There’s a somewhat unfortunate strain of left-wing criticism of cap-and-trade that seems based largely on not understanding how cap-and-trade actually works. Paul Krugman, for example, today notes that the great climate scientist James Hansen seems to have a number of erroneous views on this subject.

One point that I think deserve special emphasis, because I’ve spoken to many people who are confused about it, is that the point needs to be made that in terms of environmental impact, it doesn’t matter who you give carbon permits too. When the government sets a cap on carbon dioxide emissions, the overwhelming environmentally relevant issue is just “how low is the cap.” Everything beyond that is about money and economics, don’t environment and the atmosphere. The reason is that once you cap emissions, the right to emit becomes a valuable thing. If the government auctions off the permits, then the government gets the money and can spend it on something useful. If the government gives the permits away to me, then I’m going to sell them and get rich. If the government gives the permits away to polluters, then some polluters will keep on polluting just as they would under the auction scenario, except they’ll be spared the cost of actually buying the permit. And other polluters are going to realize that the cost of reducing pollution is less than the money they can earn by selling permits.

However you do it, pollution is reduced. If the cap is aggressive, it’s reduced a lot. If the cap is timid, it’s reduced a little. The allocation of permits is an issue of who bears the costs of reducing pollution, it has nothing to do with the extent of the pollution reduction. In general, auctioning the permits is more economically efficient and thus a generally better idea, but it’s a total wash environmentally. The fact that some politically powerful subset of polluters may reap a financial reward is unfortunate, but not actually relevant to the climate issue.

If a pollster asked me how I feel about the health reform proposals in congress, I would tell him that I am a 100 percent enthusiastic backer of these reforms, that I regard as the most awesomest reforms ever proposed by humankind. But that’s because I know how polls are reported in the press, not because that’s how I actually feel. If given the ability to answer a nuanced question, I would say that these are reforms that are worth doing but that don’t go nearly as far as I would like in changing the system. Now Nate Silver tells us about a poll that actually did offer some nuance, an Ipsos-McClatchy survey that let people say something about what they though was wrong with the bill:

One way to look at this: 43 percent of people favor health care reform, whereas 38 percent oppose it (20 percent are undecided). But the actual plan under consideration gets numbers that are more or less the reverse of that — 34 percent in favor, 46 percent opposed — because a significant number of people think the plan doesn’t go far enough.

This has always been my assumption, but it’s good to see some empirical conversation.

On the merits, I think it’s crucial to draw a distinction between a bill that doesn’t go as far as an ideal bill would go, and a bill that actually doesn’t go far enough to be worth doing. My view is that a bill that will provide a modicum of decent health insurance to millions of currently uninsured Americans, while also making some progress on various aspects of delivery reform and cost control is a bill that would be worth doing. But at the same time nothing that’s been on the table legislatively has gone remotely as far as ideal policy would in terms of either curbing the role of insurance companies or transforming the delivery of health care services.

Lee Fang has a post about how David Koch, one of the ten richest men in America and a major source of financing for right-wing attacks on climate science, also likes to portray himself as a friend of science and uses his money to get glowing reviews from the likes of the Smithsonian Institution Human Origins Program director Rick Potts: “What we find in David Koch is a person who’s committed to doing things for the American public that has no relationship to politics.”

The reality, of course, is that Koch is intensely political, funding, among other things, the “Hot Air Tour” aimed at misleading the public about climate science and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is one of the leading denialist institutions out there.

That said, as best I can tell Koch is also genuinely interested in research into human evolution. He helped underwrite NOVA’s excellent recent three-part series “Becoming Human.” It seems to be available online and I recommend people watch it. That said, if you watch the end of Episode One you can see Koch the Paleoanthropology Enthusiast collide with Koch the Global Warming Crank as it concludes with an oddly upbeat description of the positive role cataclysmic shifts in climate have played in human history. What the research is saying, basically, is that climate swings led to a lot of death, destruction, and extinctions thus opening up new ecological niches that our ancestors filled but the material is presented in a weird “change is good!” kind of way that avoids mentioning all the death.