Awkward Utopia

This week’s topic: Global Warming and Gore’s Peace Prize

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Jimmy G: There is fuzzy math/faulty logic employed in giving Gore a Peace Prize.

Harsha: Correction: He only won $700,000.

FC: According to Colbert, the market has spoken. The movie made money, global warming [gw] is real.

MM: The prize was political in nature. What has Al Gore done fore peace (unless gw causes mass chaos, which nobody is saying)? Even if gw is undesirable, there are still better things on which we should focus our scarce resources.

Harsha: The first peace prize given for an environmental cause was in 2004.

JN: If it is happening, it could cause massive devastation. A drastic rise in sea levels would cause a refugee crisis in places like Bangladesh.

JG: I’ll take the firm stance of no, gw doesn’t exist. The people who are screaming about it (eg. Gore) don’t know anything. It’s all speculation. Maybe even a Democratic conspiracy. Anti-business environmental groups can’t attack companies directly, so they attack them like this.

FC to MM: Studies show there’s a correlation between violent crime and high temperatures. They keep the temperature in jails very low.

[Discussion of Russia as an outlier]

JG: Correlation is not causation. Like Denslow says, more people get hit by cars in Florida than elsewhere. Is that because drivers here are worse, or because more people walk?

FC: Well, I concede temperatures are rising but I don’t concede that it’s my fault.

AB: Diego would like to point out that we are experiencing not gw but global cooling.

MM to JG: People attack corporations all the time. Friedman encountered that. [Talk of CW's icebergs melting/sea level dropping theory] People are pushing for government action. But it’s not clear gw has a negative effect on the standard of living of Americans. Science is slow to determine the truth of anything (eg. new prescription meds must be tested repeatedly). If it is occuring, and it’s caused by humans, we still don’t know for sure what its implications are.

AT: If you accept that something must be done, that’s an attack on liberty. My actions can only be regulated if they have some effect on other people. If gw alarmists are right, almost everything anybody does affects other people and can be controlled. Also, no one country can solve this alone. A world government would have to be instituted.

Jenny: I heard a preposterous-sounding argument that glaciers melting actually disproves gw. I want Al Gore to run for president again so I can make fun of him.

FB: Of course the prize was political. It always is. That the earth is warming is the scientific concensus, but they can’t prove the cause.

JN to FC: The coldest temperatures have the highest suicide rates! Even if we accept that gw is happening, is that bad? And also, what will be the cost to the American std. of living of intervening? Cutting our fuel usage would be an enormous inconvenience. We should prepare to deal with higher temperatures, not try to stop them.

BL: I voted for Gore in 2000 and was upset that Bush won. I’m happy to be a Democrat. He was only awarded the prize because of who he is. Climate change is happening but it isn’t mostly caused by humans. A carbon tax is the best solution if something has to be done. It would allow us to lower other, more distorting taxes.

Harsha: Gw drives innovation. Since people care about this issue, companies have developed new technologies with other benefits (eg. cars with better gas mileage).

Zack: To what extent are greenhouses gases responsible for gw? I think it’s a second or third order cause. It’s also hard to assess whether gw is a good or an evil. Warmer temperatures increase the growing season somewhere. We probably couldn’t stop it anyway.

FL: Most people agree that this is happening, and that it will impact us. Pollution harms kids who get asthma because of fumes from cars.[Grumbling] How do you explain the ozone depletion if there is no human effect on the environment? We do contribute to changes.

BL: But it’s hard to predict the changes.

FL: Reducing our use of CFCs led to contractions in the holes in the ozone layer.

DG: It’s true that people are anti-business. As far as Kyoto protocol and measures like it go, unless something applies to everyone, it’s only there to get at Western corporations. But I don’t think the issue is bad. Look at all the innovation that has been promoted. There are inefficiencies in the current system (eg. we are too reliant on cars). Pollution is a real thing that really leads to asthma in children. A gas tax is not a horrible idea, though a global treaty is not the way to go.

SS: I can’t contribute much to a discussion just of gw. But we undoubtedly have an empirically verifiable effect on the environment. There’s a region in the Gulf called the “dead zone” because it can’t sustain life. My position is that we have an ethical obligation to not destroy the earth. When you turn swamp into Disney World, that’s a better use of that land. But nobody says the Gulf is better now than it was before we killed it. People want cheap food, but they also want forests and pretty beaches, and there is a disconnect between consumption and its indirect costs.

MM: It’s all about property rights. The problem is that nobody owns the air. I can’t protect the sky around my house. There is an oversupply of pollution.[SS challenges the premise that pollution has any demand at all.] That’s the main argument for government intervention. Privatizing waterways would be easier. This might sound outlandish, but children get asthma because their parents chose to live in an urban environment.

DG: There is a smaller incidence of asthma when public transit is implemented (eg. in Europe).

AT: If it’s happening, the worst possible effect is a rise in sea levels. CW’s theory doesn’t work well, but humans are hardly responsible. Even the temperatures on Mars are rising. It’s also not clear we could do much to stop is. Maybe build a wall around the arctic. Large and permanent settlements are a recent development. The earth might warm naturally, or a meteor could cause a rise in sea levels. Maybe the problem is our concept of permanence.

JG: Democrats are hypocrites. They wanted to implement a $1 gas tax when a gallon was $.99. Now they’re complaining about prices.[It is pointed out that the problem is more with profits than prices.] I don’t think a world government with us in control would be so bad. The voice of the ACLU would be minimized. …The mars landing was a government conspiracy.

FC: Gw will encourage space exploration. That’s good.

CW: He might as well have gotten an award in math for what he did. Ludicrous! Kyoto was a horrible way to deal with the problem. It had losers and winners. People don’t care about the fish dying in the Gulf or it would factor into the price of food. The damage is to ecosystems which doesn’t matter much. Oil company profits boom and bust like any other. The function is to make life easier for everyone. There should be more.

BL: The reason for environmental problems is that the pricing mechanism doesn’t work (eg. water is underpriced). The same thing happened in the USSR. There’s no money to invest further and no incentive to to ration at the individual level. Congress is an absentee landlord. If people had a stake in wildlife there would be less environmental degradation.

MV: Pollution rights should be sold to companies instead of having a carbon tax.

BL: The end results are theoretically the same, but with a tax you have a recurring revenue source with which you could replace other taxes.

Jeremy: This is all very partisan. It’s still a young problem and should be left to scientists.

JN: Studies are done by academics who are biased.

CW agrees: It’s like the NEA. The political context matters. Agendas exist. Studying gw gets you grant money. It should be left to the market.

MM: “The government should inject more money into research.”

DG: Dead zones lead to problems with food chains. A decreasing supply of fish increases prices. Fertilizer used to grow corn kills animals.

AT: The problem with ethanol is that it raises the price of food. It matters when pollution kills fish because that passes the cost on. Zoning also causes problems.

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SS would like to add that although she feels there is an ethical mandate that we not unnecessarily destroy ecosystems and drive animal species to extinction, there are obviously economic arguments to be made as well. Coral reefs can not withstand changes in water temperature of even a degree or two. What happens to Australia’s tourism industry when the Great Barrier dies?