The plan is to destroy traditional farming of animals and edible crops to be replaced by industrial scale plant-based foods using specially bred (GM) and factory-made meat using specially bred (GM) insects as the protein base.
We are already being prepped for these with advertising for non-meat ‘meat’ products, propaganda about eating lentils being ‘good’ for the planet and eating meat from animals producing methane being a planet-killer.
Large scale investment and large areas of land (step forward Bill Gates) will be required to grow the plants, both for the plant-based foods and to feed the insects, and enormous processing and storage facilities will be needed to turn out the ‘food’.
The masses will not voluntarily give up their traditional diet, so as with vehicles and heating, the normal production will be banned, or taxed, regulated out of existence.
This will place our entire food supply in the hands of a few big corporations, controlled by big investors hand in glove with Governments. Whoever controls our food controls us.
Methane reductions is now doing for farming what carbon dioxide reduction has done for transportation and our electricity and gas supplies. Getting rid of normality and forcing the ‘new’ normality on us.
It is transparently obvious that the fake climate change doom is about global government and the indentured servitude of the Human Race to a small group of the rich and powerful, who of course will livre like kings off the sweat of the peasants.
The private sector rarely "shows its work" either, even internally to the company CFO. For example, I would guess that the vast majority of businesses decide on product and service pricing via a trial and error process, even airlines which are expert at load management (filling as many seats as possible before an airplane takes off). Airlines try particular prices for seats on particular flights. If the planes start filling up too quickly, the airlines raise prices, and vice versa. If planes are not 100% filled by the time flights are scheduled to leave, then the price suddenly drops to accommodate standby passengers, airline employees, etc.
Another example is professional team sports and free agency. Despite the advent of cybermetrics and other cross-sectional data on every available athlete, general managers toss contracts around without "showing all their work." How do the Mets know that Max Scherzer is worth $33 million per year and not, say, $23 million or $43 million? It's simply the deal that the Mets and Max were able to shake hands on through a negotiating and trial-and-error process. Unlikely that the deal is perfectly optimal.
Similarly, I would argue that the most efficient way to manage carbon emissions would be carbon taxes, preferably globally (although not one and the same price, nor one and the same taxing authority, everywhere). Through trial and error, taxing authorities can figure out what tax rate is accomplishing desired tradeoffs (emissions containment versus economic activity). It surely wouldn't be perfectly efficient, but surely would be better than "command and control" type regulations.
"As an aside, I should point out that animosity toward gasoline-fueled automobiles and “smokestack” industry long preceded the focus on global warming."
Which makes it highly likely that global warming is just the latest justification for even older animosities. Before global warming it was overpopulation and demon rum. Worker exploitation is perennial complaint. Somehow the solution always seems to be putting the people pushing the crisis in charge to dictate how everybody else is going to live. As with carbon emission reductions in the US, which are largely due to the shift from coal to natural gas electric generation, any progress solving the declared problem is usually a happy accident and likely counter to anything the crisis mongers propose since their object isn't solving the problem but getting themselves into power.
“This was a fair concern, and I would say that the regulators who mandated filtering systems probably got it right…. And the air in Pittsburgh is cleaner because it no longer is a steel town.”
Is the air cleaner because of mandated filtering, or because general economic conditions shifted manufacturing away from Pittsburgh? And is some other city’s air now less clean because of it?
In this landmark article, Schelling emphasizes conflict of interest between developing economies and advanced economies: “The need for greenhouse gas abatement cannot logically be separated from the developing world's need for immediate economic improvement. The trade-off should be faced. It probably won't be.”
Given that China and other developing countries strategically place priority on growth, Schelling urges policy-makers to adjust pragmatically and to focus fresh attention and commensurate resources on adaptation to climate change.
2) Sarah Anderson & others, The Critical Role of Markets in Climate Change, Working Paper 24645 (National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2018), at p. 7
Inspired by Schelling, economists now conduct systematic research about adaptation. This recent overview of research explains: “Adaptation has some distinctive advantages. In addition to adaptation undertaken by private individuals or firms, adaptation policies can be implemented and adjusted unilaterally by countries without requiring international coordination. A country’s adaptive responses offer opportunities for learning. They can serve as templates for use elsewhere.”
