Roger Pielke, Jr. Fri Jun 06, 05:24:00 PM MDT writes:
A delightful comment at the NY Times under Krugman’s post:
Link: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/energy-choices/?smid=tw-share#permid=11963264
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BlueSky Phoenix, AZ 7 hours ago
Almost every one of you is mistaken. Krugman made up the argument that a percent reduction in emissions translates into a percent reduction in GDP, one-for-one.
Pielke didn’t say anything remotely like that. He never even mentioned any magnitdues or sizes or numbers pertaining to reduction of emissions translating to GDP loss.
What you’re doing now, running for the hills talking about how stupid or dishonest Pielke is, because this guy you like who is on your team said that Pielke is stupid or dishonest — this is bogus. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Neither does Krugman. He doesn’t understand the Kaya Identity. He doesn’t understand Pielke’s argument, and he certainly hasn’t reported it to his readers.
Pielke is saying that we can’t just wave a wand and instantiate some linear growth in technology that costs the same as oil, coal, gas. He said technological progress is not linear. He said technological progress is not completely predictable. These are perfectly reasonable things to say, epecially since they happen to be true. He didn’t make any wild claims.
I think people in the future will have empathy for us. It’s really weird to see Nobel laureates be such terrible sources, isn’t it? It’s unbelievably weird. A Nobel economist should never make the errors Krugman makes, and no human being should so revel in his own malice and hatred that he openly expresses joy at purporting to find out that someone is stupid or dishonest. This is the New York Times??
“But of course that is just anecdotal. Still….”
Yes and of course I know lots of people who refuse to take flu shots because they had a bad experience once. It’s anecdotal of course…
For solar to reach grid parity it has to cost roughly 1/4er to 1/6th what a burner costs per watt. Capacity factor. For the best wind sites 1/3rd. And that does not take into account storage. Dollars per watt is not a good measure. Dollars per watt-hour is better.
Will,
I have used vitamin C to cure internal infections. Bad infections. It works for me. In fact I have had doctors suggest putting it on infected wounds. It worked.
Simon, I think the point Krugman has consistently made is that once the economy is no longer in depression that is when the budget should be brought into balance. The point Keynes made 70 years ago still holds, the time for government austerity is the boom not the bust. The Europeans have certainly proved that again in spades. Because of both growth and inflation, the debt to gdp ratio collapses rapidly if you balance the budget, over a 12 year span the nominal economy will double in size given 6% annual nominal growth (real plus inflation), if no new debt is issued by keeping the budget balanced for that stretch, the debt burden is slashed in half. If you run a surplus as we did for the last few years under Clinton, the ratio collapses even faster. Hairshirt economics is silliness, and Krugman has attacked that relentlessly and I believe effectively.
“stockdoc77 says:
June 8, 2014 at 6:33 pm
Business as usual would suggest that we will at least double and perhaps triple CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere”
There is no evidence anywhere that supports your claim. ~1200 – 1600ppm/v, really? How long would that take given we know ~50% is absorbed by the biosphere annually?
The point Keynes made 70 years ago still holds, the time for government austerity is the boom not the bust.
But the spending was supposed to be done out of accumulated surplus. According to Keynes. Adding debt adds drag to growth. Besides – government is a worse judge of investment opportunities than the obviously inefficient free market. What you get is crony capitalism. Sometimes also called oligarchy. The friends of the regime get rewarded. The enemies punished – by taxes if they are lucky. By special visits from the taxman if they are not.
Economics – although some arithmetic is involved – is a political science.
@M Simon
“I have used vitamin C to cure internal infections. Bad infections. It works for me. In fact I have had doctors suggest putting it on infected wounds. It worked.”
It doesn’t matter if it works for you or not. It has to work in double blind controlled experiments. Since it has no measurable effect in double blind controlled experiments, it’s not science. I’m glad you think it works for you though, or maybe it really does work for you. But that’s not of any help to the rest of us.
The Krugman effect is merely what I call the Friedman effect, named after Tom Friedman, who has come to think of himself as a climate scienitst.krugman is merely a cheap copy of Friedman, who has been hectoring and boring people for about 6 years.
