Entry 2294, on 2023-09-23 at 10:52:48 (Rating 3, Politics)
The modern world seems to be driven far too much by emotion, and far too little by rationality. It's difficult to say whether this is because the decision makers are irrational, or whether they are just playing a game to stay popular with the hysterical masses. Maybe it's a bit of both.
Where does lack of rationality show up? Well, almost everywhere really, but in this post I want to concentrate on policies around climate change. Are actions being taken to reduce climate change rational? Are they the best we can reasonably do? Is climate change even real?
Well, before I go any further I have to say that I am not a cimate change denier. I think the evidence for it is sufficiently good that we can reasonably say it is true, and the evidence that it is primarily caused by human activity is also good, although not certain. My area of skepticism on this subject is not whether it exists or not, but what, if anything, we should be doing about it.
There is good reason to think that climate change will cause some areas of the world to become far more difficult to live in. This particularly applies to places which are already marginal, like the Middle East. It is somewhat ironic, that the area of the world a large proportion of fossil fuels comes from will be worst affected, but I will avoid any feelings of schadenfreude here!
There is also a real risk of rising sea levels making life difficult in some areas of the world as they are inundated by the sea, and a large fraction of our cities are near sea level.
There are several other problems as well, such as deaths caused by higher temperatures, crop failure because of drought, and increased damage from natural disasters such as forest fires and hurricanes.
But note that I don't believe this is an "existential" threat. I don't think there is any chance this will mean the end of humanity, or even massive loss of life, and it certainly doesn't mean the end of life on Earth, or the end of the planet itself. Those are all examples of the mindless hysteria peddled by pressure groups who are either very ignorant or incredibly dishonest about their real objectives.
But, despite that, it seems simple, doesn't it? We don't want any of the bad things I listed above to happen, so surely we should be doing all we can to stop climate change.
Well, no. We shouldn't. We should be doing what is reasonable to prevent excessive warming, but every action has a cost as well as a benefit, and those need to be balanced.
Some people would say that no financial cost is too much to pay to save the planet, but this is wrong in two ways: first we don't need to save the planet, we just need to try to make it more liveable; and second, financial costs have consequences, because resources put into mitigating climate change might have been used to eliminate poverty, or cure diseases, or reduce pollution.
And the argument that increased wealth only benefits the rich is untrue. It may disproportionately help them, but there is a clear link between the economic success of a country and the average standard of living of its people.
So I think there is a very good case to say that some action should be taken to help reduce warming, but it should be related to the benefits it brings, and be balanced against the costs.
Current efforts are pretty pathetic. The current global efforts primarily involve the Paris Agreement. This isn't a single agreement, it is a series of pledges which differ greatly from one country to another. And it is currently failing miserably with practically no major country coming close to achieving their agreed goals.
So we are spending trillions on an agreement which will never succeed, and every effort seems more like an attempt at global virtue signalling rather than a genuine effort to improve anything.
For example, here in New Zealand, we produce such a small proportion of total global emissions that it is barely even worth us trying, but our government may still have to spend billions buying carbon credits overseas to meet its climate targets, according to a recent report.
And while those billions are being spent to achieve nothing of any real merit, we have a health system which is falling apart, an education system which seems to failing, and a cost of living crisis where a significant number of people can't live a decent life.
The government has tried to reduce our carbon production by subsidising electric cars, and there are certainly more around now than there was in the past, but only the middle to upper classes can afford these, and the poor are stuck with paying more for fossil fuels for their old internal combustion engine (ICE) cars. Is this really the best a left-wing government can do?
Carbon taxes have some merit, but they would need to be universal to be truly effective. For example, if the US imposed a carbon tax, but China didn't, many companies would switch production to China, which would both make no difference to carbon production, but would also cause massive harm to the US economy.
It would require the utmost optimism to think that all countries would ever agree to a standard carbon tax across the globe, so that option has major problems. But is it really any different in principle from the uneven adherence different countries have to the Paris Agreement?
In the past there is arguably only one way we have ever made real progress, and it's not through government interference, extra taxes, or global agreements. It is through innovation.
Look at the "crises" we have had in the past, which were viewed in very similar ways to the global warming crisis today...
Before we had motorised transport the people of London were debating how horse manure could ever be eliminated from the streets, as more and more people used horses for transport in that city. But there was no need to solve that problem because cars came along (ironically powered by fossil fuels) eliminating the horses. When air pollution became an issue, more efficient engines and catalytic converters solved that problem too.
