Politics – Page 186 – a sibilant intake of breath

Mintz on carbon taxes

Jack Mintz, who is apparently one of Canada’s leading economists, came out in support of a carbon tax today. Specifically, he suggested that federal taxes on gasoline be expanded to include the taxation of other carbon-generating fuels. This sort of upstream tax on fuels can complement a cap-and-trade regulatory scheme for large emitters by covering sectors of the economy too small to be efficiently addressed through the latter approach. Mintz does not have a reputation as a green champion, making his endorsement all the more suggestive of a general trend towards accepting carbon taxes as one good approach for addressing the massive problem of climate change.

Whereas the carbon tax recently created in British Columbia begins with prices of $10 a tonne, eventually rising to $30, Mintz proposes a federal tax of about $42 a tonne. One of the major issues raised concerns inter-provincial transfers from high emission provinces like Alberta and Ontario to lower emitting provinces like Quebec. That being said, there are many ways in which carbon taxes can be designed. They can be set up so as to not increase the overall tax burden, on account of taxes being reduced elsewhere. They can also be designed so that revenues collected in one province must also be recycled or invested there.

With luck, people will start to realize the opportunities inherent in replacing conventional taxes with carbon taxes. Doing so will offer a strong financial incentive to invest in greater efficiency, cleaner fuels, and more sustainable practices generally.

Hurricanes and climate change action

At several points in the past, I have mentioned the possibility that the majority of people will not be willing to accept serious action on climate change until at least one big, unambiguously climate related disaster has taken place. The same point is made in Joseph Romm’s book but, whereas I have speculated that it could be vanishing icecaps or large-scale climate induced human migration in Asia, he seems to think that Atlantic hurricanes striking the United States may make the difference.

There is good reason to find this plausible. The strength and frequency of hurricanes both have a lot to do with sea surface temperature (SST). While it isn’t feasible to attribute the occurrence or harmfulness of a particular storm to climate change, it is relatively easy to show a correlation between rising global temperature, rising SST, and more severe hurricanes. Simulations conducted by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory led to them concluding that “the strongest hurricanes in the present climate may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the earth’s climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.” Within decades, rising SSTs could make the kind of extraordinary hurricane seasons that have proliferated since 2000 the low end of the new scale.

This matters partly because a hurricane-climate change connection would affect Americans directly and very visibly. Insurance prices would rise further, at the same time as more areas became uninsurable and serious questions arose about whether to rebuild at all in some places. The cost trade-offs between insurance, protective measures like higher levees, and storm risk would be thrown into sharp relief. The perceived damages associated with climate change would also shift from being associated with people outside of North America at some distant point in the future to being both physically and temporally immediate.

Obviously, it would be better if serious measures to combat climate change (eliminating non-CCS coal, pushing hard on energy efficiency, building dramatically more renewable capacity, etc) could come about simply as the result of a reasoned assessment of the IPCC’s scientific conclusions and projected associated costs. If, however, it is going to take disasters before people and politicians are ready to embrace real change, we should hope that they will come early, carry a relatively small cost in human lives, and not exacerbate the problem of climate change in and of themselves, as fires and ice loss do.

Air travel and looting

In some ways, engaging with the ongoing debate about air travel and greenhouse gas emissions feels like being among a crowd of looting rioters. People are happily smashing windows, grabbing cameras and iPods. There you stand, wondering what ought to be done.

The easy option is to loot. Your small contribution to the total level of theft and damage will not be recognizable after the fact. Immediate benefits can be secured for yourself, with costs being born by some unknown other person at some point in the future. In choosing to refuse, you accomplish nothing noticeable. Furthermore, you risk cursing yourself in the future for having missed out: for having not gotten ‘while the getting was good.’

The people around you want you to loot. Having a non-looter around is uncomfortable. It draws attention to the way in which the choice to loot is a moral choice, and how it is made on an individual basis. It forces people who are looting to justify their choice somehow – both publicly and in the confines of their own thinking.

The comparison above risks infuriating people and generating accusations of hypocrisy. How can anyone who has flown before say such a thing? It is true that past misconduct damages a person’s credibility. At the same time, it has no bearing on the fundamental rightness of wrongness of the position being adopted. As individuals, we need to consider whether the environmental harm associated with flying is somehow akin to being one tiny node in a million-person mob. If so, we need to question whether it is something we can continue to do.

Hell and High Water

Joseph Romm’s Hell and High Water: Global Warming – the Solution and the Politics – and What We Should Do might be fairly described as an American version of George Monbiot’s Heat. It describes much less intrusive means for responding to the threat of climate change, as well as being more tailored to American politics. It is also less ambitious that Monbiot’s work, since it aims at the stabilization of atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) below 550 parts per million (ppm) rather than 450.

