The Glade 4.0

You are aware that international trade and all of the things that bring you the creature comforts you demand are far more damaging than green house gasses? Human beings are responsible for nearly 100% of non-native pest invasions. Human beings are responsible for nearly 100% of invasive vegetation situations. Human beings are responsible for almost all of the diversity problems in our river systems. There are a million and one things we've done to change this planet, but you guys are hung up on the one thing we can't prove, can't fix, and can't reverse.

But, you know ... the HIGCC Debate and any policy action resulting from it is literally pissing in the wind. You're too busy chasing another one of Paul Ehrlich's ghost impacts (we past the world ending 7 billion people mark btw) to fix the things we might actually understand and have a chance of correcting.

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I'd be a bit more sympathetic towards folks crying about stuff they're taking someone else's word about if the real folks behind the cause weren't so blatantly using the situation to cover their agenda of wealth redistribution.

The buying and selling of carbon credits isn't going to accomplish anything other than taking from the 'haves' and moving it to the 'have nots'. As long as that remains the solution, they're lying about what they think is the problem. And the people that believe them? Idiots.

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In time, this too shall pass.

....and once again you've somehow assumed I'm espousing a particular policy on HIGCC.
We're talking about green legislation, which you have categorically rejected, which can include any of ten-thousand different areas of anti-pollution measures, up to and including greenhouse gas emissions, but also sulfur emissions, laws about moving invasive species, heat emissions, radiation emissions and other categories too numerous to name here.
As for Can't Fix/Can't Reverse -there are actually some technologies that could reduce greenhouse type effects (see previous post, I'll have to dig out the articles on the technologies.)


but you're still demanding a standard of proof on human climate impact that is not required in ANY situation including a court of law. You're effectively watching someone pull the trigger, watching the bullet impact someone's head and then screaming that "We don't know the victim didn't die of an aneurism a split second earlier!!!"

But lets forget the HIGCC argument for the moment, there are a dozen other reasons to lay down laws requiring greater fuel efficiency, reduced emissions, etc including public health, national security, etc.

But Khross's pocketbook I'm sure trumps all other concerns.

TheRiov:

Not really. You talk about car emissions: largely driven by the HIGCC debate. Never mind that Europe, Japan, and the rest of the developed world is kicking our asses in automotive technology because they took a different approach. They actually make more efficient machines. We simply attach more efficiency depleting scrubbers to ours. The tack for compliance taken by our engineers is almost entirely driven by compliance with regulations and legislative requirements. Instead of just setting standards, we require the inclusion of components and features that make meeting those standards more difficult. Our engineers are a disadvantage, because they can't solve the problem appropriately.

Then there's the fuel itself. Ethanol is worse for the environment than petroleum fuels. It's worse for the economy. It's worse for the vehicles, but it's inclusion in our gas (raising to 15% in 2014), is at the government's requirement. European gasoline still has led in a few variants; gasoline produced at much higher octane levels and higher burn temperatures for more controlled ignition and power is the rule, not the exception in the rest of the world.

Then there's the fact that the EPA keeps banning high fuel efficiency diesel engines from import, because diesel produces more emissions per unit of fuel.

Green legislation defeats your goals.

The greenest car manufacturer on the planet is Subaru. The greenest electronics manufacturer on the planet is Ricoh. Both of them voluntarily operate so far above Japanese waste standards as to have 0 landfill waste plants in the United States. But our government makes it harder for companies to do such thingshere; our government makes it hard for companies to actually be environmentally conscious. American Subarus, while good cars, are not nearly as efficient or emissions clean as their European and Japanese counterparts, which have less direct legislative regulation and intervention in their final builds. Ricoh copiers manufactured in the United States have extra parts they didn't need in their original designs.

I mean, hell, if you really want to understand why green legislation is bad ...

Figure out why the Ford GT 5.7L V8 only gets about 9 mpg, while the Koenigsegg CCX has a turbo-diesel tunable engine that puts out 850 horsepower and gets 40 mpg under nominal highway operation.

Figure out why the United States is so hostile to nuclear energy; in fact, figure out why the United States won't let the AEC standardize our nuclear reactors and production facilities.

And, ultimately, green legislation is bad because it creates an external shift in supply curves and thus horribly, horribly skews the economic realities and costs of improving our environmental impact. Green legislation makes being green more expensive.

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We can agree that bad or poorly structured regulation is often (or even nearly always) worse than none. But that argues for creating BETTER regulation, not none.

TheRiov:

All regulation is bad or poorly structured, see the last sentence of my post.

