The Social Cost of Carbon game
[Canadian] Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault recently announced that the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), or the dollar value of supposed damages associated with each tonne of carbon dioxide emissions, is about $247, nearly five times higher than the old estimate of $54. He made it sound like a discovery, as if a bunch of experts had finally been able to measure something they previously only guessed at. Like when scientists were finally able to measure the mass of an electron or the age of the Earth, now finally we can measure the SCC.
But in reality there has been no breakthrough in economics comparable to those physics breakthroughs. Countless SCC estimates already exist ranging from small negative amounts (i.e. carbon dioxide emissions are beneficial) to many thousands of dollars per tonne. Every such estimate is like a complex “if-then” statement: if the following assumptions hold, then the SCC is $X. Yale economist William Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics for developing some of the first methods for combining all the “if” statements into systems called Integrated Assessment Models or IAMs. And using conventional economic and climate modelling methods, he tended to get pretty low SCC values over the years, which has long been a sore point among climate activists and the politicians who share their agenda.
But economists are on the case. The $247 figure referenced by Guilbeault comes from a new report from the Biden administration that tossed out all the previous models, including Nordhaus’s, and instead cobbled together a set of new models that when run together yield much higher SCC values.
In many ways the new models are just like the old ones. For example they persist in using an Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity of 3 degrees C. This refers to the warming expected from doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The authors cite the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the basis for this decision, apparently unaware that that estimate has already been shown in the climate literature to be flawed. Using the IPCC’s own method on updated data yields a sensitivity estimate of about 2.2 C or less, and as I have shown in a recent publication this is enough to cause the SCC estimate in a standard model to drop to nearly zero.
The biggest boosts to the new SCC figure hailed by Guilbeault come from revisions to agricultural productivity impacts and mortality costs from climate warming. The evidence for large negative agricultural impacts comes from a 2017 article by Frances Moore and co-authors that looked at the combined effects of CO2 fertilization and warming, concluding the net effect would harm global agriculture. Oddly, they used the same data as a 2014 study by Andrew Challinor and co-authors who had found the opposite: the combination of increased CO2 and warming would have much more benign, and in some cases even beneficial, results.
How did Moore et al. get different results from the same data? They used a different statistical model but unfortunately didn’t provide evidence showing it is better than the one Challinor used, so it’s unclear whose results are stronger. But we know whose are more popular. The Biden administration team referred only to the Moore study and left out any mention of the Challinor one, and it is a safe assumption that the reviewers didn’t notice the omission. See how the game is played?
https://financialpost.com/opinion/junk-science-week-social-cost-of-carbon-game
**************************************************Lloyd’s of London latest in long list of net zero alliance quitters
Lloyd's of London has become the latest insurer to quit the United Nation’s Net Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA), as US political pressure and fears of antitrust lawsuits grow.
“Lloyd’s has decided to withdraw from the NZIA with immediate effect,” the company said on Friday.
“We continue to support the UN’s principles for sustainable insurance and sustainable development goals, and remain committed to delivering our sustainability strategy including supporting the global economy’s transition.”
Lloyd’s has joined the likes of AXA, Allianz and QBE in fleeing from the alliance in recent weeks, as membership of the group fell to just 17 firms as of Tuesday, from 30 in March.
Members of the NZIA, which was set up under GFANZ in 2021 by ex-Bank of England governor Mark Carney, have faced scrutiny from US Republican politicians over climate commitments, alongside fears of competition lawsuits such as collusion.
“As the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance disintegrates before our eyes, we must ask why these huge companies with their hordes of lawyers did not see antitrust issues [before],” Reclaim Finance analyst Patrick McCully commented on the departures last week.
“We must wonder whether their ditching of the alliance has more to do with fears of losing business in the US than real legal jeopardy.”
The United Nations had stressed the need for collaboration in cutting emissions, though the calls were not enough to prevent the wave of exiting firms from growing.
