Kyoto Protocol comes into force:
The Kyoto accord, which aims to curb the air pollution blamed for global warming, has come into force seven years after it was agreed.
To celebrate, I am throwing a huge after-party at my house where we plan on eating tree bark, those white wormy little things under bricks and Bermuda grass (good fiber). Games include: a fire-free bonfire of the Vanities (we basically just stack capitalist tools in a heap) and the cult classic, Jump-to-Conclusions. Try to arrive before dusk though, as I am running low on candles and cannot afford the bling bling needed for green solar panels.
More on the fallacies and foolhardiness of the Kyoto Protocol: 1 2 3 4
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I blogged about this at
Must’ve miscoded the link. Here it is.
I’ve posted on this many times, and this is the argument I’m most proud of.
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First: Is climate change occuring? Who knows? Many, with not just a little twinge of partisanship claim it absolutely isn’t, and many others claim it is. Let’s assume it is.
Second: Is it detrimental to the global economy? This is much harder to calculate. There are winners and losers in this, from increased crop yields, to lost coastline, higher air conditioning prices, to increased shipping opportunities in the northern passage. Let’s assume its a net cost, why not. We can even assume that the cost is huge.
Third: Is there anything that can be done to mitigate the effects? Maybe. Some people argue that reducing carbon emitions by immense amounts, or at least agreeing to not raise them will have some effect of slowing climate change and its economic effects, though by how much is also quite debatable.
Fourth: Are the costs of the mitigations after applying the discount rate (opportunity cost) less than the cost of dealing with the supposed immense economic harm that we will supposedly have to endure by not making any policy changes. Good luck actually coming up with a definitive answer on this one. You have to come up with a very small discount rate and absolutely immense economic costs for climate change for this to be worthwhile.
So you have to have very accurate data to have public policy that isn’t just appeasing alarmism. In my opinion, climate change is occuring, it doesnt matter if it’s our fault, and we shouldn’t do anything about it except work on policies to deal with climate change rather than to mitigate it.
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I’ve not seen any group that advocates mitigation produce numbers that are persuasive of government intervention. I have seen a few arguments that acknowledge that climate change policy cost benifit analysis is highly sensitive to the discount rate, but then they go off and assume that points 2 and 3 are allready known. I suspect that climate change will be a net benifit rather than a cost making the entire debate moot.
Something further (in a discussion with a co-worker) – even if you can see a trainwreck coming, can government even do the right things, as opposed to lots of expensive and intrusive busywork that won’t even help the problem.
Name one uniformly positive to US Security policy passed after 9/11.
In my discussion, it is the problem of peak oil (given the amount of friction, a large supply shock would cause the economy to collapse – not unlike a half-dozen other threats like the credit pyramid, our foreign intervention, new acts of terrorism, but we could tax fuel to make it more expensive so as to reduce its use before a shock).
The Kyoto protocol is a similar problem, and assuming any accuracy to the science (a supreme court is bad enough, the founding fathers didn’t have a board of scientists which could overrule laws although Franklin and Jefferson were scientists for a reason…) how do you implement such a policy justly – i.e. some other way of distributing resources except by price via supply and demand? Canada is a signatory – we will see how well they do and if a few provinces apply for statehood in the US.
Just last night I saw some jerk on a Canadian news program claiming that following Kyoto is a great idea because it will “create many jobs in the country.”
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