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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby shickingbrits on Wed Sep 24, 2014 5:51 pm

Mets,

Thanks for an answer, something tangible to shred. I will be happy to do so in the appropriate thread. My point to Degaston was twofold: that he bases his guiding principles on ignorance and that he demands answers when he provides none.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby Metsfanmax on Wed Sep 24, 2014 7:16 pm

shickingbrits wrote:he bases his guiding principles on ignorance


That's a pretty good first approximation. There's very little that humans do know compared to the sum total of things that one could in principle know. Only the supremely arrogant and unintelligent start from the stance that they already have the answer.

and that he demands answers when he provides none.


Not because he can't, just because he thinks there's no point. And I'm sure there isn't, based on the fact that you plan to "shred" my post instead of having a discussion about it.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby shickingbrits on Wed Sep 24, 2014 7:57 pm

I don't see what's to discuss. You are quite happy with people shouting climate change with a near zero knowledge of it, calling for widespread economic change and in some extreme cases suggesting we whittle the population down to 50,000,000.

You're quite happy to post that 97% of scientists agree on global warming. How many scientists would agree with your 2-3 degrees per doubling of CO2? Why since this has been known since 1900 have scientists consistently failed to forecast warming based on CO2? Aren't they all using basic algebra? If it increases by 2-3 degrees per doubling, then the significance of the change of a 40% increase should be rather transparent, there should be all sorts of measurable results. I know some simple algebra. Let's start at your base level of 250 ppm. Half equals 125, 62.5, 31.25, 15.625, 7.8125, 3.9, 1.95, .975, .4875 (tell me when to stop). So 9 doublings times 2 or 3 equals 18-27 degrees. That's celsius, so 64-80.6F.

Feeling happy with that answer for trace amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere and resulting temperature difference from what would be experienced at 250 ppm? Cuz I'm not.

It's a joke of an answer. And yet that is the "accepted answer" by "most" "mainstream" "scientists".
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby Metsfanmax on Wed Sep 24, 2014 8:34 pm

shickingbrits wrote:I don't see what's to discuss. You are quite happy with people shouting climate change with a near zero knowledge of it,


No I am not. I think it's a shame when people talk about stuff they don't know about and ridicule others who know about the same amount of science they do. However, when the vast majority of a scientific community agrees on something, it's a safe bet to go along with them, so in that sense I think they're doing the smart thing.

calling for widespread economic change and in some extreme cases suggesting we whittle the population down to 50,000,000.


I don't like that either. I'm not a hippie. I like capitalism. I like having air conditioners and the internet. I think that we can actually solve climate change without hurting the economy at all, since climate change is a negative externality -- that is, a market inefficiency -- and correcting the market failure through a simple and transparent carbon pricing mechanism will actually likely improve our economy according to a number of sources.

Still, the fact that random hippies and communists think that global warming is happening has nothing to do with whether it's actually happening.

You're quite happy to post that 97% of scientists agree on global warming. How many scientists would agree with your 2-3 degrees per doubling of CO2?


Basically every single one. It's based on ironclad physics. There's basically no way to disagree with it barring a complete overturning of our understanding of elementary thermodynamics. You don't even have to believe in anthropogenic climate change to understand the basics of the greenhouse effect.

What the climate modelers are trying to do is pinpoint exactly where that number is, and there's a lot of complications to that. And it's OK to be somewhat skeptical of the price number they give. But the fact that it has to be somewhere in that vicinity is based on physics so simple that I think no one with an undergraduate degree could deny it.

Why since this has been known since 1900 have scientists consistently failed to forecast warming based on CO2? Aren't they all using basic algebra?


Can't say for certain, but probably because it just wasn't measurable at the time. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human industrial activities at the time of Arrhenius was a lot smaller, and you couldn't have pinpointed human activity in the climate signal because the timespan was too short and it could easily have been masked by natural variability. Also, keep in mind that obviously it would have been ludicrous at the time to claim with any certainty that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would actually ever substantially increase above the pre-industrial level, because that would require a clairvoyant understanding of our how energy economy would eventually develop over the next 100 years.

If it increases by 2-3 degrees per doubling, then the significance of the change of a 40% increase should be rather transparent, there should be all sorts of measurable results.


There are measurable results. The average global temperature now is about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was in pre-industrial times. This is so uncontroversial in the scientific community that it's hard to emphasize it properly.

I know some simple algebra. Let's start at your base level of 250 ppm. Half equals 125, 62.5, 31.25, 15.625, 7.8125, 3.9, 1.95, .975, .4875 (tell me when to stop). So 9 doublings times 2 or 3 equals 18-27 degrees. That's celsius, so 64-80.6F.

Feeling happy with that answer for trace amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere and resulting temperature difference from what would be experienced at 250 ppm? Cuz I'm not.


Why not? Because it strains your mind to believe that carbon dioxide could actually be important to our atmosphere? What actual reasoning is involved here?

To help understand how important greenhouse gases are to our atmosphere, consider that the temperature we would have on the Earth's surface caused only by sunlight reaching the Earth would be around -20 degrees Celsius. Yet the actual average temperature of the Earth's surface is close to 15 degrees Celsius. Basically all of that can be attributed to the major greenhouse gases in our atmosphere: carbon dioxide and water. Without those substances in the atmosphere, we'd all freeze: the incident light from the Sun is not enough to sustain life on Earth. We're only all here because CO2 and H2O trap some of that light and keep it here.

It's a joke of an answer. And yet that is the "accepted answer" by "most" "mainstream" "scientists".


If people with years and years of study in a field come to a different conclusion than you about the field they study, isn't it at least worth considering why they think you're wrong?
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby shickingbrits on Wed Sep 24, 2014 9:20 pm

I'll be nice and max out your figures -20 - 15, a 35 degree difference. And I'll take the lesser of your figures for temperature derived from the total greenhouse effect of CO2, 18C. That leaves 17 degrees to be made up of other gases. I haven't added the 60% increase from 250 to 400ppm. You have an elementary physics problem with your equation.

Water vapor is the most important atmospheric greenhouse gas. Carbon dioxide is the second most important greenhouse gas.