Almost 100 years ago, it looked like there was going to be mass famine because the world's food production systems couldn't keep up with demand for food from the increasing population. But in the 1940s and 1950s Norman Borlaug created many ways to improve the productivity of food crops, and basically avoided starvation around the world.
There is an extensive list of innovations which ended potential so-called global disasters. I'm not saying government action has never helped, because it is well recognised in economics that not all factors are accounted for by traditional markets. Economics has "externalities", which are costs which economics doesn't account for (because they have no immediate financial effect) and climate change is one of these. It may be that incentives are necessary to encourage innovation in this area.
If we spent a lot more on true innovation instead of playing a crazy game of spending trillions on mostly ineffective measures, like we do now, it would most likely be possible to fix climate change and boost the economies of the world at the same time.
What form would these innovations take? Well, that's hard to say, because by nature they are often hard to predict, but there are two obvious types...
First, we could find new forms of energy which were cost effective and reliable, unlike solar and wind. I would suggest we need nuclear energy: fission until the fusion process is perfected, which might finally be happening. Those plants could be used to produce fuels which release no carbon, like hydrogen. It might even be possible to adapt existing internal combustion engines to run on this fuel.
Second, we might be able to find a way to remove excess carbon, either from the atmosphere itself, or at the exhausts of cars or chimneys of coal fired power plants. Note that removing it from the atmosphere seems like a huge project, but we would have trillions to invest, and that would have the advantage of reducing existing excess CO2 levels.
In fact, some economists have shown that for every dollar spent on "green" innovations, about $10 would be gained by reduced need for climate change mitigation measures. I don't necessarily believe this exact number, but maybe it has some degree of merit. And many countries actually signed up to an agreement to increase innovation in that area, but never actioned those promises. Sound familiar?
At this point you might be saying, if it is as easy as I suggest, why does almost every government in the world follow a different path? As I said above, governments are rarely driven by rationality and careful thought. They tend to be reactive to demands from pressure groups, and the climate change groups, including the silly hysterical children who think they are doomed to die from climate change, are amongst the most strident and most visible, to the extent that a majority of the population have been taken in by their claims.
Maybe when the Paris Agreement fails, instead of signing up for yet another piece of harmful bureaucracy, we might see that there is another way. Use tools like carbon taxes and subsidies to a reasonable extent, but put most effort into innovation. We need a truly smart person - another Norman Borlaug - to produce a solution.
The existing attempts at reducing carbon have failed us. Why keep trying the same thing over and over, when we know that human nature makes them unlikely to work? It's time for a better approach, and to forget about the climate change BS.
Comment 1 by Anonymous on 2023-09-23 at 11:33:59:
First you are a MAGA, now you deny climate change. What has happened to you. Do you want to talk about it? :)
Comment 2 by OJB on 2023-09-23 at 12:15:59:
Yes, I will talk abut it, but first could you please read my actual blog posts (instead of just the title?) which clearly show I am neither a MAGA nor a climate change denier.
Comment 3 by Anonymous on 2023-09-23 at 17:23:56:
Felt it is maybe a bit one sided but could not argue.
Comment 4 by OJB on 2023-09-23 at 17:26:37:
Yes, I wrote this post after reading a book on the subject. The author was accused of cherry picking the evidence, which might be partly true (the critic wrote for the New York Times, so is pretty biased himself), but I just wanted to show there is another side to the story, which is almost never presented by the mainstream media.
Comment 5 by OJB on 2023-09-25 at 13:28:48:
Inevitably I have been challenged to list some alternative technologies which we should be researching. I briefly mentioned some ideas in the post, but I'll list two here (also briefly) and say that these aren't crazy ideas with no scientific credibility; they really are proper options...
Nuclear power. The most ironic and annoying things about the environmental activist community is that they want to prevent climate change but reject one of the best ways to do it: nuclear power. Modern reactors are incredibly safe, and some can even use waste material from older generations of reactor (fixing two problems at once). Currently, nuclear is expensive, but that's why we need to do the research. With standardisation and new technologies, it is the obvious choice for energy production.
Carbon capture. Planting more trees captures carbon from the environment; both new emissions and existing excess levels. But trees take up a lot of land and take a long time to grow. There are technologies being developed now (but not quickly enough, hence the need for more work in this area) which could be far more effective and relatively cheap if they are improved beyond current capabilities. This would allow the continued use of carbon fuels, where it is appropriate, without causing any harm, plus it would fix the existing excess carbon levels.
If we put the money being spent now on measures which have little chance of working into a massive research and development program to develop these, and other, technologies, I am confident we could have real solutions within 10 or 20 years. Sure beats the idiocy we are faced with now!
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