More equal incomes = socialism = poverty for all?

There's a truth behind the idea in the title. But it's not so much the income distribution, but the incentives provided that make an efficient economy. And, taxes are not the only means to influence the income distribution, regulation can do its bit too.

Let's think of football. Clubs willingly pay very high salaries to star players. Does this enhance economic activity by providing a bigger incentive to work? Methinks, not. Rather, the high salaries for the stars draw resources away from salaries for the people needed to make the game run, and also resources away from other worthwhile activities, such as education or investment in renewable energy. It is even questionable whether the players themselves are truely better off.

Which tells me there should be room to adjust the incentives system here through regulation, ie outlaw football player salaries greater than the salary of say the Dutch prime minister. I choose that comparison for a reason, as for public entities and companies that are majority state owned there is precisely such a regulation in the Netherlands.

There are two ways to argue for such regulation, one is belittled as envy by some, and called a desire for social justice by others. The other is to say that far from there always being a trade-off between more equality and economic success, there are in fact situations, where a regulation can achieve both.

Unlike the tax the rich question, which lends itself to partisan arguments we all know too well, about how the party of the right wants to take from the poor to give to the rich, and the party of the left supposedly is out to destroy the economy, intelligent regulation to affect incentives to work, invest and protect the environment and other public goods, is not easily put into a simple yes/no paradigm.

I'll give a few examples of regulation. For employees whose main role is to provide leadership a government imposed ceiling seems to have few drawbacks to me. Their employers benefit, because they have to pay less, and they do not suffer from their employee being enticed to work for the competition through higher salaries. They therefore have to spend more on other things, and with a sufficiently high ceiling, a few hundred thousand Euros, employees will be motivated a plenty to work hard, both by the money, and by the status leaderships roles provide. Don't forget people who have plenty of money still compete to become US president, a role which provides little monetary benefit compared to their 100 million Euro plus fortune.

For entrepreneurs who put their own money at risk for a risky venture, I think the reward of outsized returns is an important motivating component; so here I'd be more careful about regulation that imposes reward ceilings.

For music and literature, I'd restrict copyright severely, and possibly on top of that impose other restrictions, for example, a maximum entrance fee for visiting a concert.

Israel and the Arab Spring

The Arab Spring is one of the most important developments towards world peace and it has motivated me to think again about the danger posed by the unresolved Israel/Palestine issue.

On the one hand, Israel's Jews have a legitimate fear that they will be treated as second class citizens, if they accept a solution, where they are no longer the majority in their state. And they also have a legitimate fear that they might even be thrown out of the Mid East and forced to migrate to Western countries.

On the other hand, the current situation is also clearly unacceptable. Palestinians are neither citizens of Israel, as they would be with proper annexation of the occupied territories, nor are they allowed to form their own proper state. They are therefore second class citizens, unless they choose to emigrate to Western countries.

For the good of everyone, in Israel, in the wider Middle East and for the world as a whole, much more needs to be done I think to force the parties to come to an equitable deal. In my opinion, this needs to involve more pressure on Israel, especially from Western countries. Arab countries should also emphasise their opposition to violence to resolve the issue and equally importantly, show that Jewish citizens have nothing to fear by enhancing the rights of Jews in the Arab world.

And Israel should offer to withdraw completely to something close to the 1967 borders, make everyone inside the new borders an Israeli citizen, and clearly communicate that the long term aim is freedom of movement and equal rights for all, so that in 50 years it would be perfectly acceptable for Jews no longer to be a majority in Israel.

Defending the science and the left/right political divide

What I want to explore a bit more here is the concept of uncertainty. At the activist/left end of the spectrum much of the focus is either on small probability, high impact climate outcomes, or on the near 100% probability that we need to act.

Why is there often so much partisanness in the discusion? Is the other side evil? Out to cause death and destruction because they love to see people suffer, or because they are greedy and heartless and only argue for their own interest?

