William Nordhaus, from his book A Question of Balance, quoted in the New York Review of Books:
Whether someone is serious about tackling the global-warming problem can be readily gauged by listening to what he or she says about the carbon price. Suppose you hear a public figure who speaks eloquently of the perils of global warming and proposes that the nation should move urgently to slow climate change. Suppose that person proposes regulating the fuel efficiency of cars, or requiring high-efficiency lightbulbs, or subsidizing ethanol, or providing research support for solar power—but nowhere does the proposal raise the price of carbon. You should conclude that the proposal is not really serious and does not recognize the central economic message about how to slow climate change. To a first approximation, raising the price of carbon is a necessary and sufficient step for tackling global warming. The rest is at best rhetoric and may actually be harmful in inducing economic inefficiencies.
It’s hard to see how anything else could work. And yet Labor is showing about as much leadership on the issue as the Libs did – even with control of both houses of parliament and a crippled Opposition. From Friday’s SMH:
The average floor area for houses was expected to increase by 145 per cent by 2020, driving up the amount of energy used for lighting and heating. People were also relying more on electricity to meet their energy needs instead of traditional methods, such as a wood fire for heating.
The report found one in four households buys a new television each year and that Australia has the highest per capita sales of power-hungry LCD and plasma screen televisions in the world.
Televisions now use more power than cooking, heating or air-conditioning and are fourth on the list of households’ greatest energy users, behind water heating, refrigerators and lighting.
LCD and plasma screens use more energy than old-style CRT’s of the same size; even worse, they tend to be bigger. It’s hard to see how the obvious response – to apply taxes to them – would make much of a difference: people are already ready to fork out thousands of dollars for their TV’s. Of course, the government isn’t even proposing anything that drastic:
To combat this, Mr Garrett announced the Government would phase in a 10-star rating system for electrical appliances over the next year. It will cover appliances such as refrigerators, clothes dryers, washing machines and dishwashers.
A separate, voluntary labelling system for televisions will be brought in over the next six months, with mandatory labelling and minimum efficiency standards introduced next year.
The energy rating system’s only going to affect the shopping habits of do-gooders (unless the price of energy increases steeply). And besides, encouraging people to buy the most energy-efficient plasma isn’t addressing the problem. As with 4WD’s, what we have here is an expensive luxury item that is harmful to the public good.
In the difficult task of fighting global warming, an easy place to start would seem to be to cut out the high-polluting inessentials: things which, if eliminated, would hardly affect quality of life. In other words, start banning or restricting the sale of products like plasma-screen TV’s and 4WD’s. We didn’t have two-metre TV screens a decade ago, and there’s no reason they should be treated as a right today.
It’ll never happen.
The solutions to global warming that rest on technological advances have huge problems. The physicist Freeman Dyson, in the New York Review of Books, puts faith in technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere:
Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its grasp. Keeling’s wiggles prove that a big fraction of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes within the grasp of biotechnology every decade. If one quarter of the world’s forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by half in about fifty years.
It’s probably more realistic than clean coal, but there are some small problems:
- How on earth could you go about replacing a quarter of the world’s forests?
- How on earth could you do that without it being an ecological disaster?
- If the carbon dioxide is halved in fifty years, where does that leave us in one hundred years? With none? Or do we clear a quarter of the world’s forests again in fifty years?
What’s frustrating is that there is plenty of debate about ludicrously drastic technological approaches that won’t happen for decades, but curbing our present-day luxuries isn’t even on the table.
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