An Inconvenient Ruth
Al Gore uses a lot of electricity. Al Gore buys carbon offsets. Libertarians who take anthropogenic global warming seriously - count me among them - generally favor markets in emissions over hard regulatory targets for individual homes and businesses. That way people and companies can decide to conserve or offset or buy unused capacity as they see fit, minimizing emissions while maximizing utility.
Curiously, the “free market” think tank that gives us our first link declares that Gore’s free choice to use his own money to offset his family’s carbon output makes him a “hypocrite,” since he thinks global warming is bad. This may seem odd, but perusing the Hit & Run comment thread from which I got the above links will clarify: libertarians believe in principles, and one of the most important principles is
AL GORE SUCKS AND IS FAT FAT FAT!!!!
Therefore anything he does is wrong. I believe this is explained somewhere in the works of Ludwig von Mises.
UPDATE: I’ve always thought Brian Doherty himself is awesome, and I look forward to reading his new book. (Which I promoted a couple weeks ago!) So I tried to specify that my harshest criticism was directed at some of the material in the comment thread on Hit & Run rather than Brian’s original post. I think it’s very easy to miss that distinction in what I actually wrote, though. Let me be clear: Brian Doherty didn’t say Al Gore is fat. Fact is, Al Gore is fat, but Brian didn’t say it. Some of his respondents said it. I of course love Hit & Run comment threads regardless, which is why the best of the commenters work for me now . . .
Comment by Gsnorgathon —
February 26, 2007 @ 11:34 pm
Well, environmentalists are worse than Hitler, doncha know.
Comment by Thoreau —
February 26, 2007 @ 11:38 pm
I gotta say, I like the crowd here better than the crowd at Hit and Run.
And if you haven’t already, check out my fossil fuel thread below.
Comment by Rob —
February 27, 2007 @ 6:58 am
Is Reason turning into Cato II?
Comment by Mona —
February 27, 2007 @ 7:22 am
Rob, what’s wrong with Cato I?
Comment by Avram —
February 27, 2007 @ 9:39 am
Not that the energy industry wants free markets:
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 27, 2007 @ 10:05 am
Avram: I saw that! Yes, I’d like a stable and cheap supply of Nintendo Wiis and hookers, myself. Surely the government should provide me that.
Comment by Dr. Kenneth Noisewater —
February 27, 2007 @ 10:09 am
Jim:
While most of that thread was a train wreck, I thought the poster that made the analogy between buying carbon offsets and purchasing an exemption from being drafted to serve in the military was on to something.
The rich are always going to have more resources at their disposal to make many of the inconveniences that government regulation imposes on most of us a lot less inconvenient for themselves. Al Gore’s marginal utility of an hour of his own time is probably high enough that it makes sense for him to pay someone to stand in line at the DMV to renew his automobile registration rather than do it himself, like I would. (Yes, I realize that the internet has probably made examples of standing in line at the DMV moot, but work with me here…) But if we’re all going to be called-on/required to sacrifice in the War Against Global Warming, should the rich be allowed to buy exemptions from sacrifice? At what point does buying one’s way out of government-imposed sacrifice become unacceptable?
If we find ourselves in a position one day where an external military threat causes us libertarians to accept the need for the imposition of a military draft (once again, work with me here…), would the ability to purchase exemptions/substitutes be morally problematic?
Comment by Matt Weiner —
February 27, 2007 @ 10:25 am
Whee! It’s time for me to do some lefty trolling!
The rich are always going to have more resources at their disposal to make many of the inconveniences that government regulation imposes on most of us a lot less inconvenient for themselves.
That’s true. It’s also true of inconveniences that aren’t imposed by government. The only real way to solve this problem, if it is one, would be to make sure that the rich aren’t so much richer than the rest of us.
But given that inequality will persist no matter what we do, I think we have to decide on a case-by-case basis which obligations might be subject to buyouts and which won’t. Energy production and consumption seems like it’s basically involved in economic transactions, so it seems like cap-and-trade makes sense there.
