This is an interesting proposal about how we should deal with climate change:
What should we do next? Flying has to reduce. A recent report on a zero-emission future for the UK envisions a complete end to commercial aviation in the next few decades, arguing that prospective “breakthrough” technologies like hydrogen and electric planes will not arrive fast enough nor scale up quickly enough, and mainly serve to delay action now. Work on alternative domestic travel options, including a low-emission, high-quality national public transport network, needs to start immediately.
“Interesting” here including the concept of entirely barking mad.
For the question is not “How do we stop climate change?”. It’s “What level of climate change leaves us best off?”
We can even see this is the barkings of the weirdest – no one does recommend moving to zero emissions by Tuesday afternoon. Everyone does know that this would lead to the death of billions of people and that’s rather a high price to pay for Greenland not melting in 2500 AD.
So, the question then becomes one of what price? What are we willing to give up to slow or ameliorate climate change? How much climate change are we willing to accept in order to not have to give up too much? Or, as the Stern Review is based upon, what’s the optimal balance of costs and benefits?
You know, that very thing in the concept of the social cost of carbon. Yes, emissions have a cost. $80 per tonne. To have us humans as best off as we can be over time we want to not have people doing things which produce value of less than $80 per tonne of emissions and yet we also do want people to do the things that produce more than $80 of value per tonne of emissions. This is what the very social cost of carbon encapsulates for us, a method of measuring which things make us humans, over time and generations, richer?
Cool – so now we need to measure those things which do add more value to human lives, more than that $80 per tonne of emissions? It being glaringly obvious that commercial aviation does. Because – from the UK at least – we’ve all been charged, and more, that amount on our air tickets. Air Passenger Duty is actually rather above the emissions costs.
So, when faced with the costs of their actions people still fly – commercial aviation is worth more than the damages from commercial aviation. We thus don;t want to stop it – quite the opposite, we want to leave it be as it makes humans richer over time and generations.
Interesting what we find out when we take all that science about climate change seriously, isn’t it?
But the Dark Greens don’t want people to be richer, if anything they want as many as possible dead.
True, but in the event they can’t accomplish that they’d at least like to get them back to living in caves.
The one thing that everyone should remember about Climate Change is that we live twelve thousand years into a ten thousand year long interglacial period.
Here’s the problem with the climate change narrative: it comes from the same genocidal maniacs who created the Covid narrative.
Or, leaving aside their motives, both are built on “science” purporting to measure the effects of behavior and policy without having a control group for comparison, using computer models that make it hard to analyze to detect built-in biases, and that assume people won’t learn and adapt.
Indeed – it’s the deliberate use of pseudoscience. And I’m baffled, saddened and extremely angry that so many people who are supposed to be actual scientists, and their medical counterparts, aren’t using their critical, scientifically-minded thinking skills to counter this lunacy.
But the motives of these lunatics are key. They believe technocracy should be implemented worldwide, with them at the helm. It’s socialism re-branded. And they’ve nearly managed it… We really need to get rid of them. Forcefully. Now.
‘For the question is not “How do we stop climate change?”. It’s “What level of climate change leaves us best off?”’ No the question is how do we measure and quantify an abstraction? Climate is – ever seen bad climate? Is it nice climate today, better than yesterday’s? Was play at Lords ever stopped due to bad climate? Climate change is a compound abstraction. How do we decide how much is natural, how much is Man-made, and how then do we measure ‘change’ and make sure change only affects the Man-made bit not the other? Since predictions about climate become… Read more »
Yes! Now that we’ve pulled $80/ton out of an Obama bodily orifice, all we need to do is plug it in and run the numbers. And we’ll be “measuring” something?
Except that the$80 is a positive contribution to the planet, rather than a “cost”.
Mankind’s contribution to the overall climate is entirely natural, we are an animal that passes carbon into the atmosphere as all animals do, although humans only contribute a small amount, about half of the contribution that termites alone make. Plants of course do the reverse. The UK’s anthropogenic CO2 emission make up just one part in a million of the atmosphere, this tiny contribution is helping to green the planet, although obviously in a miniscule way. Global warming is now called climate change because there has been no measurable warming for some time now; which is a shame bearing in… Read more »
I think the misunderstanding here is that you’re assuming that the ruling class views climate change as a problem to be solved. Actually they consider climate change to be a plausible excuse to bring more of our lives under government/corporate control. The last thing they want is a solution, because it’s the “climate emergency” that will give them the power to regulate all energy use, and therefore all economic activity. If they wanted a solution, they’d be pushing nuclear power plants instead of bird grinders and solar farms.
I agree with the general principle. Sea levels are rising on aggregate and that is due to the thermal expansion as the world warms. Some of that rise could have happened anyway, some will be due to human activity.
What we do want is for coastal cities to be swallowed by erosion and sea-level rise at a rate less than the time it takes to replace said cities further inland. 2-400 years or so perhaps. So we need a CO2 tax that restrains pumping heat into the atmosphere for just long enough.
Must admit I think it’d be cheaper to just rebuild the cities a little faster.
When I go over to Perth and see my brother and his family, we usually go and have a look at an island that was part of the mainland many thousands of years ago. I don’t know when the rising seas will threaten Perth but I suspect that the beach and the parkland behind it will delay things long enough.
And maybe we’ll have another ice age to freeze everything up again.
“Climate Change will cost everyone £5,000 a year in 50 years time”, something like that, anyway a good example of why economics is sometimes called the dismal science. In 50 years time everyone will be £50,000 a year better off, something like that, so who cares about £5,000? It should certainly not be us today worrying about the prospects of our much richer descendants, we should be worrying about our energy deprived contemporaries.
Christopher Booker got it right!
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2018/02/Groupthink.pdf