Fingernails on Chalkboard

Those of us old enough to remember the hellish sound produced by the title action, can find a certain resonance in Luboš Motl's continual (literally) references to the supposed costs of the Kyoto protocol. I say continual, since not only does he frequently post on the topic, but he also runs a little clock-like widget on his blog displaying the supposed costs and minimal benefits of protocols never adopted or implemented.

His usual modus operandi is to treat these numbers as some sort of given and then give a long list of supposed benefits that the same investment could have purchased.

Because most people don't really "feel in bones" how much is 300 billion dollars that the world has wasted for carbon indulgences in the last two years - it looks like "some number" - let me translate the number to plain English. We could have paid for either of the following projects:

Twenty million luxury cars. Each new college student in the developed world could have received a new Chrysler 300 as a gift...

Tens of millions of houses in cheap markets or millions of houses in the most expensive markets: homelessness in the whole developed world, to say the least, could probably have been moved into history textbooks (there are about 1 million of homeless people in the U.S. only)...

Three billion of $100 MIT laptops, more than one for each family in the world....

And so on to profound tedium.

A question for you Lumo: Given that the US and a few other countries never adopted the protocol, and that nobody else has bothered to implement it, what happened to all that cool stuff you promised? I have a son in college, where is his car? Why are there still homeless people and people without laptops?

Luboš knows all this, of course. He knows that the numbers are bogus and based on conjectured events that never occurred. He even admits it. He is diligently trying to be a good right wing nutbag, though, telling the lies his audience want to hear, and doing his best to annoy the hell out of everyone else.

More seriously though, everyone knows that there are short and medium term costs for any serious attempt to control CO2 emissions. Incurring such costs would make no sense unless the long term costs of doing nothing were far higher. The recent Stern review was an attempt to make a sober assessment of those costs and benefits - a widely derided attempt (see Lumo's post here and links therin), to be sure, but a serious attempt, nonetheless. Such attempts make infinitely more sense than the meaningless chalk board scrapings of certain global warming deniers, so, quite naturally, Lumo thinks that anyone who tries to make such an assessment should be jailed.

I have said before that I don't think that human caused global warming is the most pressing ecological problem that we face. Habitat destruction and overpopulation are more serious, more pressing, and moreover, major contributors to global warming. I could be wrong about this, and will be if global warming turns out to be catastrophic.

In the meantime, I think various carbon taxes still make sense. Governments need to raise money, and carbon taxes are not especially likely to adversely affect economic growth more than other taxes. Moreover, there is good reason to believe that our heavy dependence on foreign oil is already very costly to the US. The net cost of our various operations in the Middle East over the past 60 years is surely in the trillions, none of which would have been worth spending if we were not dependent on Middle East oil.