[Zagadka]

Some people seem to approach every issue as "all or nothing"...

I think I've already been over this in this thread (there are so many duplicates of this argument), but just the measures taken in Los Angeles between the 70s and today make for a far, far better city without going to the stone age. It is possible to mitigate impact significantly and create a better environment to live in, global warming or not.

[Pants-of-dog]

We could all abandon our cars, turn off our AC and start living like we were in the 19th century. You first!

I use neither a car nor air conditioning.

So, now that I have done it, so can you.

Unless you use a wheelchair and live in an area without decent public transportation, cars are unnecessary.

A/C can be made unnecessary by simply adding more thermal mass to the building envelope, which would absorb heat during the day and give off heat at night.

In the end, though, Zagadka has the best point. Even if global warming is a hoax, we should still clean our natural environment by polluting significantly less.

[Sivad]

Some people seem to approach every issue as "all or nothing"...

I think I've already been over this in this thread (there are so many duplicates of this argument), but just the measures taken in Los Angeles between the 70s and today make for a far, far better city without going to the stone age. It is possible to mitigate impact significantly and create a better environment to live in, global warming or not.

So why are liberal elites so fixated on carbon pricing? There are far more direct and effective measures that make much more sense, global warming or not, which aren't highly regressive tax schemes that shift the burden off of those who have been profiting wildly from the carbon economy and onto poor and working class people. What do you think is going on with that?

[Pants-of-dog]

So why are liberal elites so fixated on carbon pricing? There are far more direct and effective measures that make much more sense, global warming or not, which aren't highly regressive tax schemes that shift the burden off of those who have been profiting wildly from the carbon economy and onto poor and working class people. What do you think is going on with that?

Capitalism.

In capitalist societies, no one does anything unless they can profit. This is the only way that the rich can currently profit off global warming.

[Suntzu]

I use neither a car nor air conditioning.

So, now that I have done it, so can you.

Unless you use a wheelchair and live in an area without decent public transportation, cars are unnecessary.

A/C can be made unnecessary by simply adding more thermal mass to the building envelope, which would absorb heat during the day and give off heat at night.

In the end, though, Zagadka has the best point. Even if global warming is a hoax, we should still clean our natural environment by polluting significantly less.

I live in an area with no public transportation. It is also hotter than hell here, so air conditioning is bordering on being a necessity. I'll turn off my AC if you turn off the heat.

[Pants-of-dog]

I live in an area with no public transportation. It is also hotter than hell here, so air conditioning is bordering on being a necessity. I'll turn off my AC if you turn off the heat.

I don’t actually care.

I was pointing out that your attempts to shut down debate by demanding some weird standard is hypocritical at best and irrelevant for judging the veracity of a claim.

Also, you do not need a vehicle if you are capable of riding a bicycle. Most adults can do this. And the Pueblo Indians created a whole town that used thermal mass as a way of regulating indoor heat without a/c. Are you somehow incapable of attaining a level of building performance equal to or better than indigenous people using stone age technology?

[Zagadka]

Trump administration releases report finding ‘no convincing alternative explanation’ for climate change
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ene ... te-change/

The Trump administration released a dire scientific report Friday detailing the growing threats of climate change. The report stands in stark contrast to the administration’s efforts to downplay humans’ role in global warming, withdraw from an international climate accord and reverse Obama-era policies aimed at curbing America’s greenhouse-gas output.

The White House did not seek to prevent the release of the government’s National Climate Assessment, which is mandated by law, despite the fact that its findings sharply contradict the administration’s policies. The report affirms that climate change is driven almost entirely by human action, warns of potential sea level rise as high as 8 feet by the year 2100, and enumerates myriad climate-related damages across the United States that are already occurring due to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming since 1900.

