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.
Not sure I would label the "green" destruction of society a plan. I think it is more a bad ideology - like Communism under Stalin or Pol Pot. The people pushing the decimation of farming and of reliable power generation are delusional. They do not have a plan but rather an agenda to create misery.
This misery movement should be resisted and stopped. It should be denounced for being both stupid and wicked. Those pushing it ought to be shamed and shunned from civil society. Politicians backing this evil must be challenged and voted out of power.
But I fear the people are too weak minded. The people have been brainwashed to trust their lying leaders and to believe living well is a curse on the earth. The people have been enslaved by their ignorance.
The plan is not the ideology, it is the product of the ideology : neo-Paganism - Earth/Nature worship. It holds that Mankind is a pestilence on Earth and is destroying it. Mankind needs to be treated like any pestilence, if not eliminated totally then number and extent reduced so it does little damage.
The plan - the green plan - is to do just that by regressing Humanity to a pre-industrial society whose number will be reduced by starvation and disease, whose effect on Earth will be reduced by people spending their time toiling in the fields rather than consuming goods.
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!
"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"
This was hilarious. No data set is "non-manipulable". Hsu is either incredibly naive or lying.
The fiscal condition of USG is so bad that there is no revenue problem. The U.S. emits about 5 billion tons of co2 per year. You could tax each ton $100 - which is substantially above most mainstream estimates even from left-leaning groups and by itself would raise the price of gasoline by $2 per gallon, over ten times the current federal motor fuel tax - and then you could allocate 100% of those revenues to the deficit, and by current projections USG would still be deep in the red for the foreseeable future and the national debt would still be growing at a percent or two of GDP every year, at least.
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.
Carbon emission reductions in the US are largely due to the shift from coal to natural gas in electric generation which is a consequence of natural gas being pretty much free for the taking since it's an almost unwanted by-product of fracking for oil. All of this is not only counter to the hallucinations about using wind and solar of so-called 'technological optimists' but generally actively opposed by anybody who buys into the green nude eel bovine waste product, as evidenced by the Biden administration's disaster of an energy policy.
The higher value use of natural gas is the leveraging of the lightly-fixed hydrogen of methane to make fertilizer and other chemicals and lighten heavy petroleum of which the world has ample reserves but which without gas is usually too expensive to convert into more useful substances via much less efficient methods, e.g., wasting a lot of energy to liberate the needed hydrogen from water.
Yes, if it's cheap and plentiful, there are advantages to using gas for electricity such as low capital costs, easier transport, quick throttling over a wide range, and satisfaction of peak load demand.
Still, the US uses way more gas for electricity than could be explained by economic factors because there is such a heavy regulatory thumb on the scale weighing in favor of that use instead of for hydrogen.
Which is why, while the US used to make its own fertilizer, and indeed US companies still have the global competitive edge at the technological frontier for related chemical industry catalytic processes, those companies demolished the old domestic plants and rebuilt them in places like Trinidad (which drinks the milkshake out of the same basin exploited by Venezuela) and now uses that hydrogen down there to make the fertilizer abroad instead, which has to be transported inefficiently long distances to American farmers because we are just burning our own hydrogen up wastefully, turning it into steam instead of more valuable chemicals, so we can feel we're being greener.
In the future we'll eventually have to use water, and with any luck the technology to produce lots of cheap hydrogen using economical nuclear reactors will mature and be widely adopted. And by widely I mean widely within Northeast Asia, because the way things are going it's pretty clear that nothing short of a miracle and regime change would allow such things to be built and operated anywhere in the West.
I think, no way of being sure, of course, that the key technology will be CO2 capture and sequestration run with near zero marginal cost nuclear or geothermal or possibly solar (since CO2 is not time and season sensitive). The cost could well be low enough to allow for the continued use of gas and even some petroleum in specific activities.
I don't think so. The prime use-cases of CCS are at the sites of complexes of the largest fossil fuel power plants which are generating electricity. If you had power available from a cheap nuclear reactor nearby, you would just use it to make the electricity instead.
There's no efficiency gain to be had by diverting the nuclear energy to that purpose instead of using a portion of the fossil plant's own energy production to accomplish it, which is indeed how all the pilot projects work.