Radiation and Climate, Vardavas & Taylor, Oxford University Press (2007)

If CO2 is contributing as you say at least a 2 degree C per doubling, it must be contributing at least more than water to temperature, now if only the global temperature would raise itself to satisfy your simple subtraction that would be sweet. You should really do some basic math before tackling algebra. Start with some addition of the other gases.

I know damn well why they sell this blatant perversion of basic established fact, they are in it for the money, status which is being proffered by the state for helping them enact further state control.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby Metsfanmax on Wed Sep 24, 2014 9:29 pm

shickingbrits wrote:I'll be nice and max out your figures -20 - 15, a 35 degree difference. And I'll take the lesser of your figures for temperature derived from the total greenhouse effect of CO2, 18C. That leaves 17 degrees to be made up of other gases. I haven't added the 60% increase from 250 to 400ppm. You have an elementary physics problem with your equation.


Wait, so first you were complaining about how carbon dioxide was responsible for too large of a change, and now you're complaining that it isn't important enough? But, you answer your own question:

Water vapor is the most important atmospheric greenhouse gas. Carbon dioxide is the second most important greenhouse gas.

Radiation and Climate, Vardavas & Taylor, Oxford University Press (2007)

If CO2 is contributing as you say at least a 2 degree C per doubling, it must be contributing at least more than water to temperature, now if only the global temperature would raise itself to satisfy your simple subtraction that would be sweet. You should really do some basic math before tackling algebra. Start with some addition of the other gases.


It is precisely the combination of both carbon dioxide and water that is responsible for the bulk of the greenhouse warming. I even said that in my last post -- did you even read it? When climate scientists consider the warming effect of carbon dioxide, they're already taking into account the additional warming due to the extra water that is added to the atmosphere. That's why you can't explain the difference between the current temperature and the sun-only temperature using only carbon dioxide. But when you account for both of them, that's where you get the real Earth temperature. And since the combination of the water and the CO2 in our atmosphere is what is responsible for raising the equilibrium temperature of our planet by 60 degrees Fahrenheit, why is it so hard to believe that adding a little bit more can have a serious impact?

I know damn well why they sell this blatant perversion of basic established fact, they are in it for the money, status which is being proffered by the state for helping them enact further state control.


If they're in it for the money, why don't they just sell out to the fossil fuel industry? Exxon pays better than the NSF.
Last edited by Metsfanmax on Wed Sep 24, 2014 9:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby degaston on Wed Sep 24, 2014 9:30 pm

shickingbrits wrote:My point to Degaston was twofold: that he bases his guiding principles on ignorance and that he demands answers when he provides none.

I don't think that I've really said that much about my guiding principles, so I'm not sure what you're even basing this accusation on, but I think that I base my guiding principles on knowledge as opposed to dogma. Feel free to provide some evidence to support your claim if you have it.

If I were to suggest that you appear to be projecting again, I would probably try to back up my claim with quotes from you, like:
shickingbrits wrote:Evolution is a tree and from that tree we've sampled several of its fruits. Social Darwinism, eugenics, genocide. You recognize that these are the fruits and yet keep offering me the apple. I don't want the apple and I don't care much about the poetic sales pitch of the serpent who convinced you to eat it.

i am merely concerned with the fact that it has proven itself poisonous. If you would like to dissuade me that it is poisonous, the best way isn't to say the Nazis are the best example of it. Letting you try to convince me that that wasn't a poisoned fruit is not a torment that I would wish upon myself.
Maybe you can clarify what the apple represents to you here, but you seem to be saying that you prefer ignorance because you don't like some of the ideas that evolution has given rise to. I'm a little curious as to how you feel about all of the negative ideas that have come from religion. I guess that fruit is just fine, right?

As for demanding answers while not providing any, let me refresh your memory a little:
Your first post to me was:
shickingbrits wrote:Degaston,
I am not a climatologist either. Can climatologists say how much heat is absorb per unit of CO2? Can they say the saturation point? What suggestions of theirs do you think provides the best solution to counteract this poisonous product?

You don't say why you want to know this, or why I should be the one to look it up for you, or what, if any, conclusion you think can be drawn from this. You don't provide any information or opinions of your own, and yet you demand that I respond to all these questions.

In my posts in that thread, I had only been discussing how there was no justification for saying that the ice caps were not melting, and had already said that I was not a climatologist, so my opinion on global warming was based on the consensus view of 97% of them. (Not that they couldn't be wrong, but when 97% of experts in a field agree on something, I'd need to see some pretty compelling evidence to go against them.)

When I didn't submit to your demands, your next post was:
shickingbrits wrote:Degaston,
So you don't even know the very base of the problem and yet you are trying to tell people they should be afraid.
"A political shift in will" to do what? To bring down CO2 emissions? by how much? how?
You lack a beginning and end. Your story sucks.
And you wonder why I wasn't interested in trying to have a "debate" with you?
Last edited by degaston on Thu Sep 25, 2014 8:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
universalchiro wrote:@degaston: whatever dude you win, you have it all figured out. You have out smarted even God.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby shickingbrits on Thu Sep 25, 2014 6:34 am

Degaston,

Ignored.

Mets,

Math is the foundation of physics. You state something which is mathematically impossible, that CO2, the second most important greenhouse gas is responsible for more of the earth's temperature than the water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas. Just how much more important water vapour is (25,000 ppm at 25C and 80% RH compared to the 400 ppm of CO2) you have completely neglected. When reports are published stating not only that water vapour is more important as a greenhouse gas, but that the hydraulic cycle's activity acts to disperse CO2 effect then what you are left with are a few fish in a big sea and are claiming that the fish are the medium and the water is living in them.

When I point out that placing all your figures in your favour results in an impossible situation, you claim it's cuz I didn't read your post. Well, I definitely read it well enough to calculate your figures, which you don't dispute and which quite clearly are wrong. And you are perfectly happy to claim scientific knowledge. That's just dandy.

So f*ck math, f*ck known physical properties, long live myth.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby Metsfanmax on Thu Sep 25, 2014 8:15 am

shickingbrits wrote:Math is the foundation of physics. You state something which is mathematically impossible, that CO2, the second most important greenhouse gas is responsible for more of the earth's temperature than the water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas.


