Comments by Geoffrey Styles Subscribe

On Do Leaked Emails Undermine the Scientific Consensus?

I think we need to be clear about what questions the leaked emails raise.  They don't put the entire phenomenon of global warming back in play.  Forget all the fancy charts; a quick look at the temperature anomaly data makes it very clear that the planet has been warming by 0.2 deg. C per decade, even if the annual increases have more or less stalled since 1998.  And there's no indication of global cooling in these numbers. However, climate forecasts depending on complex models and long-term historical temperature data derived from proxies might be a different matter.  I would want to know a lot more about whether researchers actually followed up on apparent suggestions involving screening out data and papers that conflicted with the consensus interpretation.

At the very least, all this creates an image problem.  No one should expect climate scientists to be like Albert Schweitzer, but when you peel back the lid on their discussions, we certaintly don't expect to find comments and "tricks" that would make Enron traders feel right at home.  As I've commented elsewhere, if similarly embarrassing emails had been leaked from a big oil company or bank, few would be focusing on the niceties of the invasion of privacy involved. Someone needs to figure out whether the scientists involved were merely blowing off steam or actually manipulating their results, and I suspect that only other scientists are competent to ascertain that. 

Geoff Styles 

On The "CRU hack" and the deplorable state of reporting and blogging

Simon,

You're describing basic good manners, but what do you think the outcome would have been if the institution that had been hacked into had been Exxon, and the emails revealed this kind of discussion amongst climate skeptics?  Nor have I heard much protest along these lines concerning the much more serious lapses of security involved in leaks related to military and diplomatic strategy in Afghanistan.  The polite world to which you allude ended a couple of decades ago.  We might all wish for its return, but not so selectively.

Geoff Styles

On Paying the Bill for Electric Vehicles

MJ,

Thank you for that comment.  There is indeed a diminishing return on investment in increasing fuel economy, and it's easiest to see when you state the latter in the terms commonly used in much of the world, as units of fuel over units of distance (e.g., liters/100 km.) This phenomenon owes as much to thermodynamics as economics.  However, I was alluding to the even steeper apparent drop-off in fuel savings observed when you state fuel economy in our inverse metric of miles per gallon. 

On "Carbon Debt"

It isn't necessary to fear that a new global climate deal would lead to world government--a red herring, in my view--to see that the notion of the OECD paying "carbon debt" to the developing world puts the whole issue on an unhelpfully-divisive basis of blame, rather than promoting a spirit of all of us being in this together.  I have no doubt that we will need to help poorer countries adapt to a changing climate, which if the scientific consensus is correct looks inevitable no matter what we do.  But I do object to paying our economic rivals to adopt technology that will benefit them and make them more competitive.  We certainly don't owe them that.

On Paying the Bill for Electric Vehicles

Paul,

My posting reflected my concerns that the sum of money involved is far in excess of the quantifiable benefits it would produce for many years, and that the beneficiaries of these policies need to invest (and risk) much more of their own capital in such an endeavor.  With massive deficits, govt. needs to be smart about how it spends it limited funds to have the biggest impact possible.  When it comes to car batteries, we could double the federal R&D budget and double it again and still only spend a fraction of what the Coalition is suggesting, and probably have at least as much impact on bringing down the cost of EVs over time.

As for the oil industry, I was sure this would come up.  I'd point out that the tax benefits promoting domestic energy production to which you allude are large in aggregate, because of the scale of the industry, but much smaller in proportion compared to what the Coalition is asking for.  And after receiving these tax breaks, the industry still pays an effective tax rate of around 40% on profits--certainly not my idea of a free lunch. 

If the oil industry turned up with a report asking the government to provide tax credits to consumers for the purchase of gasoline, wouldn't you be skeptical?  (And no, the current low taxes on gasoline are not the same as handing people money to burn it, even if they are insufficient to cover the cost of the CO2 externality.) 

