Party Like It's 1988

Indur Goklany at the Cato blog gives us one of the genuinely dumbest arguments I've heard in a long time. His started point is James Hansen's argument that the safe, sustainable level of CO2 in the atmosphere is 350 ppm. Then Goklany observes that we're currently well above that level, and passed 350 ppm back in 1988. Then he asks "Is the world better off today compared to 1988?" and concludes that it is. Therefore, we should let catastrophic climate change move forward unabated. After all, "But would we want to go back to the world of 1988 — or even 1998 for that matter?"

I used to think it would be good if we could get the murder rate back down to 1963 levels, but now that Goklany's so sagely pointed out that there were no HDTVs back then we can see the foolishness of wishing to travel back in time. Because, clearly, a literal reversion to 1988 living standards is the only conceivable method of reducing carbon emissions as human beings are, as is well known, utterly incapable of devising technological and organizational methods of enhancing energy efficiency or discovering less-polluting sources.

Comments

Indur gets 2008 Boob award.

Posted by whoa now | April 15, 2008 3:40 PM

This isn't a genuine "argument" meant to sway policymakers.

Goklany's goal is to hope that the argument in his blog makes it to other bloggers. If it's popular enough, it could become the crux of an argument that appears in a "publication" of Cato's, which might be lucky enough to be mentioned in a press release, which then gets reprinted in the Washington Times, which gets picked up by Drudge, which gets read by your cranky uncle, who sees fit to repeat it at the dinner table during Thanksgiving. And if that happens, it's considered a successful argument.

Posted by Tyro | April 15, 2008 3:41 PM

Speaking of genuinely dumb arguments, why do you jump immediately from the present to catastophic climate change?

What, you're one of those dudes who don't believe in foreplay?

Posted by BigFatAlGore | April 15, 2008 3:43 PM

Fucktard. And of course, the Cato blog doesn't allow comments.

I preferred John Oliver and Andy Zaltz's version in The Bugle podcast, that when you weigh the potentially devastating effects of climate change against the importance of maintaining share prices and poll ratings, it's just not worth the effort. But they were taking the piss.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | April 15, 2008 3:55 PM

I want to reduce carbon emissions back to August 1966 levels so I can go see the Beatles at Shea Stadium.
-j

Posted by John I | April 15, 2008 4:01 PM

That was an stunningly silly argument. I'm always amazed when a writer is willing to post his or her name next to a particularly galling piece of writing......it's the blog world equivalent of hoisting a big "I AM AN IDIOT" sign above one's head, by choice. Although I'm sure the conservative blogosphere will run with it anyway...just today, Rush Limbaugh was lamenting the fact that global warming seems to have been accepted by most of the "drive-by media" and that GOD FORBID American citizens might actually have to PAY a bit to do something about it. I bet that if global warming was melting Rush's daily diet of Oxycontin, Viagra, and ding-dongs, he'd change his tune with a quickness...

Posted by edsbowlingshoe | April 15, 2008 4:05 PM

A good goal would be for global temperatures to not rise for a decade or maybe even decrease.

Oh wait
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7329799.stm

Posted by Dave | April 15, 2008 4:13 PM

Geezh, this kind of sophomoric "argumentation" might be expected from an intern at CATO, but clicking through to this guy Goklany's bio shows he's been churning out this BS for "over 30 years." You'd think he'd be better at it by now.

Then again, I guess we should be thankful that he remains an idiot capable only of simplistic & easily mocked/refuted "arguments."

Posted by reader | April 15, 2008 4:19 PM

This is standard. Steven Landsburg made the exact same argument about trade in the New York Times a couple months ago:

All economists know that when American jobs are outsourced, Americans as a group are net winners. What we lose through lower wages is more than offset by what we gain through lower prices. In other words, the winners can more than afford to compensate the losers. Does that mean they ought to?

Um, no. Even if you’ve just lost your job, there’s something fundamentally churlish about blaming the very phenomenon that’s elevated you above the subsistence level since the day you were born. If the world owes you compensation for enduring the downside of trade, what do you owe the world for enjoying the upside?

It's either laissez-faire capitalism or back to the stone age....

Posted by lemuel pitkin | April 15, 2008 4:20 PM

Rick Astley, Poison, Bon Jovi and Def Leppard were big chart-toppers in 1988. Plus, Reagan was president. So I'll take destruction of the environment, thanks.

Posted by Ned | April 15, 2008 4:23 PM

People who oppose these Free Trade agreements should pay Landsburg lots of money to voice his opinions as widely and as loudly as possible, because this would result in their sure defeat.

It's fundamentally bizarre that a person advocating an economic system that only works because people act in "rational self interest" would demand that people not act in their own rational self interest.