No I did not. Where did I say that? Again, you assert below that you're actually reading my posts, but if you were reading them carefully then you wouldn't have made this mistake.

Just how much more important water vapour is (25,000 ppm at 25C and 80% RH compared to the 400 ppm of CO2) you have completely neglected.


No I have not. Where did I say that, and how is it relevant to the discussion of whether adding more CO2 to the atmosphere is a bad thing? All it means is that adding more water to the atmosphere is also a bad thing. Which, incidentally, adding more CO2 to the atmosphere would do.

When reports are published stating not only that water vapour is more important as a greenhouse gas


You don't need a report to conclude that water vapor is a more important greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It's really basic physics.

When I point out that placing all your figures in your favour results in an impossible situation, you claim it's cuz I didn't read your post. Well, I definitely read it well enough to calculate your figures, which you don't dispute and which quite clearly are wrong.


Your calculations weren't right, but I didn't dispute them because it wasn't relevant to the point, which is that CO2 has a very significant effect on the atmosphere. I also never said they were correct. (They're obviously not correct, or else you could have kept going to arbitrarily small concentrations and concluded that we've had 100000000 doublings of CO2 compared to zero and therefore we should all be living in a burning inferno.) The reason why the calculation isn't correct is that it is warming potential (roughly speaking) that is exponential with concentration, not temperature. If you look at what Arrhenius originally calculated, he was calculating what modern scientists would call the radiative forcing: basically, the amount of power per unit area that carbon dioxide is responsible for. This makes it easily comparable to the Sun's radiation, which we also measure in terms of heat power per unit area. The conversion from this warming potential to a temperature increase is dependent on other factors. The 2-3 degrees Celsius number is basically valid for the situation we actually live in. If the temperature were much smaller or much larger than it is now, that might change. I gave the number for the planet we actually live on, not some fictitious and irrelevant one, since I assume that's what you wanted.

If your response to this is: oh, so the situation is complicated and how can we possibly understand it, then f*ck off. Science can be complicated, especially if you're trying to get really detailed answers. Doesn't change just because you're too whiny to sit and think about it. Some of us do like to sit and think about it, and we've actually learned a thing or two.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby tzor on Thu Sep 25, 2014 9:09 am

Metsfanmax wrote:About 2-3 degrees Celsius per doubling of CO2. We've known that since about 1900. What's next?


Metsfanmax wrote:You're misunderstanding the point. I was not saying anything about the actual increase of carbon dioxide that we have observed. shickingbrits asked for the following information, essentially: if we were to double the concentration of CO2, how much would the temperature rise as a result? I was giving him the answer to that question, without saying that the concentration has risen by that much.


OK let's break it down then. You have given a "prediction" (and a fairly detailed one) indicating a specific range for a specific concentration increase.

But you also admit that isn't based on imperial evidence because we have never observed a doubling of CO2.

And the earth is so exceptionally complex. The implication of such amounts on a biosphere that actually runs off of CO2 is difficult to determine precisely. This same biosphere also can have impacts on other elements that can impact global temperatures (and in the case of methane significantly more).

Metsfanmax wrote:So if you then ask, how do we know what that number is if the concentration hasn't doubled? Then you're asking the wrong question. The amount "per doubling" is just a convenient yardstick we use. It didn't have to be "per doubling." It could have been "per increase by a factor of 1.429."


No, it's a stupid idea. You don't know the curve you can't extrapolate the data beyond what has been observed because you can't assume the curve is what you think it is based on the limited data. This is like a 19th century textbook on traveling between the stars before they realized that traveling beyond the speed of light was impossible, the linear curve's predictions had no relation with reality at speeds near the speed of light.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby Metsfanmax on Thu Sep 25, 2014 10:15 am

tzor wrote:OK let's break it down then. You have given a "prediction" (and a fairly detailed one) indicating a specific range for a specific concentration increase.

But you also admit that isn't based on imperial evidence because we have never observed a doubling of CO2.


It is based on empirical evidence. Both indirectly, in the sense that we basically know the physical laws that govern our atmosphere, and directly, in the sense that we can measure it. Again, read carefully what I wrote. Estimating the warming per doubling doesn't require us to actually observe a doubling. Since we understand the physical law that governs how the warming responds to an increase in concentration (the exponential law I mentioned earlier), we only need to measure how much warming actually results from a given level of concentration increase. Then we know the values for the rest of the exponential curve. If this breaks down, it's not because our understanding of the greenhouse effect is wrong -- it's not. It would be because there are lots of complicated feedbacks that can tune that value upwards or downwards because of the effects that the warming has on our planet.

And the earth is so exceptionally complex. The implication of such amounts on a biosphere that actually runs off of CO2 is difficult to determine precisely. This same biosphere also can have impacts on other elements that can impact global temperatures (and in the case of methane significantly more).


This is true. The simplified model doesn't account for all of the feedbacks. But suppose you didn't know anything else about the planet besides the effects of CO2 and water vapor in raising the Earth's temperature. Your best guess would then be that the temperature would rise 2-3 degrees in response to a doubling of CO2. Now, as you make your model more complex, you add more physics and that can change the value. However, since you're starting from ignorance, there's no particular reason for you to believe that the feedbacks will decrease the effect rather than increasing it. (However, as a policy maker, you might still want to plan for the worst because planning for the worst for no reason is a lot better than ignoring the possibility of the worst and then having it happen.) It's true that you can say "the Earth is complicated." That doesn't mean we get to ignore the problem. If you ask most climate scientists, they're seriously worried that there's a possibility of the problem being a lot worse than the 2-3 degrees Celsius, in part because we don't really understand those feedbacks that might happen after we've significantly warmed the planet. That is the scary part. Why do we want to risk going there? Said another way, it would require us to be very lucky for all of the feedbacks to conspire so as to basically cancel the warming effect. While it's possible, it's a stupid thing to bet on. Yet that's what the US Congress is currently betting on.

No, it's a stupid idea. You don't know the curve you can't extrapolate the data beyond what has been observed because you can't assume the curve is what you think it is based on the limited data. This is like a 19th century textbook on traveling between the stars before they realized that traveling beyond the speed of light was impossible, the linear curve's predictions had no relation with reality at speeds near the speed of light.


