Klimapolitik

Excellent news! More nails in the coffin of AGW. I suspect though that the virulent Irish warmists will be the very last people on Earth to accept that AGW is a crock.

While I can guarantee that the translation engine isn’t perfect, it may allow more people to make some sense of the documents.

Document 1, from Junior Chancellery researcher http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=http://www.swp-berlin.org/common/get_document.php%3Fasset_id%3D7054

Document 2, from Federal Ministry Advisory Council. http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=http://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/nn_4342/DE/Wirtschaft__und__Verwaltung/Finanz__und__Wirtschaftspolitik/Wissenschaftlicher__Beirat/Gutachten__und__Stellungnahmen/Ausgewaehlte__Texte/0903111a3002,templateId%3Draw,property%3DpublicationFile.pdf

Ever heard of expanding earth theory? Maybe more space will be made for our troublesome oceans!

Australia has claims on over half of Antarctica much of which is not claimed by any other country. If only the ice would melt? Wonder why we are generating more electricity from coal?

As we enter a mini ice age, due to declining solar activity, the thought uppermost in minds devising “clever policy intervention” is not to look too stupid as they reverse course. I know, let’s blame Chaudry and the UN!

Alan and buddy
Why should I tell you the answer?

I would like to get a few of your opinions on this…..do you not think the problem of peak oil (demand greatly outstripping supply, not that we are going to run out of oil) is something that should be focusing the mind rather than climate change??

Haven’t heard it mentioned on many discussions here so just wondering what your thoughts are……sorry if I am taking this a bit iff topic!

@ RT: “That would imply that Ireland should ditch its subsidies for energy efficiency and renewables.” Absolutely!

This has to be. If you cannot achieve your target without a taxpayer prosthesis, then it is not economic. It is incurring a future cost. There has to be a constitutional prohibition on the granting of tax subsidies, write-offs, etc. The granting of these tax ‘incentives’ are one of the reasons we have the level of un-repayable debt we have. The citizen taxpayer in this state, and a few others, is close to financial shut-off. When will the cent fall on this one? I guess it won’t until it is too late. The Special Interest groups have too much political influence. Reform, if it ever comes, will be involuntary.

The energy predicament we face is one of massive, excess consumption. The first line has to be reduce, reduce, reduce. However, if you do go down this route, aggregate economic activity will go into permanent, incremental decline. Now what would that do to incomes? And what will that do for taxes? At what point do the citizens of SS Earth realise that the vessel is foundering?

OK. Lets scrap this nonsense about doing with less. Burn on and be damned! The oil will become scarcer faster and our principal concern will then be about the supplies of fresh water and food into urban areas.

“Unfortunately, the people who run climate policy have little understanding of energy. ” Yep. Just delete ‘policy’ and insert ‘religion’. Replace ‘little’ with ‘a vague, inadequate and unstructured’.

@ De Roiste: Peak Oil! What Peak Oil? Oh, the one that shows that world production of liquids plateaued a few years back! And the unhelpful Export-land Model of Production depletion! This is a Political Economy blog. I hope I’m wrong, but I have a sneaky suspicion that someone may, one day, write a piece on this blog along the lines, “No one saw this (energy catastophe) coming”. Its not coming: its arrived!

B Peter

@Brian,

I was going to post that this report would be “seized upon” by denialists. Then I thought: No, too negative, this is basically good news. Then I read your post.

“More nails in the coffin of AGW. ”

Now, Brian, that is not what the report said. Your “seizing upon” and brandishing the report as a club is hardly the most rational and reasonable response.

It seems to me the report:

– accepts the facts of AGW
– argues that the problems that arise from AGW can be mitigated by simple policy steps.
– argues that Germany (and by extension the EU) should “wait and see” about alternative energy technologies.

They probably have some sensible suggestions, but unfortunately I cannot read German, so I have to try to get an English translation.