Posted by Tyro | April 15, 2008 4:28 PM

Matt -

The thing you're forgetting is that guy's like this don't ever want to have to make any personal sacrifice. Ever.

They're the same people who urge war in the Middle East, but won't support a tax levy to properly support our troops. (Never mind the notion that they or their children might actually have to serve in such a conflict themselves.)

I'm sure they wouldn't mind agreeing to stem climate change, as long as they wouldn't actually have to do anything to get there...

Posted by Trigger | April 15, 2008 4:32 PM

I wonder if Dave was a "convert" following 1998?

I've seen lots of other people use 1998 as a totem for GW for the purpose of noting the drop in temps following it. It wasn't. It was a freak El Nino year. 2005 was warmer (by some measures) and wasn't an El Nino year. This "decade" meme has been making the rounds for several months and it's a function of picking where you start and end measurements: it's purely a rhetorical argument. If you look at the record, the temps of the recent "cooling" are higher than those of the previous decade. Some cooling.

No climatologist that I've ever read believes that global temps will invariably rise. What climatologists insist is that we pay attention to the physics: CO2 and other GHGs trap long wave radiation that has been reflected from the earth. This will slowly warm the planet. An El Nina can swamp the input from GHGs, but when El Nina goes away the increase in GHG concentrations is still there and temps will rebound.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | April 15, 2008 4:32 PM

Is Indur Goklany's remark a good illustration of the "Dark Brown" mentality that Quiggin talked about?

(BTW, Landsburg's an idiot, but I actually agree that the idea of winners from trade compensating losers from trade is a rather bad policy principle. If one winner from trade is a person formerly making $20,000 a year as a waiter or somesuch who now makes $40,000 a year in some type of export-manufacturing or import-distributing job, and one loser from trade is a big GM shareholder once making $160,000 a year, who has seen his dividends decline to $150,000 thanks to competition from Japanese manufacturers, then should we really say that the guy on a $40,000 salary should sacrifice $10,000 of it to raise the other guy's dividends up to former levels? It makes much more sense, in my view, just to try to help the poorer people in society in general terms. (One might object that generally trade exerts an upward influence on inequality, but if you were to look at trade at a sufficiently granular level, I am fairly confident you'd find some rich losers and poor winners -- and if you agree with the principle of compensating losers from trade, rather than just helping out poor people generally, you can't consistently deny rich losers from trade compensation.))

Posted by Julian Elson | April 15, 2008 4:40 PM

Oh yeah what if Al Gore sucked all the CO2 out of the air at once then everything would freeze and we would all die and then Obama couldn't impose his elitist juhadist proletarian gulag on us all. So maybe global warming is fake and maybe you forgot that Michael Moore was fat.

Posted by El Cid | April 15, 2008 4:41 PM

Julian Elson: free trade does the following-- it's like giving $100 to 300 million americans while throwing 400,000 people out of their $60k/yr jobs. Sure, you have a net gain of (30 billion - 24 billion) = $6 billion, but is that really any consolation to the several hundreds thousand people who have lost everything, simply so that many people can get a little bit more?

Granted, politics normally works in the opposite way: take a little away from everyone to give a lot to a few people (usually ending up with less the total), but it's hard to say, "sure, you've lost your job and your savings, but it's better than living in a mud hut."

Posted by Tyro | April 15, 2008 4:48 PM

Good to see you posting on this, Matt. I think this subject is underrepresented in the liberal blogosphere.

BTW, David Roberts at Grist is a good read on AGW...

Posted by JJ | April 15, 2008 4:59 PM

But Tyro, those people can get new jobs even if those new jobs may suck more. So the calculus works a little differently.

I think Julian has a good point. We're not going to specifically try to target helping those who suffer from a new free trade deal. Would that even be reasonably feasible? No, but instead we can talk about building a more egalitarian society through other measures if free trade tends to be a force against equality and if its benefits are so great that they're too much to pass up.

But the way this would work is that you have Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats want a more progressive tax system and the Republicans want more free trade. The Dems give the Republicans freer trade in exchange for a progessive tax system. In the real world, Dems are pressured to adopt free trade policies so people take them 'seriously' and then the Republicans lower taxes on the richest 1%. It's win/win, really.

Posted by mpowell | April 15, 2008 5:18 PM

Good to see you posting on this, Matt. I think this subject is underrepresented in the liberal blogosphere.

BTW, David Roberts at Grist is a good read on AGW...

Posted by JJ | April 15, 2008 5:20 PM

Posted by reader: "Geezh, this kind of sophomoric "argumentation" might be expected from an intern at CATO, but clicking through to this guy Goklany's bio shows he's been churning out this BS for "over 30 years." You'd think he'd be better at it by now.

