Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach [See also the follow-on post entitled “Why Revenue Neutral Isn’t”
I was pointed by a commenter on another blog to the Canadian Province of British Columbia, where they put a carbon-based energy tax scheme into effect in 2008. Before looking at either the costs or the actual results of the scheme, let me start by looking at the possible benefits of the scheme. I mean, on my planet if there are no benefits the costs are kinda beside the point. The BC carbon-based energy tax was sold on the basis that it would help in the fight against the theorized CO2-caused global warming. So how much will the actions of our northern cousins affect the world temperature?
Well, that’s hard to answer, but we could set an upper bound on the possible cooling by a thought experiment. According to the current climate paradigm, CO2 rules the global temperature, and the change in temperature is about 3°C for each doubling of CO2. That means if we know the emissions, we can calculate the resultant temperature change.
So here’s the thought experiment. Suppose British Columbia had been founded in 1850 as a separate country with the high ethical aim of achieving freedom from evil carbon based fuels. And instead of calling it “British Columbia”, the early colonists decided to call it “British Utopia”, because they were going to make the ultimate sacrifice in the fight against evil carbon dioxide. They weren’t going to use any fossil fuels ever, their country would be a true utopia. So they built a wall around British Utopia and didn’t trade with anyone, to keep out nasty carbon from trade. To avoid CO2 emissions they didn’t use any oil, either their own or from elsewhere. They didn’t make any cement, or import any, too much CO2 released in the manufacture. The Utopians didn’t use coal for heat or transportation or making steel, just wonderful organic renewable wood. Since the carbon in wood was recently taken from the atmosphere, burning it doesn’t add CO2 to the atmosphere, it just replaces what the tree removed from the atmosphere. And suppose further that they had kept true to that until today …
To me that sounds like they’d lead short lives under brutal conditions, breathing a hazy brown atmosphere from all the wood smoke. And if you run your country on wood you might well end up looking like Haiti … but we’ll let all that go for the moment and ask the important question:
If the British Utopians had made that noble sacrifice for humanity in 1850 and foresworn fossil fuels … how much cooler would the world be today?
Fortunately, given the assumptions made by the IPCC under the current paradigm, we can calculate how much cooler it would be if the British Utopians had given up emitting CO2. The CDIAC has data for both Canada and the World ms showing CO2 emissions since 1750. And since for a given country the CO2 emissions are a function of population, and we know the historical BC population as a fraction of the total, we can figure the total BC emissions, and thus, the amount of Utopian cooling. So here’s the true Canadian hockeystick, showing how much cooler, year by year, the world would be from the British Utopians’ self-sacrifice:
Figure 1. How much cooler the world would be if the British Utopians had abjured the evil carbon habit in 1850.
Now, the blue line in Figure 1. shows how much the virtuous actions of the British Utopians have cooled the planet over the last century and a half. If they had “Just Said No” to fossil fuels, the blue line shows how much cooler we’d be today. That would be about five thousandths of one degree … man, those Utopians really know how to get the most bang for their buck, huh? Give up all the modern comforts for a century and a half, live in the dark ages for decade after decade while everyone else is partying down, and what do they have to show for a hundred and fifty years of self-deprivation?
Five thousandths of a degree of cooling.
But wait, it gets worse … think of the grandchildren!
Over on the right hand side of the graph I’ve shown another fifty years of projected emissions. For a young couple just starting a family today, in fifty years their grandchildren will be in their thirties. So what might the BC carbon-based energy tax achieve for these grandchildren?
I’ve shown two possible futures. One is fifty years of the “Business As Usual” scenario in red. This continues the post-1970 trend, which has been an average of about a 1.5% annual increase in British Columbia emissions. That’s what we might pessimistically expect if there were no carbon-based energy tax of any kind. That’s worst-case.
And in green, I’ve shown what would be the absolute best-case result from the carbon-based energy tax. This is the total fantasy outcome, where the BC emissions remain at their 2008 value (the date of the BC tax), and they don’t increase at all for fifty years. Of course atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise because of the constant annual addition of the same amount of CO2 emitted in 2008, but not so much as in the “Business As Usual” scenario.
