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The Forum > Article Comments > Anti-sceptics dance on reason’s grave > Comments

Anti-sceptics dance on reason’s grave : Comments

By Malcolm King, published 23/7/2010

There can be no freedom of thought without the right to be sceptical. On climate change or anything else.

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Jedimaster, OLO is not a "commercial enterprise", it is a not-for-profit and is owned by a number of institutions. But it has to pay its bills. The advertising goes to defray expenses, but it doesn't cover the costs. I have never earned a cent myself from OLO.

If you're worried about "running me ragged" I'd rather know of a problem before it gets out of hand than after. It's the ones that run away that cause me the most grief. And so what if the other side in a debate complains? If their complaints have merit then I'll deal with them, and otherwise not. You only have a problem with "tit for tat" if you started the argument and are trying to shift the blame.

I'm not as much concerned about who starts a problem as dealing with the problem.

Loxton I couldn't find anything on Sophie Trevitt's article to warrant moderation. As you aren't so concerned as to nominate anything I think we should agree that the comments don't need moderating in this case.
Posted by GrahamY, Thursday, 29 July 2010 11:47:09 PM
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Jedimaster

I’m afraid at this stage we enter into a debate on the epistemology. (Aaaaaaaaaaaaagghhh! Shrieks off-stage.)

It’s a standard of proof issue: what degree of knowledge do we need in order to be satisfied that government action is warranted? I maintain that we need to be able to logically eliminate the possibility that it will result in a net total negative. (Policy action would need to provide a net benefit, not a mere benefit, because merely benefitting one group at the expense of others, in a total net cost, does not answer.)

You’re saying, correct me if I’m wrong, that in practice we can’t have that degree of knowledge, good management does not require it, and the question is, whether a resulting net benefit is acceptably likely given all that we do and can know.

There are both fundamental ethical and epistemological issues with this approach.

The special and defining characteristic of government, whether democratic or not, is a claim of a legal monopoly of the use of force or threats of force over its subjects. It is this power of coercion which attracts the advocates of policy, otherwise they would advocate non-coercive means to the same goals.

It is one thing to manage one’s own life and property, or that of someone else with his consent, on the basis of unknowable likelihoods. It is another thing entirely to ‘manage’ someone else’s, without their consent, by threatening to use force against them to ruin their life. It is fundamentally unethical to do it where doing so imposes a liability, or death on the one, to confer a benefit or privilege on someone else. Yet this unethical outcome cannot be avoided by the likelihood and collective approach.

‘letting the market rip is not an option’
See there you’re assuming what is in issue again?

Since people will peaceably exchange unless forcibly overridden (aka ‘the market’), the issue is whether to forcibly override them, so it is no argument just to blandly assert that leaving people alone is not an option. It’s circular again.
Posted by Peter Hume, Friday, 30 July 2010 11:25:20 AM
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Graham Y
Perhaps I should have said "businesslike" - you have a mandate, a budget and a board- you are resource constrained. And being an NFP, all the more reason to encouraged self-regulation of your clients.

Peter Hume

It's more an issue of etymology than epistemology (more shreiks offstage)- "it all depends on what you mean by..."

In the case of AGW, seeing that it is a global phenomenon, then action must have global effects and benefit everyone- with the exception, of course, those whom we wittingly wish to disadvantage- eg willful polluters etc.

By "letting the market rip", I meant a market that is unconstrained (ie "left alone") will exhibit market failure in this regard -the problem of "indivisibility". As Garnaut pointed out, it is an "N-Person Prisoner's Dilemma" or a "Free Rider Problem". Each "player" believes that their little bit of "cheating" (ie polluting) is too insignificant to matter. Collectively, it is disastrous- the sub-prime mortgage disaster is another example.

In this case, each consumer thinks that their little bit of extra carbon doesn't matter. Collectively, it does. However we do it, carbon use needs to be constrained.

It was the neo-Cons (remember them?) who gave us the sub-prime disaster. Clearly, without regulation, they'll do it again- and how many people have been made destitute, starved or even died because of that disaster? In the case of carbon, we're all neo-Cons.

