Solution to climate change is simple, elegant

The scientific consensus is that man-made climate change is real, it's happening now. (Tea Party friends: don't send me an article about some scientist who stormed out of the IPCC in protest; that doesn't negate the IPCC's findings.)  And the consensus of economists is that a carbon tax is the easiest and cheapest way to rectify climate change.

Why?  Because of the free market, and all that.  As long as there is no market for CO2, then the market can't react to it.  Taxing CO2 emissions suddenly puts an economic cost on it, and then businesses can put their creative and technical genius to work at reducing their emissions, i.e. their production costs.

It's pretty simple.

The boringly mainstream solution to climate change

By Tim Worstall

April 9, 2014 | Pando Daily

URL: http://pando.com/2014/04/09/my-very-mainstream-solution-to-climate-change/

German solar power = 20 nuclear stations!

Yep, those Germans sure are smart.  But there's just no way we in the U.S. could spend a few $ billion subsidizing an infant industry (solar power) that could wean us off foreign oil and not impose negative externalities.  Nope, only those super-efficient Germans can manage that.

Germany sets new solar power record, institute says

By Erik Kirschbaum

May 26, 2012 | Reuters

URL:  http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/26/us-climate-germany-solar-idUSBRE84P0FI20120526

Krugman: GOP's jobs plan is to pollute more

Unfortunately, as Krugman noted elsewhere: "Today's American right doesn't believe in [negative] externalities, or correcting market failures; it believes that there are no market failures, that capitalism unregulated is always right. Faced with evidence that market prices are in fact wrong, they simply attack the science."

Oh, and the eventual GOP nominee Mitt Romney is flip-flopping once again.

Party of Pollution

By Paul Krugman

October 20, 2011 | New York Times

Last month President Obama finally unveiled a serious economic stimulus plan — far short of what I'd like to see, but a step in the right direction. Republicans, predictably, have blocked it. But the new plan, combined with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, seems to have shifted the national conversation. We are, suddenly, focused on what we should have been talking about all along: jobs.

So what is the G.O.P. jobs plan? The answer, in large part, is to allow more pollution. So what you need to know is that weakening environmental regulations would do little to create jobs and would make us both poorer and sicker.

Now it would be wrong to say that all Republicans see increased pollution as the answer to unemployment. Herman Cain says that the unemployed are responsible for their own plight — a claim that, at Tuesday's presidential debate, was met with wild applause.

Both Rick Perry and Mitt Romney have, however, put weakened environmental protection at the core of their economic proposals, as have Senate Republicans. Mr. Perry has put out a specific number — 1.2 million jobs — that appears to be based on a study released by the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association, claiming favorable employment effects from removing restrictions on oil and gas extraction. The same study lies behind the claims of Senate Republicans.

But does this oil-industry-backed study actually make a serious case for weaker environmental protection as a job-creation strategy? No.

Part of the problem is that the study relies heavily on an assumed "multiplier" effect, in which every new job in energy leads indirectly to the creation of 2.5 jobs elsewhere. Republicans, you may recall, were scornful of claims that government aid that helps avoid layoffs of schoolteachers also indirectly helps save jobs in the private sector. But I guess the laws of economics change when it's an oil company rather than a school district doing the hiring.

Moreover, even if you take the study's claims at face value, it offers little reason to believe that dirtier air and water can solve our current employment crisis. All the big numbers in the report are projections for late this decade. The report predicts fewer than 200,000 jobs next year, and fewer than 700,000 even by 2015.

You might want to compare these numbers with a couple of other numbers: the 14 million Americans currently unemployed, and the one million to two million jobs that independent estimates suggest the Obama plan would create, not in the distant future, but in 2012.

More pollution, then, isn't the route to full employment. But is there a longer-term economic case for less environmental protection? No. Serious economic analysis actually says that we need more protection, not less.

The important thing to understand is that the case for pollution control isn't based on some kind of aesthetic distaste for industrial society. Pollution does real, measurable damage, especially to human health.

And policy makers should take that damage into account. We need more politicians like the courageous governor who supported environmental controls on a coal-fired power plant, despite warnings that the plant might be closed, because "I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people."

Actually, that was Mitt Romney, back in 2003 — the same politician who now demands that we use more coal.

How big are these damages? A new study by researchers at Yale and Middlebury College brings together data from a variety of sources to put a dollar value on the environmental damage various industries inflict. The estimates are far from comprehensive, since they only consider air pollution, and they make no effort to address longer-term issues such as climate change. Even so, the results are stunning.

For it turns out that there are a number of industries inflicting environmental damage that's worth more than the sum of the wages they pay and the profits they earn — which means, in effect, that they destroy value rather than create it. High on the list, by the way, is coal-fired electricity generation, which the Mitt Romney-that-was used to stand up to.

As the study's authors say, finding that an industry inflicts large environmental damage compared with its apparent economic return doesn't necessarily mean that the industry should be shut down. What it means, instead, is that "the regulated levels of emissions from the industry are too high." That is, environmental regulations aren't strict enough.

Republicans, of course, have strong incentives to claim otherwise: the big value-destroying industries are concentrated in the energy and natural resources sector, which overwhelmingly donates to the G.O.P. But the reality is that more pollution wouldn't solve our jobs problem. All it would do is make us poorer and sicker.

Study: Coal electricity hides $62 B in costs per year

Report finds massive hidden energy costs, mostly from coal
By David Roberts
October 20, 2009 Grist.org

A new report from the National Research Council on the "hidden costs of energy" is, frankly, stunning. In a sane world, it would be headline news.

Producing and using energy imposes all sorts of costs on public health, crop yields, ecosystems, recreation, educational performance ... the list goes on. Many of these costs don't end up reflected in the market price of energy; consumers don't see them or factor them into purchasing decisions. They are hidden, paid indirectly through, for example, health-care spending or environmental-remediation costs. Such costs are external to energy markets—externalities, as economists call them—and they represent an enormous subsidy to the dirtiest sources of energy.

I'm always left somewhat dissatisfied by discussions about externalities. People seem to imagine them as external in some sort of metaphysical way, as though the costs inhabit an immaterial and weightless ether. ("Social" costs, they're sometimes called.) But costs are costs. Someone pays them, with real money. They dampen economic productivity, like driving with one foot pressing the brake.

In 2005, Congress set about finding out just what these external costs of energy production and use amount to. It requested that the National Research Council (part of the National Academy of Science) attempt to place a number on them. On Monday, the NRC released its report: "Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use."

First, note that the report did not attempt to quantify the damage to ecosystems and agriculture wrought by climate change. It did not attempt to quantify the national security costs of securing energy supplies. It did not attempt to quantify the land-use costs of biofuels. It didn't attempt to quantify the costs of mercury pollution, which as Bill Chameides documents, are substantial. It didn't attempt to quantify the impact on taxpayers that subsidies to the coal industry impose.

So a huge chunk of costs were written out, meaning the results are extremely small-c conservative. Nonetheless, the NRC found that hidden costs amounted to $120 billion in 2005.

Of that $120 billion, a whopping $62 billion—over half—came from one source: coal-fired electricity plants. And that's only a partial accounting, as Ken Ward Jr. reports:

Maureen L. Cropper, a panel member and professor of economics at the University of Maryland, noted that the study also did not examine "upstream" costs of coal-fired power—such as damage from mountaintop removal mining— or "harm to ecosystems" from other impacts, such as disposal of toxic power plant ash.

If MTR mining, ash disposal, mercury emissions, market-distorting subsidies, and climate damage were taken into account, how much farther do you think coal's costs would rise, in both absolute and relative terms?

Remember this report the next time you hear that "coal is cheap."