Discussion: airplane travel and ecological conscience

huh?

Maybe he meant to link to an article like this one? Air travel with a clear conscience

Apologizing here in advance of the accusation... you generate more carbon dioxide as a result of a 3000 mile cross-country trip in an average CAFE car, driving solo, than in a 80% full transcon, 2500 mile flight in an Airbus (per paseenger). I think if there is two of you in the car, then it's slightly less per person for the car. I'll dig up the exact numbers if there is interest, but the conclusion should be fairly obvious given price considerations—it's usually ~50% less expensive to fly than the price of gas used to drive the same distance solo, and since the two fuels are priced about the same per gallon and they generate _roughly_ the same amount of carbon emissions per gallon, there should be an about a factor of 2 win for flying. Most of your $250 roundtrip ticket is indeed fuel.

Extrapolating this thesis, one comes to the conclusion that this thread would be more appropriately titled "Solo driving and ecological conscience". Note also that there are political and societal costs of driving that seem to not be present in flying, most notably driving's ~×10 fatality rate per mile travelled compared to flying, and the absolutely insane urban planning in this country that flourished after the murder of public transit as a transportation alternative, by a consipracy of car manufacturers and the federal government in the 1950s.

I am impressed that a blank post can generate this much response!

It's an example of very good delegation.

yes well if this was in my school forum there would be at lest 50 posts by now. teens can talk about anything, put one word in the title and we can make a whole conversation out of it. It is actually kind of scary.

You don't drive from the Bay Area to RDU/BOS/NYC/... very often, though, do you, Tundra/Desert? Conditional on having to make the trip of 2500 miles, you probably should fly, but there are probably too many trips being made at the margin with the externalities from greenhouse gas emissions being taxed.

At $85/ton of CO2 emissions (the figure in the Stern report for the environmental cost of emissions), and at 100g CO2/passenger-km (at the low end of IATA's estimates of emissions - up to 350g /passenger-km for short-haul), then aviation should be taxed at $13.60 per 1000 miles of flight for the environmental cost of CO2 emissions alone - so around $65 for a domestic transcon roundtrip. At the high end, if aviation emissions are more damaging due to the fact that they occur at altitude, then more. Also, since shorthaul is more inefficient, a 500-mile roundtrip could be up to three times more damaging (so $40 for New York - Atlanta return, say). Add airport charges and the cost of the air traffic control system to that (so, roughly, add the current taxes to this). This is the appropriate average tax, so you could argue that taxes should be higher on higher fares (leisure travel is more elastic). But it still suggests that that coast-to-coast orienteering trips should be a little more expensive than most of us would like.

Multiply by 1.5 for east coast US - Europe ($100), 2.5 for west coast-Europe ($160), and a little over 4 for Australia-Europe ($270).

And yeah, I flew just under 90000 miles last year; but the economist in me thinks I don't have to pay enough for it (and nor do others).

My point remains; before blaming emissions on aviation, tax gasoline used by cars. If equitable taxes were levied on emissions, the pain from having to pay $65 for your transcon will pale in comparison with $750, at 8.8 tons of CO₂ per year per U.S. household from motor gasoline use at about 1000 gallons/year.

Of course airline fuel isn't taxed at all.

It does give you crazy outcomes back in the UK. It was often cheaper for me to fly and orienteer in Europe than drive to events a long way from London with gas at $7 a gallon

Motor gasoline isn't really taxed in the United States. In Europe, of course an aviation surcharge would make sense ahead of more gasoline taxes.

Motor gasoline isn't really taxed in the United States.

I guess the 38.7 cents a gallon I just payed this afternoon is imaginary. Granted it's way less than what they tax elsewhere, but it's still real.

I drive a lot - about 25,000 miles a year. I'm not sure there's a way around that if you're serious about training and racing and live in the midwest (where travel to training and most meets can only be reasonably accomplished by car). Carpooling helps, but would really help would be an affordable electric car. Still waiting on that one.

I drive even more, just shy of 40000 miles for the most recent fiscal year, and 1145 gallons (for a one-person household). Most of it is commuting, because I live so far from where I work, in part because real estate is so expensive near where I work, and in part because I prefer living in a rural area. It's too far to bicycle, and the train takes too long (because it's an indirect route). More telecommuting would help, and my client is also talking about moving the office closer to where I live. But I certainly don't have a small footprint.

Goes to show what some in the green movement are finally coming around to: big cities are good for the environment. Less land used, less energy used, less waste produced. Living out in the sticks may feel AOWN, but it generally does a lot more damage to the environment.

It is true that North Americans do not pay the true cost of gasoline if one includes the externalities and the fact that most of the industry in subsidized throughout it's extraction/production/distribution cycles. And, in regards to cities, any group of people living outside their lands capabilities to support the population (ecological footprint) would be considered not sustainable. But the reverse is somewhat the problem ebuckley commented on - those that have the land but put large fences around it to exclude its usage from others (our right we argue). Can't think of too many other species that purposefully do such actions.

Also, to go further on the city debate. The perceived impacts we have on cities is deemed lesser than in pristine environments due to the fact the cities are already impacted environments. A parallel is the camping hierarchy; camp in the designated impacted areas set aside for camping; then completely virgin areas; then lastly the semi-impacted areas. The latter two are based on that we'll leave the virgin areas virgin when we depart and that we'll eventually turn that semi-impacted area in to a fully impacted area.

I'm not sure if it's still true, but I recall in the mid-80's (when the US population was around 250 million) that a serious study of the matter concluded that the US could completely eliminate our dependence on foreign energy sources if everybody could be convinced to live in New Jersey except for farmers, who could feed the whole population from just Texas. The rest of the country could just go back to being wild.

Of course, nobody was seriously suggesting this as a course of policy (I mean, really, New Jersey?), but the point is that very large populations can be supported by relatively small areas if the proper infrastructure/technology exists and that the resulting situation is far less impacting and generally more healthy than spreading people out.

To show the difference between heavily taxed European gasoline and the prices you pay:

US ~$2.00 per gallon (tax: ~20%, ~40c)
Sweden ~10.00 SEK ($1.44) per litre (tax: ~71%, ~7.09 SEK, ~$1.02)

1 gallon = 3.78 litres, $1.00 = 6,95 SEK
makes the Swedish price $5.44 per gallon (tax: ~$3.86)

Info about the current US gas prices and taxes was taken from here.

Whatever these numbers show I guess we´re still lucky in some way since we don´t have to deal with the driving distances you have to get to an orienteering meet - and usually flying is no alternative either.

The real problem, though, is that reducing one's CO2 a bit is nice, but not really addressing the problem. What's needed is a ten-fold or hundred-fold reduction. I read the results of a UND study that determined that manmade emissions of CO2 were 140 times that of all the land-based volcanos combined. (Other emissions were also compared.)

What is needed to achieve a meaningful impact is a replacement of energy sources. Wind rather than coal, electric cars (using wind or solar power) rather than gasoline or diesel.

As Eric points out, electric cars cost twice what similar gasoline cars do, and it's true that wind costs a third more than coal (plus the cost of dealing with its variability (pumped storage; grid improvements)). But the world economy came through a doubling of petroleum prices with barely a flicker. (And what's the cost of being stuck in Iraq? :P)

It would take 30 years I suspect to fully change over...but how many decades until Middle East peace :-) ? (And since the difference between a mile of ice over North America and none has been 180ppm to 280ppm for every ice age in the last half million years, maybe being at 380ppm, heading for 480ppm before we can come to a stop, concern about ice sheets at not so very different latitudes seems reasonable.) Sorry, evolved into more of a rant than originally intended.

As a point of comparison, Australian petrol tax is something like A$0.38/litre (US$1.12/gallon) - well above American levels but well below European. (Average price here in the cities is around A$1.10/litre - US$3.25/gallon).

Wow, that's a lot of numbers. I guess what I had in mind when I saw the subject of this post is that - given the relatively low number of orienteerers in the vast country where I live, I end up doing a large amount of flying to attend larger meets. I do feel bad about the environmental impact of this.

Real solution is in trees :) More CO2 - just plant more trees. More trees - more interesting places to orienteer :) I think I already fulfilled my part in tree planting but would add more in coming years.

Urbanization destroys trees so all back to rural style of life!

Ummm... I think that's a kind of simplistic analysis there, Sergey.

No, rural life destroys trees, because you have to chop them down to make room for houses. Urban life preserves trees, because people live in a compact area and leave the forests alone. In my rural yard, I whack trees on a routine basis, the seedlings that sprout from the acorns dropped by my giant oak that start growing in the lawn. (The oak itself undoubtedly does suck up some of the CO2 that I generate, for what that's worth.)