You can extrapolate -- the curve isn't based on the data, it's based on elementary physics. You don't just get to throw your hands up and say "thermodynamics doesn't apply to the Earth." It does. Get over it. Again, the breakdown does not occur because of the elementary thermodynamics of the greenhouse effect, which we know empirically beyond any doubt apply to the Earth. (You'll never find a climate change denier with any actual serious science background claiming that thermodynamics doesn't apply to the Earth.) It occurs because of other physics which is ancillary and which occurs when the temperature of the planet changes.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby tzor on Thu Sep 25, 2014 12:56 pm

Metsfanmax wrote:You can extrapolate -- the curve isn't based on the data, it's based on elementary physics.


So does Newtonian physics, but it fails once you get near the speed of light. Why? Because other factors which weren't all that apparent in your original observation range kick in and overshadow the numbers. And since CO2 isn't the biggest contributing factor, if CO2 increases actually triggers an even greater factor the difference could either be much higher or much lower depending on how that factor is changed.

Here is an article that makes this point. Those terrible twins of climate change, CO2 and H2O

The process begins with the slight increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere known to be caused by human emissions. Because CO2 traps slightly more heat, it also causes more water to evaporate. Water vapor (H2O) is also a greenhouse gas, so that causes a feedback loop, in which the temperature increases further, causing more water to evaporate. In the summer months, the result is much hotter weather than you might expect from CO2 alone.

But H2O has an opposite effect in winter. As temperature drops, the increased amounts of H2O forms clouds, which block sunlight and thus cool the earth further. Winters will be even colder than one would expect, plus there would be increased precipitation, including snow.


Now that actually made several assumptions but it's besides the point. H2O can at times keep heat in and at times prevent heat from coming in. And that doesn't count the effect plants have on the H2O and the CO2 levels in the atmosphere (plants need both of these two elements).
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby Metsfanmax on Thu Sep 25, 2014 1:52 pm

tzor wrote:
Metsfanmax wrote:You can extrapolate -- the curve isn't based on the data, it's based on elementary physics.


So does Newtonian physics, but it fails once you get near the speed of light. Why? Because other factors which weren't all that apparent in your original observation range kick in and overshadow the numbers.


This analogy is just completely incorrect. Newtonian physics fails because the actual physics you thought you understood is different than you thought. Relativistic physics also works at sub-relativistic speeds, it's just unnecessary work in most cases. In this case, it's not the greenhouse effect physics that somehow changes when the temperature changes from 293 K to 295 K. We understand basic thermodynamics and QM too well to believe that something unexpected is going to happen to the way carbon dioxide molecules absorb light when the Earth's atmosphere is two degrees warmer. Again, the problem is with other things that happen in response to the warming. You may find it to be an irrelevant difference, but it's not an irrelevant difference. It is huge, because you're using it to sneakily suggest that we don't understand greenhouse effect physics when in fact we completely understand it. What we don't fully understand is cloud physics. Just because both of these things end up changing the temperature of the Earth doesn't mean that you get to lump it all in one place and say "well we just don't really understand the physics." We do understand very well some parts of it, and not quite as much some other parts of it. The point here is that the part we do know very well suggests very bad things for us, and the only way out is to blindly hope that the part we don't know well will luck out in our favor. It's just a silly thing to hope for when people's livelihoods and homelands are on the line. It's even sillier when the most modern calculations of these things don't save us from the warming.

Now that actually made several assumptions but it's besides the point. H2O can at times keep heat in and at times prevent heat from coming in. And that doesn't count the effect plants have on the H2O and the CO2 levels in the atmosphere (plants need both of these two elements).


Yes, well fortunately we have smart people out there who try to be a little more precise than "some times this happens, and some times this other thing happens." And almost all of them are telling us that the net effect does not come close to cancelling out the warming. (In fact, the latest IPCC reports point out that there's a possibility the net cloud feedback on our system is positive and not negative. This is because clouds at high altitude tend to trap more heat than they reflect, and it's likely that global warming will tend to trade low-lying clouds for high-lying clouds.) But it didn't take a genius to figure this out. Why? Because the Earth is warmer than it would be without CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere. Warm enough for life to thrive. That gives us a pretty good hint that usually the net effect is to warm the planet, not cool it.

So every single thing we do know points toward a large warming coming in the following decades. The only bastion for "skeptics" to hold on to is that maybe the entire scientific community missed something big and the whole thing will just end up being no big deal. This is not particularly appealing to me.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby BigBallinStalin on Thu Sep 25, 2014 5:19 pm

Mets, I lost that link about the benefits and costs of global warming--given different projections. If you have it handy, could you please repost it?
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby Metsfanmax on Thu Sep 25, 2014 5:31 pm

Not sure which one I gave you before. Here is the relevant intro from the 2007 IPCC report detailing their overview of the social cost of carbon. The 2014 report I don't think has published their updates to the cost-benefit analysis. Let me know based on the IPCC page if you want more links, I can get you the Stern, Nordhaus, etc. reports they mention.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby BigBallinStalin on Thu Sep 25, 2014 6:10 pm

Metsfanmax wrote:Not sure which one I gave you before. Here is the relevant intro from the 2007 IPCC report detailing their overview of the social cost of carbon. The 2014 report I don't think has published their updates to the cost-benefit analysis. Let me know based on the IPCC page if you want more links, I can get you the Stern, Nordhaus, etc. reports they mention.


Thanks. I should be able to find the referenced reports pretty easily too.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby BigBallinStalin on Thu Sep 25, 2014 6:33 pm

Metsfanmax wrote:
calling for widespread economic change and in some extreme cases suggesting we whittle the population down to 50,000,000.


I don't like that either. I'm not a hippie. I like capitalism. I like having air conditioners and the internet. I think that we can actually solve climate change without hurting the economy at all, since climate change is a negative externality -- that is, a market inefficiency -- and correcting the market failure through a simple and transparent carbon pricing mechanism will actually likely improve our economy according to a number of sources.


There's two big problems with standard Pigouvian welfare economics

(1) Its methodology can be used to equally justify pro-market or anti-market policies on the same issue, so this kind of economic 'science' is at the whim of the economists' ideology.

