Cap and Trade or Carbon Tax?

As we wind our way toward Copenhagen, debate about climate change policy has intensified. Particularly interesting is the US debate, where a seemingly trivial administrative ruling is having tremendous implications. Back in the Bush years, the EPA ruled that CO2 was not a pollutant and, hence, could not be regulated by the EPA. In April, 2009 (following a 2007 Supreme Court ruling) the EPA in the Obama administration ruled CO2 was a pollutant. The implications of this are huge. It means that CO2 emissions are covered under existing legislation and, hence, the EPA can create administrative rules limiting CO2 emissions WITHOUT having to pass legislation through Congress. While there are legal constraints on the types of rules they can come up with under existing law (which mean this probably isn't the best way to go), this gives the Obama administration a really big hammer to use on Congress: do something significant about climage change or the EPA will act unilaterally.

Two EPA lawyers with 20 years of experience dealing with cap and trade legislation, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, have recently inserted themselves into the debate. As the Obama administration moves toward cap and trade legislation in Congress, they are advancing an alternative -- a carbon tax (or, since tax is a bad word in the US, a carbon fee and rebate system). This is a scheme similar to that proposed by Stephen Dion (though that didn't go over very well, did it?) and, increasingly, by thoughtful economists like Nobel winner Joseph Steiglitz, who served as Chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton administration. Their recently posted YouTube video is below. For more info, go to their website.



It is tempting to think of this as just a policy debate. But, at its root, it is an argument about creating social rules to facilitate cooperation. Their basic complaint is that cap and trade, as a big accounting scheme, is subject to all sorts of accounting tricks. This means both that it is ineffective and, equally as significant, that it will be seen as inequitable. Since cooperation depends on trust, this means that, over time, an inequitable cap and trade system may self-destruct. Since there really isn't time to limit emissions by trial and error -- that is to try one policy, see if it works and adjust it if it doesn't -- we need to get the policy right the first time. Stated another way, the policy needs to take account of social theory -- our understanding of processes related to social rules and trust -- as well as economic theory. More about rules and cooperation later.

The Critical Supply of Minerals and Elements for Technology

The guys over at the Oil Drum are obsessed with counting things: how much of anything is left in the ground, etc. The graph posted here is an estimate of how much minerals and elements are left to be mined that are critical to our current technology and how long that supply will last, given current uses. I'm not sure of the date of this information, and I cannot vouch for how accurate it is. But it's certainly a spectacular graph and is at least informative on the types of minerals we use and suggestive of the supplies we need. The graph was posted in a response to a post about an article in the November Scientific American, "A Plan for a Sustainable Future."

Approaches to Complex Systems

In this talk George Francis provides an overview of different approaches to the study of complex adaptive systems. The talk is interesting in that he draws as much on social science theorizing as that developed in the natural sciences. World System Theory, in particular, is discussed at length.

He is also the author of 'Models for Sustainability Emerge in an Open Systems Context,' an article covering much the same ground.

World Development Report 2010 focuses on Climate Change

The most recent World Bank Development Report, WDR 2010, focuses on development and climate change. The main ideas of the report aren't particularly surprising: a) both developed and developing countries need to address emissions now and b) developing countries can shift to lower-carbon paths while promoting development and reducing poverty, but this depends on financial and technical assistance from high-income countries.

However, there are a number of interesting specifics. Among them this map showing the predicted global changes in agricultural productivity. Canada, Northern Europe and Russia are the big winners, with the southern hemisphere suffering substantially.


Another graph compares the emissions savings from more fuel efficient cars in the US with the additional emissions needed to provide 1.6 billion people in developing countries with electricity. Quite a thought provoking comparison.

When the Climate Change Center Cannot Hold | MR Zine

Video of JBF's lecture at the University of Vermont last week.

