Economists are Not Technologists

Carbon emissions, carbon dioxide, methane etc, are technical facts. The impact on the climate is also a technical fact, with some degree of uncertainty, but put that aside for the moment. How does one solve this problem? One would assume with additional technical means. Lee carbon intensive production, carbon capture, and the list goes on. Input, less output equals net accumulation.

Now economists are always at taxing problems out of existence. But reality seems to show otherwise. Let's consider a simple example. If the workforce at Harvard, the real workers doing such things as cleaning and cooking, not thinking stuff, commute from afar, and thus produce carbon emissions, will taxing them reduce emissions? Only if you terminate them and have the other folks clean up after themselves. How can taxing reduce emissions when demand is essentially inelastic? I think that is something from economics.

The only solution is technical. Really.

But NY Times writers again note:

...people use too much dirty energy because they don’t have to pay the true costs it imposes on the world: pollution-related health problems in the short term and climate change in the long term. Economists refer to these costs as externalities, because they are not naturally part of the market system. “We have a climate problem,” ..., “because markets fail, and fail badly, in the energy sector.” The only solution, he argued, was for governments to raise the price of emissions. Economists and other policy experts have long focused on this idea of carbon pricing. It can take the form of a carbon tax, ... Or the pricing can be embedded in a system of permits known as cap-and-trade, as President Barack Obama and other Democrats proposed in their 2009 bill to address climate change. Either way, the underlying concept is simple. When a product becomes more expensive, people use less of it. Carbon pricing is an elegant mechanism by which market economics can work on behalf of the climate rather than against it.

Just collecting more taxes from the people who can afford it the least is not the answer. We have the answer but the problem is economists and not carbon.

Now the most, in my opinion, shameful of all the ones I have seen so far is the MIT presentation of an economist bemoaning climate change. They note:

As dire as those scenarios seem, Stern also expressed some optimism, saying that policymakers are now much more likely to believe that we can can combine continued economic growth with zero-emissions technology — a change from common views expressed at, say, the 2009 global climate summit in Copenhagen. “What we’ve seen I think in the last five years or so is a change of understanding of the policy toward climate change,” Stern said, “from ‘How much growth do we have to give up to be more responsible and sustainable?’ to ‘How can we find a form of growth that’s different and sustainable?’” However, he warned, a world with a net of zero carbon dioxide emissions within a few decades will be absolutely necessary for society to maintain its current form. “The net zero is fundamental,” Stern said. “That’s not some strange economist’s aspiration. The net zero is the science. If you want to stabilize temperatures, you’re going to have to stabilize concentrations. Stabilizing concentrations means net zero.”

Again it is the economist bemoaning something that the technologists can mitigate. But alas no technologist saying what can be done. Net zero carbon dioxide means just what? Plants consume this essential nutrient, do we kill off all plants, my backyard would be in revolt.