Prosperous countries have greater resources for local adaptation. For example, presently, the Netherlands, but not Bangladesh, can create comprehensive infrastructure against rising sea levels.
International migration is a crucial mechanism of adaptation to adverse national climate change. However, international migration, unlike many other forms of adaptation to climate change, but like carbon taxation, does require international cooperation. Specifically, international migration requires more open borders by major destination countries.
3) Olivier Deschenes, "The Impact of Climate Change on Mortality in the United States: Benefits and Costs of Adaptation" National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 30282 (July 2022).
Deschenes studies the impact of air conditioning technology for adaptation to global warming. He reports two striking findings:
a) The residential sector increases electricity consumption (AC) in order to adapt to higher temperatures; but the commercial, industrial, and transportation end-use sectors do not.
b) Adaptation by air conditioning reduces mortality, but exacerbates global warming (i.e., has a large negative externality):
"This paper reviews and extends the recent empirical literature on the impact of climate change on mortality and adaptation in the United States. The analysis produces several new facts. First, the reductions in the impact of extreme heat on mortality risk previously documented up to 2004 have continued up to 2019, consistent with continued investments in health-protecting adaptations to high temperatures. The second part of the paper examines the private and external costs of electricity generation and consumption related to high temperatures, a commonly-used proxy for measuring the consumption of adaptation services. Extreme temperatures increase electricity demand in the residential sector (relative to moderate temperatures), but not in the commercial, industrial, and transportation end-use sectors. The additional electricity demand in response to high temperatures results in significant external costs due to the release of local and global pollutants caused by the combustion of fossil fuels in order to produce electricity. These external costs, documented for the first time in this paper, are one order of magnitude larger than the private cost of adaptation associated with electricity consumption."
Re: "Note that even if your solution is a carbon tax, you still need to Show Your Work. How could a carbon tax in the U.S. shift production elsewhere, perhaps leading to higher overall emissions? How high a tax could you enact without having the costs exceed the benefits?"
I would like to highlight research by two scholars who attempt to answer at least Arnold's second question. Each scholar shows his work. Each proposes a distinct, new mechanism to calibrate carbon taxation.
1) Robert Pindyck.
See Robert S. Pindyck, “The Use and Misuse of Models for Climate Policy,” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 11:1 (Winter 2017) 100–114. Available (open access) online:
Pindyck sharply rejects mainstream models of the social cost of carbon, which are used to calibrate a carbon tax. He writes:
“many of the key relationships and parameter values in these models have no empirical (or even theoretical) grounding and thus the models cannot be used to provide any kind of reliable quantitative policy guidance.” (p. 104)
Instead, he proposes a different principle for setting the carbon tax rate—and a different mechanism.
His principle is to reduce the chance of *catastrophe* to an acceptable level, rather than to pretend to balance economic growth and environmental harm at the margin.
His mechanism has two steps. First, canvass a range of experts about (a) the likelihood of a catastrophe in the inaction scenario and (b) the reduction of CO2 emissions necessary to reduce the chance of catastrophe to a prescribed level. The relevant experts are climate scientists and environmental economists. The survey must use operational definitions of ‘catastrophe;’ for example, one might define ‘catastrophe’ as a contraction of at least 30% in GDP. Second, economists would use the findings from these surveys of experts to calculate a range of values for the social cost of carbon in simple, transparent models with a range of discount rates (degrees of concern for future generations). Pindyck would avoid any pretense of precision.
Alas, since Pindyck wrote this article, experience with pandemic management has revealed, disturbingly, that deference to experts about catastrophe risk is fraught with problems.
