Ross Douthat and the Fight Against Cap-and-Trade
Ross Douthat has a column in today’s New York Times in which he kindly mentions me, but far more important, manages to make a multi-layered argument for why an informed rational observer should oppose cap-and-trade legislation within the length restrictions of an op-ed. In my view, the position that Ross presents – basically, that the cure is worse than the disease – is the rationally persuasive argument that won the day in recent legislative debates in the Congress.
I believe the debate and politics of this issue have, so far, played out along lines I set forth a couple of years ago. That doesn’t mean, however, that the debate is permanently settled. Nothing in American politics ever is, and the attempt to introduce cap-and-trade through legislation, regulation and/or judicial rulings is likely to continue for many years.
Jim, I think Chet is making a really strong point there at the end. Would you argue that best-guess climate and non-climate carbon costs should not be somehow incorporated into current energy market prices (particularly when doing so would make potential solutions more viable)? Is it just a question of finding a viable way to offset the economic burden of additional taxes?
— Walker Frost · Jul 26, 07:31 AM · #
I will echo Chet on two points: one, saying that the cap and trade bill was killed due to rational discussion is pure fantasy, and I’m frankly agog that I read that sentence here. Second, Bjorn Lomborg’s work should be permanently excised from this debate, because it has been ruthlessly but fairly debunked, in a way that I can’t see anyone seriously questioning. I cannot tell you how damaging it is to our national discussion on this issue to see people like Douthat, and through extension, yourself, continuing to champion Lomborg. If you want to be seen as an evidence-based climate change skeptic, you need to call intellectual frauds like Lomborg for what they are.
More generally, you know, this grand idea of conservatives and libertarians, that the sole vehicle for positive change is growth, that we’ve got to do everything we can to maximize it and nothing else, and that this will deliver all the world needs to its people, most importantly, the needy and poor…. It really approaches religiosity, the right’s obessive belief in the pursuit of growth.
Which, you know, is weird, as we’ve just lived through a major economic event that left us in dire straits and seriously undermined our economic security, but which was created and fueled by a period of incredible economic growth. But this, of course, was merely a blip, or so they tell me.
That’s the big bet, that growth is going to continue unabated and that growth and growth alone will solve our problems. And you better be right….
— Come Back Zinc! · Jul 26, 09:55 AM · #
Hey Zinc, I wasn’t aware Lomborg had been debunked. If you can you provide some links I’d be grateful…
(and I really do love the handle. “You asked to live in a world without zinc, Timmy!)
— Ben A · Jul 26, 11:31 AM · #
Answering my own question…
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/02/21/book-review-the-lomborg-deception.html
— Ben A · Jul 26, 12:45 PM · #
Thanks for that link, Ben A & Chet.
I had no idea. Lomborg appears to be the Michael Bellesiles of the right.
The difference, of course, is that Bellesiles was forced to resign his professorship and is never cited by anyone on the left; whereas Lomborg can still be cited by right-wing writers everywhere, up to and including the New York Times. This is because the left, in the US today, is interested in how policies affect the world, while the right in the US today is concerned with its own version of political correctness.
— Elvis Elvisberg · Jul 26, 12:50 PM · #
“The difference, of course, is that Bellesiles was forced to resign his professorship and is never cited by anyone on the left”
Well, I can’t provide a cite by anyone on the left, but wasn’t the truthfulness of an article written by him brought into question within the past week?
— RSF677 · Jul 26, 03:56 PM · #
I’d probably support some kind of cap and trade if I had any confidence it would work. Even with perfect execution it’s unlikely to avert the catastrophe, no?
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jul 26, 04:49 PM · #
That’s true but incomplete. Without the US, nobody will act. But it doesn’t seem like China wants any part of it, regardless of what we do. And even in the US it’d be messy. We’re not going to get the filet mignon cap and trade; we’re going to get the sausage.
So it’s a dilemma. It’s a problem with a remote but cognizable chance of catastrophe. We have to do something first or no one will; if it gets done it probably won’t get done well enough to succeed; either way, we bear the brunt of the cost (though we bear the brunt of the blame) and China remains a Wild Card/system clincher who doesn’t want to play.