I 'love' polar bears, too bad they won't be around in not so distant future.
I like what California does, though It could be too little to late at this point, but who knows I may be wrong.
It looks like until Economic Factors outweight the urgency to change the ways we do/make/use/waste things, most people won't budge.
I do my best to save what's isn't lost yet, I changed all bulbs, bought low emission car (wish it was a hybrid or even better electric one, but I can't afford to pay for failure of those hi-tech parts), threw away old appliances, recycled my old laptop and other e-waste, perhaps will install a solar pannel on the the roof one day and am thinking of getting rid of oil heating equipment as well.
But as I said, the urgency isn't in the air yet, especially when our goverment fools around with sientific reports to hide the truth from "unaware" public.
Perhaps untill something like "Katrina" wipes out Bush's and other "folks" ranches and houses, I don't see things change a lot in the near future, but then again this could be blamed on a terrorist act and that we need more troops in Middle East because of that.

Things change when enough people decide they need changing. It may not be much longer. (I hope.)

By the way, if you're worried about hybrid batteries needing replacement (a $2000-3000 hit), as of a year ago, Toyota claimed that they'd never replaced a single battery, except due to the car being in an accident. So, the batteries seem to be lasting pretty well...the first Priuses were in the late 90s I believe. (I haven't heard whether they have since replaced any.)

Well, here some bits on hybrids.

I don't analyze - I do what my father told me: "Build a house, raise a child, plant a tree". The later should be more like "plant trees".

Urban areas are tree-less concrete slabs that stole land from forests.

Back to rural life and planting lots of trees among houses!

I'm a skeptic when it comes to economics or technology being where the answers will come from. I'll add before continuing that I'm an environmental engineer who is involved in the residential geothermal field (10 years of contaminated sites work prior to that) - so I've heard the science. Or more to the matter, I've heard that the best minds can't even forecast a sustainable society for us (western standards). I've seen that any energy source (green or otherwise) is used to increase our extraction rates (consumption) elsewhere. Diminishing returns or increased pricing (as per the market system) do not work either - we just find a way to extract in such a manner that prices are affordable until the item is just gone (Atlantic Cod Fishery is an example).

Social systems are hopefully what will save us, and I wish I knew what this would be. Societal peer pressure? Political leadership? International organizations being able to operate their mandate?

I definitely hope to be proven wrong.

And to add, a mature forest is a carbon-neutral system.

I feel like a grump now...but I guess I'm just trying to clear some of the "smoke" on the issues.

Do the math, Sergey. If everybody tried to live in a rural area, there would be no rural areas. The only hope is to cram as many people as practicable into a small space and leave some of what's left over to nature.

As to the solar/coal economics, I've very close (but not quite there yet) to being willing to bite the bullet on that. I could get my house off the grid (which is mostly coal powered) if I was willing to accept a 70-80% increase in electric costs. An affordable electric car would push me over the edge.

Hybrids are NOT the answer. They get their electricity from burning gasoline - no net gain there. I had a 1988 Geo Metro that got 65 miles to the gallon. 20 years and $10,000 of hybrid technology later I'm supposed to be impressed with 50?

I agree, but primarily for this reason. Hybrid technology could theoretically give European cars even better gas mileage too. Since some of you seem to like numbers, here's another interesting page.

From the figures I've seen, the main effect of hybrids is that they cut fuel consumption levels in the city to roughly those achieved on the open road. This means that if you do most or all of your driving on the open road, a hybrid will have similar fuel consumption to a similarly-sized conventional vechicle - it's in city driving that they really come into their own.

I don't use my car much during the week (most of my commuting is by either bicycle or train) - most of its mileage comes from going to events at weekends. I average about 18,000 km/year, but in the summer (when there are few or no events outside Melbourne) I'm often in the 500-1000km/month range.

A pricing system that worked...emissions trading schemes in the US, which reduced air pollution dramatically.

Of course, legislative solutions work too...banning DDT that is credited for returning eagles throughout the lower 48, after being largely gone in my youth.

urthbuoy said:
Diminishing returns or increased pricing (as per the market system) do not work either - we just find a way to extract in such a manner that prices are affordable until the item is just gone (Atlantic Cod Fishery is an example).
1. It is of course false that correctly set taxes (or permits, though taxes are probably preferred here) can't solve the problem (tax gas at $200/gallon and emissions will fall). The question of whether the appropriate level of taxes are politically implementable is another question.
2. It's not axiomatic that even if the planet does get 'trashed', a la cod fisheries, that this isn't the right thing to do. Whether it is or not is a function of people's preferences and the costs of emissions abatement.

For example, it seems like the biggest worry for some people is whether they can ski. That has a value to them. The question is whether that value is enough, in economic terms, to justify emissions reductions.

(Similarly, it's also not obvious that banning DDT was justified to save the golden eagle, unless enough people cared either about the golden eagle per se, or about other things the golden eagle helped with, or about other things DDT did to the ecosystem. DDT had a lot of positives too - tropical insect-borne diseases are pretty much eradicated from the US South - and you could argue that the death of all the golden eagles would have been a small price to pay for that.)

In other words, the argument at its most basic is between two different worldviews - one, that sustainability is a good and even necessary thing in its own right, and the more economic view that sustainability represents a reduction of consumption today in exchange for better living conditions for far future generations.

Under the first, it's obvious that we need to cut emissions.

Under the second, it is a quantitative argument, for which the current favorite answer, that in the Stern report, recommends a tax at the levels I mentioned above.

Many economists find the Stern report geared to produce alarmist numbers, in that he uses a discount rate of 0.1% per year (roughly, a unit of consumption in the year 2300 is still worth 75% of what one now is worth; more precisely this is in utility terms rather than consumption, but it's approximately right). You can make the answer come out completely differently by assuming something closer to the more usual 2-3% rates shorter-term studies use (with 2%, a unit of consumption in 2300 is worth only 0.2%, rather than 75%, of what it is worth today; with 3%, the corresponding figure is 0.01%).

That is, in this framework, the key question is 'how much of a cost are we prepared to put up with in order to increase the living standards of (far) future generations?' And if the answer is 'not that much', then we shouldn't bother with reducing emissions much, even if that leads to the planet being uninhabitable in a few hundred years.

IPCC AR4
HOT! off the presses

http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf

My previous post assumes that anthropogenic climate change is occurring; the question is whether it's worth bothering to do anything about it. Or at least, anything much.

I like the way public gets informed about what the heck is happening out there. " Global warming is 'likely' due to humans" or "90% chance that global warming is because of humans." despite numerous sientific data collected over extensive period of time that suggests just that. It's like, yes I broke it, and now I am just trying to convince myselft that it's indeed broken because of me.

Feet wrote:
>how much of a cost are we prepared to put up with

I haven't taken economics since Grade 12 (and I certainly didn't go to MIT) but doesn't using less energy cost less?

re: living standards. Hmm, so how many people die each year in the US due to coal burning? A good way to improve living standards is to adopt cleaner energy. Oh and if 90% of the World's climatologists say that there is a human influence on climate then thats good enough for me. I'm pretty certain if 90% of the World's economists said that you should buy stock A or B or sell currency C or D the lay public would do it.

How many orienteers come to meets alone in their own vehicle?

Chicago's public transportation system has always been extensive. For the past dozen years I've patiently produced instructions about using this system to get to our O meets. But to my knowledge, no other orienteer has ever chosen to use this system to get to a meet.

Again, I'm not disputing that there is with extremely high probability human-caused climate change. To an economist, one key piece of evidence is that even people motivated to find evidence pointing the other way (eg, the current US administration) can't really do it. (Not my argument.)

Of course, using less energy costs less. However, the reductions in carbon emissions required to mitigate climate change significantly are large enough that simply reducing waste is certainly not enough, even if everyone does, and you will never get everyone participating at least at current energy prices. Also, one person's waste is another person's enjoyed consumption (I personally heat my house to 56F but others definitely prefer 74F - is that waste? I don't drive a Hummer, but some would prefer to do so - is that waste? I would prefer not to have to coordinate my travel to O meets with other people, so I can go when I want and how I want - is that waste? Who gets to say?)

Once you are beyond eliminating some waste, the next emission reduction has to come either from shifting energy production technologies, or changing lifestyles. People like their current lifestyles, which is why they chose them, so doing this has a cost. And shifting energy production technologies also has a cost (how big it is is an empirical question that I don't know the answer to). That cost either takes the form of reduced consumption now directly, or of consumption foregone in exchange for investment in alternative technologies, and/or of extra capital investment in reducing emissions, or... - but there is a cost. And the question is 'is it worth it?', or rather, 'how much emission reduction is worth it?'

