PV Gap

Bertha Said:

Is this a good response to the proposed Copenhagen Protocol?

We Answered:

1. "There exists no subset of man that is smarter ..."

An obvious fallacy. A free market functions most efficiently when all players are equally informed, but that never happens in reality. In fact, if you happen to be better informed than others and act on that in a certain way, you can be jailed for the crime of insider trading. In other words, equal information is only an ASSUMPTION of the free market, and if that assumption is not true, then YES, of course there can be a subset of persons who can make better decisions than others. That's the whole IDEA of a market, for god's sake.

2. Another obvious fallacy. If the US were to raise the top marginal tax rate from 39% to, say, 40% for persons making more than $5 million a year, not one poor person would suffer a whit. Reducing incentives to build wealth has no effect on those who live paycheck to paycheck. And it's utterly untrue that government does nothing productive with tax money. In fact, goverment investment is just as effective in job creation as private investment -- and sometimes more so.

3. There are so many fallacies in this one it's hard to count. One wonders where Harrison gets his false information, but it's certainly not from reading scientific journals. Climate models omit precipiation? Lie. Climate models omit cloud albedo? Lie. Climate models omit convection? Lie. Climate models omit solar effects? Lie. Fifty times more water in the air than CO2? Lie -- it's more like 10 times. Beyond that, water and CO2 absorb infrared at different frequencies, so not all of their effects overlap. And beyond that, CO2 is 4 or 5 times more efficient than water at absorbing infrared. And beyond that, water vapor goes in and out of the air too rapidly to forced climate change, while CO2 stays in the air for centuries.

4. This isn't the broken window analogy at all. Nobody is talking about blowing up coal fired power plants. What we're talking about is pricing fossil carbon in a way that recognizes its true cost to society. As far as subsidies go, the current subsidies of oil (to take just one example) massively dwarf those of renewables, or of nuclear. So let's even the playing field.