You know, I’d really like to see us get out of recession before anything happens. And this is even before I get to the hard reasons why our data, predictions, and ability to cure global climate are suspect at a fundamental level.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jul 26, 05:18 PM · #
I guess you missed the part where I was an astrophysicist and fractal geometrist before I was a philosopher of science/mind before I was a lawyer. I was real busy-like in my teens and twenties; one of those accelerated kids.
And where did you get the idea that I wanted to talk about Republicans?
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jul 26, 05:39 PM · #
Let’s assume it’s not true. Let’s assume, rather, that you and I are making out in front of three Bangladeshi judges.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jul 26, 05:57 PM · #
I just want to point out that Jim wrote that the anti-cap-and-trade argument cited by Douthat “is the rationally persuasive argument that won the day in recent legislative debates in the Congress.” He doesn’t say rational persuasion was the means for that outcome. So settle down, Chet.
— Matt Feeney · Jul 26, 06:46 PM · #
Ross Douthat has a long way to go if he’s trying to equal david brooks in whiny-liberal conservatism, but he does make some good points. The more hysterical cries of concern regarding overpopulation and food shortages never materialized, due in part to technological advances in food production. On the other hand, many things environmentalists were concerned about in the 1970s (the spread of toxics throughout the globe; rapacious devouring of resources; yes, climate change) have followed more or less precisely the pace they were predicted to follow.
Now, the global ecosphere is a good bit bigger than the national ecosphere, and so it’s unsurprising that it’s taken somewhat longer for the cumulative effects of human consumption to manifest themselves there; but manifest they have. Toxics in antarctica, persistent pollutants accumulating in higher marine mammals; garbage in the oceans; yes, climate change. The reason we Americans don’t notice is because we Americans passed some spectacularly successful legislation protecting our health and environment in the 1970s, such as the clean air act, the clean water act, the endangered species act. In the span of decades we cleaned up our air. Water is a bit harder, largely due to a lack of resources for enforcement. Back then (Oh, Nixon…) we could still think clearly, could still take care of ourselves.
Ross Douthat acts as though the problems that were predicted never came to pass, but in fact they have. He’s just blind to them. I agree with Chet- It’s foolish to continue to talk about “the remote possibility” of climate change. It is here. America is an addict and the Congress is its dealer. It’s a tired cliche but it’s true- we’ll do anything to keep getting our cheap energy, to avoid the difficult task of changing our lives. there is precisely one narrative in America’s recent history, and that is addiction to excess coupled with a lack of willpower for restraint.
Oh, and Dr. Sargent? We’ve all been fractal geometrists after a night on the bong. get over yourself.
— Brandon K · Jul 26, 07:04 PM · #
Walker:
I ried to address this question (or least something very close to it) in this post a couple of years ago.
KVS:
Even having never seen either you or your esteemed interlocutor, that’s about the most horrifying image ever.
— Jim Manzi · Jul 26, 07:42 PM · #
Chet, I repeat: To say that “a rationally persuasive argument won the day” is not to say that rational persuasion was the means for the victory. An irrational person could reject a rationally persuasive argument and then sign off on it if I gave him, say, money or, depending on how irrational he was, a handful of colorful pebbles. The argument would remain rationally persuasive, and yet it wouldn’t have been rational persuasion that won his assent. I took Jim’s formulation to be making precisely this distinction.
BTW, I’m keen to see some examples of me denying the plain meaning of words. I’m not saying I don’t do this, only that I’m hoping the examples you adduce are fun ones.
— Matt Feeney · Jul 26, 09:38 PM · #
And if we refer to “the beautiful blond woman who won the race on Saturday”, does that imply that she won the race BECAUSE she was beautiful and blond?
— John Schwenkler · Jul 26, 10:58 PM · #
“Thanks for that link, Ben A & Chet.
I had no idea. Lomborg appears to be the Michael Bellesiles of the right.”
So what you guys are saying is that Lomborg is just as much a sloppy, partisan hack, playing fast and loose with the facts, as you three are doing in this comment thread.
That’s a serious allegation, indeed.
— The Reticulator · Jul 26, 11:06 PM · #
I would like to ask Jim Manzi a question (forgive me if this has been discussed already): Given that some climate models predict a low probability chance that temperatures will rise so quickly as to render much of the earth uninhabitable for humans within 100 years, can he at least appreciate the sense of alarm that some people, like myself, have about recent climactic history? Shouldn’t the existential danger, even if it is the most remote possibility, compel one to act to prevent it?
