Adjusting to global warming

No, they are just waving about the possibility of that “massive compensatory tranfer”, in order to dismiss the costs of stopping the warming, so that in the end nothing happens.
Cynical and disgusting.
Note that Lomborg’s economist friends are the kind of people that continue to state that “free trade” is purely good for poor countries.

It contains the great line:
“But in income-adjusted terms, are Indian cities overcrowded at all?”
Is this a reference to the American obesity problem?

The costs will be incurred by the poor in places like India who will end up with their homes and workplaces under water, and the benefits have been and will be reaped by the already rich in the first world who carry on driving their SUVs

‘scuse me! SUVs aren’t all that common outside of North America: since when did it become “the west”?

“If the economist and policy-wonks who parrot the Lomborg line are proposing a massive compensatory transfer from the winners to the losers then I haven’t heard of it.”

Wouldn’t that sort of planning be a bit…..premature? Or did the flooding of cities already occur while I was sleeping?

dsquared,

Given that the water would be at my ankles for most of my life, I’d probably prefer increased wealth to pay off the banker who loaned me the money to move inland. Because with Kyoto or without Kyoto, the water is going to keep rising. And I’d prefer it to rise a little faster and have the ability to pay for the consequences, than to rise margianlly slower and be starving to boot.

In 50 years when this is a real issue, most effected countries will be wealthy enough for it to not really matter. And those that aren’t wealthy enough, will be exposed to a much larger pool of wealth for those in need.

I think Lomborg’s original assertion was that Kyoto will, at best, only delay the inevitable rise in sea levels by a few years. This leads to the reasonable question, “Is it worthwhile to go to all this expense for such a small return?”. Lomborg decided that the answer was “No”.
If there was a feasible method of enforcing a timely compensatory transfer, then perhaps we should abandon Kyoto and proceed along those lines. Jet misses the point, though, such a transfer would have to be agreed from the outset (i.e. now) as the effects of rising sea levels would be progressively experienced by the “losers” over the next 100 years and beyond. This transfer is really just emissions trading, which is part of Kyoto anyway, so we’re almost back where we started. And if the deal wasn’t agreed up front and binding to all parties, what would there be to stop countries weaselling out of it once the time came to cough up? I think it’s a bit naive to expect the additional wealth generated (if any) to magically transfer itself to all the injured parties in such a scenario.
All this may be irrelevant as I don’t agree with Jet that Kyoto will necessarily generate extra recessions for signatories. There are ways of reducing national emissions without losing economic competitiveness. Swap all SUVs for Smartcars, for example. Or start cycling. There may be an initial hit while we invest in new technologies or nuclear plants, for example, but the efficiency gains might eventually offset the investment. I’m not an economist, though, so I’m only speculating.
Lomborg raised an interesting point but unfortunately he has allowed himself to become a poster boy for anti-Kyoto parties with vested interests in maintaining high fossil fuel usage and I think his credibility is now very questionable.

Paul raises an interesting question here; how can it possibly be the case that it would destroy the world economy for 100 years if Americans started buying European-style small diesel hatchbacks instead of the cars they currently favour? I seem to remember (possible bullshit alert) that this simple change would achieve a significant proportion of the USA’s Kyoto commitments.

Further to dsquared’s point, as I understand it one big reason that fuel-inefficient cars are so popular in the US are that US fuel taxes are nowhere near European levels. And I see little prospect of that changing give the disproportionate Senate representation low-population-density, and thus high-car-use, rural states. Of course, a modest fuel tax increase- presented, with good reason, as a measure necessary to enhance national security- might well have been acceptable in the crisis atmostphere of September 2001. But we’ll never know now…

How would a fuel tax have increased national security? The reason we are dependent on middle eastern oil is that it is the cheapest oil to produce. Imposing a fuel tax will cut crude oil consumption and subsequently the price, thereby INCREASING the percentage of Middle Eastern oil that we consume. Unless, of course, we only imposed an import tariff on oil from the Middle East, which while it would probably violate WTO standards, would more importantly be (correctly) percieved as a direct attack on the lifestyle of upper-middle-class Saudis. You know, the ones who flew planes into the World Trade Center.

Fuel taxes are also a) hideously regressive and b) unpopular EVERYWHERE, not just in large western states.

On Paul’s comment above:

I see no good reason to believe that those who gain from trading carbon emissions would be the same people who would get a compensatory transfer under a just scheme. Nor do I see any reason to believe that the amount paid from country X to country Y under an emissions trading regime would be anything like the amount payable under a scheme of just compensation.

I’d add that whether an enforceable system of compensatory payments is feasible is an entirely different question from whether a compensatory payment is owed in justice.

Lomborg’s point is that The Kyoto treaty will cause too much economic damage for the benefits and that there are more cost effective ways to help the third world. It is true that none of these cost effective ways to help the third world currently have any real chance being implemented.

Jet, how do you know that the cost of caps on CO2 would be more expensive than rising sea levels? It’s a very bold statement and not I think uncontested so I think it deserves a little fleshing out.

dsquared, on US automotove fuel consumption the situation is not just the unusually low direct taxes on fuel but tax breaks for SUVs. Firstly they are exempt from California’s fuel consumption rules which force manufacturers to achieve a minimum average mileage across their sales which effectively taxes large cars but because of the exemption not SUVs. Secondly it is easier to get an SUV made tax deductible than it is a car so USians are actually tax incentivised to use gas guzzlers. I believe but cannot cite supporting evidence to show that the US is the only major market where average fuel consumption per mile has been rising not falling. I don’t think having to drive a European car is a major loss of utility although it might entail a loss of US comparative advantage.

