I’m…glad to see that Ezra Klein is explicit about his acceptance that climate change is expected to have extremely limited effects on the United States for at least the next hundred years. I figure that ought to be pretty important when debating the proper policies for the government of the United States. On the other hand, we continue to disagree about the financial efficiency of the foreign aid program defined by transforming the energy sector of the American economy in order to very slightly ameliorate a predicted problem that might affect people who might live in low-lying equatorial regions of the world decades from now.
As Bjorn Lomborg would say, it’s a lousy deal. But of course, it’s not about economic efficiency. It’s about forcing everyone into the secular religion of our moral betters.
[Early afternoon update]
Keep the lights on! Fight the bill.
The effects of climate change regulation are not something I worry a great deal about. I’m a technological optimist — I expect the costs of net emission reduction, in the end, to be a fraction of what we were warned they might be. This was the experience with SOx emission control in the US, where the emission trading market eventually settled on a price six times lower than had been projected.
As an example of what might lead to this, consider Klaus Lackner’s efforts at atmospheric CO2 capture. His team has come up with a new way to capture CO2 from air, using adsorbent plastic sheets. The CO2 binding is controlled by humidity, making it very easy to liberate the CO2 at very low energy cost, and making the system cost effective at an estimated price of $30/ton of extracted CO2.
Paul, you’re assuming the regulations are rationally drafted and sufficiently flexible to reflect the then-current market prices. You’re assuming they don’t just ban the use of coal entirely, or something dumb like that. These are not safe assumptions. There are very few examples of such well-drafted regs.
You may be technologically optimistic (as I am), but I think you’re politically naive. As Rand notes, the current Administration doesn’t actually care about economic performance. This is the (religious, not rational) Puritan mindset with a list of Sins derived from Paul Ehrlich instead of the Bible.
I’ve been watching a lot of Hulu lately and was disgusted by a ad paid for by the ‘Fight Climate Change’ initiative. It parroted all the Al Gore doom and gloom and made it sound like the World was going to boil away tomorrow. I’m afraid that even if the message gets tempered or debunked entirely that these environmental groups are already too entrenched to extinguish at this point.
@Paul
His team has come up with a new way to capture CO2 from air, using adsorbent plastic sheets.
Hmmm…
So, what if the government set up plants to do that sort of thing on a massive scale — a sort of Apollo program of carbon sequestration. Could they potentially capture all the CO2 released by US power companies each year, or even more? Is it remotely possible that human engineering could remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than the human world puts in?
The CO2 binding is controlled by humidity, making it very easy to liberate the CO2 at very low energy cost
Hmmm…
So, if the US were to sequester enough CO2 in these rapid-release sheets — it would be like a Global Warming Doomsday Weapon! How sweet would that be? Forget nukes, once we had enough CO2 under our President’s thumb (the button would naturally be green instead of red) we could simply dictate terms to the world. “Do what we say or we’ll gas all out a$$es back to the Pre-Pennsylvanian era!”
😉
Nobody move or the polar bear gets it!!!
So, you trap CO2 with plastic sheets. Then what, put them in a landfill?
So, you trap CO2 with plastic sheets. Then what, put them in a landfill?
Pump it underground. There are various places it could go (old oil or gas fields, deep pressurized aquifers), but fractured ultramafic rock formations appear particularly promising, since the CO2 (when some water is present) will react exothermically with the rock to make carbonates and silica.
Atmospheric CO2 extraction enables us to collect the CO2 anywhere, so we could position the collectors above favorable geological formations.
Nobody move or the polar bear gets it!!!
😀
“The effects of climate change regulation are not something I worry a great deal about.”
CO2 is MUCH more pervasive that SOx. These regs will go into effect long before there is tech to deal with it. The zealots are in charge of the environment and the inmates are running the asylum. The zeal with which attacks on vital sectors of our economy will be made will astound you. They will have the media and Hollywood. It will be like service anouncements during WWII on steroids. I’m waiting for the proof CO2 is responsible for GW and not that big fusion reactor in the sky.
Make beer.
CO2 is MUCH more pervasive that SOx.
The point was the relative cost of SOx control vs. the projections, not the absolute cost.
I expect the cost of CO2 control to be much higher than SOx emission control, but also to be much less than the high end estimates.
The problem isn’t the “cost”, even if much less than high end estimates.
The problem is the precedent — that government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” can regulate the very gases you exhale, for a “public good” that is theoretical, and vastly more harmful in the aggregate than the narrow “good” it claims to offer.