A New Category of Failure

Since I started blogging again, I've tried to revive Organic Matter without the wonkiness that used to characterize the site. So far, if success were salsa, mine would best be described as 'mild.' I even forgot to include a photo in my last post, not that I have one to illustrate any of the ideas I was writing about. If YouTube, philosophy, and climate change have one thing in common, it's that they aren't very photogenic. Anyway, I've created a whole new category to describe the deepest fathoms of my failure. And I intend to plumb these depths with fervor.

This all happened because of a letter which I was compelled to write in response to an op-ed in my parents' hometown newspaper, the Redding Record Searchlight. In his piece, Keith Ritter cites Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger's new book, Breakthrough, to restate and reargue the tired canard that "technology will save us." His argument could very well be a corruption of Nordhaus and Shellenberger's these - I haven't read the book myself, and I'm hesitant to let Ritter put words in their mouths. Like most of his ilk, he ignores economic realities, including entrenched subsidies for carbon-based fuels, and an utter lack of public funding for renewable energy development. The point is, his piece so infuriated me that I couldn't keep myself from writing to the paper. And having been published, I likewise cannot keep myself from tooting my own horn on the Internet. The text of my letter is after the fold, which is after a completely unrelated photograph.

In last Sunday's column Keith Ritter, like his subjects Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, conflates environmental regulation with the failure of popular gloom-and-doom environmentalism. Yes, pessimism is a poor motivator, and the mainstream environmental movement would do well to learn this simple truth, but regulation has a proven track record for solving environmental problems and protecting the public.

Research, human ingenuity, and new technology will necessarily play a large part in mitigating climate change, but waiting for Washington to fund the massive public investments that Ritter calls for is not a solution. What incentives have we given our policy makers to invest money in clean energy? And where will these untold billions come from? Even economists agree that market tools -- such as a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax -- are the most effective way to encourage clean energy research and development. Perhaps most importantly, a market-driven approach distributes the cost between people and business, rather than dumping it directly on the public.

Worth reading the book

By Michael Shellenberger (not verified) at January 1, 2008 - 2:19am | reply

Thanks for commenting!

Indeed, as you suspected: our book makes our views on all of this far more clear than second hand blogs and columns. We don't suggest "waiting," but we do believe investment will have more impact than regulation.As Kyoto has shown, regulation alone won't do much. See this article:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/21/EDDRU269O.DTL

And here we make a more extended case:

http://www.thebreakthrough.org/ideas.shtml

Thanks for considering these important issues!

Michael

I'll add it to my Amazon wish list

By chris at January 3, 2008 - 12:52am | reply

Thanks very much for your comments, Michael. I think that I lost a lot of my readers (and commenters) when I stopped writing here for over two years, so I was pleased to find a comment at all, let alone one from someone relatively well-known (some might say infamous).

I don’t think that the Kyoto Protocol can fairly be used as a singular example to demonstrate that climate change regulation will fail in any form. As a counterexample I would look at the Montreal Protocol. Montreal was obviously dealing with CFCs rather than GHGs, but they are similar in that they both have point sources and distributed externalities. Still, I wouldn’t argue that regulation alone will stop greenhouse gas emissions, just as I wouldn’t argue that any one source of renewable energy will be sufficient to wean us from hydrocarbon fuels.

As you rightly say in the first article you linked:

Instead of making clean energy relatively cheaper, a new, post-Kyoto agreement should instead focus on making clean energy absolutely cheaper.

This sounds great, and R&D is the obvious path to cheaper renewable energy. What I would add is that increasing the cost of non-renewables will create a strong incentive to reduce the cost of renewables. So the sooner clean energy is relatively cheaper, the faster it will become absolutely cheaper.

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