Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
How many times have you heard the claim that some government regulation -- say, the cap and trade bill -- is really just a "hidden tax" because it will increase the cost of production for a company and therefore we'll pay more for their products? Sometimes it's stated without it being a tax, just that given policy X is bad because it will increase the cost of doing business and cause goods to cost more.
And of course, no one really wants to pay more for a product, right? But it seems to me that this argument, by itself, is pretty meaningless because it is equally true of government regulations that we all support. Forbidding factories from using child labor increases the cost of doing business and drives up the price of what is being produced; would anyone like to repeal those laws and allow child labor again?
Requiring a chemical company to safely dispose of the by-products of their work is expensive. It's far cheaper to just allow them to dump into the nearest river or stream, or into a hole in the ground where it can leach into the groundwater. Safe disposal costs money and those costs are inevitably passed on to those who buy their products. Would anyone therefore like to allow chemical companies to dump their waste anywhere they'd like?
Should we go back to allowing factories to work people 100 hours a week without overtime pay? Or eliminate laws requiring them to provide safe working conditions for their employees? The very same argument can be used against each and every such regulation, all of which has nearly universal support.
Now, if you want to argue that a particular regulation is not worth the cost, then by all means do that. Sometimes you'll even be right. But establishing that you're right will require more than merely pointing out that it increases costs and therefore prices.
If you want to argue that a particular regulation is not a good idea because it will provide incentives that negate the good things about a market, then by all means make such an argument. There are lots of situations where that's true, where a given regulation is in fact supported by big business because it helps insulate them from competition and therefore makes the market function with worse incentives for corporate behavior.
I think that's one of the lessons that liberals can learn from libertarians, the importance of understanding how markets operate so you can avoid regulations that distort markets for the worse and design regulations that help maximize the benefits of a free market while minimizing the negatives (and conversely, libertarians can learn from liberals that, yes, free markets can and do have negative consequences at times).
But if you're just going to argue that regulation is bad because it increases costs, you really aren't saying much of anything. That, by itself, is not a coherent argument against a given regulation.
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Um, I probably don't want to know the answer to that question, do I?
Posted by: Imrryr | December 15, 2009 9:13 AM
With regard to pollution controls, a million years ago, I saw an interview with the late and unlamented Ayn Rand in which she called for the elimination of all such controls on the basis that pollution from smokestacks was a good thing as it evidenced productive economic activity.
Posted by: SLC | December 15, 2009 9:27 AM
What you're talking about is not increases in costs, but increases in prices, by forcing internalizing of what would otherwise be externalized costs.
Subtle difference.
Posted by: abb3w | December 15, 2009 9:29 AM
An irrelevant difference for the point of this post because the argument being made is that increasing the cost of production leads to an increase in prices. And then, of course, there's the argument that making those products more expensive may well be a good thing because it forces consumers to pay the real cost of those products rather than having a sizable portion of the cost externalized and diffused among all members of society who then have to pay for the cleanup and the damage done to health and biosphere.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | December 15, 2009 9:35 AM
Ed stated:
True, but it appears to be politically sufficient to make this argument. In fact, we often hear the rhetoric change to, "it will raise the deficit" when many times the policy proposal is either deficit neutral or will reduce the deficit.
I am a proponent of policy where we attempt to generate government revenue in as transparent a method as possible. "Limited government" advocates, which I'm not and find to be a childish/naive position, often agree with this proposal because they think people will be less prone to support tax increases and spending proposals; I think quite the opposite. I think more transparency will help people logically understand the relationship between taxes and the very services that benefit society; that hiding taxes promotes a juvenile understanding between taxes and services rendered or squandered.
One position I take contra to transparency however is that I favor cap and trade rather than a carbon tax for one simple reason. We know the CO2 targets we must hit to mitigate AGW, cap and trade if done correctly (a giant if) allows policy makers to set those targets, the variable becomes the price. The more transparent carbon tax sets the price, but you can't control the target. In this case we care about output, not price, therefore I support cap and trade done correctly. Here's a blog post from liberal economist Paul Krugman with a graph helping to explain this position . There are arguable counters in favor of carbon tax so I hold my position tenuously. I emphasize Krugman's being a liberal because cap and trade was a right-wing idea validated to have worked in some other developed economices while the carbon tax has generally been a liberal position.
I'd argue cap and trade does promote transparency, only to output rather than a dollar figure. The public can easily understand what scientists state our goal should be for a given year and subsequent years and then look to see what cap was set by policy-makers and achieved in the past relative to the goal.
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 15, 2009 9:39 AM
My father used to argue that paying farmworkers a decent wage would raise food prices, so therefore it was important to continue to pay them slave wages. He managed, however, to avoid the word "slave."
Posted by: Zeno | December 15, 2009 9:42 AM
Ed, are you asking these questions seriously?? Because the simple, unironic answer is that any number of conservative Republican types want exactly that--to return to the era of complete non-regulation. Who, after all, opposed the imposition of minumum wage, and has fought against every increase? These guys would be delighted to return to the 100-hour, six-day week (no overtime, of course); heaven knows they're doing their best to undo most, if not all, the victories of organized labor (not that the unions haven't become spoiled). One sure way to tell one's economic philosophy is whether you refer to the 1890's as "The Age of the Robber Barons of Industry" or as "The Gilded Age."
Posted by: gary l. day | December 15, 2009 9:55 AM
The fact that capitalist and socialist approaches have been bound up with political ideology is quite unfortunate. An unbiased look shows that both are merely economic tools, which work well in some cases and not so much in others.
I am a programmer, and I have likened it to if we had a for-loop party and a while-loop party. Everyone from the for-loop party, whenever there was a need to implement a loop, said, "Oh, clearly the only way to solve this problem is with a for loop. Those commie while-loop proponents just want to eat up your extra processor cycles." Meanwhile, everyone from the while-loop party would blather on about, "Those fat cat for-loopists are all just in the pocket of Big For-each. They'll leave your computer wide open to a virus just to make an extra buck!"
Yeah. Not very productive.
(Of course as I become more and more involved in strategy decisions, it seems like the reality is closer to this than I'd like to think...)
Posted by: James Sweet | December 15, 2009 10:08 AM
"Forbidding factories from using child labor increases the cost of doing business and drives up the price of what is being produced; would anyone like to repeal those laws and allow child labor again?"
Um, Ed? You do realize that one of the major reasons that most U.S. manufacturing has been outsourced to Mexico, China, India, etc., is that those countries do allow child labor, and so produce goods more cheaply?
Posted by: Pat Donohue | December 15, 2009 10:15 AM
Imrryr:
Um, I probably don't want to know the answer to that question, do I?
Pat Donohue:
@Imrryr: Whether you want it or not, it appears you have an answer.
Posted by: DaveL | December 15, 2009 10:23 AM
Actually, let me expand that argument to your entire post: the quality-of-life regulations (child labor, workplace safety, hazardous waste cleanup, overtime, etc) that you cite are what essentially killed American manufacturing. Yes, such legislation is moral and righteous and beneficial and all of that; but rather than conform with those regulations, every corporation that was able moved their production centers to countries where workers had few or no legal rights.
I take your point about these regulations having nearly universal support. But you're remiss not to note that the 'hidden tax' - the cost of those regulations - is almost never passed on to the consumer; we in the United States don't pay more for products made in accordance with child labor laws, etc, because the vast majority of the products in the market today are cheap foreign goods made by American corporations in countries where there are no child labor laws. We Americans get the sense of moral righteousness that comes from high-minded regulation of human rights offenses *and* the cheap goods that come from ignoring human rights entirely.
Posted by: Pat Donohue | December 15, 2009 10:28 AM
@DaveL - Indeed.
Posted by: Imrryr | December 15, 2009 10:29 AM
Wow, Pat Donohue actually momentarily dropped the Poe and made a coherent point. I'm astonished.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | December 15, 2009 10:29 AM
I'd like to point out that Mexico, India and China do all have laws against child labor. In fact every UN member nation does. However, those laws are often ignored, particularly in the India and China. So Pat's overall point remains. Even if he got some of the details wrong.
Posted by: Abby Normal | December 15, 2009 10:42 AM
"I take your point about these regulations having nearly universal support. But you're remiss not to note that the 'hidden tax' - the cost of those regulations - is almost never passed on to the consumer; we in the United States don't pay more for products made in accordance with child labor laws, etc, because the vast majority of the products in the market today are cheap foreign goods made by American corporations in countries where there are no child labor laws"
I do not think that statement is accurate.
We do pay less for the products that are made in other countries, some of which do have horrendous labor laws or, simply, no labor laws. However, the corporations that have those goods manufactured do not pass along any more of the "savings" than they have to in order to sell the goods. The difference between their "true cost" and what they have to sell the product for is money in their pockets.
I'm not an economist but I'd be willing to bet that the ONLY motive for going overseas is profit. The human toll is just collateral damage in the marketing scheme.
Posted by: democommie | December 15, 2009 10:43 AM
Pat Donohue @ # 11: ... the cost of those regulations - is almost never passed on to the consumer; we in the United States don't pay more ...
No, all we pay is the monetary and social cost of militarizing our borders, police-stating our workplaces, and suffering an explosion of anti-immigrant xenophobia and subsequent empowerment of wingnuts, all due to the predictable human consequences of turning our "back yard" into toxic sweatshops. Such a deal!
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | December 15, 2009 10:53 AM
Democommie,
I would bet that the ONLY motive for most companies or people to make a product in the US or overseas is (gasp) profit.
Posted by: Mike | December 15, 2009 10:56 AM
Sadly, I think plenty of people would love to repeal all regulations. After all, if people don't like working in dangerous conditions for 100 hours a week, they could just work somewhere else, right? If people don't like chemical companies dumping byproducts into nearby water sources, then they just won't buy from that company, right? If people don't want to risk dying from an unsafe food product, they'll just pay more for food from companies that use routine testing, right? See Ed, to some people, the market is perfectly rational and all problems will be solved by just letting it use its invisible hand. And if people die, they deserve it for being stupid and/or cheap. These people often call themselves "Libertarians", which is why it always seems weird when you use the same label for yourself. I'm afraid that you're in the minority within your own group, and it might be easier to just abandon them and start something new.
Posted by: catgirl | December 15, 2009 11:04 AM
Interesting read. Personally I prefer an honest tax. I've long advocated the idea of dropping all trade tariffs and home-industry subsidies in exchange for a "civilization tax" wherein a country pays a tariff in accordance with how many points of, say, the UN Declaration on Human Rights they meet.
In Canada the Liberal Party last campaigned on a carbon-tax platform called the Green Shift, intended to reduce pollution and carbon emissions.
Instead, we wound up with a minority government under a man who thinks global warming is "a socialist plot." Which tells you what the appetite for realism here is.
I liked it, and so did most economists. Unlike many taxes this one was transparent and reasoned, and you could clearly have seen what proportion of the cost of a good or service was carbon tax.
The problem with cap-and-trade is that it isn't transparent and will almost certainly be abused. If the carbon tax raises the price of widgets by 3.4¢, then will the Acme Widget company not raise the price by 4¢?
The Green Shift had its problems, but I'll take an honest tax over corporate screwing any day.
Posted by: Metro | December 15, 2009 12:02 PM
Pat D. @ 11:
As someone who worked for years in the tech sector shuffling tens of billions of dollars of business around to various countries, Pat Donohue's non-Poe points @11 extend into hyperbole to the point of being arguably absurd. Yes there is some anecdotal evidence and even a couple of small mfg'ing sectors that partly correlate between their downfall and these factors, but his points are not representative of all American manufacturing nor even the biggest sectors as he represented nor did these factors 'kill American manufacturing'.
American manufacturing is not dead, see this graph showing how stable output is relative to GDP since 1947. Yes direct labor counts (and even some indirect) has gone down, partly because of a huge rise in productivity and also partly due to Fareer Zakaria describes as 'the rise of the rest'.
