Quotulatiousness

October 25, 2018

It’s not a “bribe” … it’s an “incentive”!

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Terence Corcoran explains why the federal government’s promised “incentive” isn’t in any way, shape, or form any kind of bribe:

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome aboard the all-new Canadian Cynical Circular Carbon Circus, the amazing Liberal climate control spectacle that will send you on a great environmental ride into the future.

Come on in! We will pay you to not consume fossil fuels — as individuals and as industries. It’s an economic revolution that takes us beyond blockchain and cryptocurrencies and cannabis into a brave new universe in which money goes round and round and everybody wins. We will pay Canadians with their own money — more than $20 billion over five years in carbon taxes that will raise the price of gasoline by 11 cents a litre by 2022, and ever higher thereafter if not sooner. Everybody pays and everybody wins, except for those who don’t. And some people win more than they pay. It’s better than a lottery!

For the people of Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswick, the federal carbon circus cash comes via a new “Climate Action Incentive Payment.” An Ontario family of four will receive $307 for this year, the amount to be claimed on 2018 income tax returns. A Saskatchewan family will get a Climate Action Incentive Payment of $609.

What’s the Climate Action Incentive Payment for? The Liberal plan unveiled by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna Tuesday doesn’t specify. What are taxpayers in the four provinces being incented to do, exactly, with this new wad of free cash? There is only one explanation: Vote Liberal in 2019!

The payments are based on a 2019 carbon price of $20 a tonne, rising to $50 by 2022. As the carbon tax goes up, Ontario families will receive $718 in 2022 and Saskatchewan families $1,459. And there will be more to come, presumably, since the latest doomsday scenario from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the font of all speculation and data manipulation on climate issues — warned that by 2030 (only 12 years from now) a carbon price of somewhere between $135 to $5,500 per tonne would be needed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

October 20, 2018

Barley, beer, and climate change

Filed under: Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

There was a “study” recently released proclaiming the end of beer … or at least a huge hike in beer prices coupled with a drop in availability due to climate change. Tim Worstall explains why the report is — at best — misleading:

Barley (Hordeum vulgare) at the United States National Arboretum.
Photo by Flikr user “Cliff” via Wikimedia Commons.

You’ll have seen the various reports over the past few days that climate change is going to do terrible damage to the beer industry. The mechanism is that drought and heat will reduce the barley yield, this will then reduce the amount of beer that can be made. What follows is the explanation from the actual researchers of what they’ve done. It is, to put it mildly, nonsense. For their assumptions are wrong. Let us say that climate change does reduce barley yields on those lands currently planted to it. But we do know that as this happens then other, more polar, regions open up to being suitable for the growing of barley. So the initial worry is just untrue.

They then go on to insist that we’ll feed the cows on the barley that’s left rather than make beer from it. Thus the shortfall in beer is greater than that in barley. Nonsense upon stilts. Humans don’t work that way. We started this agriculture thing because we wanted the beer after all. Feeding the animals came later – and often enough the cows are fed on the barley after we’ve made the beer from it anyway. We’d put our minimal supply into booze not beasts.

Finally, they tells us that Irish beer prices would double. No, really, given the level of taxes there upon the stuff it’s really not true that even their 30% reduction in barley supply is going to double the price.

October 13, 2018

It’s always TEOTWAWKI, and the demands are always the same

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sean Gabb on the message and tactics of the alarmists — whose chosen fixation shifts over time, but whose demands are always the same:

Once you cut through their verbiage, the enemies of bourgeois civilisation have two demands. These are:

  1. Put me and my friends in charge of preferably a one-world government with total power over life and property; or, until then, or failing that,
  2. Give us a lot of money.

When I was younger, the occasion for making these demands was something to do with poverty or economic instability, and the alleged need was for a bigger welfare state, or state ownership of the means of production, or playing about with money to “move the aggregate demand curve to the right.” The nice thing about these claims and their alleged solutions was that they all had to be debated within the subject area of Economics. Because most of us knew a lot about Economics, we could always win the debates.

By the end of the 1980s, winning was so easy, the debates had become boring. Since then, the alleged need has shifted to saving the planet from some environmental catastrophe. The resulting debates are now harder to win because most of us are not that learned in the relevant sciences. Though I am more than competent in Economics, my main expertise is in Ancient History and the Classical Languages. Much the same is true for most of my friends.