The coal-burning particulate pollution issue is a side-issue that suggests coal specifically should be taxed for this reason; I don't dispute that. (I argued in my first post of this thread in favor of a carbon tax, fwiw; but I am not arguing in favor of 'sustainability' or 'reducing my carbon footprint', which are not concepts that make much sense to me.)

Also, just to be clear: I'm not setting myself up as an expert here: climate change economics is definitely not my field, and nor is climatology.

I just wonder how this CO2 can be recaptured.

I know of only one economically viable mechanism - re-forestation. May be there are others?

chitownclark,

Why is it that O racers won't use the transit system? I've noticed the same lack of transit use here in Ottawa where we hold a series of summer evening meets in city parks.

Well, I personally don't use it since it takes longer, is less reliable and less convenient in terms of scheduling, and doesn't cost enough less to make any real difference to me. And where this isn't true, I do use transit (eg,
- when I was a student, so that I cared more about the difference in cost,
- when in Boston so that driving was less efficient,
- when in some European countries where driving is relatively more expensive than in the US and the transit system functions better
- even in the US, in cases when transit is actually efficient (usually, downtown to/from airports is the only case that satisfies this in my experience).

how about taxing oil and gas industry profits at 50% - today there would have been an additional $45 billion to put to good use.

oh, and this just in - global warming is totally for real, check out this irrefutable evidence.

totally for real

My paradigm is that economics is purely a human construct. One in which nature could give a $%#! so to speak. Basically, we are limited by the laws of nature, and we sometimes pretend otherwise.

It does have tools in which we could use as leverage points to "green" us up, but more often than not it is used as a decision making tool by politicians to defend business as usual - and it sells.

And I recall hearing that if our world's population wished to currently be sustainable our standard of living would be on par with Poland's. This leads to one of four likely futures in which "walls are built". Or those with the power live behind them, while those without live with most of the consequences.

One sad thought, is the human species does not have the power to change. It could be shown the future to 100% certainty (like a smoker being shown their lungs) and we don't, as a species, have the wisdom (we do have the intelligence) to change.

Why is it that O racers won't use the transit system? I've noticed the same lack of transit use here in Ottawa

boyle: I believe it is inertia...and addiction. As urthbuoy points out, its kinda like smoking: smokers know its not good in the long run, it's expensive and dirty, yet they continue to smoke. If I had a car, I'm sure I'd be driving to meets every week too.

But once having sold my car, giddy with the sense of adventure, I walked over to the bus stop in my O gear...and got on. And found that I liked it, despite the waits for connections. When I leave the house, I know that I'll be reading my book within 5 minutes. There's something akin to orienteering in the challenge of finding the best route to a distant suburban location without the use of a car.

If 90% of the World's economists said that you should buy stock A or B or sell currency C or D I would know which stocks and currencies to short.

I'm guessing it's more likely that 90% of the lay public couldn't name an economist by name even if their carbon emissions depended on it.

I would never take public transit in O gear. Under any circumstances.

Baltero never takes public transit not in O gear. Under any circumstances.

I confess, I have done it: but always with stile (DVOA or US Team tops:)
I also do not believe that global warming is bad, caused by humans or not, surely the civilization will pay the price for it one way or another: it just the matter of adaptation and survival.

IPCC AR4
HOT! off the presses

Haven't read the whole thing yet, but I must say the figures are very pretty. I've heard that W likes picture books, so maybe he'll look at these?

I particularly like the color scheme on p. 19 - Projections on Surface Temperature Changes.

In 2020 the world is painted with greens and pale yellows indicating surface temperature changes in fractions of a degree. But by 2090 the globe has become all crimsons, dark reds and blacks, reflecting sudden extreme temperature increases...a real hell-hole

Feet, your argument appears to reduce the consequences of global warming to impacts on lifestyle choices (e.g. whether Swampfox will have to move to Nunavut in order to get his attack badger fixes). That would appear to be somewhat shortsighted. Furthermore, by your argument, it should be fine for me to chuck my rubbish out the window of my flat - it won't affect me, after all. Yet such behaviour is generally agreed to be antisocial.

I think attack badgers will love global warming, they will get bigger and meaner, eventually growing to the size of tyrannosaurs and dominate the Earth as such creatures did millions of ears ago, than the circle will be complete and nobody will talk about global warming - they will wait for another Ice Age, hiding in caves.

feet wrote:

".... I am not arguing in favor of 'sustainability' or reducing my carbon footprint', which are not concepts that make much sense to me."

Are you not a professor of economics with a PhD from MIT?

The concept of sustainability does not make much sense to you?

I think we really are in trouble.

In honor of this likely being the largest discussion based solely on a title, I'd like to propose the term "rudy" discussion to describe such a phenomenon. I imagine this being in the style of a coffeehouse discussion amongst some local actors, "Antelope and attack badgers! Discuss amongst yourselves and report back."

Rudy, with all due respect, when I talk about being "serious about training and racing in the midwest", I'm referring to someone who spends a lot more time working technique in the forest than you do.

As you well know, I do ride my bike to woods workouts and local races from time to time. However, if I did that for all my woods training, there's no way I'd get in 250 hours per year off road (and I wouldn't get any training on our best maps). Trading terrain/trail running for cycling is a fine compromise if you don't care about results, but if you're "serious" about being fast in the woods, it's not a smart play.

OK, let me rephrase slightly. The concept of 'sustainability' makes sense to me, but it isn't clear it's a good thing. (What do I care if the planet is uninhabitable in 2100? I'll be dead then. And I bet many out of the large fraction of the world's population living on less than $1/day care even less than I do.) The Earth is just a resource for us to use up.

What I meant to say (and didn't, at least not clearly) is that I don't see any reason why I personally should reduce my emissions simply because of sustainability. In particular, what the 'carbon footprint' concept is actually used for is to persuade people to cut their energy consumption more than they otherwise would want to, given energy prices. This makes little sense to me. One of the things that money gets you is the right to consume more of lots of things, and energy is one of those things. A fine way to organize society. It's only right and proper that the founders of Google get to fly around on their own personal 767 - they earned that right.

Now, it is true that my using more energy does affect other people in the future through climate change. So future generations would be better off if using energy was taxed more, since this would slow down climate change. If we care about future generations, then we should vote for carbon taxes. Now, I personally actually do care a bit about this, so I would be happy to vote for carbon taxes higher than the level in the US ($13-15/1000 flight miles seems about right to me, actually). (I would also vote for much higher gas taxes, but the reason is basically unrelated to global warming - it's because extra driving has costs of congestion and higher accident rates which are largely unpriced and dwarf the global warming costs. I would be better off if other people drove less, so I'd be happy to tax driving more, even if that means I also drive less.) The ultimate question is whether most people care. If they do, then we should reduce emissions, until the benefit from reducing emissions is matched by the cost in reduced living standards.

djalkiri, the difference with the trash defenestration example is that if I do that, I will pay for it (for example, the apartment complex will kick me out). So I don't do it. Plus the cost to me of putting the trash out properly is very small. In the carbon case, the cost to me of not flying so much is much larger. So I still do it.

I think that's the first time I've seen someone use the word 'defenestration' without trying really hard to find a way to make it fit the context.

On track with the real discussion, feet, you talk about sustainability only in how it affects future generations. But many of the same kinds of effects that we'll see in 2100 will be present, albeit to a lesser degree, over the coming decades. Is sustainability for our own retirement a different matter?

To some extent, in that we are alive now and so will be alive then and enjoying life then, so definitely better not to screw things up completely in the short run. But even a world that warms 6 degrees C by 2100 is probably still pretty good to live in until I die, say in 2040 or 2050.

So it all boils down* to how much you either value preserving the Earth for its own sake, or value the lives of future generations. And I'll be honest - economics really doesn't have much to say about either of these, except that it's hard for me to see why future generations are valued as highly in the calculations as you need to do to get any serious carbon reduction to be worthwhile. After all, if things go well, then future generations will be richer than us and able to deal with global warming themselves. And if they don't, well, they'll never be born, and I don't care much about the welfare of people that will never exist...

Oh yeah, and it's hard to square caring for the future survival of the Earth for its own sake with people's actual behavior most of the time. So I think we can rule that one out too.

* Pun only kinda intended.

Wow. Earth as a resource to be used up. Rich people earned the right to be wasteful. Who cares about the earth in 2100?

These ideas are abhorrent to me, but they do seem to be accepted by a large segment of society. Perhaps this explains why lots of people mistrust our economic structure, and also why people feel they are wasting their lives at work. The economy is efficient, but what does it optimize?

