The world according to climate change alarmists
22 Apr 2016 1 Comment
in environmental economics, global warming Tags: climate alarmism, conjecture and reputation, philosophy of science
Climate Change: What Do Scientists Say?
19 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in economics of media and culture, environmental economics, global warming Tags: climate alarmism
#Morganfoundation discovers that #Ukraine is a dodgy place to buy credence goods
19 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in economics of climate change, economics of crime, economics of information, environmental economics, global warming, industrial organisation, international economic law, international economics, International law, law and economics, politics - New Zealand, survivor principle Tags: adverse selection, asymmetric information, carbon trading, climate alarmism, climate alarmists, credence goods, experience goods, inspection goods
Morgan Foundation yesterday put out a report pointing out that many of the carbon credits purchased from the Ukraine under the carbon trading scheme are fraudulent.
That comes with no surprise to anyone vaguely familiar with business conditions and the level of official corruption in the former Soviet Union. Russia is a more honest place to do business.
Carbon traders who buy from the Ukraine are not buying an inspection good. An inspection good is a good whose quality you can ascertain before purchase.
They are not buying an experience good. An experience good is a good whose quality is ascertained after purchase in the course of consumption.
Source: Russia, Ukraine dodgy carbon offsets cost the climate – study | Climate Home – climate change news.
What these carbon traders in New Zealand are doing is buying credence goods from the Ukraine. The credence goods are the carbon credits, which the Morgan Foundation and others have found often to be fraudulent.
A credence good is a good whose value is difficult or impossible for the consumer to ascertain. A classic example of a credence good is motor vehicle repairs.
You must trust the seller and their advice as to how much you need to buy of a credence good. Many forms of medical treatment also require you to trust the seller as to how much you need.
Carbon credits are such a credence good. You know there is corruption in the Ukraine and many other countries that supply them. You may never know at any reasonable cost whether the specific carbon credits you buy were legitimate.
The reason why carbon credits are purchased from such an unreliable source is expressive voting. As is common with expressive politics, what matters is whether the voters cheer or boo the policy. The fact whether it works or not does not matter too much.
The Greens are upset about this corruption in carbon trading. They did not mention the corruption in international carbon trading and climate aid when they welcomed the recent Paris treaty on global warming but that is for another day.
https://twitter.com/kadhimshubber/status/721831502372302849
Co-ordinated international action on global warming is rather pointless if some of the key countries with carbon emission caps are corrupt, which they are.
As Geoff Brennan has argued, CO2 reduction actions will be limited to modest unilateral reductions of a largely token character. There are many expressive voting concerns that politicians must balance to stay in office and the environment is but one of these.
Once climate change policies start to actually become costly to swinging voters, expressive voting support for these policies will fall away, and it has.
Networked Carbon Markets
Source: World Bank Networked Carbon Markets.
One way to stem that fading support is to buy carbon credits on the cheap and there is plenty of disreputable suppliers of cheap carbon credits. Buying dodgy carbon credits as a way of doing something on global warming without it costing more than expressive voters will pay.
One of the predictions of the adverse selection literature is that if consumers cannot differentiate good and bad goods from each other, such as with used cars, the market will contract sharply or even collapse because buyers cannot trust what is on offer. This risk of adverse selection undermining a market applies with clarity to carbon trading.
Source: How Can Your Vote Shape a Low Carbon Future? It Starts with Carbon Pricing.
The future should sue today’s climate activists for slowing The Great Escape
16 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in development economics, economic history, economics of media and culture, energy economics, environmental economics, global warming, growth miracles, law and economics Tags: climate activists, climate alarmism, extreme poverty, The Great Enrichment, The Great Escape, vexatious litigation
@CFigueres seriously mistaken on carbon emissions and global poverty
13 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, development economics, economic history, energy economics, environmental economics, global warming, growth disasters, growth miracles, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: climate alarmism, extreme poverty, global poverty, The Great Escape
What They Haven’t Told You about Climate Change
30 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in economics, energy economics, environmental economics, global warming Tags: climate alarmism, global warming
1 Hot Month is the signal but years of The Pause is just noise
27 Mar 2016 2 Comments
in economics of media and culture, environmental economics, global warming Tags: climate alarmism, conjecture and refutation, philosophy of science
Temperature trends in the 20th century
22 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in environmental economics, global warming Tags: climate alarmism, global cooling
Solution aversion and the anti-science Left
11 Mar 2016 1 Comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, economics of regulation, energy economics, environmental economics, global warming, health economics, law and economics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, property rights, Public Choice Tags: antiscience left, climate alarmism, geo-engineering, GMOs, growth of knowledge, gun control, motivated reasoning, nuclear power, political persuasion, solar power, solution aversion, wind power
Climate science is the latest manifestation of solution aversion: denying a problem because it has a costly solution. The Right does this on climate science, the Left does it on gun control, GMOs, and plenty more. Cass Sunstein explains:
It is often said that people who don’t want to solve the problem of climate change reject the underlying science, and hence don’t think there’s any problem to solve.
But consider a different possibility: Because they reject the proposed solution, they dismiss the science. If this is right, our whole picture of the politics of climate change is off.
Some psychologists wasted grant money on lab experiments to show that people that think the solution to a problem is costly tend to rubbish every aspect of the argument. Any politician will tell you you do not concede anything. Sunstein again:
Campbell and Kay asked the participants whether they agreed with the IPCC. And in both, about 80 percent of Democrats did agree; the policy solutions made no difference.
Republicans, in contrast, were far more likely to agree with the IPCC when the proposed solution didn’t involve regulatory restrictions…
Here, then, is powerful evidence that many people (of course not all) who purport to be skeptical about climate science are motivated by their hostility to costly regulation.
The Left is equally prone to motivated readings. For example, it was found that those on the left are much more concerned about home invasions when gun control can reduce them rather than increase them.
The Left picks and chooses which scientific consensus as it accepts. The overwhelming consensus among researchers is biotech crops are safe for humans and the environment. This is a conclusion that is rejected by the very environmentalist organisations that loudly insist on the policy relevance of the scientific consensus on global warming.
Previously the precautionary principle was used to introduce doubt when there was no doubt. But when climate science turned in their favour, environmentalists wanted public policy to be based on the latest science.
The Right is welcoming of the science of nuclear energy or geo-engineering. The Left rejects it point-blank. Their refusal to consider nuclear energy as a solution to global warming is a classic example of solution aversion. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Is Climate Change Our Biggest Problem?
06 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in economics, energy economics, environmental economics, global warming Tags: climate alarmism, global warming
How to deal with science denialists
03 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in economics of education, economics of information, economics of media and culture, energy economics, environmental economics, global warming, health economics Tags: antiscience left, climate alarmism, growth of knowledge, philosophy of science, quackery, Quacks
Most climate alarmists do not separate the policy issues, the economic issues, from the science of global warming as suggested in this flowchart. Specifically, they do not ask what is the economic and social cost of global warming.
The climate alarmism wheel of Fortune
27 Feb 2016 Leave a comment
in environmental economics, global warming Tags: climate alarmism, conjecture and refutation
Think Again: The Green Economy @janlogie @GarethMP
23 Feb 2016 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, energy economics, environmental economics, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, Public Choice, resource economics Tags: climate alarmism, green economy, green rent seeking
Source: Matthew Kahn (2009) Think Again: The Green Economy | Foreign Policy
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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