We have governments, we always have. They often need to be reminded of etymological and epistemological matters, but for the most part they need to do what they are mandated to do- organise large -scale action for the benefit of all- in the long term.
Posted by Jedimaster, Friday, 30 July 2010 1:27:18 PM
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As to the epistemology, let us assume, very much in your favour, that everything you have argued on that point is conceded (which it’s not). Now. All you've shown is that there are values that are outside economic calculation. You still haven’t shown the likelihood of any given policy being more beneficial than the status quo.

There is still a need to establish, even to your lesser standard of proof, that government is able to achieve a net benefit. But you haven’t done that. You’ve simply *assumed* it.

It's true that economic calculation can only be used for things that are exchangeable against money, and not for values that are an end in themselves, like the niceness of one's grandmother, or the beauty of a waterfall, or the value of the climate.

But that does not make government a presumptively better solution because it has *exactly the same problem* *and* is incapable of economic calculation in the fields where it displaces private property. The free-rider problem is *worse* with government, not better; the ability to pass off the risks and costs of one's action is far greater with a monopoly of coercion, than in a system in which initiating aggression is illegal.

Adding planned economic incoherence to the problem which otherwise remains the same is no improvement.
Posted by Peter Hume, Friday, 30 July 2010 3:48:27 PM
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Peter Hume

Quid pro quo, I will concede that I haven't demonstrated conclusively that government action will provide a net benefit. That is because it is impossible to prove anything that is still in the future- it is an intention. We can only demonstrate that intentions that have been enacted have succeeded or not. That is the nature of things- we apprehend, we plan, we act, we review and then repeat the cycle.

It seems, from what you have said, that on review, governments can't do anything useful, or as well as individuals, or the private sector, can do. That's hard to prove, as we can't test that hypothesis with physics-like empiricism. I, for one, as a public servant instigated, developed and managed a number of programs that many members of the private sector said were good and wouldn't have happened without governmnet involvement. One of those areas was an R&D funding program (market failure of inappropriability and risk) and another was a science museum (inappropriability and indivisibility). Wider examples include defence, health, education and law enforcement. They may be poorly executed, as we all know, but show me a country anywhere and at any time in history relied entirely on the private sector for these services.

Would I like to see government-run restaurants and supermarkets? Certainly not. But in the area of AGW-abatement, governments have to be relied upon to fund R&D and trial programs on a scale commensurate with the problem. That means getting money to do it. Most of the schemes proposed are essentially "hypothecation" schemes where money is raised from a specific area (in this case carbon users) and fed back into that same area to address market failure.

This all assumes that I think that there is a problem (AGW) to be addressed, which I do, and that the private sector will not address it adequately and in a timely way.
Posted by Jedimaster, Friday, 30 July 2010 5:28:52 PM
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JM, I can't speak for Peter, but speaking for myself, the AGW hysterics generally fail to make out a cost benefit reason for acting. The IPCC certainly fails.

The commissioning of the Stern Report by the British Government recognises this failure, but unfortunately the Stern Report was a political document rather than an economic one. He used an absurdly low discount rate and the report is useless.

Bjorn Lomborg has tried to do something with more rigour and his Copenhagen Consensus suggests there are a lot of more important things to concentrate on.

My own personal position is that one doesn't need to look at the risks, just accept that China and India will never have the political will to change their emissions while their populations are below Western standards of living. In which case adaptation rather than abatement is all we can do.

My other position on this issue is that one ought to ask the question "How much CO2 is optimal". My guess is that it is much higher than at present. If mankind has the ability to alter the world's climate then it has to intelligently assess what it ought to do. Just deciding that the answer is to bring it back to where it was 40 years ago without any analysis of that assertion is not a good solution.

We need a mature debate on the issue, not the debate that has been happening, which has been quite juvenile, and mostly on the hysteric's side of the argument. (In this judgement I'm disregarding the nutters who inhabit both sides of the debate and who have little professional credibility, so please don't throw up at me people who say tiny amounts of CO2 can't change the global temperature).
Posted by GrahamY, Saturday, 31 July 2010 4:03:05 PM
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