Sustainability may not make sense monetarily, but does ethically. I think most sustainability practices can be derived from the moral responsibility to provide future generations with a world equal to or better than what we currently have. Actions which irreversibly damage the environment (species extinction) or defer major problems to future generations (CO2 emissions) are unsustainable. Arguments for neglecting sustainability to maintain standards of living are legitimate, but they feel weak in America, where excess consumption is rampant.

Flying or driving to orienteering events is a real moral dilemma for me. I defiantly see the irony in driving to be outdoors in nature. It's difficult to justify any recreational activity in a context of sustainability, but I hope that I spend my working hours doing enough good to earn the right. (ethically, not economically)

feet wrote:

"(What do I care if the planet is uninhabitable in 2100? I'll be dead then..."

"To some extent, in that we are alive now and so will be alive then and enjoying life then, so definitely better not to screw things up completely in the short run. But even a world that warms 6 degrees C by 2100 is probably still pretty good to live in until I die, say in 2040 or 2050."

I used to have some hope that economists were not complete idiots with at least some grasp of reality, but I think that your comments here have eliminated any hope that I had for the sanity of your particular profession. I personally hope that you are not planning on having any children, who in case you haven't realized, will be living in the world that you leave after you die. Biologically speaking, you should at least have some compassion for your own offspring, since they would be carrying your genes, that presumably, you would like to see passed on.

Could I minimize my environmental impact by simply dying as soon as possible? Of course, that wouldn't leave a better world for my descendants, seeing as how I don't have any.

jmm - The Golden Rule is you can attack the idea but not the person. It is most likely we all share the same values, but it is how we prioritize those values that leads to debate (such as this).

I wouldn't be quite so sure that you won't be alive in 2100. Computational hardware will exist by 2020 that can outperform the human brain. Software generally lags hardware by 10-15 years, so somewhere in the 2030's, the idea of "porting" a person to an artificial host will be a problem that is actively pursued. If you live 10-15 years beyond that, it will almost certainly be a reality.

Whether or not that's a good idea is a completely different discussion, but economists (or anybody else who engages in long-term planning) who fail to realize that the whole paradigm of life expectancy is about to get turned on its ear are missing the big picture.

I probably got a little bit too riled up, so sorry about that.

Ebuckley points out the problem of needing to drive to get to suitable training areas. A couple of our big problems in North America are:
1. Infrastructure is designed to be car friendly but not pedestrian/bike friendly.
2. Our current private property/land use rights greatly limit the amount of available terrain.

As I type this, I can look out the window at a hundred or so acres of woods and fields. (about 40 ha for our metric cousins). But, if I go there to run/train, I could get shot or prosecuted. That hasn't 100% deterred me, but I don't go there often and certainly not during hunting seasons.

I live within 5 miles (8 km) of several orienteering maps, but walking or biking there requires using busy roads with narrow berms. Of course, cutting through the afforementioned woods and the fields beyond them would save a little distance and most of the worst roads (as well as offering additional training).

In the short term, we probably aren't going to make much progress on passing land access laws like those of some northern European countries (eg you can cross any woods & camp one night before seeking the owner's permission to stay longer), but we can certainly join bicycling groups and others in advocating for more pedestrian and bike friendly road systems.

Feet wrote:
>economics really doesn't have much to say about either of these.

And with that I would say is where traditional economics has failed. It does not take into consideration the depreciation value of the goods and services provided by the environment. Take the Exxon Valdez disaster for example. If Exxon were required to pay for the environmental damage that was done to the goods and services that the environment provided that were lost due to the oil spill (rather than just the clean up) then they would have likely gone bankrupt (and ironically wouldn't have been able to fund all those climate change
skeptics and deniars for the last 15 years). Anyway, I recall the true amount in environmental service depreciation/degradation for Exxon Valdez was in the $60 billion range when environmental economics was applied. Interestingly the insurance industry has been very quick to realize the economic implications of global warming.

The economy is efficient, but what does it optimize?

CEO compensation, of course. You are working for the man, who has now "earned" the right to not care about his fellow men, even tho without which, his lifestyle wouldn't exist. I question the notion that the market is efficient at establishing wages (presently), but also think (ironically) that it might even be more brutal were it allowed free reign to be truly "efficient".


Biologically speaking, you should at least have some compassion for your own offspring, since they would be carrying your genes, that presumably, you would like to see passed on.


The phenotype has no incentive to care about anything. Only the genotype (theoretically) does. Genotypes who build phenotypes who care (either about their offspring or future unborn strangers), or build phenotypes who can survive in Venus-like conditions 100 years from now will in theory survive provided the above conditions they built for happen to become (or are) relavent.

(And please don't flame my genotype's phenotype, I don't think these notions are controversial among serious evolutionary biolgists, tho just like the 10% who deny anthropogenic climate change, I'm sure there are dissenters).

Of course, genotypes may have incentive to build phenotypes who can badger other phenotypes into caring about them or "society", and are probably doing well to build phenotypes who call others "antisocial" when they do not. They may even have incentive to build phenotypes who are willing to pay tribute to feudal or CEO lords, because doing so may be a better wager than mass-striking and letting society run amok to "the jungle". Who knows, but if the metric is pure headcount, the feudal system seems to be working out a bit better than "the jungle".

Now, it would be nice to tie this to either the present thread or orienteering, but alas it is not to be. At least I'll do my part in preventing the tragedy of the commons and not tie it to or mention attack badgers in any way.

Hammer wrote:
>It does not take into consideration the depreciation value of the goods and services provided by the environment.

Apologies for leaving in the middle of all this - ironically enough, I had to go home because of heavy snow and a warning of whiteout conditions.

This is wrong. Environmental economics is economics. Environmental services are largely unpriced, or at least underpriced, and therefore wasted. Oil spills are one example, and global warming is another. However, they _should_ be priced, and the vast majority of economists would agree with this. I haven't said anything to the contrary.

In fact, you are making my point for me: there should be a price to pollute ($60 billion, you say, should be the price of spilling oil in Alaska in Exxon Valdez amounts; $85/ton, says the Stern report, should be the price of emitting carbon dioxide). And if you pay it, you should get to pollute if you want to. From this it follows that if you have the cash, you'll pollute more. I have no problem with this.

What I said economics didn't have any way to put a price on is the intrinsic value of something. Does the Alaskan environment matter only because it provides environmental services, or does it matter in addition for its own sake? The first is traditional economics; the second isn't.

blegg wrote:

> Sustainability may not make sense monetarily, but does ethically.

I made some fairly inflammatory statements above that are a bit distracting from the real point I'm trying to make. So let me state things differently.

1. Carbon emissions have negative consequences for society that are not currently priced. Therefore the price of carbon should be higher. This is not much of an ethical statement because a higher carbon tax would make almost everyone better off.

2. How high the carbon tax should be is exactly an ethical question. The reason is because most of the $85/ton currently recommended comes from a) valuing future generations much more than we currently do (if we value them as much as Stern does then in order to be consistent we should also be saving very large fractions of our incomes in order to hand these over to our children, but we do not in fact do this; why we should treat our environmental legacy differently is an ethical question), and b) it is an ethical question whether we should value the environment _for its own sake_, beyond the value of the services it provides.

Because it is an ethical question, economics will not give you the answer to it. What economics will do is tell you how to implement whatever answer you want at least cost. (Short answer: a carbon tax.)

3. I made the inflammatory statements (in particular, the 'Earth is just a resource to be used up' one) above not because I actually believe them wholeheartedly myself, but to make the point that if you find these statements objectionable, then this is a problem you cannot solve by yourself. If you reduce your flying, then you just make it cheaper for people who do not care much about carbon emissions to increase theirs. Net effect on emissions: not much. Whereas if we increase the carbon tax, everyone will decrease their flying, and more importantly, the total amount of flying will decrease. This is what prices are for. The part that makes no sense to me is the 'guilt' thing about 'reducing my carbon footprint'. Reducing total consumption to amount A does not mean dividing A by the world population, n, and rationing everyone to consume A/n. People do not like rationing. Instead, increase the carbon tax until aggregate consumption equals A, and let the economy sort out how to split it among people.

The only way I can make sense of the 'reducing my footprint' concept at an individual level is that if you care deeply about carbon emissions, you might want to show others how you can live a decent life even while consuming less energy.

4. I do not see a way around paying people who do things society values a lot (like investment banking or tax law - since almost nobody actually enjoys doing these things, we have to get them by paying people a lot for them). And then in a free market, these people can buy what they want. The only way to stop them using a lot of energy and buying a lot of energy-intensive goods is to increase the price of energy. But even then, in a free society, you will not be able to prevent others (Brin and Page with their 767) from spending on what they want. And nor should you. Why do you get to decide?

