The political and economic blogosphere seems to be pretty happy with the latest discussion paper from the Garnaut Review, from Christine Milne, through Peter Martin, to Harry Clarke, to Joshua Gans. The person most directly concerned, Penny Wong remains a study in non-commitment, of course.
There are several reasons why this proposal is getting an enthusiastic response, including its reasonably solid environmental credentials, the adherence to economic orthodoxy (and previous experience) in auctioning permits rather than handing them out; and, perhaps, a small degree of schadenfreude in that the Greenhouse Mafia of existing polluters aren’t going to be rewarded further for polluting.
One of the major debates about carbon charging is whether the carbon price should be fixed (or restricted), and the market allowed to determine the quantity of emissions, or whether the amount of permits should be fixed and the carbon price should be allowed to float accordingly. A number of economists – notably Warwick McKibbin, has been pushing the idea that any scheme should attempt to control the price. Garnaut has come down firmly on the side of quantity controls, and letting the carbon price float freely. In practice, no such scheme will be pure; the carbon price would of course be set on the basis of achieving carbon reductions; the emissions trajectories of a quantity-led scheme will be influenced by the economic costs. But, from a mindset point of view as much as anything, I prefer the idea that the environment be the target, and the economy can adapt to what the environment needs rather than the other way around.
The second good thing about the proposal is that he proposes that all the permits will be auctioned, rather than given to power companies. As well as the schadenfreude factor, this really would be good news. As Peter Martin discussed in his post, this simplifies things greatly and will likely lead to more efficient permit allocation – trying to give permits away in a fair manner is going to be very complex and lead to all manner of rent-collecting. This happened in the EU emissions trading scheme, where the power companies made a fortune by raising electricity prices and taking advantage of free permits – the report discusses this quite extensively on pages 32 and 33.
There has been a lot of squealing from the generators about this, claiming that without free permits that they will unable to invest in emissions reduction technology. Garnaut himself has pooh-poohed this; if the economic incentive is there to reduce emissions with new technology, it will happen regardless of whether they’re given a big lump of cash or not. Furthermore, the likelihood is that the profits from the free permits will just be pocketed, because new generators will have to buy permits on the open market, thus pushing up the marginal cost of electricity anyway. Politically, however, there is likely going to be immense pressure for some form of compensation to generator owners, and it’s going to be of a form that the Rudd government finds hard to resist. Why? Because amongst the biggest owners of coal-fired power stations in Australia are the NSW and Queensland state governments.
The next good thing about this proposal are the multiple “emissions trajectories”. Garnaut suggests three scenarios for allocating permits beyond 2012: the first (scenario B in the report) assumes unilateral action by Australia, the second (scenario C) assumes the developed world sets firm targets, and the third (scenario D) is to be adopted when a comprehensive global agreement including the developing world is reached. Scenario D, Garnaut states, would involve cuts well beyond the 60% by 2050 election campaign promise. So why is this good, you may ask? Several reasons. Garnaut has indeed made it clear that any global agreement is going to require Australia to make much bigger emissions cuts – hopefully giving political cover for the government to move beyond their “60% by 2050″ line. Secondly, if the scheme was adopted, there would be a massive incentive to “hoard” permits, in anticipation that they will become scarcer – and go up in value – as Australia shifts to the more restrictive scenarios. Therefore, we might get the early action to reduce emissions we need, even if we don’t explicitly adopt harsh early targets immediately. While it might be nice if we just bit the bullet and adopted scenario D, this isn’t a bad plan.
It’s interesting to note who Garnaut argues should receive compensation from the scheme – less well-off households, regions currently heavily dependent on coal-fired power stations such as the Latrobe Valley in Victoria, and trade-exposed energy-intensive industries; the classic being aluminium smelters. The first two are unlikely to cause many arguments, though some environmentalists will wince at the thought of more money going to support carbon sequestration efforts. But the last is going to be controversial. For what it’s worth, just shutting down aluminium smelters and the like is pretty pointless if it just results in more inefficient ones being set up in China.