See also Russ Roberts' recent interview of Pindyck at EconTalk:
“I propose a two-part policy instrument consisting of (1) a carbon tax that is indexed to a ‘basket’ of climate outcomes, and (2) a cap-and-trade system of emissions permits that can be redeemed in the future in lieu of paying the carbon tax. The amount of the carbon tax in this proposal (per ton of CO2) would be set each year on the basis of some objective, non-manipulable climate indices, such as temperature and mean sea level, and also on the number of certain climate events, such as flood events or droughts, that occurred in the previous year (or some moving average of previous years). I refer to these indices and events as climate outcomes. In addition to a carbon tax rate being set each year, an auction would be held each year for tradable permits to emit a ton of carbon dioxide in separate, specific, future years. […]. The market for tradable permits to emit in the future is essentially a prediction market for climate outcomes.”
Alas, policy-makers, regulators, and central planners show no sign of any interest in experimenting with prediction markets to set policy!
Activity and place quantitative goals make sense only to the extent that they approximate the results of a tax on net emissions of CO2 and methane. As a technological optimist, I do not think the rate would need to very high (and hence the dead-weight lost very low) and so it is not hard to imagine that many specific measures are too restrictive if counterproductive. Of course my technological optimism is tempered by the regulatory obstacles to putting new technology into practice. Still, in the face of opposition to taxation of net emissions, some amount of sub-optimal policy must be better than doing nothing.
Arnold - You made one statement to which I strongly object, “But there are costs that the market does not count.” The implication is that those “costs” are climate change, but it almost doesn’t matter. You know this better than I but buyers are not homogenous with the same set of preferences. Some buyers are putting a high value on the costs of climate change by spending on items like EVs. A lot of corporate America is putting a high value on the costs of climate change by attempting to decarbonize their operations.
From the early days of my awareness of the climate change debate, the market has responded to the threat in what I perceived to be a logical progression. It started with few buyers acting and has grown to many. Just because the market doesn’t act in lockstep fashion doesn’t mean that it isn’t acting.
There is a large and important set of problems where the problem must be solved before the data is available to generate an adequate model. The early stages of the pandemic were such a case, as are most military actions from the defender's point of view.
In such cases the usual best practice is to stabilize, then analyze, then strategize, then execute. So, for example, early in the pandemic we locked down everything. That was pretty close to the optimal strategy given that we didn't know enough about the disease to generate a better one. The stabilization phase is an attempt to stop the problem from quickly worsening and buy some time for analysis.
My point is that you are assuming that it is possible to show your work, i.e. to realistically model climate change with the data we have in sufficient detail to calculate an optimum solution. So far it hasn't been. "Use less fossil fuels" is still the best idea we have*, and it's not clear how the costs (and fatalities) of crashing the economy from lack of energy compare to the costs (and fatalities) of crop failures due to excessive heat and drought. But we'll only learn how devastating the famines are if the famines happen, and there wouldn't be enough left of the political system to make use of the data.
*Renewable energy just doesn't scale sufficiently well, and fusion power is still nowhere near ready. Nuclear fission power is actually a good choice, but politically infeasible for now and ultimately limited by availability of fuels.
Of course, gas powered vehicles also have construction costs and infrastructure costs and all the other secondary costs and externalities. The math is so hard! I wish there was some mechanism that could aggregate all the available information and individual preferences that could reduce the costs and benefits of every product and every service into a single quantity. I wish this quantity could guide decisions about the allocation of scarce resources. Maybe it would be a mechanism of human action but not human design? Then we could just look at a new electric car, look at a new gas powered car, look at a used car, and instantly know which one provides the most value and consumes the fewest resources.
The plan is to destroy traditional farming of animals and edible crops to be replaced by industrial scale plant-based foods using specially bred (GM) and factory-made meat using specially bred (GM) insects as the protein base.
We are already being prepped for these with advertising for non-meat ‘meat’ products, propaganda about eating lentils being ‘good’ for the planet and eating meat from animals producing methane being a planet-killer.
Large scale investment and large areas of land (step forward Bill Gates) will be required to grow the plants, both for the plant-based foods and to feed the insects, and enormous processing and storage facilities will be needed to turn out the ‘food’.
