Indonesia's palm oil fires emitted more greenhouse gases in a day than the U.S.
qz.com
qz.com
For about a quarter of the year there are virtually no fires, another quarter (we're there now), there are a lot. Further, in most years the fires are much fewer than they are now, and we're now in a record year.
So the headline is true, but only for the worst part of a record breaking year. You can't extrapolate it. In general, say per year or per decade, the headline is false, and CO2 emissions are a topic that is spoken about in the context of such timeframes, not 'who emitted the most in a 30 day period in one particular year'.
Further, the comparison itself is misleading as the CO2 figures for the US (and all other countries, for that matter), only count burning fossil fuel (and producing cement). Not capturing emissions when fracking? Not counted. Millions of cows farting all over the place? Not counted. Agriculture? Not counted etc. That's why if you compare Indonesia to the US, Indonesians emit about 6 times less CO2 per capita. That's why it's a bit of a weird comparison. You're comparing one country's emissions within limited parameters, to another country's emissions from phenomena that fall outside of those parameters.
Anyway obviously it's a big concern nonetheless and a better comparison would probably be that this single industry approximately doubles Indonesia's fossil fuel burning CO2 output on average every year. That's quite excessive for just one industry (last I checked ~8% of exports, with exports at $200b on a GDP of $870b) and it doesn't have to be that way, palm oil can be grown (slightly more expensively) by simply clearing a forest rather than burning it and all the peat underneath. (the peat is really the issue, forest burning itself is often in large part compensated by regrowth)
Some of the things you note that aren't counted should be counted. But burning trees should not. Those trees removed the same amount of CO2 from the atmosphere while they were growing that is given off when they are burned; it will eventually be absorbed by whatever is then grown there afterward. The same thing goes for most (but not all) agricultural processes.
The real problem is not the CO2 that's given off, but the CO, soot, and various other organic and nitrogen compounds. Better known as smoke, which fouls the air for critters, like humans, that breathe it. Any change in the greenhouse effect is incidental and temporary. That doesn't mean that Indonesia should not be required to compensate those whose air is fouled, if they wish to continue allowing this. My guess is that if they were forced to do so, they would suddenly find it much easier to enforce their existing law against this type of burning.
The greenhouse effect is 'incidental and temporary' in the same way as a pandemic or nuclear war: if you're thinking in geological timescales and have no particular interest in the wellbeing of human beings.
Trees that are cut down (and their predecessors) may have been storing carbon for a long time, and whatever comes next may not store anything like as much carbon (or may be continually harvested and used).
You need to go back and actually read what I wrote. The greenhouse effect, if any, induced by burning non-fossil plant matter is incidental and temporary. In other words, on those geological time scales you cherish, as well as a human time scale, the net change in CO2 from burning such material is zero. The only way to make it not-zero is to render that land permanently unusable by any type of plant. Which is certainly possible, but not a side effect of slash-and-burn "farming". There's also the very strong possibility that whatever replaces that vegetation is actually going to grow faster, and thereby remove more carbon from the atmosphere than what was there before. Mature trees, in particular, don't grow very quickly.
This is simply a fact. One of us is in denial, all right, but it's not me. You need to get over your excessive fear-mongering; it's not helpful to the cause. Stick to the facts if you want people to believe you.
Trans fats make great muffins. But, oops, they happen to kill humans. So we ban them. Turns out palm oil also makes great muffins and doesn't kill humans. So, we burn down the ecosystem in Indonesia to make more of those delicious muffins and contribute to global warming.
Maybe we can just go back to using butter?
Sigh. There is no getting around the elephant in the living room: population. Either we control it, or the laws of physics will do it for us.
Well, you can milk anything with nipples.
I am genuinely curious.
Was it an attempt at humor? Did you think it would be well received in a forum where conversation tends to be more serious and informative?
Are you aware of the rules and just don't care? Or did you think this comment was especially funny and warranted an exception?
Not trying to troll, and I know I'm putting you on the spot so to speak, but figured if it would be worth it if you answered the question seriously.
And yes, I am aware of the irony that my post isn't especially contributing either.
I understand where the pearl-clutching is coming from but I think you've overreacted to the word "nipple."
Yes, I guess I thought my light-hearted comment might be received the way it was intended. Even in a serious/informative setting it's OK to inject a little humor here or there. I really don't think HN is on the brink of devolving into pun threads if that's your concern. If people think a comment is an unwelcome addition to the conversation, downvotes will certainly get that point across.
> Are you aware of the rules and just don't care?
Yes, I'm familiar with the comment guidelines (which certainly don't ban humor) and I'm aware of the "unwritten" rule that HN will usually tolerate only a small amount of levity in comments.