Finally, we come to what the report labels “inter-temporality” – whether “banking and borrowing” of permits should be allowed. As I guessed, Garnaut wants to allow banking, but also borrowing, under control of the Reserve Carbon Bank-type body he is proposing to administer the scheme. From that early post, there are two big concerns with such schemes – firstly, that emissions now and later are not equivalent in their effects, and secondly, the moral hazard of emitters borrowing heavily, and when they can’t repay their carbon debts putting political pressure on governments to change the rules to wipe out their debts. Christine Milne’s press release rightly identifies this as a real concern. Garnaut argues that the multi-trajectory scenario above is likely to result in hoarding, rather than borrowing, and furthermore argues that the Reserve Carbon Bank will be able to regulate net lending to keep it under control. Garnaut promises to flesh this part of his proposal out further by the time of his final report.
In any case, Garnaut seems to be mostly on the right track. Here’s hoping that the government sees fit to take his “inputs” seriously, even the politically unpalatable bits.
Nice post Robert. Thanks for an excellent summary.
Fossil fules are price inelastic, so putting up their price in the short to medium term is going to do nothing to reduce emissions.
By analogy, if petrol prices go up over Easter, people don’t drive their cars less. They just pay more to the oil companies for the petrol.
Later, much later, they may buy a new Prius or sell their car. But in the short term, because fuel is a complementary commodity, they’ll just fork out the extra money.
Also, the incidence of any such impost will be, because it is consumption driven, fall disproportionately on those on lower incomes.
That’s why Ross Garnaut talks about using the revenue raised from the sale of the permits to offset the increased energy costs falling on lower income people. But that is merely subsidizing demand – which will then add to consumption of energy products.
It’s merely an income transfer to off-set a cost.
So, the emissions trading scheme will quickly become a massive revenue raising exercise for Rudd and Co, and will do nothing to reduce emissions until the long term. And probably not them, either.
Nothing.
And here’s something you should know about Ross Garnaut…
For more than a decade he has chaired Lihir Gold, a PNG miner. Lihir’s mine sits on top of a volcano, and, since 2003, it has harnessed the steam to create geothermal energy, a relatively clean source of power.
Lihir is spending more than $160 million to expand the geothermal project which, it hopes, will position it to benefit from carbon trading.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/recommendation-would-benefit-author/2008/02/21/1203467286239.html
Gullible.
In breaking news relevant to this thread, a large chunk of the Antarctic ice sheet has begun to collapse.
I must be a power company.
Eliot: clearly, you’re not a believer in the substitutability of goods and services.
I think that’s a very well written post on this topic. I agree that Garnaut is on the right track. Let’s hope that the Federal Government will implement the recommendations to properly deal with the issue, even if some of it is unpopular.
Yes, excellent post, and I’m not just saying that because I agree with all of it.
Paul at 3, that’s dramatic, but there was an even bigger one earlier this month (34 x 20km) at the Pine Island Glacier. On this site there’s a map showing where the melt is speeding up. The Wilkins, I think, is on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. The Pine Island is the melting bit further south. That particular basin has an area the size of Texas and enough ice to put up the sea level by 25cm.
Although there is still plenty of ice there the Ross ice-shelf and the one in the north are both melting. Most of West Antarctica is, of course, on rock below sea level, and the whole is worth 5m sea level worldwide. Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate said that it’s fairly well accepted that 125,000 years ago when the temperature was 1-2C higher than now (with CO2 levels no greater than 300 ppm!) and the sea level 4-6m higher, Antarctica and Greenland contributed roughly equally.
As Garnaut says, the solution will need to start soon if there’s going to be one!
Brian, would that be the same Antarctic that had record ice growth last winter?
I find the next paragraph especially amusing. Why, it’s almost like you’re saying that lowering CO2 levels would make absolutely no difference, and that other more powerful drivers are at work on climate. Are you a closet sceptic? Confess your sins heretic!
While I agree that merely using the money raised from any auction to subsidise use from low socio-economic households, that money could be used more creatively, to upgrade the energy efficiency of public housing for example, or provide assistance to low income households to instal energy efficient devices, solar hot water systems, and even electricity generating solar panels.
While I agree that merely using the money raised from any auction to subsidise use from low socio-economic households, that money could be used more creatively, to upgrade the energy efficiency of public housing for example, or provide assistance to low income households to instal energy efficient devices, solar hot water systems, and even electricity generating solar panels.