(It also seems as though it would make the most sense to have the energy companies purchase offsets and pass the costs onto the consumer, which basically means that consumers purchase offsets indirectly. Which is to say that, as usually, rich people get to use more energy because they can afford more. Hence the original point, that the rich have more resources to do anything than the rest of us.)
But getting drafted is basically not an economic transaction, so I see no reason why we should entertain the idea of buying another draft spot — anymore than we should allow people to pay others to serve their jail time for them.
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 27, 2007 @ 10:25 am
Dr. Ken, yes it would indeed be morally problematic. Maybe so problematic that we’d be right to forbid it.
But war is a martial activity and energy consumption is economic. “Moral equivalents of war” aren’t, really. I don’t think the analogy is very close.
Comment by Matt Weiner —
February 27, 2007 @ 10:47 am
Hm. That seems to have been some low-quality lefty trolling, if I say so myself.
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 27, 2007 @ 10:55 am
It was good libertarian trolling, though. I was on the verge of saying that the end result of maintaining that it’s wrong for rich people to buy off their carbon consumption because they can afford to use more energy is to establish some minimum level of energy consumption as an entitlement. I can’t see libertarians wanting to add entitlements.
Comment by Matt Weiner —
February 27, 2007 @ 11:02 am
Heh. OK, maybe I can try this: It may be that someday we’ll see the limitation of carbon emissions as an existential struggle on the level of the sort of war that calls for a draft. And in that situation we wouldn’t want the richest to be able to bid up the price of energy so that no one else would be able to consume any. So Dr. Ken’s point is basically that when we face a sufficiently bad threat we may need to move to complete socialism.
I don’t know, this still seems like basically exactly the same thing that you said.
Comment by Avram —
February 27, 2007 @ 11:38 am
Matt, your argument reminds me of something I read just this weekend — George Orwell’s “The Lion and the Unicorn”,
his Amber-Narnia crossover fanfica pro-socialism essay written during the Blitz. Orwell argues that England needs to convert to socialism because a capitalist nation can’t possibly compete with a fascist war machine.Comment by mds —
February 27, 2007 @ 11:49 am
Rob, what’s wrong with Cato I?
“It is my opinion that Carthage must be destroyed.” Rather a brutal imperialist foreign policy, there. And don’t get me started on his D’Souza-style attacks on moral decadence.
As for the Institute, they do much good work, but are fond of being lying about the Social Security “crisis.” (How’s that for lefty trolling? Eat my dust, Mr. Weiner!)
Comment by mds —
February 27, 2007 @ 11:52 am
Orwell argues that England needs to convert to socialism because a capitalist nation can’t possibly compete with a fascist war machine.
Well, Britain and the United States sure proved him wrong during the war.
Comment by Matt Weiner —
February 27, 2007 @ 12:08 pm
Dust, eaten.
But I’m not, except trollishly, arguing that severe crises really necessitate socialism on all fronts. Just (perhaps mildly trollish here) that when some sufficiently vital resource is scarce enough we may have to ration it, because free market exchanges would lead to morally repugnant outcomes. Which may be mds’s point; Britain really did institute a rationing system during and after the war.
Comment by Carlos —
February 27, 2007 @ 12:22 pm
“Well, Britain and the United States sure proved him wrong during the war.” I can’t see how causing something like only 10% of total german army casualties proves that. On the other hand, the soviets (which caused the other 90% of the casualties) sure proved that they could compete.
Comment by mds —
February 27, 2007 @ 12:32 pm
but are fond of being lying about the Social Security “crisis.”
Okay, Mr. Weiner can spit the dust back out. I see-sawed between “being misleading” and “lying,” since the latter is more honest but also more inflammatory. Instead, I apparently ended up embracing “being lying,” which is a perfectly cromulent expression.
Which may be mds’s point;
Indeed. Apologies to Carlos for my missing <sarcasm> tags. I also vaguely recall hearing of a few measures that weren’t exactly free-market in the US, as well as in Britain.
Comment by Avram —
February 27, 2007 @ 12:34 pm
Matt, the idea (or one of them, anyway) behind emissions trading is that as carbon credits become more expensive, they increase the incentives to find other solutions.
