Carbon Pricing is the Best Path to Realistic Technological Solutions for Climate Change
A non-artificial tree
Will Wilkinson and Ryan Avent further bat around the geo-engineering subject, with Wilkinson in comments mentioning super-carbon-eating trees as the kind of technological fix to which he thinks environmentalists are giving short shrift. For basically Popperian reasons I don’t think it makes sense for political pundits to spend a lot of time debating the relative difficulty of developing different hypothetical future technologies. Instead, I would just say that the best way to find out whether human ingenuity is better at keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations at a sustainable level by developing artificial trees or by developing better windmills is to . . . implement a binding emissions reduction scheme that puts a price on CO2 emissions.
This isn’t, in other words, an either/or choice. If you had a cap-and-trade system in place, that would put a range of modalities—better efficiency, more clean energy production, more trees & algae, and carbon-scrubbing machines—in a competitive framework. One assumes we’d be looking at some kind of mix. But defining the correct mix in advance seems very hard. Hence the appeal of a basically market-esque mechanism that creates incentives to work on these various ideas without unduly prejudging the appropriate level of investment in speculative technology.
What I think is remarkable is the extent to which people on the right, in their zeal to avoid a market mechanism that the business establishment happens to hate, have a tendency to talk up what instead amounts to a kind of Five Year Plan approach. Instead of regulating carbon, let’s just direct scientists of invent miracle trees! Let’s turn the sky red! The greenhouse gas problem is one of the largest political crises the liberal/democratic/capitalist order has ever faced, but unlike something like Hitler the basic shape of the problem is something we’ve seen and dealt with before. The whole “sometimes there are negative externalities and you need to charge people for them” thing is in basic textbooks. Maybe the result of such a scheme will be a technological miracle, or maybe not but the shape of the policy environment that will let us find out isn’t mysterious.
30 Responses to “Carbon Pricing is the Best Path to Realistic Technological Solutions for Climate Change”
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October 20th, 2009 at 11:30 am
I largely agree, but what you’re saying only works if the GHG pricing extends into the negative for behavior that removes GHGs from the atmosphere. Geoengineering is something that private individuals or organizations are not going to do on their own unless they get paid for it. If it turns out that a coal power plant can reduce its GHG balance more efficiently by paying for the planting of supertrees than by CO2 sequestration, then the GHG-pricing scheme needs to favor this.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:35 am
It basically comes down to the fact that libertarians are predominantly sci-fi nerds (I say this as a sci-fi nerd) and free market principles tend to go out the window when we talk about super cool technologies and spaceships.
Though presumably Will Wilkinson wouldn’t endorse some sort of Apollo Program for miracle trees, so I do wonder what mechanism he thinks would be effective in spurring innovation in geo-engineering besides cap-and-trade. I mean, it is the conservative “market based” approach… but there’s only political opportunists in foxholes… or something.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Would be great if this debate would shift from just global warming to environmental damage in general. All those technological fixes, next to that they dont work target just global warming which is just one of many externalities produced by burning fossil fuels.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:53 am
There is a parallel universe out there where McCain won the election, threw his weight behind a cap and trade scheme that gave away licenses to existing energy industry stakeholders, libertarians are running around touting the benefits of this brilliant market-based solution to global warming, and Fox News is mocking the lefties who are complaining that the licenses weren’t auctioned to raise revenue for renewable energy research.
In this universe, however, a progressive black Democrat won the election. Therefore, Parallel McCain’s proposal is a growth-destroying socialist tax.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:58 am
The market, of course, only results in optimal outcomes for conservative policy priorities.
October 20th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
John Galt will invent the device that saves the planet, and if he has a problem with policy, he’ll blow up that planet saving device.
October 20th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Excellent Popper reference. Predicting the future development of technology is stupid. If we knew how to make super trees, we’d be making them now.
This quote, on the other hand, is the most astute political observation I’ve seen in years:
.
Money.
October 20th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Yes Matt I totally agree and eagerly await Obama’s speech announcing a $500 annual surtax on individuals with proceeds to be divided up by the same group that brings us the Pentagon budget!