Exactly! – In fact exactly like this.
Eliot, why will poor people, given a higher electricity bill and a wad of cash in some manner, automatically spend the cash on the bill? Many of them will decide to use less power and spend the money on something else.
Do you have a decent cite for the statement that electricity demand is inelastic? Given that there have been no strong price signals given out so far, I would suggest we don’t really know. The smart meters that will be rolling out in Victoria will allow people to judge when they’re using more and when it is more expensive.
besides, I am firmly of the belief that there are many many easy wins in domestic energy efficiency. I don’t see how my household, which has sacrificed basically nothing whatsoever, is more than 50% more efficient than the Victorian average. The sole advantage I have is awareness. There are so many ways in which domestic electricity consumption can drop.
Eliot, carbon emitters will be forced to clean up as the permits are withdrawn over time, or pay more for increasingly scarcer permits.
Apparently Eliot doesn’t believe in price signals.
Robert Merkel says;
‘Substitutability’ is price elasticity. In the short-to-medium run, complementary commodities, like fules, are in-elastic.
We live in the short-to-medium run. that’s where we feel our pain. Get it?
I believe in ‘Substitutability’ over the long term. But you’re going to be clobbered in the short term.
wilful asks;
Well, the most immediately obvious reason they’ll spend the extra cash on the electricity bill is because the electricity bill has just gone up, which is why they’re getting the subsidy in the first place.
Poor people don’t have a lot of discretionary purchasing power – and as I pointed out, energy costs are not typically very “discretionary” anyway. That’s why they’re called “price inelastic”. By definition, consumption of a price inelastic commodity, like fuel, medicines, food, doesn’t alter much with price.
That’s why people get so upset about fuel prices being expensive. It’s not like chocolate truffles or diamond rings, which are also expensive but which you can easily substitute other things for.
And also, fuel costs are built into everything we buy – and the more important, fundamental things like food, shelter and transport are not things we can easily do without. So, what economists call the “incidence” of the extra costs is more likely to be passed on to the consumers – whether righ or poor, it makes no difference.
Really, wake up everyone. You’re going to be paying big time for all this hysteria. No matter what inane spin Kevin Rudd’s PR advisers put on it.
Anyway, here’s some more terrifying news about the Arctic melting…
- in 1947.
wilful asks;
Google this as a term…
Thanks for this summary – it’s clear and thorough.
Eliot, are you trying to deny that global warming due to anthropogenic carbon emissions is real? Doesn’t that reference you have just quoted tell you that, actually, this has been a serious problem for a lot longer than most people think?
So Eliot, your real answer was “no, I don’t know that electricity demand is all that inelastic. But I’ll obfuscate around the point.”
Ta for that.
Also, people don’t mind paying more for something. It won’t change their behaviour.
Well yes, the current fuel prices create enough motivation for people to whine about it. Eventually it will be enough that people will start to act. At the moment the value gained by using fuel is so much greater than the cost of it that small changes in the cost doesn’t change the value:cost ratio, hence the inelastic nature; however at some cost people will change their consumption habits.
No it’s not easy. That’s why there’s a need for significant financial incentives, to reward those that make the effort.
Sure we all need food, but we don’t all need food imported from half a world away where the labor is cheap. There is also plenty of room for energy optimization within peoples transport habits.
A “carbon tax” doesn’t really strike me as much more than a consumption tax, not unlike the GST, that simply focuses on resource consumption rather than economic value. It will possibly have a similar outcome, a short term spike in inflation while allowing for the market to correct itself and compensate for the new external forces.
Andos points accusingly and asks;
And yes, I have stopped beating my wife. The “anthropogenic” environmental impacts of human populations are manifold and probably logarithmically related to our population growth and levels of economic development.
Malthus and Darwin pointed that out a long, long time ago.
But that doesn’t alter the fact that the costs of emissions trading will, by definition, impact disproportionately more on the poor than the rich.
That’s precisely why Ross Garnaut advocates using the revenue from the sale of permits to compensate those on lower incomes – a bit like how the other Food for Oil scheme was supposed to work.
That it founders on the simple economic logic of price elasticities isn’t altered a jot by whether global warming started now or back when Darwin was a lad.