Methinks these explanations are attractive because of the way evolution has shaped our nature. But, they are also rather inadequate. Much of the debate is done in people's spare time and with very little direct benefit for the participants. I believe people engage in climate debates out of idealism and secondarily for the entertainment value, so it's a mix of charity work and football supporter. Which does not answer though how people decide which side to support, or why there are two sides in the first place. Aren't the facts clear and supportive only of one course of action? Which is where we can come back to the subject of uncertainty and the limits of knowledge.

How can we predict outcomes? For smoking, apart from models and fundamental insights, we can take two groups and compare and see what harm smoking does. But for the probability of predicting ecosystem collapse or nuclear war? There aren't multiple Earths to do controlled experiments on and neither is the past a very good guide. During the Roman Empire there could be no nuclear war. There were no nuclear weapons. This rather limits extrapolation from the past. We haven't had nuclear war for over half a century, so it's a good bet we won't have one in the next month. But how probable is it in the next 100 years?

So, how does this give an explanation for the existence of two sides in the debate again?

There is no rational way to assess the risks of societal or ecosystem collapse or the benefits of technological developments far out into the future.

I tend towards the non activist camp primarily because I love technology and the promise for the future it holds, and secondarily because I am hopeful the world is moving towards complete peace in analogy with the evolution Europe has experienced over the last 50 years. Many other non activist minded people I think are motivated by what they think the free market does for people, and a distrust of the state limiting people's freedom. Activists I think worry about societal instability, as well, but as a consequence of the greed of corporations. And they worry a lot more about ecosystem vulnerabilities. Some of this is about values, sure, but a large part is about implicit assessments of unknowable probilities.

By now you must be wondering about the title I chose. What I am pleading for here is more awareness of the limits of science in deciding political issues, more awareness also of the danger that partisanness leads us to underestimate the reasonableness of opposing views.

Climate myths continued

The key question in the climate debate is always what it all means for policy.

So, the 0.8 C may be 0.8 rather than 2.0C at present because of "natural factors"* or because of aerosols and ocean heat uptake.

What does it mean for policy on:

Geoengineering

CO2 capture and storage

Nuclear energy

Energy efficiency

CO2 taxes

Feed-in tariffs

On geoengineering, I notice that both sides vehemently agree that they do not want it now and that only some research is permissible. Neither follows from the climate sensitivity debate. In fact, if climate response was perfectly independent of the forcing applied and all types of forcing were perfectly additive and always linear, it should follow that geoengineering is a perfectly reasonable response.

I have noticed though that both sides agree on this one on the notion of not messing too much with nature.

Also for the other topics where actual policy decisions are required, ...

how does people's stance on nuclear power relate to the degree that masking to date is "natural" or due to anthropogenic aerosols and ocean heat uptake?

or

how would it relate to their views on feed-in tariffs for solar power?

* Defined here as if we had a billion Earths to experiment with, then taking a 1000 with the CO2 change and a 1000 without them, we'd have a change of 0.8C in either case on average. The Earth system acts like a thermostat towards CO2 and the reason the temperature rises is the same as with a house where the thermostat during the day is set 2 degrees higher and the rise of the outside temperature is purely coincidental and not causative of the temperature change inside the house.

Some climate myths

Some people just do not get the concept of a thermostat, at least with regards to climate.

On Wattsup this got illustrated with our core body temperature. That stays constant even when the forcing is changed.

Now while there is somewhat limited evidence in my opinion for the climate being like a thermostat, there's also precious little against it. We just know too little about world albedo and relative moisture content. We cannot measure these terribly well now and have a very poor grasp of past changes.

These factors are quite capable of completely counteracting CO2. We do not have a billion Earths, where we could pick 2000 for controlled experiments with statistics derived from 1000 runs on Earth without anthropgenic effects and 1000 with them included.

But let me do a thought experiment. In that thought experiment, we leave out CO2 changes and everything else constant and a physically possible result would be that the temperature change is identical up to date.

While I consider the notion that a climate thermostat is unphysical a myth, there's another myth shared by both sides of the debate.