I expect food production to see a huge revolution in 10-20 years - think something like genetically modified simple organisms that are designed to produce specific nutrients - like specific protein or sugar or fat.
If you can design them to be energy efficient and work in low amount of space in a controlled environment (say a shallow pool of water + UV lamps or something like that) you can have huge factories that stack these "ponds" on top of each other working 24/7 pumping out nutrients.
Then it's just a matter of combining them in to food.
In general this entire mindset that there is "limited resources that we can't go beyond" is completely bogus and proven false over and over again - resources are just things that our knowledge/technology allows us to use to solve particular problems as we create new technology we grow potential resources.
Oil was used as a folk remedy until we learned how to refine it.
Earth becomes physically overpopulated - that's so far in to the future that you can count on realistically colonizing space by then.
A realistic concern is if we can reach innovation fast enough to avoid "rough patches" but long term it's incredibly unlikely that we can't solve technical problems.
Look at any satellite images of the amount of land that is being used by farming in the world. Those places used to be natural ecosystems that no longer exist.
We have already started a mass extinction event from which the level of biodiversity we used to have is essentially unrecoverable.
We are not separate from said ecosystems. Also, what makes you think people's desire to have children trumps the health of the systems we depend on for survival?
There are physical limits and laws of thermodynamics that no amount of innovation will be able to fix.
What is the point of continued population explosion? Satisfying some people's belief that reproduction is an inherent right?
People have been crying about overpopulation since forever - like the Pink Floyd song goes "And if you survive till two thousand and five I hope you're exceedingly thin" - we have the least poverty in history and the population is still growing. Sorry to burst your green bubble but we are nowhere near close to thermodynamical limits of sustainability on earth
>What is the point of continued population explosion? Satisfying some people's belief that reproduction is an inherent right?
Yes. This is the perverse reality that most of modern "environmentalist" arguments come down to "what I see as preserving nature is more valuable than people". Sorry buddy but if I had to chose between no more seals or not having children - well at least we have video footage of seals.
There's a classic puzzle that goes like this: you have a jar full of growth medium and a single bacterium of a species which divides twice an hour. One week later the jar is full of bacteria. At what point was the jar half full?
The classical answer is: 30 minutes before the end of the week. But the real answer is that this situation is impossible, because after a week of doubling every 30 minutes the population would be about 10^232 bacterial cells, which is more than the number of sub-atomic particles in the universe.
It's not about thermodynamics, it's about math: exponential growth cannot be sustained in a finite universe (let alone a finite planet). Sooner or later we will hit a limit. The only question is whether that limit will be imposed by the laws of physics or whether we will choose to become the masters of our own fate and impose it on ourselves. Personally I prefer the latter option because the former will almost certainly be very, very unpleasant.
Sooner or later sun will burn out, universe will expand in to nothingness, etc.
Those arguments are pointless - we won't reach those limits within our lifetime even with highest growth projections and who knows what happens after that.
But that's not what OP is arguing - baby seals - ie. "bio diversity" and "wildlife preservation" - is more important to the modern green movement than increasing the standard of living for a large part of human population and hence the enlightened ideas such as forbidding reproduction and limiting resource use.
Yes, in about 5 billion years.
> we won't reach those limits within our lifetime
Between "our lifetime" and 5 billion years there is still a very broad range of possibilities. Maybe you don't care what happens to the next N generations, but I do.
It's not about not caring - it's about not knowing what will and will not be relevant. As I've said before - people have been talking about population explosion since forever - we should be starving from 80s. All these people consistently ignore progress in their predictions.
You don't know what the dominant method for food production will be in 20 years or what will be the dominant energy source - as someone linked above the things I'm talking about are already starting. How can you predict what will be relevant in 100 years ? We should deal with problems coming in 10-20 years - we don't have the tools to deal with the longer term than that.
No, that's not true. Thomas Malthus wrote his famous essay less than 200 years ago. The oldest human writings are only a few thousand years old. That's the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things.
> How can you predict what will be relevant in 100 years?
Because I can do math. So I can understand that exponential growth cannot be sustained in a finite universe, let alone a finite planet. I can calculate how long we can continue at current (or historical) growth rates before we run into various limiting factors.
For example: the carbon biomass of earth is ~10^15 kg. The carbon mass of homo sapiens is about 10^11 kg. Our current doubling time is about 60 years. That works out to about 600 more years of growth at current rates before the biomass of earth consists entirely of homo sapiens. That's a hard upper bound on how long we have left if we don't slow our growth rate.
Honestly we have no idea how society will look like in 50 years with the advent of AI and such nobody knows what close future holds let alone 100 years - this "we're doing it to save the future" is like people talking how there's going to be unsustainable urban problems in 100 years with horses before the cars were invented - you think that limits you think matter (like biomass, or planet size, or w/e) are somehow intrinsically relevant and unsolvable - sorry but as far as problems go those are fairly straightforward on such a long timescale.