Or maybe the Kerry effect also has some pizazz?
I think they all should be sent to the phantom zone for a few lifetimes as in Superman 1.
I’m glad you think it works for you though, or maybe it really does work for you. But that’s not of any help to the rest of us.
Could be placebo effect. Could be body chemistry. I didn’t get good healing from my body until I upped my intake of C well above the common recommendations. Up until I read Pauling on the matter small cuts often turned into large infections.
What we know about how bodies work is quite generalized. We will do much better when the knowledge is particularized.
Double blind tests are better than nothing. But they are not particularly good when individual body chemistry variations determines outcomes as much as the particular medicine involved.
BTW I’m not aware of any double blind tests on infections vs C levels. Or using C on wounds. OK I did some looking and found this:
http://www.surgerysupplements.com/the-role-of-vitamin-c-in-wound-healing/
These physicians noted that spontaneous breakdown of surgical wounds in the absence of infection occurs with relative frequency in many patients, and they connected this to the patients having low levels of vitamin C. Their recommendation was administration of vitamin C based on their observations that wound healing becomes faulty when vitamin C levels are inadequate (Dr. Rath Research Institute, July 28, 2008).
Another early study from 1941 recommended saturating the body with large doses of vitamin C daily (1,000 mg) for three days before surgery, and then keeping these high levels maintained with supplemental doses during the healing period. This study concluded that large doses of vitamin C are of utmost importance to wound healing (Hunt, Alan H., January 1941).
So Pauling may have been mistaken about colds. But there seems to be a fair literature on the efficacy of C for wounds. I haven’t found anything yet on direct application. But it did work for me on a badly infected wound.
@jim2 June 8, 2014 at 11:53 am
No need to ramp up energy source research to a very high level to find a non-CO2 but energy-dense source of energy, such source was already identified many decades ago. It is ordinary granite, the default stuff continents are made of, one ton of it having the same useful energy content as 50 tons of coal (+ 133 tons of atmospheric Oxygen). Of course there are thousand times better ores than that, plentiful for millennia, it just shows we’ll never run out of fuel, at least not for the rest of Earth’s lifetime, a timeframe not regularly considered by economists.
Even the technology to extract it safely &. cheaply was all but developed decades ago, then shelved for political reasons.
Not all nuclear technologies are created equal. Our current industrial base is hopelessly outdated, plutonium factories in pressurized vessels with energy as a byproduct at less than 1% fuel efficiency are Cold War relics, an absolute no-go. We could use a highly efficient fuel cycle instead at low pressure with passive safety, no chance for weaponization &. no long half life isotopes left in waste. It is only a matter of legal regulation and a little bit of R&D effort, with no insurmountable engineering issues ahead, RTFM mostly.
stockdoc77 says:
June 8, 2014 at 2:47 pm
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If so, why not simply burn coal/gas AND plant trees? Much of the globe has been de-forested, and much of it could be re-forested. To a large extent, it was the industrial revelotution that saved what little forests that remain in developed countries from the chop. But for the use of coal, in these countries, they would have disappeared long ago.
Greens like to talk about CCS and seek to push this as a requirement when building modern power generating stations. And yet, the best form of CCS are trees. Nature got that one sorted long ago. It is a tried and tested ‘technology’ and very simple to introduce!
Burning of biomass (because of its low calorific value) produces far more CO2 than does either coal or gas. It is not as ‘green’ as claimed. So using conventional fuel AND planting trees would result in a greater reduction in CO2 than using biomass. But the Greens like to conceal that fact since they do not favour the use of coal or gas.
Other renewables presently do not result in any reduction in CO2 emissions because of the need for backup by conventionally fueled power generation. Until the back up problem is overcome, ie., until an effective cheap and reliable mass storage device exists, our present renewable technology can never result in any significant reduction in CO2 emissions. PERIOD.
The only low CO2 power generation presently available is nuclear. But the Greens do not like that.
stockdoc77
June 8, 2014 at 7:05 pm
says:
‘He was right that the stimulus was insufficient in size.’
