Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Washington Post Economics Columnist Robert J. Samuelson’s advice to solve the climate crisis is to double or triple the price of fuel and hope for a scientific breakthrough.
We’re on mission impossible to solve global warming
By Robert J. Samuelson
Columnist
October 14 at 7:34 PMIf there were any doubt before, there should be none now. “Solving” the global climate change problem may be humankind’s mission impossible. That’s the gist of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. group charged with monitoring global warming.
Unless we make dramatic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane and others), warns the IPCC, we face a future of rapidly rising temperatures that will destroy virtually all the world’s coral reefs, intensify droughts and raise sea levels. We need to take action immediately, if not sooner.
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It’s not clear how this would be done. The reality is that global carbon emissions are rising, not falling. Emissions today are about 60 percent higher than in 1990, according to the World Bank.
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What is to be done?
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My own preference is messier and subject to all the above shortcomings. I would gradually impose a stiff fossil-fuel tax (producing not a 10 or 15 percent price increase but a doubling or maybe a tripling of prices) to discourage fossil-fuel use and encourage new energy sources. In addition, some of the tax revenue could reduce budget deficits and simplify income taxes. With luck, a genuine breakthrough might occur: perhaps advances in electric batteries or storage. That would make wind and solar power more practical.
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Imposing indescribable economic pain, while hoping for a bit of luck, is the “preferred” option? Why not simply build a few nuclear reactors, and use known technology to put a massive dent in the global carbon footprint?
Obviously I don’t believe CO2 is a problem – but if it was a problem, imposing unimaginably painful, life destroying taxes on ordinary people in the hope that their agony might produce a scientific advance would not be my preferred option.
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Society adjusts to tax, any tax. What’s really funny is that if the tax is applied planet wide, the people who will be hurt the most are the poor. Many products are made from fossil fuels. That puts a lot of the goods and services that result from those products out of reach. If the taxes aren’t planet wide, then all AGW is doing is determining where things are made.
How do you harvest the crops, process them, and move them to market? Think those combines, tractor trailers, refrigeration, cleaning and packaging are going to be done with electricity from wind and solar?
I’ve bought 3 as in THREE battery powered electric lawn mowers….. when I buy them, the very first question is ” Can I return it?”… All three died before the end of the season, and the season here is short.
$240/gal gas? Then everything else will be in proportion. Did society stop working because gas went from 10 cents/gal to $3/gal ? Wages won’t stagnant. For the $240/gal gas, wages will go to $80,000/week at least.
Evidently, AGW has no concept of market. There is no command economy that has ever been successful. EVER!
Let a ‘thousand gardens bloom’, might add to slightly, but if you rely solely on it, you will starve. NOKO anyone??
rishrac
You said, “Society adjusts to tax, any tax.” Including a 100% tax? I suspect that society can adjust to taxes up to the limit of disposable income. Beyond that, changes in life style and standard of living will be necessary.
I love these rich SOBs saying they want to triple the fuel cost. They don’t care how high the costs go, they’re income is in the six digits. Somehow, they totally ignore the single mom living outside of town who needs to drive to work. If her fuel cost triples, her kids don’t eat … but arrogant jerkwagons like Robert Samuelson overlook her needs entirely.
Grrrr …
w.
So true.
Conservatives care, elites don’t. They should though. Tripling fuel price had severe effects on economy, including these people who get easily jobless in case the people needs to pay more for fuel. The economical illiteracy is as common is the scientific one.
Tripling fuel price would easily triple anything that depends on energy. That’s a lot of economy. After having a three-digit inflation with no dent on world CO2 emissons growth, they might think.
This age is gonna go in history books as the age on insanity and hysteria.
Typos unintentional. Sorry, getting angry.
Increasing energy costs can’t cause inflation. The reason for that is because the money that is being spent on energy is no longer spent on other things. As demand for those other things goes down, the price for those other things goes down as well.
Only inflating the money supply faster than the economy is growing can cause inflation.
Yes and no. depends on the elasticity of price of the goods.
Non-essentials are very price elastic, so yes as you say, less demand will eventually result in price drops (or more likely businesses going out of business entirely as their costs will have increased but their revenues will have decreased – companies still need to cover costs in order to stay in business, they can’t drop prices below their costs and expect to remain a viable business.).