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But 'more expensive' is not evil per se. Yes, it can raise prices, but a) there is often a downstream cost savings in health care, (asthma, cancer expenses, etc) or b) reduced cleanup expenses.

Look at the history of industrial accidents, how many of those could have been prevented by better regulation & enforcement. Yes, its often (but not always) more expensive. History has shown that business CANNOT be trusted to make the right choices.




This is dogma. It is not a reasoned argument.

Riov / Khross,

If I may interject, the entire discussion between you guys is silly. First "green" is overused, abused, subjective, and as a result, basically meaningless at this point. Secondly, whether regulation is "good" or "bad" is another subjective, meaningless argument.

How do we price negative environmental externalities into transactions without regulation?

Not always. I can't find the article now, but BP was forced a few years back to do a huge amount of environmentally friendly changes to their operations because of various spills and messes they had made. The end result was it actually provided a huge ROI for them, because the process of performing the process clean up to support the "green" changes improved their processes and efficiency. If I recall right, it ended up saving them something crazy like $700M.

You don't; you need to get past this notion that the force of law exists to make things equitable. It doesn't.

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Aizle:

I can pretty much categorically disprove those claims without reading your source. At no point in history does adding steps, regulation, and components to a process make it more efficient. It might make your results more uniform; it might improve your productivity; it might do a world of things that are net-beneficial relative to the status quo. Improving efficiency, however, is not one of those things. In this day and age where every high school graduate has heard the terms Six Sigma or Toyota Production System or Kaizen or Lean or <insert production waste reduction philosophy here>, it astonishes me that people think they get more efficient when they make human systems more complex. Complexity simply improves your potential for error. When we get into massive organizational systems and huge production outfits like BP, regulatory compliance initiatives are an immediate and long term decrease in efficiency and production. And I'm curious as to how the Deepwater Horizon regulatory requirements saved BP $700m on their bottom line, since they were fined 4.5 billion and had to pay out another 10 billion or so in damages.

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Well, it can be more efficient in terms of total costs and total benefits if you include the third party impacts (i.e. the externalities you acknowledged can't be priced in absent regulation). If Company A and Company B both produce widgets and generate the same revenues and production costs doing so, they are equally "efficient" producers of widgets. However, if Company A just dumps its wastewater into the river, causing downstream users to incur an additional $100 of costs/harm, whereas Company B pre-treats its waste at a cost of $80, thus preventing the downstream users from incurring costs/harm, then Company B is $20 more "efficient" in an overall sense.

RangerDave:

I'm well aware that is how our government calculates such things; I just wanted to be clear that real efficiency and high-order accounting efficiency are not the same thing.

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Oh I know. I'm just throwing it out there. Anyway, I'm a little surprised you don't think externalities should be priced into transactions. Even from a property rights perspective, isn't there a solid diffuse harm / public nuisance justification for doing so?

RangerDave:

I don't think it's the government's place to price such externalities. If you really want to get into it, we'd have to target about private markets and private solutions for a lot of things. There are externalities relative to you and me, but of those externalities are created by government regulation, then their net effect is to further diminish the parties involved in the transaction, not improve the transaction.

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If you require uniform results, often it does, by preventing reworking of the effort to achieve uniform results.

Khross - blanket statements are always a bad idea.

You might as well wipe the board...

Arathain:

Increasing complexity decreases efficiency, primarily because complexity increases the opportunity for human error to affect your process. In fact, complexity is the bane of efficiency in human processes.

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This and this.

Let's just assume for the sake of argument that HIGW is both real and detrimental:

Graph Moore's Law and temperature on the same chart and ask yourself if it really makes sense to be trying to fix this OMG right now. It's like treating a slow-growth cancer with aggressive radiation. No one wants to hear this, but sometimes procrastination is an entirely rational and appropriate thing to do. It will be vastly easier and cheaper to engineer a solution to this problem after another 80 or 100 years of technological advancement. I really don't see any long term benefit in going out of our way to address the problem in the present.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Adding steps, regulations, and components does not necessarily include increasing complexity. It's quite often the opposite. Completing checklists comes to mind.

Arathain:

...

Well, now we know why you aren't an EE or ME.

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Lovely, here we go. In typical fashion, rather than continuing the discussion with someone who disagrees with you, you will instead declare that I simply just don't understand. Next comes either insults, unsupported claims of expertise, or dancing in an attempt to deflect.

What I don't understand is why you insist on being so difficult to have a discussion with.

I look forward to his reply that is both a denial and example of what you just said.

Tautological Khross is Tautological.

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Holy shitsnacks!