The same argument applies to geothermal power sources, except with the additional issue of the sequestration usually requiring nearby deep and large geological storage capacity* as a place to pump and store all that high pressure CO2. The idea being that when the giant underground hole is full of CO2, you cap the sucker and then *never disturb or disrupt* anything underground in that vicinity ever again, warning future potential diggers like it's a radioactive waste dump, lest they release all that gas into the atmosphere and undo all that hard work, not to mention whatever marginal impact it would have on the climate. That's just not compatible with drilling and running a geothermal operation nearby.
But getting back to nuclear power, if you could replace all current and expected fossil fuel power plants with lots of new cheap nuclear plants, then to the extent one accepts the mainstream and officially promulgated narrative about it, the emissions 'problem' is basically solved. What's left over from the petroleum and chemical industries and from agriculture is low enough to be ignored and fully tolerated because any further marginal reductions after that point aren't warranted even by the most alarmist climate models.
And, solely in terms of technical feasibility, this could be done right now. There are enough proven reserves of Uranium out there that by using breeder reactors and recycling processes those nuclear plants could easily be satisfying the entire global demand for electricity for centuries to come, which was once France's actual strategy and approach to secure domestic energy production implemented in reaction to the oil embargo crises. Alas, with the exception of China and a few other countries, the rest of the world has both rejected this opportunity as a matter of opinion and policy, and many of those countries have failed to maintain the level of their civilizational capacity and undergone various degenerations such that they have made themselves incapable of safely and economically sustaining such 'advanced' infrastructure which posed little challenge to the Apollo era societies. But there's been a lot of ruin in two generations.
*There is an exception in terms of coastal plants near very deep water which could, in theory, pump their CO2 maybe 1000 meters down where the pressure is high enough to keep it liquid for a long time and buoyancy tends to be counteracted by a phenomenon kind of like 'miscibility' (but not really, it's complicated). This is what allows huge amounts of CO2 to remain in several African volcanic lakes at super-saturated levels unless and until some quake or explosion or similar kind of event causes it all to bubble up suddenly to the surface like opening up a well-shaken can of soda, which was responsible for several historical mass casualty events. The French did a lot of good work installing giant 'straws' in most of those lakes which constantly send the excess CO2 to the surface and which are fountains able to run solely on the energy released by the process itself.
Not much to disagree with on policy here. I do assume that Co2 sequestration will be chemical into an inert mineral (carbonized serpentine?) that can be dupped into the ocean or something. The key, I think is smarter, (cost-benefit based regulation of risks) and a market for net CO2 emissions reduction (a tax on net emissions)
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 argument is that there is a market failure because there is no cost to producing a negative externality. The market can't aggregate information about anything which doesn't have a price. It doesn't make sense to argue that the market can do this already with ordinary prices and so we don't need an intervention, when the intervention is needed to set the price that enables the market to perform that function.
With an ideal version of a carbon tax applied in neutral uniformity and accurate proportion to the total 'footprint' that went into making everything people buy to include imports, then you would be right. That's why most non-progressive economists who are willing to license some kind of emissions control by the government favor such a tax, or otherwise a cap and trade emissions permit scheme which also leverages those market mechanisms and aggregation processes to 'price in' all those contributions.
As it happens the math is not really all that hard. Most things which require a lot of carbon-emissions-producing energy to make or do use that energy in big chunks in a small number of attributable steps which are fairly easy to identify and about which it is not too difficult to estimate the emissions. For a lot of large products, objects, or structures, most of the emissions came about in the process of refining the constituent materials. So for an ICE automobile, a reasonable first order estimate is simply to get the weights of steel and aluminum and multiply by the respective average emissions factors for the typical industrial production processes of those materials.
One can do this for electric cars too and the only major difference is that one has to add in the substantial carbon footprint of all that refined lithium in the giant battery, and this is the precise ball that many EV boosters tend to try to hide when touting the green bonafides of the vehicles, since it turns the purportedly slam dunk argument alleging major environmental benefits into one that is much weaker, especially when the electricity itself was produced with fossil fuels.