Are you not aware that stimulus money was used to fund the Fast and Furious operation that we still don’t know very much about?
‘He was right that with the economy in depression even very low interest rates and high budget deficits would not be inflationary.’
Are you aware that the government has removed items from the basket that had been used in the past to determine the overall price of consumer goods?
stockdoc77 says:
June 8, 2014 at 7:05 pm
“He was right that quantitative easing would not result in a collapse of the dollar.”
QE = money printing; so let’s rewrite that as
“He was right that money printing would not result in a collapse of the dollar.”
Money printing worked pretty well for the Weimar republic as well, until it didn’t.
https://mises.org/daily/3661
commentary on
“Exchange, Prices and Production in Hyper-Inflation: Germany, 1920 – 1923, by Frank D. Graham (Princeton University Press, 1930)”
fascinating series of comments. thanks to you all (well almost all) for your thought and care.
“If you run a surplus as we did for the last few years under Clinton…”
You should check your numbers.
Total federal debt
Jan 19 2001 – 5.728 trillion
Jan 19 2000 – 5.727 trillion
Jan 19 1999 – 5.619 trillion
Jan 19 1998 – 5.496 trillion
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/pd_debttothepenny.htm
Federal revenue exploded at the end of the ’90s (following the Repubican’s takeover of Congress). With the divided government, they couldn’t agree to ramp up spending quickly enough to outspend the increase. This changed with the election of Bush, at which point there was a ‘double whammy’ of increased spending combined with decreased revenue following the tech boom crash.
A key reason that neo-Marxists like Krugman are so nasty is that they have nothing else to fall back on when their inability to convince people of their false claims are not working. That’s because:
– They failed to develop a proper method of knowledge, which has to start from a good perceivable view of reality before proceeding to abstractions.
– They have built their life on superstition, they’ve been at it so long they don’t know how to start over.
– Their beliefs come from emotions, so they’ll use emotional methods to defend them.
– The ideology they have adopted, whether consciously or not, teaches use of force. (Neo-Marxists try to pull a scam of niceness, but their beliefs are rooted in a views of humans as untrustworthy (hence their drive-to-the-bottom/dog-eat-dog economic theories).)
Couple of points. Keynes never suggested that countries needed to accumulate surpluses, his view was that balanced budgets during good times and deficit spending during bad would be the path out of the great depression, he was right. Such a policy would result in rising debt to GDP ratio during recessions and falling ratios during booms, in the long run keeping it acceptable. Britain’s debt to GDP ratio was 250% after WW2 btw, and ours over 100%. The government never needs a surplus, it doesn’t know what to do with the money (invest in the stock market not a good idea for the government). Jim’s comments don’t take into account the difference between total federal debt, which includes debt assets held by the Social Security Trust Fund, and net federal debt, which is debt held by the public. Even in the late 90’s the gross debt still rose slowly because social security taxes were in such surplus over benefits, the surplus was and still is “invested” in government bonds, but those bonds are held by one arm of the Federal government and owed to the other, they do not add to net publicly held debt, which is the metric that is used by most. If we count the bonds held by Social Security as a real debt, then Social Security is solvent for decades, and there is no need to cut benefits.
Vitamin C is used to aid wound healing, and most patients with bedsores are given it routinely. Whether supra therapeutic doses are of any benefit or only create expensive urine is another question.
As to whether government spending could have mitigated this recession just look at total government employment, which rose by 250k per year under every President from Carter to W. Under Obama we are down 700k government jobs (almost all at state and local levels such as teachers, police, transport workers etc) from 2009. If the Feds had run a deficit and given the money as block grants enough to allow the state governments to avoid layoffs and expand workforce at the historical rate, another 2 million people would be off government assistance and working and paying taxes, and their economic activity would generate higher sales for private sector which would then expand in response, depending on the framework used that would give us another 1-2 million jobs. As state economies improved, and tax revenues returned to normal, the Feds could ease off on the temporary support. Another 3 million employed people would be good thing, given that we have slashed the deficit much too quickly (10% of GDP to under 4% in 4 years).
