On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 7:57 AM, <[email protected]>wrote:
> > Gar wrote (thank you for entering the discussion): > You are formulating here the reason why we are past the > point where policies can do the trick. Without a broa grassroots movement where people in the developed nations > realize that more consumption does not lead to more > happiness, but on the contrary the pursuit of more > consumption leads to disaster, without a broad awakening > that we are all in this together and that humans everywhere > have to cooperate and preserve the ecosystem, without such a > radical cultural and philosophicl change humanity will not > be able to jump out of the groove they are in. > > I don't disagree that we need a grassroots movement, but I don't agree that we need a form of left austerity. We have to technology to increase GDP even in the developed nations while decreasing negative environmental impact to close to zero. I agree that GDP is an awful way to measure whether an economy is good for the people or not. But because of the massive infrastructure changes needed to phase out emissions, it would be close to impossible to make the changes we need without increasing even conventionally measure GDP as a side effect. In the long run the world may need to go to a steady state economy, and at any rate material betterment should be measured in things like lifespan,good physical and mental health, leisure and other aspects not included in conventional GDP. > Assuming such a cultural change is on the way and people are > asking: how can we elicit in a fair way the cooperation of > everyone to do the heavy lifting that is required -- I think > if this is the situation, then people will embrace > individual carbon rationing as a fair framework coordinating > everybody's efforts to decarbonize their lives and the > economy. > > Again I don't agree. Carbon rationing is unneccessarily complicated and inconvenient. A simple carbon fee with the revenue divided equally among the population of the area where the fee applies will accomplish the same thing, with less pain and less inconvenience. > > > Leading with carbon pricing is bad policy and bad politics. > > I agree with Gar that public investment must play the > leading role. But as long as not all production is > socialized, public investment cannot do the trick alone, > I would agree with this not only for reasons of revenue, but for reasons of information. That is to say even if we had full socialism either market socialism or planned socialism without markets, the transition could not be managed effectively without a carbon price. Even in the case of a planned economy with no markets, I think a carbon price would be a needed for accounting purposes to do the planning effectively. But both under capitalism and (counterfactually) under socialism a carbon price is reinforcement - not the main driver. And when we are talking reinforcement a simple fee (tax) makes more sense than a trading system. That is especially true where the measurement of what we are putting the price on is inaccurate and imprecise. And as I have pointed out, the peer reviewed literature shows that while aggregate measures of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG emissions) are very precise and accurate, when we get to the local and especially the unit level, measurement of pollution is less accurate and precise than any feasible annual target. When the reinforcement is that rough and ready a carbon tax makes much more sense than any form of trading including a carbon rationing system. If you create tradeable financial instruments based on information that imprecise it is possible that someone could end up making a profit while increasing emissions or lose money reducing emissions. Someone might end up with surplus permits to sell, not because they actually reduced emissions more than planned but because measurement error shows them as reducing emissions more than planned. Similarly someone might end up buying more permits not because they actually increased emissions more than intended, but because measurement error shows them as having done so. A carbon fee, though it still will inevitable get the scale wrong at least can't get the sign wrong. > > > And when we talk about degradation of forests and loss of > > forest and farm soil and so on there is a whole other > > level of measurement difficulty. > > For forest management it is not enough to measure CO2 but > one also needs to measure the other ecosystem services > provided by forests. The report "World in Transition -- A > Social Contract for Sustainability" by the German Advisory > Council on Global Change (Schellnhuber) writes on p. 300: > > True, but not the point I had in mind. (And I don't blame you for not engaging in successful mind reading. If you could read minds, especially at a distance, you could grow rich, and finance a large grassroots movement if you chose.) When we talk about biological systems, even without human intervention the carbon in them varies a lot with time and temperature. If a forest is completely left along, it will have drastically different amounts of carbon in different seasons and in different years. There will be decreases as well as increases. Thus any attempt to put a price on biological carbon has to start with a business as usual (BAU) scenario - a story about what "might have been". Then actual measurements (which in practice are not all that accurate or precise) have to be compared to that story. And of course we never know what might have been. Stories of this kind are a social product, and cannot really reflect reality. So while I support a carbon price as reinforcement in most sectors (power production, manufacturing, transport, and buildings) when it comes to agriculture, forestry and land use, a carbon price is useless. Because of the need for "just so" stories in measurement, a meaningful carbon price is not possible with agriculture and forestry. The only way to manage farms and forests and other types of land use is through regulation and public investment that controls means rather than trying to get precise measurement of ends. You can measure a trend in a forest or farm over the course of year - a minimum of three years and for any degree of certainty more like five or seven. And you never know for sure if a natural disaster or feedback from global warming will release the carbon stored even so, over that period of time you can at least get a reasonable probability that a farm or forest is storing rather than releasing carbon without comparing the results to a just- so story. But again this will be a very rough measure on the lines of "large loss, moderate loss, about the same (small gain or loss), moderate gain, large gain. That is not precise enough for either a trading system or carbon tax in the usual sense, but good enough for command & control regulation with a fine for carbon losses and perhaps a reward for large scale carbon storage over a period of years. Again even in other sectors, precision is not good enough for trading, though good enough for a carbon tax as long as that carbon tax is looked upon only as very rough and ready reinforcement and not a main driver. > > a purely climate protection driven transformation does not > > make sense in forest management. The WBGU recommends > > increasing the overall focus on ecosystem services, as the > > availability of safe water and soil quality are also > > decisive for the transformation. > > I can recommend this report highly, it can be downloaded for free from > > http://www.wbgu.de/en/flagship-reports/fr-2011-a-social-contract > > The WBGU is naive about carbon trading (they recommend a > business-level cap and trade system), they do not mention > that many of their recommendations go against the spirit of > the capitalist world system, and their extensive literature > list has neither Scheer nor Lohmann. Nevertheless this > report makes a lot of valid points which I have not found > elsewhere assembled so neatly. I consider it obligatory > reading for anyone concerned about the climate. I am going > to use it and the video-taped lectures of the associated > "Transformation Seminar" for my environmental economics > class next Spring. > > Hans > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- Facebook: Gar Lipow Twitter: GarLipow Solving the Climate Crisis web page: SolvingTheClimateCrisis.com Grist Blog: http://grist.org/author/gar-lipow/ Online technical reference: http://www.nohairshirts.com
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