For example, when I entered the industry computer software allowed planner/buyers to handle about 30 direct material parts on their desk (direct material are components used to build a product, like a tire for a car or the screen of your computer display). When I left in 2003 the average was about 250 parts per desk.
Manufacturing lines that contained about 40 people to build printed circuit board assembly in 1985 took four people who were building 3X with defects per million dropping from 5000 to 12.
All the tech business I moved off-shore or worked with suppliers to move to lower-cost countries was not due to the items listed in Donohue's comment, but instead for three reasons:
1) direct labor wages (where all workers were adults)
2) lower wages for indirect labor, yet capability was there. (Indirect labor are people not on the manufacturing line, but instead in jobs like manufacturing and/or process engineering, purchasing, planning, test engineering, etc.)
3) Regional marketing considerations, i.e., Eurozone, NAFTA, emerging markets in China and the rest of the Far East. This consideration was that to sell in these emerging markets, it was strategically prudent to also build product there as well otherwise governments were more encouraged to put huge tarriffs on imports.
4) Loss of excellence here in America vs. these countries. For example, our best and brightest engineers were not going into careers in manufacturing engineering to build printed circuit boards, but they were in Taiwan. As the technical demands on manufacturers increased, Taiwan was able to achieve excellence hard that was shrinking or even non-existent in the States due to a lack of engineering talent.
In addition, in the tech industry (which I believe is now the largest manufacturing sector), their standards required certain environmental standards be met to maintain certain certifications used to insure product reliability and other objectives. For example, all the printed circuit boards I sourced in Taiwan, about a $300 million per year spend came from shops that had closed loop water systems that cleaned their water. In addition, all were on a program at the time to reduce lead content given the selling markets, like Europe, had lead reduction requirements. When economists talk about globalization, it is this sort of minimum standard and continuous improvement from the toughest customers that must be met.
My direct frame of reference would include the following countries: Malaysia, Thailand, People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Hungary, Brazil, and the Czech Republic along with several other countries that are considered developed.
In the hundreds of shops I visited, I only once saw kids working. They were in their family's tiny back-alley shop prepping the leads of an insertable part (Taipei, Taiwan). We pulled the business; not because their kids were helping them, hell I was cutting meat in my dad's supermarket when I was 12; but instead because they were the sole-source of this work supplying 40+ automotive lines. We couldn't afford the risk of their not delivering quality parts on-time given it cost up to $3000/minute to shut down an automotive line where everyone was operating in a Just-In-Time environment, i.e., only holding hours or days worth of parts.
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 15, 2009 12:04 PM
Metro stated:
Actually, cap and trade in practice is transparent if done competently, which has happened in some countries. In fact it creates transparency to the very thing that causes us to advocate for a tax on carbon, an attempt to control and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. What is transparent is the level of emissions. What is a variable is the price to spew gasses.
Re your price example, companies will always be looking to maximize net profit, not necessarily price. For example, reducing your price might lead to more profit by selling more units over your fixed costs while at the same time weakening your competitors by reducing their market share - which both weakens their brand and forces them to apply more of their fixed costs across less units sold. This can be such a compelling desire that we have laws in place to combat 'predatory pricing'. In most markets where no monopoly or oligopoly exists, the market sets the price, not the cost structure of an individual company, especially in markets where technology capabilities vary across competitors.
Given that gas refineries do not operate in what appears to be an efficient market in equilibrium, I can't extend my arguments to gas prices. This is why I posited my position on cap and trade tenuously in my first comment where I'm hoping to consider economic arguments cognizant of that market's efficiency.
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 15, 2009 12:16 PM
My comment @ 20 should have included Mexico as well.
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 15, 2009 12:29 PM
Michael Heath wrote:
Economists, whether liberal or conservative, tend to favor letting the market solve things whenever possible. The problem is that a great many markets are handicapped with externalities, and the prices are all wrong and you have market failure.
A further problem is asymmetric information. A company knows its own costs far more accurately than the government. Even so, companies have every motivation to exaggerate costs of carbon amelioration until it actually has to clean up, at which point the true costs are frequently revealed to be an order of magnitude or two below predictions.
In short, other things being equal, cap and trade is automatically favored by economists over a tax. Other things aren't equal, of course, but it takes a strong argument to persuade an economist that the tax is better.
Posted by: william e emba | December 15, 2009 12:47 PM
Of course, one could look at the destruction of so-called ecosystem services as a hidden cost of not doing some sort of carbon mitigation. In this light, no action can also be seen as being as much of a "tax" as taking action.
Right now, bees work for very cheap (just keep giving them sugar water when they aren't out pollinating), and we continue to reap the benefits of bee-pollinated fruits and vegetables. How much cost would there be if we hired workers to pollinate the plants by hand? (Paradoxically, AFAIK, this sort of employment due to lost ecosystem services could be construed as a benefit to GDP, since we will be hiring more people...)
Similarly, trees do a good job of producing oxygen, and we don't really need to provide them with very much, since we don't control the amount of light and water that most trees we harvest actually get. However, what are the costs of producing oxygen from carbon dioxide without arboreal photosynthesis? (True, we could use algae, but then we have to do something about all that dead and dying algae, the decomposition of which creates carbon dioxide again...)
So, what w.e. emba says hits a nail on the head. Markets don't handle externalities. That is the weakness of markets. However, externalities do exist. They are real. They affect us and those who will come after us. The only way, though, to have markets react to these forces is to include them in the market in some way. ... if we want to have a market-based solution to begin with.
Posted by: Umlud | December 15, 2009 12:56 PM
Ed: An irrelevant difference for the point of this post
For the particular argument? No; making the distinction does not contradict your argument, which is not quite the same thing. Recognizing that distinction allowed you to immediately make the connection that making those products more expensive may well be a good thing because it forces consumers to pay the real cost of those products rather than having a sizable portion of the cost externalized and diffused among all members of society who then have to pay for the cleanup and the damage done to health and biosphere. (I thought saying "forcing internalizing of what would otherwise be externalized costs" made that obvious, but my view of what constitutes "obvious" is abnormal, so the more explicit version was probably worth stating.)
A point strengthening the core argument is not what I would term "irrelevant".
I also presumed the post has a wider point implicit that too many people don't think precisely when reasoning about economics; it's also peripherally relevant there.
Posted by: abb3w | December 15, 2009 12:58 PM
Umlud wrote:
The paradox has an easy resolution: It's just not so. But this mistake is popular. There are always pundits who chime in after big natural disasters about the silver lining of increased economic activity. Well, if it's so good, why wait?
Economics, most broadly construed, is the study of choice. In theory, more choice is inherently superior to less choice, simply because the greater range of options might include something better.
In other words, people do not pollinate by hand today because they are better employed elsewhere. Switching people to pollinate from elsewhere means something else suffers.
You get growth from new options, not fewer options.
Posted by: william e emba | December 15, 2009 1:26 PM
The short answer is that if Acme Widget Company was able to raise the price by $0.04, it would already have done so. The real story is that any increase in input costs (or taxes on producers) is going to be borne partially by the manufacturer in lost profits and partially by the consumer in increased prices. The relative ratios depend on market conditions, but there's no reason to believe that one party will actually end up better off (that is, with a higher profit margin or greater buying power).
It's similar to the fiction that the buyer pays for the real estate fees in a house sale. The reality is that those fees take a chunk out of the seller's profits and the buyer's buying power, but we write it down on paper as the buyer paying it all. My guess is that it's because it allows the buyer to finance those fees, increasing the amount they can pay to middle men over what they might have been willing to pay if cash was paid upfront.
Posted by: Troublesome Frog | December 15, 2009 1:31 PM
I read a short book a few years back that basically said Cap and Trade can be either good or bad depending on how it's actually implemented.
As an example, it claimed the German version was not very good because the permits were GIVEN to corporations outright, and the revenue from them was just put into the government's general fund. As an alternative, it suggested that the permits should be sold and the revenues should be put directly into funding of alternative energy solutions.
Anyone remember this book?
Posted by: xebecs | December 15, 2009 1:40 PM
Though there are a few who would like an entirely laissez faire system and would repeal even things like child labor laws and worker safety requirements, they are -- at very best -- a marginalized fringe. Yes, I know some libertarians and conservatives like to make lip service to the ability of free markets to solve any problem and prevent any negative outcome, but can you imagine any politician seriously submitting a bill to repeal laws against child labor? They'd be out of office in no time, even in the most conservative district. The train left the station on such matters long, long ago, and there is no serious constituency for them with any political power. If you took a poll and asked the question "should the government do away with child labor laws" you'd get about 98% no on that question.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | December 15, 2009 1:51 PM
I agree with your premise, but is it not true that employed lawyers, judges, and bailiffs add to GDP? However, couldn't their jobs as easily be seen as opportunity costs of the system in which we live? If there were no crime (i.e., a loss to the economy), then there would be no need for lawyers, judges, and bailiffs (at least to the extent to which we have them).
[movie-trailer voice]Imagine a world where bees died...[/movie-trailer voice] Pollination needs to happen, and (AFAIK), we don't have robots to do it for us. Some people are going to become pollinators. Some of those people will have moved from other jobs, others will become pollinators after they are done with schooling, and others will leave the unemployment rolls and become pollinators.
Now, I'm not an economist (and I'm not going to pretend to be one, either). However, in the same way that lawyers, judges, and bailiffs add to GDP, even though they could be working elsewhere in a world without crime, in a world without bees (or seriously diminished in our capacity to pollinate to produce fruit) wouldn't pollinators be adding to GDP in the same (or similar) way?
Posted by: Umlud | December 15, 2009 1:57 PM
Troublesome Frog states:
Actually, seller's commissions are paid by the seller because the contractual listing agreement is between the broker and the seller. Payment is for marketing the sale of a home, not bringing a buyer to a sale. The price that is established is based on what the market will bear, irrelevant of the commission (though this is often fought over once a buyer makes an offer). While Buyer's Agency contracts continue to grow and I act as either as a Realtor, the commission effectively (though not contractually) comes out of the commission agreed to by the seller and their listing agent even in these cases (co-brokerages are still how payment is rendered, even when the agent who brings the buyer to the table is not a sub-agent of the listing agent but instead the agent of the buyer).
People outside the industry typically think that since it is the buyer bringing the funds to the table, either in cash or cash and financing, it ultimately is the buyer paying the Realtors (normally two are involved). But that's not true, buyers pay the market price, and sellers have costs of sales including the commission. Some sellers will try to avoid this cost by doing a FSBO (For Sale by Owners) where they set a list price below their perception of the market price though with a projected net proceed value adjusted for what they believe they'll save not using a Realtor; this only works in very bullish or liquid markets where the FSBO listing is then often under-priced given the FSBO seller considers historical prices rather than future prices. For example, I purchased a FSBO in 2003 where he seller arrogantly and ignorantly thought he'd saved himself 3.5% percent in a seller's commission when in fact his house was underpriced by about 12% relative to the market for similar homes (his appraiser went back 2 years without normalizing past sales figures by pricing trends. What a good Realtor would have done was look at the last six weeks and adding a premium assuming the sale wouldn't occur for about 3 months). Another failure FSBO owners fail to realize is that the marketer of their home is rarely the agent bring the buyer to table, that usually comes from another agent, in spite of increased listing transparency for consumers via the Internet.
From an economic perspective, the market price for a home is set by the market, the commission is a cost of sale borne by the seller. There is of course a natural tendency for both buyers and sellers to attempt to cut their commissions previously contracted, but that normally doesn't work except in foreclosure sales (when buyers' agents are desperate) or in very sweet, illiquid deals or unless the Realtor is a part-timer whose not very professional or competent.
I have rarely taken a cut in my commission. In fact, I own properties with partners where I'm the listing agent and they don't get a discounted commission either. In bear markets I actually raise my commission.