That won't help.
Suppose we manage to completely terraform Mars (extremely unlikely in just 600 years) and suppose that the biomass of Mars can be made equal to that of earth. It will only be one more doubling time (i.e. 60 years) before Mars is completely full as well. Then what?
> you think that limits you think matter (like biomass, or planet size, or w/e) are somehow intrinsically relevant and unsolvable
No. I don't know what the limiting factor will ultimately turn out to be. It may be that we will eventually succeed in transmuting matter and turning the entire mass of the universe into homo sapiens. You can do the math on that too. That will get you out to a couple of thousand years. After that we would need to find a way to get around the law of conservation of mass. You have to be a pretty extreme optimist to believe we'll have that figured out by then.
I'm not much in to that "native American wisdom" about how we should be one with nature and how we can't eat money - money = resources + capital + labor = solution to whatever problem you're facing given enough time. As far as I'm concerned we should be working on solutions to reduce our dependence on the ecosystem - climate change is just an a symptom of a bigger problem - the environment we depend on is fragile - the solution isn't praying that everything stays the same and maiming ourselves so we stay within some magical limit they think is going to "appease" the "balance of nature" - we should be working towards replacing it with a more robust systems (eg. like controlled/engineered food production instead of relying on weather, pesticides, herbicides, etc. and hoping all goes well). This is what I mean by regressive thinking - instead of focusing on how these eventual problems could be solved trough innovation their solution is "stop doing whatever we beleive might cause that and hope for the best".
Are you totally not able to comprehend that material gains in human living come at the cost of the extraction of resources from the ecosystem, and that said extraction is literally unsustainable?
Do you not understand that the exponential growth of the last century has had an impact on the planet greater than the rest of the entirety of human existence?
It is impossible to continue the resource extraction we have maintained for the last 20 years, for the simple reason that the climate is already starting to do number for us and this is just the beginning, consequence of said resource extraction.
Unless you like the idea of geoengineering the planet (and no one in their sane mind does) the idea that progress depends on human consumption has to stop.
You are the exact example of when psychologists say that people cannot really comprehend the exponential function.
You don't seem to be able to understand that reliance on the ecosystem is not a good thing - it's inherently unstable anyway - just because we were fortunate enough up to this point doesn't mean that a big event like a volcano, weather or biological catastrophe can't destroy the ecosystem and us with it.
Sea level only matters if we can't develop underwater construction in 100 years - As I've said it's unlikely that even in 20 years we will be using traditional farming as a food source - let alone in 100 years - just like we advanced from hunter gatherer -> farming - we adopted the environment to us - the next step is already happening.
You seem to be stuck in the mindset that just because we can't deal with something now it will be a problem in 100 years. If we had to deal with this issue in 10-20 years I would be worried (it would still be possible but it would require large scale dedicated effort) in 50-100 years it's practically guaranteed to be solved by standard progress.
People have been screaming about overpopulation exponential growth, etc. since forever[1], and it's yet to show any signs of being reality.
The solution isn't running back to the caves and wishing everything stays as it was if we stop burning stuff and stop having children so we can enjoy the views - it's to take control of environment and reduce dependency on inherently unstable factors.
>"a system that produces pure nutrients at up to 220,000 pounds per acre per year (the global record for agriculture is 3,600) at less than 20 cents per pound, all while generating 99% fewer greenhouse gases than conventional farming means." ... "Berry and his team found these organisms. They gave them the ability to take in sunlight, CO2, water, a final ingredient that changes based on the end product, and the ability to secrete a pure nutrient when all these ingredients come together."
...
>there's a company called proterro[2], that's producing sugar, at the third of the price of current agricultural methods - AT 5 CENTS PER POUND!.And they make 30 times sugar per acre as regular agriculture. And at their website , they say they can also make aminoacids - which are the building blocks of protein , so maybe they could also make proteins. that kinda validates essentient's vision , furthermore , their system basically eats CO2 - which is great.
This stuff has to pass massive regulatory and protectionist hurdles. It will be fun to tell all the world's farmers their income will stop and their assets are wothless. Or fight against political groups that want to outlaw or heavily restrict artificial foods.
Having studied environmental and social science for 11 years, published and achieved multiple "degrees of knowledge" for a solid career base; it was so very sad and frustrating that everyone seemingly persisted to "talk" around the elephant.
It drove me bonkers and was labelled a pessimist by my peers. I left academia 3 years ago and now travel the world, programming and documenting tropical flora and fauna. Best decision I ever made, pity it cost me £20,000 to arrive at it though.