Take, for example, the latest occasion for making the two demands stated above. This is that the sea is filling up with waste plastic, and that this looks horrid, and is being eaten by the creatures who live in the sea, and that they are all at risk of dying – and that this will be a terrible thing of all of us. For the solution, see Annie Leonard, writing in The Guardian: “Recycling alone will never stem the flow of plastics into our ocean. We must address the problem at the source.” You can take her last sentence as shorthand for the usual demands.

What response have I to this? Not much directly. Give me half an hour, and I will explain with practised ease that the Phillips Curve is at best a loose correlation between past variables, and that there is no stable trade-off between unemployment and inflation. But search me how most plastics are made, how long they take to degrade, or what harm they do if eaten.

A short search on the Web has brought up some useful information. There is, for example, an essay by Kip Hansen, published in 2015 – “An Ocean of Plastic.” He says, among much else:

  • That the Great Garbage Patch said to be floating about the Pacific is a myth, and that the main alleged photographs of it were taken in Manila Bay after a storm had washed the rubbish out of the streets;
  • That the amount of plastic waste floating in the sea is very small per cubic metre of water, and that it is invisible to the uninformed eye in the places where this Garbage Patch is said to be floating;
  • That plastic waste quickly breaks down into tiny chunks that are then eaten by bacteria, who are not harmed by it;
  • That larger chunks eaten by fish and birds are easily handled by digestive systems that have evolved over many ages to cope with much worse than the occasional lump of polystyrene foam.

His conclusion:

    The “floating rafts of plastic garbage”-version of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a pernicious myth that needs to be dispelled at every opportunity.

October 12, 2018

Carbon taxes may be efficient, but let’s not rush into it quite yet…

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Terence Corcoran says we shouldn’t jump at the chance to kill our economy just because carbon taxes are efficient:

It didn’t take long for federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna to tweet out the news implying that the Nobel committee supported the government of Canada’s carbon-price scheme. The Montreal-based carbon-taxing NGO, the Ecofiscal Commission, hailed Nordhaus for having “demonstrated” that a universal price on carbon was the most “efficient” way to curb climate change.

Before jumping aboard the Nordhaus bandwagon, however, carbon-taxing politicians and all Canadians might want to take a closer look at what they are being led into.

[…]

Nordhaus and his co-winner of this year’s Nobel in economics, former Stanford economist Paul Romer, are great believers in “incentives.” As Romer said in a post-Nobel interview (tweeted by McKenna, naturally): “I believe, and I think Bill (Nordhaus) believes, that if we start encouraging people to find ways to produce lower carbon energy, everybody’s going to be surprised at the progress we’ll make as we go down that path. All we need to do is create some incentives that get people going in that direction, and that we don’t know exactly what solution will come out of it — but we’ll make big progress.”

But why a tax? If all we need to do is deploy the price mechanism, why impose a tax? Let’s ignore for a moment the dubious assumption that the science and economics of climate change are sound and settled. Would it still not be better to have the government set the carbon price, require the energy companies to charge it, but allow the revenue to flow not to government but through to energy companies and their shareholders, and others in the supply chain? That’s where market forces and the above-mentioned miracle price mechanisms — rather than government planners — would determine where to invest and what energy alternatives are best. (No gas retailer could possibly eat the cost of a 90-cent-per-litre carbon tax, so they’d have no choice but to pass at least most of it along to the customer).

One of the ironies of carbon taxation is the enthusiasm for “market mechanisms” and “prices” among politicians who otherwise abhor and resist market pricing of everything from roads to health care to rental housing to public transit to education to broadcasting and telecom and the internet and the price of cannabis, not to mention the Canadian price of milk and chickens. With carbon, market pricing is suddenly a great idea, no matter how fanciful the analyses and speculative the projections.

September 6, 2018

Trans-partisan planning

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Coyote Blog, Warren Meyer offers a plan to address man-made climate change, pitched to avoid being dismissed as “typical” of one or the other side:

While I am not deeply worried about man-made climate change, I am appalled at all the absolutely stupid, counter-productive things the government has implemented in the name of climate change, all of which have costly distorting effects on the economy while doing extremely little to affect man-made greenhouse gas production. For example:

  • Corn ethanol mandates and subsidies, which study after study have shown to have zero net effect on CO2 emissions, and which likely still exist only because the first Presidential primary is in Iowa. Even Koch Industries, who is one of the largest beneficiaries of this corporate welfare, has called for their abolition
  • Electric car subsidies, 90% of which go to the wealthy to help subsidize their virtue signalling, and which require more fossil fuels to power than an unsubsidized Prius or even than a SUV.
  • Wind subsidies, which are promoting the stupidist form for power ever, whose unpredictabilty means fossil fuel plants still have to be kept running on hot backup and whose blades are the single largest threat to endangered bird species.
  • Bad government technology bets like the massive public subsidies of failed Solyndra

Even when government programs do likely have an impact of CO2, they are seldom managed intelligently. For example, the government subsidizes solar panel installations, presumably to reduce their cost to consumers, but then imposes duties on imported panels to raise their price (indicating that the program has become more of a crony subsidy for US solar panel makers, which is typical of these types of government interventions). Obama’s coal power plan, also known as his war on coal, will certainly reduce some CO2 from electricity generation but at a very high cost to consumers and industries. Steps like this are taken without any idea of whether this is the lowest cost approach to reducing CO2 production — likely it is not given the arbitrary aspects of the program.

These policy mess is also an opportunity — it affords us the ability to substantially reduce CO2 production at almost no cost.

August 19, 2018

QotD: A unified theory of left-wing causes

Filed under: Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Isn’t it interesting that no matter what the current global crisis is, according to leftists, the solution is always the same: a benevolent world dictatorship of the enlightened elite, and mass transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor nations.

That’s what they want to do about global warming. It’s what they wanted to do about overpopulation. It’s what they wanted to do about endangered species.

Steven den Beste, commenting on “Population Bomb Epic Fail” by Steven Hayward, 2011-10-29.

August 10, 2018

The tough part of selling a national carbon tax … is the “tax” part

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As Colby Cosh points out, you can find all sorts of economists to explain why a properly constructed and applied carbon tax is the least harmful way to reduce carbon output, but Canadians typically focus on the “tax” part and not the claimed environmental efficiency benefits:

In yesterday’s Financial Post, the Calgary economist Jack Mintz asked the question “Why are carbon taxes so unpopular?”, pointing out that plenty of countries and jurisdictions have commitments to climate progress and energy efficiency but that few use this particular policy instrument. I guess Jack wouldn’t have had much of a column if he had just adopted the spirit of an auto mechanic explaining a breakdown to a naive car owner and jabbed directly at the problem. “See that word ‘taxes’? There’s your problem right there.”

And, truly, it is not quite as simple as that. But, as Mintz suggests, it is a big part of the difficulty. As a means of helping reduce carbon output, carbon taxes are competing with subsidies and regulations. Pervasive carbon taxes are, as a general principle, a less costly way of eliminating freely exhaled carbon, pound for pound or ton for ton.

If the tax is well designed, you are slapping a uniform unit price directly onto the thing you are trying to prevent; and you are leaving people and businesses to make decentralized judgments, based on their knowledge of their own circumstances, about whether to avoid the tax, and when, and how to do it. Even though the initial level of the tax must be something of a guess, you can adjust it by arbitrarily small increments until you have eliminated just as much carbon output as you wish to.

Economists will recognize that last paragraph as a grocery list of the relative advantages of carbon taxation. But voters are predisposed to hate taxes, and are very sensitive to their size and their side effects. They may not like government subsidies for windmills or carbon-capture schemes or certain species of light bulb either; but subsidies can usually be sold on the basis of local job creation or business incubation, and they can be — let’s face it, inevitably are — adjusted for maximum electoral benefit.

For my part, I don’t disbelieve the economists on the efficiency arguments … I just don’t trust the government to design and implement such a tax without rigging the system to benefit favoured corporations, regions, and donors.

July 1, 2018

Over-generous subsidies encourage fraud and waste

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Catallaxy Files, Rafe Champion continues discussing Matt Ridley’s book Climate Science: The Facts:

Ridley went on to criticise biodiesel programs and the promotion of diesel cars. Then he mentioned one of the most outlandish schemes – the clearing of forests on the west coast of the US to convert into wood pellets to burn in British furnaces instead of coal to generate electricity. The Daily Mail reported that this was one of the legacies of Energy Secretary Chris Huhne.

    Mr Huhne, who served in the coalition government and was later jailed for perverting the course of justice, championed the energy source in office and is now European chairmen of Zilka Biomass, a US supplier of wood pellets.

Nice work if you can get it.

