5 ms·

One last chance to save mankind

33 points by nickb 18y ago

hendler 18y ago
I wouldn't write off carbon trading yet. Trading of emissions now may not be enough to do any offsetting (only shift monies around), but as the trading system grows to be accountable and based on harder science, then why not, as the article points out, include Lovelock's idea of burying charcoal as part of the "carbon trading" market?
menloparkbum 18y ago
Carbon trading makes me realize that my idealism is waning as I rapidly approach old age. I agree with Lovelock in that it seems like a gigantic scam. However, rather than outrage, I'm thinking "How can I get in on the ground floor of this gigantic scam?"
- 3pt14159 18y ago
  The key is to ignore CO2 and focus on the much more potent ones, because you can sell credits for equivalent tons of CO2. See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Greenhouse_Gas_by_Sector.png Step 1: Collect Nitrous Oxide in giant tanks. Step 2: Store the Nitrous Oxide Step 3: Get $$$ from CO2 market Step 4: Use portion of money to buy 30 year government backed securities to cover maintenance of the tanks/land. Keep the rest as profit. The key is to get your storage/transportation to a minimum. High compression, or piped to the ocean floor, maybe.
- medearis 18y ago
  I couldn't really find much in what he had to say about WHY it is a "scam." The linked article requires registration and is cut off before it starts explaining why "this approach is misguided." While carbon trading may not be a solution for global warming, it is one of the few models we have for using market incentives to curb carbon emissions in the short term.
  - Retric 18y ago
    If you just tax carbon emissions at say 1$ per ton it's easy to track. But with cap and trade people who say plant 1 million trees in the desert can get credits for making things cleaner and sell them. Now the plants all die, but that's not important as long as you can convince the regulators that some of them might make it your in the clear. With a simple tax everyone pays, when it get's complex those who understand the system pay far less.
  - m0nty 18y ago
    I think there's some info in here: http://www.carbontradewatch.org/pubs/carbon_neutral_myth.pdf http://www.carbontradewatch.org/pubs/carbon_neutral_myth.pdf It's been a while since I read it through but their basic point is that carbon credits are to the environment what indulgences were to the mediaeval church.
    - ovi256 18y ago
      Mediaeval Catholic church please. No other church sold indulgences (the other major church, Eastern Orthodox, definitely did not). Yeah, I'm a semantic nazi. PS: great comparison, I'll steal it for my own arguments. With your permission of course.
      - m0nty 18y ago
        "With your permission of course." Not my comparison, so go ahead. The PDF I linked to was interesting because I'd always wondered if carbon trading (in all its forms) helped much, and the answer seems to be "no".
jwb119 18y ago
as far as i can tell, carbon trading is not directly subsidized by the government as lovelock seems to imply. the closest thing i can find is subsidies for emissions reductions equipment (which could allow the company purchasing the equipment to then receive some compensation by selling capacity). am i missing something?
- anamax 18y ago
  > as far as i can tell, carbon trading is not directly subsidized by the government as lovelock seems to imply. It's subsidized in the sense that few people will buy carbon credits unless they're being forced to do so.
c1sc0 18y ago
Actually the most interesting point brought up in the article wasn't about carbon trading, but about the future of our species: "I don't think we can react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up" - James Lovelock vs. "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." - Vernor Vinge
- Rod 18y ago
  Quoting economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006): "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." Remove the word "economic" from the quote, and it still applies perfectly. No expert has ever been able to predict where the human species will be in a few decades.
ivankirigin 18y ago
Creating scarcity of a good available in the commons is pretty straight forward. The devil is in the details though, especially for something like carbon which affects pretty much everything. I would generally prefer a tax on coal and oil, which is easier to account for, and doesn't pick a winner. The main problem is that taxes like this typically go into general funds, rather than helping the problem with, say, investment in research into alternatives.
jsdalton 18y ago
I agree with his premise, though I don't entirely agree with his conclusions. I've come to think that the problem with our approach to global warming right now is that it's been yoked to environmentalism as a broader, and in many ways, spiritual cause. Many of us are guilty of using the threat of global warming to shepherd other goals in there...e.g. renewable or alternative energy, resource conservation etc. I happen to be inclined toward spiritual environmentalism myself, but if the earth is REALLY warming up due to human caused carbon inputs, we are fucked if we think a few extra wind farms and energy-conscious homes are going to solve anything. The only solution I think mankind is even capable of undertaking is a technology solution...i.e. we need to find a way of getting carbon out of the air and into the ground. It may not be pretty, cheap, or some nirvana of holistic living, but it's actually how the problem will get solved. Don't know if I'm making sense, but this is just what I was thinking about recently.
- jerf 18y ago