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 15, 2009 2:03 PM
Heath: Your comment #20 was very interesting and made a convinceing case. Would you mind if I passed it on to an economist I know, to see what she thinks? I'm not asking this because I doubt you (if I did, I probably wouldn't bother); I just want to see how closely your own experience matches the overall picture.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 15, 2009 2:19 PM
I didn't think there was anything "hidden" about it--the entire point of cap & trade is to raise the price of energy sourced from fossil fuels, in order to more accurately reflect the true cost of its production, which is currently largely externalized (a bad thing even in the free-marketeers' world, supposedly). The whole free market model is based on the idea that there are no externalities anyway, so what's their issue? The issue is that most of these people don't actually understand the foundational assumptions of the model they claim to support.
Posted by: Uncephalized | December 15, 2009 2:41 PM
Troublesome Frog wrote:
Acme was always "able" to raise its price. The question was whether it be more profitable to do so.
In case of perfect competition, for example, Acme didn't raise the price, because nobody else raised their price. After the tax, all manufacturers will raise their price, but typically not as much as the tax.
In case of monopoly, Acme didn't raise the price because the price was already raised to the maximum they could get away with. Each penny increase in price meant fewer sales. The question is how much fewer, and how great the existing sales already are. Acme will typically respond to the tax by raising prices, but not as much as the tax.
This is more accurate.
Posted by: william e emba | December 15, 2009 2:41 PM
Michael Heath:
Sorry about the confusion in what I wrote in the last post. I brain farted on who pays the agent on paper. I have no idea why I wrote that backward. It doesn't even make sense in light of my financing comment.
My point is that while the seller pays the agent, the incindence of cost is split between the buyer and seller, just like any overhead cost is. There is nothing special about this cost that makes it impossible to partially (or largely, depending on the market) pass on to the buyer. It's exactly the same as tax incidence: If real estate agents across the board raised their fees by $1,000, home prices wouldn't stay the same. That's the buyer's incidence. It just happens that the buyer can finance his incidence, so his sensitivity to it is reduced, bidding up agent fees across the board.
I would argue that aside from seller incompetence, another key reason FSBO properties sell for less is that the buyer knows perfectly well that there's an additional cost not being incurred. It's no secret that the seller's cost is a few thousand dollars lower, so he isn't really in a position to pocket all of it at the bargaining table.
Posted by: Troublesome Frog | December 15, 2009 2:50 PM
Spending on criminal matters is really a tax, not a good. The GDP fails to subtract the costs of crime.
There are economists who insist that police budgets not be part of GDP, but I believe they currently are.
Posted by: william e emba | December 15, 2009 2:55 PM
That's precisely what I meant by "able." Regardless of how competitive the market in question is, each seller has already set prices at a level that they believe will optimize its profits. There's nothing about adding a tax that changes market conditions to allow the seller to increase prices without losing money.
Your explanation can be modeled very generally without looking at competition by looking at the relative elasticities of the market actors.
Posted by: Troublesome Frog | December 15, 2009 2:55 PM
@26 - william's comment on choice made me think of this clip from the stand up economist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4
Choices are bad!
Posted by: Gonzo | December 15, 2009 3:00 PM
Raging Bee, (reference # 32)
Heath’s experience closely matches my own. I was in electronics manufacturing from the mid 1980’s until 2001, when the industry essentially disappeared from the U.S., and while I might quibble about a point or two, his description of the situation is well stated and accurate.
Posted by: Shenda | December 15, 2009 3:17 PM
It's Econ 101. Draw the supply-and-demand curves: typically, with price vertical and quantity horizontal, a giant X, with the NW-SE line for demand and SW-NE line for supply. Where the two curves cross is the perfect competition equilibrium price. The monopolist typically creates an artificial shortage, picking a smaller quantity, costing him some piddling amount to make but selling at a jacked up price. His profit is the area of the rectangle between the price axis, the vertical line at actual quantity, and the two horizontal lines, at the piddling price of manufacture and the high price of selling.
A manufacturer tax moves the supply curve vertically up the amount of the tax. The new perfect competition equilibrium price up and left, meaning a higher price (but not raised as much as the tax). The monopolist wants to continue to maximize his profits, and responds to the tax by choosing a slightly lower quantity.
Posted by: william e emba | December 15, 2009 3:38 PM
Raging Bee @ 32 - sure. Please excuse the typos, e.g., "Fareer" instead of "Fareed" among some others. My perspective should match up if he or she looks at the EMSI* portion of the tech sector or its customers and suppliers, especially since I was a minor source of those Wall Street Analyst research papers, which I found were consistent with my experiences and tens of thousands of other business-people in that sector or related. I left that industry in 2003 so what I know is based on experiences up to then though the graph is timely.
Of course the big news for that sector wasn't related to Donahue's points so that went unstated; that is how OEM's hollowed out their companies by selling their manufacturing capabilities and capacity to EMSI companies, which had a huge impact on supply in the market price (under-utilized OEM factories being sold to companies who tried to fill that capacity by offering their services). This drove pricing down often below fixed & variable costs just to cover some fixed costs which was a chronic issue wiht earnings growth in the early 2000s besides the Telecom meltdown. OEMs sold their mfg'ing cpabilities for several reasons:
1) They were looking for cash to buy new technology (it seems large OEMs can't organically develop products in tech adequately).
2) Since manufacturing capability is not a core success factor for marketers of tech products, it was often inadequately managed while EMSI companies lived or died based on their operational capabilities in manufacturing.
3) When their capacity couldn't be utilized, they wanted to protect their reputation by not laying off workers, they'd instead sell to an EMSI company. The EMSI company usually got a fixed term contract to run the factory for several years; the workers then had a chance to prove they could build other companies' products during that time, if they couldn't, the factory was shut down with the business originally purchased moved to a more capable factory. The "bad guys" were companies no consumer ever heard of so no real harm came to the OEM who originally failed to succeed with their investments in manufacturing.
4) To a large degree, OEMs were able to transform what was a fixed cost, manufacturing capabilities, into far more of a variable cost. That's because decreases in orders to their EMSI suppliers wasn't punished too badly given they usually had other emerging companies who needed the excess capacity recently filled out (unless of course the whole market takes a dive, but I didn't see that even in the early-2000s when consumer products, medical equip., and automotive remained strong). Not sure what the effects have been since 2007.
*Electronic Manufacturing Services Industry
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 15, 2009 3:53 PM
It's an old foil: If the government does anything, we promise to raise prices and blame it on the government! Just look at the insurance companies threatening to do that - funny, but in the past 40 years I've seen insurance premiums skyrocket as the insurers bought hospitals and thus controlled the costs throughout the entire health industry. Our government also lets the drug cartels get away with fixing their prices; why do pharmaceutical drugs cost so much more in the USA than in Canada or the EU even when those drugs aren't subsidized by the Canadian or EU governments? If anything all these cartels and virtual monopolies are making it extremely tempting to bring on price regulation.
Posted by: MadScientist | December 15, 2009 4:13 PM
william e emba:
We're saying exactly the same thing. I'm simply saying that specifying a difference between monopolistic and competitive behavior is unnecessary in this case because it's merely a mechanism rather than a result. In either case, the fact that neither side of the transaction pays 100% of the tax incidents follows in a straightforward way from the slopes of the supply and demand curves.
One can construct a model of a monopolistic market in which price increases by more than the tax. It's a bit of a special case IIRC, and nobody walks away richer, which is what the original post we were responding to was implying. We're in agreement that the notion that increased taxes are a potential backdoor way to greater profits for producers is just wrong.
Posted by: Troublesome Frog | December 15, 2009 5:20 PM
I found that a hot cocoa gift set received from an exchange at my wife's holiday party stated the food in the container was made in the US, but was packaged in the decorative container in China. I understand the recent stigma of foreign-made food products, but how much insanely cheaper must the labor be for a company to justify shipping food products to China for them to be put in pretty packages and shipped back to the US? I sincerely hope that cap and trade or carbon taxes eliminate such blatant inefficiencies.
Posted by: ABradford | December 15, 2009 5:31 PM
Taxes and cap and trade will not eliminate blatant inefficiencies. This is because you are stupid.
Any human endavour operates on a profit motive. That profit may be making yourself feel good, or earning money, or what have you. For sales and business, if you raise the cost of doing business with a cap and trade legislation pass, then the cost increase will be passed along to the customer.
Whatever business practice (continue polluting and buy credits, fire half the workforce and hire an efficiency specialist or attempt to reduce emission to satisfy cap) that is the most profitable will be chosen. Please note this doesn't preclude the emissions, it only causes them to be a (further) business case.
However, let us consider the question at hand. Any regulation which seeks to raise the cost of business by necessity does not effect the producer or the consumer inequally. With child labour lost, companies had to spend more to produce the same goods and there is a resultant higher price-point equilibrium upon which the cost of such a good will settle, driven by market dynamics. Do we repeal child labour? This is a question only of our conscience. To most of us, the thought of a child working at a factory is reprehensible. Put yourself, however, in a mythical country where each member of the family works. (Try real hard, I know this really doesn't exist...) Therefore, each member, children included, contribute by work to making the family situation overall better by a larger relative income. If you say to a family with 100% employment that is also barely subsistent that now 1/2 of the family may no longer work, you are regulating to remove the option of feeding oneself. To do this requires either a provided resource flow (welfare) to offset the income lost, or, to starve and die. Consider then that in any situation where a surplus of wealth is not had, that child labor may be a contributing factor to things like the lack of starvation.
Do I suggest repealing child labour laws? Of course I don't. It is my personal belief (which is prejudice by my wealthy upbringing) that each child should have my western-conceived childhood of happiness and toys and a public education. Do I suggest allowing children to starve? Of course not. However, in the hypothetical (lol) situation above, which is the correct answer?
We answer such questions by a "cost-benefit" analysis. For this situation, dead children is a much higher cost than the benefit of a westerly childhood fantasy.
For cap and trade scenarios, we must also assign costs and benefits, no?
I think we will find much of this discussion, of the REAL question of cap and trade programs will break down here.
For example, if we define our cap too harshly, families in China that use coal-fired home heaters will now be without their only economically viable source of heat. This is frozen children, people. This is a cost.
Also, if we make our carbon credit profit motive too large (the ability to short the market exists, schemes exist to create offsets or false offsets,) then there becomes a profit motive to cheat the system itself. This is also a cost.
Now for the much simpler side, the benefits! If we institute a cap and trade, we will most definately cause the Earth's temperature to stop changing and reach the absolute optimum temperature for every location on the globe. Or.. We will remain locked on the same natural temperature rise that can be observed historically. Or we will still remain in a variable temperature cycle and not effect it at all. Or, we will reduce the production of greenhouses gases and global temperatures will decline indeterminate amounts.. Wait, isn't that a cost?
The point in fact of cap and trade is that the ability to objectively weigh the benefits vs. the costs does not exist. For example, there are some number of climate models making global predictions, and this number is greater than one, and these climate models produce variable results. This is because one model has not been proven correct (or even could possibly be,) or else the other models wouldn't exist. Given this situation, the actual offset of result produced by a given legislation toward that end cannot be subject to any cost and benefit analysis. Without a proven benefit, cap and trade is just a tax without a purpose. And, to that, I object.
Buffoon
Posted by: Buffon | December 15, 2009 6:17 PM
Buffon, since climate is a complex system, calling any given model "correct" or any given run a "prediction" is missing the point. (For instance, you can't predict the exact date of a volcanic eruption, so if one goes off, any model output that didn't have an eruption in that exact date is necessarily invalid (and likewise, those that do get it right were just lucky - for instance, Hansen's famous 1988 model had a major volcanic eruption in 1991, the same year Pinatubo erupted, but the date was just a lucky guess. The model assumed one eruption over its run given known probabilities.)). That's why the proper term is "projection" (similar to a military scenario's projection, or an economic projection).
