It's about gasoline prices

I've been mulling a couple of issues related to global warming, the result of attending a forum on the subject here in the City a couple of weeks ago, and then having Larry Dale from the U.C. Berkeley Climate Change Center come to PG&E for an exchange of information just this week.

At Hanson Bridgett's forum on the state of renewable energy, the "least political" (actually maybe the most political) and most controversial speaker, as you might expect, was the academic, Severin Borenstein, the local media's favorite talking head on energy issues in the state of California. The main points I garnered from what he had to say were

1) Approaches based on decisions about how to reduce greenhouse emissions based on the current view and centralized incentive systems (renewable portfolio standards as well as cap and trade systems) are likely to have unforeseen effects and may not work. (I would note that Arthur Laffer has been campaigning recently against the cap and trade initiatives from the vantage of his pure free enterprise ideology, on what seems to me a pretty reasonable argument that caps may ultimately have to be implemented as pure constraints on our energy usage, if we can't find substitutes for fossil fuels like coal, so that there aren't enough carbon credits around to trade.)

2) The only approach that is really likely to work is a carbon tax, because the economic incentives aren't tied to any particular kind of technology (allowing new technologies or solutions to come into the mix on an equal footing with the current favorites), and because it's the best way to price externalities. Severin didn't go into the utter impossibility of proposing a tax that would be seen at the gas pump at a time when the Democrats, of all people, have made a huge issue of high gas prices...

3) The climate change deniers are mutating into climate change "adapters," meaning that the perspective of those who don't see a point to limiting greenhouse emissions is becoming that we can't do anything about reversing global warming, so let's make the best of it. Severin expressed his opposition to that perspective on the grounds that the "adapters" are thinking in terms of averages, whereas the catastrophic effects of extreme events are so drastic that we really need to be trying to change the trajectory rather than pretending that we can ride the wave. I'm actually not sure if that's the right approach to take: I don't want conservative ideologues controlling the debate on social adaptation to climate change, and ultimately I'm not convinced that science indicates we can do anything to change the trajectory (and that's not to deny the human role in climate change or the fact of its happening). But the moral part of his argument, which I take to be that those who have caused or exacerbated climate change bear moral responsibility when extreme events caused by that climate change affect others.