— Bradley Cooke · Jul 26, 11:23 PM · #
John Schwenkler,
Please link to said race, preferably through a Google image search, and let the combox community be the judge.
— warren oates · Jul 27, 12:07 AM · #
Look, Chet, simply saying “yes it does” repeatedly and “words have meaning” and using italics leaves a lot of things unproven. “A rationally persuasive argument won the day” is close to but not identical with “the day was won by rational persuasion“ or simply “rational persuasion won the day.” And, indeed, one can be excused for thinking the two, at a quick glance, to have the same meaning. But it is not merely sophism or denying that words have meaning to insist on the distinction signaled by the indefinite article. Without the indefinite article, the reference is clearly to both an act of persuasion and the subjective process of being persuaded (rationally, i.e. sincerely, with reasons and not force or etc). With the indefinite article, the reference could, similarly, be to a self-enclosed process of whereby rational arguments effect rational assent, or it could be to a discrete proposition (or series of propositions) with no prejudice as to the subjective state of the people whose minds, or at least whose votes, have changed. I’m not just wanking here, buying time til you fall asleep or lose interest. Nor am I arguing for ambiguity to further the nefarious sophistic meaning-of-words-denying designs you’re trying to pin on me. I’m saying it serves the comment thread best if, faced with the fact that words and phrases sometimes have more than one meaning, you impute the more reasonable one to the person you’re arguing against. That way you don’t waste so much energy and excitement trumpeting the probably unsound discovery that Jim Manzi doesn’t know what Congress is, or does. Now, if Jim wants to step in and say that he believes Congress to incarnate the ideal speech situation, I will gladly retract my defense of him.
— Matt Feeney · Jul 27, 12:13 AM · #
“The more hysterical cries of concern regarding overpopulation and food shortages never materialized, due in part to technological advances in food production.”
Global warming is the result of “over” population. Global warming is caused by individual people each contributing to the total amount of greenhouse gasses emited. If we didn’t have so many people, global warming wouldn’t be a problem. And food shortages due to global warming are a reasonable posibility. So were warnings really hysterical? Or did we just forget about overpopulation when it didn’t happen within our collective 2 week attention span?
On a tangent that somehow seems related (but I’m too tired to figure out how) the fact that global wraming is an unforseen consequence of industrialization (and consequentially, population growth) is an example of what worries me about global warming. I’ve said it a bunch of times before but there are bound to be unforseen consequnces to global warming, things no one can even imagine, just like no one imagined global warming even as recently as 2 or 3 decasdes ago, much less during the infancy of the industrial revolution. And here we are in the infancy of global warming, our imaginations just as inadequate.
Another good example of the unforseen sins of the fathers is slavery. Did the founding fathers imagine the civil war when they compromised on slavery in order to secure the support of the slave states? Maybe some did, but I imagine most thought moving forward without the slave states would cost too much.
— cw · Jul 27, 12:47 AM · #
Chet, if, after what I’ve written, you’re describing “rational persuasion” as a “tactic” but not even bothering to defend this usage against my clearly contrary usage, then you misunderstood what I wrote about rational persuasion, and the argument is sailing past the key disagreement. We might as well just agree that you think Jim Manzi is a liar. Now there’s a great starting point for further discussion!
— Matt Feeney · Jul 27, 01:29 AM · #
“I ried to address this question (or least something very close to it) in this post a couple of years ago.”
That is a good article. I’m sorry I missed it back in May. I’ve been a long-time proponent of a netzero petroleum tax, but you’ve given me something to chew on.
— The Reticulator · Jul 27, 02:28 AM · #
like it
— home medical equipment · Jul 27, 03:08 AM · #
Reticulator,
Thanks.
Matt / John:
Thanks, and you are of course correct about my assertion of meaning. Chet is, unfortunately, the only TAS commented that I ever just decided (as of maybe a year ago) to simply ignore – always.