@Sporthog:
You mustn’t believe everything Eamon de Valera said. Your “We are not a[n] engineering nation. We don’t […]” sounds odd to me, and might annoy several engineers of my acquaintance. Nations don’t build boilers: people (and companies) do. There is nothing inherent in Irishness that says that boilers etc can’t be built here. Recall that the modern turbine (pace Hero of Alexandria) was designed by an Irishman, Charles Parsons; that Charles Wye Williams made many contributions to the development of (inter alia) steam boilers and ship design; that Nicholas Callan of Maynooth invented the induction coil and the Maynooth battery ….

Your “We don’t […]”, even if it is grounded on a thorough knowledge of developments in all Irish institutions of learning and research, might be better as “There are currently no large companies designing, building and testing ” but there is no reason why we must assume that that state is inevitable.

As for the IBM PC, I was using a Victor 9000 before the IBM PC came out. Variable speed disk drives and a Winchester, no less.

bjg

@ Brian J Goggin,

Perhaps I should have worded my comment above differently. I have a difficulty in understanding how Ireland can be world class, forefront of cutting technology in the Smart grid and the change from the traditional carbon based technology today and maintain control over this development. Its the control of the development which I don’t buy. It sounds too much like spin.

I agree that there is nothing inherent in Irishness that means we cannot develop heavy industry here. But we all know it is uneconomical to us to do so.

I accept that there are many Irish people who are very talented and creative in innovation etc. It was not my intention to cause offence to these groups and apologies if I ruffled a few feathers. In fact I could add another to your list, Holland the inventor of the submarine as we understand it today.

But even if a group of several talented Irish people came together, formed a Irish company, developed innovative technologies / ideas / designs there is no guarantee that it would still be around after a number of years. These companies tend to be identified and merged into bigger corporations etc. In fact a lot of knowledge which has been accumulated by European companies is going east to China.

Perhaps the reason being is Ireland just never reached critical mass, the market was always too small.

@EWI
No. It’s Richard Tol the translator.

@Sporthog
Note that the Council argues that Germany, home a great engineering companies, does not have a first mover advantage.

@BJG / Sporthog
Ireland is home to great companies and great people, but not too many. A small place can excel in a few things only. Excellence requires experience, so chances are that the Irish will be good at similar things in the future as they are today.

I think there is actually something in the Smart Grid software thing. Nothing like enough by itself to justify what we are doing in electricity generation, but worthwhile even so.

Software and IT services is one of the very few areas where we have a substantial cluster of indigenous businesses in knowledge-basedindustries, trading internationally. It employs about 15-16,000 people, with sales of about €1.7bn, maybe 60% of which are exports.

In some important ways, long term prospects have improved with the downturn. Construction and the healthcare system are no longer cannibalising software by sucking in the technically and scientifically minded people, and putting upward pressure on pay.

Some of software’s best successes have been in areas that have been new to Ireland. The interesting thing is that it is not solely, or even mainly, a matter of building one or two businesses based on proprietary IP. What actually happens is that we build up expertise in an area (such as, for example, mobile technologies) that we retain even when early flagship businesses (such as Aldiscon in the case of mobile technologies) get bought out and even closed. Alumni of these businesses go on to themselves create dozens more businesses, often employing many more than their predecessors.

The industry has not created any lasting national champions in the mould of Nokia. It would be positive if it did, and we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that it might happen with Smart Grid technologies. I know that if I was involved in setting the direction for ESB International or ESB Networks I’d be working towards that right now. But software doesn’t need to produce a national champion to deliver the economic goods. A bunch of new SMEs will bring a lot of value to the country too.

Developments in managing the Irish National Grid are at the bleeding edge of electricity network management internationally, because the Grid’s enormous reliance on highly variable wind power, and the rate at which this reliance is increasing. The people involved in developing the Grid are hitting and (hopefully) solving problems ahead of their counterparts elsewhere in the world. It would be wasteful not to take advantage of the know-how they are building, and doing it through software/IT services has a good fit with the competencies we already have as a country.

@Richard,

Hate to throw a spanner in the works, but I’m not sure I agree with the summary of the second article.

