Climate Change - Who's Responsible?

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 was a corker as well. They simply stated that, as all of it would be exported, then it wouldn't make any difference at all to UK prices. So even if the country was floating on a cushion of the stuff, gas prices would only ever rise into the future: absolutely nonsense as anyone can see. If we can ship all our cheap shale gas off to other people, then the world gas price goes down – and also they can ship all their cheap shale gas to us. So gas gets cheaper in the UK. And if it isn't easy to ship gas around (it isn't) then the shale gas we have in the UK has to be used in the UK, pushing gas prices down again.

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.