Krugman is, as often, being sloppy. Pielke did refer to the Kana Identity, which Krugman might have mistakenly thought translated into one-for-one equivalence between GDP and emissions. That’s a mistake, as one of the terms in the identify is emissions as a ratio to energy consumption. There’s nothing in the identify which constrains that to be a constant.
In fact, that is part of Pielke’s point, it is precisely that ratio we need to reduce, if we do not want to constrain growth. However, I disagree with Pielke when he glibly claims there is no such thing as a carbon cap because technological innovation cannot be dictated by fiat. He’s partially right, but that doesn’t mean a carbon cap cannot exist.
As an aside, I once tracked down Kana’s original paper which refers to emissions, but does not specifically refer to carbon. Many subsequent papers invoke Kana and replace emission with CO2 emissions. It may not be a big deal, except that people talking about carbon constraints should be careful about invoking Kana, who did not mention carbon directly, if I recall correctly.
Wound infection = bacteria. Cold = virus. Vitamin C impact on bacteria has zero relation to vitamin C impact on viruses.
Please don’t get confused – I’m Patrick Boyle. I’m not the commenter Patrick nor am I the commenter Patrick B who have posted here.. I politely urge those two gentlemen to change their names. Perhaps to stockdoc77 or M Simon.
For example Patrick B (not me) wrote “Then, when it turns out the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining, I have to turn to the back-up coal plant I built “. The idea is right but the details are wrong. Coal powered boilers are not appropriate for solar or wind backups. They take too long to start up. The wind dies down and it takes a couple hours to get the coal fired boilers up to temperature and back on-line.
That’s why T. Boone Pickens made all those wind mill commercials a few years ago. The best back ups for wind or solar power are natural gas turbines which come on line almost instantaneously. Mr. Pickens is heavy into natural gas.
Krugman left his credibility far behind a while ago.
He is now busy tarnishing his reputation.
Krugman lies constantly and is a celebrated NYT columnist. WUWT kicked out Steve Goddard for being considerably less tendentious.
Krugman was right about the Iraq war.
He predicted we would successfully remove Saddam install a democratic regime at historically low costs in lives and money? That Iraqi GDP would quintuple? That millions would gain access to water/sewer/electric service? That most Iraqis would support the invasion?
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/centers/saban/iraq%20index/index201207.pdf
What did Pielke mean then other than the truism that any change in energy policy will have some cost?
No, obviously some changes would result in lower costs.
Between Krugman’s hit piece on Pielke, and John Holdren’s comments on Pielke earlier, I’d say that he’s hit a nerve with the establishment. Quite the target on his back, and quite a few willing to take their shots while they still can, even if they have to lie to discredit him.
It’ll be interesting if there’s a regime change in the next election, and Pielke is given a prominent role, He’s shown that he’s tough enough for big league politics, taking the best that partisans can shoot at him and is still standing tall.
Stockdoc, you’ve really knit the kangaroo this time:
“He was right that monetary policy, which has normally been sufficient to end prior recessions, will not work this time as we are against the zero lower bound.
He was right that the stimulus was insufficient in size.
He was right that with the economy in depression even very low interest rates and high budget deficits would not be inflationary.
He was right that quantitative easing would not result in a collapse of the dollar.”
It’s one thing to be ridiculously and diametrically wrong, like Kruglitz and Stigman were about their purported areas of expertise. It’s quite another for someone to quote their wrongology approvingly even AFTER history has demonstrated the precise opposite.
And then we have the true beclownment where someone in the thread above has already made the point in relation to the hugely outperforming UK economy that discredits the argument.
Since space doesn’t permit a full declownification of your claims, let me just point to the scoreboard for 2 stats:
1) by what % of GDP has the US budget deficit come down since the GOP said “enough” to Obama’s wasteocracy? (Let’s call it 8% of GDP?)
2) by what % has the unemployment rate fallen during this process?
Then you could compare it to what your idols predicted would happen.