New at Reason

November 15, 2006

Ronald "Nairobi" Bailey reports on Kofi Annan's big ideas for making carbon trading an economic plus for the developing world.

Comments

|11.15.06 @ 3:36PM|#

Ronald, who did you piss off at Reason to get stuck with this job? Seriously, keep up the good work. You can be assured that neither local paper in Detroit is covering it. HMMM, I wondere why people aren't buying them as much as they used to.

|11.15.06 @ 4:52PM|#

Brice Lalonde, former French environment minister, declared that the ultimate goal is that "anybody who takes carbon from the earth's crust has to pay to put it back."

It's nice to see discussion of deforestation and reforestation being included in carbon measurements.

Last year I went through the exercise of figuring out what would be the most economically efficient way to deal with global warming provided it is a problem. Part of that solution is recorded in the comments on this thread.

The bottom line is that there is a good amount of evidence that atmospheric carbon sequestration would on the order of a penny per pound of CO2 -- or 20 cents per gallon of gasoline.

When you compare this Coase-inspired solution with the proposed Pigouvian carbon taxes, it is far, far cheaper and admits far less government involvement. In addition, it actually solves the problem!

|11.15.06 @ 5:02PM|#

Another distressing thing about the prospect of actually figuring out how carbon emitters can pay rainforest-rich nations, aside from the expected graft, is that it almost certainly will encourage the kleptocrats to *retard* economic development in their countries. As the standard of living rises, presumably so will their carbon production and thus lowering their "entitlement". To keep the "entitlement" up, they'll need to keep their forests intact and their people poor.

|11.15.06 @ 5:42PM|#

The solution is to have secure private landownership. If a Kenyan goatherd can earn whatever pittance he can earn by letting his goats eat young tree-shoots, or he can earn more by planting trees and being paid off by rich nations, he'll do the latter, take the money, and invest in some kind of other of (a) more tree-friendly livestock, (b) moneymaking enterprise, (c) tree-based agriculture.

If the money from the rich nations goes to the corrupt government, then our goatherd is screwed.

And we should start paying the Brazilian herders for their shares of the Amazon post-haste, before it gets cut down. They could certainly make more selling carbon sinks and access to pharmaceutical research than they could for low-quality beef far from market.

|11.15.06 @ 10:36PM|#

then our goatherd is screwed.

The whole herd? Oh my.

|11.15.06 @ 10:37PM|#

If we paid Central and South Americans to screw their goats, I'll be there'd be a lot less violence.

Yeah buddy. Save the planet, screw your goats.

|11.15.06 @ 11:09PM|#

Uh, again.... WHY is it such a problem to have more CO2 in the atmosphere?

Ron already believes it could be a problem. Last I saw, nobody could even DEFINE the problem - they just believe that a temperature rise could be a "problem".

So, what is it? More tornadoes? Where is the evidence of that? More huricanes? Where is the proof, or the precedent? What is the "ideal" level of CO2? What is the benchmark?

Asking people to become poorer for some crisis that cannot be defined is pure evil.

|11.16.06 @ 4:16AM|#

If we paid Central and South Americans to screw their goats, I'll bet there'd be a lot less violence

Perhaps not at the individual goat level, though.

ed|11.16.06 @ 8:56AM|#

Asking people to become poorer for some crisis that cannot be defined is pure evil.

Well put. But your detractors will point out a "world consensus" on the coming apocalypse. They will also claim that poor countries will somehow be better off if U.S. automobiles get 30 MPG instead of 29. And if everyone agrees to go along with the scam, Africa will stop being the world's perennial basket case.

Trust them. They are smarter than you.

R C Dean|11.16.06 @ 10:34AM|#

Yeah, nothing solves problems like paying people something for nothing. And I think that's pretty much what carbon trading is.

I pay you hard cash in exchange for, what, exactly? You do nothing for me, and in fact you do nothing at all, because you have sold off your right to do anything that generates carbon.

I think what I get in exchange for my cash is permission from the government to continue doing what I was doing.

It is beyond me how anybody can support this, unless they are planning to horn in on a scheme that might as well have "rent-seeking fountain of corruption" tattooed on its ass.

|11.16.06 @ 12:41PM|#

RC dean,
Do you throw your trash and sewage on the street and ignore it? Or do you pay to have them disposed of properly?

I, like many in the West, happily pay. In countries that don't, people live in disease and squalor.

CO2 waste is the same thing with just a different context of disposal, and a different consequence of ignoring.

|11.16.06 @ 7:21PM|#

Do you throw your trash and sewage on the street and ignore it? Or do you pay to have them disposed of properly?

CO2 is NOT a pollutant. Please use another argument, this one is fallaciuous.

|11.18.06 @ 7:20PM|#

"CO2 is NOT a pollutant. Please use another argument, this one is fallaciuous."

I and many others disagree. Also CO2 isn't the only greenhouse factor. Soot. Methane. Ozone. Various other relevant gasses are at play.