Aviva PLC (LSE:AV.) and Beazley PLC (LSE:BEZ) were among the alliance’s remaining members on Monday afternoon.
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The great heat pump hype is almost dead
Has a product ever looked and sounded so boring yet excited such passions as the domestic air source heat pump? It might be a dumpy white box with a fan, but for some people it is the device which is going to save human civilisation by decarbonising one of the big sources of emissions: home heating. For many others it looks like a con – an expensive and substandard piece of kit which the Government is forcing down our throats as it panics about trying to fulfil its foolish, self-imposed target of hitting net zero by 2050.
For those in the former camp, a new report by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) does not make comfortable reading. The CMA looked at the marketing of heat pumps and other products and concluded that some buyers are at risk of being misled. It looked at claims made by a sample of businesses on websites and other advertising and found that in only a fifth of cases were claims backed up by evidence. Among them, for example, was a claim that “you can save up to £1335 with an air source heat pump”. It also warned that claims about the environmental and cost-saving benefits of these products are not always based on “real world” conditions, such as the weather or the size of homes.
The truth is that whether you will save money running a heat pump depends on what you are replacing it with, and on the relative price of electricity versus the fuel you are currently using. Even the Government’s energy quango, the Energy Savings Trust, doesn’t hold out the prospect of great savings. Replace a new A-rated gas boiler with an air source heat pump and you might save £115 a year, it claimed. Replace a new A-rated oil boiler with a heat pump, it said, and it could cost you an extra £130 a year. It is only if you are replacing a 30 year old boiler or storage heaters that you can expect to save hundreds of pounds a year on running costs.
But all that depends on the heat pump being installed properly – something which some aggrieved customers are finding has not been done in their case. One Telegraph reader last week complained of spending £20,000 installing an air source heat pump, supposedly with a seven-year year manufacture guarantee and a two-year guarantee through the company that had installed it. When it broke down, it turned out the installer had gone bust.
There, encapsulated in one case study, is the problem with heat pumps. They are horrendously expensive to install, and as a nation we seem not to have the plumbing skills to install them properly at anything like the rate the Government is trying to get us to – it is seemingly aiming for 600,000 a year by the end of the decade.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/01/the-heat-pump-hype-is-finally-dying/ ?
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The poor are being priced out of air travel
Nothing better illuminates the elitism of the green lobby than its loathing of cheap flights. The eco-aware have sleepless nights thinking about plebs jetting off for two weeks in Magaluf. ‘All that pollution for a holiday that involves little more than getting pissed by the pool?’, they snottily wonder. Green MP Caroline Lucas once wrung her hands over ‘cheap stag nights in Riga’ that puke yet more ‘emissions’ into the air. Commentators tut-tut over ‘violent, boozed-up Brits’ who enjoy ‘debauched weekends’ overseas thanks to cheap flying. Plane Stupid – the 2010s anti-flying movement run by plummy greens – condemned the ‘binge-flying’ of people who choose destinations ‘not for their architecture or culture’ but because you can ‘fly there for 99p and get loaded for a tenner’.
Class disdain drips from every word. The rabble-bashing of flyingphobes echoes the priestly handwringing that greeted the birth of mass tourism in the late 1800s. A ‘swarm of intrusive insects’ was how one Victorian moralist described the masses who traipsed to Bognor Regis or Land’s End for a few days’ sweet relief from work. Modern greens are far too PC to call anyone an insect (though an academic journal did say that cheap-flight tourism ‘uncannily resembles an auto-immune disease’, leaving ‘ruin and destruction’ in its wake, which isn’t much better). But they share with their Victorian forebears an urge to wash away the unsightly masses, whether from beauty spots like Land’s End or from the poor, stained skies that can take no more of man’s toxins. And they might finally get their way. Cheap flights are in trouble. The poor might have to content themselves with Bognor again.
