If there is uncertainty in climate science, as most climate change deniers like yourself claim, then it is possible that the climate situation could be better than, about the same as, or worse than what expert consensus argues it is. If each is equally possible, then there is a 66.67% chance the situation is what experts claim or worse. If one thinks that the experts are better than random guessing about climate and chances are that they are about right is 75%, then there is a 87.5% chance the situation is what experts claim or worse. -- paraphrasing Germaine, locking horns in a futile attempt to communicate rationally with climate science deniers, ~2015
Germaine communicating rationally with Republicans
and other climate science deniers
Epiphany: Since we're going to burn carbon fuels, why not
push harder to incentivize alternatives and just hope it's not too late?
But what to do? → Put up solar panels, buy an electric car
and install a little nuclear reactor in the back yard ☢️
Recent articles are coming out arguing that due to fear of backlash by the radical right, climate science experts have soft-pedaled their estimates of damage from climate change. Our climate situation is worse than previous estimates. Now, some economists are starting to wake up to what the climate really is in real reality, instead of what it is in the faux reality dreams of rigid laissez-fair capitalists. That is forcing some to do a rethink about climate and economic damage. The New York Times writes:
Pace of Climate Change Sends Economists Back to Drawing Board
They underestimated the impact of global warming, and their preferred policy solution [a carbon tax] floundered in the United States.Economists have been examining the impact of climate change for almost as long as it’s been known to science.
In the 1970s, the Yale economist William Nordhaus began constructing a model meant to gauge the effect of warming on economic growth. The work, first published in 1992, gave rise to a field of scholarship assessing the cost to society of each ton of emitted carbon offset by the benefits of cheap power — and thus how much it was worth paying to avert it.
Dr. Nordhaus became a leading voice for a nationwide carbon tax that would discourage the use of fossil fuels and propel a transition toward more sustainable forms of energy. It remained the preferred choice of economists and business interests for decades. And in 2018, Dr. Nordhaus was honored with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
But as President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act with its $392 billion in climate-related subsidies, one thing became very clear: The nation’s biggest initiative to address climate change is built on a different foundation from the one Dr. Nordhaus proposed.
Rather than imposing a tax, the legislation offers tax credits, loans and grants — technology-specific carrots that have historically been seen as less efficient than the stick of penalizing carbon emissions more broadly.
Carbon taxes and emissions trading systems have been instituted in many places, such as Denmark and California. But a federal measure in the United States, setting a cap on carbon emissions and letting companies trade their allotments, failed in 2010.
At the same time, Dr. Nordhaus’s model was drawing criticism for underestimating the havoc that climate change would wreak. Like other models, it has been revised several times, but it still relies on broad assumptions and places less value on harm to future generations than it places on harm to those today. It also doesn’t fully incorporate the risk of less likely but substantially worse trajectories of warming.
Dr. Nordhaus dismissed the criticisms. “They are all subjective and based on selective interpretation of science and economics,” he wrote in an email. “Some people hold these views, as would be expected in any controversial subject, but many others do not.”The outcome reflects a larger trend in public policy, one that is prompting economists to ponder why the profession was so focused on a solution that ultimately went nowhere in Congress — and how economists could be more useful as the damage from extreme weather mounts.“You’re saying, ‘Things are going to cost more, but we aren’t going to give you help to live with that transition,’” said Rhiana Gunn-Wright, director of climate policy at the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute and an architect of the Green New Deal. “Gas prices can go up, but the fact is, most people are locked into how much they have to travel each day.”
At the same time, the cost of technologies like solar panels and batteries for electric vehicles — in part because of huge investments by the Chinese government — was dropping within the range that would allow them to be deployed at scale.
For Ryan Kellogg, an energy economist who worked as an analyst for the oil giant BP before getting his Ph.D., that was a key realization. Leaving an economics department for the public policy school at the University of Chicago, and working with an interdisciplinary consortium including climate scientists, impressed on him two things: that fossil fuels needed to be phased out much faster than previously thought, and that it could be done at lower cost.
“We all cringe [because we're all laissez-faire capitalists],” said James H. Stock, an economist who serves as vice provost for climate and sustainability at Harvard University. But all things considered, he said, a $7,500 tax credit and reliable charging network might be as powerful as high gas prices in getting someone to buy an electric vehicle.
In that sense, subsidies are a variant of pricing policy: They effectively raise the cost of fossil fuels relative to renewable alternatives. Only recently did the supply of those alternatives reach the point where a tax credit would make the difference, on a large scale, between buying an electric vehicle or not.
“Economists could be faulted for not shifting quickly enough as these prices have fallen so surprisingly,” Dr. Stock said. “My criticism wouldn’t be ‘Why did you start with a carbon tax?’ but ‘Why didn’t we embrace the investment strategy five years ago?’”
Some economists are rethinking cost-benefit. They are reluctantly concluding something actually politically doable actually needs to be done, even if it does mean, gasp!!, some government intervention and policy action. The Republican Party and carbon energy sector (Exxon-Mobile, Shell, etc.) have successfully denied climate change and blocked a carbon tax for decades because they both hate government and taxes. The GOP is clear that the climate change threat is that it suggests a need for government intervention, not that we need to cut back on burning carbon fuels. According to GOP sacred gospel, all government intervention must be blocked at all costs, because all government is all bad all the time (except of course when it protects the elites and their power and wealth).
Government, just like Democrats and liberalism, are evil atheistic socialists and pro-pedophilia. The only people who do not know this are Democrats, liberals, atheists and pedophiles.
Q: Will the awakening of some economists make any difference in the Republic Party's all out opposition to trying to do anything serious about trying to combat climate change, while being dead serious about defending carbon fuel pollution business as usual?