The masses will not voluntarily give up their traditional diet, so as with vehicles and heating, the normal production will be banned, or taxed, regulated out of existence.
This will place our entire food supply in the hands of a few big corporations, controlled by big investors hand in glove with Governments. Whoever controls our food controls us.
Methane reductions is now doing for farming what carbon dioxide reduction has done for transportation and our electricity and gas supplies. Getting rid of normality and forcing the ‘new’ normality on us.
It is transparently obvious that the fake climate change doom is about global government and the indentured servitude of the Human Race to a small group of the rich and powerful, who of course will livre like kings off the sweat of the peasants.
The private sector rarely "shows its work" either, even internally to the company CFO. For example, I would guess that the vast majority of businesses decide on product and service pricing via a trial and error process, even airlines which are expert at load management (filling as many seats as possible before an airplane takes off). Airlines try particular prices for seats on particular flights. If the planes start filling up too quickly, the airlines raise prices, and vice versa. If planes are not 100% filled by the time flights are scheduled to leave, then the price suddenly drops to accommodate standby passengers, airline employees, etc.
Another example is professional team sports and free agency. Despite the advent of cybermetrics and other cross-sectional data on every available athlete, general managers toss contracts around without "showing all their work." How do the Mets know that Max Scherzer is worth $33 million per year and not, say, $23 million or $43 million? It's simply the deal that the Mets and Max were able to shake hands on through a negotiating and trial-and-error process. Unlikely that the deal is perfectly optimal.
Similarly, I would argue that the most efficient way to manage carbon emissions would be carbon taxes, preferably globally (although not one and the same price, nor one and the same taxing authority, everywhere). Through trial and error, taxing authorities can figure out what tax rate is accomplishing desired tradeoffs (emissions containment versus economic activity). It surely wouldn't be perfectly efficient, but surely would be better than "command and control" type regulations.
"As an aside, I should point out that animosity toward gasoline-fueled automobiles and “smokestack” industry long preceded the focus on global warming."
Which makes it highly likely that global warming is just the latest justification for even older animosities. Before global warming it was overpopulation and demon rum. Worker exploitation is perennial complaint. Somehow the solution always seems to be putting the people pushing the crisis in charge to dictate how everybody else is going to live. As with carbon emission reductions in the US, which are largely due to the shift from coal to natural gas electric generation, any progress solving the declared problem is usually a happy accident and likely counter to anything the crisis mongers propose since their object isn't solving the problem but getting themselves into power.
“This was a fair concern, and I would say that the regulators who mandated filtering systems probably got it right…. And the air in Pittsburgh is cleaner because it no longer is a steel town.”
Is the air cleaner because of mandated filtering, or because general economic conditions shifted manufacturing away from Pittsburgh? And is some other city’s air now less clean because of it?
Show your work. ;)
On the policy front, we must compare several scenarios: inaction, prevention (e.g., a carbon tax),
mitigation (e.g., geoengineering), and adaptation (e.g., construction of dykes or migration).
I would like to highlight a few studies of *adaptation* as an alternative to (local or national) carbon taxation. These studies show their work.
1) Thomas C. Schelling, “The Cost of Combating Global Warming,” Foreign Affairs (November-December 1997).
Available (open access) online: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1997-11-01/cost-combating-global-warming
In this landmark article, Schelling emphasizes conflict of interest between developing economies and advanced economies: “The need for greenhouse gas abatement cannot logically be separated from the developing world's need for immediate economic improvement. The trade-off should be faced. It probably won't be.”
Given that China and other developing countries strategically place priority on growth, Schelling urges policy-makers to adjust pragmatically and to focus fresh attention and commensurate resources on adaptation to climate change.
2) Sarah Anderson & others, The Critical Role of Markets in Climate Change, Working Paper 24645 (National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2018), at p. 7
Available (open access) online:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3185918
Inspired by Schelling, economists now conduct systematic research about adaptation. This recent overview of research explains: “Adaptation has some distinctive advantages. In addition to adaptation undertaken by private individuals or firms, adaptation policies can be implemented and adjusted unilaterally by countries without requiring international coordination. A country’s adaptive responses offer opportunities for learning. They can serve as templates for use elsewhere.”