Now, the difference between those two possible scenarios, the worst-case and best-case scenarios, is the theoretical maximum possible cooling that might result from the carbon-based energy tax. That is shown by the black line in the lower right corner … and that cooling is three thousandths of a degree.
So there you have it. All of the pain that the folks of BC are going through, all of the miles of paperwork, all of the sacrifice, all of the damage done to the poor, all the taxes collected and bureaucrats coddled, for all of that, what the good Canadian folks have achieved for their grandchildren is three thousandths of a degree of cooling.
…
…
About all I can say is, I certainly hope than the grandchildren show a proper appreciation for that fantastic inter-generational gift, and that they send the old geezers a nice thank-you card like Miss Manners recommends. After all, it’s the thought that counts, and it’s not often you get a present that’s that significant …
Seriously, folks, the anti-carbon zealots must have hypnotized the masses. I know no other way to explain such idiocy. Here’s the thing:
Suppose someone came up to you and said “I can guarantee you that I can cool the planet by three thousandths of a degree over the next fifty years.” And suppose you checked them out, and found that they were telling the truth, in fact they could guarantee the three thousandths of a degree of cooling in fifty years.
How much would you personally pay for that?
Would you pay a thousand dollars to be guaranteed that amount of cooling, 0.003°C, and not today but in fifty years?
I wouldn’t. Not worth it. Too much money for too little benefit.
But the collective madness of the BC citizens has reached the point where they’re willing to establish an economy-slowing tax accompanied by a whole bureaucracy, with enforcement officers and piles of paperwork, and spend millions and millions of dollars in the mad pursuit of a best-case benefit of three thousandths of a degree cooling, not now, but in fifty years.
All I can do is shake my head in astonishment, and wonder at the madness of crowds. A plan is proposed, someone does a cost-benefit analysis, the benefits are too small to have a hope of being measured and don’t occur for decades … and in response people say “Great plan, let’s implement it immediately”???
Ah, well … I’m an optimist, I figure at some point our Canadian neighbors will wake up and go “Wha?” …
Best to all,
w.
PS—As I mentioned above, I wanted to take a look at the benefits, the costs, and the effects of the BC carbon-based energy tax. I’ve only discussed the (lack of) benefits in this post, so as you might expect, there will be a couple of additional posts to cover the effects and the costs. In fact they’re mostly written, because this started as one post and got unbearably long … so I’ll cover the costs and the effects of the BC tax in future posts.
PPS—Please don’t tell me that this is just the first step. The BC taxpayers have already spent half a billion dollars on this farce and that’s not the half of it. If your wonderful first step costs a billion dollars for a cooling of 0.003°C, I am not interested in your second step whatever it may be.
NOTE: This is one of a four-part series on the BC carbon-based energy tax. The parts are:
British Columbia, British Utopia
Fuel on the Highway in British Pre-Columbia
Why Revenue Neutral Isn’t, and Other Costs of the BC Tax
tonyb says:
July 12, 2013 at 1:00 am
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Tony
I am surprised that you got any response from the climate scientists. None refuted your figures, and 4 confirmed in broad terms what you were saying. I will leave out the jibe as to whether you can accoringly claim 100% consensus amongst climate scientists as to the temperature reduction that will be achieved.
i have seen similar figures banded about. May be Booker, or Delingpole or even Andrew Neil would be interested. I would have thought that Booker and Delingpole might well be willing to write an article on this. the problem is that they are not widely read by Joe Public.
I have seen a number of interviews by Andrew Neil who appears somewhat sceptical. He may be persuaded to use this info when interviewing a politician from DECC, or someone else promoting renewables. It would make for an interesting interview. So although it may not form the main basis of an interview, it could be used by him to create an uncomfortable moment, and interviewers like creating such moments. I consider it worthwhile contacting Andrew Neil additionally providing him with the details of the response(s) that you received from the climate scientists.
Additionally, your scenario/info could form the basis of a parliamentary question. Bishophill has a post on this, and if it is not one of the proposed questions, I would suggest that you raise it as a proposed question. One could additionally ask whether the government considers that such expenditure represents value for money, and if so why.
