Unlike
most people, I'm not concerned as to whether humanity is causing climate
change; it's simply not something that will be proven, until it's too late. So
that puts that aspect to bed and sidesteps a large proportion of the
discussion.
It
is very clear to me that we are treating our living space in a pretty poor
manner, rather like Mediaeval folk throwing their excrement & waste into
the street. We are effectively doing the
same thing today. Fortunately we moved
on from open sewerage systems, developed the ones we have today... and pay for
them.
Until
people, Economists, Policy Advisors and ultimately Politicians understand that
we need to clean up our pollution; this being a moral imperative, not a
free-market one; we won't be getting the equivalent of a sewerage system for
all the pollutants we are currently dumping into our own back yard.
Using
the analogy of modern sewerage systems, there is a simple process to introduce
the currently missing pollution remediation systems, that we need. It's founded on basic economics: the cost of
any process that causes pollution must have the cost of remediation included in
the cost of the product at the point of sale.
Simple.
The
pollution remediation cost is collected and made available to pollution remediation
industries who remove the offending pollutants in a similar manner to modern
sewerage systems.
Think
about it...
We
can continue using coal, gas, nuclear, cars, ships etc. but, as consumers we
will be paying a higher price for those energy sources that have the higher
remediation costs.
You
can see how this would give rise to a level playing field in terms of True
Energy Costs and, I suspect, that currently uneconomic renewable sources, could
become economic (without needing any subsidies that Tim correctly points out
are somewhat ludicrous); whilst highly polluting sources such as coal & oil
turn out to be very very expensive.
I
know, you're very sceptical. It can't be
done, you say. How can we come up with the cost of remediation (or externalities
as Economists like to categorise them)? It's
all too difficult. It's too expensive.
Wrong.
Imagine
the response of a Mediaeval person being told that he would be much better off
if he paid (a large) amount of money to have his excrement hygienically removed
from his house. The reaction would be
very similar to the one I expect most people have to my solution described
above.
As
for Tim's conclusions: Politicians rarely solve big issues, they generally
skirt around them. Policy Advisors generally provide Politicians with
"solutions" they believe the Politicians may be able to implement
without compromising their hold on power.
Which is why we have the variable degrees of mess that Tim describes.
It's unlikely to change until either there is a very smart Politician that can
articulate a simple scheme that allows us to continue using our existing
equipment whilst adopting an environmentally neutral philosophy which means
actually removing the pollution we add to the environment.
Am
I hopeful?
No.
Democracy
is more and more dysfunctional and it's more likely that we will continue to
pollute our back yard and then pay for the consequences when they occur, which
is not a very responsible approach but this is simply too big an issue for
today's Politicians to deal with effectively.
The real climate change
conspiracy – or is it a cock-up?
By Tim Worstall
Energy Last updated: June 6th, 2012
Even if climate is changing, our policies
are hopelessly muddled
Viewing the ghastly mess that politics makes
of anything, it can be difficult to decide between cock-up and conspiracy
theories. Are politicians simply too dim to perceive the effects of what they
do, or are they are plotting to make the world a worse place?
Which brings us to where I believe the real
climate change conspiracy is: in what we're told we must do about it all. I've
pointed out that if we assume that the basic science is correct (and I
certainly don't have either the hubris or technical knowledge to check it) then
the answer is a simple carbon tax. The British Government employed Nick Stern
to run through what was the correct economic response, assuming the IPCC was
correct, and that was his answer. So the question has to be why hasn't that
same government enacted that very solution? Which is, as I say, where I think
the conspiracy comes in.
For instead of this simple and workable
solution we end up with the most ghastly amount of wibble and dribble.
Consider the subsidies to renewables. Our
system gives higher subsidies to the more expensive technologies: clearly
ludicrous. We have some limited amount of money, whatever that limit is, and we
thus want to get as much renewable power as we can from that limited money. But
we give five times more money per unit of power to the most expensive technology,
solar, than we do to the cheapest, hydro. What have the politicians been
smoking to deliberately spend our money in the most inefficient manner
possible?
Or we could look at the argument for subsidy
to solar itself: we're told that it will be economic, comparable to
coal-generated power, within only a couple of years. Thus we must have subsidy
now – which is insane. If something is about to be profitable without subsidies
then we don't want anyone installing it yet; install it in a couple of years when
it is profitable without subsidies. Why waste good money when we can just wait?
The Department of Environment and Climate
Change (DECC) is guilty of a couple of horrors. At one point they proudly
pointed out that renewables would be cheaper than gas. Which, given that each
renewable is more expensive than any gas, is quite a trick to pull off. What
they had actually done is assume that if we had renewables then we'd all use
much less electricity because it would be so expensive. In fact, the renewables
calculation assumed that we would use half as much power as the gas
calculation. I can do that sort of thing too, prove that 50 apples will be
cheaper than 100, but I'd like to think that a government department would be
able to come up with more sophisticated trickery than a newspaper hack.
DECC's claim that shale would not make gas
cheaper in the UK UK UK UK has to be used in the UK
We've also had Ed Davey announcing that he
doesn't think there's any shale gas to talk of about. Weirdly, we have a method
to find out: drill for it. But rather than do that, Ed listened to Centrica and
then announced this sad lack of that shale gas (which every other country in
the world is finding all over the place). Centrica were, by the way, the people
who owned the Lancashire shale field before
Cuadrilla Resources. Centrica were the people who 20 years ago said there was
no gas there and Cuadrilla were the people who a year ago said there was lots.
Ed took Centrica's word for it, listening to the people who really don't want
to be shown up, and didn't even bother to ask Cuadrilla.
We've also an inspired misunderstanding
about carbon prices. The EU has a cap and trade system: if you want to emit a
tonne of CO2, you've need a permit to do so. Many of these are given to
industry but some have to be bought. Our Ed Davey – you know, the man in charge
of this whole climate change thing – has recently announced that there must be
a minimum price for such permits. Showing, sadly, that he doesn't understand
the first thing about such a permit system. In the carbon tax that I recommend,
yes, it is the tax which limits the emissions. In a permit system it is the
number of permits: the price of the permits shows how expensive or cheap it is
to meet the target. Thus we should all want to have very low permit prices, for
that shows us that it is very cheap to meet that target. At which point the
minister in charge says no, my goodness no, we can't have it being cheap to
save Gaia – we'll have to artificially raise the price! I'm sure you'll agree
that this is just drivelling absurdity.
And for my final example of incompetence, I
give you the Climate Change Levy. This is a tax paid on power; that's fine,
it's similar to a carbon tax. Coal pays it, gas pays it, but solar hydro and
wind do not pay it. That's also fine, for low- to near no-carbon power sources
shouldn't be paying a climate change levy. Given that nuclear has carbon
emissions about the same as wind and hydro and less than half solar, should
nuclear pay this charge? Well, no, obviously, it shouldn't, but it does.
So this is where I identify the conspiracy
in climate change. Not in the basic science, which I'm perfectly happy to
accept. But in the discussion, the rules, the regulations, about what we should
do about it. Just about every decision that is actually being made seems to
flow from ignorance, mendacity or even, as with the CCL and nuclear, just plain
flat-out stupidity.
I still haven't worked out whether this is
simply a conspiracy of damn fool idiots or whether they really do have it in
for us.