And then there are the household biomass furnaces in Britain, promoted by Huhne under the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scheme whereby businesses and households pay for a renewable energy boiler upfront then receive payments for up to 20 years depending on the amount of heat they produce.

    Some unscrupulous homeowners can double the amount they produce by using heat generated under the RHI to dry wood or other materials.

    This can then be fed back into the boiler to burn it and generate even more heat – and money from the public purse.

    The scheme was started in 2011 by Chris Huhne, then Liberal Democrat energy secretary, for businesses then extended to domestic customers three years later. Households and firms can apply for grants to switch from fossil fuel heating systems to renewable ones such as biomass boilers, which burn wood pellets, chips or logs.

As the scheme is open to applications until 2021, final payments to participants will run to at least 2041. By this time, the bill for taxpayers is expected to hit £23billion.

Closely related is the the Irish “Cash for Ash” scandal that paid more than the cost of the fuel. An orgy of corruption was sparked by renewables in Spain and there was the strange phenomenon of solar power generated in the dark because the Spanish subsidy was initially so generous is was worthwhile to shine diesel-powered lights on the panels overnight.

June 30, 2018

Wealthy virtue-signalling hurts the poor

Filed under: Books, Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Catellaxy Files, Rafe Champion discusses some of the points raised by Matt Ridley in his recent book:

Essentially, the poor pay for the virtue-signalling of the rich. Dr Matt Ridley opens chapter 14 of Climate Science: The Facts with some blunt claims.

    Here is a simple fact about the world today. Climate change is doing more good than harm. Here is another fact. Climate change policy is doing more harm than good.

On top of that he points out that the poor are carrying the cost of today’s climate policy. That is something for the ALP [Australian Labour Party] and the social justice warriors to think about.

This should remind people of another great postwar example of destructive virtue-signalling – massive foreign aid to the developing nations aka the Third World. That did more harm than good for the people of the Third World, apart from the crony criminals in power. The great Lord Peter Bauer was onto that very smartly, starting in the 1940s and his findings have been consolidated lately, notably by William Easterly [in] The White Man’s Burden: Why the west’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good. There are exceptions to the rule such as hands-on medical care and private education.

Ridley mentions in passing some of the cases where apparently smart people have made very bad calls, starting with a prominent and wealthy leftwinger who he debated on TV. Faced with the charge that climate policy was hurting the poor he replied “But what about my grandchildren?”. As though the future wellbeing of the presumably affluent and privileged grandchildren of the talking head might be threatened by policies that help the poor who are with us at present. Ridley also cited a son of Charles Darwin who thought that eugenic breeding programs were essential to save civilization and Paul Ehrlich who in 1972 predicted that millions would die due to over-population (prompting the one-child policy in China).

May 7, 2018

Study: climate change skeptics behave in a more environmentally friendly manner than believers

Filed under: Environment — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In common with some similar observed phenomena, people who like to signal their climate change beliefs are actually less likely to act in environmentally beneficial ways than declared climate skeptics. At Pacific Standard, Tom Jacobs details the findings of a recent study:

Do our behaviors really reflect our beliefs? New research suggests that, when it comes to climate change, the answer is no. And that goes for both skeptics and believers.

Participants in a year-long study who doubted the scientific consensus on the issue “opposed policy solutions,” but at the same time, they “were most likely to report engaging in individual-level, pro-environmental behaviors,” writes a research team led by University of Michigan psychologist Michael Hall.

Conversely, those who expressed the greatest belief in, and concern about, the warming environment “were most supportive of government climate policies, but least likely to report individual-level actions.”

Sorry, I didn’t have time to recycle — I was busy watching a documentary about the crumbling Antarctic ice shelf.

The study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, followed more than 400 Americans for a full year. On seven occasions — roughly once every eight weeks — participants revealed their climate change beliefs, and their level of support for policies such as gasoline taxes and fuel economy standards.

They also noted how frequently they engaged in four environmentally friendly behaviors: recycling, using public transportation, buying “green” products, and using reusable shopping bags.

The researchers found participants broke down into three groups, which they labeled “skeptical,” “cautiously worried,” and “highly concerned.” While policy preferences of group members tracked with their beliefs, their behaviors largely did not: Skeptics reported using public transportation, buying eco-friendly products, and using reusable bags more often than those in the other two categories.