If I understand you correctly Willis, you say that what British Columbia do or not do regarding carbon emissions, does not matter because they have such a small population. Therefore they should not do anything. I think this is a rather odd way of reasoning. Please explain if I have misunderstood.
My other objection to this post is that you call a carbon tax a cost, which I think is misleading. If you apply the same logic to other taxes, why not remove income tax or corporate tax or perhaps value added taxes. What good do they do after all? Income taxes make all working people a bit poorer. Value added taxes make all goods more expensive. Corporate taxes make it more difficult to grow a business and create more jobs. No good in any of those, is it?
The answer is that, seen from a statewide perspective, a tax are not a cost, it is a way to transfer money to the government. Only the administration part of the taxes should be regarded as costs, and I don’t think carbon taxes need to be more costly than other taxes.
After all we need some taxes to bring money to the government, so why not put a tax on the bad stuff we want to reduce rather than tax good stuff like creating jobs? I think it is democratic to regard CO2 emissions as bad since the majority think it is bad for the globe. The main purpose of the carbon tax is still to bring money to the government, but a side effect is that it encourages people to choose less carbon intensive products.
Mario Lento says:
July 11, 2013 at 10:47 pm
…. In other words, now is not stasis, but whatever the temperatures are going to be, they’d be 3/1000 cooler if BC stopped increasing emissions?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It depends on whether or not you invoke the The Logarithmic Effect of Carbon Dioxide and ‘Feedbacks’
Richard Verney says;
‘i have seen similar figures banded about. May be Booker, or Delingpole or even Andrew Neil would be interested. I would have thought that Booker and Delingpole might well be willing to write an article on this. the problem is that they are not widely read by Joe Public.’
That is the problem. Booker Delingpole et al are not widely read, let alone by anyone who would take notice.
Straws in the wind bur we have been agitating with our local MP’s against absurd solar farms proliferating in our part of the world. I see they intend to table a parliamentary question about better planning to stop the industrialisation of the countryside. I might send the material to her as back up information.
tonyb
You just have to put that (imaginary) .003°C in the right perspective Willis. The question is, how many Hiroshima-sized atomic explosions does that represent? /sarc
Population of BC = 4.1 million
Population of the world = 7.1 billion = 7100 million
Population of world/population of BC = 1732
x Global temperature change from BC zero carbon= – 0.003
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Global temperature difference w/o free riders = – 5.20
well yes, that is a bit concerning.
BC has two political parties. One is run by crooks, the other by incompetents. We usually elect the crooks because the crooks recognize that you can only steal money from people that have money. The more you keep people working, the more there is to steal.
The carbon tax has been a disaster for the people of BC, taking large amounts of public money and funneling it to friends of the government. The Auditor General wrote a scathing report on the waste and corruption involved, showing that there was no benefit in terms of CO2 reductions.
Already short tax money that should have gone to schools and hospitals to buy new, fuel efficient furnaces or to improve insulation in older buildings was instead funneled largely to one single company to fund a project that would have gone ahead anyways.
To fund the shortfall in taxes the BC government raided the reserves of the Insurance Corporation of BC and BC Hydro, which operate at arms length from the government so that their debt does not appear on the government’s balance sheet, and then used these funds to declare a surplus going into the election.
Surprise surprise, the Insurance Corporation of BC raised insurance rates 12% over 1 year. Luckily for us it is a monopoly. It is illegal in BC to buy your mandatory basic vehicle insurance from any other insurance company.
1 Eli Rabbett + 1 calculator = fuzzy math.
Does anyone really believe that the carbon tax was (is for those trying to get one) anything but a new source of revenue for the government to dole out? And how can redistribution of this tax money be revenue neutral since there will be a lot of “friction” from the redistributors?
Canadians don’t like to think for themselves. Too much work. Thus they rely on their governments, the CBC and David Suzuki to tell them what to believe and do. I’m ashamed to be Canadian sometimes. The people up here are very gullible and easily duped.