That's also why we have so many different models. When you overlay the results and account for each model's uncertainties, what they all agree on is something you can express a high degree of confidence in. It's not perfect (i.e. if we don't know if a feedback exists, it can't be included - the IPCC models on sea level rise, for instance, notably excluded sudden dramatic ice loss, since we don't know enough to model that), but we have methods of dealing with uncertainty in science. In translating that to policy, the wise course of action is that with decreased certainty comes increased precaution (in the same way you'd move slower through a minefield where you can't see the mines than in one where you could).
At this point, it's worth seeing what the models actually say. (Citations included at link.)
What all the models, and basic physics, and empirical, observational evidence agree upon is that continuing business as usual in terms of carbon emissions will be catastrophic. There is no empirical basis for disputing this. For that reason alone, I can conclude that putting a cost of "free" on carbon emissions is a market failure that needs to be dealt with.
It always boggles the mind when pro-market conservatives seem to discount the fact that an economy depends upon a stable climate. You'd assume that they'd be interested in conserving the environment that allows markets to flourish.
Posted by: Brian D | December 15, 2009 6:52 PM
Correction: I misread the date in the 1988 model I mentioned above. The prediction was 1995, not 1991, but the point I made still holds.
I'd also like to add that the pro-market Heartland Institute, in addition to denying climate change, also runs websites like Overcirminalized, which does protest child-labor laws, as well as laws against child sexual slavery, internet identity thieves, child soldiers, internet pedophiles / child pornographers, ENRON-style fraud, and (naturally) pollution, claiming these are “trivial conduct [that] is now often punished as a crime”. (All of these are as recent as last year, by the way.)
But, obviously, they’re still representing the Moral Majority.
There is a thread that ties all of this together, but that's another story.
Posted by: Brian D | December 15, 2009 6:58 PM
Ack, sorry for the triple-post. Overcriminalized is a project of the Heritage Foundation, not the Heartland Institute. (I always get their names mixed up, as both are right-wing think tanks that have a name starting with H.)
Posted by: Brian D | December 15, 2009 7:01 PM
Unfortunately U.S. companies, rightly prevented from taking part in such practices within the U.S., frequently avoid these "extra costs" by moving simply doing them outside of the U.S. Indeed, we as a nation have had frequent disputes with India regarding our dumping of industrial waste off their costs and, as has been documented at other sites, European companies have taken up the practice of "disposing" of their waste in the oceans off Somalia rather than following the proper protocols at home. So too with child labor laws, worker safety and benefit regulations, and employment regulation. In recognizing the good free trade can bring, we must also acknowledge the damage it can do when industrial restrictions are not universal.
Posted by: Julian | December 15, 2009 7:43 PM
@ SLC
And besides, when you're a chain-smoking, amphetamine-popping narcissist, you can't possibly believe that a little sulfur dioxide is going to hurt you.
Posted by: Dr X | December 15, 2009 8:08 PM
Sorry to interrupt the gleeful chortling over Ayn Rand's dessicated corpse, but all of this presupposes that CO2 is a dangerous "pollutant" and not just an essential trace gas as many scientists outside of the "consensus" contend.
If we face no impending peril from the 1/10,000 of the atmosphere humans have added, then all of this amounts to an unnecessary inefficiency added to the economy that will only benefit a few entities, that are granted favorable position by virtue of government fiat, while financially burdening every one else.
The alleged "benefits" are nebulous and far in the future and can only be justified by use of hard to prove and harder to quantify "externalities".
Hardly a risk free proposition considering the current state of the world economy.
I can hear SLC's knee jerking from here.
Posted by: Lance | December 15, 2009 9:58 PM
No Lance, it doesn't presuppose anything of the sort.
The science part of this debate is over, apart from a few sore losers like yourself who won't admit defeat even when the fat lady is singing an aria on the half way line.
It's now a political debate - what this discussion is all about.
So either piss or get off the pot.
Posted by: orion | December 15, 2009 10:46 PM
It does no such thing. It is a conclusion based on the best available evidence, and the consensus among relevant scientists is overwhelming. Many of the most well known climate change "skeptics" are not even scientists, at all, and those that are, more often than not, are not climate scientists.
It can be argued — successfully, in my opinion — that you have a moral responsibility to, at the very least, elevate the consensus among scientists in a relevant field above that of anyone or anything else, unless you are prepared to put the work in to learn about the science, publish your findings, and take part in the scientific process. I am yet to find a "skeptic" that has done all of the above, and who also hasn't been shown to be wrong over and over again, only to largely ignore the criticism.
From the IPCC (here):
Also: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability: Chapter 19: Assessing Key Vulnerabilities and the Risk from Climate Change:
Posted by: Damian | December 15, 2009 10:46 PM
Lance @ 51 - please provide a peer-reviewed citation from relevant scientists publishing in a relevant scientific journal for the claims you make here contra to peer-accepted science. I'm not asking for the peer-accepted findings given your knowing you are outside the "consensus" (though I don't think you realize you're so far out I can see the aluminium on your head all the way through the inner-tubes). I know those. I'm merely asking for a contra but still scientifically valid view that backs up your claims. That being:
That science doesn't understand the neccessity for CO2 and also doesn't understand that marginally higher levels are harmless. Please also provide a link to this source besides a valid citation.
I think you're out of your league in this forum. I suggest you get back on your tricycle and take cover at the denialist site who told you that CO2 is merely an essential trace gas [wrong, it's actually imperative to life on earth] where increased levels don't have an effect on climate [also wrong, actually wildly wrong].
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 15, 2009 10:46 PM
On the politics of a carbon tax: Gregory Mankiw is one of the leading proponents of a carbon tax (he doesn't like cap and trade for technical reasons), and I think you'd be hard pressed to accuse him of being a liberal.
The math behind the virtues of externality taxation was done in the 1930s, and the logic of it is accepted by what is, for all intents and purposes, the entire economics profession.
While I oppose the current attempts to develop a global carbon tax its not because the idea of taxing pollution at some rate is foolish, but rather because any attempt to develop a global deal on such taxes is doomed to failure and we should be focusing our efforts on second-best solutions that might actually work.
Posted by: James K | December 15, 2009 11:44 PM
orion and damian,
"No Lance, it doesn't presuppose anything of the sort."
"It does no such thing."
Perhaps you two need to look up the word "presuppose". If you do not "presuppose" that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant why would you even consider capping and trading its emissions?
Michael Heath,
"I think you're out of your league in this forum. I suggest you get back on your tricycle and take cover at the denialist site who told you that CO2 is merely an essential trace gas [wrong, it's actually imperative to life on earth] where increased levels don't have an effect on climate [also wrong, actually wildly wrong]."
You need to get on your tricycle and peddle over to a dictionary and look up "essential". Obviously CO2 is "imperative to life on earth" that's why I called it an "essential" trace gas.
A "trace gas" is by definition any gas that makes up less than one percent of the atmosphere. CO2 constitutes 0.0385 percent by volume of the earth's atmosphere, thus its classification as a "trace gas".
If you have an argument with those points you should perhaps loosen the chin straps on your "tin foil hat" a bit because they are proven indisputable facts.
Also where did I say it had "no effect" on climate? The debate, which is far from over fellars, is to the extent of that effect and whether that effect is on net a negative to the earth's bioshpere and if so to whom and over what time frame.
All the sputtering and insults change those points not one jot.
Oh and as to the "political" debate, that isn't going so well for those in favor of cap and trade legislation either. Public opinion is turning against any such punitive regimen on CO2.
In case you hadn't noticed the world runs on fossil fuels. Pretending that we can just punish people into switching to much more expensive and largely unavailable alternatives without massive disruptions and costs is irresponsible.
Also, perhaps one of you indignant eco-saviors can show me a study that says how many degrees the average global temperature will be lowered for each billion dollars of GDP spent to mitigate CO2 emissions?
If, as some of you claim, there exists scientific evidence as to the temperature effect of CO2 that should be an easy task.
And if you can't provide such numbers why the hell should we invest a single penny, let alone what looks to be trillions of dollars in lost productivity, in such a scheme.
Posted by: Lance | December 16, 2009 1:45 AM
Child labor ended because it became economically efficient not to rely on it. When you have starving children in the streets, they're going to find jobs no matter how hard the government tries to prevent them from doing so. (The "banning safe abortions leads to back-alley abortions" argument is a fairly good analogy.) When you don't have starving children in the streets, the government then steps in and passes feel-good anti-child labor laws in an attempt to take the credit. In the current U.S. economy, the effect of repealing child labor laws would be essentially nonexistent. You might get a few less entertainment news pieces about how some child actor had to fight for an exemption from the laws, but that would be about it.
Similarly, when jobs are scarce, people fearful of becoming unemployed will find a way to work unpaid overtime off the books if government policy prevents them from doing so officially (cf. any job that gives you a 1099-MISC instead of a W-2), and when employees are scarce, employers will find ways to increase non-monetary compensation if government policy prevents them from increasing wages (cf. the introduction of health insurance benefits).
Requiring companies to safely dispose of wastes is not a regulation per se, but the prevention of criminal trespass. Current law gives companies a sweet deal in this regard, so it's actually imposing costs on the public, not on corporations. Since the current law was largely written by corporations, this should come as no surprise.
The problem with regulation is not that it increases costs, since as in the above examples it really just makes costs less noticeable. The problem is that it simultaneously distorts market signals and utterly fails at achieving its stated goal.
Of course, all of the above assumes a true free market. In a true free market ('true' denoting that government does not enforce land (en)title(ment)s, making the collection of ground rent impossible; cf. Mark Twain's "Archimedes" for a short explanation of why this distinction from the faux-free market of conservatives is necessary), all regulation would be unnecessary. Under state monopoly capitalism (the current system in the U.S. and the opposite of the free market), such regulations may be desirable to restrain the privileges granted by the government to the large landholders, but one runs into the problem that the government is being asked both to metaphorically light buildings on fire by a rich well-connected group and to put the fires out by a scattered group that has been systematically impoverished by the first group. So, while I'd rather have the ameliorative regulations than not in the present system, I predict that they are unlikely to be effective and suggest that a better strategy would be to reform the system of regulations for land-use.
This viewpoint falls broadly under the umbrella of left-libertarianism/classical liberalism, the voice of which is sadly all too often drowned out by the vulgar libertarianism that calls loudly for the end of ameliorative surface regulation and tacitly for the continuance of the underlying structural regulations that made these imperfect surface regulations popular in the first place (cf. #18 above). The "Hidden Tax" argument is vulgar libertarianism. Left-libertarians would also oppose these regulations in principle, but would see them only as symptoms of larger structural problems that are potentially necessary until the structural problems are addressed and that will go away naturally once the structural problems are addressed.
catgirl @#18 notes:
It's worth noting that left-libertarians historically have referred to ourselves as liberals, as socialists, and as libertarians. For some reason every time we come up with a name some other group with different beliefs likes to attempt to steal it from us and usually has success in doing so (and there's already some movement among no-proviso Lockeans to take, or at least share, 'left-libertarian'). At this point, trying to come up with a new label for our ideas would just create more confusion. Besides, "libertarian" by itself isn't a complete political description. If we imagine the political landscape as a two-dimensional grid (not in the Nolan chart sense) with a left-right axis and a statist-anarchist axis, the label "libertarian" refers primarily to the anarchist side on the latter axis and not to any particular left-right position. Since the current left and right as represented by the major political parties in the U.S. are united in promotion of the statist position, it's not unreasonable for left and right libertarians to make common cause in defense of the voluntarist position.
Posted by: Miko | December 16, 2009 3:12 AM
Miko,
Thanks for the very nuanced political disposition.
I grow weary of conservatives espousing only the libertarian principles that favor their parochial statist interests.
