decline of 0.5 degrees Celsius in the mean summer temperature “decreases the number of days on which crops ripen by 10 percent, doubles the risk of a single harvest failure, and increases the risk of a double failure sixfold,” For those farming at least 1,000 feet above sea level this temperature decline “increases the chance of two consecutive failures a hundredfold.”
The flight from abandoned farms to cities produced “the urban graveyard effect,” crises of disease, nutrition, water, sanitation, housing, fire, crime, abortion, infanticide, marriages forgone, and suicide. Given the ubiquity of desperation, it is not surprising that more wars took place during the 17th-century crisis “than in any other era before the Second World War.”
By documenting the appalling consequences of two climate changes, Rosen and Parker validate wariness about behaviors that might cause changes. The last twelve of Parker’s 712 pages of text deliver a scalding exhortation to be alarmed about what he considers preventable global warming. Neither book, however, supports those who believe human behavior is the sovereign or even primary disrupter of climate normality, whatever that might be. With the hands that today’s climate Cassandras are not using to pat themselves on the back for their virtuous empiricism, they should pick up such books.
— George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist. © 2015 The Washington Post
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Meanwhile, we pay more, for nothing.
why would you do that? wouldn't you just pay for things that were less expensive? (e.g. buy goods and services that incur less of a tax because "they emit" less carbon).
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 8, 2015 - 08:23am PT
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Evidently, this is interesting:
The geographical distribution of fossil fuels unused when limiting global warming to 2°C
A layman's summary.
"Our results suggest that, globally, a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and over 80 per cent
of current coal reserves should remain unused from 2010 to 2050 in order to meet the target of 2°C."
Furthermore:
The researchers note that their findings, ultimately, mean that, despite the industry drive for exploitation,
staving off disaster requires a different course. "[P]olicy markers' instincts to exploit rapidly and
completely their territorial fossil fuels are, in aggregate, inconsistent with their commitments to this
temperature limit."
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Were in the biggest oil patch shakedown since the 1980's. Look for rigs being laid down across america (and the world)as the lenders get increasingly nervous. Of course with the new lower energy prices it will make increased end point energy taxes ( carbon taxes) more palatable. Even lying repubs can support that.
What are the secondary effects of this economic warfare?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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What are the secondary effects of this economic warfare?
probably not that good for Alaska... eh rick?
the cost of oil is dropping, so it doesn't cover the expense of extracting the many "new" sources of that resource, the easy-to-get reserves having been drained. All current reserves of fossil fuels are more expensive to extract than in the past, due to a large number of factors.
It will be interesting to see how the market reacts... selling off reserves that might become difficult to sell in the future is certainly one way of insuring return-on-investment, albeit at a lower price. However, the oil producers are trying to guess what the future holds. The less confidence they have in their abilities to predict, the more volatile the market become.
We seemed to have switched to policy and away from the climate science.
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EdwardT
Trad climber
Retired
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We seemed to have switched to policy and away from the climate science.
Speaking of policy, now is the time to raise gasoline taxes and pass laws for additional future taxes. It's absurd that the federal gas tax has not been increased in over 21 years. Ridiculous.
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