This is going to be a long conversation but I want to stake out my point clearly from the start so when we keep coming back to it you will know where I am coming from
I hold these positions
- Climate Change is almost certainly real
- Humans are almost certainly causing it with carbon emissions, deforestation and domestication of animals
- There will be large environmental costs associated with climate change include a very rapid increase in extinctions
- There are likely to be major population dislocations because of climate change
- There are likely to be major agricultural shifts because of climate change.
Nonetheless, we should pursue the development of fossil fuels as rapidly as possible including looking for ways to streamline regulation in North American regarding fossil fuel production.
Why?
The Immediate Concerns.
- We are in the midst of a long Aggregate Demand slowdown in the Northern Hemisphere. This could be alleviated in part by increases in investment demand. Encouraging the exploration of fossil fuels provides this investment demand. It is like free stimulus for the economy.
- We have a serious dearth of high paying jobs for middle-brow men in this country. Energy extraction, refining and transport provide a potential attractor for these men. Otherwise we will face serious social consequences from watching the wage of these men fall to minimum wage and an increase in permanent joblessness.
- Global growth is constrained by natural resources at the moment, chief among them energy. The speed at which the entire globe can grow is limited by the availability of energy sources and puts us in a rare zero-sum fight over growth. No, this is not a permanent state of affairs even without fossil fuels. High energy prices will induce development both in energy saving and the production of new sources. But, this could take a very long time and produce a high tension period lasting potentially for over a decade.
Rapidly expanding North American fossil fuel production can help cure us of many of the current ills that we face. If you read me you know that I am very now-focused in general, but over time I will try to convince that this is a really big deal and working class families are really struggling.
There are other public policy solutions that you can find but aside from wage subsidies (which seem unlikely in this environment) and opening up new industries for hard working middle-brow folks there will be little improvement. Health care won’t do it. Improving the schools won’t do it.
Even more importantly, there are hundreds of millions of very poor families around the world right now, who would benefit enormously from lifting the energy constraint on growth. It would allow us to shift out of biofuels which would do a little – though not much – to alleviate the other big natural resource constraint, food.
The Long Run Concerns
The primary concern is that this would make it most difficult to meet our aggressive targets in controlling global warming. I stress, not impossible, because no one can predict the future of alternative energy development. I tend to think solar will come to dominant energy production in a matter of decades regardless, because the fundamentals are becoming so cheap.
However, even if we have to face the warming, we face it in the future with a much richer and more progressive world.
The raw wealth accumulation in third world will make much of the transition cost effective. As global manufacturing leaves China for Southeast Asia and eventually Africa billions of people will be lifted out of poverty. These people will adjust their living patterns anyway. They will build new cities and new infrastructure. If they do it in a way that is sensitive to climate change then there is little marginal cost.
An expansion in global trade production also means that local agriculture becomes less important. Farming will become harder in the Congo but easier in Russia. This is fine if the Congo has something to sell to Russia. Growth and trade mean that the costs are greatly ameliorated.
Opposition to immigration is concentrated in the older cohorts of most Western Societies. As they die off the younger generation will be more cosmopolitian and more welcoming of immigrants. This means that a large part of the harmful affects of climate change will be mitigated simply because so many people move to North America and Siberia over the next 100 years.
We will lose species, there is no question about that. An effort to capture and catalog them genetically should be done. However, I caution us against putting too much weight on the flora and fauna that we have. The vast majority of species have gone extinct. We are left with a very small set that happen to have thrived in these conditions. Its not clear that they are somehow fundamentally superior to what will come next, and of course something will come next.
There remains the possibility of geo-engineering. If we really decide that climate change is intolerable there are things we could do to stop it. The very fact that the side effect of energy production is inducing this process tells us how sensitive the climate can be to our interventions. That likewise means that we can introduce other interventions.
Now, we shouldn’t be convinced that we can fine tune the planet. There will always be unintended consequences. However, we should be confident that if things are clearly and obviously much worse for humanity as the world gets hotter we can do something about it. We should not make the perfect the enemy of the good enough.
Lastly, and this will persuade few people but it is important, 100 years is a long time in the industrial age. However, it is simply forever in the information age. There is an extremely high chance that the very nature of human society itself will have changed by that time in ways that render this entire issue moot.
It would be tragic if we sacrificed the wellbeing of poor people today for something that became almost meaningless 100 years from now. Yet, that is precisely what we may be doing.
43 comments
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Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 10:48 am
from Italy
If I understood well, the main principle from which most of your reasoning comes out is that “in the long run we are all dead”. This is the same argument you used for the post on China, now with climate change and so on.