(Not to suggest that all problems can be happily solved through the application of sufficient monetary incentive — the economic equivalent of the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics.)
Comment by Matt Weiner —
February 27, 2007 @ 12:44 pm
I had managed not to think about the Soviet Union while evaluating comment 15, so I’ll breathe the dust back in, thankyouverymuch.
Avram, that’s a good point, and carbon credits strike me as probably the best idea out there. But I still think it may be true that if carbon expendability was scarce enough it might become necessary to ration it rather than go for a market solution; just as, if there were only about enough water for everyone to drink, I would rather go for a hard ration than let the richest people buy it up for bathing and lawn-watering.
Also, wouldn’t a hard cap also increase the incentive? The parenthesis is appreciated.
Comment by Avram —
February 27, 2007 @ 1:20 pm
“Hard cap” means there’s a strict limit imposed on everybody, right?
That’d provide an incentive, but it would also shut down companies (and maybe even whole industries) that just couldn’t function under the limit. That’d mean the pool of people working on the problem is smaller, and poorer.
Comment by Steve —
February 27, 2007 @ 1:29 pm
Avram, it’s a hard cap system as distinguished from “intensity-based” quotas, in which carbon emissions limits would be pegged to something else (oil consumption, e.g.). A hard cap goes with cap-and-trade policies, in which people under the cap can sell carbon credits, earning themselves money and providing good market-driven incentives to lower emissions.
On the other hand, Al “Zerzan” Gore wants to see us all reduced to hunter-gatherer status and living in tents, so he’s a big fat hippie wrongo for engaging in this capitalist exercise while living in a big house, and our comrades at Reason are completely correct.
Comment by ajay —
February 27, 2007 @ 1:59 pm
The other problem with a hard cap (from the point of view of cutting emissions) is that, once you are under it, there is no incentive for further cuts. Emissions trading means that, even if you are the cleanest business in the entire country, you still have an incentive to get even cleaner if you can do so at less that the market price of carbon credits.
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 27, 2007 @ 2:00 pm
Before we get too excited about Soviet production during WWII, let’s recall that they massively depended on aid from the US and Britain. I will concede, though, that if your highest goal is fighting wars that a command economy offers some benefits to you. Maybe not as many as you’d like, though, given the way the Cold War went.
Comment by Matt Weiner —
February 27, 2007 @ 3:12 pm
To be clear, I’m talking about extreme emergencies, and do not think that a hard cap (which I did mean as distinct from cap and trade — probably used it wrong) would be a good idea. Nor am I advocating a command economy. Yet.
Comment by mds —
February 27, 2007 @ 3:49 pm
Gad, I finally clicked through to Hit & Run. It helped me realize how much I love you guys. Never has the label for that section been more appropriate. Doherty seems too reminiscent of the royal libertarians in a recent Pandagon thread who invoked Thomas Paine in support of an absolute right to property. Danged schmibertarians. [Shakes cane]
Trackback by Freedom Democrats —
February 27, 2007 @ 4:15 pm
Libertarian Environmentalism…
Brad Warbiany at the Liberty Papers offers up a hypothetical scenario in which government is funded entirely by externality payments. Sounds very close to a geolibertarian dream. Even if there are some problems with the proposal, I think it’s hard t…
Comment by Phillip J. Birmingham —
February 27, 2007 @ 4:41 pm
Maybe not as many as you’d like, though, given the way the Cold War went.
Slightly off topic, but I’ve always found it ironic that people love to invoke the Soviets or the Romans as examples of How To Get Tough With The Uppity Wog. Um, folks, you don’t hear much from the USSR or the SPQR these days, so it couldn’t have been all that effective.
Comment by Caldem —
February 27, 2007 @ 5:37 pm
On the safety valve comment above by Edison Electric, their is actually a good argument. the cost of reducing carbon is unkown within a large range. In those cases environmental economists have argued that its better to have a hybrid tax/permit scheme where, say, their is alternatice x$/unit emissions tax you can pay instead of buying a permit. This lessens damage when there are extremely high costs or supply shocks that temporarily increase demand for permits.
