This is why attempts to censor, deplatform and even criminalize discussion of climate and energy policy prescriptions are so insidious, offensive and wrong-headed.
Over the years I've proposed that any climate/energy 'fix' come with a label stating how many degrees Celsius a proposed action will reduce the global temperature.
The line of politicians, consultants, NGO's, supranational organizations, corporations (Enron, BlackRock et al) etc. agreeing to do this is very short.
From The Milken Institute Review, June 21:
In a recent post on the Institute for Energy Research website, Jordan McGillis, the IER’s deputy director of policy, worries about the implications that scientific and economic uncertainties pose for sound climate policy. He warns that if we reason that “climate change causes harm, therefore we should blunt that harm even if we aren’t sure on the magnitude,” we “risk causing more harm than we resolve.”
This is not a small matter. In that post and elsewhere, McGillis is especially critical of a “target-consistent” approach to climate policy that begins by setting a specific goal and then works backward to devise policies to reach it. World leaders have, in effect, already opted for target consistency. In the Paris Agreement, they set a goal to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels. To reach that goal, greenhouse gas emissions would need to fall to net-zero by about 2050.
McGillis and his organization are cautious on climate policy, but there are critics of target-consistent climate policy on the activist side, too. In an article for Science, Joseph Aldy and several colleagues express the view that a push to swap the economists’ approach, which drives emissions decisions by internalizing the social cost of carbon, for a target-consistent approach that works backwards “could set back climate policy, just as the United States is poised to take meaningful climate action.” As they see it, “the target-consistent approach replaces scientific assessments of damage … with subjective judgements about political targets and choices.” Because “the anchor for the target-consistent price is fundamentally political, not scientific, it is therefore subject to arbitrary change.”
In my view, these critices of target-consistent climate policy misunderstand the relationship between science and politics in climate policy, as well as misunderstand the alternative to target consistency. Here’s why.
The Social Cost of Carbon
First, we need to understand what the critics of target-consistent policy hold up as the scientific alternative—an alternative that centers on the “social cost of carbon,” or SCC. The SCC is a measure of the harm done, not just immediately but through all of the future, by the emission today of one unit of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in other greenhouse gasses.Economists have long argued for putting a price on carbon emissions equal to the SCC. The idea is that emitters would then curtail pollution when the cost of doing so was less than the price, but continue business as usual if the cost of cleaning up was greater than the price. This is often called the “Pigovian” approach after the British economist Arthur Cecil Pigou, who first proposed it more than a century ago.
The pricing approach could be implemented by taxing emissions or by creating an emissions trading system (aka “cap-and-trade”) that capped total emissions and allowed polluters to buy and sell rights to emit. Some economists argue that a carbon price alone could do the job of optimally controlling emissions. Others see a carbon price as part of a broader approach that also includes regulation and subsidies.
In that case, the SCC could still serve as a benchmark in testing whether a proposed regulation or subsidy would be cost effective. In any event, the outcome would be climate mitigation policy that was effective without being so aggressive as to (in McGillis’s words) “cause more harm than we resolve.”
All this sounds good, but it turns out to be devilishly difficult to pin down an exact value, or even a narrow range of values, for the SCC. It’s not that economists haven’t tried. One of them, William Nordhaus, even won a Nobel prize for his efforts....
....MUCH MORE
More on 'truth in labeling' from the introduction to a January post:
The policy prescriptions being chosen guarantee higher prices. There is no way around that fact, it is the goal.
Reducing temperature is not the goal. If a person asks the question, "How many degrees will this policy decrease the temperature" you get blank stares, followed by handwaving, followed by vilification.
Yet it is very straightforward, if the goal is to limit temperature rise, there is this tool that scientists (and others, many others) use called math that would give us the answer but you never see things put in terms of degrees. We have targets expressed in degrees (stay below 2° or 1.5° or whatever, we have targets that reference megatonnes of carbon but we never get the answer to the question "How much, in degrees Celsius, will $200 carbon reduce the temperature?"
....This has helped form my personal belief that carbon trading is not going to lower world temperature by even a half-a-degree.
For example, in an October 1998 article in Nature, Martin Parry (Co-chair of the IPCC's Working Group II) said the effect of the Kyoto Protocol (and it's associated carbon trading, CDM etc. [articles 6,12 and 17 of the protocol]) would be a reduction of –0.05°C by the year 2050.
Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research estimated that Kyoto would result in a reduction from baseline of 0.06°C to 0.21°C . (under one Kyoto scenario 0.06 to 0.11°C, under another 0.11 to 0.21)....
*****
....If you can find where they answer the introductory question, send up the Bat Signal.
Wait. On second thought, no bats.