March 14, 2018

The navy we need versus the navy we’re willing to pay for

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Campbell recounts the ups and downs of the federal government’s plans for the Royal Canadian Navy over the last few decades:

A Chilean navy boarding team fast-ropes onto the flight deck of RCN Halifax-class frigate HMCS Calgary (FFH 335) during multinational training exercise Fuerzas Aliadas PANAMAX 2009.
US Navy photo via Wikimedia.

One of my old friends, commenting to another equally old friend on social media, said this: “Surely, the PM and his government must see the obvious — that as the oceans warm and the ice melts the Northwest Passage becomes navigable year round. He’s been sounding off about climate change ad nauseum so that would seem to be understood by him. As a teacher he must also know that European colonial powers sought a shortcut between east and west but were deterred by ice. That’s changed, which he acknowledges, and Canada’s claim of the.increasingly ice free Northwest Passage as sovereign territory is under threat. Absent Canada’s willingness, and any capability, to enforce it’s claim, Canada surrenders any legitimate right to ownership of the Northwest Passage and the resources in the territory it abuts. That a maritime nation bordered by three oceans needs a blue-water navy is axiomatic. And once the PM acknowledges that the Northwest Passage is about to become Canada’s Suez Canal he must recognize that it, too, needs to be protected and defended by the Royal Canadian Navy. But the navy can only do that if it has ships and sailors. If Canada doesn’t expend the effort to protect its shores and assert its claims someone else will.” Sound pretty sensible, doesn’t it? Climate change will, very possibly, open the Northwest Passage; it Canada cannot patrol and police those waters then others will exploit them; it’s the Navy’s job to patrol and police our waters … I have argued that the “constabulary fleet” that should do that ought not to be in the Navy, but that’s a different issue … for now.

[…]

Way back when ~ I’m working from memory and I’m happy to have these numbers corrected ~ the Royal Canadian Navy said, in a document called “Leadmark,” if my memory serves, that, in addition to infrastructure (headquarters, schools, dockyards, etc) it needed:

  • A fleet with global “reach” which meant more than a dozen “major combatants” (destroyers and frigates) plus four support ships so that, at any time, it could have one combat-ready task group in each of any two of the world’s oceans;
  • A coastal (three coasts) patrol fleet consisting of a mix of submarines and another dozen “minor combatants” (corvettes and mine hunters);
  • Organic air elements for those fleets;
  • Auxiliary and training vessels.

Circumstances changed over time but the Paul Martin government finally committed to new helicopters for the fleet and thanks to his decision and to the perseverance of the Harper government they are, finally, entering service, only 25 years after Jean Chrétien abruptly cancelled the Mulroney government’s signed contracts for (then) new shipborne helicopters.

[…]

What we, Canadians, do not have is a properly funded plan to build the real Navy that the country with the world’s longest coastline, that borders three oceans, needs and deserves.

Since I am pretty sure that, absent some catastrophic events, Prime Minister Trudeau has no interest in warships (or the Coast Guard) I can be fairly confident that while new ships will be built they will be too few in number for the jobs that need doing.

There are no votes in promising to rebuild the military. The Liberals will ignore it and the Conservatives would be wise to not make it much of a campaign issue … Canadians, an overwhelming majority of Canadians just don’t care. But the Conservatives need to get some first rate naval and shipbuilding people into a room and decide, for themselves, what the real costs are for what the Royal Canadian Navy really needs.

The expected warming of the Arctic Ocean and the potential opening of new shipping lanes through areas currently claimed by Canada should be a huge encouragement for the federal government to get serious about ensuring that the RCN, the Canadian Coast Guard and the RCMP are properly prepared and equipped to protect our sovereignty in this region. As in so many other climate change matters, however, the government loves to talk the talk but is manifestly uninterested in walking the walk. More new ships, submarines, helicopters, bases, and the military staff to crew/staff them would be a very expensive commitment that wouldn’t shore up votes in those critical marginal constituencies and would reduce the government’s ability so spend money in aid of getting re-elected (the Liberals are in power now, but the same sort of political calculus applies to the Tories as well).

Mr. Campbell is a Conservative and clearly harbours hopes that Admiral Andrew Scheer will be more willing to make the RCN a priority, but history does not support that hope. The last time (and possibly only time outside periods of declared war) that a Canadian government was serious about the military was before 1957. Canadians are hopelessly in love with the idea of being a peaceful nation and have never been willing to engage with that old Latin tag “Si vis pacem, para bellum“

March 13, 2018

The economic argument for carbon taxes

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall explains what a carbon tax is supposed to do, as opposed to what many environmental activists want it to do:

The essential economic analysis is that carbon emissions are an “externality.” There are costs to third parties of the freely chosen activities of consenting adults. If there aren’t such third party costs then the adults get to consent – as long as your bedroom contains only those freely consenting adults then what goes on there is up to you. But if there are those third party costs – say, the noise from the enjoyments causes lost sleep among the neighbours – then some societal power to force an adjustment seems reasonable enough.