Likewise for wind turbines. Giant wind turbines require the installation of extremely heavy and enormous cement foundations to anchor the giant mast and provide stability in the face of incredible amounts of torque and vibrational forces. The carbon footprint of all that cement is truly huge, another ball the greens like to hide. Cement is calcium oxide and made from calcium carbonate by releasing a molecule of, yep, co2. Getting it to release that molecule requires incredibly high temperatures in special furnaces. Even if you could somehow produce that heat from renewable or nuclear-sourced electricity, you would still have a bunch of emissions. But of course no one does that, the heat comes from trainloads of the cheapest, dirtiest coal in China where most or our cement is now made in facilities less efficient than used to exist in the U.S., despite significant and even more co2-emitting transport costs, because it's ok or we are allowed to ignore it when the emissions are over there, not over here, even though unlike with local pollution problems, we all share the atmosphere and global climate. The point is, it's easy to count up and make tolerable estimates if one makes a little diligent effort, but if you do it, the picture doesn't look that compelling after all.
Even solar cells are made of sheets of semiconductor which depend on the smelting (uses carbon, emits carbon dioxide), refining, and crystallization process of the very energy and carbon emissions intensive Czochralski method. Cheap coal allowed to be burned dirty means cheap solar cell production which, yet again, is why the market is increasingly dominated by China. Not because the US doesn't have plenty of its own cheap coal, but because it refuses to use it because burning coal here is bad for the atmosphere, but burning even more coal abroad is fine for the atmosphere.
Also, the thing about solar cells, lithium batteries, and wind turbines is that they depreciate faster than fossil fuel plants and infrastructure, and that they have much more limited lifetimes before they begin to rapidly degrade in performance. And that unlike the steel and aluminum in ICE vehicles their energy-intensive materials cannot be cheaply recycled in a way which avoids putting a similar amount of energy to that which was needed for original production right back into them again, which means you are going to emit all that carbon all over again in the future, that is, unless you are willing to simply hand-wave all that away with wishful thinking and by making heroic, unargued assumptions about this problem having been somehow magically solved in the future. Something to keep in mind, however, is that lithium batteries, electric motors, solar cells, and electricity generating wind turbines are by now all *old* technologies which have been around a long time. That is to say, we are the future that past greenies assumed would have surely figured out these problems by now. But we couldn't do it. It was wrong for them to think that way then, and it's still wrong now.
You dream big. Unfortunately so much of our economy is subsdised/ regulated and otherwise interferred with that finding such a number would be difficult.
I think the general idea of global warming via greenhouse effect caused by human burning of fuels raising co2 levels is usually attributed to the great physical chemist Svante Arrhenius in a series of works starting in 1896. As to this consequence being seen as undesirable or dangerous which leads simple minds to perceive co2 as having a metaphysically bad character and the emission of it being 'evil', that came a lot later in the evolution and eventual convergence of the post-war environmental movements. If I recall correctly, Arrhenius thought it would be an improvement by opening up and making habitable and arable a lot of useless frozen wasteland in the colder countries and arctic, and by stimulating more plant growth by fertilizing vegetation with extra co2 while at the same time using less water (which is true because less water is lost to evaporation through narrower leaf pores that don't need to open so wide to obtain the needed amounts of co2 from the atmosphere. You can verify this for yourself by using a propane-powered co2 source in a grow tent garden.)
Well, you might chalk that one up to Arrhenius coming from chilly and largely unfarmed Sweden, so of course he would be looking forward to a little warming. But apparently most Swedes do not share that opinion today, and as with Greta Thunberg, quite the contrary.
Oh man, trust me on this one: that rabbit hole is super deep and the learning curve is super steep.
Not only is it really unlikely to be worth the investment of time of even a very talented person already familiar with the basic physical rules and principles of fluid dynamics to delve into these things close enough to make reliable independent judgments, but there is the more fundamental problem of the predictions being the result of using nation-state-scale computational resources and thus not amenable to normal rigorous intellectual analysis and scrutiny. At the current level of wealth and technology, even that scale of resources turns out to pale in comparison to the task. You can think of it as being in principle a lot like weather forecasting except many, many orders of magnitude more demanding.
And even if you achieve the maximum possible human fluency in all that, then you're *still* in big trouble. That's because the models themselves incorporate empirical factors that - even assuming that even as concepts they actually map to reality, which has by no means been genuinely proven or 'settled' - are highly uncertain and greatly disputed. Or, at least they once were and justly still would be if the institutions and personalities dominating the field hadn't gone down the road of full epistemic corruption, enforcement of conformity to official orthodoxy, and persecution of heresy.
