Plus Tom Toles on “Fine for a painting, but not for a planet?”
I have a bonus Toles blog post and cartoon (in color) at the end, but first, here’s a post from my colleague Matt Yglesias:
A frontal assault on the idea of prudential regulation of the financial system is unlikely to be a political winner, so the smart guys are sneaking through the back door:
Mr. Gensler, in testimony before a House appropriations subcommittee, called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission “a good investment for the American public, overseeing vast markets with a relatively small staff.” Despite the nation’s budget deficit, Mr. Gensler said his agency needed a budget increase “because, as we saw in 2008, without oversight of the swaps market, billions of taxpayer dollars may be at risk.”
Although the White House agrees with Mr. Gensler, Congressional Republicans are eying severe cuts to the agency’s funding.
Of course the premise of Gensler’s testimony is that if Congressional Republicans come to believe that higher CFTC funding is important to maintaining appropriate derivatives regulation, that will make them more inclined to back it. My suspicion is that the reverse is true. If Gensler were to solemnly promise that he will endeavor to waste a giant share of his agency’s budget on buying really fancy office chairs, that the committee might be persuaded to listen to lobbyists from the chair industry and pony up the money. The aim here is to starve enforcement agencies of money needed to enforce the law. Then when the next crisis comes we’ll get (a) a giant bailout and (b) the argument that since existing regulations didn’t work, clearly what we need to do is formally repeal all regulations and pretend there won’t be any future bailouts.
A brilliant strategy, in a Bernie Madoff sort of way (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“). And that brings me to Toles’ latest:
Here is Toles’ latest blog post, “Fine for a painting, but not for a planet?”
There is a principle in art conservation. “Don’t do anything that can’t be undone.”
Seems like an idea that could usefully be applied to planet earth. Specifically in three ways.
1) Don’t drive species to extinction
2) Don’t destroy a habitat that species rely on.
3) Don’t change the climate in ways that will result in the above.
Yes species occasionally go extinct all on their own. And occasionally are swept away in huge mass extinction. This is not one of those times unless we make it one. Species are not replaced in a time frame that has any meaning to human history. We have the power to impoverish ourselves irreversibly or take care of what we have. The argument on the other side would be what, exactly?
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Yep .. Starve the watchdogs and then blame them after a ‘theft’ for being week and sleepy … couldn’t get more convenient ..eeh.
Nice cartoon, 2nd one … Consoling ‘cents of humor’.
The “GET A LAUGH” button below each pane seems dis-consonant with the cartoons themselves. They are meant to be satirical, but they are so dead on it’s not even funny.
“The argument on the other side would be what, exactly?”
Uhh…my quarterly balance sheet?
The argument on the other side has to do with, “Who gets what?”.
Let’s be practical here. People work hard to get it (whatever it is … but something like money is a very popular definition of ‘it’) and when they have it they believe it belongs to them.
The argument does something like: I have worked hard and made the right choices in life and now I have it. So now I should give it away to someone else who has not made the sacrifices I have made to get it? That’s unfair to me and everyone else who have achieved it.
Hummm … this is starting to look like, “The Tragedy of the Commons” where for everyone to be successful everyone has to give up something. Individualistic thinking and accounting are poisonous to this debate. When this individualism is coupled with a propaganda industry which spews FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, the results should not surprise anyone.
I go back to a theme from Game Theory I’ve mentioned here before. The Game of the 21st C is: “The Tragedy of the Commons”.
If we solve this game, our species lives long and prospers. If we can’t solve it, our species dies a long and brutal death.
The Climate Debate
Imagine people try to open a door.
Imagine on the other side of the door are some heavy bodyguards blocking the entrance paid by a single man.
Now imagine how more and more people start pushing against the door to have it open.
And while people push the door water starts to rise around them.
We are now at the moment when the bodyguards feet start to slip and the door is opening with a whammy.
uhm, the tragedy of the commons is that some people use and take a whole lot, and leave the rest to deal with the ill effects. The commons are not equal, by any means. BP, Goldman Sachs, nuclear companies – they make take the big risks, and get most of the gains (profits), but many of them wont necessarily feel the bad effects – that the rest of us pay for.
Less than 50 days away: http://imattermarch.org/
Please send this link along on your emails to raise awareness from coast to coast to coast
Make this Mother’s Day one for the books…
Well, Japan had regulations and look what happened to them!
(This is sarcasm.)