The book is basically divided into two sections: one of which describes the nature and extent of the threat posed by climate change and one talking about solutions. The book is very explicitly focused on what climate change will do to Americans. Romm argues that too much coverage has focused on effects in poor countries, leading Americans to think the impact of climate change on their lives will be minimal.

Romm talks a great deal about how groups opposed to GHG regulation have created and funded a group of irresponsible ‘experts’ trying to convince the general public that major disagreement still exists about the reality and probable impact of climate change. He is very critical of the media, particularly for giving equal attention to the conclusions of a few oil-funded crackpots, compared with those of the enormous majority of scientists and all major scientific assessments.

I have some quibbles with some of Romm’s technological recommendations. I think he is a bit overconfident about the rapidity with which carbon capture and storage and cellulosic ethanol might be deployed. That said, the vast majority of what he says is correct, well defended, and similar to the thinking of others who have considered the questions seriously.

One notable omission from the book is emissions associated with air travel. At no point are they mentioned, either as a problem or an area where policy could yield improvements. As Monbiot effectively highlights, emissions from air travel are among the toughest to address, not least because lots of well-off people who consider themselves environmentalists and support good environmental policies nonetheless want to be able to jet off to South Africa or New Zealand.

Overall, Romm’s book is informative and accessible. He does a good job of bringing the issue home for Americans – de-emphasizing issues like the preservation of nature and international fairness – and emphasizing why they, personally, should be worried. Certainly, the kind of climatic impacts projected by the IPCC for 2030 or so are enough to make any reasonable person extremely nervous. He is right to say that, in a world where GHG concentrations are 650 ppm or more, climate change will be the issue being dealt with by all governments. Equally, he is right to point out that concentrations of that magnitude have a very serious risk of pushing us into a self-reinforcing cycle producing temperature increases of more than 5˚C globally and sea level increases of 25 metres or more. Hell and high water, indeed.

“The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America”

A book I am reading at present – Joseph Romm‘s Hell and High Water – drew my attention to an essay on climate change written by Frank Luntz, a political consultant who worked to oppose the regulation of greenhouse gasses.

The leaked memo, entitled “The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America,” provides a glimpse into the strategies of climate delayers that is both informative and chilling:

“The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science…

Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly…

Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”

The cynicism of it all is astounding. To see something as vital as climate change treated as a superficial, partisan rhetorical battle is extremely dispiriting.

The actual document is also oddly unavailable online. I had to use the Wayback Machine to find a PDF of the original leaked document. I am hosting it on my own server to aid people in locating it in the future. Clearly, I cannot vouch for its veracity personally. That said, articles in The Guardian and on George Monbiot’s site accept the document as genuine.

Small change

The New Yorker has an interesting article on American coinage. It focuses particularly on the question of what should be done with small denomination coins, given the ever-higher prices of metals like zinc, copper, and nickel.

It also includes a lot of interesting asides: such as how the American nickel was designed to have a mass of one gram per cent of value, at a time when the American government was flirting with the metric system. The article also features an amusing example of how industry sets us shell groups of ‘concerned citizens’ who are keen to block changes to the law that would be disadvantageous to them. In this case, a major supplier of zinc to the U.S. Mint founded Americans for Common Cents in order to resist moves to eliminate the diminutive coin.

Personally, I think that scrapping the penny is an act long overdue. For years now, I have been picking them out of the change I get back from purchases in order to reduce the mass of stuff being ferried about in my pockets. Even if every price gets increased to the next five cent mark, the benefits from being rid of the bothersome coin will be more substantial.

New nuclear plants, new nuclear waste

These days, nuclear energy is frequently spoken of as being in the midst of a ‘rebirth’ or renaissance, largely because of high oil prices and concerns about climate change. Those concerned about greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions do need to give the technology some credit as a mechanism for producing large amounts of power with relatively limited climatic effects. That is no reason to ignore the problems with the technology – from water use to nuclear waste to long lead times – but it does compel the formulation of a considered response.

One possibility I came up with would be to require firms building new nuclear plants to build geological sequestration facilities for the nuclear waste the plant will produce over its lifetime before the plant can begin operation. That would probably further delay the deployment of the technology, but it would avoid boondoggles like the ongoing conflicts about Yucca Mountain. It would also be a step away from the “act now and worry about the consequences later” mentality that has infected so much of energy and environmental policy.

