If You’re So Smart, How Come You’re Not – Um, Never Mind
It’s Al Gore’s world and we’re just living in it:
At 59, he’s an Academy Award winner, a bestselling author, a front-runner for the Nobel Prize, and a concert promoter who turned out to be a bigger rock star at this year’s Grammys than the rock stars themselves.
What no one is talking about is that he has also become a stunningly successful businessman–and that has fueled his comeback.
The skinny. And I can’t resist quoting the libertarian grace note . . .
One problem he had in politics, he says, was identifying an issue too early–”‘predawn’ is the term I use”–to be able to act on it. But “in the business world, particularly at a time when things are moving so swiftly, if you can see it early, you can make a business opportunity out of it.” He pauses. “For whatever reason, the business world rewards a long-term perspective more than the political world does.”
Neel has made the point here before that unchecked anthropogenic global warming doesn’t just represent market failure – so far it represents a massive political failure as well. Gore may accomplish more as Mr. Outside than he would have managed from within.
Comment by Jon H —
June 26, 2007 @ 10:53 pm
Also, as an Apple board member, he invented the iPhone.
KIDDING, NOT TRUE, ENTIRELY FACETIOUS COMMENT
Comment by B —
June 26, 2007 @ 10:55 pm
Does this make Al Gore our Greatest Non-President?
Comment by bad Jim —
June 27, 2007 @ 4:21 am
If you’re so smart, why haven’t you saved the world?
We superheroes get this all the time. The rest of you don’t seem to understand that you have to save the world every day.
Or perhaps you’re all too distracted by having to save your own worlds every day.
Comment by jlw —
June 27, 2007 @ 8:57 am
I’ll buy that it is a failure of politics as well as a market failure. But one of the problems confounding a political-end solution is three solid decades of government-is-the-problem, let’s-deregulate-everything rhetoric from the elite consensus. I know, I know–once people pick up the board with a nail to fend off Kang and Kodos, they’ll build bigger boards and bigger nails until they build one big enough to destroy the Earth. But there are some problems so large that we need every tool at our disposal, ideology be damned.
Comment by Leonard —
June 27, 2007 @ 9:35 am
Actually no. “Ideology be damned” is the ideology of the powerful, since ideology is what stands in their way. After we give power to the Bush admin to “fight terror”, because it’s so world-shakingly important, and to the Edwards admin to “fight global warming”, because that’s so world-shakingly important… then they have the power. And in fact the problems were not such problems to begin with. It’s as true with terror as with CO2 release. To some extent both are real problems, but not all problems have solutions. Some problems you just have to live with and make the best of.
If you are willing give up your rights for millions of people a century now, then the slipping begins. After all, aren’t millions of children — innocent children, mind you — dying of disease and malnutrition RIGHT NOW? And if we’d only impose a small tax on the rich… a small intervention with small military forces… a minor enslavement here or there… a few little things… we could solve it! Those innocent, doe-eyed children may not thank you personally, but you know in your heart that you’re pure.
I cannot think of any real problem that is so serious I’d roll over for it. Not any. Maybe if a giant earth-killing comet were coming and somehow we could deflect it, but only if we enslaved every human being alive to the Great Cause… but no. This is the sort of stupid argument, exactly akin to the ticking bomb, designed to get you to name your price. Once we have established what you are, then we haggle over the price. I may have a price, but until the time comes when some actual money is on some actual table, I will not plan out my whoredom. It only helps the powerful, if they know exactly how much of other people’s money they have to pay to get you to kneel.
Comment by jlw —
June 27, 2007 @ 10:30 am
So, Leonard, if you know a way to stop global warming that involves torturing inocents, please pass it along to the Cheney administration.
In the real world, we need both strong private action and strong public action–not to stop global warming (it’s too late for that) but to slow it down enough that my son and his children will live in a world with a climate and coastline I might recognize. Foregoing public action because millions of hypothetical children might be crushed by a somewhat anologous, but wholy imaginary action is something you’d expect from religious zealots, not intelligent modern individuals.
It might be possible to admire the commitment of an Orthodox man who’d starve to death rather than eat pork or shellfish. It’s not possible to admire someone who’d condemn generations just because he’s got a hang-up with the government.
Comment by jlw —
June 27, 2007 @ 10:52 am
When it comes to finding the best course of action, the slippery slope and the ticking time bomb are equally stupid models.
