It’ll be all about the Metro Mayor’s proposal for transportation investment, revenues and the referendum today, all day. I’ll post a response when I can.
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But in the meantime here’s a topic, taken from The Dish (“Will Global Warming Defeat Us?”), that always generates response:
Why Reducing U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Is a Risky Move in a Global Economy.
International climate negotiations are somewhat similar to the prisoner’s dilemma. Assuming man-made global warming is costly to all countries, the optimum solution is for all countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. But for an individual country, the better option is to keep burning low-cost fossil fuels while other nations reduce their emissions. Since all countries recognize that other countries are likely to cheat and continue to use fossil fuels, they all fail to cut their emissions.
Is there a way out of that dynamic? Two political scientists, Scott Barrett of Columbia and Astrid Dannenberg of Princeton, tried to find one in a 2013 study using game theory experiments. They concluded that if game players know for sure where the threshold for huge losses is located, they will cooperate to avoid it. The catastrophe threshold acts a form of punishment that encourages cooperation.
However, the experiments showed that “when the threshold for catastrophe was even slightly indeterminate, the players crossed essentially every time”:
The current uncertainties about the effects and intensity of future climate change suggest that countries are unlikely to follow the Obama administration’s lead. Based on their experimental results, Barrett and Dannenberg hold out the hope that climate research that reduces threshold uncertainty might help spur countries into mutual cuts of their greenhouse gas emissions.
However: Why it’s still not “game over” for global warming.
Different models have different estimates for how costly global warming will be. But everyone agrees on the general point — risks and damages keep piling up as the world gets hotter. So if the world can’t prevent 2°C of warming, it’s still a good idea to try and avoid 3°C of warming. If we can’t avoid 3°C of warming, it’s still a good idea to avoid 4°C. And so on. …Setting hard boundaries — and framing things in terms of success and failure — is a much more intuitive way to think about the issue. (I’ve been guilty of this sort of talk myself.) But it doesn’t really make sense to declare “game over” at any point.
But it isn’t clear that the prisoners dilemma really is holding up policy change. Certainly competition is used as an excuse not to do anything, but that does not seem to be the real motivation. Mostly it is fear of change and vested interests. Obviously carbon intensive industry does not like carbon taxes and will moan about them, but there are only a few carbon intensive industries like steel and cement where competition is really an issue. And under current trade rules, environmental levies on imports based on carbon emissions would be allowed. The opposition looks more like the anti gay marriage movement. Cries of impending doom, and then when it happens and most people don’t even notice, that crowd moves on to something else. Another factor to consider is that energy savings are savings. A vehicle that burns less fuel costs less to operate. Some carbon reducing measures are capital intensive – rapid transit projects, electrification of freight railways, conversion of coal fired generators to nuclear and wind, district energy systems – but they will save money over the longer term. And we are apparently in a world of capital glut, very low returns, so capital intensive systems are less expensive.
The status quo has already been defeated. Innovation is the only way forward.
I was thinking about the issue in just these terms once Obama announced new directions for the EPA and his critics complained that the USA couldn’t fix the world by itself (so why do anything). It isn’t exactly like the Prisoner’s Dilemma but there are similarities – there are perceived rewards to betrayal and the biggest benefit comes if we all co-operate. I suspect that part of the reason that Harper and Clarke are pushing LNG and tar sands so heavily is that they know that if they wait, the world will wake up and the market will disappear. They aren’t climate deniers per se, they’re just acting like it because they see more value in betrayal than in co-operation.
On the positive, unlike in the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma where each trial is distinct, actors in our game can always revise and adapt. In studies of game theory, it seems a little co-operation leads to more co-operation in a virtuous cycle. By taking small steps, Obama is starting down a path which can lead to more, bigger steps. It encourages other countries to follow. It sometimes feels hopeless but big changes can happen quickly in the right circumstances.
And above all, it’s worth remembering that the cost to bring our emissions down to the levels recommended by the IPCC is minimal, a fraction of a percent of global GDP (especially when compared with the cost of inaction). We don’t need more research, we don’t need more technology. We have all of the knowledge and the tools to hit the goals, we just need our “leaders” to start taking steps.