Essentials, on the other hand, are not very price elastic. You still need food, for example, so the demand for food will still be there regardless of price. But now the cost of shipping that food to your local store has gone up, resulting in the price to buy it going up.
The net result is that your dollar’s purchasing power decreases and you will be getting less for each dollar as the costs to make and ship the goods you still do buy will have gone up forcing the prices of those goods to go up in order to cover the added costs. And your choice of goods to purchase will also have decreased as makers of goods for which demand has dropped go out of business because, to reiterate, companies still need to cover costs in order to stay in business, they can’t drop prices below their costs and expect to remain a viable business.
It doesn’t matter how price inelastic a good is if the populace no longer has enough money to buy it.
The only thing price elasticity does is prolong the period of adjustment, it doesn’t eliminate the adjustment.
The populace will shift it’s spending from the price elastic goods (ie the non-essentials) to the price inelastic goods (ie the essentials). Overall that will be bad news for the economy as the price of goods still being bought is inflated to cover the added costs and the goods that aren’t being bought will no longer be available for sale (as companies who can’t cover the costs go out of business, shrinking the economy).
Also, remember too that efficiencies of scale factor in as well. Let’s look at those businesses for whom demand decreases due to money being spent elsewhere.
Lets say at current demand, company A can make Widget B at $1.00 per unit cost because they can manufacture the widget in large enough numbers that the total cost per unit is $1.00. Now you add this crippling tax, and since fuel costs are a big part of company A’s manufacturing costs let’s say the cost per unit at that volume increases to $1.50 as a result. However, demand has dropped thanks to that tax diverting money elsewhere in the economy, so company A no longer can sell at that volume and thus won’t be manufacturing at that volume. At the lower volume, the cost per unit will also increase due to the decreased volume (it’s less efficient to make fewer at a time) so now it costs, say, another 5 cents per unit due to the smaller scale of operations. price per unit is now $1.55. Assuming the company’s profit margin was modest to begin with, while they could temporarily lower price in order to move previously manufactured inventory that suddenly became excess to demand, there, however, is no way they can continue to stay in business at a lower price – their costs have gone up too much to make continued operations viable at a lower price. Their prices have to rise or they have to go out of business. Even if you can somehow call the increased costs of the tax a wash, the increase in costs of scale due to lower demand is still an form of inflation.
Bottom line, when you increase costs enough, prices will rise because companies need to cover costs in order to stay in business. so yes, increasing the cost to do business does inflate prices.
Yes companies can try to increase their prices, but that doesn’t mean the consumers have the money to buy at these new prices.
And if they can’t sell at a price that covers their costs, they go out of business. Enough businesses go out of business and the economy shrinks.
Only inflating the money supply faster than the economy is growing can cause inflation.
conversely the money supply staying the same as the economy rapidly shrinks (due to economy crippling taxes) can have the same effect
“jerkwagons” — I like it, except I would capitalize it and use it differently — Jerkwagons: Modes of transport used to avert erroneously conceived planetary warming, constructed to work using technology that casts people who are not affluent into dire survival straights, in order to support the delusions of those who insist on driving these vehicles.
“If there were any doubt before, there should be none now.” That statement is more a function of ratcheting up hysteria than reality.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
H. L. Mencken
A timely quote, Joey. 🙂
One of my favorite quotes. Especially since it describes AGW/”Climate Change” to a tee, and did so long before anybody ever suggested such a thing. As I like to put it, it’s “the best description of so-called “climate change” you will ever hear.”
The Washington compost has a real, let them eat cake attitude. Someone should roll a guillotine up to their front door.
“With luck, a genuine breakthrough might occur: perhaps advances in electric batteries or storage. That would make wind and solar power more practical.”
We know already that wind and solar are the least green power sources on the planet, with huge footprints, unrecyclable materials, huge infrastructure, shorter than projected lifetimes, and intermittent power production.
Batteries have the limits of chemistry unless you get into installations as large as solar farms. [Using supercpacitors is horrendously dangerous.] And then there is the lifetimes of batteries, which means they also have to replaced regularly and have high maintenance costs. Very simply, the available energy storage devices would easily double the costs of mind and solar, magnifying even more the infrastructure as well. It is a lost cause but is always pushed by the greenies as a possibility.
