Blog Action Day: Mitigating Climate Change With Complementary Policies
Burning methane gas is a relatively clean way of generating power compared to other fossil fuel options. But directly releasing methane gas into the atmosphere is a climate catastrophe. Methane packs far more greenhouse punch per unit than does the better known carbon dioxide. Thus, as Andrew Revkin and Clifford Kraus write in The New York Times plugging various kinds of leaks in our infrastructure for storing and transportation methane is a highly effective way of mitigating climate change. What’s interesting, as they also observe, is that in many cases this isn’t just cost-effective, it directly saves money. The cost of the leaks, in other words, is higher than the cost of plugging them.
In addition to illustrating the specific point, that kind of thing highlights the efficacy of so-called “complementary policies” alongside a hoped-for basic mechanism of putting a price on greenhouse gas pollution. In a kind of black box rational agent model, the price mechanism alone should provide all the incentive people need. In practice, agents with a limited amount of time and attention can often find themselves neglecting small problems with large cumulative impact. Methane leakage is a striking example, but home insulation is probably a more broadly applicable one. Normal people simply don’t take the time to do a cost-benefit analysis on investing in better-insulating their homes and the problem of attenuated attention to this issue gets even worse when you consider things like rental apartments and office space. Under the circumstances it makes a lot of sense to try to push the level of evaluation up to a more macro scale and then hand down new building codes and direct financial incentives for retrofitting. Over the long term, there’s no substitute for carbon pricing to create incentives for both efficiency, innovation, and investment in existing clean energy technology. But in the short-term, our best bet is almost certainly the efficiency-enhancing properties of these kind of complementary policies.
At any rate, today is Blog Action Day and the issue is climate change. Tell your friends! When people look back one or two hundred years from now on American politics in the early 21st century, they’re probably not going to care about the ups-and-downs of health care policy or derivatives regulatives. They are going to care about what we did or didn’t do to forestall an ecological catastrophe.
6 Responses to “Blog Action Day: Mitigating Climate Change With Complementary Policies”
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October 15th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Too bad mitigating methane being released from Siberian permafrost won’t be so simple. Really too bad.
October 15th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
well, maybe if we had a siberia-sized cork…
October 15th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
“Assume people.”
October 15th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
The rental problem is a good example of that. The landlord generally pays the cost of something like new windows, but the tenant pays the heating bill. So there’s little direct incentive for the new investment even with higher fuel prices. Indirectly the landlord might be able to get more rent for a better insulated building, but I don’t think that the general experience, at least not on a one for one basis.
October 15th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
OGT, this sounds like a prisoner’s dilemma problem. Landlords generally can be better off if they all made their buildings more efficient and raised rent to compensate for it, but since tenants pay more attention to the monthly rent rather than to monthly heating costs when choosing where to rent, a landlord could defect by offering lower rent and not upgrading his/her building. The answer, of course, is collective action, which in this case means landlords hire the mob to break the windows of landlords who don’t upgrade their buildings. This is clearly much better than the socialist alternative of government regulation.
October 20th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
In 200 years time, people will think how foolish people were to accept the idea that humans were causing the world to heat up. People did exactly the same thing in medieval times about the appearance of comets, believing them to harbinger the end of the world. Your statements sound very similar. They are unscientific and emotional. Most real scientists do NOT accept the theory of AGW because they understand the chemical equation:
C(fossil fuel) + O2(air) = CO2 + H2O + Heat (Hopefully you accept this equation)
You therefore must accept this chemical reaction occurring simultaneously:
CO2 + H2O + sunlight = C6-H12-O6(biomass) + O2. ( photoautotrophic growth)
Therefore, the only relevant question regarding AGW, is to ask which chemical reaction taking place is returning the greater volume of gas to the atmosphere. Is it combustion, respiration, decomposition (plus other inorganic redox reactions) which consumes oxygen and produces Carbon Dioxide, or photoautropic growth which consumes CO2 and produces Oxygen?
Air-breathing plants plus aquatic carbon-fixing phytoplankton produce about 150,000,000,000 tonnes of biomass every year. This is a huge mass but this includes everything that grows across the whole planet including the oceans. To complete this photoautropic activity, living matter has to sequester about 470 billion tons of CO2 annually from the atmosphere to produce this amount of biomass. Of this, about 10% of the CO2 (47 billion tonnes), is permanently lost to the atmosphere due to the creation of irreducible biomass and carboniferous deposition. Add to this the 4 billion tons of organic-based waste which is buried in landfill sites around the world, (representing approx 12 billion tons of CO2), gives a total loss to the atmosphere of 59 billion tons of CO2. Since the declared total amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere worldwide is 29 billion tons (US Energy Information Administration) leaves a 30 billion ton shortfall of CO2 in the atmosphere. Your AGW prognostications has to be wrong. Even at a very basic level, the imagined rise in CO2 for any industrialised country would be offset by the mere waste (80% carbon) that’s permanently captured when buried in landfill sites.