Again, economics analyses here by suggesting that we’ll get too much, or too many, of those third party costs if people aren’t paying for them. If we’ve not got to pay to soundproof the orgy then we’ll have more orgies than if we do. It’s fair that we insist upon such soundproofing perhaps. But sometimes we cannot insist upon such direct actions – then we’ve got to try and change the price system. Which is what the carbon tax does.

There are benefits to using fossil fuels – transport, heat, cooking and so on. Given current technological levels immediate banning would mean billions die – commonly thought to be a Bad Thing. But there are those costs imposed upon others as well in the climate change the emissions cause. The answer is that we look to that greatest good of the greatest number, the utilitarian answer. Where emissions produce more value than the damage they cause – including over time – then we want them to continue. Where they don’t then we want them to stop. That way we get the maximum possible value being created and thus all humans – over time – are as rich as we can be given current technologies.

Calculating what this number is, this tax rate, is also known as determining the social cost of carbon emissions. The Stern Review may or may not have exactly the right number but it’s a good enough starting point, $80 per tonne CO2. Say 50 cents or so per gallon of gas. Slap that tax on and we’ve corrected the price system. People who use gas are now paying the environmental costs of their use. So, anything they use it for must create greater value than the damage being caused. We’re copacetic at this point, we’ve the optimal level of emissions.

Note that this logic still works whatever you think of the rate. 1 cent or $100 a gallon, the logic is still the same, we’re only arguing over what is that social cost of carbon. Stick a tax on of whatever it is and we’re done.

Even if climate change isn’t a problem, or isn’t happening, we do still need some tax revenues somewhere. It’s also better to tax consumption than incomes or capital, better to tax things inelastic in demand with respect to price than those elastic. Fossil fuel consumption taxation is a consumption tax and the demand for fossil fuels is, in the short to medium term at least, inelastic. We’re fine with fuel taxation therefore.

For a quick backgrounder on the concept of externalities, MR University did a video on this a few years back. For reasons to worry that your government might not be quite as revenue-neutral in imposing a Pigouvian tax, Warren Meyer also has doubts.

March 9, 2018

QotD: Contempt for science

Filed under: Education, Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The waging of a “war on science” by right-wing know-nothings has become part of the conventional wisdom of the intelligentsia. Even some Republican stalwarts have come to disparage the GOP as “the party of stupid.” Republican legislators have engaged in spectacles of inanity, such as when Sen. James Inhofe, chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, brought a snowball to the Senate floor in 2015 to dispute the fact of global warming, and when Rep. Lamar Smith, chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, pulled quotes out of context from peer-reviewed grants of the National Science Foundation so he could mock them (for example, “How does the federal government justify spending over $220,000 to study animal photos in National Geographic?”).

Yet a contempt for science is neither new, lowbrow, nor confined to the political right. In his famous 1959 lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” C.P. Snow commented on the disdain for science among educated Britons and called for a greater integration of science into intellectual life. In response to this overture, the literary critic F.R. Leavis wrote a rebuttal in 1962 that was so vituperative The Spectator had to ask Snow to promise not to sue for libel if they published the work.

The highbrow war on science continues to this day, with flak not just from fossil-fuel-funded politicians and religious fundamentalists but also from our most adored intellectuals and in our most august institutions of higher learning. Magazines that are ostensibly dedicated to ideas confine themselves to those arising in politics and the arts, with scant attention to new ideas emerging from science, with the exception of politicized issues like climate change (and regular attacks on a sin called “scientism”). Just as pernicious is the treatment of science in the liberal-arts curricula of many universities. Students can graduate with only a trifling exposure to science, and what they do learn is often designed to poison them against it.

Steven Pinker, “The Intellectual War on Science”, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018-02-13.