  One of the proofs that the advocacy has become spiritual is precisely that engineering solutions are verboten. You can't engineer your way to spirituality, you can only suffer you way to it. (And if the poor must suffer twice as much, well, that's the price of my spirituality.) If CO2 were a real problem and we were actually interested in solving it, engineering solutions are not a option, they are the only option if the alarmists are correct. We must not only stop putting so much out there, we must actively take out what we have put in. Yes, I use the word "alarmist" and I'm basically a "doubter"; I'll self-label so there's no need to accuse. A small-but-significant portion of the reason why is the fundamental unseriousness of the alarmists on this point; if it's a problem, then let's fix it, not use global warming as an excuse to implement a whole raft of policies that oh-so-coincidentally you wanted even before it's was a problem and not-so-coincidentally aren't all that effective against global warming. (The whole "we can't afford to take engineering risks we don't understand" is complete nonsense. Apparently we know with 100% certainty what is coming down the pike with our current emissions, and that is Complete Doom. It's hard to beat a negative like that and... frankly, engineering isn't exactly unfamiliar with that condition anyhow. Apparently we can predict the climate with 100% certainty unless we actually try to use this knowledge to fix the problem, and we must instead only engage in actions that by the IPCC's own admission and models will cost trillions and do next-to-nothing. See, I just have trouble wrapping my head around this whole meme-complex as an engineer; either we have a real problem and engineering solutions should be on the table, or engineering solutions shouldn't be on the table because we don't have a real problem, but trying to split the difference is just inconsistent. BTW, if you believe in AGW but you also believe that engineering solutions should be on the table then I would not label you an alarmist; I reserve the term for those who are using nakedly using AGW as a means of advancing all-but-unrelated political agendas, not those who honestly believe there's a problem that should be solved in the most effective manner possible, whatever that may turn out to be. I don't really agree that this is a problem (there are great problems but they lie elsewhere and don't have one nice catch-phrase), but if I'm wrong, hey, let's fix it! It's worth saying again.)
Spyckie 18y ago
interesting... I'm taking a class on the economics of Global warming, but as we just started I don't know if I can comment just yet. However, allowance trading worked very well in controlling acid rain - one of the incentives to use it on carbon emissions as well.
- mhartl 18y ago
  However, allowance trading worked very well in controlling acid rain - one of the incentives to use it on carbon emissions as well. There's a key difference: the time lag between emissions and acid rain is short. Stopping the formation of nitric and sulfuric acids in the atmosphere happened shortly after the emissions ended. Not so with carbon dioxide; the time lag is decades. Even if all CO2 emissions stopped tomorrow, the Earth would still continue to warm. This might seem like cause for pessimism, and perhaps it is. But it also undermines the sense of urgency, almost desperation, among many environmentalists that we should "do something", no matter how ill-thought-out that something may be. It seems better just to wait, and try not to do too much harm in the short run. Maybe we're doomed, maybe technology will save us. Either way, it's going to be a heck of a ride. :-)
gruseom 18y ago
What an embarrassingly vain and foolish title.
electromagnetic 18y ago
He's just repeating crap that's been said for centuries "the earths too populated to sustain!". They've been saying it forever, yet populations are still growing and so is food production. "the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left" The first part is laughable, his citation was a decrease in rice production 'predicted' because of global warming. At worst (if rice went extinct) only about 2 billion people would be at risk of potential starvation, however as the temperatures increase so do the ranges in which plants grow so when rice isn't producible other food will be and these foods already have a high productivity for plants. For the majority of the century rice production would likely be switched between the different types of rice; areas that start getting more droughts would end up growing drought resistant strains and in areas that get flooded, well then you'd grow the deep water rice. The last part of that quote is just full out laughable. There's no evidence of significant decreases in human population in the early 500,000 years of human existence. The biggest population declines in humanity have happened relatively recently, namely the black plague and the spanish flu and all the major disease outbreaks. I'd love to hear where he got th figure '2000' from, because that would have shown in our genes. If the human population really had dropped to 2000 people, the human race would have gone extinct. If he's talking about modern humans (us) then this is 100% bullshit, because we haven't seen anything like an ice age because we've been around for 10,000 years. If he's talking about the Cro-Magnon then it's BS again because they largely supplanted the Neanderthals by adapting to the warmer weather better. If he's talking about... oh wait the humans that lived through an ice age were the Neanderthals, which pretty much thrived during it, they lived in Southern Britain and Northern Britain at the time was a glacier! I mean his claim is laughably moronic, because the one time when homo sapiens were truly at risk in the Ice Ages we would see it, but the Neanderthals lived throughout most of Europe and the Middle East. Here's a link to prove my point, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Carte_Neandertaliens.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Carte_Nea... the red dots are where Neanderthal fossils have been found, and it even shows where the glaciers extended to during the Ice Age. I mean, if you look at modern human population estimates, yes it's been below 5,000... because we'd just evolved! The lowest estimated population is before fossil evidence of modern humans, IE pre-8000BC. A similar thing will have happened with the Cro-Magnons, as they simply expanded and supplanted the Neanderthals, likely the same as Homo Sapiens Sapiens did to the Cro-Magnon. Human population likely never dipped below hundreds of thousands because a new species simply overtook the last. In fact Homo Sapiens Sapiens came right at the advent of agriculture when humans stopped being migratory and were truly affected by environmental change (IE you couldn't just follow your food). /Rant over. Summary: This guy's more quack than a duck.