In the real world lithium hydride batteries have the highest energy density available as they include to two lightest useful elements. Batteries, such as sodium hydride, are much heavier but then they would be large immobile building installations. There remains the inherent energy losses of transportation to and from these batteries and energy conversion to and from the batteries, not to mention the investment and maintenance costs.
NUCLEAR – LIFR, yes!
The advantage, and nearly the whole point, of batteries is energy portability, not energy storage. Making a battery that’s too big to carry defeats the purpose…
To paraphrase (not by much) Barry Obama –
So if somebody wants to drive a car, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that gas.”
To paraphrase (not by much) Barry Obama –
If you like you car you can keep your car (you just won’t be able to afford the fuel needed to drive it anywhere).
Okay, I think I have a workable plan for those who want to phase out fossil fuel.
Cow manure !
Raise some cows, collect their excrement, shape it into logs, and burn these for heat. Give up cars and all other means of fossil-fuel-powered transportation by centralizing communities where everything is within walking distance. Maybe some horse drawn wagons can also be used, and use the horse manure for heating fuel too.
Of course, this would require lots of grueling physical labor, all day, every day, all the years of one’s life, but, hey, this level of physical exertion would keep bodies fit and healthy. A life based on processing crap could become most fulfilling.
Yes, I am proposing a utopia based on animal crap. Put away those iPhones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. No more devices to express all the angst. It’s time to get to work on some real living.
Nothing is more real than real crap, … lots of it, … the practical kind, … the kind you can actually get some use out of. What? — you say you want to save some time on all this crap handling? Well, forget the step of shaping it into logs — just mound it into big piles, and, within these piles, build a dwelling. The natural decay process will generate enough heat to keep you warm on those cold nights. What’s that? — the smell? Well, nobody said it would be easy. Real work involves some discomfort, and, in this case, the benefits of a bit of discomfort are worth it.
If you are willing to impose brutal discomforts on people by raising the costs of conventional fuels beyond people’s abilities to purchase, then, surely, you can bear the discomforts of a life dedicated to processing crap, in the name of environmental justice.
Nuclear is the only scheme that would enable large reductions in CO2 emissions. (Say 50%).
Germany has proven that forced spending on wind and sun gathering is an expensive waste of money.
Doubling or tripling the cost of gasoline is not going to change the above.
The cult of CAGW’s science is 100% incorrect and their wind and sun gathering ‘plan’ to reduce CO2 emissions by even 50% is not possible, regardless as how much is spent.
German CO2 Emissions, No Reduction in 10 years.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/10/10/why-arent-renewables-decreasing-germanys-carbon-emissions/#2f2ae6e68e15
http://notrickszone.com/2018/03/28/germany-proves-that-burning-money-on-green-energies-does-not-reduce-co2-emissions-bitter-result/
France has the lowest CO2 emission per unit of electrical power produced (25% less than Germany after Germany spent $550 billion on ‘green’ energy) as the French have the highest percentage of electricity produced from nuclear.
Again – AGAIN – I ask: What returns are we going to get from this?
Even anything measurable?
I can guarantee you the disaster if they did this would be measurable.
As Bjorn Lomberg calculated, the effect of the “Paris Climate Deal” would, similar to the Kyoto Protocol before it, have the effect (ASSUMING the BS they call CAGW to be correct) of reducing the average temperature by an amount too small to accurately measure, for a period of time measured in WEEKS, a HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW.
Doesn’t that lofty goal sound worth squandering TRILLIONS to accomplish?!
Good job he is talking USA. At current exchange rates, an (Imperial) gallon is about US$8.00, so tripling our fuel costs would mean a $24 gallon.
I wonder if he has worked out the effect on emissions worldwide even of reducing US car fuel consumption to zero. I suspect even that would make only a small percentage contribution
Samuelson needs to sponsor some research about what happened to the climate following the quadrupling of oil by Saudi Arabia in 1974. (Clue: nothing)
Anyone advocating taxing the 1st world away from fossil-fuels is more a socialist than a scientist. They (socialists) will take the money and, when MMCC is no more – ‘cos it wasn’t a problem anyway – they will take the credit, and keep the money.