On The Real Policy Lesson From the Chinese Wind Turbine "Scare"

The underlying situation reprises many elements of the "industrial policy" debates of the 1980s.  The message conveyed by the posting is accurate as far as it goes, but misses the real "real lesson." The US wind industry lags its European competition because European countries chose to subsidize the sector through much more generous and consistent tax benefits and a hidden tax on electricity consumers (a.k.a. the "feed-in tariff".)  But while that created an advantage for the European companies involved, it didn't make them self-sustaining.  Should we decry the fact that the US didn't build up a larger subsidy-reliant industry, here, so that our subsidized wind manufacturers could better compete with theirs?  Or should we instead focus our complaints on the flaws of a hastily-conceived stimulus measure that heaps further rewards on already heavily-supported European and Chinese wind firms?  This outcome was entirely predictable, if the folks designing the stimulus had given the matter even five minutes thought. Let's assess responsibility where it properly belongs, rather than lamenting the lack of a comparable US industrial policy towards wind power, which in spite of many billions in subsidies still retains the inherent shortcomings that Mr. Barton cites.

Geoff Styles

On Nuclear Energy Growth Might Turn Promises of Low Natural Gas Prices Into a Reality

Rod,

I might point out that without natural gas as an option for power generation in the 1980s and '90s, when co-generation was taking off and aero-derivative gas turbines were optimized for powergen, many more coal plants would have been built instead, emitting much more CO2 than those gas turbines.  That's because nuclear was on indefinite hold in the wake of both TMI and the WPPSS bond default, and wind was still mainly an expensive and inefficient tax dodge. 

Geoff

On Fee-and-dividend is superior to cap-and-trade for effective carbon emissions reductions

Barry,

If cap & trade can't escape being labeled as a tax, does anyone honestly think that a transparent euphemism like "fee-and-dividend" will fare better?  Can you point out any common-sense definition of a tax--and an income-redistributing one at that--that this concept doesn't match?  Don't get me wrong; I'm all in favor of putting a value on the GHG externality.  While I admit that I still regard cap & trade as superior to a carbon tax--despite everything this Congress has done to change my mind--I'd take a carbon tax as better than nothing, if it were properly designed and implemented.  But from my perspective this sort of labeling merely plays into the hands of those who will oppose any tax at all on principle, no matter how sound the underlying economic justification for it might be, by making it appear deceptive. 

Geoff Styles

On Against Waxman-Markey

The video raises some legitimate criticisms of cap & trade as proposed under Waxman-Markey, compared to a hypothetical carbon tax with rebates--and let's drop the euphemisms, here; a tax is a tax.  At the risk of sounding overly cynical, I'm afraid they're ignoring an even more important flaw in either approach, while misunderstanding some basic differences between greenhouse gas emissions and the criteria pollutants their employer has regulated for decades. 

The flaw lies in their assumption that the problems they identify are inherent in cap & trade, rather than in the political framework in which it has been crafted. For example, the offset loophole arises mainly from the politics that exempted certain emitting sectors from the emissions cap, giving these constituencies the opportunity to generate revenue by selling offsets against their uncapped emissions.  There is no guarantee that the same politics would not distort a carbon tax system just as badly as they have cap & trade, and good reasons to think they would.

Ultimately we need the lowest-cost cuts from any sources, not just from fossil fuels, as they seem to believe.  The cheaper the average reductions are, the more of them we can afford without harming the economy needlessly.  Effective climate legislation depends on politicians putting a higher priority on achieving real emissions reductions than on rewarding favored constituencies via the mechanisms of either cap & trade or a carbon tax. 

On "Carbon Debt"

alex,

There are numerous holes in that logic, not least that there is little else on earth that is "shared equally between all people".  That assertion takes this argument out of the realm of policy and into politics and political systems.  While I certainly have opinions on it, it's beyond the scope of my blog.

On "Carbon Debt"

Ed,

The worst-case outcome is not doing nothing about climate change; it's implementing an agreement, based on such principles, that contorts the global economy in pursuit of a political agenda, yet accomplishes little to reduce actual emissions, thus leaving us with the underlying problem but less resilience in adapting to its impact. 

On We're Number One

It's a notable finding, and it goes hand in hand with the observation that we're actually more energy independent than many of our competitors in the global economy. 

Proved reserves have never been a particularly good predictor of future production, as evidenced by another stat from the same reserves data you cited: the US has produced a cumulative 200 billion bbls from proved reserves that never exceeded 40 billion at their peak.