Hahahaha!
October 20th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
[...] Matthew Yglesias: What I think is remarkable is the extent to which people on the right, in their zeal to avoid a market mechanism that the business establishment happens to hate, have a tendency to talk up what instead amounts to a kind of Five Year Plan approach. Instead of regulating carbon, let’s just direct scientists of invent miracle trees! Let’s turn the sky red! The greenhouse gas problem is one of the largest political crises the liberal/democratic/capitalist order has ever faced, but unlike something like Hitler the basic shape of the problem is something we’ve seen and dealt with before. The whole “sometimes there are negative externalities and you need to charge people for them” thing is in basic textbooks. Maybe the result of such a scheme will be a technological miracle, or maybe not but the shape of the policy environment that will let us find out isn’t mysterious. [...]
October 20th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
A cap and trade process will inevitably lead to a crazy quilt of evasive and abusive behaviors that will result in many Enron-like scandals.
Market forces would be better focused to reduce CO2 if fossil carbon was simply taxed as it was extracted from the earth. The resulting higher fossil energy cost would soon cause everyone to reassess their energy usage and would give an economic push to anyone developing alternatives.
The proceeds of the tax could be used to offset payroll taxes or perhaps pay for universal medical care (idea from Al Gore).
October 20th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
On the other hand, government funding and support for new anti-climate-change technologies is not very sensitive to the price of carbon.
October 20th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
LFG… do you really imagine that Congress would ever return our carbon taxes to us to spend as we wish?
No way they will ever give up control of even one nickel of a new source of spoils to spread among their “contributors” just as they were unwilling to actually return our money to us for “stimulus”.
Yes yes they will trot out their theories “proving” that we are not as stimulus savy as they are. After all they spent 700 billion$ and have created 30,000 jobs!
The single best argument against cap and tax is the endemic corruption of our Ruling Class.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
LaFollette Progressive wins.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
What I think is remarkable is the extent to which people on the right, in their zeal to avoid a market mechanism that the business establishment happens to hate, have a tendency to talk up what instead amounts to a kind of Five Year Plan approach. Instead of regulating carbon, let’s just direct scientists of invent miracle trees!
This is exactly what I’ve been thinking!
These geoengineering schemes are the most terrifying command and control, big government programs I have ever heard discussed. You don’t trust the government to provide a public health insure option, but you do trust the government to pump sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to blot out the sun?
October 20th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
You don’t trust the government to provide a public health insure option, but you do trust the government to pump sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to blot out the sun?
Word.
Also, they trust the government to refashion Afghanistan and Iraq of all places into uncorrupted Western-style market democracies.
October 20th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
This is where having some sense of history is important. Conservatives have always been for big government engineering projects. The Southern dems, and then GOP, were and are the best friend of the Army corps of engineers. The first Federally controlled hydraulic engineering project – the one that basically overrode state control of rivers – was put in place by Hoover, as a secretary of Commerce under Coolidge, in response to the Mississippi River flood of 1927. Hoover’s name is on one of the biggest dam projects out west, which basically made the imperial valley an agricultural powerhouse – why? Not cause Hoover was a real popular guy in the 1930s. It was because Hoover pushed for these projects. Reagan, running aainst Carter, pushed against Carter’s environmental pullback of dam building and water supplying projects in the west – in fact, it was one of his strongest cards in the 1980 election. Carter had actually wondered whether it was really cost effective to basically support agro-industries with below cost water provision. The best book about this is Cadillac Desert, which is one of those books everybody should read if they want to understand American politics.
Conservatism should not be thought of as an ideology, or at least only as an ideology, but as a phylogenetic exttention of the interests of certain industries – the defense industry complex and the petro-chemical industry. The oil companies financed most conservative think tanks and magazines up to the eighties, and are still major financers – most rightwing billionaires owe their fortune to oil. And the petro industry is heavily oriented towards big project engineering – viz, Haliburton.
Now, of course, conservatism is autonomous enough to have departed, on some level, from simply defending low taxes and heavy government supports for corporate projects – there’s the rightwing church groups, for instance. But the money still comes from companies with a huge stake in engineering.