Geoengineering the Climate

Over the past couple years scientists have expressed renewed interest in geoengineering solutions to climate change, the idea that there is a technological solution to global warming that doesn't require people to modify their actions. So, for example, you dump a bunch of iron into the ocean in order to create an algal bloom which will soak up carbon from the atmosphere. Or, more imaginatively, you mimic the action of volcanos by pumping large quantities of reflective sulphur dust into the Earth's stratosphere through a patented 18-mile-long hose held up by helium balloons.

Most people start to laugh when they hear this stuff. And, indeed, these ideas were largely discarded by the scientific establishment years ago when they were first proposed. A number of them are described in Bill McKibbon's book The End of Nature first published in 1989. The recognized problem is that they have massive unintended consequences. Thus, for example, all that sulphur pumped into the stratosphere ultimately ends up in the ocean and transforms the oceans chemistry (and not in a good way). But, the scientists feel they are being forced to return to these ideas because the scientific evidence concerning climate change has become both stronger and more alarming while political consensus on effective international action has become weaker. In short, they are giving up on the political apparatus and social changes and starting to contemplate the need for immediate technical action because in order to avoid a tipping point in the climate.

As this article in The Guardian shows, these ideas are gaining popular attention. Equally as significant, in my view, is the fact that China is taking these ideas seriously. As they showed during the Olympics, the Chinese are capable of acting on a massive and concerted scale to accomplish environmental goals (e.g., clean air in Beijing during the Olympics) if they so desire. Even more significantly, geoengineering solutions are relatively cheap. This leads Gwen Dyer to speculate in Climate Wars about the possibility that certain nations particularly threatened by the consequences of climate change (for example, Small Island Developing States) might go rogue and intervene in the biosphere on a massive scale in order to prevent sea level rise, even if there were little international support for such schemes.

Wikipedia provides an interesting overview of some of the schemes.

Climate Change as Evidence of A System

Where can we find evidence of a social system? Do we have to concoct some kind of academic hocus-pocus to linguistically conjure up the "idea" of a social system?

I don't think so. Evidence of a system, and by that I mean a human social system, is all around us: it's climate change.

Let's look at what we already know from the science of climate change:

• Individuals don't create climate change

• 6.5 Billion individuals together don't create climate change

However:

6.5 Billion individuals PLUS a capitalist system, a technological system, create climate change.

In fact, it isn't even all 6.5 billion of us. At least half the world's population is so poor, so "underconsuming," that their collective contribution to global carbon emissions is almost negligible.

It really amounts to the richest one sixth of the world's population, the 1 billion or so who consume the most, who contribute the vast majority of the world's excessive carbon emissions. And it's not just that 1 billion alone. It's 1 billion PLUS all their automobiles, highways, coal-fired power plants, suburban subdivisions, millions of acres of shopping malls, agribusiness, distant factories and 60" television sets, all consuming, burning and emitting energy, that together create climate change. The technological system of resource extraction, production, distribution and consumption, as an economic system, makes a larger contribution to the production of climate change as the billion or so "individuals" who participate in that system.

To this we must add "nature's own" climate feedback cycles that, triggered by this excessive human C02 production, continuously creates more warming than just the human social system alone. What begins as a human system problem then becomes a human/environment system problem. And that is the ultimate designation of a system.

And to prove this point, please listen to physicist Anita Burke, who worked for Shell Oil International, advising their top corporate leaders on the causes and impacts of climate change. She spoke at the "Gaining Ground" conference in Vancouver, Oct. 2009, along with Bill Rees. Anita gives us the numbers: individual and household consumption of energy, water and other resources only counts for 10-25% of all resource consumption. The other 75-90% is used by corporations.

US Senator Bernie Sanders: The Environment, the Economy, and Energy Independence

Bernie Sanders is the Independent Senator from Vermont, and the only declared socialist in the US Senate.

This presentation by him sums up a lot of issues well. Though I've also noticed how, in the United States, "energy independence" is a real buzzword in the drive to alternative energy sources - ie. America should not be beholden to dictators from Venezuela and Saudi Arabia (rather only be beholden to creditors in China, okay I added that one, but it is the truth).

