The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming is now available at Amazon.com
Why has the world been unable to address global warming? Science policy expert Roger Pielke, Jr., says it’s not the fault of those who reject the Kyoto Protocol, but those who support it, and the magical thinking that the agreement represents.
In The Climate Fix, Pielke offers a way to repair climate policy, shifting the debate away from meaningless targets and toward a revolution in how the world’s economy is powered, while de-fanging the venomous politics surrounding the crisis. The debate on global warming has lost none of its power to polarize and provoke in a haze of partisan vitriol. The Climate Fix will bring something new to the discussions: a commonsense perspective and practical actions better than any offered so far.
Editorial Reviews via Amazon
From Publishers Weekly
Pielke (The Honest Broker) presents a smart and hard-nosed analysis of the politics and science of climate change and proposes a commonsense approach to climate policy. According to Pielke, the iron law of climate policy dictates that whenever environmental and economic objectives are placed in opposition to each other, economics always wins. Climate policies must be made compatible with economic growth as a precondition for their success, he writes, and because the world will need more energy in the future, an oblique approach supporting causes, such as developing affordable alternative energy sources rather than consequences, such as controversial schemes like cap-and-trade, is more likely to succeed.
Although some may protest on principle the suggestion that we accept the inevitability of energy growth, Pielke’s focus on adaptation to climate change refreshingly sidesteps the unending debate over the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and opens up the possibility for effective action that places human dignity and democratic ideals at the center of climate policies.
The book is available at Amazon.com and I think it is destined to be a best seller in the “Global Warming” category.
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Damn. This is going to push my book:
http://www.theclimateconspiracy.com/?p=462
off the charts at Amazon 🙁
I don’t need a fix. No really. I’ve got it under control. I can stop anytime I like. Honest.
Finally, some critical and clear thinking which proposes incentive and economically sound solutions to our future energy needs. I’ll be ordering my copy today.
It should be clearer that the description of the book is by the publisher, from the Amazon page, not written by Anthony (or so I assume!). And the Publisher’s Weekly quote should be set apart from Anthony’s own comment at the end.
Sorry to nitpick, but not making authorship clear is a frequent source of confusion on this otherwise excellent blog. It’s not hard to do with careful use of quote marks, indentation, type changes, etc.
/Mr Lynn
Climate policies must be made compatible with economic growth as a precondition for their success,
And not the voodoo economics of the “green” jobs that the administration is pushing. Paying $500k per job is not economically viable.
Phil, thats sort of what I was thinking too.
Climate alarmists have been claiming to understand basic economics for decades now. There seems to be a more conciliatory tone here, but the message is the same so I’m not impressed. They still want to control the economy according to their ideals, nothing new for me to see here.
Growth of energy production is a given for progress—it should not be feared, but desired—and bringing the undeveloped countries up to our level. Then there will be the wealth and resources to fix environmental damage and ameliorate future damage, just as we are doing today in the developed countries.
We will not be using carbon for major energy eventually as we move to newer and better nuclear power for our industrial energy. Nuclear is the most environmentally friendly as it will have the least footprint and the new systems are orders of magnitude safer than they were/are and the current generation actually has a very good record in the US. Chernobyl is the outlier as its designed truly sucked, being built effectively out of charcoal and set to become a bonfire upon meltdown. Three Mile Island was a success with no injuries and good containment, despite the alarmists pretending that it was a disaster.
David is correct in my opinion. Some environmental legislation has gone beyond rationality, sending jobs to China, doing far more environmental damage.
IMHO, The deep greens & “watermelons” won’t like this as AGW has been purely a political / psychological item for them (either consciously or sub-consciously) since the beginning of the concept. The concept of AGW touched something in them that appealed to some deep sense of guilt & that we must atone for our sins . Suggesting that we should allow energy growth of any kind will get the same reception as suggesting GHG’s may not be the monster problem Mann, Gore, Hansen & company suggests.
This reaction by AGW supporters is predictable. It is also predictable that the AGW blogs will lash out at Pielke with multiple ad homs, which will only further weaken their case & show the world that they had little of substance behind their argument all along.
Watch it happen, folks!
It is a shame because it is apparent that both Pielke’s are level-headed academics, trying to do quality work, free of politics. At the end of the day, that is what we should want from all researchers. Yet, this work will be derided for not following the AGW gospel. Sad.
To which I can’t help but reply with the classic line that “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist”.
Common sense? I thought that was long lost. Well welcome back old freind!
Welcome politicians, tie up your high-horses in the back, have your servants turn off the supercomputers for a spell, grab yourself a cup of coffee and let’s sit down and talk some real turkey, partner.
But do they still know how to read, speak, and understand common sense?
Professor Pielke, can’t wait to read it. Long, long overdue.
How many times do we have to tell you that it’s not a “finite planet.”? Nothing is a resource until the mind of man makes it one, and the raw materials, both living and non-living, for creating resources are for all practical purposes unlimited. Then there is the rest of the Solar System, ripe for the taking.