“It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” the document reports. “For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”

The report’s release underscores the extent to which the machinery of the federal scientific establishment, operating in multiple agencies across the government, continues to grind on even as top administration officials have minimized or disparaged its findings. Federal scientists have continued to author papers and issue reports on climate change, for example, even as political appointees have altered the wording of news releases or blocked civil servants from speaking about their conclusions in public forums. The climate assessment process is dictated by a 1990 law that Democratic and Republican administrations have followed.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and President Trump have all questioned the extent of humans’ contribution to climate change. One of EPA’s Web pages posted scientific conclusions similar to those in the new report until earlier this year, when Pruitt’s deputies ordered it removed.

The report comes as President Trump and members of his Cabinet are working to promote U.S. fossil fuel production and repeal several federal rules aimed at curbing the nation’s carbon output, including ones limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from existing power plants, oil and gas operations on federal land and carbon emissions from cars and trucks. Trump has also announced he will exit the Paris climate agreement, under which the United States has pledged to cut its overall greenhouse-gas emissions between 26 percent and 28 percent compared to 2005 levels by 2025.

[Scott Pruitt blocks scientists with EPA grants from serving as agency advisers]

The report could have considerable legal and policy significance, as the scientific matter provides new and stronger support for EPA’s greenhouse gas “endangerment finding” under the Clean Air Act, which lays the foundation for regulations on emissions.

“This is a federal government report whose contents completely undercut their policies, completely undercut the statements made by senior members of the administration,” said Phil Duffy, the director of the Woods Hole Research Center.

The government is required to produce the National Assessment every four years. This time, the report is split into two documents, one that lays out the fundamental science of climate change and the other that shows how the United States is being impacted on a regional basis. Combined, the two documents total over 2,000 pages.

The first document, called the Climate Science Special Report, is now a finalized report, having been peer reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences and vetted by experts across government agencies. It was formally unveiled Friday.

“I think this report is basically the most comprehensive climate science report in the world right now,” said Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers who is an expert on sea-level rise and served as one of the report’s lead authors.

It affirms that the U.S. is already experiencing more extreme heat and rainfall events and more large wildfires in the West, that more than 25 U.S. coastal cities are already experiencing more flooding, and that seas could rise by between 1 and 4 feet by the year 2100, and perhaps even more than that if Antarctica proves to be unstable, as is feared. The report says that a rise of over 8 feet is “physically possible” with high levels of greenhouse-gas emissions, but there’s no way right now to predict how likely it is to happen.

When it comes to rapidly escalating levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the report states, “there is no climate analog for this century at any time in at least the last 50 million years.”

Most striking, perhaps, the report warns of the unpredictable — changes that scientists cannot foresee that could involve tipping points or fast changes in the climate system. These could switch the climate into “new states that are very different from those experienced in the recent past.”

Given these strong statements — and how they contradict Trump administration statements and policies — some members of the scientific community had speculated that the administration might refuse to publish the report or alter its conclusions. During the last Republican presidential administration, that of George W. Bush, the national assessment process was highly controversial, and a senior official at the White House Council on Environmental Quality edited aspects of some government science reports.

Yet multiple experts, as well as some administration officials and federal scientists, said that Trump political appointees did not change the special report’s scientific conclusions. While some edits have been made to its final version — for instance, omitting or softening some references to the Paris climate agreement — those are focused on policy.

A senior administration official, who asked for anonymity because the process is still underway, said in an interview that top Trump officials decided to put out the assessment without changing the findings of its contributors even if some appointees may have different views.

A federal scientist involved in writing the report, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said that political appointees made no effort to change the scientific findings after being briefed on them.

Glynis Lough, who is deputy director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists and had served as chief of staff for the National Climate Assessment at the U.S. Global Change Research Program until mid-2016, said in an interview that the changes made by government officials to the latest report “are consistent with the types of changes that were made in the previous administration for the 2014 National Climate Assessment, to avoid policy prescriptiveness.”