(2) There's also the decades-old critique of Pigouvian economics by James M. Buchanan and Ronald Coase (both are Nobel Laureates):

Either Pigouvian solutions are redundant because private actors would negotiate away the conflicts (in the case of zero transaction costs), or the Pigouvian solution is nonoperational (in the case of positive transaction costs, including information costs). If private actors are unable to glean the cost and benefits and bring them into alignment, then how are government officials to do so? Rather than measure that which we cannot reasonably assume we can measure, both Coase and Buchanan advocate an opportunity cost approach to public economics. The comparative institutional analysis that such an approach leads to would, as Coase put it, 'start our analysis with a situation approximating that which actually exists, to examine the effects of a proposed policy change and to attempt to decide whether the new situation would be, in total, better or worse than the original one.'


    from Boettke's Living Economics, which partly summarizes Buchanan's Cost and Choice and Coase's "The Problem of Social Cost" and The Firm, the Market, and the Law.

In short, Pigouvian welfare economics is trapped between being either redundant or nonoperational. Still, its adherents for decades have hardly addressed the logical problems of their 'science'. After all, the state still needs its 'solutions'. This is a huge problem for economics because many economists promise that which they cannot provide. People then get frustrated at economics, which is improperly being used, but most don't realize this (and they're more than happy to rely on the economic science when it conforms to their worldview).

    Recall Easterly's complaint about the 'tyranny of experts'. It's a global problem which has long been out of hand.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby Metsfanmax on Thu Sep 25, 2014 6:58 pm

BigBallinStalin wrote:There's two big problems with standard Pigouvian welfare economics

(1) Its methodology can be used to equally justify pro-market or anti-market policies on the same issue, so this kind of economic 'science' is at the whim of the economists' ideology.


What do you mean by the distinction between pro-market and anti-market policies? My thinking about it has been that this is about correcting for an externality. That didn't have to be pro-market; it could be that there are unintended consequences that make the resultant policy damaging to the economy on balance. My point was only that some people who have run the numbers predict that in this particular case the net effect on the US economy is positive because of the transition away from fossil fuels. But that only happens if the revenues are returned. So understand that I'm not coming at this from a pro-market or anti-market perspective. I'm merely arguing that one can attribute the problem of global warming to an externality that has not yet been internalized, which is true regardless of the optimal solution to that problem.

(Are you referring to the arguments that are made for using Pigouvian taxation for subsidy purposes?)

(2) There's also the decades-old critique of Pigouvian economics by James M. Buchanan and Ronald Coase (both are Nobel Laureates):

Either Pigouvian solutions are redundant because private actors would negotiate away the conflicts (in the case of zero transaction costs), or the Pigouvian solution is nonoperational (in the case of positive transaction costs, including information costs). If private actors are unable to glean the cost and benefits and bring them into alignment, then how are government officials to do so? Rather than measure that which we cannot reasonably assume we can measure, both Coase and Buchanan advocate an opportunity cost approach to public economics. The comparative institutional analysis that such an approach leads to would, as Coase put it, 'start our analysis with a situation approximating that which actually exists, to examine the effects of a proposed policy change and to attempt to decide whether the new situation would be, in total, better or worse than the original one.'


    from Boettke's Living Economics, which partly summarizes Buchanan's Cost and Choice and Coase's "The Problem of Social Cost" and The Firm, the Market, and the Law.

In short, Pigouvian welfare economics is trapped between being either redundant or nonoperational.


To me, the strongest part of this critique is essentially the argument that it is difficult for the policymaker to know the true external cost that one would need to correct for. However, what they are saying does not seem obvious to me, in particular "if private actors are unable to glean the cost and benefits and bring them into alignment, then how are government officials to do so?" When it comes to this particular issue, perhaps part of the problem is that private actors on both sides of the issue have tacitly agreed to ignore the issue. The standard model that Buchanan and Coase must be considering is that the actor knows what their private cost is and what the social cost is, but the fact is that for large-scale environmental issues like global warming that is not a very good assumption. A large fraction of the public refuses to accept the reality of the situation, and many more accept the reality but likely underestimate how much global warming will affect Americans, both indirectly and directly. In such a situation I don't think any individual firm could attempt to match the private and social costs because there's a free rider problem where a company that is willing to sell at a lower price will get away with it due to all of the people who neglect the long-term concerns of global warming in their short-term decision making. So I think this is one case where one could make the argument that government officials do actually have more information on average than the individuals making the transactions. It's not like the simpler externalities that economists normally have to deal with, like noise pollution from a factory, etc. The social cost is borne among every person on the planet, but most people have no idea what the social cost really is or how much they should want to pay to avoid it because the impacts are decades down the line.

What do you think?

Still, its adherents for decades have hardly addressed the logical problems of their 'science'. After all, the state still needs its 'solutions'. This is a huge problem for economics because many economists promise that which they cannot provide. People then get frustrated at economics, which is improperly being used, but most don't realize this (and they're more than happy to rely on the economic science when it conforms to their worldview).


Pigouvian taxation: the worst solution to the problem except all of the others? When your practical alternatives are command-and-control regulation and subsidies, I'd at least go for the most transparent and predictable one.

Recall Easterly's complaint about the 'tyranny of experts'. It's a global problem which has long been out of hand.


It is valuable advice to consider but I know too much about physics to think the experts are wrong on the problem. The solution is admittedly another issue.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby BigBallinStalin on Fri Sep 26, 2014 8:14 am

Metsfanmax wrote:
BigBallinStalin wrote:There's two big problems with standard Pigouvian welfare economics

(1) Its methodology can be used to equally justify pro-market or anti-market policies on the same issue, so this kind of economic 'science' is at the whim of the economists' ideology.


What do you mean by the distinction between pro-market and anti-market policies? My thinking about it has been that this is about correcting for an externality. That didn't have to be pro-market; it could be that there are unintended consequences that make the resultant policy damaging to the economy on balance. My point was only that some people who have run the numbers predict that in this particular case the net effect on the US economy is positive because of the transition away from fossil fuels. But that only happens if the revenues are returned. So understand that I'm not coming at this from a pro-market or anti-market perspective. I'm merely arguing that one can attribute the problem of global warming to an externality that has not yet been internalized, which is true regardless of the optimal solution to that problem.