Here’s another crucial fact the Food for Oil advocates have overlooked.
People on low incomes comsume proportionately greater of their incomes than people on high incomes. It’s a phenomenon called by economists the “marginal propensity to consume“.
So, not only will the Garnaut Food for Oil subsidy programme actually feed the demand for fossil fuels – it will do it faster than if he’d not compensated the poor at all.
Really. The Garnaut Food for Oil programme is a looming disater.
There are two main types of price elasticity, the price-elasticity of demand and the price-elasticity of supply. There is also income-elasticity. I assume that most of the discussion here is about the price-elasticity of demand. We can increase the price-elasticity of demand for electricity by better labelling of electrical goods and technologies such as smart meters. Because different fossil fuels can be substituted for each other, a carbon price can lead to emissions reductions by substituting one fossil fuel for another. This happened with the EU ETS with black coal substituting for lignite (brown coal), and lignite-fueled baseload coal-fired power stations shutting down over the weekend.
If supplies of a fossil fuel (e.g coal) were completely elastic, or demand was completely inelastic, then the carbon leakage would be such that an Australia-only ETS would be much less effective that reducing the supply of fossil fuels by reducing their production through price or quantity controls.
If supplies of a fossil fuels were completely inelastic, or demand was completely elastic, then reducing Australia’s exports of this fuel would make no difference – more of the fossil fuel would be dug up elsewhere.
Of course the reality is somewhere in between. After a bit of Googling I found one paper suggesting that the price-elasticity of coal was -0.08 (fairly inelastic) during the inter-war period, another paper suggested that the price-elasticity of coal for the OECD was between -0.57 and -0.69 (not so inelastic).
Therefore a way to manage carbon leakage would be to have some sort of tax on emissions intensive fossil fuels (primarily coal). This may be more appropriate than assistance to trade exposed emissions intensive industries.
Re Craig Mc at 9 I write these things especially to amuse you. Not. Read the climate code red report and then we can have a conversation.
For everyone else, I understand that the extent of winter ice doesn’t matter much. It’s the state of affairs at the end of summer about the time of the autumn equinox, and how that compares to earlier years that’s important. This year two slabs of ice with a combined area of about 1000 sq kilometres have fallen off. (I heard today that the Wilkins ice sheet covers 16,000 sq ks in all so there scope for a lot more. They are worried about the whole thing.) So with all that ice newly in the water you can imagine that the formation of sea ice will have a head start this winter in that area.
But overall the Antarctic is losing ice, even in the East.
The Pine Island area drains 40% of West Antarctica and the glaciers there are putting out three times more volume than they were recently.
On CO2 levels I’m saying we may need to lower them more than heretofore thought to achieve ice sheet stability and that’s everyone’s problem.
But let’s leave this now please to another thread.
Eliot wrote:
This is wrong. We were saturated in Melbourne by stories of the trains getting packed once petrol settled to a price of between $1.20 to $1.50 per litre. Fuel is only inelastic where there is no alternative. In many places, there are alternatives, including public transport, cycling, walking or planning your travel to minimise petrol use.
Oooh, why it should be titled the “Double Super Mega Pants-Wetting Code Red Report”. Hilarious reading. It will do well in the usual market segment.
Eliot Ramsay is correct in saying that in the short term, demand for electricity is inelastic.
However, in a situation where demand is inelastic, any increase in producer cost, e.g. a rise in the cost of one of the inputs like coal or oil is immediately passed on to consumers. The price of oil has quadrupled in the last few years. Have any of the oil refiners gone out of business? No.
The existing coal-fired electricity producers know perfectly well that they’ll be able to pass on the cost of any carbon tax or emission cap. What they want is a subsidy from any government stupid or corrupt enough to believe what they say. The NSW government is a likely candidate, being one of the most stupid and corrupt in recent history.
A slight clarification on #23
I should have said “a way to manage carbon leakage would be to have some sort of tax on exports of emissions intensive fossil fuels (primarily coal).”
Re #26: Some discussion about the contents of the report would be more interesting and appropriate than irrelevant comments the title. The Climate Code Red report is well written, well referenced, and very relevant.
Thanks Peter.