While I agree that land entitlements skew the basis of the free market I wonder if there is any realistic mechanism for dissolving this entrenched principle.
Also, as regards the current CO2 issue, how do you prove trespass against emission of a trace gas that may or may not have negative, spatially and temporally non-specific, consequences?
Posted by: L:ance | December 16, 2009 3:32 AM
Do you have to prove harm to prove trespass? Would it be legal for me to follow you into your home and stay there provided I didn't damage anything?
Posted by: Matty | December 16, 2009 5:57 AM
I see Lance was unable to provide a citation to support his notions. Typical.
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 16, 2009 8:04 AM
Pat Donohue (way back at #9) -
Yep, let's get back to the laissez-faire days of years past. Down with regulations!
Who cares if airline pilots* (say) have been awake for over eighty hours straight? Couldn't possibly pose any risk to the flying (and general) public, right? - DJ
--------------
* Some regulations don't lead to out-sourcing. They are implemented across an industry to manage risk.
Posted by: DIngoJack | December 16, 2009 8:23 AM
Re Michael Heath
Mr. Michael Heath should be informed that fuckface Lance is also a HIV/AIDS denier who posts equally inane comments on that subject on Tara Smiths' blog. Just another pimple on the asshole of humanity. Much in the same vein as Mr. Milesius aka Robert O'Brien.
Posted by: SLC | December 16, 2009 9:51 AM
Ed is a democrat (small d). He just doesn't like to think he is.
There's only one really egregious hidden tax that I can think of in this country and that's the way the Federal Reserve inflates the money supply. It's like pickpocketing using magic.
Lance, I think we need to cap the emissions of these politicians swarming to cap and trade conferences. If they can't attend without spewing tons upon tons of CO2, then they can't attend.
Posted by: Juice | December 16, 2009 10:13 AM
SLC,
At least try to be accurate with your smear tactics.
I have never visited "Tara Smith's" blog. In fact I have never heard of it.
I have also never questioned the link between HIV and AIDS.
To put it bluntly, you are a despicable liar.
Micheal Heath,
I'm not sure what you are requesting.
Are you really asking for peer reviewed papers verifying that CO2 is an essential trace gas? Did you read my last post? These are facts known by even the moderately scientifically literate undergraduate student and are available even at "sciency" sites like Wikipedia.
The real question is what is the climate's sensitivity to CO2 and other greenhouse gases and how reliable are computer models based on parameters that try and predict the future state of a complex coupled nonlinear system.
The answer to the first is that a variety of papers and authors give a very wide range of answers with ill-defined error bars and mutually exclusive results.
The climate models most often cited in the IPCC reports have been demonstrated to be outside of their confidence intervals by virtue of the fact that the earth's average temperature has stubbornly refused to rise to the levels they have predicted.
Specifically what evidence are you requesting?
Posted by: Lance | December 16, 2009 10:44 AM
A Google search of Tara Smith's blog reveals she hosts a blog here at Scienceblogs called Aetiology. I have never, until 30 seconds ago, visited or even noticed that blog let alone commented on the HIV/AIDS issue.
So SLC either show evidence that I have ever commented on that topic there or admit that you are a lying piece of shit.
Posted by: Lance | December 16, 2009 11:01 AM
Let me address Brian D's address to my original post.
Let us start with what I think is his strangest point:
"It always boggles the mind when pro-market conservatives seem to discount the fact that an economy depends upon a stable climate. You'd assume that they'd be interested in conserving the environment that allows markets to flourish"
Climate is not and has not been stable ever. Inasmuch as this argument of stable climate implicitly supports global warming being unprecedented, it is unfortunately a conclusion of global warming being unprecedented also. Please learn your history better: Previous to the current global warming scare, it was a global cooling scare. And a global warming scare before that. I suspect there was some sort of cooling scare and warming scare before that even, because the cycles of climate seem to be just long enough to outlive our collective memory. This state of affairs (variable climate) has continued for quite a long time, and is completely independant of the current global warming question. Therefore, to think oneself learned and to also avoid historical reality is to be not learned. Also, maybe I interpret this incorrectly, but you say "we have methods of dealing with uncertainty in science," which seems to me to imply that you are both a scientist and quite foolish. You seem to misconstrue projection (that which is proven only by a later test) with approximation (that which can statistically demonstrated.) "Science" does not deal with uncertainties (well, apart from Heisenburg, but that really isn't uncertainty, it's degrees of freedom,) it deals with inaccuracies and lacks of precision. These can be improved on. Projections, let us be simple in our view, are simply demonstrations of prejudice: A variable is set by the modeler to some value, and some answer is given. Proof: The model exists, therefore not all values are certain. This case is self evident. My science is apparently not your science.
Second, free markets with no volatility stagnate. If the temperature was 72 constantly all over the world, this would lead to a larger margin of market gentrification than for there to be a variable climate.
Second, you make the point that there is model uncertainty and this is the premise of multiple models. This, in fact, is a confirmation of my statement: Without a 100% accurate *projection* you can have no real, substantial, realistic, pragmatic, pointful, germaine, usable, discussable, obvious, intuitive, reasonable, humanly decent, morally decent, logically decent, unreproachable, peer-reviewed, double-blind tested, reproduceable,
REAL
cost-benefit
analysis.
There is no quibbling on this point. If you can't project the future to 100%, you can't in any way say with a brain in your head that you can ascertain the costs of acting or not, or the benefits of acting or not to any degree of objectivity. Period. This point is self-evident. The cost and benefit of acting on the stock market become available only after action is taken. The cost and benefit of burning witches based on the consensus at the time is only available after the witch is burnt and the crops, in fact, don't grow back, and now you are down forty sticks of firewood and one duck-weight's worth of witch.
"What all the models, and basic physics, and empirical, observational evidence agree upon is that continuing business as usual in terms of carbon emissions will be catastrophic. There is no empirical basis for disputing this. For that reason alone, I can conclude that putting a cost of "free" on carbon emissions is a market failure that needs to be dealt with"
What all the politicians and bankers agree on is that without some emissions control (and thus emissions control program) there will be catastrophe. Open your eyes and re-read the IPCC reports yourself: "We can't predict" and "Uncertainty" and your own "precaution" should preclude your use of the word "catastrophe" upon which there must be immediate action. Your science
And of course there is an empirical basis for arguing this. Apparently here your science and my science disagree: My science doesn't put "skeptic" in quotation marks, science doesn't have to defend itself. The true discoveries of science are self-evident, reproducible and transparent. They stand repeated tests of time or they are discarded. That is the very basis of my science. Your science rules by consensus, discards history and already has an infallible answer. Your science, my friend, sucks.
Secondly, your last paragraph seems to imply that I am a conservative. Could you define what that means? That I choose to think up my own opinions, contrast differing viewpoints? Are you saying I hate polar bears? Scientists like myself can separate our own emotional responses from data. Emotional response is why graphs like Mann's Hockey Stick were created. Why Phil Jones suggested he would change the peer review. Not because their science is wrong or that they are conspirators, but because they believe strongly enough in a viewpoint to ignore the precepts of science. They have made science marketing.
Posted by: Buffon | December 16, 2009 11:10 AM
Re Lance
Allow me to extend my apologies to Mr. Lance. I now find that I have confused him with a schmuck calling himself cooler who is a conspicuous commentor on Prof. Smiths' blog and is a noted HIV/AIDS denier.
However, if Mr. Lance thinks that a concentration of 380 parts per million of CO(2) in the atmosphere couldn't possibly be significant, I suggest he try breathing an atmosphere with 380 parts per million of HCN. He will be in for a rude awakening.
Posted by: SLC | December 16, 2009 11:29 AM
SLC,
Apology accepted. This isn't the first time you've flown off the handle confusing me with some other poster try to avoid doing so in the future.
HCN is a highly toxic gas that doesn't exist in any measurable concentration in the earth's atmosphere. The toxicity is caused by the cyanide ion, which halts cellular respiration by inhibiting an enzyme in mitochondria called cytochrome c oxidase.
CO2, while still a trace gas, is necessary for photosynthesis and is, at geological time scales, scarce by comparison to past atmospheric levels. It doesn't become toxic to humans until levels many orders of magnitude greater than its current level.
Comparing the two is in a word absurd.
Posted by: Lance | December 16, 2009 11:56 AM
I'm sorry, let's also let SLC try to survive in an environment where 380 ppm CO2 is brought to zero.
SLC, maybe you can also riddle me, what contribution to global warming does the sound of one hand clapping make? Silly argument is silly.
Posted by: Buffon | December 16, 2009 12:13 PM
Re Lance @ #68
Mr. Lances' response missed the point. The issue isn't whether CO(2) is a gas lethal to humans at the 380 parts per million level. The issue is whether that concentration could be having an effect on global climate. The point being made was that even small concentrations can have large effects. Unless, of course, Mr. Lance is going to deny that glaciers in Bolivia are not disappearing along with the ice in the Northwest Passage, both events that have been remarked upon in recent news items. By the way, it would be nice if Mr. Lance would remark on these news items as all of his fellow deniers have thus far declined to do so on this and other blogs.
Posted by: SLC | December 16, 2009 12:15 PM
Wow, wait one evening and this thread goes from sensible policy discussion to yet another well the denialists have to poison to PREVENT sensible policy discussion.
I don't have time to address all the recent asshattery, so I'll just take Lance's first nugget of transparent stupidity...
Sorry to interrupt the gleeful chortling over Ayn Rand's dessicated corpse, but all of this presupposes that CO2 is a dangerous "pollutant" and not just an essential trace gas as many scientists outside of the "consensus" contend.
No, dumbass, it doesn't "presuppose" anything; it OBSERVES that CO2 traps heat in an atmosphere to a greater extent than other gases, that CO2 concentration in our atmosphere is increasing, and that both that increase and observed increases in overall temperatures are both due to human activity. There's no "outside the consensus" opinion credibly disputing any of that. Or if there is, you have yet to point us to it.
If we face no impending peril from the 1/10,000 of the atmosphere humans have added, then all of this amounts to an unnecessary inefficiency added to the economy that will only benefit a few entities, that are granted favorable position by virtue of government fiat, while financially burdening every one else.
Yo, genius, have you ever bothered to look at the "unnecessary inefficiency added to the economy" by dependence on foreign oil, and the subsequent unprecedented wealth transfer from the West to the OPEC nations? Ever ask yourself how much more efficient our economy would be if we could keep even a fraction of all that money? Not to mention the "unnecessary inefficiency added to the economy" by the obvious and observable destruction of our environment by people who don't care about anything but their own short-term gain? Or are you just one of those libertards who don't consider the destruction of a useful ecosystem "inefficient?"
Hardly a risk free proposition considering the current state of the world economy.
The current state of the world economy proves that sticking to the status quo wasn't exactly a "risk free proposition" either. Seriously, boy, you sound like an inbicele quibbling about the danger of firehoses, while totally ignoring the fact that his house is on fire.
And you wonder why we confuse you with another denialist idiot?
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 16, 2009 12:19 PM
raging bee,
I have long since learned that you are immune to logical, fact supported argumentation.
Other than this brief reply I am going to ignore your poorly written, insult laden drivel.
You could surprise me and compose a reply that isn't self-refuting and civil, but I'm not holding my breath.
Posted by: Lance | December 16, 2009 1:24 PM
I have long since learned that you are immune to logical, fact supported argumentation.
How would you know that when you've never provided any? You seem to have learned a lot of things that are plainly false.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 16, 2009 1:48 PM
SLC
Are you suggesting that the northwest passage has never been clear of ice EVER before in the history of the Earth? In fact, the burden of proof is on you. If you can prove that it in fact is an unprecedented event in Earth's history (not man's) then I may indeed consider it to be a point to address. But, in fact, it more than likely has been ice free before, and probably will be iced again sometime in the future. Silly argument is STILL silly. It was very cold today compared to this day last year, doesn't that disprove global warming? See, just as dumb.