February 18, 2018

“The minority of one is the most oppressed minority of all”

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Matt Ridley on the rising tide of neo-Victorian prudery in western society:

Is it so different here or are we slipping down the same slope? Pre-Raphaelite paintings that show the top halves of female nudes are temporarily removed from an art gallery’s walls; young girls are forced to wear headscarves in school; darts players and racing drivers may not be accompanied by women in short skirts; women are treated differently from men at universities, as if they were the weaker sex, and saved from seeing upsetting paragraphs in novels; sex is negotiated in advance with the help of chaperones. We have been here before.

In Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s novel of 1928, she portrayed the transition from the 18th century to the Victorian period thus: “Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides.”

How we laughed at such absurdity in my youth. But even for making the point that some of the new feminism seems “retrograde” in promoting the view that women are fragile, the American academic Katie Roiphe suffered a vicious campaign to have her article in Harper’s magazine banned before publication. “I find the Stalinist tenor of this conversation shocking,” she told The Sunday Times. “The basic assumption of freedom of speech is imperilled in our culture right now.”

The sin of blasphemy is back. There are things you simply cannot say about Islam and increasingly about Christianity, about climate change, about gender, to mention a few from a very long and growing list, without being accused of, and possibly prosecuted for, “hate speech”. Is it hate speech to say that Muhammad “delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse”? That was Voltaire, one of my heroes. You may disagree with him but you should, in accordance with his principle, defend his right to say it. In demanding tolerance of minorities, many younger people seem to be remarkably intolerant.

There is an odd contradiction between the declared wish to live and let live — “diversity!”, “don’t judge!” — and the actual behaviour, which is ruthlessly and priggishly judgmental. They never stop drafting acts of uniformity, always in the name of the collective against the individual. The minority of one is the most oppressed minority of all.

January 10, 2018

Tipping toward a new Ice Age

Filed under: Environment, History, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Matt Ridley on the possibility that our current interglacial period — the time period during which all of human history has played out from before the start of agricultural civilization down to today — may be coming to an end:

In 1976 Nicholas Shackleton, a Cambridge physicist, and his colleagues published evidence from deep-sea cores of cycles in the warming and cooling of the Earth over the past half million years which fitted Milankovich’s orbital wobbles. Precession, which decides whether the Earth is closer to the sun in July or in January, is on a 23,000-year cycle; obliquity, which decides how tilted the axis of the Earth is and therefore how warm the summer is, is on a 41,000-year cycle; and eccentricity, which decides how rounded or elongated the Earth’s orbit is and therefore how close to the sun the planet gets, is on a 100,000-year cycle. When these combine to make a “great summer” in the north, the ice caps shrink.

Game, set and match to Milankovich? Not quite. The Antarctic ice cores, going back 800,000 years, then revealed that there were some great summers when the Milankovich wobbles should have produced an interglacial warming, but did not. To explain these “missing interglacials”, a recent paper in Geoscience Frontiers by Ralph Ellis and Michael Palmer argues we need carbon dioxide back on the stage, not as a greenhouse gas but as plant food.

The argument goes like this. Colder oceans evaporate less moisture and rainfall decreases. At the depth of the last ice age, Africa suffered long mega-droughts; only small pockets of rainforest remained. Crucially, the longer an ice age lasts, the more carbon dioxide is dissolved in the cold oceans. When the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere drops below 200 parts per million (0.02 per cent), plants struggle to grow at all, especially at high altitudes. Deserts expand. Dust storms grow more frequent and larger. In the Antarctic ice cores, dust increased markedly whenever carbon dioxide levels got below 200 ppm. The dust would have begun to accumulate on the ice caps, especially those of Eurasia and North America, which were close to deserts. Next time a Milankovich great summer came along, and the ice caps began to melt, the ice would have grown dirtier and dirtier, years of deposited dust coming together as the ice shrank. The darker ice would have absorbed more heat from the sun and a runaway process of collapsing ice caps would have begun.

All of human civilisation happened in an interglacial period, with a relatively stable climate, plentiful rainfall and high enough levels of carbon dioxide to allow the vigorous growth of plants. Agriculture was probably impossible before then, and without its hugely expanded energy supply, none of the subsequent flowering of human culture would have happened.

That interglacial will end. Today the northern summer sunshine is again slightly weaker than the southern. In a few tens of thousands of years, our descendants will probably be struggling with volatile weather, dust storms and air that cannot support many crops. But that is a very long way off, and by then technology should be more advanced, unless we prevent it developing. The key will be energy. With plentiful and cheap energy our successors could thrive even in a future ice age, growing crops, watering deserts, maintaining rainforests and even melting ice caps.

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