Prosperous countries have greater resources for local adaptation. For example, presently, the Netherlands, but not Bangladesh, can create comprehensive infrastructure against rising sea levels.
International migration is a crucial mechanism of adaptation to adverse national climate change. However, international migration, unlike many other forms of adaptation to climate change, but like carbon taxation, does require international cooperation. Specifically, international migration requires more open borders by major destination countries.
3) Olivier Deschenes, "The Impact of Climate Change on Mortality in the United States: Benefits and Costs of Adaptation" National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 30282 (July 2022).
Available online:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30282/w30282.pdf
Deschenes studies the impact of air conditioning technology for adaptation to global warming. He reports two striking findings:
a) The residential sector increases electricity consumption (AC) in order to adapt to higher temperatures; but the commercial, industrial, and transportation end-use sectors do not.
b) Adaptation by air conditioning reduces mortality, but exacerbates global warming (i.e., has a large negative externality):
"This paper reviews and extends the recent empirical literature on the impact of climate change on mortality and adaptation in the United States. The analysis produces several new facts. First, the reductions in the impact of extreme heat on mortality risk previously documented up to 2004 have continued up to 2019, consistent with continued investments in health-protecting adaptations to high temperatures. The second part of the paper examines the private and external costs of electricity generation and consumption related to high temperatures, a commonly-used proxy for measuring the consumption of adaptation services. Extreme temperatures increase electricity demand in the residential sector (relative to moderate temperatures), but not in the commercial, industrial, and transportation end-use sectors. The additional electricity demand in response to high temperatures results in significant external costs due to the release of local and global pollutants caused by the combustion of fossil fuels in order to produce electricity. These external costs, documented for the first time in this paper, are one order of magnitude larger than the private cost of adaptation associated with electricity consumption."
Re: "Note that even if your solution is a carbon tax, you still need to Show Your Work. How could a carbon tax in the U.S. shift production elsewhere, perhaps leading to higher overall emissions? How high a tax could you enact without having the costs exceed the benefits?"
I would like to highlight research by two scholars who attempt to answer at least Arnold's second question. Each scholar shows his work. Each proposes a distinct, new mechanism to calibrate carbon taxation.
1) Robert Pindyck.
See Robert S. Pindyck, “The Use and Misuse of Models for Climate Policy,” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 11:1 (Winter 2017) 100–114. Available (open access) online:
http://web.mit.edu/rpindyck/www/Papers/MisuseClimateModelsREEP2017.pdf
Pindyck sharply rejects mainstream models of the social cost of carbon, which are used to calibrate a carbon tax. He writes:
“many of the key relationships and parameter values in these models have no empirical (or even theoretical) grounding and thus the models cannot be used to provide any kind of reliable quantitative policy guidance.” (p. 104)
Instead, he proposes a different principle for setting the carbon tax rate—and a different mechanism.
His principle is to reduce the chance of *catastrophe* to an acceptable level, rather than to pretend to balance economic growth and environmental harm at the margin.
His mechanism has two steps. First, canvass a range of experts about (a) the likelihood of a catastrophe in the inaction scenario and (b) the reduction of CO2 emissions necessary to reduce the chance of catastrophe to a prescribed level. The relevant experts are climate scientists and environmental economists. The survey must use operational definitions of ‘catastrophe;’ for example, one might define ‘catastrophe’ as a contraction of at least 30% in GDP. Second, economists would use the findings from these surveys of experts to calculate a range of values for the social cost of carbon in simple, transparent models with a range of discount rates (degrees of concern for future generations). Pindyck would avoid any pretense of precision.
Alas, since Pindyck wrote this article, experience with pandemic management has revealed, disturbingly, that deference to experts about catastrophe risk is fraught with problems.