The 0.8C or thereabouts increase is supposed to be much smaller than it would be based on the forcing, because much of the increase is temporarily hidden by aerosols and ocean warming.

Now suppose, the aerosols did in truth cancel out in their effect and there was no ocean warming, it's blithely assumed that this would continue to be the case in the future.

It's quite possible that clouds or the ocean surface through albedo changes keep temperatures down now, but there is no guarantee they would in the future. In fact, all thermostats break given enough being thrown at them.

I like another example of a thermostat, a petrol tank open to the atmosphere. It'll resist the forcing through evaporative cooling; at some stage though, it stops acting like a thermostat and there is an explosion.

The variability of renewables

Actually I think it is mainly wind, where this is an issue. Hydropower, biomass or geothermal are much like baseload or peaking power plant.

And solar is not nearly as problematic as one might think at first glance. It is largely quite predictable. At 3 in the morning it is always zero, and peak output is always around lunchtime. Seaonal differences are predictable, and after a few months of regularly looking at the daily output graphics provided by transparency EEX, I see that cloudiness also gets averaged out quite well even over an area as small as Germany.

On all days this summer solar has flattened out the load profile for conventional power plants, effectively it has been nearly like peaking power, and to me it is clear a lot more solar could be employed across Europe without requiring any storage.

For wind this is different, wind power I have seen at well above 10 GW in the middle of the night and at 200 MW during peak demand hours. There tends to be more wind in the winter than the summer, but with solar, you can rely on the output enough I think that conventional power plants can go into maintenance in June, while for wind that is not the case.

Libya, climate and partisanness

http://www.juancole.com/2011/08/top-ten-myths-about-the-libya-war.html

These days I am amazed at who I am in agreement with, both Juan Cole and William Hague. And how these people have come to the same conclusions as me without being prompted along by partisan leanings. Unlike a lot of people whose opinions on Libya are based on either opposition to Obama or opposition to supposed Western imperialism.

Much of the climate change debate has degenerated to the level of pure partisanness. When I hear about "scientists" supposedly "defending the science", I strongly feel neither side is talking about facts. So, I have somewhat lost interest in that particular debate, which is mostly about angels on pinheads, while the world is largely taking the right action given a threat that is hidden by a fog of unknowable unknowns, but clearly does not require banning the car tomorrow and equally clearly isn't a figment of leftwing activists' overworked imagination.

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Congratulations Libya! I wish for a bright future for all Libyans.

The load profile in Germany on a typical working day this spring

From transparency.eex.com

How important is the Arab Spring?

I am hopeful that the world in 50 years will have made the same transformation as Western Europe over the last 100 years, no more war and freedom of movement for everyone on the planet.

There are no guarantees though and I think supporting the Arab Spring may be the most important thing we can do today to get to a free world without war.

This support can take many guises, from co-operation on solar projects in North Africa to pressure on Israel, to humanitarian aid, to accepting refugees, to indeed military means.

Broadly, my concern isn't so much the detail of the how, much of what the EU or US do and aspire to goes in the right direction, what worries me is that there is too little empathy, too little interest, too much half-heartedness, too much focus on partisan politics.

Runaway warming

Many people just dismiss the possibility out of hand with little thinking, or drag in the fact that it hasn't happened for billions of years and with much higher CO2 levels.

The most obvious thing the comparison with past climate leaves out is that the sun is steadily turning brighter. Billions of years ago it was 30% less bright than today.

As an interesting aside, this throws up the question whether we really still have billions of years on this planet without some anthropogenic cooling thrown in. Life without man might end in a billion years with runaway warming boiling the oceans away even with very low CO2 in the atmosphere.

One way we can attack the problem is always radiation management, make the sun less bright through aerosols and the like and comparability with past climate is restored.

That doesn't work for a mad max future, where humanity is down and consists of remnants after being ravaged by disease, nuclear war etc. take your pick.

On the other hand, maybe it's not possible after all, but then what's the reasoning?