I am not saying this is wrong, just noticing that this seems to be almost the central point for you.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 10:49 am
tomfid
This sounds like a ‘hair of the dog that bit ya’ approach to recovery.
If the negative social externalities to dirty fuel consumption are large, this plan would seem to presume that there’s an unstated positive social externality that is even larger. If the origin of that is aggregate demand dynamics, why focus on fuels in particular?
How is increased production of fossil fuels in North America going to help the poor, who mostly aren’t in North America, except through some kind ot trickle-down process? Since the poor (elsewhere) will bear the brunt of the climate costs, while the rich (North America) benefit from this, it seems a bit self-serving.
And is it even going to work? Oil prices are 5x what they were a decade ago, yet there’s only been a small increase in production. Perhaps the physics of the situation, field sizes that are >100x smaller than they were a few decades ago, are the real constraint.
You are aware that there’s no known geoengineering approach that simultaneously preserves temperature and precipitation patterns? Temperature rise can be stopped, but not climate change, and the consequences may be worse.
Why not do something more creatively bonkers to stimulate aggregate demand? Print a trillion dollars of depreciating coupons to finance energy efficiency and renewable projects, for example?
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 11:29 am
Brett
@tomfid
Good point. You could slow down the actual rise in temperature by dumping a bunch of aerosols into the atmosphere (which is basically what we did from 1945 to the 1970s, before clean air rules), but that in of itself has some adverse climatic effects.
@Karl Smith
They won’t be much richer if they’re spending huge amounts of money per year for decades to adapt by moving/shielding cities from rising sea levels, among other problems. Never mind the economic dislocation involved in changing large patterns of human habitation and business because of the same problems.
It’s also important to emphasize that it’s not like we’re going to suddenly wake up in 2100 and have to deal with a problem. It’s likely going to be a serious problem in 20 years, which will then get steadily worse if we exacerbate (and that’s ignoring possibly risky events that make it worse, like if the Siberian permafrost starts thawing). Perhaps 100 years is in the “long run we are all dead” category for you, Karl, but in 20 years you’ll still likely be alive.
@Karl Smith
You’re rather blase about what would be the largest long-term population shift in human history, away from the coasts where most people live.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 12:48 pm
Brad Johnson
Dear Mr. Smith: Are you an idiot, or a sociopath, or is this just Swiftian satire?
Yours,
Mr. Johnson
Saturday ~ December 3rd, 2011 at 2:09 am
bonzhe
I vote idiot.
The argument boils down to:
1) We should *knowingly* wreck the ecosystem in order to generate well paid jobs in North America in the short term. We need not consider any alternative means to create jobs.
2) “However, we should be confident that if things are clearly and obviously much worse for humanity as the world gets hotter we can do something about it.”
3) “100 years is a long time” and who knows what might happen? Hey, we’ll all be dead!
Swiftian satire would surely go further. This is pure Panglossian dreaming. Granted, the effect is sociopathic, with a truly revolting disinterest in human welfare, but I still get the impression it’s intended to be sincere.
The article suffers from a very common delusion among some economists, who feel it is their duty to make unpalatable, unethical or socially unacceptable ‘solutions’ appear perfectly balanced. In a kind of conjuring trick, they present, with a flourish, the ‘counter-intuitive’ results of an action or policy. I am pretty sick of this vapid showmanship and Professor Smith would do well to keep the impulse in check.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 12:52 pm
rjs
a 2 c worth; keep our fossils in the ground, they will only become more valuable with time; better than $ in the bank…import as much as possible to invest in wind & solar infrastructure…both solar & wind have a big carbon front-load, but if we’re to have a civilization like we’ve become accustomed to we should do both NOW, before the fossils run out..
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 1:19 pm
Alan
Karl,
Kudos on attempting to engage on this topic. You were very generous in your positions (especially: 3,4, and 5 — although a lot depends upon your definition of ‘large’ and ‘major’), yet it clearly wasn’t enough for those replied so far.
I am in complete agreement with many of your points, however I don’t think that logic and reason can win in the public forum on this topic. People’s minds are set.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 1:38 pm
Arthur Smith
Your argument seems to apply equally well to investment in, for example, solar photovoltaics, for which there are no corresponding down-sides regarding pollution or climate. In particular you argue:
* Encouraging the exploration of fossil fuels provides this investment demand. It is like free stimulus for the economy.
