[lbo-talk] Cooling a fevered planet - article in Z Magazine

Gar Lipow the.typo.boy at gmail.com
Sun Jul 13 11:25:50 PDT 2008


My recent article on the economics, policy and politics of global warming is the most recent issue of Z magazine. Currently it is available at no charge at http://www.zcommunications.org/zmag/viewArticle/18060, though I understand this will move behind a paywall occasionally. Comments, and debate are welcome.

Just to give a taste: ====================================== Cooling a Fevered Planet Economics, policy, and vision for fighting global warming July, 01 2008 By Gar Lipow Z PAPERS ON VISION AND STRATEGY

Nobody, except for a small lunatic fringe, still disputes that human-caused climate chaos endangers all of us. Further, most serious scientific and technical groups who have looked at the question have concluded that we have the technological capability today to replace greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels with efficiency improvements and clean energy—usually at a maximum cost of around the current worldwide military budget, probably much less. The question therefore is: what's stopping us?

To answer that we need to look at the causes of global warming—not the physical causes, but the economic and political flaws in our system that have prevented solutions from being implemented long after the problem was known.

One driver is inequality and the maintenance of power that keeps inequality in place produces perverse incentives in resource use. An example of this is a usual economic suspect behind global warming, the lack of full social pricing. Fossil fuel use imposes all sorts of costs on others. A tax that recovered some of these costs would reduce emissions, though how much is arguable. Arthur Cecil Pigou invented the idea of this type of taxation back in 1912. Since most of the direct cost would fall on consumers, it is puzzling at first glance that big corporations and the very rich have never had any great enthusiasm for the idea. The answer lies in inequality. Lack of social pricing means we all pay some of the expenses generated by others. But due to inequality, the very rich and the big corporations are able to impose many times the costs on others that others can impose on them—an advantage they don't want to lose.

A second obstacle is deliberate obstruction by various bad guys in both business and government. These are not trivial. Ross Gelbspan has spent most of the past decade documenting the successful efforts of coal, oil, and automakers to thwart regulation of greenhouse gases.

But the flaws that cause continuing resource waste extend far beyond low prices and bad guys. While a portion of the clean replacement technology would cost more than our current system (if you don't count human life), much of it is less expensive. Experts widely agree that substantial savings are available at lower costs than fossil fuels. A majority of these same experts agree that efficiency improvements using existing technology could reduce consumption by at least 40 percent, at a cost less than the price of fossil fuels. Similarly there is widespread agreement that existing renewable sources, such as wind power and solar space and water heating, could replace 20 to 30 percent of remaining demand at a similar savings. That means that over half of emissions could have been eliminated at a profit. A substantial minority, including Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute and Dr. Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek of the Factor 10 Institute, believe that potential efficiency improvements are much greater than 40 percent, substantial enough to pay the remaining cost of all other emissions reduction.

But even the lower number forces us to look beyond too-low pricing and deliberate obstruction. Why does a market based system ignore chances to make large profits?

The rest can be found at: http://www.zcommunications.org/zmag/viewArticle/18060



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list