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 27, 2007 @ 10:55 am
I’m unconvinced, jlw. I’ve noticed that there really are slippery slopes. Ticking bomb scenarios, not, though.
Comment by Gsnorgathon —
June 27, 2007 @ 11:14 am
What exactly are you unconvinced of, Jim? There are slippery slopes, true. But does government regulation to curb global warming constitute one?
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
June 27, 2007 @ 12:02 pm
jlw: the latest IPCC report makes it pretty clear that CO2 emissions aren’t a big problem — their models suggest that a very modest carbon tax is pretty much all you need to push the economy onto a carbon-friendly growth path. My mind was honestly blown at how small the necessary changes are.
But, unfortunately, carbon taxes are political death, whereas corn ethanol and coal liquification and other pointless boondoggles have lots of very influential Senators lining up in support, and carbon-free power sources like wind power have very influential Senators trying to strangle them at birth. All of these examples were deliberately chosen with Democratic congressmen in mind. This is not to excuse the Republicans, whose boobery on this issue is well-known, but rather as a reminder that the slippery slope to regulatory capture by special interests is a bipartisan phenomenon.
But on net I’m actually very optimistic about global warming — at current rates of improvement, in five years wind power will be the cheapest form of power production even without subsidies or carbon taxes, and right now solar power is on a growth path that puts it where wind was five to ten years ago. Throw in plug-in electric hybrids, and it’s not impossible that the transition will happen faster and with less pain than we can imagine. And this is ignoring all sorts of long shots like ultracapacitors or flow batteries becoming cost-effective.
Comment by jlw —
June 27, 2007 @ 1:30 pm
Neel:
We both agree that there’s a political problem standing in the way of tackling global warming. But I think it’s important to go a little deeper, to why such transparently self-serving arguments (against carbon taxes and CAFE standards and promoting solar and wind energy) can find traction in the political process. If people weren’t already primed to respond positively to government-is-the-problem rhetoric, they’d likely be more able to accept the in-this-case-government-is-part-of-the-solution reality. Rather than have a knee-jerk, one-size-fits-all reaction to every suggestion of government involvement, we ought to be looking at a whole suite of solutions and using the ones that do the most good with the least amount of dislocation.
Also, like you, I keep track of developments carbon and carbon-free energy sources, professionally in my case. And, like you, I think the technological solutions are readily at hand. But in the free market, it’s going to be more expedient to burn through every last ton of coal (as long as emissions aren’t taxed) than invest in solar or in the energy storage solutions needed to make solar and wind viable for the majority of our electricity needs. (Oh, and since this is a libertarian site, nukes. Sure. Though I think the combination of wind, solar, and storage is a cheaper and more robust longterm solution.)
If you want to be really optimistic, in a perverse way, you could check out the April paper by Kharecha and Hansen where they suggest that there’s not enough oil and gas to wreck the climate, and that zeroing out coal emissions would keep CO2 under 450 ppm. Or the recent writings by Dave Rutledge at Caltech, who thinks that even coal may be too scarce to do too much damage. But the “hope” of running out of carbon fuel before we run out of ice cap isn’t something I’d want to bet my son’s future on.
Comment by Matt Weiner —
June 27, 2007 @ 2:11 pm
It might be possible to admire the commitment of an Orthodox man who’d starve to death rather than eat pork or shellfish.
You shouldn’t; Judaism says that you should violate kashrut if it’s the only way to stay alive. The only sins you should die rather than committing are murder, idolatry, and adultery.
(NB: I get the first part from Sunday-school memories, some story about a Rabbi saying the Motzi on Yom Kippur during an epidemic, and I get the second from Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem. So someone more theologically oriented might correct me.)
Um. On substance, I think Leonard’s right that principles can be extremely important, though of course we disagree on principles. But I also think jlw is right about how libertarianish rhetoric has aggravated the political problem. It’s no coincidence that some of the bad actors on global warming denialism (CEI, TCS) wrap themselves in the libertarian flag. [I'm trying to use neutral formulations as to whether they're really libertarian, because that's contentious.]
Comment by jlw —
June 27, 2007 @ 2:34 pm
Thanks for the correction, Matt. I suppose I should revise my analogy to:
It might be possible to admire the commitment of an Orthodox man who’d rather die than sleep with Jessica Alba. But, um, er, where was I?