The Tragedy of the Commons occurs when people use up a shared asset before they use any of their own.
With CO2 and greenhouse gases, there is no other asset, no private stock of good climate, to enjoy once the common one has been used up. This is the only planet we’ve got.
The ordinary Libertarian buzz words don’t apply.
The word of the day from http://wordsmith.org/words/usufruct.html is usufruct – the right to use and enjoy another’s property without destroying it.
Seems we’ve strayed far from the “without destroying it” part… so much so that hardly the next generation is considered, much less the 7th generation as directed by the Iroquois Confederacy…
The tragedy of the commons to my way of thinking began with the idea of private property. Those who saw life as a competition to pile up more loot than others, began to steal it from those others. So you get brigands turning themselves into chiefs, kings and emperors. They surround themselves with armed killers and they set about extracting protection money from farmers, herdsmen, merchants and artisans etc-these become serfs and peasants. Later the standover men ‘enclose’ ie steal the common land adding to their wealth. Even bigger profits come from ‘entrepreneurial’ activities like slave trading, slavery on plantations, slaves mining billions in silver at Potosi and the like and in exterminating tens of millions of indigenous in the New World and stealing their fabulously rich and productive land. Why you can even turn a nice buck from exterminating your near kin, as in the Scottish Highland Clearances or the Irish Potato Famine, during which, in obeisance to the Laws of Free Trade, you continue to export grain while children starve in ditches.
The only real difference today is that the blood-suckers have no more ‘New Worlds’ to conquer. They control everything, from politics and the indoctrination system of the MSM to the very stuff of life, patented hence expropriated for rentier purposes against all common sense and decency.And the greed and lust for ‘More!’ has reached the biological limits of a finite planet. The millennial habit of stealing, intimidating, and killing where necessary to get your way, ie the lifestyle of the uber-Mafiosi, has hit a dead-end. The robbers’ class has reacted by falling back on their perennial strengths, violence, bullying and intimidation. I mean, honestly, is what is happening in your Tea Party governed states, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan etc not the throwing down of a gauntlet by the banditti? Is this not, at long last, after many false alarms, the arrival of some decidedly unfriendly form of naked authoritarianism? I’d call it fascism, but it hardly amounts to that.
We are species.
…thus it’s counterproductive to destroy habitat in the name of stopping global warming – at the moment a huge land grab going on to build concentrated solar while rooftop solar incentives are cut.
http://www.mojavedesertblog.com/2010/08/doubts-about-desert-tortoise.html
http://intercontinentalcry.org/save-the-mojave-desert-from-mass-industrialization/
Sorry Joy. I do wish we would use rooftops and already-degraded land first, but I WILL NOT start a battle with anyone trying to develop alternative energies. It will only give fodder to faux news (witness the fun they derived from attacks on cape wind). PLEASE try to be diplomatic in your attempts to nudge the developers to minimize their intrusion. This is not the time to fracture our base.
Or maybe you actually work for the Koch brothers. They would LOVE to see a battle split proponents of solar energy.
Joy, I appreciate your desire to protect the desert tortoise and the desert ecosystems. I share that desire.
But please consider what will happen to the entire desert ecosystem if we allow temperatures to rise significantly higher than they now are and at the same time reduce the already sparse rainfall. Already we are seeing some lizards ceasing to reproduce because it’s gotten too hot for them to hunt. If they don’t eat enough, they don’t mate.
Might it make sense to use <1% of the desert in order to save the other 99+%?
Joy, the second link you provide includes the words “mitigation concepts with no scientific foundation” which sounds like science denial to me.
Apart from that, it seems like any damage could be averted by a change of site, ME
Joy#14, I’d agree that protecting a vulnerable habitat and endangered species would be a priority in a sane world, but it’s emergency time. We have reached the stage of choosing ‘lesser evils’. As the others have said, stopping climate destabilisation, which will destroy all habitat and most higher species if unchecked, has to be the absolute priority. Please beware of cunning denialist industry dissemblers, feigning concern for habitats or creatures that they never showed any interest in before and which they would happily crush under their wheels if uranium or oil was discovered in that desert.
Joy, let’s do a little math.
Suppose we define the “California” desert as a rectangle stretching from Las Vegas south to the Mexican boarder (400km) and from Hemet east to Phoenix (500km). That gives us an area of 200,000 square km and at 247 acres per sq km the rectangle contains 49,400,000 acres.
