1. It’s not that the cost-benefit and risk analyses that support efforts to price carbon are a house of cards, it’s the emissions rights givewaays and politician-directed pork-barrel “green technology” subsidies/grants, and the deceptive way in which these “solutions” are being marketed to us that is the house of cards.

Yes, we need carbon pricing, and yes increasing costs will have a particularly regressive bite, and it is wrong to sell this as easy rather than facing it honestly. It is also wrong to fail to note all of the eager feeding at the federal troughs that the latest climate bill anticipated – some $56 TRILLION in giveaways. I agree that if this is the type of climate policy that we are looking at, people will very quickly get fed up and demand lower prices – which might very well gut any benefit from cap and trade.

But it doesn’t need to be. Climate policy can be both sustainable AND fair – as long as it protects the interests of average Americans rather than sereving to feed the special interests of well-fed elites. What we need is either a carbon tax (or auctioned emission rights) with ALL PROCEED REFUNDED pro rata to citizens – as Jim Hansen has recently argued for, based on long-standing proposals of “Sky Trust ” advocate Peter Barnes and more recent proposals of Biddle and Boyle.

The tax and 100% dividend approach recognizes that the atmopshere is a public good – not something that fossil users have a primary claim to – would create long-term support for climate policy by allowing consumers to pay for the higher costs they face, even while providing incentives to change behavior, and would minimize pork barrel rent-seeking.

2. “How can the world achieve economic growth while at the same time decarbonizing the global economy?”

“[T]here is apt to be little public or political support for mitigation policies that increase the costs of energy in ways that are felt in reduced growth.”

These are misguided. CBA tells us that pricing carbon makes sense now – because GDP “growth” is an inadequate measure that ignores the damage done to important and valuable assets that are unowned and unpriced. Rather, there is likely to be little long-term support for climate mitigation policies if the burden of such policies is not fairly shared, but shifted to lower and middle class consumers. Revenue recycling will remove the sting.

3. Pacala’s “wedge” approach is perfectly appropriate. Citizens should understand that our problems are not unsurmountable – at least, that it, if we have the political will to address them.

Regards,

Tom

Dr Pielke and many others are pointing out why the campaign to increase fuel costs is not a viable “option” with a “plausible chance of stabilizing concentrations at 450 to 500 ppm”. And to point this out is laudable because doing nothing is preferable to doing something stupid.

But you say to Dr Pielke;
“it is impossible to debate you a since you never bother spelling out exactly what other options you would pursue that actually have any plausible chance of stabilizing concentrations at 450 to 500 ppm.”

However, that presupposes there is an “option” with a “plausible chance of stabilizing concentrations at 450 to 500 ppm”. There may be such an “option” but to date none has been evinced and at present it is not possible to devise one.

Only those who believe that it is necessary and/or desirable to stabilise concentrations at “450 to 500 ppm” have a responsibility to suggest workable methods to achieve that. And they have a problem in making such a suggestion because there is no known relationship between anthropogenic emissions and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.

Stating this problem in the words of the IPCC
“no systematic analysis has published on the relationship between mitigation and baseline scenarios”
(ref. IPCC Third Assessment Report (2001) Working Group 3 Chapter 2”

Richard S Courtney

Dr Pielke and many others are pointing out why the campaign to increase fuel costs is not a viable “ option” ” with a “plausible chance of stabilizing concentrations at 450 to 500 ppm”. And to point this out is laudable because doing nothing is preferable to doing something stupid.

But you say to Dr Pielke;
“it is impossible to debate you a since you never bother spelling out exactly what other options you would pursue that actually have any plausible chance of stabilizing concentrations at 450 to 500 ppm.”

However, that presupposes there is an “option” with a “plausible chance of stabilizing concentrations at 450 to 500 ppm”. There may be such an “option” but to date none has been evinced and at present it is not possible to devise one.

Only those who believe that it is necessary and/or desirable to stabilise concentrations at “450 to 500 ppm” have a responsibility to suggest workable methods to achieve that. And they have a problem in making such a suggestion because there is no known relationship between anthropogenic emissions and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.

Stating this problem in the words of the IPCC
“no systematic analysis has published on the relationship between mitigation and baseline scenarios”
(ref. IPCC Third Assessment Report (2001) Working Group 3 Chapter 2”

Richard S Courtney

I suggest that you re-read the post since it seems that you didn’t understood it.

