Climate Rorschack

Stephen Dubner says that folks' responses to ClimateGate are a Rorschack test: the skeptics say it confirms their worst fears and the alarmists say there's nothing there worth worrying about.

I guess that makes me a bit schizophrenic: first I saw the butterflies, then the picture started looking more like dragons.

Comments policy

I've set things so comments have to come from some registered ID: OpenID, Blogger, or whatever else Blogger will take. This cuts down spam somewhat. But I delete comments that look like spam. I've been seeing more of these lately, things like "Great post on X, for more on X see (website)". I just delete them. If I've deleted one of yours in error, feel free to try again, but make the comment look less spammy and perhaps wonder why you've failed a Turing test.

Blame Canada

New Zealand's emissions trading scheme will only impose a cost on Kiwi taxpayers if we choose to let it do so.

John Key has exempted agriculture and a few others from the emissions trading regime for the next few years; most folks reckon that this then means the taxpayer is on the hook for any aggregate carbon liabilities under Kyoto.

But who says we have to pay? Just look at Canada:

Until now I believed that the nation which has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

In 2006 the new Canadian government announced that it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%(1).

It’s now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto Protocol can be enforced only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller than that of any other rich nation(2). Never mind special measures; it won’t accept even an equal share. The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void.

So sayeth George Monbiot.

So, what happens if Key just stands up at Copenhagen and says:

Hey, folks, we're doing our share here. We've just implemented an emissions trading regime but it'll take us some time to get it all up and running. And know what? In the meantime, we don't see any point in paying the folks who managed to get the rights to carbon credits from decommissioned old Soviet factories. It's not like they'll start running those plants again in the absence of our paying them not to. So, for now we've got a domestic trading system that we're working to coordinate with the Australians if they decide to have a carbon trading system.

So, we're cutting emissions in a few sectors with a trading regime that'll eventually expand to cover the whole country. And once it does, then we'll start thinking about whether it makes sense to buy credits internationally. In the meantime, we're not going to be giving the finger to Kyoto the way those horrible Canadians have. We're trying, and we'll get there, so don't start boycotting tourist visits or anything crazy like that. And it's not like most of the rest of you have gotten any farther than we have anyway. Heck, we're even researching ways to make our cows and sheep fart less. We just don't see much point in paying this sin tax right now. Thanks very much.

What's the big downside that I'm missing?

Afternoon roundup

• Hadley Updates
  • Megan McArdle also starts updating
  • David Harsanyi celebrates skepticism


• Kiewiet said "The vast regulatory machinery of the federal government has long been and continues to be stuck on stupid."
  
  Further confirmation via Reason, though more applied to the regulations of the several states and local districts: just try operating a simple food vending truck.
  
  Read the Washington Post article and weep.

  The holdup and a temporary patchwork of directives have thwarted Washington vendor Kristin Rider, 28. In July, says Rider, whose father owns the popular Pedro and Vinny's burrito cart at 15th and K streets NW, she bought a vending license and launched her own cart a few blocks away, at 19th and L.
  
  Within weeks, Rider says, an investigator from DCRA told her she was in violation of District rules and needed to obtain a location permit from the District Department of Transportation (DDOT). In the middle of the lunch rush, with customers waiting, she was forced to close. Rider says she called DDOT the next day and was informed that the agency no longer issued location permits and that one was not required.
  
  Rider returned to her cart. But within a week, another agent arrived. First, Rider says, he told her she needed the DDOT permit. She explained that she did not. About a month later, he returned and demanded to see receipts for food purchased. Furious and in tears, "I marched myself up to DCRA and showed them my vending permit. And they said, 'You shouldn't have got that,' " Rider said. "Well, that's not my problem. The fourth floor doesn't know what the fifth floor is doing."

Guaranteed minimum income

Nolan at TVHE notes Gareth Morgan's support for a move to a guaranteed minimum income plus a flat tax.

I don't agree with Morgan's wish to fund some of the move by the imposition of a capital tax. In an ideal world, I could go with Arthur Grimes's preferred land tax, but we're not in that world.