The construct of a "Climate Sensitivity Factor" is perhaps the most infamous of these inputs, and for reasons of chaos and noise that plague any complicated long-term simulation, like with heavy artillery, if it's off by an inch then the model prediction misses by a mile. Attempts at retrodictive calibration and validation of such factors are pretty much futile when it comes to actually mitigating the scale of the problem in terms of the error-bars in the forecast.
If you want a kind of best-case scenario of such things in a much easier, much shorter-term, and much, much more simplified context, consider the maps overlaying the tracks that result from the many models out there trying to predict the path of hurricanes early in their development as tropical storms. The models are generally based on the same underlying principles and datasets and tend to differ from each other only in slight disagreements about statistical factors analogous to 'climate sensitivity'. And those small differences mean that the storm tracks go all over the place with estimated landfall sites often spread all over the whole coast of the continent.
And even if you somehow were to succeed in satisfactorily addressing all those problems and felt you had reliable and precise climate forecasts into the far future, to justify any particular intervention policy you would *still* face the problem of conducting a long-term cost benefit analysis that has to figure out, say, the differences in aggregate human welfare or global GDP in various scenarios as they might play out in the year 2100 or something. Which, duh, is completely impossible in practice and I'd argue even in theory, and anyone who pretends otherwise is either simply lying, delusionally naive and overconfident in a way that the term 'hubris' doesn't even begin to capture, or batshit insane, pardon my French.
When Lord Nicolas Stern put his name on that review of the economics of climate change back in 2006 which expressed high confidence in big net macroeconomic benefits a century hence to equally big and costly interventions in the short term, it seems to me that he was exhibiting a combination of all three possibilities.
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.
Not sure I would label the "green" destruction of society a plan. I think it is more a bad ideology - like Communism under Stalin or Pol Pot. The people pushing the decimation of farming and of reliable power generation are delusional. They do not have a plan but rather an agenda to create misery.
This misery movement should be resisted and stopped. It should be denounced for being both stupid and wicked. Those pushing it ought to be shamed and shunned from civil society. Politicians backing this evil must be challenged and voted out of power.
But I fear the people are too weak minded. The people have been brainwashed to trust their lying leaders and to believe living well is a curse on the earth. The people have been enslaved by their ignorance.
The plan is not the ideology, it is the product of the ideology : neo-Paganism - Earth/Nature worship. It holds that Mankind is a pestilence on Earth and is destroying it. Mankind needs to be treated like any pestilence, if not eliminated totally then number and extent reduced so it does little damage.
The plan - the green plan - is to do just that by regressing Humanity to a pre-industrial society whose number will be reduced by starvation and disease, whose effect on Earth will be reduced by people spending their time toiling in the fields rather than consuming goods.
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!
"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"
This was hilarious. No data set is "non-manipulable". Hsu is either incredibly naive or lying.
(And the relative weights given to different indices would be hard to specify objectively, and so would be subject to manipulation.)
The fiscal condition of USG is so bad that there is no revenue problem. The U.S. emits about 5 billion tons of co2 per year. You could tax each ton $100 - which is substantially above most mainstream estimates even from left-leaning groups and by itself would raise the price of gasoline by $2 per gallon, over ten times the current federal motor fuel tax - and then you could allocate 100% of those revenues to the deficit, and by current projections USG would still be deep in the red for the foreseeable future and the national debt would still be growing at a percent or two of GDP every year, at least.
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.
"some amount of sub-optimal policy must be better than doing nothing."
Show your work, Thomas. It isn't obvious that doing nothing isn't the best option.
Or, even if not best, that it is not better than the active policy that will actually be imposed.
Carbon emission reductions in the US are largely due to the shift from coal to natural gas in electric generation which is a consequence of natural gas being pretty much free for the taking since it's an almost unwanted by-product of fracking for oil. All of this is not only counter to the hallucinations about using wind and solar of so-called 'technological optimists' but generally actively opposed by anybody who buys into the green nude eel bovine waste product, as evidenced by the Biden administration's disaster of an energy policy.
The higher value use of natural gas is the leveraging of the lightly-fixed hydrogen of methane to make fertilizer and other chemicals and lighten heavy petroleum of which the world has ample reserves but which without gas is usually too expensive to convert into more useful substances via much less efficient methods, e.g., wasting a lot of energy to liberate the needed hydrogen from water.
