Megan McArdle states rather indelicately what is essentially my view on the subject of global warming:
…if this is true, 2% of GDP isn’t going to cut it. We’d better get back to an emissions level around 1940, or earlier, and stay there. Being that we now have about 2.5 times as many people in the country, and the world, as we did then, that’s going to be tricky. If higher emissions means the trend will continue, we’re pretty much doomed, at least until the Chinese economy collapses into food riots. There’s no point in waxing sarcastic about the American public; it’s a nasty, nasty collective action problem that I can’t see how we’d solve short of invading China.
That’s why I keep emphasizing geo-engineering.
The low-hanging fruit in reducing emissions continues to be U. S. oil consumption but just doing that is proving to be politically intractable and, worse, we can’t get where we might need to go simply on the basis of conservation, particularly conservation here. As I see it geo-engineering is the most likely solution to whatever problem we’ve got.
It’s certainly more effective than pretending you’ve solved the problem by moving it to China as our European cousins have done.
Geoengineering doesn’t solve the ocean chemistry problems–indeed, most geoengineering solutions for reducing global temperatures would actually exacerbate ocean ecosystem problems.
The only solution that will work is radically cutting emissions.
This won’t happen.
So what we need to plan for is how humans can surive in (a) higher temperatures (b) a lower oxygen environment (c) a higher CO2 environment (humans start seeing the effects of CO2 toxicity at atmosopheric levels that will be present around the year 2150) and an agricultural/food environment that isn’t dependent on ocean ecosystems in their current form.
Sounds like a wasteful government spending program disguised as “stimulus” to me.
I’ll add, with less sarcasm, that there’s a false dichotomy at play here – there’s no reason we can’t invest in geoengineering and act to reduce emissions. Indeed, I think it would be unreasonable to not attempt all possible solutions, given the potential devastation we could face.
I may be thinking of different engineering solutions than you are, Alex. I’m thinking of some of the ones I’ve posted about here and others along those lines: artificial trees to scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere and “storing” it in limestone in caves far below the earth’s surface.
Indeed, Maxwell James, I’m in favor of doing both at the same time. We shouldn’t put all of our eggs in the same basket. That’s actually the point I’m making. We can’t do everything by conservation alone (even if, as I suggested above, it does represent the low-hanging fruit). I’ve been in favor of a carbon tax for 35 years.
I’m actually somewhat hopeful that the failure of cap-and-trade will allow a carbon tax to be more widely considered again. While there will always be coordination difficulties, it is easy to imagine a “grand compromise” in which a carbon tax is enacted and the corporate income tax goes down or is eliminated entirely.
Every morning I wake up with lots of problems to solve, and “global warming” is never among them. Why? Because I decided years ago not to breed. Let the breeders solve these problems they have caused.