Interesting to note that Charles Murray proposed moving to a guaranteed minimum income in the US as well.

In Murray's proposed system, every adult American not incarcerated would get $10K, beginning at age 21, of which $3K must be used for health care. Every other welfare and aid programme would be abolished: TANF, Medicare, Medicaid, social security - everything. The system's total cost would be higher than the current welfare system but, as it would also replace social security, would be cheaper in the long run as more folks retire.

Murray notes that the current system places lots of restrictions on individuals with respect to eligibility whereas a straight cash transfer lets people make their own decisions about how to run their own lives. Moreover, since everyone would know that everyone gets the transfer, an element of personal accountability is induced: everyone knows that everyone has $10,000 a year, so someone who then requests further assistance from the private charitable sector has to answer some relatively hard questions. Other effects: fathers cannot evade child support as the judge will know the location of the bank account where the $10,000 is deposited.

In the New Zealand context, this latter point could be important: eliminating the DPB and ensuring judges have ready access to fathers' bank accounts would provide a powerful inducement for fathers to be named.

Sounds great, but I'm still worried about whether the system is an equilibrium. What happens when some poverty advocate puts out a report showing some grandmother taking care of 20 kids under the age of 18 trying to get by on her $10K entitlement. Does Labour then win on a platform that brings back much of the old system in addition to the guaranteed minimum income?

I also worry about what happens to the stringency of immigration restrictions: I like immigration, but would worry that a guaranteed minimum income would provide a powerful inducement for tighter immigration controls. Presumably benefits could be restricted to citizens rather than just permanent residents. But is that stable either?

I could probably be convinced to push the button for a scheme of this sort in preference to the current system. Not sure that I'm there yet, and I'm not there if it's funded through a capital tax, but I could be convinced.

Political charities

Hmm.

I'd wondered a while back whether the rules in New Zealand were different than those in the US: Doug Sellman's anti-alcohol lobby group here gets charitable status (contributions tax free) though its main purpose seems to be political advocacy.

But today I read that the Sensible Sentencing Trust is likely to have its charitable status revoked because the Charities Commission views its main purpose as being political.

Maybe the Charities Commission is doing some random audits.

DoC disappointments

I'm not surprised that New Zealand's Department of Conservation continues to do its best to stymie Roger Beattie's efforts to farm weka for meat. Beattie has been breeding weka on his farm near Christchurch. The bird is endangered on the New Zealand mainland but plentiful to the point of being a pest on the Chatham Islands, where Beattie worked a long time back. And Beattie's had to fight DoC every step of the way in his private conservation efforts. Beattie's current plan:

Beattie believes conservation and business go hand-in-hand. He said if there was money to be made from an endangered species, it would never die out.

Beattie said DOC's control of bird species created a protracted permit process that strangled entrepreneurial enthusiasm.

If approved for commercial farming, Beattie planned to sell weka breeding pairs to farmers and lifestyle-land owners. He estimated the birds could return $2000 per hectare.

Beattie, who has about 30-plus birds, said weka bred prolifically in the right conditions, hatching up to three clutches of four or five eggs annually, with birds ready for the table at four months.

"There are a number of natural species we harvest and farm, and birds are no different," he said.

I am surprised that DoC's excuses are so, well, horribly lame.

DOC Canterbury conservator Mike Cuddihy said the proposal raised questions, and that there were no precedents. Buff weka were protected, yet extinct, in mainland New Zealand, but could be killed and eaten on the Chatham Islands, where populations were at pest levels.

"Buff weka have a curious juxtaposition of status between mainland New Zealand and the Chathams," he said. "Breeding for consumption in mainland New Zealand is something that goes beyond anything we have contemplated, and there are no precedents that I am aware of."

Why can't Roger sell breeding pairs of an endangered species that he's raised himself? Because it would "raise questions". The question it raises for me is whether DoC's opposition is largely based on not wanting to be shown up by a private entrepreneur. They may well not want that kind of precedent. After all, what would happen to DoC's funding if private folks were allowed to save endangered species?