33 points by nickb 18y ago

I wouldn't write off carbon trading yet. Trading of emissions now may not be enough to do any offsetting (only shift monies around), but as the trading system grows to be accountable and based on harder science, then why not, as the article points out, include Lovelock's idea of burying charcoal as part of the "carbon trading" market?

menloparkbum 18y ago

Carbon trading makes me realize that my idealism is waning as I rapidly approach old age. I agree with Lovelock in that it seems like a gigantic scam. However, rather than outrage, I'm thinking "How can I get in on the ground floor of this gigantic scam?"

3pt14159 18y ago
The key is to ignore CO2 and focus on the much more potent ones, because you can sell credits for equivalent tons of CO2. See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Greenhouse_Gas_by_Sector.png Step 1: Collect Nitrous Oxide in giant tanks. Step 2: Store the Nitrous Oxide Step 3: Get $$$ from CO2 market Step 4: Use portion of money to buy 30 year government backed securities to cover maintenance of the tanks/land. Keep the rest as profit. The key is to get your storage/transportation to a minimum. High compression, or piped to the ocean floor, maybe.
medearis 18y ago
I couldn't really find much in what he had to say about WHY it is a "scam." The linked article requires registration and is cut off before it starts explaining why "this approach is misguided." While carbon trading may not be a solution for global warming, it is one of the few models we have for using market incentives to curb carbon emissions in the short term.
- Retric 18y ago
  If you just tax carbon emissions at say 1$ per ton it's easy to track. But with cap and trade people who say plant 1 million trees in the desert can get credits for making things cleaner and sell them. Now the plants all die, but that's not important as long as you can convince the regulators that some of them might make it your in the clear. With a simple tax everyone pays, when it get's complex those who understand the system pay far less.
- m0nty 18y ago
  I think there's some info in here: http://www.carbontradewatch.org/pubs/carbon_neutral_myth.pdf http://www.carbontradewatch.org/pubs/carbon_neutral_myth.pdf It's been a while since I read it through but their basic point is that carbon credits are to the environment what indulgences were to the mediaeval church.
  - ovi256 18y ago
    Mediaeval Catholic church please. No other church sold indulgences (the other major church, Eastern Orthodox, definitely did not). Yeah, I'm a semantic nazi. PS: great comparison, I'll steal it for my own arguments. With your permission of course.
    - m0nty 18y ago
      "With your permission of course." Not my comparison, so go ahead. The PDF I linked to was interesting because I'd always wondered if carbon trading (in all its forms) helped much, and the answer seems to be "no".