The response to such a demand, on the part of industry, might offer a better glimpse into what the true costs of nuclear power really are.

GHG-intensive industries and regulation

As mentioned in a recent Charlemagne column, certain industries produce so much carbon dioxide that it can be more in their interests to relocate than to face an effective national carbon pricing policy. At least, that is what they commonly argue. Examples of such industries include fertilizer, chemicals, steel, aluminium, and cement. Frequently, they have threatened to relocate if they are required to pay carbon taxes or buy permits for their emissions. While there is some reason to doubt how valid the threats are – it would be very expensive to relocate production facilities and personnel just to escape a new carbon regulatory regime – there is good reason to think about how various forms of regulation would affect such firms.

One mechanism through which such threats might be countered is by reaching agreements among major producers in as many states as possible. A Dutch chemical company will be more willing to accept carbon regulation if it knows that its American and Japanese competitors face similar requirements. This is an approach that worked well in dealing with ozone-depleting CFCs and could work similarly well in GHG-intensive industries that (a) involve a relatively small number of firms (b) located in countries with strong regulatory capacity (c) which have some political willingness to take action on climate change.

One feature many of these industries share is that a high proportion of their emissions are what are called ‘process’ emissions. This means that the greenhouse gasses are released not as a side-effect of energy production, but as a side-effect of the production of whatever it is the industry makes. As discussed before, cement has high process emissions and limited prospects for carbon capture. The situation is similar for at least some of the processes employed in the other listed industries.

One slightly counterintuitive aspect of ‘intensity-based’ cap-and-trade systems (in which firms are obliged to reduce the quantity of emissions they produce per unit of output, rather than in absolute terms) is that they are absolutely brutal for firms with predominantly process related emissions. If a cement company actually cannot do anything to reduce GHG emissions per tonne of cement, the only option under an intensity-based system is to buy 100% of its obligations from firms that have done better than their target or close down. Under a cap-and-trade system with 100% auctioning, or a carbon tax regime, such firms would basically be encouraged to contract while the economy finds less GHG intensive alternatives to what it produces. While that is a very politically difficult thing to call for, it must be remembered that all the years of unregulated emissions were, in effect, an undeserved gift from the general public in this and future generations to those firms. Discontinuing such unearned benefits is a necessary part of curbing climate change.

If we are serious about dealing with climate change, it needs to be acknowledged that not all industries are likely to find technological fixes during an acceptable timeframe. Some will simply need to shut down or be sharply scaled back. Looking across the past 100 years, it is clear that the fates of whole industries have risen and fallen in response to societal forces. The impetus for them to do so now is enormously greater, as nothing less than the future habitability of the planet is potentially at stake.

Telecom immunity and the rule of law

A recent article in Slate discusses how legal policy in the United States should be fixed in the post-Bush era. There are many things in it with which I wholeheartedly disagree. Perhaps the most egregious case is in relation to providing immunity to telecom firms that carried out illegal wiretaps for the administration. Jack Goldsmith argues:

Private-industry cooperation with government is vital to finding and tracking terrorists. If telecoms are punished for their good-faith reliance on executive-branch representations, they will not help the government except when clearly compelled to do so by law. Only full immunity, including retroactive immunity, will guarantee full cooperation.

I think the bigger danger here is providing a precedent that firms can break the law when asked by the administration, then bailed out afterwards. Only fear of prosecution is likely to make firms obey the law in the first place. Providing immunity would invalidate the concept of the rule of law, and open the door to more illegal actions carried out by the executive branch. “Full cooperation” is precisely what we do not want to encourage.

If government wants to intercept the communication of private individuals, it must be a policy adopted through the due course of law. People need to know what it involves (though not necessarily the details of exactly how it works), who supported it, and how those supporters justified the choice. Greater security from terrorism at the cost of a more opaque and lawless state is not a good tradeoff. Company bosses should fear that they will be the ones in the dock when evidence emerges of their engaging in criminal acts, regardless of who asked them to do so. The alternative is more dangerous than the plots that warrantless wiretapping sought to foil.

Impersonate Germany’s interior minister

Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s interior minister and a big fan of fingerprint-based security, is getting a personal experience with limitations in the technology. A German hacker group called Chaos Computer Club has gotten hold of his fingerprint and distributed 4,000 plastic copies along with issues of Die Datenschleuder magazine.

This highlights several major weaknesses in such technology. These include the fact that the readers can be manipulated: either physically or electronically. They also include the fact that a biometric token can never be revoked. Unlike locks and passwords, which can be replaced once they are known, a person’s fingerprints and retinal scans basically cannot be changed.

I have written about problems with biometric security before.