Raging Bee
If you look at my first comment, I believe I directly addressed the original post's question. That question, I believe, is "Because there are always cost increases in doing business, why is this one important." There is also some posh that tugs on your heartstrings, a few strange logical arguments, etc. That may be a bad paraphrase, but I think it's decent overall.
To that post I have addressed back: It is an unfounded cost, as the goal of the cost is not agreed by all parties to have merit. The "hidden tax" question is addressed by this. All taxes, ostensibly, are created to allow the government to create revenue to support a particular agenda which serves the constituents. There is a call for a reform or change, and that reform or change must come at a distributed cost to the constituency to better everyone's lives. The "denier" (in fact the word denier implies that someone is arguing against something upon which the majority is agreed, and in my opinion the fact that the majority agrees because they have been told what to think in this case is terrible) argument is critical to the overall validity of the reform in general: If there IS no anthropogenic global warming, then why is there a policy to prevent it? Why should a tax be created to fund a reform?
The fact that this question still exists, and exists so publicly, should indicate that the issue is not ready to be settled. Please note that only one side of the issue is ready to say that the issue is irrevocably settled: I, in fact, await with an open mind some unbiased science which, to my OWN understanding shows a transparent and truly predictive answer.
Now, let's address your vehement spewing of nonsense, shall we?
Your statement is CO2 is a stronger greenhouse gas than others. Please prove this point by demonstrating your understanding of molecular excitation by absorption of infared radiation. I believe once you conclude such a study, you will realize that CO2 is a relatively weak absorber compared to other gases. The spirit of your point is discarded. Secondly, high CO2 levels and temperature records show some correlation between CO2 and temperature, but, in fact, no-one can say which is the chicken and which is the egg. Certainly those high temperatures before the industrial revolution weren't, in fact, AGW. It IS an essential trace gas in the atmosphere, and everyone whom isn't a dumbass knows it.
To your second point about foreign oil dependance: I'm sorry, this is somehow germaine to the original post or the issue at hand? To create sources of energy alternative to foreign oil or harvesting our own supply is an admirable goal. It is a product of innovation, provides choice and engenders competition. But that goal has a profit motive already and is outside of the scope of the discussion. Regulating CO2 is supposed to be saving us all from certain warming-related disaster, not reducing dependance on foreign oil. Stop muddling your pies in your emotional response.
I read you calling quite someone names and insulting their intelligence, but please, tell me: Where did you get your information from that there is global warming? Don't lie to yourself when you answer the question, either. Be really honest. Do you just "know?" Do all your friends just "know?" You just watched the "news?" Have you seen some graphs? Did you watch An Incovenient Truth? Did you read and truly understand the IPCC reports? I suspect most people who agree with cap and trade either stand to profit from it or can answer yes to one of the above questions.
Raging bee, environmentalism is your religion because you have faith the temperature will go up simply because you are told it will, and you are doing nothing more than accusing Lance of being a heretic. Would you like to use thumbscrews on him until he recants?
Now we have moved away from the original poster's scope and intentions, but in fact my point there stands.
Policy usually happens because it is a mandate of popular opinion. Popular opinion usually follows the morals of an apparent majority. It does not, however, follow that all things mandated are of popular opinion OR morally correct. If the case is not proven for cap and trade to be majorally popular and morally correct, it should be discarded because it is a mandated "hidden tax" that provides no "provable constituent value" while "creating cost."
Posted by: SLC | December 16, 2009 2:24 PM
I truly am a Buffoon. I posted the above as SLC due to a tab error. I do not, in fact, wish to impersonate SLC and I apologize.
Posted by: Buffoon | December 16, 2009 2:29 PM
Raging bee, environmentalism is your religion because you have faith the temperature will go up simply because you are told it will, and you are doing nothing more than accusing Lance of being a heretic. Would you like to use thumbscrews on him until he recants?
And if you believe that the laws of gravity apply on the North Pole as they do here, just because sources you trust told you so, does that mean gravitational theory is a your religion?
Pretending science is no different from religion is a sure sign of a dishonest denialist. And, as you just admitted, a buffoon. How does it feel to be in bed with Saudi oil royalty? I guess the sheets are clean, eh?
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 16, 2009 2:53 PM
Where did you get your information from that there is global warming?
From sources more knowledgeable and trustworthy than you. Photographic evidence of shrinking glaciers also helped.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 16, 2009 2:56 PM
Raging bee
Do you bite your thumb at me, sir? For if you do I bite my thumb at thee.
Gravity is a substantiated scientific result. It is a law. The reason it is a law is it has been explained, understood, challenged and found to be resistant to rejection. It can be derived from experimental observation by a layman, or from mathematical work by a cognoscenti. It stands the test of time. However, as new innovations in the field of science search for further elucidation of the point, a larger theory may be proposed, but, this larger theory must *wholly* explain observed phenomena or it is worthless. If such a case comes to exist, will I discard my reliance on gravity to help me break one piece of china a year and to play basketball without traveling? Probably not. Do I believe that gravity works the same at sea level in the north pole as it does at the sea near my house? I have no reason to doubt it. Do I consider that lack of doubt to be a scientific conclusion? Certainly not. Grow up, child.
I did not pretend Science is no different that religion. Science is that body of knowledge which is gained through the application of the scientific method and the work which is done under the scientific method. Scientists may have faith, or they may be sinners, or they may try to hide or adjust facts, or they may make a reasonable trendline that supports their conclusion within an error bar without stepping outside of the boundaries of propriety. However, true scientific method requires that, IN TOTALITY, hypothesis, experimental setup, work, notes and conclusions are available for such to be replicated and confirmed or repudiated. Scientists (not the ones that call themselves scientists, but ALL people that function under the scientific principles of scientific method) know that this is a requirement to produce data which is not of direct commercial value. Have you seen the source code for any climate models? Have you ever tried to get real temperature data from GISS or GHNC? I didn't think so. So.. How does it feel to be in bed with Big Green? (See, I can act like a moron too.)
I suggested that your blind faith in points that you have not researched and that cannot possibly be proven today, but your willingness to drive others to that view as the only reasonable one, most definately constitutes faith and religion. If you can't see the difference, you don't need science lessons, you need language lessons. If you can't see that what you are calling Science is in fact popular opinion and NOT science, then I'm sorry you cannot critically think for yourself. If you think to cast ill framed aspersions at me.. Don't bother, I'm not going to get mad. Your data is inconclusive.
Further more, raging bee, please read carefully. At what point did I say there isn't global warming? At what point did I suggest that there should be a consensus otherwise? I support legitimate scientific inquiry, and you support castigation and name calling. I AM a scientist. Projections mean nothing more than "the jury is still out, but.. trust me." If climate scientists were convinced their conclusions were sound, all of their data and models would now be in the public eye, and being confirmed (predictively) by having at their inception demonstrated some congruence with subsequent reality. I see no such proof, therefore, there is no accurate model. End of story.
"How does it feel to be in bed with Saudi Royalty." What are you, a smelly hippie? See, I know nothing about you either. That's why I didn't making any generalizations about your morals, views or personal opinion. I questioned your arguments and your method.
Anecdotally, I made the mistake of buying an SUV because I live in the northeast and, unfortunately, there is about a mile of dirt road on the way to my house. It's an Escape, so fairly small, but still significantly less fuel efficient than the Audi or Subaru I could've sprung for with similar capability. I am now paying the price at the gas pump with my 10-15% less efficient vehicle. Do I want the market to move to the most efficient possible solution? Of course, why wouldn't I? Is that solution currently available? No. Does my saying that mean I'm a Saudi nationalist who hates polar bears? Again.. Grow up, child.
"A source more trustworthy than you." This actually proves that you think with your parrot-brain and not with your brain brain. You used the word trustworthy, like I've been trying to give you information or sell you something. Unfortunately, the scientific method can apply here, and people can just go look at my posts. I'm not trying to get you to trust me, nor am I supplying you with information, anecdotes or evidence. I have not supplied ANYTHING which should be open to doubt, and if I have, I'm open to debate on it. I have framed logical arguments to valid points. I don't require you to be in my camp, because I don't even have a camp. I don't ask you to believe me, because your belief would require me to show you horrifying pictures and sad images until you agreed with my point with your parrot-brain, because your brain-brain is currently out of service. I have been espousing, and repeat now, the desire for people to investigate and think for themselves. Stop just "knowing" and start to "learning." Skeptics to this AGW movement are just as smart as you are, they lead similar lives, they have similar kids, they eat the same cornflakes, they pay similar taxes, they poop and hopefully do so in toilets just like you. Maybe you should actually talk to somebody with, you know, an open mind.
"Photographs of shrinking glaciers"
Now, I will actually start calling some names, because, really if you support this as evidence of "Anthropogenic global warming" then I am disgusted.
Why do you think they're called glaciers, you nitwit! It's BECAUSE THEY ARE KNOWN TO GROW AND RECEDE. To glaciate! To sweep (err, creep, sorry. Very slowly creep. I got a little Al Gore there) over the earth during an ice age and to melt during an interGLACIAL period.
I saw a picture of a polar bear standing next to a truck, once. Doesn't that mean they can just drive away if their habitat is threatened?
So I think Lance's observations that you write insult-laden drivel, but I will further suggest that it is mainly formed of prejudice and hate for your fellow man, and lack of tolerance for diversity of thought and dissimilar viewpoints. Zeig heil Big Green! We haf excommunicated all zee nonbelievers, mein fuhrer. Und now vee are out uf poison.
Cap and trade policy remains a "hidden tax" until it can prove a benefit. The benefit is based on several nonagreeing "projections," supported by a "scientific consensus" and politicians. It still stands that the cost increase to doing business is unacceptable because there is, and remains, no benefit to be shown. The argument is still not derailed.
Posted by: Buffoon | December 16, 2009 4:52 PM
Gravity is a substantiated scientific result.
So is AGW.
I have been espousing, and repeat now, the desire for people to investigate and think for themselves. Stop just "knowing" and start to "learning."
This, again, is a standard refrain of denialists: acceptance of conclusions based on a prepondrance of evidence = blind faith. Unless, of course, you accept the denialists' ravings as evidence, in which case you're a bold brave free-thinker. I hear the same refrain from every deluded paranoid fruit-bat on the Web, including troofers, birfers, and LaRouchies.
Skeptics to this AGW movement are just as smart as you are, they lead similar lives, they have similar kids, they eat the same cornflakes, they pay similar taxes, they poop and hopefully do so in toilets just like you.
The "skeptics" steal internal emails, with no legal authority to do so, deliberately take them out of context, and knowingly LIE about what those emails say and mean. And they keep on lying after their assertions have been exposed as lies. In that very important regard, they're not even remotely similar to me. And, more importantly, they have proven themselves people of low morals and zero credibility. I'll take the word of a large community of working scientists over that of a gaggle of thieves and liars who don't do ANY science, thankyouverymuch.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 16, 2009 5:19 PM
Among other points, Buffon argued: "Second, you make the point that there is model uncertainty and this is the premise of multiple models. This, in fact, is a confirmation of my statement: Without a 100% accurate *projection* you can have no real, substantial, realistic, pragmatic, pointful, germaine [sic], usable, discussable, obvious, intuitive, reasonable, humanly decent, morally decent, logically decent, unreproachable, peer-reviewed, double-blind tested, reproduceable, REAL cost-benefit analysis."
And of course we cannot determine the accuracy of present climate-model projections because they concern themselves with the future — often with the year 2100, though this calendar date is diminishing in importance as observed changes continue to outpace yesterday's projections.
I have often contended with people making the point you make, on this basis: That you cannot disprove a claim about the future by saying that the event or condition projected hasn't yet come to pass.