Encouraging the construction and installation of solar photovoltaics also provides significant investment demand. How is this any worse or better than “encouraging” fossil fuel exploration, as far as economic costs or benefits? Do you mean something different by “encouraging” than what has been done up to now with renewables? Why don’t we try your fossil fuel kind of “encouraging” for PV and see how it does? Huge amounts of investment capital have in fact been pouring in to PV in recent years, the potential for growth is huge and many investors see it.
* We have a serious dearth of high paying jobs for middle-brow men in this country. Energy extraction, refining and transport provide the potential as an attractor for these men.
Ah, the jobs argument. Well, there’s even more (local) jobs in PV than in fossil fuels, and the vast majority are manufacturing and construction, typical “middle-brow male” territory. The jobs per “dollar of encouragement” ratio is much better for PV than for oil.
* Global growth is constrained by natural resources at the moment, chief among them energy. The speed at which the entire globe can grow is limited by the availability of energy sources and puts us in a rare zero-sum fight over growth.
Ok, this is where the detailed numbers matter. The total potential resource from PV is thousands of times larger than our current use of any fossil fuels. So if you insist the globe needs room to grow, there’s far more room from PV than from fossil investments. But your argument is on “speed at which the entire globe can grow”. That is in part a capital investment cost ratio argument. What are the numbers, comparing oil, coal, current and trends in PV, wind, etc. In the long run, there’s no question PV will win – but is there a short-run argument for fossil? You need some real numbers to prove it. And this is the only part of your argument that could have any real strength in favor of fossil fuels.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 3:36 pm
Leonardo
I usually enjoy reading your train of thought posts, even when I disagree, but this one seems longer and more thought out while simultaneously infinitely more ignorant. There is no evidence for most of what you say here. You seem to simultaneously want to minimize the imminent damage while maximizing the long term prospects out of pure strength of wishful thinking. This just seems like the best case scenario thought experiment of a baked college sophomore not an Econ Prof. For shame.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 3:43 pm
Curt Doolittle
Yes, well I’ve been saying the same thing for the past few years, back when the Keynesians were making ridiculous arguments that the problem wasn’t structural.
CREATE JOBS
a) New electrical grid
b) New nuclear plants
c) Exploit existing fossile fuels
These will increase investment and create a lot of excellent jobs where the return will be decreased energy costs.
CREATE A COMPETITIVE LABOR POOL
d) Eliminate the DOE, revoke all tenure and grant principles the universal right to terminate teachers at will.
e) Change the student loan program to allow effectively individual borrowing for tuition, books and residency, the repayment of which is automatically deducted from payroll over fifteen years.
f) Ban racial profiling and return to pure merit in education.
Austrians look at the problem of human capital first and foremost.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 3:49 pm
Neil Bates
OP neglects a few things. For one, alternative energy will lower demand for non-renewables, whatever else happens with them, leading to lower prices. There is an irony with that too: rapid use of the NRs means we hit “peaks” (OK, bottlenecks or slowdowns in effective output, feel better now …) sooner and whatever trouble that makes. Finally, encouraging low population growth makes demand less without penalizing per capita use, that course is disdained mostly for irrational reflexive reasons that ignore the many benefits and few disadvantages.
But your summary statement is truly dreadful. You just speculate with waving arms, “However, it is simply forever in the information age. There is an extremely high chance that the very nature of human society itself will have changed by that time in ways that render this entire issue moot.” (Furthermore, shouldn’t you consider the many other ways we could help them?) Then you pretend it is nasty to makes things harder for poor people now because of your pretense that this dubious and risky pipe dream is a slam dunk. Not responsible making of a case.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 3:58 pm
Ryan
I can appreciate the points that you are trying to make and, if given that all things were to remain as they are in the energy and mfg industries, you might even be correct.
However, looking at the historical history of manufacturing (and to some extent the mining industry), I think we can expect a shift towards more automation and less human involvement in the performance of these industrial jobs. If this shift to automation occurs, then there would be a decrease in the social benefit, which reduces the offset of the negative impact of climate change.
Also, if the investment is made as suggested, I would expect the number of workers able to do the jobs to increase, thereby causing a decrease in the wages offered for doing those jobs (a shift in the labor supply and demand).
It’s interesting, but as many manufacturing industries have learned, more money is to be made in lowering wages and increasing automation. And the one rule of history is: “always follow the money”.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 4:23 pm
A quintet of econo-inkblots « Blunt Object
[...] In praise of dirty energy: There are worse things than pollution and we have them (Modeled Behavior) I hold these positions [...]
