Environmentalism
September 18, 2007
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have an essay in the New Republic arguing for a “New Environmentalism” that doesn’t get trapped by old-fashioned arguments about pollution and regulatory structures.
They phrase the idea as “clean-energy investment that is unburdened by the pollution paradigm” (*), which parses out as something pretty close to nonsense, but what they mean is that we should focus on creating clean sources of energy instead of on simply constraining greenhouse gas emissions.
That seems obvious and incontrovertible, but the authors want to set up their idea in opposition to “environmental leaders” who insist on “limiting human power” instead of “unleashing it”. Do these people even exist? There exist fringe groups who will argue for the sort of world imagined by Ernest Callenbach, but no one in the mainstream environmental movement thinks the solution to global warming is to stop using energy.
Nor, for that matter, am I familiar with environmentalists who object to lowering the real price of clean energy, or who think conservation should take the place of investment into solar or wind production. Even the (misguided) opposition to nuclear power, which I suspect has more to do with risk bias and the history of atomic research during the Cold War than with the actual engineering problems of the technology, has faded considerably in the last decade.
So I don’t really know what the authors are talking about.
If the scientific consensus on global warming is correct, or close to correct, then the timespan in which the growth of carbon emissions needs to be halted is less than the timespan in which a non-magical solution could be developed, and the necessary infrastructure built.
But no one is arguing, on those grounds, that we shoudn’t look for solutions. It’s a big country, and we can do more than one thing at the same time.
There’s always the chance that large federal investments into environmental sciences research will find a pony, and although the pony-finding ability of other large-scale scientific projects has been hit-and-miss, there have been some notable successes.
It’s not a crazy idea. Pouring money into a large number of low-probability, high-reward enterprises certainly represents a better understanding of cost-benefit analysis than does fighting the Iraq War for oil.
But none of this changes the point that an intelligent policy can and should optimize both the low-hanging fruit of easily achievable conservation savings, and the pony-finding potential of applied research, not to mention the need to create a alternate transportation structure to alleviate the end of cheap gas.
(*) The objection seems weird, and the “pollution paradigm” strikes me as a very successful one, in that there is a high and obvious correlation between allowing factories to dump pollutants into the river, and the river catching on fire.
People, by and large, identify with the goals of the environmental movement, and the speed with which major environmental legislation was passed in the 1960s and 1970s surpasses any other similar movement in our nation’s history, to the extent that even political parties hostile to environmentalism are forced to pay lip service to its ideals. It’s not clear to me that this “pollution paradigm” is less suited for carbon dioxide emissions than it was for acid rain, or ozone depletion.
September 18th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
I couldn’t stomach the essay for long, here’s hoping I got the gist. I’d say what they blithely dismiss as the old paradigm is utterly crucial, and regulation should be stepped up many fold. The whole idea of using capitalism to fix itself has proven to be even more ludicrous than it sounded. The only way to correct the behavior of capitalist ventures is to provide significant monetary positive and negative motivators for desired behavior.
Waiting for industry to clean up it’s act on it’s own won’t happen until they lose money. Without controls in place market forces won’t be present until the customer base starts to die off. Literally, and in massive numbers. I’d prefer to avoid near term extinction (in geologic terms) even if it won’t happen until a few generations after I’m dust.
September 18th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Exactly. It’s true that there’s essentially no limit to the amount of energy the world’s population can consume, that greenhouse gas emissions represent a world-wide tragedy of the commons, and that the best long-term solution is to be able to generate clean energy.
But there’s no reason to think that this goal is orthogonal to conserving energy now (the essay makes that argument explicitly at several points), nor to conclude that regulatory structures won’t work, nor to pretend that the environmental movement is trying to thwart research into clean energy generation.
September 19th, 2007 at 5:29 am
I don’t know. Their argument seems to be keep using energy like we always have and give corporate welfare to clean energies.
The truth no one speaks about is the N word. Saw another ad last night about how perfect the world would be if we went nuclear. There has been an economic boom (if you want to call it that) throughout the west with uranian mining (great for future horror movies).
I think there is definitely a case to be made for truth in pricing. Put the tax credits and other back end government interventions away, and focus on the corporate welfare on the front end. Look at the corporate welfare in the recent energy bills.
Way to much of our energy policy comes at the expense of the commons. It seems to me getting rid of these advantages on the front end - which may very well entail regulation - will do much more for non nuclear (not that it is clean) clean energy, than grants, government research, and tax breaks on the back end.
September 19th, 2007 at 7:08 am
You know I saw an article the other day about a Cancer resercher in Erie that discovers Radio frequencies can burn saltwater what do you think about that maybe we can have cars in the near future that run on saltwater?
September 19th, 2007 at 7:44 am
Nate: re. truth in pricing, something pretty close to a consensus has emerged (at least among people who don’t need to win elections, from Greg Mankiw on the right, to Al Gore on the left) that a carbon tax is the right approach. It would factor in the externalities that currently make gas cheaper than its true cost. Using the new revenue to reduce payroll taxes, for example, could keep the switch revenue-neutral for average energy users. Subsidies to big energy companies, especially nuclear ones, are another problem, as you note.
Jason: I hadn’t heard of that research until you mentioned it, but it sounds promising, and it seems legitimate. Further research into stuff like this is exactly the kind of pony-hunt I think we should be willing to fund. In the worst case, we spend a little bit of money to let some folks go to grad school, and in the best case, we have a shiny, new technology to use.