That is damned cool. Tell us more.
I do have to remind myself that it is indeed cool, as some days I just want to pack it all in as I often feel out of my depth. A few months ago I was pulling 20-hour days to "get shit done". I'm not adverse to partnering with the right person to take the strain, in fact I'd welcome it now, alas I'm yet to find someone with similar passions who's also comfortable slumming it in tropics and is confident in high-risk foreign areas.
Waking up to a Tapir in a tropical monsoon is cool, gettin robbed at gun point by narcos whilst rebooting your VM, less so.
Tequila and some venezuelan narcos, those were some good times.
You do now :-)
Links please?
Fine, lets not talk around it. Bluntly, experience has shown that "population control" boils down to one of two things:
(1) Strong and effective social security networks, which shift incentives and produce declines (often to negative levels) in natural population increase, or
(2) Brutal authoritarian repression, extending (among other things) to either including or incentivizing outright slaughter.
How does social security reduce population? Citation very needed. I think you mean to say first world countries empirically grow slower.
And why does population control need to be brutal? You don't need to kill living people, just don't birth unborn people. Have tax paid contraceptives, tax paid abortion for those that mess up, and tax/fine/jail people that have 3+ babies (having 2 babies per couple is sustainable). Maybe also have a baby making approval process. My home remodel needs to be approved, but I can make a new person without any approval whatsoever? That does't make sense.
If you ignore the law, you go to jail. Your child will be adopted or raised in a foster home. Not killed.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7157/full/448993a...
http://news.mongabay.com/2015/06/fda-bans-artificial-trans-f...
More Accurate Title: Indonesia’s palm oil fires are emitting more greenhouse gases on some days than the entire US
It seems they claim 26 days not 1, but you are correct the initial assumption readers will come to is that every day they exceed US emissions.
Edit: OK I read the second half about peat and yes, the peat was sequestered before the fire so that is not good.
While we in the US and other 1st worlders could do much to stem our pollution especially given our ability, the fight against climate change has to be a global fight, and not just the acts of a few willing nations.
The haze did make the laser show from the top of the Marina Sands really spectacular. ;-)
[1] Like, a giant sci-fi ocean-fan... Or a military solution of invading their neighbors and running things better.
Happens in Los Angeles.
But yeah, they are not invading anyone anytime soon.
Singapore - 278 sq miles
You are off by quite a bit there. Besides, whether you are willing to admit it or not, a LARGE part of the Israeli swagger is the understanding that they have the full might of the US army behind them (be it right or not). Singapore does not have an equivalent relationship.
Wherever you think a jungle should be, you see palm trees. As far as the eye can see.
If you care about this. And you probably should. Then have a look at the ingredient list & don't buy products with palm oil.
A family member recently switched from buying margarine to butter after reading about the environmental effects of palm oil. Our dairy farming uncle then reminded us that they use palm oil in the feed for the animals to aid in managing digestion and fat levels.
All carbon comes from star fusion, what relevance does that have?
> It's irrelevant in the long term view.
It's irrelevant over geological term view, over "human" long-term view it's very relevant.
I don't have enough data to know if I agree with his point (especially since the GHG changes form), but his "long-term" refers to the life cycle of a single cow.
There's two issues with that:
1. cows really release the carbon stored in the food they eat, that carbon could otherwise stay locked (as it was before we cleared the field from which we grow feed).
2. cows also convert part of the carbon their release from their feed into comparatively worse greenhouse gases than just CO2
CH4 emissions from agriculture could be potentially reduced by improving manure treatment on farms (because untreated manure releases CH4) and regulating feed quality. Both have the side-effect of higher meat prices. N2O emissions are harder: you'd have to stop using nitrate-containing fertilizer.
[1] https://www.animalsciencepublications.org/publications/jas/p...
In other words, the only way to lower demand for palm oil is to lower the demand for all oil. In my opinion, the best way to do that is to kill the perception of biofuel as sustainable. Eating food is bad enough -- all agriculture is bad for the environment -- but burning it is ridiculous. With the exception of biofuel avgas (which is a tiny proportion of the market) electricity is superior in every way.
In a steady state, forests are carbon stores, same as coal veins, oil reservoirs or methane clathrate.
Wow...that's strange...it's going to take a bit to get my head around the logic of that. I'm not saying your wrong but I have to ponder it a bit...
[EDIT] So the article edited its conclusion after I posted this...please consider this before you ding me. It originally said the fires were releasing that much. Thank you.
