re: #48 garhighway

Is this the carbon industry’s fall-back position? “Yeah, we’re fucking up the planet, but there’s really nothing practical you can do about it, so leave us alone.”

There’s nowhere left to hide on the question of whether or not AGW is real and substantial, whether or not, as time goes by and CO2 atmospheric levels rise, temperatures will rise more.

Harping on the “uncertainty” in the forecast is a losing game; as the facts trot into the stadium to do their I told you so victory lap, the forecasts are, one after the other, proving to have been, if anything, conservative.

Uncertainty cuts both ways, and if the forecasts are uncertain, that means not only that things might not turn out as bad as they’re saying, but that things might just as well turn out substantially worse.

If you can’t argue the problem away, what to say? Argue the solution away. Argue that there’s nothing we can do. Argue that money spent addressing AGW is money taken from

(i) union benefits [if you’re talking to a union leader]
(ii) tax receipts, [if you’re talking to a Democrat]
(iii) dividends, [if you’re talking to a Republican]
(iv) medicare, [if you’e talking to an old person]
(v) charity, [if you’re talking to a philanthropist]

And so forth. Every cost of addressing AGW can spawn a dozen costs in the imaginations of your audience.

Argue that the cost will be insanely high.

Argue that the discount rate applied to future costs should be 7 percent per year. (This is totally insane. At 3 percent per year, running discount rates backward 2400 years, we’d conclude that one drachma, [basically, the wages of one man-day, or roughly $50 U.S. 2011], invested by a Greek then, would have grown to 3*10 to the power 32 dollars today. That’s 6.7 times 10^27 kg of gold. That’s a cube of gold 70 thousand kilometers on a side. In other words, it weighs more than Jupiter. The deep future cannot be discounted at 3 percent, or 1 percent, or 1/2 of one percent.)

Argue that we will have godlike powers shortly, and needn’t worry about anything because we can simply put up e.g. space shields and deflect the sun’s heat. (This is totally insane. Things may get to the point where we must attempt such measures. But even if they work, will our civilization stand for fifty thousand years?)

Argue that the warming would be good for Nome, AK. (Yeah, maybe so. Until it’s flooded. But so what?) And so on and so forth.

One of the answers to all this is that no, it’s not insanely expensive to adjust. Right now, we can produce electricity from wind power at a cost that, while higher than coal fired electricity, is bearable. Civilization would hold up.

Another answer is that we should push hard with R&D. One or two more doublings of the efficiency of alternative energy, and it wins flat out. It becomes cheaper than coal-fired electricity. Hit that target, and the whole debate just evaporates.

A multi-trillion dollar crash project to convert much of our energy infrastructure to alternative energy is probably not the best course. We’re still making progress with the R&D. Best to build some now, and then, as we get better, build more, and build it better and cheaper. Repeat until we’ve got the problem corralled.