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 4:54 pm
mattn
Given the continued increase in worldwide population and the likelihood that large developing countries would like to have a western standard of living, I have long thought that sufficient control of emissions is impossible. It’s not a question of whether we burn through all the oil, it’s a question of when, and the difference in time isn’t going to be that great (a few decades maybe), especially compared to the residence time of CO2.
The only longterm solution is carbon sequestration–we will have to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere (no other geoengineering is possible that has no negative impacts). That’ll cost a lot of money, so we are better off accelerating (as Karl Smith suggests) as much as possible so that we have an economy where sequestration is economically feasible.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 6:04 pm
tomfid
If sequestration (air capture) is the only long term solution, then wouldn’t it make sense to pay for it with a price on emissions? Certainly no one will do it spontaneously, as it is a thermodynamic loser. Of course, if you start by assuming that we’ll burn all the fossil fuels anyway, then you’ve presumed failure, so it makes sense to pray for this kind of technical miracle.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 6:43 pm
mattn
It depends upon how expensive it is to do. My (uninformed) impression is that it’s too expensive now, so a tax or any other sort of external cost isn’t likely to make it affordable. I’m not praying for a technical miracle (although that’d be nice, plus a unicorn) so much as an economic one. To a certain extent, environmentalism is an easier sell to people who are well off than to those who are not, so as temperatures become unambiguously warmer a serious sequestration effort may actually occur for a wealthier society.
I’m not saying I think this is all the first best option, just the first best option that might actually happen. I sadly don’t see a real-world scenario where we don’t go through all the oil we can get.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 7:31 pm
tomfid
It seems fairly unlikely that people who are unwilling to internalize costs of emissions now will be any more likely to subsidize air capture later. The problem will remain that the costs are up front while the benefits are substantially in the future, due to long time constants. Plus there will be conflict over perceived winners and losers from the result (as with other geoengineering approaches).
To the extent that I’m wrong about this, I suspect that it’s visible impacts that will make a difference to attitudes, not wealth. After all, the richest (US) are among the least willing to do anything at present.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Anton P. Nym
“It would be tragic if we sacrificed the wellbeing of poor people today for something that became almost meaningless 100 years from now.”
Setting fire to your raft is a perfectly rational act under all too many economic models if you are going to disembark before the flames reach you… what happens to the other passengers is an externality, so we can ignore it for purposes of this model.
In periods of disruption and mass migration, the greatest burden of suffering is borne by, you guessed it, the poor. They have the least ability to move wealth and the fewest reserves upon which to draw in times of crisis. Your point completely ignores that in the hopes that there will be no poor when we see the climatic effects… which is very much whistling in the graveyard.
It also misses the point that GDP is a measure and not an end product; it’s only one (incredibly coarse) indictator of wealth in a society. Focusing merely on it and not on the externalities leads to perverse effects like those shown in Keynes’ buried-money-in-a-coal-mine gedankenexperiment or the “broken windows” case. In terms of GDP *any* expenditure on energy works as stimulus; the argument is as strong for spending on windmills and nuclear power plants as it is for fossil fuels.
Poor people don’t need a bigger GDP, per se, but rather the fruits of it that grant more wellbeing… notably including health, which is all too often sacrificed in the pursuit of fossil fuels. (Take a look at Nigeria, for example.) We need to look at economic options in that light, and not merely in the terms of balance sheets.
By all means let us look at increasing energy production to help the developing world put poverty behind them… but let’s not make them make the same mistakes we did along the way. Surely they can skip past the worst of our technologies (as they did with telecommunications) and not have to deal with the effluent that developed nations are still trying to clean up two centuries later.
— Steve
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 5:32 pm
Ryan Cooper (@RyanLouisCooper)
Ok, I kinda sorta see what you’re talking about, but the flippant dismissal of the possible environmental costs under your “burn it all as fast as we can” scenario is staggering. Take a look at what happened during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. We’re talking trillions upon trillions of costs.
This is why people think of economics as a kind of insanity.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 6:45 pm
Becky Hargrove
Leonardo,
And who destroyed the part of you that once would have looked at the problems of the world with the eyes of a generalist.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 7:11 pm
Economist Karl Smith Suggests Solving Global Warming By Having Everyone Move To Siberia | Greediocracy
[...] Karl Smith, one of the bloggers at the influential economics blog Modeled Behavior. In his post “In Praise of Dirty Energy: There Are Worse Things Than Pollution and We Have Them,” the assistant professor of public [...]
