Climate warming, climate cooling: the law of unintended consequences
These consequences may have been unintended, but they certainly should not have been unforeseen:
When the United Nations wanted to help slow climate change, it established what seemed a sensible system.
Greenhouse gases were rated based on their power to warm the atmosphere. The more dangerous the gas, the more that manufacturers in developing nations would be compensated as they reduced their emissions.
But where the United Nations envisioned environmental reform, some manufacturers of gases used in air-conditioning and refrigeration saw a lucrative business opportunity.
They quickly figured out that they could earn one carbon credit by eliminating one ton of carbon dioxide, but could earn more than 11,000 credits by simply destroying a ton of an obscure waste gas normally released in the manufacturing of a widely used coolant gas. That is because that byproduct has a huge global warming effect. The credits could be sold on international markets, earning tens of millions of dollars a year.
That incentive has driven plants in the developing world not only to increase production of the coolant gas but also to keep it high ”” a huge problem because the coolant itself contributes to global warming and depletes the ozone layer. That coolant gas is being phased out under a global treaty, but the effort has been a struggle.
So since 2005 the 19 plants receiving the waste gas payments have profited handsomely from an unlikely business: churning out more harmful coolant gas so they can be paid to destroy its waste byproduct. The high output keeps the prices of the coolant gas irresistibly low, discouraging air-conditioning companies from switching to less-damaging alternative gases. That means, critics say, that United Nations subsidies intended to improve the environment are instead creating their own damage.
I’m not meaning to pick on the UN, especially (okay, maybe I am). This sort of thing is a hazard in all economic planning designed to shape people’s behavior and encourage one type of action over another, but as I said, it’s a hazard that probably should have been foreseen. I am most definitely not an economist, nor do I play one on TV, but I’m pretty that if something is incentivized/rewarded, that behavior will tend to increase, if it is at all discretionary. In this case, producing the gas and then destroying it became more profitable than not producing it. Companies are in the business of making money, in addition to making things. And so—more of the gas is produced.
The rest of the article is worth reading, as well. It goes into how difficult it has been to change this system once it took hold. The countries that are most involved in the overproduction of the gas are, unsurprisingly, China and India.
Here’s a quote that underlines the “unintended” part of the equation:
“I was a climate negotiator, and no one had this in mind,” said David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It turns out you get nearly 100 times more from credits than it costs to do it. It turned the economics of the business on its head.”
Forget, for a moment, about the controversies in the science of global warming. Even if the science really were incontrovertibly settled, there would still be the problem of the shortsightedness and limitations of interventions designed to change things.
That is funny.
I mean it. That is funny.
It’s called “The Dumbass Effect” and is especially common among UN initiatives.
I seem to remember (and Artfl can correct me if I’m wrong), the Soviets had a bureau which did nothing but artificially set the prices on millions of items in the economy. It didn’t work then, and it’s not working now.
Recently I read about glass manufacturing in the former Soviet Union (apologies, I have forgotten the source). The command economy awarded the plants based upon tonnage; the glass plants therefore manufactured glass so thick that it was essentially unsuited for most intended uses. Realizing their error, the command economy changed to rewarding the glass plants by square footage (meters^2?) produced. The glass plants immediately began manufacturing glass so thin it was unsuited for most intended uses.
There is nothing new under the sun; specifically, the command economy didn’t work then and it will not work now, contrary to the Left’s utopian wishes.
“But…but…we thought for sure that central planning would work this time.”
I think this is the oddest part of the post.
“… It turned the economics of the business on its head.”
What economics?
What business?
That is funny.
I mean it. That is funny.
It is. You have to laugh.
Earnest liberal do-gooders keep doing their Wile E. Coyote impression, with reality standing in for the Roadrunner.
But central planning will work. That they’ll get right, guaranteed.
This one is funny, but the more invidious aspect of left-wing psychology is the determination to use government to coerce people into things that the leftists are convinced that they should do, but that people don’t want to do.
The coercees figure out how to game the coercive policies, which prompts the leftists to take steps to close those loopholes. The coercees then figure out how to circumvent the amended policies, and so it goes. The history of the Berlin Wall is a signal example of this effect, with the DDR eventually restricting access to materials that could be used to build balloons (!).
Occam’s Beard Says:
August 9th, 2012 at 6:57 pm
“They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”
–Somebody in the USSR
OB,
I have suggested before that bureaucracies, regulations and command economies are static; life is dynamic. Just as Jeff Goldblum’s line in Jurassic Park advises us (echoed later by Sam Neill), “Life will find a way.”
The greenies who push for all this environmental BS simply aren’t very smart. They feed their egos by pushing their weight around, and since many are the kids of middle/ upper middle class families who want them to do well, they get a hearing in the public. In some ways they are like the Community Organizer in Chief who came up with such wonderful plans to help the poor. They are all totally disconnected from the real world. It was clear from the beginning that international cap and trade would not work–you would be paying someone not to cut down a tree they didn’t own in the Brazilian rainforest. I should be a billionaire cause I don’t even own a chainsaw.
I just watched a half-hour German public TV program about curly lightbulbs that actually exposed what a scam that whole effort is. Unfortunately, they blamed it on lightbulb companies that wanted to make money, completely ignoring the greenie do-gooders who pushed the idea. But still, any mention of greenie falacies on German TV is better than we have had.
We really need a return to the Catholic sacrament of confession. Go into the confessional, confess you sin, say your Hail Mary as penance, and go home. Stop trying to make the rest of us feel guilty about your carbon footprint whe you fly to Aspen for some skiing.
I just read this via Powerline:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100175368/the-fortunes-of-permanence-culture-and-anarchy-in-an-age-of-amnesia/
Toward the end there is a Chesterton quote that applies beautifully to the greenies and their bureaucatic enablers.
If anyone wants a theory for why ALL climate change for the last 6 BILLION years has occurred look into Henrik Svensmark.
There is a youtube movie called The Cloud Mystery as well as a book The Chilling Stars.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANMTPF1blpQ
It comes down to the sun, the galaxy and supernovas and their effect on cosmic rays. Cosmic rays create low altitude clouds which cool the planet. So more clouds, lower temps and fewer clouds higher temps.
The CERN recently demonstrated the central process here of cosmic rays generating the particles around which clouds form.
This theory is the best and most comprehensive, explaining all historical changes.
Thanks for the link, expat.
Hannan sums up the enviros quite well: “A great deal of Leftism is based around the elevation of vaguely wanting the world to be nicer into a political philosophy. Not actually making the world nicer — quite the opposite, usually — but wanting it. It is the ultimate political narcissism, privileging the moralistic (holding the correct opinions) over the moral (doing the right thing).”
Since it is their religion (Faith is belief without need of certain proof.), they go merrily on their way, never once examining the unintended consequences or even destructiveness of their actions.
Not a surprise. At the beginning of this madness, a Michigan-based papermill found out they could save their company by converting to low-carbon heating and getting a check for over a million tax dollars. Problem was, they were using a much more eco-friendly fuel: burning the byproduct of the paper-making process, a black substance that used to kill fish and contaminate soil. So now they get rid of it in a less eco-friendly way.
BTW, since the MSM has shown its typical due diligence in reporting all the news that’s relevant to AGW, I’ll call attention to the following event last Tuesday:
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Rare snowfall stuns much of South Africa
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Anyone seen **anything** in the news about this?
No?
Are we surprised?