Yes, if it's cheap and plentiful, there are advantages to using gas for electricity such as low capital costs, easier transport, quick throttling over a wide range, and satisfaction of peak load demand.
Still, the US uses way more gas for electricity than could be explained by economic factors because there is such a heavy regulatory thumb on the scale weighing in favor of that use instead of for hydrogen.
Which is why, while the US used to make its own fertilizer, and indeed US companies still have the global competitive edge at the technological frontier for related chemical industry catalytic processes, those companies demolished the old domestic plants and rebuilt them in places like Trinidad (which drinks the milkshake out of the same basin exploited by Venezuela) and now uses that hydrogen down there to make the fertilizer abroad instead, which has to be transported inefficiently long distances to American farmers because we are just burning our own hydrogen up wastefully, turning it into steam instead of more valuable chemicals, so we can feel we're being greener.
In the future we'll eventually have to use water, and with any luck the technology to produce lots of cheap hydrogen using economical nuclear reactors will mature and be widely adopted. And by widely I mean widely within Northeast Asia, because the way things are going it's pretty clear that nothing short of a miracle and regime change would allow such things to be built and operated anywhere in the West.
I think, no way of being sure, of course, that the key technology will be CO2 capture and sequestration run with near zero marginal cost nuclear or geothermal or possibly solar (since CO2 is not time and season sensitive). The cost could well be low enough to allow for the continued use of gas and even some petroleum in specific activities.
I don't think so. The prime use-cases of CCS are at the sites of complexes of the largest fossil fuel power plants which are generating electricity. If you had power available from a cheap nuclear reactor nearby, you would just use it to make the electricity instead.
There's no efficiency gain to be had by diverting the nuclear energy to that purpose instead of using a portion of the fossil plant's own energy production to accomplish it, which is indeed how all the pilot projects work.
The same argument applies to geothermal power sources, except with the additional issue of the sequestration usually requiring nearby deep and large geological storage capacity* as a place to pump and store all that high pressure CO2. The idea being that when the giant underground hole is full of CO2, you cap the sucker and then *never disturb or disrupt* anything underground in that vicinity ever again, warning future potential diggers like it's a radioactive waste dump, lest they release all that gas into the atmosphere and undo all that hard work, not to mention whatever marginal impact it would have on the climate. That's just not compatible with drilling and running a geothermal operation nearby.
But getting back to nuclear power, if you could replace all current and expected fossil fuel power plants with lots of new cheap nuclear plants, then to the extent one accepts the mainstream and officially promulgated narrative about it, the emissions 'problem' is basically solved. What's left over from the petroleum and chemical industries and from agriculture is low enough to be ignored and fully tolerated because any further marginal reductions after that point aren't warranted even by the most alarmist climate models.
And, solely in terms of technical feasibility, this could be done right now. There are enough proven reserves of Uranium out there that by using breeder reactors and recycling processes those nuclear plants could easily be satisfying the entire global demand for electricity for centuries to come, which was once France's actual strategy and approach to secure domestic energy production implemented in reaction to the oil embargo crises. Alas, with the exception of China and a few other countries, the rest of the world has both rejected this opportunity as a matter of opinion and policy, and many of those countries have failed to maintain the level of their civilizational capacity and undergone various degenerations such that they have made themselves incapable of safely and economically sustaining such 'advanced' infrastructure which posed little challenge to the Apollo era societies. But there's been a lot of ruin in two generations.
*There is an exception in terms of coastal plants near very deep water which could, in theory, pump their CO2 maybe 1000 meters down where the pressure is high enough to keep it liquid for a long time and buoyancy tends to be counteracted by a phenomenon kind of like 'miscibility' (but not really, it's complicated). This is what allows huge amounts of CO2 to remain in several African volcanic lakes at super-saturated levels unless and until some quake or explosion or similar kind of event causes it all to bubble up suddenly to the surface like opening up a well-shaken can of soda, which was responsible for several historical mass casualty events. The French did a lot of good work installing giant 'straws' in most of those lakes which constantly send the excess CO2 to the surface and which are fountains able to run solely on the energy released by the process itself.