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 7:14 pm
Economist: We’ll just move to Siberia to escape climate change | Greediocracy
[...] have to go to Karl Smith, one of the bloggers at the influential economics blog Modeled Behavior. In his post “In Praise of Dirty Energy: There Are Worse Things Than Pollution and We Have Them,” [...]
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 7:22 pm
Craig
“Opposition to immigration is concentrated in the older cohorts of most Western Societies. As they die off the younger generation will be more cosmopolitan and more welcoming of immigrants. This means that a large part of the harmful affects of climate change will be mitigated simply because so many people move to North America and Siberia over the next 100 years.”
Get ready Canucks and Ruskies, here we come! I’m sure you won’t mind a few billion more people coming to live with you in the next century. Seeing as how you’ll be so “cosmopolitan” and all. I’m sure we’ll be welcomed with open arms. And if by chance you’re not quite so open minded, take heart. On our journey north to the unfrozen tundra, most of will probably die in the fetid swamps of what was once the great taiga forests.
I’ve heard that you are a brilliant economist and this is the first blog post of yours I’ve ever read. So I’m gonna just assume it’s satire.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 7:22 pm
Chad Brick
Every one of your points is equally true when you substitute fossil fuels with renewables. Hence, none of your points makes the argue for the former over the latter any stronger.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 8:29 pm
Economist: We’ll just move to Siberia to escape climate change | Grist
[...] have to go to Karl Smith, one of the bloggers at the influential economics blog Modeled Behavior. In his post "In Praise of Dirty Energy: There Are Worse Things Than Pollution and We Have Them," the assistant [...]
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 8:33 pm
Lorenzo from Oz
Karl: you cannot argue against the righteous apocalypse that must punish us for our environmental sins unless we assume the requisite level of sackcloth and ashes. You really should not attempt to apply reason to religion in such a way
Keep it up.
Friday ~ December 2nd, 2011 at 9:19 pm
rjs
i dont get it…i aint got that much more time, but it dont make sense for someone your age to want to use up all of the remaining oil now & have none left for when youre older…
Saturday ~ December 3rd, 2011 at 12:25 am
Recall
Climate change doesn’t end with everybody moving to Siberia. It’s perfectly capable of making Earth flat out uninhabitable for humanity, anywhere.
Saturday ~ December 3rd, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Buster Friendly and his Friendly Friends
Fallacious reasoning. Why is aggregate growth desirable? Please explain.
Saturday ~ December 3rd, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Patrick
This is the pretty standard business/economics response. Design for the mean case +- 1.5 standard deviations, and ignore the long tail risk. Despite the fact that the cost distribution isn’t flat.
I think we just recently had an excellent demonstration of the consequences of ignoring long tail risk via the collapse of our financial markets.
The risk of a worst case distribution may only be 5% of 1% but the costs might be 1000 times greater, ignoring that sort of risk cost distribution is still a mistake even if it is a common mistake.
Sunday ~ December 4th, 2011 at 9:09 am
Andrew Marchant-Shapiro
“We will lose species, there is no question about that. An effort to capture and catalog them genetically should be done. However, I caution us against putting too much weight on the flora and fauna that we have. The vast majority of species have gone extinct. We are left with a very small set that happen to have thrived in these conditions. Its not clear that they are somehow fundamentally superior to what will come next, and of course something will come next.”
Well, yes. Save that we and those species we are currently driving out of existence evolved *together*, which suggests that there may be some interdependencies involved, some of which we are only now becoming aware of. Others may take a long time to sort out. Even if we forget the interdependencies, consider that the same world in which those species evolved was the world in which humans evolved. It might be a good idea to consider them, at the very least, the canaries in the coal mine.
As for “something coming next,” new species branch off from existing ones via the processes of mutation and competition AS WELL AS extinction. In terms of an information economy, 100 years may be a very long time indeed. For many species, it’s only a few generations–not nearly enough time for evolution to operate under the best case scenario. Once you kill off a species, you get no more branches from it.
Monday ~ December 5th, 2011 at 3:04 am
luther blissett
“Rapidly expanding North American fossil fuel production–”
Plenty of coal/gas/oil companies have leases that they could exploit if they wanted to. They’re not doing so. It’s not just that Smith is happy to defecate in the mouths of future generations on dubious economic premises; it’s that he’s ignorant of the steps necessary even to embark upon that course of action.
Monday ~ December 5th, 2011 at 12:45 pm
Neil B.
Luther, so I’ve heard – could you elaborate on why those companies aren’t exploiting the resources as much as they could?