Most living organisms contain no hydrocarbons at all. They might contain carbohydrates or proteins or fats, but not hydrocarbons.
for better or worse these stands of older trees are a finite resource, and once they've burned them all the problem stops getting worse. But by then the CO2 is released and unlikely to be re-sequestered in Indonesia anytime soon
1. Tropical peatland is not just trees. Its also got peat - a pile of vegetation that isn't exactly rotting - but rather storing carbon. In fact peat is a fuel source in many parts of the world - not coal or oil, but similar to those in releasing otherwise stored carbon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_peat
2. The process in this area also releases a lot of methane, which rotting doesn't always release, and certainly doesn't release this quickly.
Burning the tress is not part of the natural process that I can only imagine have been built over millions of years to find some sort of balance.
Just like any other system if you overload it beyond what it's built to handle it has consequences.
Genuinely interested.
This is not burning a tree it's burning forests, forests have lifespans of millennia. And that's not even considering these specific forests sit atop peat, you're not going to re-grow peat soils in 10 years.
> If we could capture all that carbon back by just re-growing trees for 10-20 years, we'd be fine.
Which is not what's happening, and fast-growers impoverish the soil and don't set up self-sustaining forests, we're mostly just setting the whole area up for erosion.
Of course it does. I have a tree. I can leave it alone for 100 years and it will reproduce itself several times over and then die and rot. Or I can burn it today.
In the normal lifecycle of a forest, there is a continuous low-level carbon release from trees rotting (or small fires) which is cycled back in the forest by new trees growing up in their placed. A mature forest is a carbon store, if the forest is stable it takes in as much carbon as it produces out.
You burn the forest, all the locked carbon gets released in the atmosphere with no recapture.
And that's not even considering that indonesian forests sit on peat, which are non-cycling long-term carbon stores.
> The problems only crop up when you extract trapped hydrocarbons from underground and burn those. Oil and Coal bad, Tree's not so much.
All that oil and coal originally came from the environment, it's the exact same result.
This does change both the short term and long term atmospheric balance. If the land were left to eventually recover then the long term balance would be restored. That isn't going to happen.
This gets trotted out every time population, deforestation, and similar are discussed in relation to climate.
Yes, the cycle is roughly balanced. However, the magnitude of CO2 in the cycle increases. The cycle is not instantaneous; some of that CO2 in the cycle is always atmospheric. If you increase the volume of CO2 in the cycle you by definition and necessity increase the volume in the atmosphere at any given time.
At huge cost to the economy and freedom from government regulations and bureaucracy. Plus, a lot of "green" solutions aren't utopic or practical.
It's not all or nothing, and I support being ecologically conscious. But I don't think it's wise to dismiss all criticism of the climate change cult.
So color me jaded about Dems shouting about tax credits for GM Volts or implementing cap and trade.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023034803045795784...
"Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research."
If it's Science, why the lies? And why the push for government intervention? I thought Science was about reality, not policy.
If climate "skeptics" aren't completely full of it, why do they constantly mix up climate and weather and otherwise constantly demonstrate fundamental misunderstandings of the topic?
In fact, there's little that's worse for HN. Such tangents are predictable, which makes them tedious, and tendentious, which makes them prolific. Tedious plus prolific equals sludge. Moreover, such discussions only get worse as they proceed, never better.
Of course it's not terrible to improve the atmosphere. But you're making it sound like all methods are equivalent; when there are limited resources to address the problem, they need to be allocated accordingly.
It's a similar situation to water in California -- yes, everyone should cut down on consumption. But the single-family mega-mansions using as much as 90 normal residences [1] cutting 10% of their water usage has a much bigger impact than an average residence cutting 10%.
Edited:
If a billion dollars spent in the US reduces US emissions by 5%, and US emissions and emissions from these fires are equivalent, and it costs less to incentivize Indonesian / Malaysian palm oil producers to stop burning peat forest and reduce emissions by 5%, we should be doing that instead.
[1] https://www.revealnews.org/article/the-wet-prince-of-bel-air...
Original before edit: If the US could spend a billion dollars to reduce our carbon emissions by 5%, or could spend a billion dollars paying Indonesia & Malaysia to stop setting palm oil on fire and reduce THEIR emissions, the results are not equivalent. The latter is 200x more effective. [the 200x was from a misreading of the article]
"Taken together, the impact of peat fires on global warming can be more than 200 times greater than fires on other lands."
And if you're looking at how the US could effectively use its financial clout to help the environment, funding investigations into who started illegal forest fires in upstream Kalimantan is probably going to be lower on the list than subsidising cleantech in California.
One of the tricks of the trade is to use logical fallacies, as they are mechanisms for hiding premises or faulty logic, which is ideal to build assumptions in the viewer's mind that are then shattered by the punchline.
The figure of speech employed here is a fallacy called Begging the Question. When the character says "what if we create a better world for nothing" he is implicitly accepting the premise that the changes proposed by the presenter would create a better world even though he might not agree with the presenter's conclusions.