Roger position has always been clear that he support both mitigation and adaptation. I don’t agree with him on that point.

What I think you should understand from what Roger wrote is that by sugarcoating the cost of mitigation those, like you, who advocates strong action will only faced the deception of big talk and no action. What people like you should understand is that if you want to succeed you need to be upfront about the real cost and not paint a rosy picture that the public will not buy or want.

I think one of the best example of the big talk and no action strategy is the UK that are speaking loud enough while acting the opposite.

I just don’t see how strategies that cost maybe 0.1% of GDP per year, which is where the IPCC and IEA seem to be, can be labeled “misguided and cannot succeed.”

You write, “the current ranges of actions at the forefront of the climate debate focused on putting a price on carbon in order to motivate action are misguided and cannot succeed.”

I couldn’t disagree more with that sentence, but in any case, it is impossible to debate you a since you never bother spelling out exactly what other options you would pursue that actually have any plausible chance of stabilizing concentrations at 450 to 500 ppm.

Needless to say, if your reanalysis of the wedges were right (and I have demonstrated that it isn’t, but let that go for now), then that ould be all the more reason to start deploying those wedges now and do so faster than five decades as I’ve been saying. If your reanalysis of the wedges were right, then a strategy based on hoping we might get multiple breakthrough technologies at some point in the future, which could somehow be deployed even faster than existing technologies could be deployed is patently hopeless.

I do agree that you seem to be conflating a carbon price with the overall cost of action. Your post seems to imply that action is simply too costly compared to the cost of inaction. Needless to say, I could not disagree with you more, nor could the IPCC, the IEA, the National Academies, and even most economists I know.

What I find inconvenient is that there is no proposal that benefit the vast majority of people that are already using a limited amount of energy.

People in my situation are doing the most they can to reduce their energy cost. Even though my situation could be worst, my household income is low enough that we have to do everything we can to reduce our energy cost. For example, we are using compact fluorescent for any light that are regularly lighted and phasing the old bulb has they die. We set the heating temp in the low 70s during daytime and at 68 at night during the winter and we set the AC at 78 to 80 in the summer. We only use our car when necessary.

I would certainly not object any scheme that would reduce my load of energy cost. On the other I will not support anything that make it worst. We have a below average consumption and I do believe that those who are higher than average should pay more for there energy. Sadly, like I said earlier the proposal put the burden on everyone and not on the worst offender.

Even if the aggregate benefit/cost ratio is favorable, there will always be narrower groups who face different tradeoffs. Carbon intensive industries, people with high discount rates, etc. have an incentive to avoid controls (unless you devise a compensation scheme to change that, e.g. grandfathering permits).

“what do I have to gain by paying more of my limited income on energy? This will not help me invest in more efficient insulating technologies or newer more efficient car.”

This is exactly the cost-price or allocation-distribution conflation I mentioned. When OPEC cuts production and oil prices rise, you and I face a real loss, especially in the short term because it’s hard to modify consumption. But if the change in energy prices occurs via a self-imposed transfer that reemerges broadly in the economy, the result is rather different. If you don’t have much money, and thus don’t consume much energy anyway, you could come out ahead under a rebated tax, because the rebate would exceed the increase in energy and conservation expenditures.

The time trajectory of implementation also matters. Truckers are rioting (and BBQ users aren’t) because fuel prices have risen quickly compared to the scale and lifespan of their assets and commitment to their career. (Also, the wealth transferred by high prices does not get broadly distributed.) If changes had occurred more gradually, with clear expectations, and softened by redistribution of the proceeds, the outcome might be quite different.

It does seem likely that the public will continue to demand lower-priced energy. Responding to that by promising to deliver same through R&D is about as delusional as promising that mitigation won’t be costly. There may be small free lunches either way, but not on the scale needed to solve the problem. The difference is that the public finds out about price-induced mitigation costs now, but only discovers that R&D fails to deliver, or gets consumed by rebound effects, much later.

The public wants much more than low energy prices. They also want higher income, for example. Yet we’ve had broad income taxes for a long time. Those induce large transfers, but they also presumably induce real, costly allocation changes. The externalities targeted (education or income distribution perhaps) are if anything more controversial than climate. This suggests that it’s not impossible to undertake costly measures with uncertain payoffs. It might take a long time, either to learn from experience or achieve some kind of paradigm shift, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we should give up.