(Are you referring to the arguments that are made for using Pigouvian taxation for subsidy purposes?)


The Buchanan-Coase critique applies to both subsidy and taxation remedies provided by Pigovuian welfare economics (PWE), regardless of the economists' ideology (pro-market or anti-market). The anti-market types are the ones who constantly go on about market failures--according to their equilibrium models. The pro-market types are the ones who 'demonstrate' the superiority of markets with their equilibrium models. Think Keynesian and Neo-Keynesian v. the free market Chicago school (namely, M. Friedman's monetarism and Lucas's New Classical economics).

I agree that the production of carbon emissions is a negative externality issue. I'm sure Coase and Buchanan would agree to; however, the framework of PWE is misleading, for reasons I'll explain in the following responses:

Metsfanmax wrote:
(2) There's also the decades-old critique of Pigouvian economics by James M. Buchanan and Ronald Coase (both are Nobel Laureates):

Either Pigouvian solutions are redundant because private actors would negotiate away the conflicts (in the case of zero transaction costs), or the Pigouvian solution is nonoperational (in the case of positive transaction costs, including information costs). If private actors are unable to glean the cost and benefits and bring them into alignment, then how are government officials to do so? Rather than measure that which we cannot reasonably assume we can measure, both Coase and Buchanan advocate an opportunity cost approach to public economics. The comparative institutional analysis that such an approach leads to would, as Coase put it, 'start our analysis with a situation approximating that which actually exists, to examine the effects of a proposed policy change and to attempt to decide whether the new situation would be, in total, better or worse than the original one.'


    from Boettke's Living Economics, which partly summarizes Buchanan's Cost and Choice and Coase's "The Problem of Social Cost" and The Firm, the Market, and the Law.

In short, Pigouvian welfare economics is trapped between being either redundant or nonoperational.


To me, the strongest part of this critique is essentially the argument that it is difficult for the policymaker to know the true external cost that one would need to correct for. However, what they are saying does not seem obvious to me, in particular "if private actors are unable to glean the cost and benefits and bring them into alignment, then how are government officials to do so?" When it comes to this particular issue, perhaps part of the problem is that private actors on both sides of the issue have tacitly agreed to ignore the issue.

The standard model that Buchanan and Coase must be considering is that the actor knows what their private cost is and what the social cost is, but the fact is that for large-scale environmental issues like global warming that is not a very good assumption. A large fraction of the public refuses to accept the reality of the situation, and many more accept the reality but likely underestimate how much global warming will affect Americans, both indirectly and directly.

In such a situation I don't think any individual firm could attempt to match the private and social costs because there's a free rider problem where a company that is willing to sell at a lower price will get away with it due to all of the people who neglect the long-term concerns of global warming in their short-term decision making. So I think this is one case where one could make the argument that government officials do actually have more information on average than the individuals making the transactions. It's not like the simpler externalities that economists normally have to deal with, like noise pollution from a factory, etc. The social cost is borne among every person on the planet, but most people have no idea what the social cost really is or how much they should want to pay to avoid it because the impacts are decades down the line.

What do you think?


RE: the first and second paragraphs, it's not that it's difficult; it's rather the case that government has hardly any idea. Individuals know to some degree, after trial-and-error, their specific marginal benefit and marginal cost curves for various activities (e.g. grocery shopping). The problem with PWE is that it postulates a representative individual, whose utility curve + constraint represents the MB and MC curves of all society. (This is impossible to know; it's simply assumed, so the knowledge problem is assumed away by the economist). The Pigouvian economist can simply imagine huge negative and huge positive externalities which do not exist in reality (e.g. education). Furthermore, individuals don't know the long-term costs of pollution, so there's no way to graph that social MB and MC curves in order to determine the magnitude of the negative externality.

Pigouvian solutions are redundant in the zero TC cost world if people can simply pay polluters to reduce pollution (or if polluters would have to pay others for the right to pollute--on the margin). Without that agreement, there'd be no market prices on marginal amounts of pollution, so we'd get inefficient amounts of pollution (hence an externality). T

The Pigouvian solution is nonoperational if governments don't know what people don't know (i.e. the MB and MC of varying amounts of pollution in various places across time. The marginal cost is not the global warming information and its uncertain range of consequences, but rather ). PWE simply assumes that it does know--through the guise of its cute models. The transaction costs are too high for people to come to some agreement on (a) who's rights are being violated (e.g. who owns the river? No one, if it's owned by the government), and (b) monitoring costs. For example, if you're my neighbor, and you like to place music real loud at midnight, that's a negative externality. If possible, we could engage in Coasian bargaining where I pay you to limit the noise to only weekends, or you'd pay me for the right to do so (depending on how the court rules). Hopefully, the inefficiency is reduced to zero since the monetary payment reduces the inefficient level of noise pollution.


RE: the third paragraph, if governments actually did have that information, then all they'd have to do is make it available, and to let the courts figure it out (in a zero or low TC world). To some degree, firms are already addressing the issue by 'going green', and many consumers are demanding products which result in lower carbon footprints. (Then, government kinda fucks this up by subsidizing 'green' things like hybrid cars--even though it has "the information"). That's an incentive issue of government, which is beyond the Buchanan-Coase critique. (That's in the realm of Demsetz's famous complaint about nirvana fallacy).

Free-riding is kinda the issue, but it's really about people's inability to pay others to pollute less (cuz high transaction costs--they can't negotiate away the inefficient level of pollution). Government has no idea what the optimal price is for optimal pollution because there's vague or no market prices on pollution (since there's no private property rights over air and most water). Also, government can only affect emissions within its own country, so the Pigouvian externality can overstate the case by incorporating emissions of other countries. The problem with PWE is that even with the climate change information, it still can't reveal what the MC and MB curves are.

Hence:
"The comparative institutional analysis that such an approach leads to would, as Coase put it, 'start our analysis with a situation approximating that which actually exists, to examine the effects of a proposed policy change and to attempt to decide whether the new situation would be, in total, better or worse than the original one.'"