The best example of that is the LA emissions market (RECLAIM) where an inflexible emissions permit market contributed significantly to the California electricity crisis of 2001 becuase the permits put a hard cap on the amount of energy that could be produced. ( and may have aided market manipulation efforts).
Comment by lemuel pitkin —
February 27, 2007 @ 6:07 pm
Don’t forget, hard caps and tradable permits don’t exhaust the options for reducing carbon emissions. A tax is formally equivalent to tradable permits — gov’t sets the price and lets the market set the quantity, whereas with permits gov’t sets the quanittiy and the market sets the price. But a tax avoids a lot of the problems of implementation with permits, for instance arbitrage between areas with different levels of enforcement.
Comment by Dr. Kenneth Noisewater —
February 27, 2007 @ 6:13 pm
Matt and Jim:
Thanks for the responses (a couple dozen posts back, now). I wasn’t necessarily trying to support the argument that buying one’s way out of CO2 emission controls is exactly analogous to buying a replacement for the draft. I was just curious to tease out the principles that make one right and the other not. After reading your responses and letting everything bounce around in my head for a while (when I should have been doing actual productive work), I’m still not sure I’ve satisfied my curiosity.
Matt’s right, we should look at things on a case-by-case basis to see when it’s proper to allow us to buy ourselves out of certain govt-imposed obligations. I’d just like to identify the criteria we should use to evaluate each case. The capricious nature of a draft lottery coupled with the catastrophic nature of the risks involved in serving is probably what makes buying one’s way out of a govt-imposed draft obligation qualitatively different than buying CO2 credits. In any event, I guess I’m still looking for something a bit more… deductive.
Trackback by Deltoid —
February 27, 2007 @ 7:49 pm
Gore Derangement Syndrome…
Conservatives and faux libertarians have been running with an attack on Al Gore from a junior version of the Competitive Enterprise Institute — apparently he has a big house/office and it uses a lot of energy. Genuine libertarian Jim Henley……
Comment by Gerard Harbison —
February 27, 2007 @ 8:53 pm
So what kinds of things do you buy with a carbon offset?
The Climate Trust has a list of projects, here.
http://www.carboncounter.org/offset-projects/project-portfolio.aspx
So, you see, if Al Gore pays the Climate trust some money, they in turn will pay money to the City of Portland, who will adjust the timing of their traffic signals to make driving more efficient, and the several hundred tons of CO2 that Gore’s house emits will be magically disappeared. Of course, the City of Portland would otherwise never have adjusted the timing of the signals; why would they take a simple energy efficiency step and ameliorate traffic congestion if they couldn’t sell it as an offset?
If you buy this, well, I have some offsets to sell you
Comment by Brian Doherty —
February 27, 2007 @ 8:59 pm
I really, really never do this (get involved in pile-ons on things I write), but my past admiration for Henley’s works makes me do it just this once: I generally think of blogging as a conversation of sorts. It’s generally done off the cuff. It doesn’t promise, even implicitly, to cover every single aspect of the topic it mentions. With comment threads attached as on Hit and Run, it is often intended deliberately to start a conversation, not be any kind of final word. I framed right at front very clearly my hesitancy about the whole “hypocrisy” topic. I asked the question I wanted to discuss at the end, which I thought this was a reasonable news hook to attach the question to. I never called Al Gore fat. I have no history I can recall of senselessly attacking Gore or writing about global warming. I confess I haven’t kept up with enviro policy trading schemes since my 1996 5000 word feature article on the topic, but since, unless I’m missing something, Al Gore could BOTH not use what seems way-more-power-than-really-necessary in the midst of a global crisis, AND use his money to buy carbon offsets, I don’t see why the carbon offset stuff negates the relevancy of this story to the question I asked at the end: how much actual serious change in personal consumption of power–not just adding on to one’s personal consumption attempts to mitigate it–is going on among the global warming concerned community? Maybe it’s an uninteresting or irrelevant question–goodness knows first thought isn’t anywhere near best thought, or even sensible thought. I’m not sure why any of this should raise these sorts of accusations about what kind of fake libertarian lying sack of corporate hysterical shill I have revealed myself to be. To me the most interesting question about global warming right now is, what if anything are people (and governments) likely to do about it? and I’ve found the answer Robert Samuelson has offered: not much effective, to be worth thinking about, and this story a means to get a conversation started about it. I don’t know a single person alarmed about global warming who seems to be doing much concerted to actually lessen their carbon footprint, and I find this interesting, and was, as the question that ends the post makes clear, seeking more data on it. Of course, i don’t think a single one of the 180 posts addressed it at all. One things I’ve learned about blogging: people are amazingly creative readers, seeing things in blog posts that they want to argue with or talk about, not what the author said or intended.