5. More personally, I used 150kWh of electricity in the last two months and drove about 400 miles in that time. I heat my house to 56F at night, 50F during the day, and I choose to live in a 3 room apartment so as not to have to heat (or clean) more of a house. So, is it or isn't it ethical for me to fly? And why do you get to make the decision for me? Shouldn't we just increase the price and let me decide?

Well, that looks like it is pretty ethical behaviour on your part. Maybe you don't bite the heads off kittens after all. You can fly to any orienteering meets that you want to and not feel guilty about it (not that it is my decision, as you point out). However, I am free to criticize if I want. If one didn't do those nice energy conserving things, then I would say that it in my opinion, it would not be ethical for one to fly to participate in unnecessary recreational activities and I would then freely point out such selfishness (not that my opinion should affect your or anyone's decision in such a case).

I much appreciate this discussion - it's nice to get some "meat" in the arguments. Here, for example, is the shallow level of depth presented in my local paper - and if you can figure out what he's arguing for you get bonus points. Feel free to tear in to one of our local editors (editor@kamloopsthisweek.com).

Kamloops This Week
http://www.kamloopsthisweek.com/
Doubleday Canada Limited
By JIM HARRISON
Feb 04 2007

We might as well move the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight.

The world’s scientists are out with a report declaring global warming has reached the point where we’re all going to hell in a handbasket — and the blame is being placed squarely on the shoulders of mankind and his penchant for pollution.

Unless we all make radical changes, they warn, the planet is doomed.

These are collectively among the brightest minds around, but despite the conclusions by the International Panel on Climate Change, there remain reluctant believers.

Any fool can see there’s something afoot and the Earth is warming.

But whether all of it can be laid at the feet of mankind remains debatable.

This planet has undergone serious weather change before, and for far longer than homo sapiens have been around.

The point is these are educated opinions.

But scientists and their conclusions have frequently been wrong over the years.

The real problem is that people buy into their hypotheses, and drive their politicians to taking action, even though they have no idea what the outcome will be.

This phobia to limit CO2 emissions and cut down on greenhouse gases threatens to trigger decisions that divert huge resources from more productive areas — all without any guarantee we’re accomplishing anything positive.

Kyoto is a popular catchword, but until there is demonstrated and a proven benefit to what it hopes to accomplish, and unless there is genuine buy-in by all of the worlds’ nations, it becomes little more than a good name for a dog.

Sounds like the Kamloops editor was listening to Stephen Harper 2-3 years ago (heck 2-3 months ago).

Feet, as you say, there's often a difference between an individual's stated preferences and revealed preferences (e.g. someone says they want to save the planet but they drive a car that gets 18 miles to the gallon and heat their house to 75F). We can't always conclude from the discrepency that revealed preferences are more accurate. Ignorance plays a role too. For example, if you ask your average parent if they want the best for their child, then they say "yes, of course." But people still cram their houses full of pesticides, they let their babies watch TV for hours on end, and so on. Does that mean that they don't actually care more about their kids than about not having to swat the occasional cockroach?

After having calmed down somewhat after a nice relaxing ski (which I hypocritically drove 30 km to get to), I'll apoligize to my fellow training logging colleague for some of my earlier unfounded comments (Though, making provactive statements, one should expect a provactive response).

I have no problem with the idea of a carbon tax and in fact would probably vote for one as well, but I don't think that anything of that sort will ever be implemented until the point at which wasteful energy consumption becomes as socially unnaceptable of a behaviour as, say, cigarette smoking is. This is the reason why I disagree with the idea that people should not be made to feel guilty for their excess energy use (and the carbon emissions, etc. that this causes).

By way of analogy, let us suppose that we are able to calculate all the external costs to society of smoking cigarettes, and then we add that to the cost of a pack of Marlboro's and call it the "cancer tax". If I am willing to pay the cancer tax, does this then absolve me of any further responsibility for the consequences of my habit, since I have now paid the market price for my antisocial behaviour? Does this give me the right to smoke when I want, where I want, and how I want? If I was a smoker, would everyone here be ok with it if I was sitting next to them at a restaurant, took a long drag on my king size Belvedere, turned around a blew the smoke right in there faces? Theoretically, since I have paid my cancer tax, people should be ok with it, since I have already paid the market cost for my behaviour through the cancer tax. However, I don't think any reasonable person here would be ok with it, since we have for the most part decided that this is an unnaceptable behaviour. Until excess energy consumption becomes equally unnaccetable, nothing will be done about it. The emissions from the tailpipe of one's Hummer need to become like blowing cigarette smoke in one's face before a carbon tax will ever be implemented.

On another note, the question of calculating the value of A (total annual energy use) that is sustainable in the long-term is a difficult question, but it has nothing to do with the "price" that we put on energy, though I suppose, "price" could be used as an incentive to get people to use less of it, which I suppose is the purpose of the carbon tax, which probably will never be implemented without guilt.

However, I digress, if we assume that A comes from purely biological sources, then the long-term value of A that is sustainable is A=NPP (net primary productivity, or the rate at which all ecosystems on earth accumulate energy, mainly through photosynthesis but some also through chemosynthesis by the organisms at deep-sea vents, minus energy lost to respiration by said plants, but also heterotrophic organisms like humans that have to obtain their carbon from eating other organisms). Recall that the economy is contained within the ecosystem, as any ecologist will tell you, and not the other way around. Currently, humans already use a disturbingly high proportion of the earth's terrestrial NPP. Also recall that fossil fuels are nothing more than a storehouse of the results of millenia of photosynthesis. If we decide to run the economy on things like biodiesel, ethanol, etc., we can attempt increase the earth's NPP and therefore A through more intensive agricultural practices (which have their own consequences), or to usurp more NPP for our own purposes (which also has consequences), but the total sum of the earth's biological productivity will always be the upper limit for A, and hence the upper limit for the size of any economy based purely upon biological energy. Of course, we can also increase A by obtaining energy from inorganic sources, like photovoltaics, wind, nuclear, etc., but these have consequences and limits as well.

On another note, I don't think that a planet where we are running an A=NPP economy would be very conducive to good orienteering, unless you like running through endless fields of switchgrass.

we must hit ourselves as a society with both taxes AND guilt, and pronto - otherwise our society is down the tubes as the warming oceans rise over the coastal cities, interesting new weather patterns lambast both our less-developed nations & our... insurance companies in North America, and so on. And it is just OUR society that will go down the tubes along with some other particularly elegant local biomic (I made that word up) expressions such as the polar bears on their fading arctic ice. The biomes themselves will flow and change and adapt to pretty much whatever we do, making up new & fabulous lifeforms which I am thrilled just to imagine. I am in awe of the energy and thought of the posters on this thread, and like them am both excited & fearful to see if our collective energy & thought as a race or society will be enough to pull it off in time. Being in my mid-forties, I think I will probably make it off the planet before things get really horrid in a worst-case scenario (yay! I hate suffering, especially my own!), but in the meantime I do my best to figure out the best things to do in my daily life to help ease our society away from the aforementioned worstcase scenario, sometimes by reading informed & passionate discussions like these. You go, you orienteers!! (and good on you JMM for a gracious apology, orienteers are so civilized.)

And good on feet, for helping me at least, crystalize my thinking, with his non-pc analysis. The subject of Global Warming has received far too much politically correct hand-wringing; it's nice to see a spade called a spade:

...the key question is 'how much of a cost are we prepared to put up with in order to increase the living standards of (far) future generations?' And if the answer is 'not that much', then we shouldn't bother with reducing emissions much, even if that leads to the planet being uninhabitable in a few hundred years...

And so as a result, chitown, what are your views now?

uninhabitable for humans, that is, remember the flexible biomes that gave rise to us will cheerfully find other exquisite experiments to place into the strange new environments we leave behind.
To be biologically philosophical -
One of our uniquenesses (made that word up too) as a species is our moral sense, so to meander wildly off with one of Socrates' ideas, morality could be called the purpose of our species - thus a vital question could be SHOULD we reduce emissions etc ? One COULD frame our moral "game" up as a simple us-vs.-future-generations scenario (followed by, "well, screw them")...but then it's not so challenging a game, is it? ;-)

And it is just OUR society that will go down the tubes along with some other particularly elegant local biomic (I made that word up) expressions such as the polar bears on their fading arctic ice.

Not so fast. While the magnitude of the changes we're seeing are not geologically unprecedented, the rate of change most certainly is. Many species can not adapt fast enough and in fact those critters would have to expand their range 50 times faster than normal to keep up with global climate change. A 6th major mass extinction is on the horizon - some predict 50% of all species by 2150. This isn't just a big deal if you love to cuddle with cute, furry mammals. Biodiversity affects the health of our own habitat and food sources.