September 19th, 2007 at 8:37 am
Ben and Jason, color me suspicious on the salt-water energy front. If you’re simply using radiowaves to break the bonds between Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms and then counting the energy gained when the water ‘burns’– that is, when the Hydrogen atoms recombine with atmospheric Oxygen– you’re going in circles.
That article you linked to doesn’t really explain the technology, but salt-water strikes me as a rather low-energy-density substance, too.
Just the kind of thing the government should start paying money for- a perpetual motion machine.
September 19th, 2007 at 9:14 am
If there’s a 10% chance that the technology works as advertised, and then a 10% chance that it can be used industrially, you’re looking at a probability of success of 1%, and that’s optimistic.
But the cost of funding research in the field is trivial on a national scale. A few NSF grants to a couple engineering departments is all that’s needed now. By and large, the folks who approve research grants are scientifically adept people who aren’t likely to be fooled by hucksterism (which is what happened to a lot of the cold fusion research a few decades back, having been removed from the realm of science and into the realm of politics).
I think the philosophy should be “generous but demanding”, when it comes to taxpayer-funded research.
September 19th, 2007 at 10:15 am
But that strategy seems like getting an office pool together to get Powerball tickets. Keep pouring money in, and eventually you’ll hit a discovery that will justify that incoming money?
If we were running a surplus, you’d have a case.
If alternative energy were not being invested in and researched at the levels it should (a market failure), you’d have a case.
The next politician who says in the debate, “We need an Apollo Program, but, like, for energy!” will have lost my vote. Since when did the Apollo Program pay for itself? Since they invented Tang? Moreover, you can make the case that it hindered space exploration- do you notice all of these companies now trying to fly to space, Virgin’s CEO and stuff?
That’s getting a little away from my point. My point is that I cannot justify to taxpayers investment in R&D that will not bring returns. Stop the spending, somebody!
September 19th, 2007 at 10:45 am
I suppose the comparison to Powerball would depend on the estimated odds of success. The NSF budget for 2007 was less than $6 billion, with research grants accounting for a little over three-quarters of the total. The cost of the Iraq War to date is over $453 billion, and is estimated to cost upwards of $2 trillion. For the cost of the war, we could fully fund the NSF for 330 years.
And what would the cost be of an initial funding round into the salt water thing? Maybe $200,000? It’s not even an issue. “Stop the spending” shouldn’t be directed at R&D investment that (a) is an insigifnicant part of the budget, and (b) historically offers a very good ROI (discrediting the lottery comparison).
A better comparison would be to venture capitalists, who will fund a large number of startups, under the working assumption that most of them will fail, a few of them will plod along, and a tiny, tiny minority will do extremely well.
September 19th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
I think that free market soulutions are the way to go I know you guys are skeptical for the most part when it comes to a free market but it will almost always work. with that salt water breakthrough yeah its in the early stages but I’m sure some energy company will see it as profitable and they will pick it up.
September 19th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
I think that free market soulutions are the way to go I know you guys are skeptical for the most part when it comes to a free market but it will almost always work. with that salt water breakthrough yeah its in the early stages but I’m sure some energy company will see it as profitable and they will pick it up.
September 19th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
I’m not skeptical of the free market. It’s just that there are things that markets don’t handle well, and politics tends to be concerned with those things, because there usually needs to be a market failure before people start thinking about government intervention.
I would also note that the salt water thing was discovered by a professor whose salary is paid by the taxpayers, working at a public university created by the state of Pennsylvania. If the free market can capitalize on that, great, but the discovery is not a market solution.
September 19th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
OK, I think we can agree to disagree about the possible ROI of different R&D projects.
But can you take a step back from the salt-water edge? The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that it’s unfair to do this.
September 19th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
I have no stake in the salt water thing, other than observing that it was reported by a reputable news source with no technical details.
September 24th, 2007 at 8:26 am
You do know Greenspan was taken totally out of context what he was saying what that he supported the invasion for those reasons. He never said that President Bush went into Iraq to get oil if he did where is the oil? Why is the Price of Gas So high?
September 24th, 2007 at 10:31 am
The argument Greenspan was making, which I think is non-controvertible, is that we invaded Iraq because we care about the political situation in the Middle East, and that the reason we care about the political situation in the Middle East is because they have oil. He wasn’t suggesting that we invaded Iraq in order to seize oil resources in a 19th-century sort of way.
My argument is that the multi-trillion dollar cost of fighting the Iraq War is way more expensive than any counterfactual increase in the price of oil because of political problems in the Middle East, even leaving aside the fact that our war is not contributing to a more stable Middle Eastern polity.
September 24th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
So do you think the Political Situation in the Middle East will be better if we leave?
September 25th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
I think there’s a chance it will improve, a chance it will stay the same, and a chance that it will get worse. I don’t think the likelihood of things getting worse will increase if we leave, and I don’t think the likelihood of improvement is increasing the longer we stay.
I don’t think the political situation in Iraq can be changed in any meaningful way by the presence of 100,000 or 200,000 American troops. More precisely, I think there’s a very small chance that staying might work, but the costs of staying are so high, and the probability of success so low, that it doesn’t make sense for us to stay, especially since the benefits of success are, at this point, not that big to begin with.
September 26th, 2007 at 5:46 am
So you think we should give up and abandon Iraq like we did Vietnam? If we do that who will ever want to be our Ally in the future? by doing that we will show that we can’t handle war period. Don’t you think that will embolden Al Quadia?
October 4th, 2007 at 3:34 am
What no answer? I’m dissapointed.