Robert, I’ve been wanting to thank you for this post. It’s a very neat summary of the essentials. I don’t think there has been a link to Garnaut’s document yet which can be found here (pdf file).
I don’t pretend to fully understand carbon trading but one of the central points was that Garnaut had opted for quantity controls. Surely that means that quantity can’t go up so price will if the commodity becomes scarce in relation to demand. This then makes low carbon or carbon free sources more competitive.
Relevant here may be an interview with ethicist Professor Michael S. Northcott of Edinburgh University on RN’s The Religion Report. He’s written a book called A Moral Climate, about treating global warming as a moral and ethical issue. In it he claims that free markets are a structural sin. Ditto for carbon trading schemes. It seems to me that quantity controls should satisfy Prof Northcott because the public good over-rides individual indulgence.
Peter Wood says;
Yes, and remembering to shut the fridge door so the little light doesn’t come on.
Alister says:
And in many places there are few, if any alternatives.
You can walk home instead of catching the bus or driving a car. But unless you burn candles instead of using electric lights; have a wood-fired stove, don’t consume any products transported by anything other than donkey carts, never travel past the end of your street and generally live to a standard above that of the early Middle Ages, then you are going to be consuming energy.
And even if you manage to reduce average fuel consumption by, say, half over the next 20 years, since populations insrease exponentially, then fuel consumption will continue to rise at an accelarating rate.
Fuel is inelastic because at any given time it is a complementary good tied to other forms of economic activity.
That’s why the Garnaut Food for Oil programme is going to impact most heavily on lower income groups.
If fuel prices were elastic, instead of inelastic, you wouldn’t need a subsidy. The increase in prices would disproporinately reduce consumption of energy.
But since that’s not going to happen, Garnaut suggests a system of credit transfers. He’s frankly acknowledging by that that people won’t be able to reduce their energy consumption to any significant degree. Hence we have to compensate them for the higher costs they’ll face.
I mean, it’s simple enough logic.
Where neo-liberal economic models fail – on the global level – is that they place no value on common resources (air, water, fish stocks, etc).
Which leaves two options: privatisation or regulation of those resources.
Privatisation would be severely impractical as enforcement of commercial rights are impossible (oi, fishies, stay in that patch of sea! Cloud, you come back here!). Though in a sense this is what we do currently within the nation state system. And hasn’t it worked well?
Which leaves regulation. Like, say, some international agreement to manage the scarcity of those resources.
Of course you could take the perspective that schemes like carbon/emmissions/etc trading form an attempt to quantify the commons (to an extent), and work them into the global economic system.
Eliot Ramsey:
The point isn’t to consume no energy, the point is to consume a sustainable amount of energy and use a market mechanism to determine the optimum way of limiting consumption.
Population growth is something that will be important to address, however just because there are other factors influencing the total consumption rate doesn’t make any individual factor not worth consideration. Besides, halving the average consumption will half the total consumption, it’s not as if population growth is dependent on energy consumption (although if people can’t afford to go out or turn on the TV, maybe they’ll resort to more er… natural past times).
He’s acknowledging that some people won’t be able to adjust in the short term and that it’s probably not fair to throw them to the wolves. He addresses these people with the subsidy, while using the trading/auction system to create the economic incentives for the people that can make the change, driving the market towards sustainable behaviors.
Peter Wood:
I think it would also be worth considering taxing imports based on an approximate carbon footprint. By doing so in a coordinated effort with other willing countries, you could create a large enough trading block that would provide economic incentives to draw other countries in.
I’ve just heard Geraldine Doogue in a promo for Saturday Extra on ABC’s RN tomorrow. She will be interviewing Ross Garnaut and raved about his expertise on politics and particularly China as well as his expertise on climate change.
In another comment on Robert’s post, he mentioned the problem of trade-exposed energy-intensive industries, for example aluminium.
It’s interesting that at the recent G20 meeting in Tokyo Japan proposed an industry sectoral approach:
I think the logic behind this is that the world can than prioritise major industries and rationally decide where certain activities should be located for optimum efficiency. But there was no traction for the idea at the meeting.
I sense national interest trumping rationality and the general good here. Developing countries are no doubt interested in picking up facilities that developed nations can’t fit under their reducing emissions caps.
