Reply To: Cap and Trade

[HermannH]

Brian H wrote:
*Employees are not involved/the issue. There is no “IPCC research center” as such. These are people with day jobs that just happen to be fat and happy because of AGW alarmism, who submit papers for massaging and editing by the IPCC (WHICH IS A POLITICAL AGENCY of the UN). They do, I suppose, get paid for participation in the IPCC charade, but it’s the long-term economic and political benefits that are “drivers”–plus professional prestige and clout.
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BTW, the most rabid of the AGW activists are demanding 80% reductions in CO2 production by 2050. Without FF, that would take us back to living standards from the 1800s, and probably also population levels from then. Which they’re quite OK with.

Brian – I am not going to try to convince you that AGW is real or that too much CO2 in the air and particualrly the oceans can be harmful for a large number of organisms. Nothing short of a Damascus Road Conversion will change your mind. But please reflect on this:

You seem to believe that more than 90% of all climate scientists fall in one of three categories:
A) Either they know that AGW is a hoax and they are milking it for all it’s worth.
B) or they are fools and have no clue what they are doing.
C) or they know that AGW is a hoax, but they are simply to scared to tell the truth; another version of A), really.

No doubt there are some climate scientists that enjoy their fame and the money and job security since GW has become a hot topic; who would not. No doubt there are some individuals that perform sub-par research; every group has a bottom 10%. But accusing 90% of either being fools or willingly compromising their research is a bit of a stretch. Even politicians and lawyers show more integrity than that. People usually don’t become climate scientists because they are lured by money or fame or power.

About the prestige and clout issue: I happen to believe that multinational oil companies and OPEC countries have a bit more economic and political clout than a bunch of windmill and solar cell producers. I wouldn’t be surprised if the net profits of the first group are larger than the total revenue of the second group.

At this time no one can declare with absolute certainty that AGW is a fact but no one can declare that it is a hoax either. If I was a gambler it would put the likelihood of it being real at least at 50% and the likelihood of some kind of worst-case scenario (Greenland melting completely within the next couple of hundred years, ocean acidification killing most corral reefs and a lot of marine life that depends on them, etc.) would be at least 5%. This is assuming that nothing significant is done to stop the growth in CO2 emissions let alone reducing them from current levels. All of the worst-case scenarios also result in large-scale human suffering and the economic cost would be in the trillions.

I don’t know about you, but I pay almost $1000 a year for house insurance alone. I never had a claim in 20 years, so the odds of something really bad happening are less that 5% in a year. Yet I still keep the insurance because the peace of mind of knowing that some disastrous event won’t wipe me out is worth it. And so it is with all insurance, a multi-multi-billion dollar industry: we pay dearly to mitigate the effects of some unlikely but potentially disastrous events. We even have insurance for events that are so remote we won’t even live to collect the money, it’s called life insurance.

So what is wrong with paying something upfront to reduce the probability of a GW catastrophe? Or are you so sure that you are 100% right and the vast majority of scientists that study climate professionally are wrong?

I fully agree with you that reducing CO2 emissions will be very painful for everyone. I also share your aversion to Cap and Trade, it is too complicated and therefore open to too much manipulation; a slowly phased in carbon tax would be much better. Unfortunately any proposal with the word ‘tax’ in it is doomed from the start.

In the end the question is: do we take our chances and delay action and risk the possibility that 10 to 30 years down the road we find out that GW is real after all? At that point we may have set something in motion that cannot be stopped and our children or grandchildren may also end up with living standards of the 1800’s with population densities to match. That is why I am interested in FF. If it worked it would provide a pain-free way to reduce human CO2 emissions; everybody would be a winner (well except oil and coal companies).