“some of the tax revenue could reduce budget deficits”
Which means that the middle class would be paying down the bulk of these deficits which gets the rich off the hook of using their wealth. In other words, a carbon tax will help preserve the rich’s wealth.
Remember the days when the dems wanted to tax, tax, and tax the rich. Today, crickets…
ANY carbon tax that gets implemented by any state or nation is a direct attack on the middle class and a way for the rich to preserve their wealth. I really believe we should start framing a carbon tax in this way, I think it would be an effective way to slow down or even stop it.
It’s the French revolution all over again. The elite taxed the poor beyond the brink of revolution.
What more will it take to convince warmers that CO2 has little, if any, effect on average global temperature. The warming trend that started in about 1973 ended in about 2002. CO2 has increased since 2002 about 40% of the increase 1800 to 2002 while average global temperature now is about the same as it was in 2002.
The solution to climate change is so simple. Just make fuel so expensive that the poor and the elderly all die of hypothermia. It has the added benefits of solving the over population problem, and killing off energy intensive industries. The latter also helps deal with over population because all the unemployed industrial workers will die of malnutrition. It’s a win, win situation.
My apologies.
It appears that I screwed up a closing bold just before the closing blockquote in my first blockquote above.
It should be:
“That would make wind and solar power more practical.”
This Wahington Post guy says rhat :
:We’re on mission impossible to solve global warming”
If his means trying to turn back warming he is probably right. The sarliestcooling period in our temperature char ts in use started about q877. Temperature steadily declined until the year 1910, over a 30 year period. At that point temperature change reversed itself and for the next thirty years, from 1910 to 1940, te,perature steadily rose. At ts the point in 1940 still another temperature reversal tok place and the notorious;y cold World War II cooling period descended upon us. It It bottomed out betweej1955 amd 1965 and then dlowly started to rise again. This cold spell gave rise to several cold stories in magazines that we later made fun of. The warming that grew out of this upward temoerature move has been the lomgest and steadieat in history. If it does not break soon our grandchildren will inherit a very warm planet. It is already 45 plus tears old and is still going strong. I want to emphasize that none of these temperature changes can be attributed to any gteenhouse effect warming by carbon dioxide or otjer GH gases. In 1988 Hansen, who claimed then to know what climate would do during the following 30 years, made an attempt to pin down the greenhouse effect to current human activity. One of his test curves was named scenario B and he prevented the currently formed greenhouse gases from workimg with scenario B after the year 2000. To compare the greenhouse warming before and after human contributions of course. What happened? there was no observable difference between the two sections of his scenario B. And if this is true, there is no other human- caused greenhouse effect anywhere else on this planet. (And obviously coolimg was out even before this.) Needless to say, none of the temperature ups and downs I described above can seem to be human caused. But they are real and need to be explained. I have come to thefollowing conclusions about that. First, we need a physical process that can create gloal winds working for substantial periods of time and yet be capable of changing its aspects when force is applied. I can think of mothing more likely than global winds that xover continental areas and ocean basins with equal probability. Seing that gas a big part of it overing the oceans, it is likely that part their burden is to carrys water vapor. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas and bringing it into this area will contribute to the strength of the greenhouse effect associated with temperature changes. In some cases temperature change is very abrupt, like im 1910 and 1940. Think of two large cloudiness areas over an ocean that slowly ritate to bring their influemce to bear as the temperature divisions change under the influence of the moving global cloud cover. Glonal winds are involved in temperature changes and no addirional greenhouse
The conversation makes no progress.
Anything that is politically feasible, is inconsequential Anything that might be impactful, is not feasible. And whether the alarmists care to admit it or not, the proof is simply insufficient to justify radical, expensive courses of action anyway.
“And whether the alarmists care to admit it or not, the proof is simply insufficient to justify radical, expensive courses of action anyway.”
BINGO!!
It is not simply a matter of increased cost. The ENERGY consumed to design, manufacture, install, maintain and administer renewables exceeds the energy they produce in their lifetime. Without the energy provided by other sources, renewables could not exist. They can only exist now because fossil fuels are still used to power the industry to manufacture and install them, heat/cool the homes, power nearly all vehicles, power farming, etc. in support of the people involved. Incorporating mandatory storage and/or standby CSGT makes it much worse.