Desipis </strong says;
Population growth is entirely dependent on energy consumption. Entirely.
Look at this:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/soot-in-the-greenhouse-and-kitchen/
In other words, even if we went back to the pre-industrial modes of production featured in so much eco-fantasy, we’d still be warming the globe. On wood stoves!
Really, the eco-fantasists are in no position to accuse others of being in denial.
I think that the generation companies’ main concerns are that they are going to need to invest large amounts of money whatever policy is in place, but are not certain that policy will remain constant over the investment period.
I doubt very much that they are concerned with the Garnaut report per se – after all, they will just pass on the increased costs.
However, they do not have a lot of confidence in the Garnaut report actually ’sticking’ – ie if the increased prices actually do cause political pain, will the policy results of Garnaut remain or be neutered. If neutered, what will the new policy be? Will their previous investments become redundant? If a reduction in power production is predicted, then their new power stations will be smaller capacity than otherwise. What happens if that lower capacity is not enough because (surprise surprise) the energy demand IS inelastic? Who is going to cough up the extra money to then build more power stations when even the newer and more expensive ones are not enough?
Till the time those questions are answered, power companies are not going to invest in any new technology unless they have to – and all costs passed on. As pointed out, it is those on lower incomes that will bear the brunt of this. Not only via the increased $$ cost, but also on any system constraints. (If my rich insulated and airconditioned mansion with its diesel backup has a power failure, I am not going to sweat nearly as much as the working fambly in a poorly insulated house/flat when the power goes off).
For power companies to ask for subsidies is pretty crude in my view though. What they should be doing is to point out the uncertainties that could lead to political and policy trouble and ask for guarantees for cost recovery if policy is changed. (ie no subsidy for the policy as presented to them, but a cost recovery if that policy is found to be flawed and needs to be changed after they have built new infrastructure).
For example, let’s say the Govt sets a target of say, 20% reduction in projected power demand over the next twenty years, and power companies build new clean generating facilities to cover that target. Let’s say then that the power demand does not go down by 20% – is the Government going to fine the power companies because of a generation shortage? Or is it going to allow them to have rolling outages without penalty? If not, then what is the policy going to be? I see little chance of any company board allowing the spending of the hundreds of millions of dollars needed without some sort of policy clarity.
I would like to comment on some implications in Eliot Ramseys posts (whether intended or not) that a) Reducing carbon dioxide emmissions would necessarily lead to a reduced quality of life, including reduced use of technology and reduced net (usable) energy use, and b) that efforts to reduce carbon footprints necessarily mean substantially hgiher energy costs.
Most Australians could reduce home energy use by up to 20% and make virtually no changes to lifestyle with some fairly minor investments(home insulation, timer switches, energy saving globes, etc). Larger savings could be made by homes in more remote areas by swiching to solar electricity. Updating your car from a 1990’s model to a modern common-rail diesel engine could save up to 60% of fuel-generated carbon emmissions – these are some of the improvments that could be funded by compensation to low-paid and heavily affected consumers.
With some more fundamental changes, such as in home design, city design and use of alternative transport and work arrangements, whole populations can improve both their quality of life and their energy efficiency (meaning we can have both a higher population and lower carbon use).
While this does mean a higher price for carbon-based energy (possibly greatly increased by say 2030), this need not mean that we are forced into massive energy bills. As the cost of photo-voltaics reduces, these will become more appealing to home owners as a replacement or suplementary source of home energy, and purely electric cars should be available comercially within the next ten years. With a properly functioning energy market (which we don’t currently have in Australia), people can make choices about the source and price of energy they use (for example, use some wind energy because it is cheap, and use some from a diesel powered sub-station because it is reliable). Research in Scandinavian countries seems to show that when allowed a choice, the price elasticity of demand for electricity from alternative sources increases markedly.
We can have our cake and eat it too, but it does require a genuine commitment by governments to create these opportunities, both through price signals, and with subsidies and other inducements.
Eliot Ramsey:
Huh? Having a plasma TV, a hummer and blasting the air-con makes people have more kids?
It’s not about going pre-industrial. De/reforestation is considered an important part of the carbon trading system. There are plenty of greenhouse gases we should focus on as well as carbon dioxide, however I’d be curious to know if soot actually stayed around in the atmosphere indefinitely like carbon dioxide does.