Finally there is an intermediate space between achieving a global reduction in CO2 emissions and doing nothing. Kyoto was written in its eventual form in no small part to make it possible for the US to sign. It didn’t and nor has it made real alternative prposals. By the time it does it may be too late to curb demand in China and India and the real genie will be out of the bottle.

“The costs will be incurred by the poor in places like India who will end up with their homes and workplaces under water”

But what is the net present value of these people? Does the whole population of, say, Bangladesh, earn enough in their lifetimes to make them worth the cost?

Seriously, I don’t follow the environmental arguments closely enough, but isn’t the warming risk to Bangladesh more from more frequent and intense monsoons washing people out to sea (which happens already) than from slowly rising water levels?

Chris Bertram wrote “If the economist and policy-wonks who parrot the Lomborg line are proposing a massive compensatory transfer from the winners to the losers then I haven’t heard of it.”

Hmmm, have you read anything by Lomborg on global warming? This is exactly what he is constantly proposing.

For example, see here:

“…we should not spend vast amounts of money to cut a tiny slice of the global temperature increase when this constitutes a poor use of resources and when we could probably use these funds far more effectively in the developing world. This connection between resource use on global warmingand aiding the Third World actually goes much deeper, because the developing world will experienceby far the most damage from global warming. Thus, when we spend resources to mitigate globalwarming we are in fact and to a large extent helping future inhabitants in the developing world.However, if we spend the same money directly in the Third World we would be helping present inhabitants in the developing world, and through them also their descendants. “

Jack,

The US issues that where not addressed where the equal inclussion of all countries (specificly China and India) and a full emission trading policy. China and India are not under the same restrictions as say Italy.

Jack — I think you’re right about the two parts to the animus against Lomborg. I think there’s another part to it too, which is that Lomborg violated the environmentalist creed, and That’s Not Done. Should we boo Lomborg, though, for the use that’s been made of his work? (Isn’t that a bit like boo’ing Giotto for all the lousy representational art that’s made use of his innovations?) Better to both dicker over the validity (or nonvalidity) of his analyses, and continue pressing for reasonable-but-positive action, no?

surely the key point here is the assumption of increasing returns. If calcutta is flooded and veryone moves to Bombay then the net effect is that India becomes better off – because one city of 30 million has higher output than 2 of 15 million. (On the other hand if they move to the countyrside or smaller cities then India is worse off.)

So the case for “compensation” is by no means guaranteed – Global Warming might make India better off.

we should not spend vast amounts of money to cut a tiny slice of the global temperature increase

That’s correct. On the contrary, we should be spending vast amounts of time, money and effort, to cut a huge slice off the global temperature increase.

This whole thing that economic growth (as measured by the notoriously dubious GDP or GNP) is always and everywhere good is a fallacy. We should be measuring quality of life indicators, to get a holistic idea of the benefits and costs of policies.

This arguement will go on until 100 years from now when everyone who lives near the ocean swims to work. The only part of the arguement that each side immediately accepts as valid is that competitive alternative energy sources would solve the problem.

We need billions more invested in solar research, that is the tree you should be barking up.

Chris makes my point that the damage to economies by Kyoto would far outweigh the cost done by global warming.

Pretty bold statement considering we don’t even know the extent of global climate change. But I guess I should defer to your judgement, since you know how the markets will react and how the global weather system will react (including the global ecosystem) and that we should just invest in solar.

Easier said than done.

And the uproar from lot of scientists re: Lomborg, is that he misrepresents a lot of science in his polemic.

If rising sea levels were all we had to worry about, it would be an easier decision to make.

Maybe my question wasn’t clear… Suppose Kyoto has limits b and c for countries B and C. Population of country B is stable but that of country C goes up. Do b and c change?

Of course, a modest fuel tax increase- presented, with good reason, as a measure necessary to enhance national security- might well have been acceptable in the crisis atmostphere of September 2001. But we’ll never know now…

The Bush administration used that atmosphere to get the policies they had been hoping for all along. I think they were wrong to do so. And I like to think that even if I’d agreed with those policies, I’d still find taking advantage of the crisis atmosphere wrong.

The fact is that we have no idea what climate change is going to bring. The sea rising is one of the more probable, and that’s the one we’re arguing about in costs and benefits here. But what I’m hearing from my friends who work in this area is that the effects will be extreme weather everywhere. “The storm of the century” will happen every five years, or “the longest drought since 1850” will happen every twenty years. Some rivers will flood; others will go dry. Maybe the gulf stream will shift, making Europe a heckuva a lot colder and less fertile.

The point is that we just don’t know what the effects will be, but that they’ll probably suck and will probably cost a lot of money to deal with.

At a basic level, a conversative should be very concerned about this: almost all scientists agree that human activities are having a real impact on global weather patterns, and the nature of that impact is difficult to predict. Shouldn’t a real conversative want to protect the future against possibly catastropic change?

The costs of Kyoto have come up a few times in this thread, so I should throw in my two cents.

A recent literature review (Barker and Ekins The Cost of Kyoto for the US Economy The Energy Journal 2004 page 53) of the costs for the US economy has found that the non-climate costs are “gradual and well designed… the net costs for the US of mitigation are likely to be insignificant, that is within the range +/-1% of GDP“.

The great problem with the Kyoto accords is niether the cost nor the small impact. It is an intellectual excercise that pretends to make 100 year predictions. That is impossible. Hubbert’s peak (maximum oil production) may not actually be today but even the most extreme anti-enviromentalist can not believe that we will continue to find enough oil to match the 100 year projections. Somewhere between 2030 (worst case) and 2070 (best case) will all stop burning oil because shortages will end the viability of “found oil” energy. How smoothly we make this transition is a political question but whether or not we make it can not be ini doubt.