Not much to disagree with on policy here. I do assume that Co2 sequestration will be chemical into an inert mineral (carbonized serpentine?) that can be dupped into the ocean or something. The key, I think is smarter, (cost-benefit based regulation of risks) and a market for net CO2 emissions reduction (a tax on net emissions)
You certainly have an opinion, but I don't see any relation to what I said.
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 argument is that there is a market failure because there is no cost to producing a negative externality. The market can't aggregate information about anything which doesn't have a price. It doesn't make sense to argue that the market can do this already with ordinary prices and so we don't need an intervention, when the intervention is needed to set the price that enables the market to perform that function.
With an ideal version of a carbon tax applied in neutral uniformity and accurate proportion to the total 'footprint' that went into making everything people buy to include imports, then you would be right. That's why most non-progressive economists who are willing to license some kind of emissions control by the government favor such a tax, or otherwise a cap and trade emissions permit scheme which also leverages those market mechanisms and aggregation processes to 'price in' all those contributions.
As it happens the math is not really all that hard. Most things which require a lot of carbon-emissions-producing energy to make or do use that energy in big chunks in a small number of attributable steps which are fairly easy to identify and about which it is not too difficult to estimate the emissions. For a lot of large products, objects, or structures, most of the emissions came about in the process of refining the constituent materials. So for an ICE automobile, a reasonable first order estimate is simply to get the weights of steel and aluminum and multiply by the respective average emissions factors for the typical industrial production processes of those materials.
One can do this for electric cars too and the only major difference is that one has to add in the substantial carbon footprint of all that refined lithium in the giant battery, and this is the precise ball that many EV boosters tend to try to hide when touting the green bonafides of the vehicles, since it turns the purportedly slam dunk argument alleging major environmental benefits into one that is much weaker, especially when the electricity itself was produced with fossil fuels.
Likewise for wind turbines. Giant wind turbines require the installation of extremely heavy and enormous cement foundations to anchor the giant mast and provide stability in the face of incredible amounts of torque and vibrational forces. The carbon footprint of all that cement is truly huge, another ball the greens like to hide. Cement is calcium oxide and made from calcium carbonate by releasing a molecule of, yep, co2. Getting it to release that molecule requires incredibly high temperatures in special furnaces. Even if you could somehow produce that heat from renewable or nuclear-sourced electricity, you would still have a bunch of emissions. But of course no one does that, the heat comes from trainloads of the cheapest, dirtiest coal in China where most or our cement is now made in facilities less efficient than used to exist in the U.S., despite significant and even more co2-emitting transport costs, because it's ok or we are allowed to ignore it when the emissions are over there, not over here, even though unlike with local pollution problems, we all share the atmosphere and global climate. The point is, it's easy to count up and make tolerable estimates if one makes a little diligent effort, but if you do it, the picture doesn't look that compelling after all.
Even solar cells are made of sheets of semiconductor which depend on the smelting (uses carbon, emits carbon dioxide), refining, and crystallization process of the very energy and carbon emissions intensive Czochralski method. Cheap coal allowed to be burned dirty means cheap solar cell production which, yet again, is why the market is increasingly dominated by China. Not because the US doesn't have plenty of its own cheap coal, but because it refuses to use it because burning coal here is bad for the atmosphere, but burning even more coal abroad is fine for the atmosphere.
Also, the thing about solar cells, lithium batteries, and wind turbines is that they depreciate faster than fossil fuel plants and infrastructure, and that they have much more limited lifetimes before they begin to rapidly degrade in performance. And that unlike the steel and aluminum in ICE vehicles their energy-intensive materials cannot be cheaply recycled in a way which avoids putting a similar amount of energy to that which was needed for original production right back into them again, which means you are going to emit all that carbon all over again in the future, that is, unless you are willing to simply hand-wave all that away with wishful thinking and by making heroic, unargued assumptions about this problem having been somehow magically solved in the future. Something to keep in mind, however, is that lithium batteries, electric motors, solar cells, and electricity generating wind turbines are by now all *old* technologies which have been around a long time. That is to say, we are the future that past greenies assumed would have surely figured out these problems by now. But we couldn't do it. It was wrong for them to think that way then, and it's still wrong now.
You dream big. Unfortunately so much of our economy is subsdised/ regulated and otherwise interferred with that finding such a number would be difficult.
does anyone knows what the actual scientific/economic source of the "carbon dioxide is evil" dogma is?