Perhaps no agency under Trump has tried to downplay and undermine climate science more than the EPA. Most recently, political appointees at the EPA instructed two agency scientists and one contractor not to speak as planned at a scientific conference in Rhode Island. The conference marked the culmination of a three-year report on the status of Narragansett Bay, New England’s largest estuary, in which climate change featured prominently.

[EPA removes climate pages from public view after two decades]

The EPA also has altered parts of its website containing detailed climate data and scientific information. As part of that overhaul, in April the agency took down pages that had existed for years and contained a wealth of information on the scientific causes of global warming, its consequences and ways for communities to mitigate or adapt. The agency said it was simply making changes to better reflect the new administration’s priorities, and that any pages taken down would be archived.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has repeatedly advocated for the creation of a governmentwide “red team/blue team” exercise, in which a group of outside critics would challenge the validity of mainstream scientific conclusions around climate change.

Other departments have also removed climate change documents online: Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, for example, no longer provides access to documents assessing the danger that future warming poses to deserts in the Southwest.

And when U.S. Geological Survey scientists working with international researchers published an article in the journal Nature evaluating how climate change and human population growth would affect where rain-fed agriculture could thrive, USGS published a news release that omitted the words “climate change” altogether.

The Agriculture Department’s climate hubs, however, remain freely available online. And researchers at the U.S. Forest Service have continued to publish papers this year on how climate change is affecting wildfires, wetlands and aquatic habitat across the country.

While the Trump administration has not altered the new climate science report substantially, it is already coming under fire from some of the administration’s allies.

The day before it was published, Steven Koonin, a New York University physicist who has met with EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and advocated for the “red team/blue team” exercise, pre-emptively criticized the document in the Wall Street Journal, calling it “deceptive.”

Koonin argued that the report “ominously notes that while global sea level rose an average 0.05 inch a year during most of the 20th century, it has risen at about twice that rate since 1993. But it fails to mention that the rate fluctuated by comparable amounts several times during the 20th century.”

But one of the report’s authors suggested Koonin is creating a straw man. “The report does not state that the rate since 1993 is the fastest than during any comparable period since 1900 (though in my informal assessment it likely is), which is the non-statement Steve seems to be objecting to,” Kopp countered by email.

Still, the line of criticism could be amplified by conservatives in the coming days.

Meanwhile, the administration also released, in draft form, the longer volume 2 of the National Climate Assessment, which looks at regional impacts across the United States. This document is not final, but is now available for public comment and will itself now begin a peer review process, with final publication expected in late 2018.

Already, however, it is possible to discern some of what it will conclude. For instance, a peer reviewed Environmental Protection Agency technical document released to inform the assessment finds that the monetary costs of climate change in the U.S. could be dramatic.

That document, dubbed the Climate Change Impacts and Risk Analysis, finds that in a high end warming scenario, high temperatures could lead to the loss per year of “almost 1.9 billion labor hours across the national workforce” by 2090. That would mean $ 160 billion annually in lost income to workers.

With high levels of warming, coastal property damages in 2090 could total another $ 120 billion annually, and deaths from temperature extremes could reach 9,300 per year, or in monetized terms, $ 140 billion annually in damages. Additional tens of billions annually could occur in the form of damages to roads, rail lines, and electrical infrastructure, the report finds.

This could all be lessened considerably, the report notes, if warming is held to lower levels.

Bolding mine.

Someone's gonna get fired...

[Atlantis]

I'll turn off my AC if you turn off the heat.

The last laugh will be on you. I set aside a couple of weeks each year to make fire wood from trees that would otherwise produce emissions due to decomposition. I also get by without AC during the summer at 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) because the traditional rammed Earth architecture of this region keeps you warm in winter and cool in summer.

[Suntzu]

You are cutting down trees!

[Hindsite]

Trump administration releases report finding ‘no convincing alternative explanation’ for climate change
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ene ... te-change/


Bolding mine.

Someone's gonna get fired...

The problem with that bold part is that there were no climate change scientists around 50 million years ago to collect any data. So all that is guessing and made up nonsense.

