CLEAR might be the way to go

Cantwell’s Climate Bill Gathers Steam

[Via The Daily Score blog]

There’s an interesting insurgency that may give lie to recent predictions of federal failure on cap and trade. Senator Maria Cantwell from Washington has a modified “cap and dividend” bill, called the CLEAR Act, that’s slowly but surely picking up momentum.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post gave it a nod:

Is there no alternative between simple do-nothingism and House complexity? In fact, there is. An alternative proposal increasingly capturing interest on Capitol Hill is the CLEAR Act… It would also raise costs, of course, but the government would rebate 75 percent of the revenue from the permit auctions back to the populace.

…80 percent of Americans would break even or come out ahead, even as consumption patterns shifted toward greener goods and greater energy efficiency.

That came on the heels of an approving editorial in The Economist:

Enter Maria Cantwell, the junior senator from Washington state. She is pushing a simpler, more voter-friendly version of cap-and-trade, called “cap-and-dividend”…

Ms Cantwell’s bill is refreshingly simple. At a mere 40 pages, it is one-thirty-sixth as long as the monstrous House bill (known as “Waxman-Markey”, after its sponsors)…

Then, too, there was a qualified endorsement by Harvard economist, Robert Stavins:

So, the politics of their proposal looks appealing, and the substance of it looks promising – a simple upstream cap-and-trade system (called something else), with 100% of the allowances auctioned (with a “price collar” on allowance prices to reduce cost uncertainty), 75% of the revenue refunded to all legal U.S. residents, each month, on an equal per capita basis as non-taxable income…

That’s the good news. The bad news, however, is that the proposal needs to be changed before it can promise to be not only politically attractive, but economically sensible…

By the way, I can’t recommend Stavins’ analysis highly enough. It’s fantastic (though I certainly don’t agree with everything he says in it).

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While the bill is not perfect, its simplicity means that if it does not provide the best benefit, we can tinker wit it in ways that are understandable. as opposed to current legislation which is so complex that the possibility of loopholes could negate everything.

CO2 is a pollutant

Is CO2 a pollutant?

[Via Skeptical Science]

We commonly think of pollutants as contaminants that make the environment dirty or impure. A vivid example is sulphur dioxide, a by-product of industrial activity. High levels of sulphur dioxide cause breathing problems. Too much causes acid rain. Sulphur dioxide has a direct effect on health and the environment. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is a naturally occuring gas that existed in the atmosphere long before humans. Plants need it to survive. The CO2 greenhouse effect keeps our climate from freezing over. How can CO2 be considered a pollutant?

A broader definition of pollutant is a substance that causes instability or discomfort to an ecosystem. Over the past 10,000 years, the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has remained at relatively stable levels. However, human CO2 emissions over the past few centuries have upset this balance. The increase in CO2 has some direct effects on the environment. For example, as the oceans absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, it leads to acidification that affects many marine ecosystems. However, the chief impact from rising CO2 is warmer temperatures.

Figure 1: CO2 levels (parts per million) over the past 10,000 years. Blue line from Taylor Dome ice cores (NOAA). Green line from Law Dome ice core (CDIAC). Red line from direct measurements at Mauna Loa, Hawaii (NOAA).

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Too much of anything can be bad. The amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere will have consequences. Some of those will be higher temperatures and some will be acidification of the oceans.

Business as usual is not going to work. No matter what the politicians in Utah believe. We shall see if they actually listen to people who understand these things. Particularly since Utah would be so greatly impacted by rising temperatures,

“We cannot function with only politicians in charge”

Truth, Consensus, and IPCC

[Via Only in it for the gold]

As scientists, we believe that certain propositions are demonstrably and objectively true, and that our objective is to determine which ones they are. Given that we are in the public employ, the public has some say about which matters we are paid to investigate, and we try to align our own interests with those of the public.

Before people were going around wishing climate scientists dead, we had rather interesting lives, as there was a social motivation to pursue an incredibly interesting set of questions about how the world is put together. Not every intellectual style is happy with our pursuits; evidence tends to be messy, experiments equivocal, models approximate. On the other hand, the contacts with other fields are varied, and contacts with other countries inevitable. Unfortunately, we started to come across some rather bad news.

The beliefs of the best-informed people held together. Evidence that didn’t align was almost invariably found faulty, as the picture was refined. By 1979, the outlines of the present consensus had emerged among the most accomplished physical scientists, and rather quickly became the basis for further research.

As time progressed, the news became bad enough that we had to start drawing the public’s attention to it. Accordingly, an international body, the IPCC, was formed to collate and represent that news to decision makers and the public. There is evidence that IPCC was deliberately constituted so as to understate risks, largely under the influence fo the Reagan administration.

The Reagan administration wanted to forestall pronouncements by self-appointed committees of scientists, fearing they would be ‘alarmist.’ Conservatives promoted the IPCC’s clumsy structure, which consisted of representatives appointed by every government in the world and required to consult all the thousands of experts in repeated rounds of report-drafting in order to reach a consensus. Despite these impediments the IPCC has issued unequivocal statements on the urgent need to act.

The IPCC summaries of the “consensus” were intended to report the state of science, not to define it. The “consensus” was and is just the spectrum of opinion held by working scientists. Some questions often raised by the public are considered “settled” in the community, while others are not. (Nobody claims “the science is settled” as a whole. This is a straw man.) The purpose of IPCC is not to do research but to review it and report upon it.

Nobody “worked for” the IPCC. (A few WMO employees spend most time on IPCC business. Pachauri himself draws no salary from IPCC.)

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This is one of the best descriptions of the process, particularly from the scientific viewpoint. While the science is very good, it is the policy aspects that need better work. The problem with policy, though, is much of this report are being done by amateurs while they are opposed by professionals.

Letting only politicians do this will not move us forward. But this will mean scientists must get better at policy. Or at least better PR.