A true cost-benefit analysis such as you describe is impossible in this situation, and also irrelevant. We tend to take extraordinary measures to prevent loss of life, even when the chance that lives will be lost is not 100 percent. We will do so (at some point) with regard to the effects of climate change. My point is that it will be better, and less costly, to begin those measures now rather than to wait until the harm resulting from climate change is impossible for anyone to ignore. I am far from alone in holding this view.
Posted by: Chris Winter | December 16, 2009 6:34 PM
Chris Winter,
"My point is that it will be better, and less costly, to begin those measures now rather than to wait until the harm resulting from climate change is impossible for anyone to ignore."
If you are honest you will admit that you have suffered no harm from climate change. Even if one has complete faith in the instrumental record, a rather dubious position in light of the current scandal at the East Anglia CRU, the earth has warmed by less than one degree in the last 100 years. This has not harmed anyone.
I'm quite sure no one can tell a less than one degree increase in average global temperature that has occurred over a hundred years.
Even if you accept that ALL of that warming is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, a position that no scientist holds, their have been enormous benefits from that burning and little to no demonstrable harm.
Let's be real here. At this moment my home is being heated by natural gas, I took a shower with water heated by natural gas, my lights, TV and computer are on thanks to electricity provided by Duke Energies local coal powered generation plant. The cars that are going to get my wife and I to work are fueled up with gasoline refined from petroleum. The university where I am headed to teach is similarly powered by fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels have lifted humanity out of a smokey, dung and wood burning quasi-neolithic existence.
In a word they are good.
I am a scientist, but one need not be to see that the evidence for any real harm from climate change is tenuous and that any such harm would occur many years in the future. Those that are honest will admit that there would also be benefits to a warmer world as well as possible hazards.
Some will tell you that increasing the cost of fossil fuels will increase the use and availability of alternatives that have side benefits such as not being controlled by large corporations and foreign despots. I am all for alternative energy sources but I say lets make sure we have built a sail before we throw out the oars. If and when these alternatives become economically viable society will begin to switch over to those fuels just as society switched over from dung, wood and whale oil when coal and petroleum became economically superior options.
I am not going to argue with you about the scientific evidence for dangerous climate change. It has been my experience that people that "believe" in it do so based on their interpretation of the science as well as many reasons that have little to do with the science.
Note that I'm not saying that a scientific argument can't be made for dangerous climate change, just that in my experience people also bring a great deal of other more political, spiritual, emotional and contextual issues to the discussion.
I have grown weary of these often nasty battles. Rarely do they concentrate on the science. Just look at the nasty, emotionally charges and insult filled post above if you doubt me.
Ultimately, since we live in a representative democracy, it will be decided in the halls of congress and local legislatures. I will urge my senators and representatives to vote against any cap and trade or carbon tax legislation. I think these schemes are extremely counter productive and harmful to the economy, both the countries and my own.
It looks to me that cap and trade legislation is unlikley to go forward in the senate.
I will continue to do whatever I can to ensure that it will not become law.
You of course are free to take other actions.
Posted by: L:ance | December 17, 2009 6:49 AM
If you are honest you will admit that you have suffered no harm from climate change...
If YOU are honest, then YOU will admit that your position on this issue is based on nothing but shortsighted, uncaring selfishness, refusal to even contemplate the concept of short-term sacrifice for the long-term commmon good, and total disregard for any meaningful concept of the general welfare in the real world. All the rest is clearly just rationalization.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 17, 2009 9:55 AM
Raging Bee
Shut up, the adults are talking. Nowhere in your worthless diatribe did you make a point. Your preponderance of evidence's existence is your own faith because you probably haven't ever seen any data that wasn't force fed to you in a movie. May God have mercy on your soul.
Chris Winter
"And of course we cannot determine the accuracy of present climate-model projections because they concern themselves with the future — often with the year 2100, though this calendar date is diminishing in importance as observed changes continue to outpace yesterday's projections.
I have often contended with people making the point you make, on this basis: That you cannot disprove a claim about the future by saying that the event or condition projected hasn't yet come to pass."
If we go back 30 years, we see a global cooling scare with a call for immediate action prompted by mass media hysterics and politicians. I say the contrasting viewpoints, both backed up with a preponderance of science, demonstrates that we should correlate our predictions more closely to a test of time before we decide to take some sort of drastic and costly action. For example, let us say a climate model is reasonably well reviewed by researchers in the field. Shouldn't that model be tested against reality for some number of years before it is granted mandate of heaven? All scientific work is not correct.
The point of your matter is very simple. You believe, because you have been given limited information, that there is a global warming trend (which can be shown. Because it existed before significant human-related CO2 output, it must thus be considered natural.) However, that is further permuted into a belief that there is a more recent accelerated warming trend on top of the natural climate variability. That this trend is continuous. And that this trend will be destructive and costly to humanity.
Let me put this another way. Most of the world (by population,) is, by our estimation, poor. Let me try some global warming logic on them:
"Sorry guys, you can't use your coal-fired heaters to stay warm this winter, because if you do, next winter it won't be so cold."
"Folks, I understand you live close to the sea because you are using it as a majority food source. But, you see, it's going to rise about a twentieth of an inch, gradually, this year. And since we don't want you to come refugee-ing later, please stop using wood to cook dinner."
"Poor farmers, I understand that your crops grow faster in higher ambient CO2 levels, and this helps you feed the people around you. But you can't use this gasoline powered irrigation pump, or this old diesel tractor. So, you can keep farming, but only if you buy this new solar-powered hybrid American-made Ford tractor. Or you could try to do it all by hand, I suppose"
I believe, if we carefully review what we can find about the past, that human beings thrive in warm climates and decline in cold climates. I think we can further learn from the past that plants thrive in warm climates and extra CO2, and decline in cold climates and lack of CO2.
I've even seen papers (which I will let the readers find) that grudgingly admit that the net effect of warming and higher CO2 levels will be beneficient to mankind in general.
What, really, are the costs of the temperature going up? Somebody tell me. Oh, and raging, given that higher temperatures and higher CO2 means more comfort and more food for the majority of the world's population, it is actually you that is being selfish.
I'd like to borrow a quick page from Crichton. In 1900, if we were standing in New York City, a model may have indicated that we were irrevocably traveling toward all being hip deep in horse poop. This model maybe have made sense. It may have had a scientific consensus. Compared to today's global warming movement, it would have been much more quantifiable and predictable. If they had extended that model 100 years to the future, the picture would have been ghastly and scary. But of course, we are wise enough to know that none of that poop came to pass.
In comparison, man is currently observing natural trends and cycles.
I remain rock steady on my initial point. Everyone just "knows" the costs, they are worse storms and more malaria and rising oceans and man baked to death in the terrible sun, refugees fleeing the heat and rising hungry sea to richer lands that will support and nurture them better. The problem is, what everybody knows is common knowledge, it isn't science. Sea levels have, on average, risen for ten thousand years. The people that live on the ocean already contend with tide variability that is ten times the predicted ocean level rise in the next ten years, and most of that ocean level rise is and has been natural. We're still here and in a current state of "flourishing." Ocean surface temperature has gone up up to 2008 and our storm seasons have been dying down. Malaria vectors flourish in low temperature where stagnant standing water supports the larval cycle. Refugees don't flee heat: Not everybody in the world needs air conditioning. A warm season (not a wet or dry season, a warm season) typically means a shorter harvest cycle, more food, better ethnic music and more tourism. A cold winter means rapid consumption of heating resource, higher costs and ultimately death by lack of heat or food. Not that you can't starve in the summer, but... That's not AGW either. The fact that you are scared by some claims about AGW consequences doesn't mean that Global Warming has been proven to you, it means that you have been scared into believing that even if it might not happen you should still have an insurance policy.
Stop being selfish and actually start educating yourself about what COULD be a cost benefit analysis. And don't JUST get it from Al Gore. Don't be a back-patter. "Yes, yes, we watch the movie, lets all agree!" Read some skeptical literature. Read "Ponder the Maunder." Learn some about the world around you and how it actually is thought to react to higher CO2 levels. Read some of this peer-reviewed literature and IPCC reports, and pay just as much attention to "uncertain" and "unlikely to be predicted" as you do to "drastic" and "consequences."
Money to pay for something that probably isn't happening, that if it was may be to the betterment of mankind and if it isn't has no costs, the popular knowledge consequences of which are all 100% debatable or spurious is STILL a hidden tax that can't hold up.
All of the cost estimations for the cost of CO2 remediation come from the concept that we want to remediate CO2. This means AGW fulfills itself.
I've decided to take a denialist tone in this comment, because it seems no matter how I address the problem, certain people are just going to assume that I am an idiot and they are correct. We aren't discussing the point anymore, we are making assertions of faith. I guess I can do that too.
Posted by: Buffoon | December 17, 2009 12:21 PM
If we go back 30 years, we see a global cooling scare with a call for immediate action prompted by mass media hysterics and politicians.
Ed Brayton already debunked this story a few months ago. There was no "global cooling scare," other than ONE article in Time magazine, which isn't exactly a peer-reviewed publication. Once again, you've proven yourself the buffoon you say you are.
I'd like to borrow a quick page from Crichton.
Chrichton wrote FICTION, shit-for-brains. Why should we consider him a credible source?
I've even seen papers (which I will let the readers find)...
Translation: you're bluffing. If you really had sources that you thought we'd find credible, you'd be citing them.
I've decided to take a denialist tone in this comment...
'Nuff said. Go back to bed.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 17, 2009 2:26 PM
Global cooling: So one article in mass media and six to seven peer reviewed articles addressing the state of climate as cooling doesn't constitute a Global Cooling Scare? The War of the Worlds was a scare, and that was one radio broadcast. Because nobody made a documentary, it wasn't a scare? An article in Newsweek that portends global cooling doom IS a scare. (6 papers all urging caution and exploration turn into a doom and gloom newsweek piece.) Do I exagerate the case? It looks like I do. Is the anthropogenic global warming case exaggerated? This is obvious to anyone who chooses to look. You don't.
Crichton: Good work on actually doing research. Crichton was a writer, essayist and public speaker. It is my personal observation that his views on media and science are becoming quite confirmed. Maybe you should read some of his work besides watching Jurassic Park on the tube? Or is actually looking something up actually beyond the scope of your abilities? Oh, look: He espouses the scientific method and fact checking in science. Amazing.
I've seen papers: I should suggest papers to the reader to support my viewpoint? How self serving is that, especially when I suggest people to do their own research?
Well, then, sorry for my glaring omission to your laziness to learn about the world around you:
An obviously biased blurb,
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/07/global_warming_.html
Kersebaum, K.C., Nendel, C., Mirschel, W., Manderscheid, R., Weigel, H.-J. and Wenkel, K.-O. 2009. Testing different CO2 response algorithms against a face crop rotation experiment and application for climate change impact assessment at different sites in Germany. Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service 113: 79-88.
Weigel, H.J., Manderscheid, R., Burkart, S., Pacholski, A., Waloszczyk, C.K., Fruhauf, O. and Heinemeyer, O. 2006. Responses of an arable crop rotation system to elevated CO2. In Nosberger et al. (Eds.), Managed Ecosystems and CO2 Case Studies, Processes and Perspectives. Ecological Studies 187: 121-137.
Layman dissertation:
http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/00-077.htm#plant
My electricity and heating oil bills should also be considered as experimental data to support my point. I spent luxury money to cool my environment to non-ambient levels during hot seasons: If this is taken away, I will readily adapt. I spent necessity money to heat my environment to life-supporting levels: If this is taken away, I freeze. I have no reason to doubt that much of the population is similar. Thus to cause a luxurious expense to reduce a necessity expense is a net benefit to the population.