We refer to it as British California
Many collective approaches can be taken down this way, but it’s a rhetorical argument that entirely misses the point. If every country had waited for other countries to reduce CFCs before doing anything, nothing would have happened.
For those who want to explore the funding of the greens in British Columbia…
http://fairquestions.typepad.com/rethink_campaigns/
There are hotbeds of academia’s mercenaries to the green lobby too, providing the perfect cover, going to local governments, invited by the token green on council and spewing their misinformation in front of local politicians who do not know better.
Thank you again for a good post.
So how much will the actions of our northern cousins affect the world temperature?
Well, especially when you consider the volumes of coal and oil that they export, and the likely increases in those exports.
I see almost no commentary here reflecting awareness of the political context in BC.
The BC Liberals are not aligned with the federal Liberals. The BC Liberals are a ruthlessly practical right/center power alliance born out of deep fear of NDP (left) rule. BC Liberals have been free to dominate for over a decade following a string of scandals during the last NDP rule in the 1990s. Without a viable alternative to replace the BC Liberals, they’ve been free to do whatever they want with the exception of the last few years when they’ve had to adjust their ways under increasing public pressure. If there’s a lesson here for any democracy, it’s that you need to maintain at least 2 viable alternatives to avoid being the subject of a dictatorship.
In summary, the political context in BC can be described with one word: paralysis.
Thomas says (July 12, 2013 at 2:14 am): “Willis, why not go one step further and make a graph of what how much the global temperature would change if one individual stopped using fossil fuels?”
Why not go one step “back” and see what happens if all of Western Europe, North America, and Australia stop using fossil fuels? Bear in mind, of course, that the rest of the world (e.g. China, India, Russia, etc.) isn’t stupid enough to follow, and so will burn most of the fossil fuels the “virtuous” countries forego, fuels that become cheaper as demand decreases.
As I say at the dinner table when a finicky kid declines a particular dish, “Great, that leaves more for the rest of us!” 🙂
Gary, you give a good description of the prisoner´s dilemma. Does it pay to be cooperative when you don’t know if the other guy is just going to take advantage of you? One solution if international treaties forcing everyone to cooperate. We’ve been trying for some decades but some keep sabotaging the efforts. Or you could appeal to moral, that doing the right thing is always worthwhile even if others don’t. A world where people try to be better than their neighbors is preferable to one where you have a race to the bottom.
Your example is flawed in that the West is responsible for an overwhelming part of the total historical carbon dioxide emissions, far more than justified by our population. China has lately reached similar per capita emissions as the West, but then it’s unavoidable that you emit more trying to build up an infrastructure than when you have one already built up, and lately China has been showing signs of wanting to limit their emissions. India still has far lower per capita emissions so it’s really unfair of you to mention them the way you do.
There were real utopian settlements established in BC. Utopia never seems to work out but traces remain. Utopian thinking however continues to thrive, and not just in BC.
Andrew says:
July 12, 2013 at 1:51 am
Take it from an Aussie – as we closed alumina smelters, new ones popped up in China. And our alumina is shipped by diesel burning ships for a net increase in emissions. And the leftist govt proclaims this as a SUCCESSFUL policy.
Andrew when I lived in Iceland I toured a aluminum smelter. The alumina they smelted was from Indonesia (if I remember correctly), but Iceland had cheap hydro power to smelt the ore. Cheap electricity is needed to smelt alumina and wherever that is the smelters will follow.
Jan Kjetil Andersen says:
July 12, 2013 at 4:12 am
All I can say about your comment is Yikes!!
By a similar calculation, I determined I may as well grow my herd that I pasture on the commons. After all, reducing my herd would barely improve the commons at all.
Jan Kjetil Andersen says:
July 12, 2013 at 4:12 am
“After all we need some taxes to bring money to the government, so why not put a tax on the bad stuff we want to reduce rather than tax good stuff like creating jobs?”
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Putting aside the fact that taxing CO2 destroys jobs, Jan’s point seems to be “lets raise money for the government by taxing bad stuff.” Here in the US it’s called a “sin tax” and is the excuse for high taxes on such things as cigarettes and liqueur.