[Godstud]

If you don't know what science is, Hindsite, then STFU.

Edit for typo.. Thank's blackjack21. You make a great editor, but little else.

[Hindsite]

If you don't what science is, Hindsite, then STFU.

Well, I do know that science is not guessing and making up stuff. Praise the Lord.

[Ter]

I also get by without AC during the summer at 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) because the traditional rammed Earth architecture of this region keeps you warm in winter and cool in summer.

What region might that be?
Dry heat is less uncomfortable than humid heat but still, 40 degrees Celsius is very high. Too high to live without AC if you can afford it.

[Godstud]

Well, I do know that science is not guessing and making up stuff.

The evidence is overwhelming. It's not guessing. You are the one "guessing", since science is based on evidence and facts, not simply "guessing". Your ignorance of science is very telling.

Global warming? Quite factual.
Is It Happening?
Yes. Earth is already showing many signs of worldwide climate change.

• Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880, much of this in recent decades, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

• The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century's last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia, according to a number of climate studies. And the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that 11 of the past 12 years are among the dozen warmest since 1850.

• The Arctic is feeling the effects the most. Average temperatures in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia have risen at twice the global average, according to the multinational Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report compiled between 2000 and 2004.

• Arctic ice is rapidly disappearing, and the region may have its first completely ice-free summer by 2040 or earlier. Polar bears and indigenous cultures are already suffering from the sea-ice loss.

• Glaciers and mountain snows are rapidly melting—for example, Montana's Glacier National Park now has only 27 glaciers, versus 150 in 1910. In the Northern Hemisphere, thaws also come a week earlier in spring and freezes begin a week later.

• Coral reefs, which are highly sensitive to small changes in water temperature, suffered the worst bleaching—or die-off in response to stress—ever recorded in 1998, with some areas seeing bleach rates of 70 percent. Experts expect these sorts of events to increase in frequency and intensity in the next 50 years as sea temperatures rise.

• An upsurge in the amount of extreme weather events, such as wildfires, heat waves, and strong tropical storms, is also attributed in part to climate change by some experts.

Are humans causing it?
• "Very likely," the IPCC said in a February 2007 report.

The report, based on the work of some 2,500 scientists in more than 130 countries, concluded that humans have caused all or most of the current planetary warming. Human-caused global warming is often called anthropogenic climate change.

• Industrialization, deforestation, and pollution have greatly increased atmospheric concentrations of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, all greenhouse gases that help trap heat near Earth's surface. (See an interactive feature on how global warming works.)

• Humans are pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere much faster than plants and oceans can absorb it.

• These gases persist in the atmosphere for years, meaning that even if such emissions were eliminated today, it would not immediately stop global warming.

• Some experts point out that natural cycles in Earth's orbit can alter the planet's exposure to sunlight, which may explain the current trend. Earth has indeed experienced warming and cooling cycles roughly every hundred thousand years due to these orbital shifts, but such changes have occurred over the span of several centuries. Today's changes have taken place over the past hundred years or less.

• Other recent research has suggested that the effects of variations in the sun's output are "negligible" as a factor in warming, but other, more complicated solar mechanisms could possibly play a role.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/new ... rming.html

[blackjack21]

And I would love to see the developing world be able to defend itself from the US with WMDs.

Nuclear war would be one way to reduce the carbon footprint... What about cannibalism?

Climate change is only a minor problem if you are an uneducated moron.

Well that's good news for Thailand then isn't it?

If you don't what science is, Hindsite, then STFU.

? Did you omit "know"?

Well, I do know that science is not guessing and making up stuff. Praise the Lord.

Well, I guess you could decipher what he meant. Praise the Lord!

[Godstud]

Wow. True to form, Blackjack21, you talk only about typos and irrelevant things. You should be an editor, but not doing the editorials, as you only bring up the inane, and have no arguments.