Bradley,
I’ve written some about this precise topic. See, for example this: http://theamericanscene.com/2010/04/20/krugman-on-climate-iii-resorting-to-pascal-s-wager
— Jim Manzi · Jul 27, 04:10 AM · #
Chet,
Please stop asserting that contributors here are arguing in bad faith. It is utterly pointless.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Jul 27, 06:06 AM · #
KenB put together this script which filters out Chet’s comments.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/55304
— Ben A · Jul 27, 07:48 AM · #
Jim Manzi wrote:
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/conservatives-climate-change-and-the-carbon-tax
The New Atlantis: Journal of Technology and Society
“Consider that if the legendary sellers of Manhattan Island had put $28 in an account with a 4 percent real interest rate in 1626, they would have enough money in the bank today to buy back all the land in Manhattan. Albert Einstein supposedly said that “the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest” — and this mathematical reality is central to the wise evaluation of plans to address the risk of climate change.”
$ = 28 x e.04 × 384 = $1.3 E8.
Is the total value of Manhattan island only 138 million??
Mr. Manzi doesn’t know basic arithmetic
Michael Caplow
— Michael Caplow · Jul 27, 09:14 AM · #
Michael Caplow,
I think you ignored the word “real” in reference to the “real interest rate”. I’m pretty confident that I know basic arithmetic.
— Jim Manzi · Jul 27, 09:43 AM · #
Isn’t it at least somewhat relevant that several commenters have to circle the wagons in Dr. Manzi’s defense and come up with all of this hairsplitting in order to defend his statement?
— Come Back Zinc! · Jul 27, 10:08 AM · #
The real interest rate is the growth rate of purchasing power derived from an investment. By adjusting the nominal interest rate to compensate for inflation, you are keeping the purchasing power of a given level of capital constant over time.
For example, if you are earning 4% interest per year on the savings in your bank account, and inflation is currently 3% per year, then the real interest rate you are receiving is 1% (4% – 3% = 1%). The real value of your savings will only increase by 1% per year, when purchasing power is taken into consideration.
I suggest that in the example given above and during the period since 1626 the real interest rate is less than the nominal rate; therefore, my calculation overestimates the value of Manhattan island.
— Michael Caplow · Jul 27, 10:43 AM · #
“Shouldn’t the existential danger, even if it is the most remote possibility, compel one to act to prevent it?”
I had to look up the term “existential danger” to learn why you used it.
But now that I know about it, I’ll point out that giving governments the power to regulate in cap-and-trade fashion poses an existential danger that is even more likely. Growing the government in that fashion would increase the power of government, and power corrupts. It corrupts popes and puritans, Whigs and Democrats, and creates Hitlers, Stalins, and the bland authoritarian leadership of the EU. That’s a likelihood, not a remote possibility.
And the damage done by such corrupt power is not easily reversed. Look at the effect it has had on the Soviet empire, or even on the German state. In fact, Democrats know full well that their policies pose an existential danger to America; that’s why they forced ObamaCare through against the will of the people. They know how irreversible such actions tend to be.
— The Reticulator · Jul 27, 12:09 PM · #
Jim, the analysis you did a couple of years ago — recapped in your latest pieces — remains the most cogent and sane I’ve found opposing carbon regulation/taxation/C&T.
But I think the folks at New Republic (among others) have raised formidable objections that — if incorporated into your thinking — would put you on the other side of the issue.
I’ve summarized them, and added a couple of my own, here:
http://www.asymptosis.com/the-best-argument-against-climate-legislation-and-the-best-answers.html
Shifting our tax base from income/work/profits to a carbon tax (which is essentially a consumption tax, and pigovian at that) is exactly the kind of thing that smart economic thinkers should be in favor of.
— Steve Roth · Jul 27, 01:04 PM · #
Michael Caplow,
Sorry, but you have that exactly backwards.
— Jim Manzi · Jul 27, 04:40 PM · #
Steve,
Thanks for the compliments, and I read your post.
I think I have incorporated and addressed most of the arguments that you cite in detail (I guess you’ll have to judge how well!).
On the argument that we can swap taxes, see:http://theamericanscene.com/2007/12/05/coase-club
On the argument that the global poor get hosed, please see: http://theamericanscene.com/2009/06/30/money-is-not-the-measure-of-all-things
— Jim Manzi · Jul 27, 04:46 PM · #
Wow, this is the first time I’ve ever learned something from Chet, and after he’s apparently been banned. Thanks for the cite to the Lomborg Deception, Ben — I hadn’t known about that.
— J Mann · Jul 28, 11:40 AM · #
I just read Lomborg’s response to the Lomborg deception and Friel’s response to that response, and all I can say is that I’m thoroughly confused.
— J Mann · Jul 28, 12:06 PM · #