A Lot Of Hot Air

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

AN APPEAL TO REASON, Nigel Lawson.

Global warming is a lot of hot air. But mostly it's another political crisis, cooked up by the usual suspects, to separate you from your money. It's the latest gimmick to increase tax revenue, enrich lawyers, and limit competition.

The oldest political scheme in the book is to scare people and create hysteria. Fear makes it easy for politicians to get your money. Climate, children, Saddam, WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, crime, AIDS, etc are what the pols use to foment hysteria.

A few facts:

Cold kills a lot more people than hot.

You cannot predict the future. You have no idea what technology or event will come down the pike tomorrow.

All the global warming models assume nothing will change between now and 2001. But technology changes all the time.

The 30s-40s were warmer than now. Not much happened to the planet.

Much of the weather data is collected from airports located in urban areas. Urban areas are warmer than rural areas.

If Antarctica warms up it will likely get more snow! Much of Greenland is actually becoming colder.

 

[jomar]

That was basically Michael Crichton's premise in his novel State of Fear.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

JOMAR

I'll check it out.

I know two things: Ordinary people generally cooperate and compromise, (2) and lawyers (pols) stir shit up as often as they can.

Not counting the extremists, I believe most people want to do right and live at peace and prosper.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Even one who does think GW is real, Bjorn Lomborg, thinks the proposed responses to it are insane. And evil, because the opportunity costs they impose are denominated in dollars, but paid in lives and diminished human well-being.

But hey - they do increase the power of governments and politicians, and enrich rent seekers. Oh, wait a minute . . .

 

[colddiesel]

Nigel Lawson the author of this book was Chancellor of the exchequer under Margaret Thatcher from 1983 to 1989. He resigned because he thought her monetary policy was too liberal. Before becoming a polititian he was a financial journalist. He has no training in science.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

COLDIESEL

True. He says he's no scientist.

But neither was Darwin or Mendel or Gore.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Lomborg is a statistician, which is the exact specialty to have when assessing things like complex modeling techniques. He does accept that GW is real, and bases his work on the IPCC median projections, which body is cited by the GW faithful as the authority. To repeat, he finds the current proposals to reduce greenhouse gases to be insane, in that they impose monstrous costs in lost human well-being for virtually no signifigant reduction in GW. For example, if Kyoto were imposed, at the end of the century the reduction in warming would save one polar bear. He points out that we shoot around 500 of them each year.

 

[trysail]

That was basically Michael Crichton's premise in his novel State of Fear.

jomar,
It is an interesting book; I'm delighted that you mention it. While Crichton's book is a "novel," it does contain an extensive bibliography and a very useful section titled "Sources of Data for Graphs." I use both extensively as guides to locating the raw data underlying the field of study.

Regards,
Trysail

 

[Kev H]

An interesting article/summary that was just posted: http://www.politickernj.com/bguhl/2...stifies-repealing-global-warming-response-act

Perhaps not all pols are created equal...

 

[xssve]

As I mentioned in the solar thread, the right wing bitching about the economic costs of getting carbon emissions under control is just reverse Malthusianism - the requirement to develop new technologies to deal with these sorts of problems has historically resulted in increased economic activity, not decreases - going back at least to Whale oil.

It's really more about not wanting to make the capital investments since that's going to cut into current profit margins, even if it pays off in the long run - it's just inertia.

 

[xssve]

Oh yeah,

"And evil, because the opportunity costs they impose are denominated in dollars, but paid in lives and diminished human well-being." --Roxanne Appleby

Photovoltaics - which make power from sunlight - are taking off internationally as well. This fall, the largest solar-energy project in the world will be rolled out in the Philippines, a cooperative effort involving the Spanish government, the Philippines Department of Agrarian Reform, and BP Solar, the wing of British Petroleum that currently produces more than 10 percent of the photovoltaic cells used in the world. The $48 million project will bring electricity to 400,000 residents of 150 villages on the island of Mindanao, home to one-third of the nation's rural poor. The project will produce enough electricity to create 69 new irrigation systems and 97 drinking-water distribution systems, as well as power lights and medical equipment for 147 schools and 37 health clinics. Seventy-nine new AC systems will also become available, enabling the creation of new local businesses.

The scale of the Mindanao project is extraordinary, but the potential for micropower to raise the quality of life in developing countries - without relying on huge power plants or expensive, difficult-to-obtain fossil fuels - is being demonstrated all over the globe. Just as developing countries are jumping straight to mobile phone service without laying expensive landlines, micropower technologies are enabling those historically left in the dark to leapfrog the hub-and-spoke grids altogether.