I think the general idea of global warming via greenhouse effect caused by human burning of fuels raising co2 levels is usually attributed to the great physical chemist Svante Arrhenius in a series of works starting in 1896. As to this consequence being seen as undesirable or dangerous which leads simple minds to perceive co2 as having a metaphysically bad character and the emission of it being 'evil', that came a lot later in the evolution and eventual convergence of the post-war environmental movements. If I recall correctly, Arrhenius thought it would be an improvement by opening up and making habitable and arable a lot of useless frozen wasteland in the colder countries and arctic, and by stimulating more plant growth by fertilizing vegetation with extra co2 while at the same time using less water (which is true because less water is lost to evaporation through narrower leaf pores that don't need to open so wide to obtain the needed amounts of co2 from the atmosphere. You can verify this for yourself by using a propane-powered co2 source in a grow tent garden.)
Well, you might chalk that one up to Arrhenius coming from chilly and largely unfarmed Sweden, so of course he would be looking forward to a little warming. But apparently most Swedes do not share that opinion today, and as with Greta Thunberg, quite the contrary.
thank you for the usual long answer
but I should have been less glib
I just wanted to know what are the climate models so I can try and look at them myself
Oh man, trust me on this one: that rabbit hole is super deep and the learning curve is super steep.
Not only is it really unlikely to be worth the investment of time of even a very talented person already familiar with the basic physical rules and principles of fluid dynamics to delve into these things close enough to make reliable independent judgments, but there is the more fundamental problem of the predictions being the result of using nation-state-scale computational resources and thus not amenable to normal rigorous intellectual analysis and scrutiny. At the current level of wealth and technology, even that scale of resources turns out to pale in comparison to the task. You can think of it as being in principle a lot like weather forecasting except many, many orders of magnitude more demanding.
But if you are determined to give it a try, you can start by learning about the very mainstream and popular global climate model CM4 here: https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/coupled-physical-model-cm4/ and if you want to see how it compares to some of the other major ones try CMIP6: https://www.wcrp-climate.org/wgcm-cmip/wgcm-cmip6
And even if you achieve the maximum possible human fluency in all that, then you're *still* in big trouble. That's because the models themselves incorporate empirical factors that - even assuming that even as concepts they actually map to reality, which has by no means been genuinely proven or 'settled' - are highly uncertain and greatly disputed. Or, at least they once were and justly still would be if the institutions and personalities dominating the field hadn't gone down the road of full epistemic corruption, enforcement of conformity to official orthodoxy, and persecution of heresy.
The construct of a "Climate Sensitivity Factor" is perhaps the most infamous of these inputs, and for reasons of chaos and noise that plague any complicated long-term simulation, like with heavy artillery, if it's off by an inch then the model prediction misses by a mile. Attempts at retrodictive calibration and validation of such factors are pretty much futile when it comes to actually mitigating the scale of the problem in terms of the error-bars in the forecast.
If you want a kind of best-case scenario of such things in a much easier, much shorter-term, and much, much more simplified context, consider the maps overlaying the tracks that result from the many models out there trying to predict the path of hurricanes early in their development as tropical storms. The models are generally based on the same underlying principles and datasets and tend to differ from each other only in slight disagreements about statistical factors analogous to 'climate sensitivity'. And those small differences mean that the storm tracks go all over the place with estimated landfall sites often spread all over the whole coast of the continent.
And even if you somehow were to succeed in satisfactorily addressing all those problems and felt you had reliable and precise climate forecasts into the far future, to justify any particular intervention policy you would *still* face the problem of conducting a long-term cost benefit analysis that has to figure out, say, the differences in aggregate human welfare or global GDP in various scenarios as they might play out in the year 2100 or something. Which, duh, is completely impossible in practice and I'd argue even in theory, and anyone who pretends otherwise is either simply lying, delusionally naive and overconfident in a way that the term 'hubris' doesn't even begin to capture, or batshit insane, pardon my French.
When Lord Nicolas Stern put his name on that review of the economics of climate change back in 2006 which expressed high confidence in big net macroeconomic benefits a century hence to equally big and costly interventions in the short term, it seems to me that he was exhibiting a combination of all three possibilities.