jwb119 18y ago

as far as i can tell, carbon trading is not directly subsidized by the government as lovelock seems to imply. the closest thing i can find is subsidies for emissions reductions equipment (which could allow the company purchasing the equipment to then receive some compensation by selling capacity). am i missing something?

anamax 18y ago
> as far as i can tell, carbon trading is not directly subsidized by the government as lovelock seems to imply. It's subsidized in the sense that few people will buy carbon credits unless they're being forced to do so.

c1sc0 18y ago

Actually the most interesting point brought up in the article wasn't about carbon trading, but about the future of our species: "I don't think we can react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up" - James Lovelock vs. "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." - Vernor Vinge

Rod 18y ago
Quoting economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006): "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." Remove the word "economic" from the quote, and it still applies perfectly. No expert has ever been able to predict where the human species will be in a few decades.

ivankirigin 18y ago

Creating scarcity of a good available in the commons is pretty straight forward. The devil is in the details though, especially for something like carbon which affects pretty much everything. I would generally prefer a tax on coal and oil, which is easier to account for, and doesn't pick a winner. The main problem is that taxes like this typically go into general funds, rather than helping the problem with, say, investment in research into alternatives.

jsdalton 18y ago

I agree with his premise, though I don't entirely agree with his conclusions. I've come to think that the problem with our approach to global warming right now is that it's been yoked to environmentalism as a broader, and in many ways, spiritual cause. Many of us are guilty of using the threat of global warming to shepherd other goals in there...e.g. renewable or alternative energy, resource conservation etc. I happen to be inclined toward spiritual environmentalism myself, but if the earth is REALLY warming up due to human caused carbon inputs, we are fucked if we think a few extra wind farms and energy-conscious homes are going to solve anything. The only solution I think mankind is even capable of undertaking is a technology solution...i.e. we need to find a way of getting carbon out of the air and into the ground. It may not be pretty, cheap, or some nirvana of holistic living, but it's actually how the problem will get solved. Don't know if I'm making sense, but this is just what I was thinking about recently.

jerf 18y ago
One of the proofs that the advocacy has become spiritual is precisely that engineering solutions are verboten. You can't engineer your way to spirituality, you can only suffer you way to it. (And if the poor must suffer twice as much, well, that's the price of my spirituality.) If CO2 were a real problem and we were actually interested in solving it, engineering solutions are not a option, they are the only option if the alarmists are correct. We must not only stop putting so much out there, we must actively take out what we have put in. Yes, I use the word "alarmist" and I'm basically a "doubter"; I'll self-label so there's no need to accuse. A small-but-significant portion of the reason why is the fundamental unseriousness of the alarmists on this point; if it's a problem, then let's fix it, not use global warming as an excuse to implement a whole raft of policies that oh-so-coincidentally you wanted even before it's was a problem and not-so-coincidentally aren't all that effective against global warming. (The whole "we can't afford to take engineering risks we don't understand" is complete nonsense. Apparently we know with 100% certainty what is coming down the pike with our current emissions, and that is Complete Doom. It's hard to beat a negative like that and... frankly, engineering isn't exactly unfamiliar with that condition anyhow. Apparently we can predict the climate with 100% certainty unless we actually try to use this knowledge to fix the problem, and we must instead only engage in actions that by the IPCC's own admission and models will cost trillions and do next-to-nothing. See, I just have trouble wrapping my head around this whole meme-complex as an engineer; either we have a real problem and engineering solutions should be on the table, or engineering solutions shouldn't be on the table because we don't have a real problem, but trying to split the difference is just inconsistent. BTW, if you believe in AGW but you also believe that engineering solutions should be on the table then I would not label you an alarmist; I reserve the term for those who are using nakedly using AGW as a means of advancing all-but-unrelated political agendas, not those who honestly believe there's a problem that should be solved in the most effective manner possible, whatever that may turn out to be. I don't really agree that this is a problem (there are great problems but they lie elsewhere and don't have one nice catch-phrase), but if I'm wrong, hey, let's fix it! It's worth saying again.)