October 20th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Yep. It’s the American Conservative Way – we need to preserve freedom, so … let’s invade other countries! Yeah! That’s the ticket!
October 20th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
On one hand I agree with MY that hope is not a plan – a common failing of liberals and conservatives both that technology and innovation will by themselves make the world better. But I think MY makes the same mistake himself by assuming government interference in the economy on the scale cap & trade would involve will create the incentive for technological innovation that doesn’t now exist. Technological innovation has far more to do with the laws of physics than the laws of supply and demand. Further, technology that’s possible isn’t necessarily practical. Lots of ‘ifs’ from both WW and MY.
What’s not in doubt is that cap & trade would be disruptive to say the least to the American economy, its benefits are seriously in doubt to all but the true believers, the climatology debate is poisoned by scientifically illiterate polemics and cap & trade is not going to pass anyway.
October 20th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
[...] response to my exchange with Ryan Avent (see Ryan’s reply here) Matt Yglesias says: For basically Popperian reasons I don’t think it makes sense for political pundits to spend a [...]
October 20th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
You don’t trust the government to provide a public health insure option, but you do trust the government to pump sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to blot out the sun?
Not really — but if it comes down to a choice between that and trusting the government to eco-engineer the global economy to use 90% less carbon-based energy without fubaring everything, the 18-mile sulfur-dioxide pump starts to look promising in comparison. Certainly promising enough to give it a lot more serious consideration.
October 20th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
[...] recent post by Matt Yglesias challenged the libertarian community on their seemingly anti-market approach to [...]
October 20th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
i find funny that you’re so preaching to the converted that no one even seems to blink at one of the sillier statements i’ve seen in a while:
The greenhouse gas problem is one of the largest political crises the liberal/democratic/capitalist order has ever faced . . . .
seriously? you’ve got proof of this? or that’s just your read of what might happen if a number of things fall out a certain way over the next 100 or so years and we can’t deal with them and trying to address them now would have solved the problem and on and on and on.
October 21st, 2009 at 12:35 am
“the government to eco-engineer the global economy to use 90% less carbon-based energy ”
You are a top-notch blowhard idiot.
October 21st, 2009 at 12:59 am
[...] 3. Very good comments on geo-engineering, with some excellent sentences, and more here. [...]
October 21st, 2009 at 12:59 am
[...] 3. Very good comments on geo-engineering, with some excellent sentences, and more here. [...]
October 21st, 2009 at 2:37 am
Re Jason@1: All real cap ‘n trade schemes (EU, RGGI, AB32 in CA) contain provisions for offsets whereby emitters can contract for, say, planting a bunch of new trees, painting a bunch of roofs white, etc, and get the CO2 value of that as an emissions allowance — the net result being that if it’s cheaper to use offsets, that’s what will happen.
October 21st, 2009 at 6:19 am
Though carbon pricing has much to recommend it in many settings, and could invigorate research into the carbon dioxide reduction schemes that form part of what people talk of as geoengineering, it’s really unlikely to invigorate the geoengineering schemes that rely on reducing solar input to the system, because there’s no reasonable way to translate the change in radiative forcing into a CO2 equivalent: one is a prompt effect, one a long term effect.
This is another way of saying that cutting down sunlight is not an equal and opposite response to cutting down CO2; but that does not in and of itself mean that its not worth researching schemes to cut down sunlight, and the lack of any chance to cash in at the carbon markets is one, among many, of the reasons that little private money will flow into such research.
October 21st, 2009 at 9:44 am
[...] pundits should stay away from debating emerging clean technologies (Matthew [...]
October 21st, 2009 at 10:04 am
Meanwhile, I’m going to corner the market on sulfur.
We’re going to spew 40 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere every year for 500 years.
Yeah, baby. Rich. I’ll be rich. Crazy rich.
October 21st, 2009 at 1:40 pm
[...] Think Progress, Matt Yglesias wonders why we don’t prefer a readily available “market-mechanism” — pricing [...]