News outlets are publishing obituaries for cheap flying. ‘Are cheap flights a thing of the past?’, asked Euro News this month. ‘Airfares are soaring in Europe and beyond’, it reported. They’ve leapt by 23.6 per cent in France, 18 per cent in the UK. Bloomberg put it more definitively. ‘No more cheap flights is the new reality for air travel’, it said last month. ‘Jetting off to the Mediterranean’ is going to get a whole lot harder, it reported. Not for everyone, though. People of means will still go to Spain, Italy, Greece. It’s the minimum-wage classes who will find the door to the world being slammed in their faces. As Bloomberg coyly said, better-off people will be ‘able to swallow the extra costs’. A story as old as time.
Why are cheap flights facing so much turbulence? There are various reasons. There’s still a pent-up demand to fly following the Covid lockdowns, which is increasing competition for flights, and thus increasing prices. There’s inflation. And there’s the hike in fuel costs following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There is something else, too. There’s an ideology, a borderline religious belief, that has helped to bring about the expulsion of the poor from the sky. It’s called Net Zero. The pressure on airlines to be ‘greener’ is burdening them with extraordinary costs, and they’re passing those costs on to passengers.
Airlines are being instructed to ‘decarbonise’ in order that the Western world might meet its climate-change targets. New, strict climate-compliance laws are being introduced across Europe, forcing airlines to invest billions in the development of ‘sustainable’ fuel and eco-friendlier aircraft. The European airline sector has signed up to a plan called Destination 2050. That’s the Net Zero cult’s Armageddon year – the year by which we must have paid sufficient penance for our sins of industrial hubris if we want to stave off Mother Nature’s cruellest punishments. Airlines promise to radically reduce emissions by then. And who will pay? You and me. The International Council on Clean Transportation estimates that flight decarbonisation will cost around $1 trillion, causing ticket prices to bloat by 22 per cent by 2050.
So it is climate-change fanaticism that is pricing the poor out of the sky. Our eco-elites have decided that the freedom of the less well-off to see the world – a freedom only recently won – should be sacrificed to their feverish urge to offset every smidgen of carbon our species emits. The Net Zero drive is regressive taxation dolled up as ‘saving the planet’. Whether it’s London mayor Sadiq Khan’s green toll on diesel drivers, or EU carbon-cutting initiatives that make working life harder for farmers and truckers, or the eco-slaying of cheap flights, Net Zero is a backward, punishing ideology that hits working people hardest. Your right to work, to drive, to engage in the great, glorious pastime of travel – all are being laid lifeless at the altar of Net Zero.
Punitive eco-policies have one aim – to re-engineer the masses. As one eco-travel publication puts it, ‘Only an increase in airfare costs will significantly change our behaviour’. ‘Our’ – who are they kidding? They mean your behaviour. Note the contempt with which they say the word ‘cheap’. To them, ‘cheap travel’ is not only economically cheap – it’s morally cheap, too. It is without moral value. They sneer at stag nights in Eastern Europe, as if young men bonding before one of their number commits his entire life to another person is not an important, beautiful part of life. They mock pool holidays in Spain, unaware of how special those weeks are for people who work hard for a living. And they snobbishly assume that every cheap-flight patron is uninterested in ‘architecture or culture’, which is plainly false. I know people who’ve seen the art treasures of Florence and the cathedrals of Italy largely thanks to the opening up of air travel to working people and even the poor.
This is why they think it’s fine for them to keep on flying: because their travel is virtuous. Luvvie Emma Thompson will keep jetting across the Atlantic to attend Extinction Rebellion protests. Climate tsar John Kerry will still be on his private jet. Leonardo DiCaprio will carry on flitting between delivering eco-sermons and flying thousands of miles on luxury aircraft. Harry and Meghan will still fly to hang with Elton John even as they tell the rest of us to offset our dirty travel. Because where we are ‘cheap’ – not just our flights but our lives – they are righteous. ‘I am more important than you’ – that’s what the eco-elites are saying, without saying it, like every elite before them.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/06/01/the-poor-are-being-priced-out-of-the-sky/ ?
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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