Now let’s take the world’s largest solar project, the Mojave Solar Park. It’s 6,000 acres (and it’s huge, huge, huge compared to the 50MW Spanish Abengoa plant at 280 acres).
The Mojave Solar Park takes a total of 0.0012% of that block of desert.
You could place 1,764 Abengoa-sized solar plants in only 1% of that hunk of desert.
Okay, I have no idea how to get there from here, but here’s my dream: Everyone on Anthro-Earth is fairly represented and agrees to binding decisions about energy.
At a fairly large panel discussion (that I volunteer to moderate), each energy form has advocates pointing out all their benefits and detractors pointing out all their liabilities.
The panel of representatives then chooses how to transition to each of these forms of energy based on the plusses out-weighing the minuses.
My own intuition is that solar and wind would top the list by a wide margin, while coal would be seen as the worst energy source when all full-cost accounting is done.
As others have pointed out, the lizard who’s habitat is disrupted by a desert solar array is a cause for sadness, but abruptly and catastrophically shifting climate that kills most or all individuals of most or all species is sadder by such a wide margin – well, you could do the math.
When I go to scientific conferences I find that most scientists are most interested in the truth of their science, but when I go to energy conferences I usually find that everyone is selling something, and even if I agree with what they’re selling that leads to multiple exaggerations and distortions.
In fact in addition to Mulga’s amazing rant at #12, I’d add this: He’s speaking of the governmental, military and financial leaders, and I agree with him. But just as Hitler or Stalin couldn’t kill millions by themselves, these leaders need most of the rest of us in the most affluent countries to keep the mechanism going.
I don’t think what Mulga is saying is a vast spoken conspiracy. Little of what he brings up is ever discussed, it’s just that the whole system operates as if there were a vast conspiracy, because it is to the benefit of so many, including the middle classes who make the whole thing run but of course especially to the master class he so expertly exposes.
And a big part of the mechanism is why those energy conferences are so odious to me compared to the scientific conferences: It often seems like we’re just selling each other everything all the time, until we are literally selling ourselves to death.
Selling good and necessary things like solar and wind will best be done by comparing all their plusses and minuses with all other forms of energy as completely and honestly as possible, including their scale (which needs to grow 100-fold as quickly as possible).
I have just listened to the Chairman of Blue Scope Steel address the National Press Club. Just a sample: the carbon tax will destroy the steel industry in Oz in 10 years, Ross Garnaut got his stats wrong, the price on carbon will not change global emissions at all, all they want is a ‘level playing field’, the govt is hopeless at consulting.
One journo pointed out that their plant in Kiwi Land was still making a huge profit even with a carbon tax. His answer was quite predictably that its different over there.
So its heating up. Lots of yelling and screaming ahead! ME
“The argument on the other side would be what, exactly?”
Umm . That would be whole lot of money and a comfortable ‘modern lifestyle’ for me :-) I’m not sure about the rest of you though …
Does anyone remember this cartoon classic? Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” circa 1989, shows three fish standing on a table right next to their fish tank, where a fire rages inside the tank under the water. Caption:
“Whew! We made it out just in time. Of course, now we’re equally screwed.” I have an old, yellowed clip of this cartoon from an old newspaper that was pinned to my desk wall for years. Would be fun to find an electronic version of the original cartoon.
I keep running into an argument for the other side from a very small minority (least they’re a minority up here in Canada)–the endtimes are coming so it all doesn’t matter because the ‘good’ guys will be raptured away.
Re: Gary Larson cartoon. Yes, I have that one on my desk calendar–I have four or five years of Gary Larson desk calendars. I sorted and categorized each of the cartoons into different topics so I could find any cartoon I wanted for the appropriate topic when I taught biology. Teaching about tapeworms? I’ve got the cartoon at my fingertips. Why yes, I am a bit OCD–how did you know? :)
@ Daniel J. Andrews:
Oh it gets worse then that I’m afraid….
Here is US Rep. John Shimkus arguing, in a US Energy Subcommittee hearing that there won’t be flooding of the coastlines from AGW because in his interpretation of the Bible, that God had promised otherwise.
Rep. John Shimkus: God decides when the “earth will end”
Also, if you haven’t head of them yet, you might want to also look up the “Rapture Ready”. This collection of individuals not only think that the Earth is about to end, but many want to help speed things (like wars in the Middle East) along so that they can get “raptured” more quickly!