Monday ~ December 5th, 2011 at 12:48 pm
Neil B.
BTW, this is one of the best examples of a gob-smaking takedown in comments of a suspect blog post I’ve ever seen. Glad to have participated! REM that OP did a follow up, get on his case again, folks!
Tuesday ~ December 6th, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Revoking “Praise” of Dirty Energy | ecoAffect
[...] Matthew Yglesias I see that Karl Smith’s insouciance about climate change has driven my former colleague Brad Johnson to the brink of total despair, so I’m going to [...]
Tuesday ~ December 13th, 2011 at 9:22 am
Top Ten Signs We Are Living in a Warming World « Mediterranean Sea climate and environmental change
[...] an economist at the University of North Carolina, argued in a much-commented-upon post on the blog Modeled Behavior that while climate change was indeed happening, this was no reason to get hot and bothered: “A [...]
Monday ~ December 19th, 2011 at 10:14 pm
Brian
I say let the free market rule. Yes of course you have to have some regulation to keep things ethical. I like the science and potential behind things like biofuels, but let’s not mandate how much we have to use by 20XX. Drill here and drill now and create some competition along the way. Force the next guy to be better than the last and we’ll all be better off. More efficient at a reduced cost. I see this in the agriculture industry all the time. Diesel engines are being required to produce far less emmissions. Unfortunately that drives up the cost of equipment, but the manufacturers are now making more powerful engines that use less fuel. In my world it’s all about getting more done with less, because that’s how you make a profit by finding your best return on investment. I like to say that I’m a default environmentalist of sorts. What’s good for my bottom line by coincidence happens to be good for the planet as well. Competition breeds innovation so let the fossil fuels have at it, and we’ll all be better off in the long rung.
Wednesday ~ December 21st, 2011 at 11:01 am
Jens
“It would be tragic if we sacrificed the wellbeing of poor people today for something that became almost meaningless 100 years from now.”
Basic income is the best way to combat poverty, not destroying the natural services that most of the poor people on the planet disproportionately depend on.
The best way to ensure prosperity is to depress wages, temporarily decrease working hours in downturns and build a long-term, competitiveness-driven possibility for growth (like Germany).
There is no free lunch, it is better to be prudent and patient instead of hot-headed and greedy and thus make a serious effort to build society on something that will not end, like a limited carbon supply dug up from the ground.
IF technological fixes come around, we will be better placed to use them in a constructive way, rather then in a destructive way if we already have a society that works along these values. If preservation of the good things we have is not important then maybe the next species to die out is the human being in favour of a more efficient being with a much higher quality of life than us – a computer.
Quality of life is dependent on many things. Personally, I get less quality of life by seeing the remains of my planet being squandered so carelessly and who is to say my quality of life is less important than the ‘quality’ of life someone else gets by buying some cheap shit every time they get fearful of falling into the trap of thinking for themselves.
Saturday ~ December 31st, 2011 at 4:08 pm
Dumbest Blog Post of 2011 « The Reality-Based Community
[...] grownups who should know better, omitting children and wingnuts) goes to economist Karl Smith´s post of 2 December on climate change. This is bravely entitled ¨In Praise of Dirty Energy: There Are Worse Things [...]
Sunday ~ January 1st, 2012 at 1:29 pm
Barry
James Wimberly, at ‘The Reality-Based Community’, awarded you a – well, dumbest of year post in the climate change category:
http://www.samefacts.com/2011/12/climate-change/dumbest-blog-post-of-2011/
Monday ~ January 2nd, 2012 at 6:55 am
Scaling Green » Blog Archive » Introducing: Deep Accountability
[...] Professor Smith’s argues in his article, “In Praise of Dirty Energy: There Are Worse Things Than Pollution, and We Have Them,” that “a large part of the harmful affects of climate change will be mitigated simply because so [...]
Monday ~ January 2nd, 2012 at 3:03 pm
rjsigmund
I think it’s time to explore what Deep Accountability would look like. I’ll start here, with this Modest Proposal for University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Karl Smith. He’s the newest addition to the crowd that believes global climate disruption isn’t a problem because we can all move to the top of the world.
http://scalinggreen.com/2012/01/introducing-deep-accountability/
Thursday ~ January 5th, 2012 at 2:48 pm
Introducing: Deep Accountability - ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION – ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION
[...] Professor Smith’s argues in his article, “In Praise of Dirty Energy: There Are Worse Things Than Pollution, and We Have Them,” that “a immeasurable partial of a damaging affects of meridian change will be mitigated [...]