In another thread you opined loudly that it was not economical to mine the asteroids and the other planets, which is true—for the present. If the neo-Luddites do not stop progress in its tracks and return us to the Dark Ages, one day that bounty will also be ours.
/Mr Lynn
In general I am far less impressed with Pielke Jr. than I am with Pielke Sr.
The message I get (right or wrong) is something along the lines of “Well, why don’t we all just agree that man is heating up the atmosphere with CO2 and it’s a problem. We just don’t agree on what we should do about it”.
I actually believe it is theoretically possible that mankind’s emissions of CO2 MIGHT cause some very slight warming of the atmosphere many, many years in the the future…if nothing else changes and we continue to produce and use energy decades in the future the same way we do today. What I can’t accept is the caveat at the end of the previous sentence. One would expect our average life expectancy to remain at 61 years if nothing else had changed since 1935.
I don’t believe we have any reliable measure of temperature except for the very short satellite data that exists. In short, I have seen no compelling evidence to even accept the premise that mankind’s emissions of CO2 are causing ANY change in global temperature. This issue is steeped in politics and is very light on empirical science. I remain unconvinced that there is any legitimate need to “fix” anything in terms of CO2. There is no reason to compromise until the believers in AGW actually prove their case.
Pielke Jr. is still a “believer”. He just wants to emphasize adaptation and alternative energy schemes, for the sake of decarbonization, over punitive measures such as carbon taxes and cap and trade.
While governments should always be ready to protect infrastructure and respond to large scale natural events like floods and hurricanes it is folly to seek to eliminate carbon fuels if they are economically superior and abundant for the sake of appeasing the carbonphobes.
Color me unimpressed.
RE: GM’s classic line about exponential growth
Cute. And as I wrote the other day: “Colorful writing is not necessarily good writing.”
Why not tell us what is bothering you? What exponential growth are you talking about? Perhaps recent fuel production from microbes. Perhaps growth in wind energy. And just because something is cute and quotable doesn’t make it brilliant. If you have a truth to tell, tell it in simple and direct words and let it stand on its own merits. Best to take your cute and (non)classic line and “ x up a rope” for all anyone cares. And that is a classic line which is why I don’t have to explain it.
Did I mention the word “madman”? In the same thread it was explained to you that the energy cost of mining asteroids is such that it will first, always be uneconomical to mine them (filtering sea water makes more energetic sense), second, on a BAU technological development path, it will be likely centuries before we are able to do so (even with the extremely large net energy loss), and third, you can not mine asteroids for energy/negative entropy, and there is no substitute for that.
The above is dictated by the laws of physics, the denial/complete lack of understanding of which seems to be a common diseases afflicting the minds of the posters here. No technological progress can get you past the laws of physics. Something that only a madman (or an economist) will not recognize
I find it particularly amusing that the people who warn about the limits to growth all come from highly technical backgrounds, thus calling them neo-Luddites (and coming from people from economic, i.e. non-technical, background most of the time) is deeply ironic…
As I said, the lack of respect for the laws of physics and the inability to apply proper reasoning and to work with numbers is a common disorder here. You seem to suffer from it too. If you didn’t you would have noticed the discrepancy between what has to be replaced in terms of energy production, the time scale on which this has to happen, the starting position of wind power, its growth rates and the time this growth rate has to be sustained over. In the previous thread it was mentioned (not by me) that the US alone has to build more than 500 wind turbines every day for the next few decades to make up the shortfall of conventional fossil fuel sources due to depletion.
Biofuels are much worse because in addition to their miserable EROEI, unless you close the nutrient cycle, something that absolutely nobody is talking about when the topic is discussed (why would they, ecology, who cares…), so it is not at all on the minds of people, they are a recipe for ecological disaster. Whether it is microbes, corn, sugar cane, cellulose, whatever. And they make (and never will make) absolutely no sense energetically – biofuels are converted sunlight, the theoretical limit of photosynthesis efficiency is by a few percent lower than the most efficient solar panels, so you’re always better off with those. And you still require absurdly large areas for that, at present levels of energy demand, i.e. not accounting for future growth.
Again, economist or madman…
GM, you don’t like the current status quo and you also don’t have faith in the alternative energy options? What is your point then, are you just advocating population statis or population reduction?
GM,
Please note that in response to my previous comment you make statements about wind and bio that I entirely agree with. I was questioning what sort of exponential growth your first comment was addressing. Is someone actually claiming human population will do that? If so maybe they haven’t heard of the “demographic transition” of developing societies. Maybe they don’t realize many countries do not now have populations that are replacing themselves. Is someone claiming humans are on an exponential trajectory of fossil fuel use? Again, that makes no sense.