Spyckie 18y ago

interesting... I'm taking a class on the economics of Global warming, but as we just started I don't know if I can comment just yet. However, allowance trading worked very well in controlling acid rain - one of the incentives to use it on carbon emissions as well.

mhartl 18y ago
However, allowance trading worked very well in controlling acid rain - one of the incentives to use it on carbon emissions as well. There's a key difference: the time lag between emissions and acid rain is short. Stopping the formation of nitric and sulfuric acids in the atmosphere happened shortly after the emissions ended. Not so with carbon dioxide; the time lag is decades. Even if all CO2 emissions stopped tomorrow, the Earth would still continue to warm. This might seem like cause for pessimism, and perhaps it is. But it also undermines the sense of urgency, almost desperation, among many environmentalists that we should "do something", no matter how ill-thought-out that something may be. It seems better just to wait, and try not to do too much harm in the short run. Maybe we're doomed, maybe technology will save us. Either way, it's going to be a heck of a ride. :-)

gruseom 18y ago

What an embarrassingly vain and foolish title.

electromagnetic 18y ago

He's just repeating crap that's been said for centuries "the earths too populated to sustain!". They've been saying it forever, yet populations are still growing and so is food production. "the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left" The first part is laughable, his citation was a decrease in rice production 'predicted' because of global warming. At worst (if rice went extinct) only about 2 billion people would be at risk of potential starvation, however as the temperatures increase so do the ranges in which plants grow so when rice isn't producible other food will be and these foods already have a high productivity for plants. For the majority of the century rice production would likely be switched between the different types of rice; areas that start getting more droughts would end up growing drought resistant strains and in areas that get flooded, well then you'd grow the deep water rice. The last part of that quote is just full out laughable. There's no evidence of significant decreases in human population in the early 500,000 years of human existence. The biggest population declines in humanity have happened relatively recently, namely the black plague and the spanish flu and all the major disease outbreaks. I'd love to hear where he got th figure '2000' from, because that would have shown in our genes. If the human population really had dropped to 2000 people, the human race would have gone extinct. If he's talking about modern humans (us) then this is 100% bullshit, because we haven't seen anything like an ice age because we've been around for 10,000 years. If he's talking about the Cro-Magnon then it's BS again because they largely supplanted the Neanderthals by adapting to the warmer weather better. If he's talking about... oh wait the humans that lived through an ice age were the Neanderthals, which pretty much thrived during it, they lived in Southern Britain and Northern Britain at the time was a glacier! I mean his claim is laughably moronic, because the one time when homo sapiens were truly at risk in the Ice Ages we would see it, but the Neanderthals lived throughout most of Europe and the Middle East. Here's a link to prove my point, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Carte_Neandertaliens.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Carte_Nea... the red dots are where Neanderthal fossils have been found, and it even shows where the glaciers extended to during the Ice Age. I mean, if you look at modern human population estimates, yes it's been below 5,000... because we'd just evolved! The lowest estimated population is before fossil evidence of modern humans, IE pre-8000BC. A similar thing will have happened with the Cro-Magnons, as they simply expanded and supplanted the Neanderthals, likely the same as Homo Sapiens Sapiens did to the Cro-Magnon. Human population likely never dipped below hundreds of thousands because a new species simply overtook the last. In fact Homo Sapiens Sapiens came right at the advent of agriculture when humans stopped being migratory and were truly affected by environmental change (IE you couldn't just follow your food). /Rant over. Summary: This guy's more quack than a duck.