So the "funny" comes from pretending that we all agree that the list of things the presenter is talking about actually describe "a better world".
As for real life, I would say the cartoon, while funny, does not "sum up perfectly" the issue in real life, because in real life what is under dispute is whether governments taking more control for themselves, in order to carry out those things in the presenter's slide, is actually a better world than all of the alternatives, including taking care of the planet without giving more power to government institutions which have proven themselves incapable of seeing to completion endeavors several orders of magnitude simpler than "saving the world".
And in fact we already saw what happens when government does take control. The result is vastly improved pollution, and without wrecking the economy.
Where? What's that place where the industry (short for "all private companies") can do what they will (your words), meaning, government cannot curb their will?
I've never heard of such place in all my readings of History and Economics. I'm ready for you to blow my mind!
For times and places where pollution was not regulated, look at just about anywhere before 1900 or so.
Can you point out in your original post ("We already saw what happens") the wording you used to constrain the actions you are talking about to just pollution? I missed that. I don't want to accuse you of poorly wording your arguments, or fixing them up as you go along.
> For times and places where pollution was not regulated, look at just about anywhere before 1900 or so.
So now what you're saying is this:
We already saw what happens when the government lets the industry do what they will regarding pollution, but doesn't let them do what they will in numerous other aspects: the result is massive pollution (your example being, I suppose, US in 1880).
"And in fact we already saw what happens when government does take control. The result is vastly improved pollution, and without wrecking the economy."
Where is that place? What's the place that right now doesn't have a wrecked economy, whose government tightly regulates pollution (I want to know how often that government sends workers to collect samples from factories waste, test it in the lab, potentially sues the company for non-compliance, etc) and that had a horrible pollution problem that was vastly improved by government action?
I still think what we should try is a situation where a government lets the industry do what they will in every aspect (not just pollution). That, it seems, has never happened, and according to Rothbard, Hayek, Friedman and Nozick, would yield the most positive solution of all possible solutions (which in this case would be the cleanest environment).
By the way, this means that your original post did not refute what I said, because you only refuted the regulated-industries-excepting-pollution, whereas I was talking about unregulated industries.
I'm curious as to why you think completely unregulated industry would result in the most reduction in pollution, when industries with no pollution regulations (but with other regulations) have repeatedly shown to pollute enormously at every opportunity. What mechanism would cause industry to suddenly care about their pollution in that scenario?
How could those industries not pollute enormously, when they have to quickly adapt to any new government law or regulation (or they will die) in an unpredictable political and legislative scenario? Even if a company had plans to contain their pollution (and therefore funds allocated for this), they would quickly have to divert those funds as soon as a new regulation impeded on their business. When companies are run in unpredictable, ever-changing scenarios such as being regulated by a government, they can't look into the future with confidence to make financial decisions for it in the present (such is the nature of not being able to predict the next rule coming down the pike).
As for your question, it's simple, really. The mechanism that would cause industry to suddenly care about their pollution is called private property - which, don't kid yourself, is not the "private property" extant in the U.S. where there are still taxes for land that is owned, there's eminent domain, there's civil forfeiture, etc. Which is crazy, considering the constitution really only allows the government to own 10 square miles of land, but that's besides the point.
With private property, industries would be very careful not to pollute, say, a nearby river they don't own, because the owner might sue them for having damaged their property (just like you can sue for someone driving a wrecking ball through your house by accident or with intent to damage). If the company in question does own their nearby river, they will still have to make sure that they are only polluting the river they own, and not any downstream rivers that are not their property, or they might get sued by those downstream-river owners.
The government's job, in this scenario, is to enforce contract law and property rights (via tort law) through its justice courts. Since the river owners and the polluting company (in our example) don't have a contract with each other, only tort law applies. Clearly the company damaged these owners' rivers downstream (let's suppose) so the courts will decide the company must either cease and desist (destroying the property of river owners) and compensate them for the damage caused, or offer to buy them out, or offer to draw a contract that the river owners would agree to instead of winning the lawsuit.
If the company owns the nearby river and there are no downstream rivers, they can choose to pollute that river without consequences. If people aren't happy with that, they have many choices: they may bring awareness to the cause, stage a boycott, pool money to offer to buy the river (though the company isn't required to sell, its shareholders nevertheless like money and will be forced to weigh between 1. selling the river and finding some place else to store their waste and byproducts, and 2. continuing to pollute the river that causes them so much grief they have people offering them money to stop - the company will have to find a way to solve that impasse). Most probably this would be solved swiftly since the options outlined do not need the government.