The short answer is that it doesn’t, but I can’t give you the numbers.
Not all the CO2 persists for centuries, but a significant amount does, whereas aerosols/particulates are mostly short term, I think.
Wikipedia has some info on atmospheric lifetime of GHGs (GWP = global warming potential).
I’ve never really got all this completely sorted, but soot seems to be black carbon. NASA gives a fairly complicated categorisation of sources and effects.
Wiki calls soot a subcategory of airborne particulates) which are mostly washed out by rain in hours or weeks.
So I’d reckon hours or weeks vs virtually forever for many of the GHGs.
Kevin Brady says;
That’s undoubtedly true Kevin. And should be encouraged. But what’s our population growth rate? Oh, look – it’s 0.824% per year . (2007 est.)
That means, in less than 20 years any gains made from such a 20 percent reduction in home energy use would be completely wiped out. Completely.
Broad swathes of the Green movement are in complete denial about this or otherwise are too afraid, or perhaps too dishonest politically to address that simple fact.
Desipis right on cue asks…
No. More people having kids will inevitably result in them having plasma TVs, hummers and air-cons. At an exponential rate in this country alone of 0.824% per year. Assuming no per capita econonomic growth!
That’s why we have global warming. Any level of population growth over our rate of consumption of the earth’s energy resources, any, contributes to global warming.
It doesn’t have to be sophisticated technology. For example, as the Nature Geoscience article points out;
I can tell you, Earth Hour and Ross Garnaut aren’t going to fix that problem. It’s a stunt.
“Earth Hour and Ross Garnaut aren’t going to fix that problem. It’s a stunt.”
… [splutteringly]… but… but… but… the greeny-commo-watermelon from the socialist alliance (who I found hiding under my bed) told me it would fix everything! You mean they lied? Oh Noes!!!11one
More people having kids will inevitably result in them having plasma TVs, hummers and air-cons.
Oh, yes. It’s inevitable. Consumption driven capitalism is inevitable. Fukuyama told me so, so it must be true. And Bloody Boarders too, why not. Hey mabye it’s historical inevitability!
Eliot Ramsay is wrong. The human population does not increase exponentially. It is increasing according to a logistics curve which peaked (fortunately, and in no small part due to the Chinese one-child policy) in the 1990s.
But that’s quibbling. Ramsay is right that population growth is the main problem we face in the effort to avoid CCC. It’s too large a problem to solve however, so reduction in emissions per capita is the best we can do.
It’s not looking good.
Tony D says
Of course it’s not inevitable. I mean, the Socialist Revolutions in Russia and China have shown clearly that consumption driven capitalism is neither inevitable or even necessary as a stage in the long-run historical trend toward Communism.
- VI Lenin
No doubt, Tony, you are right Comrade. Marxism is the answer…
For info:
$430b: how much greenhouse gas cuts will cost, says Costa (SMH, 4 April 08)
Labor in attack on Garnaut (The Australian, 4 April 08)
Those interested in emissions trading might want to follow up on this recently published book: EU Emissions Trading: Initiation, Decision-making and Implementation
Here’s the blurb: Understanding the Fascinating Development of the EU ETS
(13.03.2008) A new FNI book digs deep to find out why the EU changed its position from leading skeptic to leading proponent of greenhouse gas emissions trading, how it managed so rapidly to establish the world’s first international emissions trading scheme (ETS), and what its consequences so far are.
“This book is also an important tool to understand the background for the Commission’s January 2008 proposal for a revised ETS post-2012, and to reason soundly about the determinants for the decision-making process ahead,” says co-author Jørgen Wettestad.
Thanks for the info Elizabeth. Interestingly, Costa’s figures don’t seem to add up. From the SMH article:
These two statements seem to contradict each other. $430 billion over 22 years is a hell of a lot less than 4 per cent of cumulative GDP over that time.
I promise not to bombard this blog with emissions trading links. But some people might be interested to follow up on this one: Analyzing the European Union CO2 emissions trading scheme (EU ETS) etc… http://www.caissedesdepots.fr/?article656
Oops, I think I got my elasticities in #23 the wrong way around