I will ignore the appalling possibility that, by reducing congestion, using your car less will encourage others to use theirs more, thus wiping out any benefit from your action. This kind of economist’s logic creates inertia and despair.
That is from Chris Goodall’s How to Live a Low-Carbon Life: The Individual’s Guide to Stopping Climate Change. Just imagine, when it comes to the number of players in this game, the guy doesn’t mention whether the appropriate model should use a countable or a non-countable infinity. Often it makes a big difference for the result.
I had promised to look at the author’s claim that walking and eating meat (to replenish the lost energy) can be less carbon-friendly than driving a car; his analysis does offer the appropriate qualifiers. The author also argues that flying is about the least carbon-friendly thing you can do.
This book "taught" me that a carbon tax will never be very popular with the hard-core environmental movement. Their core intuition is "It is wrong to pollute." They are less interested in the message "It is OK to pollute as long as you pay the price," which is how a carbon tax sounds to them. Goodall (pp.227-8) insists it is wrong to impose the costs of carbon emissions on the future, no matter what payment or offset you are making today. In fact a high carbon tax would just show that quite a bit of environmental destruction was going on. Quite consistently, he argues that we all simply have to stop flying. Now.
He can mail back his Harvard MBA by boat.
Here is the book’s web site. Here is his blog. Here is his carbon audit of Princes Charles.
Isn’t the countable case more plausible seeing as it is the limit of the finite case, whereas the uncountable case is not?
I know commercial flying in less energy intensive (about the same) than driving (not including the differences in refining and transport of fuel). I’m not sure how much more energy is needed to further refine oil into jet fuel, but I doubt it’s much. I think what comes out of a refinery is mostly based on what goes in. The cost of transport should be less since airports are more centrallized than gas stations and the fuel purer.
I’m interested in reading it, but I don’t want to contribute money to the author until I know it’s not bullshit. Anyone want to lend me a copy when they’re done?
Oops.
People who DON’T exercise tend to eat as much or more than people who do.
As a former Green, I can tell you that I’ve met several “hard-core environmentalists” who at heart were anti-capitalist more than they were pro-environment. Any solution like carbon taxes that would let “the rich get richer” in their mind would be unworkable in their zero-sum world view.
The environment itself is a zero-sum situation, so it’s not surprising that those with a zero-sum point of view would be attracted to environmentalism for the wrong reasons.
Liquid coal is good for energy independence, but I think it is dirty and inefficient process.
Solar is looking more promising. The negative externality of decreased albedo seems slight. I also wonder if a good portion of it can be overcome by maybe encasing towers in vacuum tubes and then a greenhouse substance (one that lets in high frequency radiation, but traps the low frequency radiation).
Aaron, iirc the problem with air travel is where the exhaust is released, not the fuel that is burned (jet fuel ~ kerosene?)
I am skeptical of anyone that gives personal recommendations for saving the planet. Anything with smaller footprint than starting a bike-to-work program seems pointless. I would like to see anyone Green give a more reasonable accounting for their alternative homes, or at least get them to admit that the major effect is upping the visible demand to developers.
These people are basically Luddites, especially conservative about technology that has the potential to
transform society. I think they would oppose the internet if not for Al Gore the internut.
“Goodall (pp.227-8) insists it is wrong to impose the costs of carbon emissions on the future, no matter what payment or offset you are making today. “
If the tax was accompanied by a payout to those who remove co2 from the air, the tax could be raised to the point where we are carbon neutral. I think that biochar/agrichar/terra preta is a pretty promising way to remove co2 from the air and I think it might be surprisingly cheap to remove c02 from the air. I am not for acting yet but I think that we could archive carbon neutrality without huge pain if we needed to.
I’m appalled by the massive amounts of carbon wasted by all the white pixels on Chris Goodall’s website. Plus, it should be all text with no fancy graphics, so less energy is used in downloads and programming.
Aaron,
The energy requirements to convert crude oil into any fuel product are small compared to the energy content of the fuel. Jet kerosene was historically simply distilled from crude oil. These days it would also come from resid hydrocracking, coking, etc. However, compared to gasoline or even diesel fuel, jet kerosene is simple stuff. Gasoline has to meet octane requirements. Diesel has cetane specifications. I believe there are aromatic limits on jet kerosene to minimize soot. However, aromatics have greater value as petrochemical feedstocks anyway.
Of course, all liquid fuels are subject to tough sulfur limits. These specs do increase (slightly) the energy cost of fuel production. Sadly, marine bunkers are still somewhat exempt from sulfur limits (or so I think).
Dear Tyler Cowan – perhaps a conversation between economists and environmentalists is rather like a conversation between a husband (left brain) and wife (right brain). (No offense to either sex intended.) If Chris Goodall says that it is “wrong to pollute” (full stop), he/she cannot really mean it literally. Even switching on the light would violate this rule. I think economists need to be smarter about interpreting what non-economists say. It’s too easy to just take statements at face value and dismiss them. That said, it is also right to hold environmentalists accountable to the statements they make, and force them to confront the implications of their statements. This, plus being more careful about interpreting what environmentalists say, would (I think) assist in finding common ground between economists and environmentalists.
And yet nobody has thought of anything new in what 50 years?
“[Certain environmentalists] core intuition is “It is wrong to pollute.’”
They really do expect everyone to adopt a “green” outlook, lifestyle, and ethic, but most have not realized that that would require what would really be a religious movement of everyone in the world.
Every decision made would require weighing the cost-benefit to the environment. Mrs. John Edwards just talked about giving up tangerines because they had to be shipped too far. We’d all be counting carbon they way members of Weight Watchers count calories — that would take a religious attitude.
For those who believe global warming is serious and we have only a few years to prevent a disaster talk of cutting the US carbon footprint by up to 80 percent. Believing that, the only alternative to radical religious conversion would be a strongly authoritarian government.
I am not suggesting all who worry about global warming think steps this radical are necessary, but if Al Gore is right about the problem, what other conclusion is possible?
The alternative idea would be to solve the problem thru market forces. Convert the commons to private property where possible, and price polluting activity appropriately. Then everyone makes the right decisions by taking into account relative prices.
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