I'm sure this will probably raise more questions for you than answer them, but having gone through that same path I can tell you all those questions have satisfying answers scattered all across many books by Rothbard, Nozick et alii but most of them have been compiled nicely by a very smart and helpful lady called Mary J. Ruwart.
Your example is very good for the lawsuit approach, because there's one polluter and one pollutee and it's very clear with liability, cause and effect, etc.
I accept that this solution works for cases like this. Indeed, it's why I mostly don't have to deal with people dumping trash on my front door and such. Property rights work fine for that sort of thing.
The problem I have is when both pollution and harm is much more diffuse. You might have thousands or millions of polluters, and millions or billions of victims. For any given polluter-pollutee pairing, the harm is far below the cost of litigation. Yet the total harm can be enormous.
For example, let's say there's a city with ten thousand factories and 20 million people. The factories are polluting the air like crazy which makes it unpleasant to be outside and causing all sorts of long-term health problems. (I just got back from Beijing so this is a particularly significant example for me.) Someone living in this city wants to sue the polluters for the massive amount of harm they're causing. How does this work?
Here's how I see it not working. They can't sue every factory because they can't afford the legal fees for ten thousand lawsuits. They'll have to pick one, or maybe a few. Now they get to court and have to prove damages. Well, the defendant's pollution is causing about 0.01% of the total pollution affecting the plaintiff. It's negligible. Even if you say that the total harm to the plaintiff is, say, $10 million, the defendant's share of that liability is $1,000. Hardly worth the time to litigate. And will you even be able to prove to the court that that particular factory is responsible for any of the pollution harming that particular plaintiff? Particles don't have serial numbers, after all, and neither do cancer cells.
Maybe you manage to put together a class action lawsuit so all 20 million citizens can band together. You still have the same problems of going after an individual factory.
Maybe the legal system is structured such that all 20 million citizens can band together and sue all 10,000 factories simultaneously. Aggregate harm can be demonstrated and liability apportioned even though no individual factory can be blamed, and no individual plaintiff can conclusively trace any ailment to the pollution. This works, but all you've done is reinvent something identical to modern environmental regulations, only they're ad-hoc regulations dictated by courts rather than concrete regulations dictated by the legislature.
And this is a relatively simple example. How would this deal with, for example, atmospheric mercury pollution that has already caused seafood to be dangerously toxic to children and pregnant women if eaten in large quantities? How would it deal with greenhouse gas pollution which won't cause any catastrophic effects for decades?
Yes, this is the scenario that would occur. It's obvious, in retrospect, you've debated this before. ;)
Are you familiar with the concept of DROs? I would need to introduce the concept of Dispute Resolution Organizations and Polycentric Law in order to explain this fully, which I am afraid would take far too long. The gist is that, due to many advantages I will skip over here, people would subscribe to DROs (like they do today for life insurance) which would mediate disputes through negotiation with a view to establishing new contracts that will repair the initial damage that is under scrutiny. People would choose DROs based on the promises and rules that DROs make and abide by when they sign their contracts with those they represent, and based on the process they have for negotiating and establishing new rules, and also their tie-breaking process.
There would be DROs for people in general, DROs for specialized trades (like medical doctors and engineers due to different liabilities), and of course DROs for companies.
If several companies are polluting the air in a given city full of people, and those people want to sue those companies for their smog having caused them bodily harm (under tort law, since your body is your property), then they could notify their DROs of their intent; those DROs already talk to each other on a consistent basis since that is how disputes are solved between people that belong to different DROs, so they already have rules amongst themselves for how to deal with lawsuits that are many-to-many in relationship, as it were. Upon asked to effectuate this plural lawsuit, the DROs representing both plural parties would engage in negotiation amongst themselves on behalf of their clients and would need to find a solution that would make most of their clients happy. Here we have the DROs interests perfectly aligned with the interests of those they represent, because if the DRO makes an unpopular decision, it will lose clients.
> This works, but all you've done is reinvent something identical to modern environmental regulations
Yes, but now without the coercion that is sine-qua-non to regulations. That means a huge decrease in the initiation of violence among people.
> And this is a relatively simple example.
It is, and I hope my sketch-answer above has enough information to inform you that there are very good and well-fleshed-out solutions to this problem as discovered by the philosophers that explore this field. Nozick is particularly good at taking readers through complicated examples of real-life situations that at first seem hard or impossible to solve with a free market.
> How would this deal with, for example, atmospheric mercury pollution that has already caused seafood to be dangerously toxic to children and pregnant women if eaten in large quantities? How would it deal with greenhouse gas pollution which won't cause any catastrophic effects for decades?