Also, insofar as you suggest that I would find ANY source that you find credible: If it doesn't agree with your viewpoint it is heresy, therefore I wouldn't consider rational thought would affect your opinion anyway, and so I don't care if you find it credible. I remember that pictures of glaciers doing what glaciers do is a credible straw for you to grasp at.
Denialist tone? Deny reality more. You got brainwashed by a movie into believing a chicken little story and you're willing to beggart the entire third world so you feel better about drinking your coffee coolata. You are selfish and you hate your fellow man because we are a stain upon this earth. Governments want this reform and rich white people want this reform, whether because they had the free time to sit in a movie theater and watch a propaganda piece or because they stand to profit from it. People on island nations like Tuvalu would like to believe that seas will stop rising if we stop CO2 emission, unfortunately this is incongruous with reality because they were rising before we started polluting CO2 on a large scale ANYWAY. People in third world countries are probably willing to commit to "1 to 1.5°C reduction (by who's model?? Me.)" and probably to get some of the proposed 10-20 billion in third world handouts, I suspect much of which will be diverted as fast as possible to profiteers and non-AGW causes such as FOOD and water-recycling centers. This, is, of course, an opinion.
The rest of the world should embrace the concept that without CO2 scares they have cheaper fuel, more food and surplus other resources like children that didn't freeze or starve to death this winter. And that is even ASSUMING that AGW is happening!
If your next comment doesn't give me some real costs to humanity of global warming, it will not be replied to. We are rehashing the same "ARGH I LIKE NATURE AND UR EVUL, DUMBSHIT I DONT LIKE U POOPY FACE" and "Please consider more than one viewpoint and actually look into things" argument over and over and over, and at some point I assume the author wished to have some further comment on the state and value of his blogpost. Consider my presence at this blog: I'm in your so-called "denialist" bloc, but I'm still looking at what other people are saying. I thought the comment on child labour laws was striking, and worth commenting on. You are here patting yourself on the back. Atta-boy.
It doesn't matter if you want it or not: Pragmatism would suggest that if the market doesn't move toward a solution because there isn't a benefit, then it will take government action to cram the issue down our throats. In the absence of an actual proof of AGW and AGW's associated non-natural costs, I still question the value in additional cost.
Thus my viewpoint on the original article remains firm: No substantial net cost to humanity of inaction can be identified objectively, and thus no benefit to the creation of an additional cost in day to day living can be quantified. If there is no benefit, because it could be reasonably concluded that there is no definable cost, then it is still a hidden tax.
Posted by: Buffoon | December 17, 2009 5:18 PM
Raging Bee,
"...your position on this issue is based on nothing but shortsighted, uncaring selfishness, refusal to even contemplate the concept of short-term sacrifice for the long-term commmon (sic) good, and total disregard for any meaningful concept of the general welfare in the real world."
You consider this to be a compelling rational response?
This is why I don't waste time discussing things with you anymore.
Posted by: Lance | December 17, 2009 5:30 PM
Ed: The train left the station on such matters long, long ago, and there is no serious constituency for them with any political power.
</ObJoke>
Posted by: abb3w | December 27, 2009 10:04 PM
Gobal warming hasn't hurt anyone? Go and tell the people Tuvalu, I'm sure it'll go down really well. - DJ
Posted by: DingoJack | December 27, 2009 10:46 PM
Dingo Jack,
Buffoon addressed the issue of Tuvalu already. What evidence do you have that AGW is what is causing the purported sea rise there or anywhere else?
At this point, I don't think there really is one person who posts consistently as Raging Bee, just a bunch of people who want to act as Poes.
Posted by: billygroats | December 27, 2009 11:35 PM
I think you missed the point (as did presumably Buffoon) at #81: "... the earth has warmed by less than one degree in the last 100 years. This has not harmed anyone." [Emphasis mine]
On Tuvalu's islands a 10C increase in temperature means: increasing soil salinity reducing crop yields, dying coral reefs unable to break-up damaging waves from storms of increased violence, increased coastal erosion, and therefore, reduced land area leading to overcrowding and starvation, nope no harm there.
Oh sorry, silly me, he meant no harm to HIS LIFESTYLE. I'm all right Jack... -Dingo
Posted by: DingoJack | December 28, 2009 1:28 AM
Think about this.
If you really did find a working formula that made you, say $1,000 a week online on average and it kept producing income no matter what, would you want to sell that idea to a bunch of noobs for $47 a pop and expect to retire on the proceeds? No way, man! It does not compute. It does not add up. And it does not make any sense to do that. I certainly don’t go shouting from the rooftops how I make my money online. Hell, I don’t want the competition taking a slice of my pie and neither would anyone who really does make good cash online.
www.onlineuniversalwork.com
Posted by: abass | December 30, 2009 1:02 PM
Increased soil salinity from higher temperatures? I guess I don't understand the causality there. I should think higher temperatures mean more precipitation mean less soil salinity as more water is forced into the atmosphere.
Oh, and since the ocean is rising anyway, Tuvalu is in trouble, AGW or not. I suppose everybody living near a volcano should be worried about AGW causing their volcanos to erupt, too.
But, let's take part in a cost-benefit analysis, shall we? The population of Tuvalu is about 11000 peoples. Because we KNOW Tuvalu is probably going to end up underwater because the ocean rise trendline (for thousands of years) is upward, we can
A) Use Tuvalu as a shining example of how AGW has an effect on poor beknighted souls that rely on fragile ecosystems like coral that terrible horrible white people have prevented from reaching a natural balance, and put into effect systems which will end up funneling billions of dollars of productivity and easy energy out of the hands of the third world (I mean, no really: We're going to give you billions of dolalrs so you can give it right back buying our technology, and no you can't use your own natural resources anymore!.. Really?)
B) Use Tuvalu as a shining example of how the natural world can effect peoples and ask for help in relocating the 11,000 people of Tuvalu to a place that won't end up underwater even if there isn't global warming.
Maybe we can employ them to paint some color on all that pesky bleached coral.
But you're right, I've totally complained, at any point, about how thinsg would affect my lifestyle. I'm one of the rich. I get to eat three square meals a day (sometimes FOUR) unlike certain peoples around the world. I easily afford heating fuel in the winter such that the concept of me or any of my friends freezing to death in the winter is a very distant thought, unlike certain peoples around the world. I have access to FDA approved, disease free meat and cheese, plentiful bread and a public water supply that is decontaminated physically and chemically until it is safe to drink from any tap anywhere I go in my entire state, such that the thought of getting diseases or sicknesses from my water is, again, a distant thought. When I go home from my work to my home, I get to turn on a magic box that brings me information about the world, educational programs, complete entertainment and mental stimulation. If a bad person tries to invade my home, I get to call a police force to assist me.
Because 11000 people live on an island that has ALWAYS been "going to end up underwater," I'm not going to overlook that the things that I have and get on a daily basis and consider more or less necessary to life are 100% out of reach to a large portion of the world's population. And until those particular needs are addressed, the concept that I need to make those people poorer and all the greenies richer to prevent a problem that isn't even a problem from turning into a problem that it probably won't be all because some guys smashed buttons on a computer until the lines pointed upward sharply at the end is. 100%. Ludicrous.
That's right, I don't care about Tuvalu. Saving four square miles of coral and 11000 people on a sinking island is NOT the greater good of humanity.
And until this stupid ass cap-and-trade concept really has a net benefit even SUGGESTED by one of you because it offsets more costs than it creates, it is STILL a hidden tax. In fact, it's not even a hidden tax. It is an out-in-the-open NET COST. But for the purposes of this discussion, it is still a hidden tax.
Posted by: Buffoon | January 4, 2010 11:15 AM
I think, at this point, I will stop commenting on this discussion. It is far past the scope of the blogholder's intent, I believe, and is moving into the realm of exactly the same as every AGW brainwash vs. AGW critic discussion ever. Oh and the money spam started.
The point that I take home from these very in-depth discussions is that people (including myself) think in bullet points and very few people are transparent about how they know what they know.
For example, I asked Mr. Raging Bee how he "got his information." How does he "know" about global warming. Can he identify the sources of information that he has used to form his opinion. His response was particularly unsatisfactory. However, I don't think he knows anymore. He just believes.
Obviously this question would require quite a long an convoluted list of blogroll, news articles, etc. But that isn't the true question, is it? To take a side on an issue means you have been polarized. To be polarized means there is a first contact that you make with the issue. It is usually persuasive. It is from that original opinion that you form that causes you to seek confirmation. It is difficult to dislodge that opinion, because you can (like Mr. Bee) discard other opinions quite readily (please see Mr. Bee's posts above.)
I will tell you my first contact with my viewpoint. I saw Al Gore's movie in college. I was quite taken with it. It just fits together, it makes sense. It is very moving. I was living at the time with several women, one named Danielle, who was especially hot and also quite taken with the movie. It provided some ice-breakers, unfortunately she had a boyfriend and that was that. Then, I was required to put no further thought into the matter for quite a long time.. until I was referred to the transcript of the trial in which Lord Monkton attacked this movie on basis of some incorrect points. (Specifically, the ones to which it is required that a teacher must give the class a handout along with showing the video.) I read the entire transcript of the trial. Monkton has a very scientific acumen, and he quite thoroughly smashes on the movie.
That is my first contact. That is my introduction to the critical side. Please note: This isn't me saying there isn't any global warming or AGW, it is me saying that my introduction to AGW (An Inconvenient Truth) was overshadowed by a critic to the movie, as far as the sensibility of the arguements. I think everybody should take some time on debated issues to stop thinking that your opinion is naturally right and start questioning it yourself. Maybe it is right! "But, this above all, to thine own self be true," and also, to thine own self be honest.
From there (being slightly confused and of course, bored at work) I looked for more info. Globalwarminghoax and its ilk proved to be quite closed-minded on their own side. Wattsupwiththat was slightly better. I read some papers (such as the biology ones above) I somehow got to Crichton's speeches and essays. Crichton's essays are (to a scientist, maybe?) particularly moving. I think they pierce the heart of the matter more skillfully than any other document. They don't really discount AGW either, they discount the type of thinking that allows unsubstantiated ideals to take hold and create popular movements unsupported by scientific fact. I suggest that anybody, believer and non alike, should read these essays and truly attempt to understand the points he is making, as they transcend our personal beliefs in issues: He truly wants better information. I find myself now to be convinced of several simple facts: We don't actually KNOW the things that we predict and the harder people try to convince you that you know something, the harder they're trying to sell it. I've found hundred of graphs that are presumably from the same temperature data that all make different conclusions. I've seen ocean ice bullet points along with graphs, and then completely contradictory bullet points and graphs. I've seen emails that a guy wrote about removing authors from peer-review journals because they didn't agree with his opinion. All the while, I hear politicians and businessmen screaming 'NOW NOW NOW' when really I just wish they'd hold on. Skeptic? Sure. I'd rather the 3rd world have coal heat and more food than solar-powered lanterns and be dead.
As to the original author, I have tried to be consistent in that all of my comments carry with them an address to the original post. I consider cap-and-trade schemes to lack the upside of any cost-benefit analysis that doesn't involve children crying about polar bears: It doesn't, to me, seem to hold up once you move past the bullet point stage. That is, if you aren't swayed that "some sort" of "catastrophe" is "happening now and speeding up" and "absolutely must be taken care of right now" then cap-and-trade schemes start to make less and less sense. Once they start making less than perfect sense, and your start to question it, you being to poke holes in the logic, and question where the costs are, and where the benefits are. Whom it hurts, whom it helps.
I believe I made some interesting and telling points in my original comment which more directly related to the original post (such as the child labor issue.)
If time proves AGW to be correct, then I hope you all enjoy the warmer weather, and in fifty or so years I will come back here and post with egg on my face.
If time proves AGW wrong, then I hope you all take a good hard look at how it was that you became so convinced of something that didn't happen.
Thanks for your time.
Posted by: Buffoon | January 4, 2010 12:16 PM