Brian Doherty
Comment by mds —
February 27, 2007 @ 10:40 pm
Um, folks, you don’t hear much from the USSR or the SPQR these days, so it couldn’t have been all that effective.
Er, well, I’d agree with the USSR, but the SPQR lasted for centuries even as a republic, and centuries more under the emperors. You apparently have an extremely stringent criterion for “effective.” I only hope the US republic has such staying power; in fact, I’ve been doubting it more and more of late.
The best example of that is the LA emissions market (RECLAIM) where an inflexible emissions permit market contributed significantly to the California electricity crisis of 2001 becuase the permits put a hard cap on the amount of energy that could be produced.
Actually, Joskow’s analyses indicate a pretty whopping huge price disparity left over even after controlling for RECLAIM credits. A lot of it seemed to be caused by “the exercise of market power by suppliers.” The EPA also noted that the caps were apparently too generous to accomplish the desired reductions, relative to command-and-control. So, surprisingly, the California crisis is not a cut-and-dried indictment of caps.
Mr. Doherty, your comment lays out some reasonable observations about climate change remediation vs. human nature. Imagine, for a moment, if the post at Hit & Run had looked more like it. Regardless, it seems Mr. Henley’s primary criticism was reserved for the comment thread, where I think reasonable people can agree that things went off the rails. Oddly, “hypocrite” is viewed as a rather charged word.
Comment by Brian Doherty —
February 27, 2007 @ 11:41 pm
Oh, the irony. I have been as creative a reader as any Hit and Run commenter or outside kvetcher that’s ever aggravated me, “seeing things in blog posts that they want to argue with or talk about, not what the author said or intended” when I mistook “the “free market” think tank that gives us our first link declares that Gore’s free choice to use his own money to offset his family’s carbon output makes him a “hypocrite,” since he thinks global warming is bad….” as aimed at REASON and me (Reason is a think tank as well as a mag, and my blog entry did “provide a link” combined with Jim’s talk of the comment thread at hit and run) rather than the folks in Tennessee. Thus, my dudgeon above is completely misaimed. Sorry all.
Comment by Matt Weiner —
February 28, 2007 @ 9:23 am
Brian, that (#36) is one of the most gracious blog comments I’ve ever seen. Would that the whole ’sphere, including me, were more like that.
On the substance, I think that the point about personal consumption of power doesn’t cut too hard against the environmentalist community, for this reason: Global warming is a collective action problem, in that it can only be addressed if everyone changes their actions. For liberals* like Gore and myself, collective action problems often need to be solved by some sort of government policy, either regulation or exhortation. If all the individuals who are most concerned with global warming cut their power consumption, it won’t do much; there just aren’t enough of these individuals. And until some effective framework — clean power laws or whatever — is put in place to help everyone reduce their power consumption, it’ll be much more inconvenient to cut your personal consumption.
As an example, I’d like to see more people riding mass transit. But that would require a lot of improvement to the country’s mass transit systems. In the meantime, I’m not going to take the bus much in Lubock, because the bus system here is just awful.
Now, it might be argued that the best thing someone like Gore can do is to set a good example. So the hypocrisy charge would be relevant. OTOH, it might be argued that the best thing to do is promoting green power by using green power for his consumption. It may depend on the policies he advocates.
Also, since Jim is a libertarian and not a liberal, he may not get to use my response. I’ll let him speak for himself there.
*I don’t mean “classical liberals” or whatever.
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February 28, 2007 @ 6:39 pm
We should all live more like Al Gore!…
From TCSDaily:
Following Al Gore’s Example for Energy Use
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