Energy independence in principle is a good thing to strive for, but we also live in a globalized inter-dependent World.

Key Concept: Emergence or Those flocking boids!

One of the great philosophical arguments of all time involves conceptualizing the relationship between different levels of phenomena: does one favor organicism or reductionism? Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? Or can it be reduced to an understanding of those parts?

Sociology, following Durkheim and his 'social facts can only be explained through reference to other social facts' dictum, traditionally favored organicism. One of the more interesting places to explore these ideas is by looking at emergence. How, for example, do we understand the flocking of birds or the existence of segregated neighborhoods in cities?


Craig Reynolds has a mesmerizing page where you can watch an individual based model of boids that mimic the flocking behaviour of birds. In philosophical terms, Reynolds is trying to explain the emergent phenomena of flocking behaviour through a set of individual-level instructions to his computerized agents (the boids). The page does an excellent job of explaining both the assumptions that are programed into the agents and providing links to a wide variety of relevant literature.

This is similar to the famous explanation for segregation provided by Nobel prize winning economist Thomas Schelling in his book Micromotives and Macrobehavior. By positing the existence of individuals (agents in the jargon) with slight-but-not-malicious preference to have neighbors of the same race, Schelling developed an agent based model showing that, over time, the result of people acting to meet these preference leads not to a mixed neighborhood but, rather, to completely segregated populations. There are a number of different simulations of this on the web, for example, here, here and here. A simpler and less interesting version is here.

But, as Russ Abbott has noted, while boids do a good job of modeling flocking behavior, they ignore energy issues. Thus, as currently conceived, most agent based representations of ecosystem phenomena are seriously deficient.

Landmark Study on the Cost of Carbon Reduction for Canada

A landmark report on climate change shows that Canada can meet its carbon reduction targets. The study was conducted by the David Suzuki Foundation, the Pembina Institute and Toronto Dominion Bank.

"Ottawa will have to lead a massive restructuring of the Canadian economy, with wealth flowing from the West to the rest of the country, if it is to meet its climate-change targets.

The Conservative government's goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 can be achieved, but only by limiting growth in Alberta and Saskatchewan."

The report states that economic growth in Alberta and Saskatchewan would be reduced by 2.8 percent, growth in other provinces would be static, and central Canada would increase its rate of employment. Even with emissions reductions, Canada's overall GDP will grow by 2.2 percent per year until 2020.

This study reveals the key technological approaches needed to achieve major reductions in Canada’s GHG emissions.

The most important of these are

• capture and storage of carbon dioxide from the oil and gas industry and power plants

• reduction of “fugitive” emissions from the oil and gas industry and from landfills

• increased energy efficiency throughout the economy (e.g., in vehicles and buildings)

• increased production of renewable energy (e.g., wind power accounts for 18 per cent

of electricity generated in 2020 when meeting either of the two targets, compared to

less than two per cent now)

• replacement of fossil fuels by cleaner electricity (e.g., for heating buildings).

The accompanying technical reports shows that switching from burning of fossil fuels to electricity generation from clean sources (such as electrifying home heating and transport) reduces emissions by 33 megatons of C02e. However, switching from fossil fuels to nuclear power in electricity generation yields the smallest reduction in emissions from that sector, a nearly negligible 0 to 1 megaton of C02e by 2020.

It's a little unclear what "Reduced fossil fuel output" refers to, but it appears to mean a reduction in the production of oil and natural gas, located primarily in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and yields a drop of 43 to 64 megatons of C02e by 2020. Carbon capture and storage yields a reduction of 30 to 76 megatons of C02e.

However, it should be noted that another report issued in September by Greenpeace CA estimated the cost of using carbon capture and storage at the tar sands projects would cost Canadians 2 to 3 billion dollars per year for the next 20 years.