Basically, it does all come down to us, but we're not the only ones affected.

A quick Google search came up fruitless, but this seems to beg the question, "Is there any good adaptable carpool software out there?". Rather than the countless e-mails it takes to arrange such things, it would be nice if each host site had a small spreedsheet/database? of sorts for their events. An addition to an electronic registration process? Maybe clubs could even turn it in to a bit of a competition? It's a small step, but a step nonetheless.

This stems from a new resolution to bike/carpool to all my local club events this year.

Whew. Sorry I missed this thread until Jim Henderson emailed me.
For a personal view of all this and much more, check out http://www.ecoshift.net

Good reading. While there have been many interesting posts on this thread, I'd like to specifically thank feet for his many thoughtfully written arguments and replies. There are a number of smart people on this thread, and I think you've helped provide a broader context on this subject for many of the folks here than we've been exposed to before. Hopefully this thread's readers have also learned a bit about how economics can be used to help compare certain aspects of our behavior, and how economic tools can help make ethics based decisions be implemented in a way that actually has some long term effects.

Personally, I've only recently come out of the climate-change-skeptic camp. I heard some arguments about 10 years ago that helped may stay skeptical, but I finally did a little research on my own, and found that most of those arguments don't seem very solid. So I do buy into the prediction that the CO2 levels are going to rise for a while, and the earth's going to get hotter.

While I'm not well versed on the background, extapolating from data up until now, to predictions of what will happen out 50 to 200 years seems to me to be a bit of over-confidence in our ability to predict things. Over my short lifetime, I've seen predictions that the Ozone hole would be nearly world-wide by now (even with the large scale replacement of CFCs with HCDCs, the hole was supposed to worse to 50+ years.) Plus I've seen the leading dietary nemesis of long-term health shift from salt, to red meat to fat to carbs.

Back subject, my main problem with current global warming thoughts isn't even related to the unpredictability of the world. Let's presume that expectations we'll be up about 5C by 2100 are right, and even that by 2200, the species of the planet will be rapdily disappearing in their diversity, because they can't adapt well. (And, let's presume ethically, that this is a bad thing that we want to prevent. ;) )

Even if so, let's say all moderte-to-rich nations (say those with median incomes of $5k & up) were actually willing to take a 10% immediate hit in all of their incomes to implement a massive rollback of greenhouse gas emissions. (I think this, BTW, is exceedly unlikely, but let's pretend we convince ourselves to do this.)

Then what? As the nations of the world that agree to do this go on reducing emissions, countries like China and India will go on their merry way, increasing their emissions, along with a bunch of the rest of the world. Plus even among 'rich' nations, many are corrupt enough that "cheating" of the limits would likely ensue.

So after 20, or 50 years, what would be the net result on the earth's course of climate change? I doubt it would be very much - maybe we could push off the deadlines for whatever doomsday we care about by 10 or 20 years, but could we really reverse things. I doubt it...

End result is that whatever cost _we_ ('rich countries') are willing to pay to reverse or forestall climate change, I think since our end product will be highly unsatisfying - we could spend a huge amount of effort, and end up with very little change the course of the world's climate.

Gotta meeting... later...

I was quite skeptical for the longest time too. At some point a few years back, I decided that personally for me the evidence had become overwhelming and indisputable. Once that happens, you better be able to change your mind.

On a strictly anecdotal, unscientific level, probably just about anyone who's been skiing XC since the late 70s knows in their bones something different has been going on, and that we're not in Kansas anymore.

Wyatt,

I think economics would be the big sword that compliant countries would wield against non-compliant countries. France has already made some comments towards the US, that unless they jump on board the EU will be putting taxes on products from them. Now whether or not France speaks for the EU remains to be seen, but the idea is that through the carbon emissions program, non-compliant countries can expect to strong-armed once enough players are on board.

We should make an effort no matter the outcome, if only to show that we have it in us as a species to rise to such demands.

...if only to show that we have it in us as a species...

In order to show whom? Is there an audience?

A lot of these are redolent of an argumentum ad baculum.

then we should reduce emissions, until the benefit from reducing emissions is matched by the cost in reduced living standards

This phrase caught my eye.

I'm always bothered that the choice is so commonly phrased as environmental benefits versus living standards. If one doubts that environmental quality is a factor in living standards, then look where the rich homes are, and where the poor ones are. Not many people, even fervent anti-environmentalists, building their starter palace next to a coal fired power plant or mine tailings (curiously, given the vehemence of some anti-eco sentiment).

If the stable sea levels and a certain number of goods are seen as more desirable than a somewhat higher number of goods, then choosing the former would lead to higher standard of living, and better economic output, by definition. After all, what counts as the "utility" that economists talk about? Why, whatever we choose to want. Even a walk in the grass is utility.

The free market, and its efficiency, has achieved such mythos that it's common to talk as though whatever the economy currently results in is what people want. But the Tragedy of the Commons was not that no one valued the commons (quite the opposite). Rather, it was that laissez-faire did not yield good results with them. One solution was private property...no commons. Another was regulation, which we see in the many remaining commons of today...pooper-scooper laws, driving regs, etc. Many things we will likely forever share (air, groundwater, sunlight and hence most energy, the rule of law, rights of way), so there need to be means of dealing with inherently common assets and interests. And that's not some outside concern separate from economics and the economy...that is economics and the economy.

Just some thoughts.

oh, so cool, jjcote, I was just gonna write back to Cristina and that is kind of part of what I was gonna write.
Cristina, you totally rock! Yes, there is something (subtlely? overtly?) repellent about what I wrote re "only our society" going Kaput. But from the point of view of what I might (shamefully) anthropomorphize as the Serene Presence, there is no difference between saying goodbye to (1) a microscopic nematode being chomped by a predator nematode in the soil of my potted geranium (2) a billion nematodes lost (3) our society (4) the beautiful polar bears(5) a baby whale being slowly & bloodily chomped by sharks ( (6) a huge chunk of an ecosystem destroyed by fire (large mammals, including myself, being destroyed by fire is a bugaboo of mine) (7) slow or fast mass extinctions caused by us or by a meteorite. And so on. No difference. No values attached anywhere. We attach values.
The Serene Presence may be the afore-mentioned biomes (like super-eco-systems), infinitely "cruel" (see above myriad deaths), infinitely "forgiving" (see myriad ecosystem-expansions past present and future), serenely indifferent to any individual creature or species, utterly indiifferent to our society, to our values, our morality, our struggles.
Or the Serene Presence may be the silent beauty of the silicates of our planet that will endure after all the flailing DNA settles back into inorganic-ness.
In any case, this "audience" is undeniably present in our world and because of its existence, I can KIND of say, whatever the outcome of our struggle, it's gonna be OK, cuz either the biomes or the granite is still gonna be here. Sometimes I believe that and I am comforted in a nirvana-self-immolating kinda way. (I think that is the point you were overall objecting to, C, that I was stating I was (kinda-sometimes) willing to let just the macro-biome-level stuff exist & screw the species, eco-systems etc) BUT at the same time, it is abhorrent to me too ! - as a western thinker and feeler locked in the samsara which I so love, I DON'T want to let it all go to granite !! I DO value things like species, and lattes, and international peace. And so do you all. So draw yer lines folks (wherever you like), and fight the long battle of our species against the reassuring but uncomfortingly cold beauty of the infinitely adaptable biome, just cuz you can. (that's yer "audience" - granite. Yikes!)
Now I shall brew some fine tea from Murchies & reread this entire thread & then walk the puppy. Again.

"As the nations of the world that agree to do this go on reducing emissions, countries like China and India will go on their merry way, increasing their emissions, along with a bunch of the rest of the world. Plus even among 'rich' nations, many are corrupt enough that "cheating" of the limits would likely ensue."

This, of course, assumes that the source fuel (ie fossil fuels) causing the emissions is in unlimited supply. Or, in the case of an economy running on ethanol, that the water used to irrigate the fuel crops or the nutrients that they draw from the soil are in unlimited supply. Or, in the case of an economy running on solar energy, that the raw materials used to manufacture the photovoltaic cells is in unlimited supply. None of these are in fact in unlimited supply. Eventually, a limit is reached for all of them. I can see how economic (dis)incentives could be used to slow the rate at which those limits are reached, but I don't see how they could change the fact that such limits do actually exist. Having finally looked into it a little (which I should have done before opening my mouth earlier), is this idea of limits included in the economic models for this? With the exception of the factors accounting for some rather hopeful "technological change" that seems to eliminate the limits, I can't see that it is. I would assume this should be important, since I can see some of these limits becoming important before the differences in the discount rate become very important. For example, there are many people who feel that the point at which 50% of all oil reserves have been extracted (ie the point at which shrinking oil supply can longer meet growing oil demand) has in fact already been reached.