So, if a Pigouvian tax is proposed, you'd have to consider its impact on the rules of the game within the US economy and its consequences. If a carbon credit system is imposed, same thing. When considering a policy, you'd want to estimate the opportunity cost (e.g. if the Pigouvian tax is too high, much wealth is destroyed, and it could've been better had there been no tax. How so? The carbon credit system could've been more efficient, or the destruction in wealth eliminates more efficient ways of production which would have reduced carbon emissions better than the Pigouvian tax). Or, local governments can build bigger levees (another opportunity cost of Pigouvian taxation).

The policymaker's life becomes much more difficult with the critique, but in reality their life is 'simpler' because bureaucrats tend not to think like Buchanan and Coase. Ignore the critique and 'solutions' abound; consider alternatives and the reality of the political process largely goes unexamined. (it's not like bureaucrats eat the costs of their own mistakes--e.g. setting ridiculously high safety standards to reduce risks that are already almost zero. It's wasteful; the opportunity cost is greater than the benefit).

In short, Coase and Buchanan are requesting a huge shift in the way policymakers and economists analyze real world issues.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby BigBallinStalin on Fri Sep 26, 2014 8:21 am

Metsfanmax wrote:
Still, its adherents for decades have hardly addressed the logical problems of their 'science'. After all, the state still needs its 'solutions'. This is a huge problem for economics because many economists promise that which they cannot provide. People then get frustrated at economics, which is improperly being used, but most don't realize this (and they're more than happy to rely on the economic science when it conforms to their worldview).


Pigouvian taxation: the worst solution to the problem except all of the others? When your practical alternatives are command-and-control regulation and subsidies, I'd at least go for the most transparent and predictable one.

Recall Easterly's complaint about the 'tyranny of experts'. It's a global problem which has long been out of hand.


It is valuable advice to consider but I know too much about physics to think the experts are wrong on the problem. The solution is admittedly another issue.


It's not the physicists; it's the other experts--economists and other bureaucrats as the policymakers.

Pigouvian taxation simply isn't the best solution of the worst solutions. It's not like others have all been tried; therefore, we know 'democracy'/policy X is the best. There's thinking on the margin (i.e. what's the optimal tax rate), and thinking about the opportunity cost (i.e. what policies or entire institutional arrangements can better handle the problem?--e.g. instead of implementing policy A, government could revamp).

But this post and much of the bottom half of the previous post have gone beyond the Buchanan-Coase technique. They're simply attacking the logical foundations of PWE, which many previously thought were gosh darn correct. They want to reduce economists' confidence in solving problems and to encourage them to address issues through historical institutional analysis (Coase) or at the constitutional/institutional arrangement level (Buchanan--in other words, government should be in the business of providing a fertile ground from which better solutions emerge, rather than relying on government to plan its way out of millions of paper bags).

They believe better solutions on firmer logical grounds lie beyond PWE. The problem is that many economists can't think strictly beyond their equilibrium models, so when you have that kind of thinking for almost a century, many possibilities will be overlooked (thus the problem with these kinds of experts).
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby tzor on Fri Sep 26, 2014 10:09 am

Another Study Finds That Climate Models Are ‘Over-Sensitive’ To CO2 Increases
A new report published in the journal Climate Dynamics corroborates previous studies showing that the climate will warm less from carbon dioxide emissions than claimed by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report found that doubling carbon dioxide concentrations would only cause 1.64 degrees Celsius of warming in the long term.

“Our results, which use data from this year’s IPCC fifth assessment report, are in line with those of several recent studies based on observed centennial warming and strongly suggest complex global climate models used for warming projections are oversensitive to carbon dioxide concentrations,” said the report’s co-author, Nic Lewis, an independent climate scientist.


The opening Bid was 2-3 ...
I hear 1.64
Do I hear a 1.5?
Let the bidding continue
It's only going to go down from here!
Behold the power of SCIENCE!
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby Metsfanmax on Fri Sep 26, 2014 10:46 am

Holy shit, the Daily Caller said we're wrong on climate change? Let's pack up our bags and go home, boys. I mean, who can argue with

Nic Lewis, an independent climate scientist


Clearly Nic Lewis (a former finance guy with a degree in mathematics) is right where thousands of other climate researchers are wrong. Yes, Nicholas Lewis and Judith Curry's paper is right and the thousands of others must be wrong, because it's always easier to plug your ears and deny that something bad is happening as long as you can find something -- anything -- to verify that view.

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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby BigBallinStalin on Fri Sep 26, 2014 11:14 am

Here's another way to look at Pigouvian taxation in regard to a range of environmental consequences:

The government is most likely not going to tax all American producers of pollution (e.g. drivers of cars). It's also not going to tax all businesses that create pollution (because of special exemptions through rent-seeking. ACA had many examples of this). So, at this level, it's already lost a good chunk of the necessary shift toward the "socially beneficial" optimum.

Furthermore, the government will spend that revenue on other projects of the state, which then increase the demand for goods through production that results in more pollution. A small fraction of such expenditures will go to solar technology and other R&D, but it'll be a very small amount. The large remainder goes to bureaucrats, producers, and consumers. [Given this nonsense, how many adherents of PWE say, "wait, instead of Pigouvian taxation, let's just subsidize 'green' tech, and let the market handle it"?]

So, what happened? We've negligibly shifted from the 'bad' outcome to a slightly 'better' outcome. In my opinion, it's worse because the government simply expanded in scale and scope, which exacerbates more problems including environmental issues. A clear example is government spending more tax revenues on more wars, which directly cause pollution and which prevent others from using markets and good governance to reach a level of better environmental care. (Note that environmentally friendly production is a luxury good which poorer countries can hardly afford).

This very brief analysis, which is omitting too much, reflects what Coase and Buchanan want from policymakers. However, this kind of analysis will not come from sticking strictly to Pigouvian welfare economics because in PWE institutions do not exist and because the political process is viewed as a homogenous blob of omnibenevolence, omnicompetence, and omniscience. PWE is crap economics.