In his comprehensive white paper, "Micropower: The Next Electrical Era" (www.worldwatch.org/pubs/paper151.html), Seth Dunn offers a roster of thriving solar- and wind-power markets in China, India, Indonesia, and South Africa, where photovoltaic panels run wireless telephone networks in rural areas. Tens of thousands of Kenyan households are going solar in a market driven by local entrepreneurs, and in Zimbabwe, where a major international solar-power summit was convened in 1996, there's a lively generation of startups devoted to designing and installing photovoltaics for home use. EPRI estimates that, for every 100 South Africans who get electricity, 10 new businesses are created. Still, one out of three people on earth has no access to electricity.

In many countries, where supplies of sunlight and wind are enormous and inexhaustible, the primary energy source for the poor is high-carbon biomass. These fuels - crop residues, scavenged wood and charcoal, and cattle dung - take significant tolls on the health of those who burn them, and add to the impact of first-world power profligacy in heating up the atmosphere. In India alone, indoor air pollution created by high-emission fuels causes half a million premature deaths a year.

Hardest hit are women, whose responsibility it often is to provide fuel for household use. In China, nonsmoking women suffer chronic bronchitis, lung cancer, pneumonia, and heart disease at rates rivaling or exceeding those of chronic smokers. These energy cycles are vicious and all-pervading: Where men have migrated out to more-developed urban areas, women - and, increasingly, children - now must clear land and plow fields in addition to scavenging for fuel, food, and water. "What provides the energy that electricity would replace? Women," Yeager observes.

In countries that already have access to electricity, micropower resources will provide ways to reduce carbon emissions, improve energy efficiency, and ease the strain on stressed grids by providing supplemental power during periods of peak use. Not all methods of distributed generation run cleanly - the diesel backup generators keeping server farms and databases online this summer in Silicon Valley also count as micropower. But even the units that run on fossil fuels generally have a lighter environmental footprint than traditional central-generation plants. Microturbines can also make use of a much wider range of fuels, from methanol, propane, and natural gas to "sour gas" normally flared off in oil drilling, thus turning waste into low-emission power. And micropower is a better fit with the quick-turnaround imperatives of the deregulated market; the construction and securing of permits for a new 10,000-megawatt power plant takes years, and requires millions of dollars in capital up front. Most important, scaling the generators to the load reduces energy waste.

Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.07/juice_pr.html

Greed and inertia posing as human concern - not only are live improved, but new markets are developed where they previously didn't exist.

Wah.

 

[trysail]

As I mentioned in the solar thread, the right wing bitching about the economic costs of getting carbon emissions under control is just reverse Malthusianism - the requirement to develop new technologies to deal with these sorts of problems has historically resulted in increased economic activity, not decreases - going back at least to Whale oil.

It's really more about not wanting to make the capital investments since that's going to cut into current profit margins, even if it pays off in the long run - it's just inertia.

It is a fact that capital spending (or "capital investments," as you term it) has no effect, whatsoever, on current profit margins. That's basic accounting.

Beyond that, none of this has any connection to absurd political namecalling—it's a matter of economics. The free market system evolved for a simple reason; it results in the efficient allocation of scarce resources.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Oh yeah,

"And evil, because the opportunity costs they impose are denominated in dollars, but paid in lives and diminished human well-being." --Roxanne Appleby

Greed and inertia posing as human concern - not only are live improved, but new markets are developed where they previously didn't exist.

Wah.

That is uncivil. You can say that you think I'm wrong in as many and as imaginative ways as you can think of, but you cannot say that I am motivated my anything other than goodwill.

 

[Boxlicker101]

It is a fact that capital spending (or "capital investments," as you term it) has no effect, whatsoever, on current profit margins. That's basic accounting.

Actually, it does. As soon as a capital acquisition is put into use, depreciation of it is begun. Furthermore, if it is bought with the proceeds of bond sales or other kind of borrowing, interest expenses are incurred.

 

[trysail]

Actually, it does. As soon as a capital acquisition is put into use, depreciation of it is begun. Furthermore, if it is bought with the proceeds of bond sales or other kind of borrowing, interest expenses are incurred.

You are correct, Box, and I am guilty of an oversimplification.

I will, however, point out that the impact of straight-line depreciation on the P&L when a very long-lived asset is placed in service is negligible (I intentionally chose to ignore that negligible impact for the purpose of making the point).

Nonetheless, I will amend my original statement to read:
"It is a fact that capital spending (or "capital investments," as you term it) has a negligible effect on current profit margins."

A conservatively managed enterprise will be financed with the minimal amount of debt consistent with a policy of ensuring the debt can be serviced under stress conditions— while earning its cost of capital across the business cycle.

In any event, the point is that no prudently managed enterprise will refrain from funding a profitable project (which it believes lies within its circle of competence and which doesn't endanger its solvency) for fear of a negligible short-run impact to its P&L.