I do not know if there are proposed solutions for those issues where there is a large delay between cause and effect. Here I am speaking from my own head and not remembering things I've read as I was above for the DRO answer: I would guess that for the first case, where a present issue was caused by something/someone(s) in a hazy past, that the tortfeasor may be impossible to track down to engage the plaintiffs. If the tortfeasor companies are still around and haven't engaged in this issue before, and proof can be established to link cause and effect to them, I imagine it could be treated as a normal lawsuit from here on (having identified both parties in the suit); their representative DROs will have to negotiate and come up with a solution that is satisfying for all parties involved; if rectification is impossible, then perhaps reparations would be in order. If there is a known method for fish-mercury removal (or the like), then depending on the pressure put on the DROs by their clients, the resolution could include the company having to pay to employ this solution, even though the person who was responsible for the mercury leak (let's suppose) might be long gone.
As for the greenhouse problem where the cause is in the present and the effect is in a hazy future, the DROs would first expect good evidence that there is indeed a cause of something going on, and sufficient evidence that this cause will result in a definable effect. Having established as much, there may be grounds for a lawsuit under threat of violence (threats of violence are considered initiation of violence by most philosophers in this area) since the noxious gases being dispersed now are threatening the lives of children and infant (we can't use "future generations") in the future, just like a threat to kill someone works.
This has been very enjoyable, and I hope you can take something away from this. Most free marketers I meet are well read and reached their conclusions from carefully reading the extremely counter-intuitive stuff that Nozick et alii put forth, or whoever else is their favorite Jew, since most of the best free market philosophers have been Jews for some reason [1] (my guess: high verbal intelligence coupled with propensity towards radicalization and high self-confidence and courage, or as they call it, chutzpah) and I feel like mentioning it because I owe my education largely to them (as an autodidact in economics), even though I am a harsh critic of their version of WW2 history (critiques which are purely based on science (especially chemical analysis) and not on any form of bigotry as many are quick to suggest).
[1] The current best jewish free marketer philosopher is unbeatably Walter Block. You owe it to yourself to listen to some of his arguments; you will undoubtedly catch a glimpse of the whole free market machinery at work through his astoundingly clear explanations. No one comes close. His defense of slander and libel are among my favorites - students that at first disagree with him are left speechless after having their contentions undone by Block.
I find it extremely difficult to take anything you say seriously when you make absurd statements like this. Environmental regulation is responsible for so much violence that its lack can cause a "huge decrease" in it?
Reading further, you are apparently using a definition of the word "violence" which is essentially unrelated to how normal people understand the word. What other words are you using your own definitions for? How am I to understand anything you're saying in any of this when apparently any word can mean anything at any time?
The unlawful exercise of physical force or intimidation by the exhibition of such force.
(Emphasis mine.)
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...
Regulation is intimidation by the exhibition of force (the regulatory body's authority is an exhibition of the threat of violence that backs its ability to fine and imprison).
That is initiation of violence number one.
Second of all, it is theft since the government is appropriating goods it does not own without permission from the owner which in this case is the company that broke environmental regulations.
That is initiation of violence number two.
Now I must ask you, Mike Ash, after all this conversation and your refutations visibly fizzling out (first your silly "I refuse to look up 'violence' in the dictionary' and presently this 'I can't see the violence in threatening banks and stealing from them' grasping-at-straws move, and after having seen my arguments for what I am defending and after your not being able to offer substantive counter-arguments), are you ready to entertain the thought that we should give fully unregulated (-by the government or any other monopoly on violence) industries and private property law a try?
I am ready and willing to help you learn more as I hope to have demonstrated throughout this discussion where I wasn't disrespectful to you and treated your inquiries fairly. I must say though, that judging from your last replies, it might be that you do not possess the intellectual honesty I thought you did when we first started this discussion, because your last two responses have been intellectually dishonest (not looking up in the dictionary, and not being willing to see the violence in state coercion).
The governments job in the present US system includes that, and its demonstrable that that function of government alone is not sufficient to encourage polluters to take great pains not to pollute others property, especially with pollutants that are difficult to trace to a single source such that ascribing liability to a particular polluter is difficult.
You suggest that things like property tax, eminent domain, etc. are problematic to your vision of "private property" (which seems a lot more like sovereign territory than private property), but you don't actually trace any causal link between the features you complain about and companies' propensity to pollute, and the avenues you point to as solutions in a "private property" (by your rather atypical definition of the term) system are, in fact, avenues that are equally present in the existing system and which have proven insufficient to the task.
[1]http://www.wsj.com/articles/north-dakotas-latest-fracking-pr...
"Just went we learn to play poker they change the game to bridge."
The US is the second largest emitter of CO2 in the world, and emits one seventh of the world total. China emits twice as much but has four times as many people. If you brought China into line with the US on a per-capita basis, you'd increase their total emissions by a factor of two!