    Also, note how I framed the environmental issue with PWE: pollution is a negative externality; therefore, tax it. I omitted how much is to be taxed and have failed to account for current taxes (e.g. taxes on gasoline). This PWE policy has been already implemented to a certain degree, but I wonder if such effects have already been incorporating into the current PWE-esque analyses and policy recommendations (imagine calculating such entanglement).
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby Metsfanmax on Sat Sep 27, 2014 7:06 pm

BigBallinStalin wrote:RE: the first and second paragraphs, it's not that it's difficult; it's rather the case that government has hardly any idea. Individuals know to some degree, after trial-and-error, their specific marginal benefit and marginal cost curves for various activities (e.g. grocery shopping). The problem with PWE is that it postulates a representative individual, whose utility curve + constraint represents the MB and MC curves of all society. (This is impossible to know; it's simply assumed, so the knowledge problem is assumed away by the economist).


It doesn't seem impossible to know in principle. It's true that the government can't know the utility curves of every individual, but it seems more straightforward to ask the question of what the representative individual's utility curve is. This seems doable because when you have a large enough number of people, you can average over all of the quirks that any individual represents. If you can estimate the monetary damage suffered to the society, then you can attribute the cost of that damage equally to everyone who contributes, in proportion to the amount that they contribute, since a molecule of CO2 doesn't care where it came from. So I don't believe that this is a problem with the framework but rather a problem of subjective assessment of total costs. If you think of examples like noise pollution, it's true that it's hard to objectively state what even the average cost to society is. But that's not an indictment of the framework of attempting to internalize externalities, so much as saying that we should only apply the framework when we're confident that we can provide some meaningful estimate of the representative individual's utility curve.

The Pigouvian economist can simply imagine huge negative and huge positive externalities which do not exist in reality (e.g. education). Furthermore, individuals don't know the long-term costs of pollution, so there's no way to graph that social MB and MC curves in order to determine the magnitude of the negative externality.


Individuals may not know, but policymakers do have a better idea in this case. Again, the most compelling criticism here is that the policymaker may be way off due to unintended consequences, but that doesn't mean that policymakers can't be more knowledgeable than individuals. They absolutely can be in cases like this. The same is true for education. Individuals won't know for decades after they receive the education whether it was useful to them, so expecting them to be able to assess the value of education to themselves seems to be an absurd approach.

Pigouvian solutions are redundant in the zero TC cost world if people can simply pay polluters to reduce pollution (or if polluters would have to pay others for the right to pollute--on the margin). Without that agreement, there'd be no market prices on marginal amounts of pollution, so we'd get inefficient amounts of pollution (hence an externality).


That's only true if people are directly feeling the effects of the pollution and their desire to rid themselves of the pollution is proportional to its negative effect on their lives. When it comes to noise pollution or traffic, sure, I trust an individual to be able to confidently assess the relevant utility. When it comes to acid rain or global warming or smog or any global issue where people cannot assess the cause of the problem, how can we expect them to know what to do? They don't even know who the polluters are, so how can they adjust their purchasing decisions to decrease the amount of acid rain?

The Pigouvian solution is nonoperational if governments don't know what people don't know (i.e. the MB and MC of varying amounts of pollution in various places across time. The marginal cost is not the global warming information and its uncertain range of consequences, but rather ). PWE simply assumes that it does know--through the guise of its cute models. The transaction costs are too high for people to come to some agreement on (a) who's rights are being violated (e.g. who owns the river? No one, if it's owned by the government), and (b) monitoring costs. For example, if you're my neighbor, and you like to place music real loud at midnight, that's a negative externality. If possible, we could engage in Coasian bargaining where I pay you to limit the noise to only weekends, or you'd pay me for the right to do so (depending on how the court rules). Hopefully, the inefficiency is reduced to zero since the monetary payment reduces the inefficient level of noise pollution.


Yeah, that's fine. Again, I would argue that the Coase solution doesn't apply when people don't even really know what impacts they're purchasing. However, I'm also willing to concede that I don't really think about this policy in Pigouvian terms. There is an externality and we are trying to put a price on carbon to reduce that externality, but I freely admit that the actual price needed to do so may have little correlation with the true social cost, given how hard it is to estimate. As a result, I believe that we should just put a high enough price on carbon to get the transition done, rather than worry too much about whether we're truly representing the external costs appropriately. It ends up sounding a lot like Pigouvian economics, but as Coase is pointing out, let's just talk about whether it's a good idea rather than whether the framework itself holds up.

RE: the third paragraph, if governments actually did have that information, then all they'd have to do is make it available,


They have, cf. the IPCC reports

and to let the courts figure it out (in a zero or low TC world).


What court do you know of that would try to fine polluters for global warming? Besides, I don't even think that's the issue. It's not the fault of polluters that global warming is happening, one could equally assess the problem to the people who demand fossil fuels, and then what do we do?

To some degree, firms are already addressing the issue by 'going green', and many consumers are demanding products which result in lower carbon footprints.


Yes, but the degree is not large enough to solve the magnitude of the problem. This is probably largely because 1) the number of people who actually care about "going green" is less than half of the population and 2) of those who do care about it, not many can afford to make meaningful lifestyle changes on their own. Buying solar panels, etc. is expensive.

So, if a Pigouvian tax is proposed, you'd have to consider its impact on the rules of the game within the US economy and its consequences. If a carbon credit system is imposed, same thing. When considering a policy, you'd want to estimate the opportunity cost (e.g. if the Pigouvian tax is too high, much wealth is destroyed, and it could've been better had there been no tax. How so? The carbon credit system could've been more efficient, or the destruction in wealth eliminates more efficient ways of production which would have reduced carbon emissions better than the Pigouvian tax). Or, local governments can build bigger levees (another opportunity cost of Pigouvian taxation).


Sure, but it's not like this type of analysis has remained unfulfilled. Plenty of people have taken a stab at estimating what the most effective policy would be in terms of the US economy, and almost all agree that the straight up pricing mechanism is superior to carbon credits or command-and-control. I think the strongest argument is that the carbon tax is least susceptible to the market trying to shuffle the price away; if the price of CO2 is $50 per ton then there's nothing a corporation can do to avoid the fee if they produce a ton of CO2. That's why most people are deeply skeptical of cap-and-trade mechanisms -- all they do is demonstrate how good the market can be at minimizing the cost of the carbon permits (cf. Europe), which is the exact opposite of the behavior we want.
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Re: Atheistic morality

Postby Neoteny on Sat Sep 27, 2014 8:23 pm

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Napoleon Ier wrote:You people need to grow up to be honest.
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