

Lessons from the Skeptics Conference - jgamman
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/lessons-from-the-skeptics-conference/
this is their science correspondent???
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Prrometheus
Ronald Bailey had some interesting notes on the conference. Their ideas seem
fairly well-grounded and reasonable, the kinds of things we should be
debating. Wish I could have been there:

<http://reason.com/news/show/125281.html>

<http://reason.com/news/show/125300.html>

<http://reason.com/news/show/125323.html>

Disclosure: I regularly receive a lot of flack for not panicking over Global
Warming.

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jgamman
I'm a fan of 'pay to pollute' - charge companies for the right to emit a tonne
of CO2. standard business practice is to reduce costs and you can alter the
rate of change by steadily increasing the price. it's conceptually simpler but
still has the drawback of being a revenue device for govt but that is not
unsolvable.

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Alex3917
The NYT Magazine isn't that bad. The investigative journalism is generally on
par with Salon.

NYT in general though tends to be either anti-intellectual, or propaganda, or
both. The idea that a carbon tax is more efficient than cap-and-trade is
laughable.

~~~
pchristensen
Why is that laughable? I was under the impression that both environmentally
and economically, a carbon tax was better.

~~~
Alex3917
Earth: The Sequel actually has a really good explanation of this. If you do
search inside the book, pages 4-8 are available, and they have a really good
summary of the history of the clean air act.

[http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Sequel-Reinvent-Energy-
Warming/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Sequel-Reinvent-Energy-
Warming/dp/0393066908/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204821527&sr=8-1)

Disclaimer: My dad co-authored this book.

~~~
pchristensen
Your dad is president of EDF? Wow, you really never know who you'll find on
Hacker News! BTW, that's a nice looking book that's now on my Wish List.

I know for sure that cap-and-trade is better than tech requirements or per-
company caps. I'm one of the biggest fans of environmental capitalism around
(see [http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/worlds-best-
primer...](http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/worlds-best-primer-on-
energy-competitiveness/) and [http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/the-
ecology-of-com...](http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/the-ecology-of-
commerce-by-paul-hawken/)), but that still doesn't explain why cap-and-trade
is better than a carbon tax. Is the concern that the tax will be too low and
not result in an absolute reduction in emissions? Or that the revenue
collected will be used inappropriately (ie not to offset the damage caused by
the pollution)? That was more what I was looking for.

~~~
Alex3917
Well I don't want to speak for him, but I think the general advantage of cap-
and-trade is that it makes it profitable for entrepreneurs to innovate. When
you give money to the government it basically gets stolen, whereas under cap-
and-trade the money goes directly the entrepreneurs who come up with the
solutions. The book is actually all about the policies that most help
entrepreneurs. To quote from the introduction:

"A level playing field. That is what these venture capitalists and innovators
require-- not assurances of profits but enough of a fighting chance to make
the huge risks they are taking reasonable. Many still will not succeed. Those
who do will need enormous ingenuity and doggedness to make their inventions
work at a marketable price."

I think most news.yc readers would actually love the book.

~~~
Prrometheus
“the general advantage of cap-and-trade is that it makes it profitable for
entrepreneurs to innovate.”

So does a tax. Innovating in green tech reduces your expenses on carbon tax.
Some may complain that this is a reduction in costs instead of an increase in
revenue, but the two are equivalent.

The entrepreneur can also sell his green tech to other businesses who want to
avoid heavy carbon taxes.

~~~
Alex3917
Let's say you have two companies. It costs company A 500 dollars per ton of
emissions eliminated. It costs company B 100 dollars per ton of emissions
eliminated.

Under a cap-and-trade system, company A can pay company B to reduce its
emissions twice as much. This way you reduce the total amount of carbon
dioxide pollution by the same amount as creating a tax would, but it is much
more economically efficient.

My understanding is that this doesn't work under a carbon tax. Again though,
the environment/economics aren't really my areas of expertise.