Then again, I guess we should be thankful that he remains an idiot capable only of simplistic & easily mocked/refuted "arguments.""

These guys (and Ian Murray, Tim Worstall et al) are professionals. This is *their job*. It's like being a lawyer, and spending your days racking up billable hours making arguments favorable to your client. Except that lawyers frequently have to deal with judges, who know better, so there's some limits.

They do it day in, day out. If an argument gets too bad (meaning really, really discredited), then they'll put it on a shelf to age, until people forget it. Then they'll pull it out and recycle it.

And being professionals means that they don't care whether many see through it; they just want to fool enough people so that their sponsors continue to pay them. And if they lose, they'll just go onto another cause - the tobacco people merely moved on as that ship sank.

Believing these guys is like believing a used car salesman.

Posted by Barry | April 15, 2008 5:28 PM

1988 was a great year for hip-hop.

Posted by djslippyb | April 15, 2008 5:37 PM

Wow. This guy works at a think tank? So O'Hanlon IS one of the smart guys - always wrong, but not actively stupid. I'll have to revise that Matt Damon Good Will Hunting think tank genius image to a more realistic Stuck On You one.

Posted by Jack H. | April 15, 2008 6:05 PM

1988....Please. Don't make me live through Ronnie Raygun again. I don't know if I could handle it.

On the other hand...Jerry Garcia was still alive and that would be good.

Posted by kindness | April 15, 2008 6:15 PM

1988....Please. Don't make me live through Ronnie Raygun again.

Raygun's last year. Could we elect Dukakis that fall? If Bush the Elder had gone down to defeat the first time around, probably no one would ever have heard of Bush the Lesser, except as a notably inept MLB owner. And I've always rather liked the idea of a president raised by Lesbians . . .

Posted by rea | April 15, 2008 6:30 PM

But would we want to go back to the world of 1988 — or even 1998 for that matter?

1998 would be kind of cool, because then we'd all know when to sell our stocks.

I'm pretty sure that every time I use one of those green eco-sacks at the grocery, the earth spins backward on its axis a little bit.

Posted by Alan in SF | April 15, 2008 7:09 PM

I disagree with the characterization of Goklany's argument. I do not think Goklany would say that we would revert to 1988 living standards if we capped carbon emissions. What he would say is that we would forgo the benefits of any missed economic growth due to the capping of carbon emissions. The analogy of murder rates and HDTV's also does not make sense to me unless you believe that the presence of HDTV's and murder rates are causally connected somehow. Carbon emissions and economic growth (what Goklany is comparing) are connected, however.

Posted by Andrew | April 15, 2008 9:23 PM

Matt is right, there is no zero sum game with environmental regulation. The scrubber that costs money for the coal plant to buy is sold by another company. Probably more jobs are created making the scrubber than are lost to maintain profit at the utility. This is why economic growth has continued to grow since the first Earth Day.

In 1988 all cars used freon in their AC units. Many people didn't want to eliminate it, said we would all sweat and their is no ozone hole. Well, it is 2008, my AC works fine and the ozone hole has reformed somewhat and grows every year. Unfortuanetly, it seems the lack of ozone was masking global warming during the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I guess Cato can posit that we would be living even better now, but I don't know how you can prove it.

Posted by Patrick | April 15, 2008 10:13 PM

I was born in 1988 and I would totally not want to be unborn, so this makes tons of sense. What's the environment if I'm not here to look at it?

Posted by Robert Geilfuss | April 16, 2008 11:02 AM

I was born in 1988 and I would totally not want to be unborn, so this makes tons of sense. What's the environment if I'm not here to look at it?

Posted by Robert Geilfuss | April 16, 2008 11:10 AM

We're running a campaign with author Bill McKibben to get this 350 target. Check it out at: http://www.350.org

Because, while we're working on that time machine to get back to 1988 (by the way, why all the slams on Rick Astley? he never wants to let you down), we should be building a movement to save our planet.

http://www.350.org

Posted by Jamie | April 16, 2008 1:50 PM

used to think it would be good if we could get the murder rate back down to 1963 levels

So you are equating murder with carbon emissions? Now I know that standard left wing gameplay is to insult a good argument rather than to engage it. But at some point you might want to be honest with yourself.

If you believe that carbon emissions are bad in and of themselves, which is really then a religious belief, then that's one thing. But, most people who want to reduce carbon emissions want to reduce them because of their possible impact on human life. The Cato author is pointing out that as carbon emissions have increased, net world gdp is overall higher and few people would chose to go back to the 80's.

In other words, the author is trying to explain that the negative NET causality of increasing emissions has not been negative despite predictions otherwise.

Posted by JoshK | April 18, 2008 9:49 AM

Best. Post. Ever.

Posted by Chris | April 18, 2008 11:49 PM