See also Russ Roberts' recent interview of Pindyck at EconTalk:
https://www.econtalk.org/robert-pindyck-on-averting-and-adapting-to-climate-change/
2. Shi-Ling Hsu
See his article, "A Prediction Market for Climate Outcomes,” University of Colorado Law Review 83 (2013) 179- 256. Available (open access) online:
https://ir.law.fsu.edu/articles/497/
Hsu writes:
“I propose a two-part policy instrument consisting of (1) a carbon tax that is indexed to a ‘basket’ of climate outcomes, and (2) a cap-and-trade system of emissions permits that can be redeemed in the future in lieu of paying the carbon tax. The amount of the carbon tax in this proposal (per ton of CO2) would be set each year on the basis of some objective, non-manipulable climate indices, such as temperature and mean sea level, and also on the number of certain climate events, such as flood events or droughts, that occurred in the previous year (or some moving average of previous years). I refer to these indices and events as climate outcomes. In addition to a carbon tax rate being set each year, an auction would be held each year for tradable permits to emit a ton of carbon dioxide in separate, specific, future years. […]. The market for tradable permits to emit in the future is essentially a prediction market for climate outcomes.”
Alas, policy-makers, regulators, and central planners show no sign of any interest in experimenting with prediction markets to set policy!
Activity and place quantitative goals make sense only to the extent that they approximate the results of a tax on net emissions of CO2 and methane. As a technological optimist, I do not think the rate would need to very high (and hence the dead-weight lost very low) and so it is not hard to imagine that many specific measures are too restrictive if counterproductive. Of course my technological optimism is tempered by the regulatory obstacles to putting new technology into practice. Still, in the face of opposition to taxation of net emissions, some amount of sub-optimal policy must be better than doing nothing.
Arnold - You made one statement to which I strongly object, “But there are costs that the market does not count.” The implication is that those “costs” are climate change, but it almost doesn’t matter. You know this better than I but buyers are not homogenous with the same set of preferences. Some buyers are putting a high value on the costs of climate change by spending on items like EVs. A lot of corporate America is putting a high value on the costs of climate change by attempting to decarbonize their operations.
From the early days of my awareness of the climate change debate, the market has responded to the threat in what I perceived to be a logical progression. It started with few buyers acting and has grown to many. Just because the market doesn’t act in lockstep fashion doesn’t mean that it isn’t acting.
There is a large and important set of problems where the problem must be solved before the data is available to generate an adequate model. The early stages of the pandemic were such a case, as are most military actions from the defender's point of view.
In such cases the usual best practice is to stabilize, then analyze, then strategize, then execute. So, for example, early in the pandemic we locked down everything. That was pretty close to the optimal strategy given that we didn't know enough about the disease to generate a better one. The stabilization phase is an attempt to stop the problem from quickly worsening and buy some time for analysis.
My point is that you are assuming that it is possible to show your work, i.e. to realistically model climate change with the data we have in sufficient detail to calculate an optimum solution. So far it hasn't been. "Use less fossil fuels" is still the best idea we have*, and it's not clear how the costs (and fatalities) of crashing the economy from lack of energy compare to the costs (and fatalities) of crop failures due to excessive heat and drought. But we'll only learn how devastating the famines are if the famines happen, and there wouldn't be enough left of the political system to make use of the data.
*Renewable energy just doesn't scale sufficiently well, and fusion power is still nowhere near ready. Nuclear fission power is actually a good choice, but politically infeasible for now and ultimately limited by availability of fuels.
Of course, gas powered vehicles also have construction costs and infrastructure costs and all the other secondary costs and externalities. The math is so hard! I wish there was some mechanism that could aggregate all the available information and individual preferences that could reduce the costs and benefits of every product and every service into a single quantity. I wish this quantity could guide decisions about the allocation of scarce resources. Maybe it would be a mechanism of human action but not human design? Then we could just look at a new electric car, look at a new gas powered car, look at a used car, and instantly know which one provides the most value and consumes the fewest resources.
does anyone knows what the actual scientific/economic source of the "carbon dioxide is evil" dogma is?