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
June 27, 2007 @ 2:55 pm
jlw: I’m actually against tightening the CAFE standards
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
June 27, 2007 @ 3:16 pm
Woops — I posted too soon. The set of good carbon policies is really small: Pigouvian taxes are best, followed by cap-and-trade and research money as second-best. However, efficient policies are generally unpopular, because they make costs explicit. The voting public hates costs they can see, but are often indifferent to invisible costs. This is a nonpartisan cognitive bias; the right ignores global warming, and the left sees it as a chance to embrace bad regulations like the CAFE standards.
Stuff like CAFE is a bad idea. When you have complex sets of rules, the rules have breakpoints and unexpected interactions, and they will get ruthlessly gamed. The whole SUV phenomenon — with their dismal gas mileage and terrible safety records — happened because trucks and cars were treated differently under the CAFE standards.
This is one of the reasons I regard cap-and-trade as a second-best to a carbon tax; it will be complex to administer and companies will lobby heavily to bias the rules in their favor and against competitors. (I was more in favor, based on the positive US/Canadian experience with acid rain, until I saw what happened when the EU tried it for carbon emissions.)
The strongest objection to a simple revenue-neutral carbon tax I can think of is that it’s regressive — but you can fix that with a rebate in the EITC.
Comment by jlw —
June 27, 2007 @ 3:26 pm
Neel:
Never said you weren’t. Just using it as an example of a regulatory proposal being attacked not on merits, but on (per Matt) libertarianish principle.
I’m on record elsewhere as suggesting that in light of the up-to-now weak demand response to the doubling of gasoline prices over the past few years, carbon taxes on fuel are likely to be insufficient to cut petroleum consumption. While CAFE standards are no panacea, and I think everyone by now is familiar with the concept that some of the advances in fuel economy in the 1980s have been given back through driving more miles, some sort of fuel economy minimum could help push Detroit away from its reliance on gas guzzlers. The solution is going to have a lot of pieces, I figure.
The important thing in transportation is to stretch existing petroleum supplies so that we don’t rush into starting up a CTL industry.
Comment by jlw —
June 27, 2007 @ 3:51 pm
Neel:
Just following up on your second response, I think cap-and-trade has a place in the electricity sector, with its relatively small number of actors and hard-to-hide emissions. (I mean, either the plant is running on it isn’t, and it is burning fuel or it’s not.) By establishing a hard (and steadily declining) carbon emission allowance per MWh that is tradeable only within the electricity sector–that is, no credits for “soft” remediation like planting trees or giving out light bulbs–you could support solar, wind and nuclear power while making it worthwhile to close down the worst of the coal boilers.
Eventually, say, over 20 years, the carbon emission allowance can get pretty close to zero. Everything is either carbon-free or sequestered.
But the rest of the economy is too complex to deal with a cap-and-trade system, and I’m not sure how it would even work in a real world situation. Along with changes (or deletions) of land use regulations and restrictions on how landfills and ag. soil management is handled, a consumer-end carbon fuel tax is undoubtedly the best way to go. Eventually, one would like to see the money raised from that tax exactly offset the cost of sequestering the emitted carbon, but we’ll probably just hand it over to consumers to buy more junk from a carbon unregulated China.
Comment by Jon H —
June 27, 2007 @ 4:26 pm
“This is one of the reasons I regard cap-and-trade as a second-best to a carbon tax;”
cap and trade is okay, as long as the cap isn’t set way too high, as happened in the EU. As soon as they realized the cap was higher than what they needed, prices plummeted from 20-30 euros/ton down to pennies.
Comment by Jon H —
June 27, 2007 @ 4:32 pm
“Eventually, one would like to see the money raised from that tax exactly offset the cost of sequestering the emitted carbon, but we’ll probably just hand it over to consumers to buy more junk from a carbon unregulated China.”
Assuming they really are unregulated. If they get motivated, I wouldn’t put it past them to institute the death penalty for exceeding carbon emissions limits.
Since green tech will most likely be manufactured in Chinese factories, I can certainly see them taking advantage of (and copying to sell cheaper) anything that also helps them operate more efficiently.
With that many people, cutting corners environmentally is not a viable long-term strategy. Or even for the next decade or two.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
June 27, 2007 @ 4:33 pm
Of course, that detail doesn’t mean that the rates of improvement will continue at the same level (in fact, when the trend’s that dramatic, it’s often best to bet that it won’t). Nor does it address the feasibility of making wind power a significant part of national or global power production.