Start with small things like plant 5-10 trees in your backyard to start trapping carbon in the form of wood.

You may even make some money on generated wood as oil/gas reserves would be depleted in about 50 years :)

Another prediction (suh).

Though, resources of methane are almost limitless so no worry about CH based fuels. By the way, "the sudden release of large amounts of natural gas from methane clathrate deposits has been hypothesized as a cause of past and possibly future climate changes. Events possibly linked in this way are the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum."

I've only recently come out of the climate-change-skeptic camp. I finally did a little research on my own, and found that most of those [skeptic] arguments don't seem very solid.

Having first been exposed to the issue in university while studying physics (more below), I've been bemused for decades at the perpetual flakiness of the anti-warming arguments. This, contrasted with the steady stream of research into all the relevant questions, used by the pro-warming side, was a contributing factor to my swaying (albeit longer ago) as well.

extapolating from data up until now, to predictions of what will happen out 50 to 200 years seems to me to be a bit of over-confidence in our ability to predict things

This is a problem with how it's presented. Global temperatures are not a matter of a 100 year weather forecast (though people are doing such things, for a reason). Weather is a prediction of how temperature is distributed across the planet on any given day. A butterfly flapping its wings might change whether Chicago gets sun or thunderstorms, but not whether the average annual planetary temperature goes up by a degree. Global temperature is determined by heat balance...heat in, heat out.

My prof for planetary astronomy had us calculate the temperature of the planets (a sensible thing to study in planetary astronomy).

First, he had us make the simplest assumption...black bodies. In other words, that the planets absorbed all incoming light (and due to physics, are optimal emitters as well). This yielded temperatures that had the right trend of course (with a bit of an exception for Venus), but were off noticably, especially for Venus, but also Earth and other planets.

Next, he gave us the albedo for each planet...how much it reflects (without distiguishing between different wavelengths of light). This gave better answers for some planets I recall (it's been two decades plus), but still some noticeable differences, especially Venus, but also Earth.

Lastly, he had us take into account the unfortunately named grenhouse effect. (Greenhouses are warm primarily by inhibiting convection, not the (very real) greenhouse effect.) Which is to say, different absorption of light at different wavelengths. Specifically, different absorption at the visible wavelengths that the sun emits strongly at (due to its surface temperature) and the infrared wavelengths that the Earth emits most strongly in. (More specifically yet, sunlight passes through the atmosphere only somewhat molested, while the IR glow of the Earth is snagged more strongly, due to the energies that molecules like water and CO2 like to vibrate and rotate at.)

The results were clear. It was obvious that the greenhouse effect is an important factor in planetary temperatures. (And even with this simple treatment, answers got quite close.)

The point is, the change in global temperature that would result from adding another 100ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere, all other things being equal, is a matter of simple college physics, not extrapolations. The questions raised are whether there will be mitigating or amplifying factors (like clouds, or gases released from warming tundra and oceans), and how much CO2 levels will rise (how much will be released, and how much will be absorbed by forests, oceans, etc, and for how long before being rereleased), how the temperature increase will be distributed around the globe, and at what points do the Greenland and Antarctic ices melt. (180ppm meant ice a mile deep over the places where I've lived in North America; 280ppm meant none. The last 150 years brought us to 380ppm; even with strong efforts we'll likely hit 480 before I die. Sea levels are up half a foot so far.)

By the way, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention some upsides. 50 million years ago, arctic Elsemere Island, though at the same latitude, was a balmy +10C, teaming with life...hundreds of species of trees, lots of animals. Some think that the equatorial regions were also inhabitable and bountious then too. But the sea levels were far higher too.

We might be facing another extinction, but maybe not as bad as the ones 10,000-plus years ago (date varies by location) when humans arrived and ate all the big animals. (It would have been interesting to see giant ground sloths and giant beavers. (So, how big were their dams?)) For the wild animals that survive...summer days?

As the nations of the world that agree to do this go on reducing emissions, countries like China and India will go on their merry way, increasing their emissions, along with a bunch of the rest of the world. Plus even among 'rich' nations, many are corrupt enough that "cheating" of the limits would likely ensue.

Yes, a key problem. If we want to change things, we need to be willing to coerce the rest of the world into following along. But since Europe, America and Japan are major markets, trade incentives could carry weight. And, it's not like China, India, and southeast Asia don't have huge incentives to avoid coastal flooding.

The problem won't be solved by a few light bulbs and a few skipped trips. So, for those interested in doing something, I'd say forego the tokenism and e-mail your government. (Sorry, being provocative. :-)

What an interesting thread! I continue to receive high marginal utility from reading the further posts, especially by feet. ;-)

Sergey: I don't analyze - I do what my father told me: "Build a house, raise a child, plant a tree". The later should be more like "plant trees".

I guess it's a good thing your father had such innocuous advice. He could have told you to "build a mountain fortress, raise an arsenal, and plant bombs".

feet: The part that makes no sense to me is the 'guilt' thing about 'reducing my carbon footprint'.

I agree. Guilt is a tax on people "with a conscience" (really should be, "who are susceptible to moral suasion"), and if you tax something, you usually end up with less of it. Anyway, a substantial carbon tax would certainly have a greater effect on people's behavior than trying to make people feel guilty (an effort which is doomed by limited reach, since it will only touch your well-educated, mostly-liberal, upper-middle-class friends, who already pretty much agree with you.) Besides, using guilt marks one as arrogant, because it presumes a position of moral authority or superiority, which can only be bestowed by others, not assumed onesself.

feet: The only way I can make sense of the 'reducing my footprint' concept at an individual level is that if you care deeply about carbon emissions, you might want to show others how you can live a decent life even while consuming less energy.

Yes, but this makes abundant sense in the realm of tastes, which economics explicitly ignores. Modeling is a powerful way of influencing people's tastes for behaving in a certain way (resource-frugal living, in this case). It is a non-threatening way to prove the validity of one's lifestyle or point-of-view and establishes the model as a person of integrity (and integrity is a quality that most people intuitively understand is valuable and therefore admire). In economic terms, less or more of a product/service/lifestyle will be consumed at a given price after people's tastes have been modified. The study of taste modification is called "marketing". ;-) chitownclark and tonyf provided examples of ways to go about this (for people without the deep pockets). Such strategies of effecting change are for people who are not content to sit around waiting to vote for the next carbon tax to appear on the ballot.

djalkiri: We can't always conclude from the discrepency that revealed preferences are more accurate [than stated preferences].

Yes, and that's where modeling, education, and other taste-changing efforts come in. Just leave out the guilt, thanks.

feet: It's only right and proper that the founders of Google get to fly around on their own personal 767 - they earned that right....

Environmental services are largely unpriced, or at least underpriced, and therefore wasted. Oil spills are one example, and global warming is another. However, they _should_ be priced, and the vast majority of economists would agree with this.

Um, feet, these statements don't help alleviate the nervous perception that economics is prescriptive and that, furthermore, cold-blooded, amoral (and even immoral) economists have the levers of power in their hands and are busily plotting the fate of all of us, probably as they recite mysterious incantations.

As I understand it, economics is a descriptive and predictive study of human behavior, which seeks to explain the production, use and distribution of goods and services. Thus, the best economics can do is not to tell us what should happen, but rather what will happen, given certain circumstances and other assumptions. The circumstances and assumptions come from observation of the outside world. The question of what should happen is left to ethicists and philosophers--er, I mean, citizens. It doesn't make any more sense to blame economics and economists for global warming or poverty than to blame physics and physicists for nuclear weapons or deaths and injuries due to falling (gravity).

Eric said: As I understand it, economics is a descriptive and predictive study of human behavior.... Thus, the best economics can do is not to tell us what should happen, but rather what will happen, given certain circumstances and other assumptions.
This is largely correct. But in a case where actions have effects on others which are not priced (the jargon is 'externalities') then by pricing them (and through transfers of cash) we can move to an allocation where everyone is better off. Economists are comfortable with this very weak kind of normative analysis. The transfers do matter here since otherwise those who really like the formerly free activity would be worse off. (And in practice the transfers rarely actually happen, which is of course a weakness in this argument. Although one case where they almost do is by allocating licences to pollute to pre-existing polluters, and then allowing them to trade these licences. Europe is close to doing this for CO2 emissions.)

