Earlier this month:
Vapourware in the energy business...
And this:
I think we have vastly oversold the role of the market in the solution to this problem...
This is pretty radical stuff - was it those lefty Unionists again? Some hack in the marginal publications, some opinionated blogger?
This is from no less an august figure in Energy Policy than Professor David Victor, Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) based at Stanford University. Professor Victor is also a Law Professor at Stanford, and as it happens very knowledgeable about the action of world markets in coal.
One of the great challenges of the climate change crisis is to make renewable energy cost less than coals and high carbon footprint fuels. This is RE < C.
This can be done by increasing the cost of using such fuels, effectively making polluters pay for the cost of actually putting polluting substances into the environment, for example by schemes such as cap-and-trade.
But the other side of the picture is what is the economic realities affecting trade in coal?
Coal is still plentiful, and surprisingly at least to me is still a massively oversubscribed commodity. The USA are still commisioning new coal fired plants - in spring of 2007, 150 new plants were either in planning or under construction. This is surprising because the news has been full of how planned coal plant projects are being scrapped - but this is 59 or so by some accounts, plenty more are still going ahead.
China has recently become a net importer of coal, despite its massive reserves. To put how amazing this is into context, it is very expensive to ship coal - it can't be pumped and is heavy and difficult to handle, compared to its value. At least until recently - prices have been going up for coal such that there are now markets and trade in coal along routes that would not have been thought viable, according to Professor Victor.
Professor Victor highlighted the failure of the ETS scheme in Europe - one of the early innovators in market based schemes to reduce industry carbon emissions. He pointed out that in recent times the trading prices for carbon were at around 25 euros/ton - but it would need to be twice that to be in parity with gas. Here parity meaning that costs would be sufficient to cause polluters to switch to the next clean fuel alternative, being gas with solar, wind and so on dearer alternatives still.
I am not a political scientist, but I don't believe in strong, heavy government - I would like to believe that a light touch at the helm would result in the best outcomes for our nation states. However I also believe that the state must act to protect its citizens from direct and immediate harm - whether its comets from space, or asbestos in our ceilings; the State fails or succeeds in its duty to the extent that it can react potently and swiftly in the face of widespread imminent harm to its people.
With climate change, droughts, cyclones, and many other nightmare scenarios awaiting, it seems that allowing the market to decide on these matters is such a failure.
Again from Professor Victor:
My own view is that the carbon markets are a mistake - its created a casino. Should be a tax.
My guess which governments of the world will be the first to realize the sense of this? I am betting it will be Russia and China before the USA and the West, precisely because of our blind worship of the market.
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I think it was Keynes who said something that capitalism was the belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of motives, would somehow work for the good of all.
ReplyDeleteAt the risk of being labeled 'anti-business' by the new McCarthyists, I think history has shown that the free market will travel to the end of any road that's open to it, and there's no one but governments who can close any of them off.
And more and more often, governments seem to be ceding their rights to impede businesses at all, in the face of attacks from the Freemarketeer Cheer Squad.
I'm not anti-business, I'm anti-bad business. Anti-selfish business, which is the type that an absolute freemarket encourages. Regulation, whether it be controls on how you treat your workers, how well you make your product, or how you treat the environment protect good businesses. Because absent that regulation, the most amoral businessfolk get to set the market rate and every act of conscience by any of their competitors is paid for directly out of their pockets or the profits to their shareholders.
Consumers can choose to buy products that are made more sustainably, or by companies that treat their employees well, and we've seen some trends this way, but as long as the vast majority of big companies oppose labeling schemes and most governments remain too cowed to introduce them, I think they'll remain at the fringes.
A lot of the same people who deny the process of evolution when it suits them politically, are happy to celebrate the economics of tooth and claw and to hoot about survival of the fittest then.
But the status quo always has the advantage - our society and economy are set up to service it, and to be serviced by it in turn. There are multi-trillion dollar concerns with absolute vested interests in fossil fuels, and they'll be using their resources resolutely to hold off any change, however inevitable, until the last second.
If not beyond.