Nowhere – as far as I can see – in this text do the authors suggest that climate change “is not as big a problem as it is made out to be”. In the overview, they do note that that “this advisory report refrains from providing an assessment of the extent or probability of the threat” (p.3) (My translation, from the DE: “Das Gutachten enthält sich einer eigenen Einschätzung des Ausmaßes und der Wahrscheinlichkeit der Bedrohung“).

Nor is the central point in the text that the first-mover advantage is overstated.

The central point in the text is that mitigation strategies are, in practice, superior to prevention because the latter depends on a degree of coordination which is absent on the international stage. Mitigation strategies do not suffer from what the authors of this report regard to be an insurmountable externality problem.

@Brian,

Many years ago I did some voluntary work in an undeveoped country which suffered from water shortages. It was actually quite a small island that had suffered almost total deforestation, so that the topsoil had washed into the sea, once-forested slopes were rocky and barren & reminded me of the Connemara Mountains of my youth.

The island still suffers from drought, especially if the annual cyclones miss the area. However, it sea levels rise, they will find their most habitable and fertile remaining areas becoming inundated. I am not sure which would serve them best – reducing global warming, or short-term aid for their water problems. I think they are an outlying, not-very-important-group in the grand scheme of things whose voices will almost certainly not be heard.

I am also a trifle suspicious of the well-heeled and their sudden concern for malaria-ridden and drought-stricken countries, now that a real sacrifice may be demanded over climate change. I am sure you are not one of those! There seemed to be very little interest when these problems were teh main priority.

@ Richard Tol the Translator

A paper written in German used the English phrasing “sacred” and “nothing special”? Intriguing.

@Richard

I should probably let this go, at the risk of sounding like a pimply-faced pedant trying to blow his own Trompete, but hey, it’s the internet and where else can I get away with doing it:

“This advisory report refrains from providing an assessment of the extent or probability of the threat. However, if one considers the available studies in summary, annual costs of climate change under the 2 to 3 degree global warming scenario would be at a level of 1 to 2 percent of world GDP, whereby it should be noted that costs vary considerably across countries.

On the other hand, if warming reaches 6 degrees – a scenario which cannot be ruled out given the current level of scientific understanding – the effects could be far more serious. Actual costs under such a scenario are difficult to estimate, because the uncertainty concerning costs increases greatly for higher temperature projections.”

(From this DE text: Das Gutachten enthält sich einer eigenen Einschätzung des Ausmaßes und der Wahrscheinlichkeit der Bedrohung. Betrachtet man aber die vorliegenden Studien im Überblick, so verursacht der Klimawandel bei einer globalen Erwärmung von 2 bis 3 Grad Celsius jährliche Kosten in Höhe von 1 bis 2 Prozent des Welt-Bruttoinlandsprodukts, wobei sich die Kosten zwischen den Ländern ganz erheblich unterscheiden. Sollte die Erwärmung hingegen 6 Grad Celsius erreichen, was sich nach derzeitigem Wissensstand nicht ausschließen lässt, können die Auswirkungen gravierendere Ausmaße annehmen. Die Kosten lassen sich in derartigen Szenarien allerdings nur schwer abschätzen, weil die Unsicherheit über deren Ausmaß mit zunehmender Erwärmung stark zunimmt.)

This is as a general note in the overview section of a 30 page document. I’m sorry, but this simply does not justify a summary of this report in which the principal point is purported to be:
“The Council argues that climate change is not as big a problem as it is made out to be”.

Note: the American National Academy of Science is to issue 3 major reports today on climate change.

It will be interesting to see if there are more of Richard’s “harbingers of changes to come”.

http://climateprogress.org/2010/05/18/national-academy-to-release-3-major-climate-studies/

@Richard Tol

Thanks for your response. As I don’t speak German it would be great to know (apart from carbon tax) what “relatively low cost” “clever policy intervention” can be put in place to tackle climate change. I tried Google translator on the document but it is hard going to read through a poor translation of an academic text.