I should not have put global warming in there because it is exactly the problem that people today who like burning fossil fuels will not be better off if we tax them so that future generations can benefit. This would only be the case if future generations could pay them for not polluting now, but this market does not exist. (I was going to say, 'cannot exist', but maybe it can be replicated by an arrangement where I pay my parents for not driving, my children pay me, and so on... That could be implemented by making Social Security contingent on how much your lifetime emissions of greenhouse gases were... hmmm... would anyone vote for that?)

That is an interesting table with plausible relative rankings.

However, I take any comparison with Amtrak with a grain of salt. There are some aspects of Amtrak, with important implications for utility, that are only apparent to people who are regular riders. Granted, the table is about fuel intensity, but my point is that when confronted with the realities of these different modes, most people might make decisions on the basis of more immanent factors than environmental sensitivity. Unfortunate, perhaps, but true.

Actually, what amazes me about that is how inefficient Amtrak is. Three times as much energy per passenger-mile as a bus?

Well, maybe you're right... but knowing how badly they manage to do everything else, their fuel economy failings are believable.

Doesn't surprise me. I was guessing that the bus would be the big winner as far as motorized transporation goes. I'd also guess that European trains do better than Amtrak, particularly if you exclude the TGV and other high-speed lines. Trains have an awful lot of iron that has to be moved along with the passengers, at least as compared to a bus.

How full the trains are will make a big difference too.

Right, that's what I mean. European trains have very good utilization.

Also Amtrak's extreme equipment tonnage/passenger reduces their efficiency as jjcote pointed out. Most of their cars are huge, lumbering double-deckers, where assigned seats only occupy the top level for the most part. Buses, limited by the width of country roads I guess, have much lower equipment tonnage/passenger.

Also, trackage in the U.S. is terribly worn-out by all the heavy coal trains bringing energy to the eastern seaboard. Amtrak trains often must travel bad track at slow speeds, or wait on sidings as priority freight trains come through. As a result, trains are late more often than not...sometimes by 8-10 hours! All of which erodes efficiency, and increases fuel consumption.

Since I travel on Amtrak with some frequency, they invited me to a "design consult" where frequent riders were asked to evaluate proposed designs for seats, bathrooms, etc. I was very disappointed to find when I showed up, that the only designs under consideration were variations on the same large inefficient and uncomfortable seats, looking like 1950's-era Buicks.

Eric, I live in a state where majority of population are required to have a "fortress" stocked with at least 2 year food supply and a small arsenal on hands. So it is also taken care of :)

http://www.providentliving.org/channel/1,11677,170...

so, since a third of these posts are now elogies to feet, a trivia question:
in which international competition did feet win a silver medal?
No cheating with search engines...


Reasons trains aren't as efficient as they should be:
1.They only get replaced every 30odd years (at a guess) so their engines use old inefficient designs. (Again, low fuel tax doesn't help things.) And perhaps old heavy metal. No puns please.
2.Trains are too safe and so weigh too much!

Regarding flying etc.: Enough people taking less flights means companies will be less likely to open new routes/add new flights, or at least slow down the rate of increase.
I think it is probably not a good idea to race as fast as possible towards burnout in order to change perceptions as fast as possible, so taking longer to burn up all the fuel out there is (imho) a better idea than not.

One of the principles that has to be used in these issues is related to the prisoner's dilemma, and probably a basis of any social society, which is that if I change how I act others will too, without any causal relation! A justification for voting, demonstrating, caring...

By the way, feet, how do economists price prisoner's dilemma type problems? People don't always act selfishly...

I assume I'm barred from answering that. It wasn't snail baiting or banana bending, though.

But I'm wondering whether an e-logie is the attackpoint equivalent of one of these and if not, whether an ology might not have been more appropriate.

ndobbs,

You point out one of the two items people respond to:

1) Peer Pressure. We are products of our society after all.

2) The other is direct cost - ie if I have to hand the garbage man $5 for every garbage can I put on the curb, there is an instant connection and chances are I'll put less garbage out (some may just dump it in a nearby ravine - ummm errr re-entrant). Most of the times these costs are not directly noted as they are buried in property taxes and so forth, and offer little incentive to reduce.sda

Speaking of pollution that threatens our lifestyle, here's a new form: today's New York Times reports that a Chinese rocket last month blew up a piece of space junk, and created thousands of additional pieces of space junk in thousands of orbits.

Now they say it is only a matter of time until a "chain reaction" slowly pulverizes all the remaining space junk into high-speed bits, many of which can orbit for millions of years.

The Kessler Syndrome predicts that the promise of space travel is fading: the day will soon come that any launched space ship would quickly be destroyed by the orbiting junk. Not to mention destruction of world-wide communications, satellite TV and GPS.

Just another indication that the world as we've known it is changing, and we had better figure out how to live right here.

If I had to guess, I'd say feet won a medal at the IMO.

The question is, did ndobbs also win an IMO medal? (IMO = International Math Olympiad)

Glaciers and ice caps started to melt long before human beings started to burn oil and coal en mass. Glaciers have been retreating worldwide since the end of the Little Ice Age (around 1850). Human race may added to the warming but can we stop it? I doubt. Buy property in Southern Canada! It will have climate of Florida in about 100 years :)

I haven't seen it being mentioned a lot, but beside from higher temps, rising sea level, species extingtion etc, what about air/water quality, new jerms and viruses? Yes people do live longer nowadays but will they be healthier? I know the answer will be, oh we will develp new pills to treat this and that, but is it really an answer?

This is something to consider, especially for bachelors :)
http://www.teslamotors.com/index.php?js_enabled=1

I'll go out on a limb here and predict that I will never see a Tesla roadster in motion. There may be electric cars in widespread use at some point (although I'm far from convinced that this is a step in the right direction), but the Tesla will be such a low-volume novelty that it will have essentially no effect on the topic at hand. Among other things, I'll observe that the money I saved by buying my car (Pontiac Vibe) instead of a Tesla would pay for (at today's US prices) enough gasoline to propel my car for about 1.2 million miles.

For a variety of reasons I imagine plug-in hybrids *will* come into widespread use, and quite possibly in the not too far off future. I reserve the right to be very wrong about any prediction I make, and especially those to which I profess a high degree of confidence.

Who Killed the Electric Car (1)

"If I had a million dollars..." lalala :)

When price drops to $25-30K range people will start buying en masse. Long live Benzin!

Tesla claims that they plan a family sedan.

It's not particularly unusual to try to commercialize a new technology by starting at the high-price, low volume end. High volume mass market would be a hard way to start.

Not sure if they'll succeed, but they do seem to be making a good attempt.

How is this for promoting an ecological conscience: Ryanair seems to be giving away tickets on flights all over Europe for free, you just pay a bit of tax. Deal ends tonight though (European time). If you hurry you now can get flights from England or Ireland to Finland for pocket change, like buying a ticket from a bubblegum machine.

If they make you fly out of Stansted, that is hardly a good deal.

If you're predisposed to feeling guilty about flying, then flying for free+tax on Ryanair is actually the only guilt-free way to go! (as there's no way demand for free flights will cause an airline to fly more) ... Tempting. Any orienteering around Stockholm in March?

Stockholm in March?

Maybe here...

Well just bought 'free' tickets to Riga for 140 euro. Babies and skis don't ride free.

"On a strictly anecdotal, unscientific level, probably just about anyone who's been skiing XC since the late 70s knows in their bones something different has been going on, and that we're not in Kansas anymore."

Yeah.... absolutely no snow in upstate NY this winter :)


Science with a big S is all about falsifiability.
Building computer models is science with a little s.

"Glaciers and ice caps started to melt long before human beings started to burn oil and coal en mass. Glaciers have been retreating worldwide since the end of the Little Ice Age (around 1850). Human race may added to the warming but can we stop it? I doubt. Buy property in Southern Canada! It will have climate of Florida in about 100 years :)"

a fun quiz for all:

Sciencists are predicting a 40-65 cm rise in sea-level by 2100. How much have sea-levels risen since the end of the last major ice age and the start of the Holocene?

a. 12.0 cm
b. 120 cm
c. 12.0 m
d. 120 m
e. 1.2 km


how many acres of corn would it require to supply a year's worth of ethanol to power an E85 vehicle for the average American?

a. 1111 acres
b. 111 acres
c. 11 acres
d. 1 acre


E85 fuel cannot be burned in most vehicles because it will corrode certain components in the engine. Which other alcohol (for which an industrialized biological production process exists) has been proposed for direct substitution of gasoline in the internal combustion engine?
a. methanol
b. isopropyl
c. butanol
d. Grey Goose

So, what's the straw man wearing today?