So, briefly, what exactly is it about this post that caused you to make the statement you did? You, Mr. Lynn, and I have now written more words here than the original post and I still don’t know. This post is a short introduction to a book. There are these phrases:
“and because the world will need more energy in the future”; and
“the suggestion that we accept the inevitability of energy growth”
Are these the ideas you object to?
Understanding E = mc^2 — By William Tucker
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=2469
@ur momisugly John F. Hultquist:
There two kinds of growth: population (P) and per capita environmental impact (AT), which are the two components of the I=PAT equation. If the I exceeds the long-terms carrying capacity of the environment (planet in our case), we’re in trouble. And that’s determined by the Liebig law which states that for an organism or a population, the one limiting factor among the many that it requires for growth is the one that’s in shortest supply.
It is the total of population and per capita consumption that one has to look at. The demographic transition will never occur because the resources necessary for those countries to become rich do not exist, but even if we suppose that population stabilizes, per capita consumption will never do so without major societal reorganization because our whole socioeconomic system is organized around economic growth; without it collapses. But you can’t have economic growth without per capita consumption growth (no matter what anyone tells you about decoupling of growth from material consumption, nobody has found a way to do that, even the computers often given as an example for that use an awful lot of mineral resources and energy to build and run). So the total I quantity will keep growing even if P was stabilized. Given that currently I is estimated to be 1.4 times the carrying capacity of the environment, and that’s without accounting for Peak Oil and the depletion of various other mineral resources, you can figure out what we’re headed for.
You misrepresent what I was saying. The alternative energy option can not replace what we are getting from fossil fuels. That doesn’t mean they should be abandoned, it meas that we should get our energy consumption within what is reasonably possible to get out of those sources while we work on finding other more concentrated sources of energy. We need to buy ourselves time – if this civilization fail catastrophically, it is game over for the whole planet (the most frightening answer to the Fermi paradox is that all intelligent life tends to do what we are doing right now and self destructs before it ever gets to be heard outside of the confines of its solar system).
Ultimately there are two main sources of energy we can rely on in the long run:
1. Energy flows from the sun and from the Earth’s core (the latter is likely to be smaller than the former). You can count wind towards that category too because it is to a large extent converted solar energy. The problem with those is that they are very diffuse and are ultimately very limited (fantasies about Dyson spheres aside).
2. There is a lot of very concentrated energy locked up in matter. Currently we have conventional nuclear energy, but this is very limited too; breeder and thorium reactors would buy us more time but there are a lot of technical hurdles to be overcome before those become reality, and it is not at all certain that this is even practically possible. All of that applies to a much larger extent to fusion. Of course if someone could find a way to produce anti-matter without the hugely negative EROEI (and the corresponding $25million a gram price tag), that would go a long way towards solving the problem, but this seems even theoretically impossible at this point.
So the energy (even though I maintain that it is always much more useful to think in terms of entropy, because this encompasses the mineral resources we use too) we can rely on in the long term is very very limited, and this means growth has to end or we will crash very hard and never recover. Not only that, given that we are already in drastic overshoot, growth has to be reversed, and if want people to live comfortable lifestyles this means both reduction of population and limiting non-essential consumption
I read the above post an I’m bemused.
Did “climatologers” even remotely think they would approach the electorate to make significant demands for painful changes in lifestyle without an absolutely watertight case?
Or did they foolishly convince themselves that they had a watertight case only to find their arguments falling apart in the adversarial court of public opinion.
Either way, they have been exceptionally foolish by winding up the political establishment. I would prefer to watch them accept due consequences as a lesson to others not to abuse the good name of science.
This looks like an attempt to shift ground, to try to save face and mitigate losses. I’m not impressed – climotologers would just take the bitter tasting medicine that is due for the implementation of damaging legislation that has already occurred.
“So the energy… we can rely on in the long term is very very limited, and this means growth has to end or we will crash very hard and never recover. Not only that, given that we are already in drastic overshoot, growth has to be reversed, and if want people to live comfortable lifestyles this means both reduction of population and limiting non-essential consumption”
well, credibility of panic mongers is very limited and this means that crisis fatigue has set in big-time and it’s boring beyond endurance. Not only that, given that doomsday rhetoric and caricature of the loony sandwich-board doom-prophet are having less and less effect in the hands of every semi-hemi-demagogue with a keyboard, the population of gurus is in overshoot, their decline is ineluctable, and if sanity is to restored, it’s an essential extinction.
GM Says: It is the total of population and per capita consumption that one has to look at. The demographic transition will never occur because the resources necessary for those countries to become rich do not exist
How do you know these resources do not exist? We have had that discussion before.
Economical factors are the only thing that hampers energy usage and I would argue as well overall population.
yet here you go again looking into your crystal ball talking about or we will crash very hard and never recover.
Science please. I see very little of it except from what I assume is malthus type equations which never work out in the real world since economics tends to trump malthus type equations. We can argue this philosophy all we want, but the burden on proving doom and gloom is on you. Many people before you have worn “less comfortable” sackcloth and worn much better “the end is near” signs.