Lessons from the Skeptics Conference | Hacker News Reader

Lessons from the Skeptics Conference

tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com

5 pointsjgamman10 comments

this is their science correspondent???

Ronald Bailey had some interesting notes on the conference. Their ideas seem fairly well-grounded and reasonable, the kinds of things we should be debating. Wish I could have been there:

http://reason.com/news/show/125281.html

http://reason.com/news/show/125300.html

http://reason.com/news/show/125323.html

Disclosure: I regularly receive a lot of flack for not panicking over Global Warming.

I'm a fan of 'pay to pollute' - charge companies for the right to emit a tonne of CO2. standard business practice is to reduce costs and you can alter the rate of change by steadily increasing the price. it's conceptually simpler but still has the drawback of being a revenue device for govt but that is not unsolvable.

The NYT Magazine isn't that bad. The investigative journalism is generally on par with Salon.

NYT in general though tends to be either anti-intellectual, or propaganda, or both. The idea that a carbon tax is more efficient than cap-and-trade is laughable.

Why is that laughable? I was under the impression that both environmentally and economically, a carbon tax was better.

Earth: The Sequel actually has a really good explanation of this. If you do search inside the book, pages 4-8 are available, and they have a really good summary of the history of the clean air act.

http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Sequel-Reinvent-Energy-Warming/d...

Disclaimer: My dad co-authored this book.

Your dad is president of EDF? Wow, you really never know who you'll find on Hacker News! BTW, that's a nice looking book that's now on my Wish List.

I know for sure that cap-and-trade is better than tech requirements or per-company caps. I'm one of the biggest fans of environmental capitalism around (see http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/worlds-best-primer... and http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/the-ecology-of-com...), but that still doesn't explain why cap-and-trade is better than a carbon tax. Is the concern that the tax will be too low and not result in an absolute reduction in emissions? Or that the revenue collected will be used inappropriately (ie not to offset the damage caused by the pollution)? That was more what I was looking for.

Well I don't want to speak for him, but I think the general advantage of cap-and-trade is that it makes it profitable for entrepreneurs to innovate. When you give money to the government it basically gets stolen, whereas under cap-and-trade the money goes directly the entrepreneurs who come up with the solutions. The book is actually all about the policies that most help entrepreneurs. To quote from the introduction:

"A level playing field. That is what these venture capitalists and innovators require-- not assurances of profits but enough of a fighting chance to make the huge risks they are taking reasonable. Many still will not succeed. Those who do will need enormous ingenuity and doggedness to make their inventions work at a marketable price."

I think most news.yc readers would actually love the book.

True, in practice if the carbon tax was used as a revenue source (or even revenue neutral - basically letting you cut taxes somewhere else), then the incentive would be to make it too low to be either a good pollution deterrent or an entrepreneurial incentive. Sort of like how the gas tax is in the US. In European countries (Japan too?), the gas tax is 10-20x as high was here and their auto and energy industries are very different because of that.

If the carbon tax was high enough (possibly higher than the amount that would maximize taxes collected) and the collected money was used to mitigate environmental impacts, then the tax would be better. Make it really high and the incentive to invent technology rather than pay the tax is still there. However, that's a lot of things to screw up so maybe the cap-and-trade is better in practice.

And I agree that environmental entrepreneurism of the sort mentioned in that book and my blog posts I linked to would be very interesting to many ycnews readers.

“the general advantage of cap-and-trade is that it makes it profitable for entrepreneurs to innovate.”

So does a tax. Innovating in green tech reduces your expenses on carbon tax. Some may complain that this is a reduction in costs instead of an increase in revenue, but the two are equivalent.

The entrepreneur can also sell his green tech to other businesses who want to avoid heavy carbon taxes.

Let's say you have two companies. It costs company A 500 dollars per ton of emissions eliminated. It costs company B 100 dollars per ton of emissions eliminated.

Under a cap-and-trade system, company A can pay company B to reduce its emissions twice as much. This way you reduce the total amount of carbon dioxide pollution by the same amount as creating a tax would, but it is much more economically efficient.

My understanding is that this doesn't work under a carbon tax. Again though, the environment/economics aren't really my areas of expertise.

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