The remark got me to thinking about just how this carbon tax is done in BC. A google search led me to this site:
http://www.fin.gov.bc.ca/tbs/tp/climate/A1.htm
From the referenced website:
“A carbon tax is usually defined as a tax based on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) generated from burning fuels.
The carbon tax applies to the purchase or use of fuels within the province. The amount of GHGs emitted when a unit of fuel is burned depends fundamentally on the chemical make-up of the fuel, particularly on the amount of carbon in the fuel.”
“Administratively, the carbon tax is applied and collected in essentially the same way that motor fuel taxes are currently applied and collected, except natural gas which is collected at
the retail level.”
So they are taxing fuels, mostly at the wholesale level, which obviously is passed on the consumer. The tax started at $25 (Canadian) a tonne in 2011 and is now $30.
The U.S. and most other countries tax transportation fuel also, but don’t call it a “carbon tax” So this is just another tax on transportation and domestic (and business) use of fuels.
My thoughts are about how little difference the tax will make in the actual production of CO2. That is, until it reaches a level where it discourages economic activity. In the US, the last few years of volatile and high gasoline prices have had little affect on gasoline consumption.
But in Britain, apparently domestic electricity prices have risen to the point where some people cannot afford to heat their homes. However , one commentor mentioned that BC gets 95% of it’s electricity from hydro.
So I suspect that until the BC carbon tax reaches the point that it severely depresses the economy, BC will see no reduction in CO2 emissions, and thus even Willis’ calculated tiny reduction in temperature will not be attained. The “carbon tax” will then just be another tax on consumers, like a sales tax or VAT, that consumers will pay little attention to.
Thomas says (July 12, 2013 at 10:50 am): “Gary, you give a good description of the prisoner´s dilemma. Does it pay to be cooperative when you don’t know if the other guy is just going to take advantage of you?”
Except it’s not really the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the case of a “carbon tax” the “prisoner” who “defects” always wins, whether the other prisoners defect or not. He just wins more if other “prisoners” defect, and even more if all others defect. It’s really more of a Prisoner’s Stupidity game. 🙂
“One solution if international treaties forcing everyone to cooperate. We’ve been trying for some decades but some keep sabotaging the efforts.”
No kidding! Can you guess why? (Hint: Prisoner’s Stupidity)
“Or you could appeal to moral, that doing the right thing is always worthwhile even if others don’t. A world where people try to be better than their neighbors is preferable to one where you have a race to the bottom.”
I love moral people who “do the right thing” even if others don’t. They don’t impose their morality on others by, for example, passing laws to confiscate others’ property to appease their own consciences, then channel the money to political allies. If individual BC citizens choose to curtail their fossil fuel use–and better yet, voluntarily pay extra for it–I say “good on ya, mate!”
“Your example is flawed in that the West is responsible for an overwhelming part of the total historical carbon dioxide emissions, far more than justified by our population.”
And economic growth, science, technology, and wealth. Funny how that kind of thing correlates with cheap energy, isn’t it? Funny how some people don’t seem to realize that.
“…and lately China has been showing signs of wanting to limit their emissions.”
Bwahahaha! Remember, in the Prisoner’s Stupidity game, the longer a “prisoner” can sucker the others into “cooperating”, the more he gains.
“India still has far lower per capita emissions so it’s really unfair of you to mention them the way you do.”
So you’re predicting that India’s CO2 emissions will not increase significantly in the future? Latin America’s? Africa’s? Their economic growth will be fueled by unicorn dust?
numerobis says (July 12, 2013 at 12:08 pm): “By a similar calculation, I determined I may as well grow my herd that I pasture on the commons. After all, reducing my herd would barely improve the commons at all.”
Would your decision be easier if:
1) People have been pasturing ever-increasing herds on the commons for a hundred years with no ill effects on the commons;
2) Recent “expert” claims of both current and imminent harm to the commons are seen to be wildly incorrect;
3) Pasturing more animals on the commons actually causes more grass to grow on the commons?
Thanks Willis. If there were no real people and real politics involved, it would be funny.
It is like watching fish trying to reduce the H20 concentration in their environment.
I am a carbon-based life form and I need CO2.