[Vlerchan]

So why are liberal elites so fixated on carbon pricing? There are far more direct and effective measures that make much more sense, global warming or not, which aren't highly regressive tax schemes that shift the burden off of those who have been profiting wildly from the carbon economy and onto poor and working class people. What do you think is going on with that?

Carbon pricing hasn't been much in the vogue for a long time now. These more-or-less invite regulatory capture with respect to the number of permits issued.

Nevertheless, to answer your question, the reason it's superior to tax carbon, as opposed to regulate it, is that it leaves firms with the singular incentive to arrange their affairs in such a manner that carbon emissions are reduced. Command-and-control regulations, on the other hand, tend to be inefficient because they render the accompanying incentive to arrange your affairs as to be in formal compliance with regulation, with a reduced impact on your carbon-use decision*. Where the former system would induce investment in green technologies, the latter would induce investment in clever lawyers and economic consultants, esp. where monitoring is incomplete.

The taxation is regressive, of course. But then I also suggest it be redistributed to the poor, preferably in the form of green public goods, like public transport, or dense, inner-city social housing. Or, if one insists, expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit or some other form of tax rebate for working class people.

---

* Both cases suffer from carbon offshoring, though.

[Sivad]

Carbon pricing hasn't been much in the vogue for a long time now.

What? Where are you getting that from?

Nevertheless, to answer your question, the reason it's superior to tax carbon, as opposed to regulate it, is that it leaves firms with the singular incentive to arrange their affairs in such a manner that carbon emissions are reduced. Command-and-control regulations, on the other hand, tend to be inefficient because they render the accompanying incentive to arrange your affairs as to be in formal compliance with regulation, with a reduced impact on your carbon-use decision

Both are terrible. There are much better ways of addressing the issue.

The taxation is regressive, of course. But then I also suggest it be redistributed to the poor, preferably in the form of green public goods, like public transport, or dense, inner-city social housing. Or, if one insists, expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit or some other form of tax rebate for working class people.

The direct tax to individuals isn't really the problem, it's the indirect tax that will be passed along through prices as a cost of living increase.

[Vlerchan]

What? Where are you getting that from?

I meet very few proponents of cap-and-trade over straight carbon taxation, even if cap-and-trade might be the first-best solutions it seems to be rather widely recognized that regulatory capture nullifies any appeal it once had. Perhaps we're residing in two separate information bubbles but that's the impression I have gotten.

Looking at what's being proposed politically there seems to be a pretty uniform movement towards carbon taxation over cap-and-trade.

Both are terrible. There are much better ways of addressing the issue.

What would you propose, out of interest.

The direct tax to individuals isn't really the problem, it's the indirect tax that will be passed along through prices as a cost of living increase.

There will be pass-through of this tax from producers to consumers. That's a large part of the basis of the tax's regressiveness.

But the sum of the taxation absorbed by firms through lost profits, and absorbed by consumers through an increase in the price level, will sum to the complete value of all taxation revenue (and since the taxation is Pigouvian no deadweight loss either!). With complete, lump-sum redistribution to consumers we would expect the consumer to be at least as well off - and, under conditions where firms can't pass-on the full value of the tax, better off*.

I have also been talking about consumers as a whole. If revenue is completely redistributed towards just working class people we'd see a rise in the standard of living - not a fall.

---

* The only conditions where consumers would not benefit in this scenario is if there was a single perfect monopolist supplying energy and demand for energy was perfectly inelastic (both untrue): under such conditions, we would expect perfect pass-through. But to state the obvious, those conditions don't exist.

[mikema63]

An interesting thing to add here was an idea considered by the Hillary campaign that they didn't end up proposing but is interesting nonetheless was a carbon tax whose proceeds would be redistributed as a basic income (in typically unimaginative Hillary fashion called Alaska for america or some such).

It also seems to suggest that vlerchan's observation that carbon taxation is what we are moving towards to be true. It's also an observation I've had running around in democratic political circles.