What is Internet good for?

Here a quick poll, pick the most fitting answer:

• I spend too much time on the Internet, and I'm aware of this
• I spend too much time on the Internet, I'm deluding myself about it

There's no need to bother with the third option, as people who don't use too much Internet are extremely unlikely to ever read this blog.

But in the spirit of "What have the Romans ever done for us?" - what good is Internet really for? Is it worth all the time we spend on it?

For the last two weeks in the spirit of Alicorn's luminosity - by the way definitely read that linked article, her first attempt was at that was a major tl;dr but these "seven shiny stories" are so short and insightful you're probably better off spending some time reading them than whatever else you're typically wasting your time on Internet, and it promoted her to my second favourite lesswrong writer after Eliezer.

So as I was saying before I interrupted myself, for the last two weeks I've been making a log of my daily activities and how much satisfaction I actually got from a given day.

Now many people who have learned economics 101 and are treating it too seriously think that whatever we're doing must by definition be the things we most enjoy, our claims to the contrary notwithstanding - so people who say the want to get thinner, but eat fuckloads of pizza actually prefer eating pizza and being fat to not eating pizza and being thin. This point of view is usually something worth considering - people usually say they want things they feel they're "supposed to want". On the other hand, the amount of evidence that we don't do what's best for us is ridiculously overwhelming.

A very very short list of such examples would include:

• hyperbolic discounting - there's only one "mathematically consistent" way of treating values over time (exponential discounting), and the evidence is completely unambiguous that we're not doing so.
• rodent experiments show also rather unambiguously that brains have separate systems for "wanting something" and "liking something". They are of course connected, so other things being equal if we like something more we will probably want it more - but this influence is far far less than total identity assumed by economics 101. Once you're aware that people might "want" things they don't really "like", and "not want" things they "like" (by the way - I'm using the words "want" and "like" rather vaguely - natural languages are spectacularly bad when analyzing humans - quite surprising actually as they seem to have been originally developed largely for social use) the entire utilitarian / consequentialist framework of analysis collapses.
• Happiness research in spite of all its ambiguity at least shows that simple models of happiness are plain wrong. If you have time to waste on the Internet - TED is filled with good talks about happiness, not just the one linked.
• Even disregarding these, you'd need to have ridiculously good information on yourself to decide what's the best thing to do. And it would be a massive understatement to say that we don't have it. And it's really really difficult to measure yourself. The idea behind "living luminously" is that increasing your self-awareness of your own mental state even somewhat might lead to highly positive results.
• and many many more

Economics 101

By the way - and if you don't enjoy how I keep straying away from whatever is my main subject all the time, you probably shouldn't be reading this blog - I'm in no way disparaging "economics 101" thinking. I find it really sad that virtually every single person in the world pretty much belongs to these two classes:

• People who don't understand Economics 101. They fail to get even such basic notions like comparative advantage or externalities.
• People who get Economics 101 - and take it far too seriously. If you even briefly look at assumptions behind all its theorems, none of them is even approximately true in the real world. Very often you get lucky and this toolkit lets you predict things about the real world decently enough, but this is about as often not the case.

This is not to say Economics 101 should be thrown away. All models are wrong, some are useful. Or from a closely related perspective - all abstractions leak. If you don't perform sanity checks, and blindly trust everything the models tell you, they will lead you far astray (you could always argue that it's not models' fault, it's fault of the way you're applying them - but this is a purely theoretical distinction).

So for example in theory economics 101 models say that laissez-faire international trade policy should outperform any kind of intervention, but in practice countries which practice export subsidies by currency manipulation like the East Asia are better off than those with less laissez-faire trade policy like Europe, which in turn are better off than those that try to follow the route of import substitution via high tariffs like Latin America.

By the way if you find this curious, the standard answer to this puzzle is that benefits of economy of scale overwhelm loses due to comparative advantage - pumping subsidies into narrow range of related industries lets your country specialize in those, and import everything else - while limiting imports of wide range of products to protect diverse local industries means they will all be small and weak. As economics 101 completely ignores the dominant factor of scale advantages, focusing on an undoubtedly real but less important factor instead.

Similar misapplication of economics 101 says that minimum wage laws invariably increase unemployment. This was universally believed by nearly all economists a few decades ago according to some surveys cited by Wikipedia, and holding such belief became almost the canonical way of signaling that you're "economically savvy". And not surprisingly it turned out to be false, all research showing either no effect whatsoever, or effect that is really tiny compared to the huge increase in well-being of the working poor. The economists have finally figured that out, and they're more or less evenly divided on the question - even those standing against the minimum wage laws typically holding much more nuanced views - and yet some naive hard-liners still hold this as a measure of "economic enlightenment".

My logs

Getting back to the subject, for each day in a bit over the last two weeks I recorded my activities, and some measures of satisfaction. The logs weren't terribly detailed, and "recording one's satisfaction" is exactly the kind of thing which would never get published in any reputable peer-reviewed journal. That's not to say that it's useless - "the official way of doing science" has led to many important discoveries, but it's for many questions it's been rather impotent, and it's important that people try different ways of finding things out too, if for nothing else then to fill in the blind spots of the mainstream science.

So my logs, of however dubious methodology they are, seem to point to the following correlations. I won't even bother pretending to have any "statistical significance" in all that of course, even forgetting about small sample of just two weeks measuring "statistical significance" necessarily assumes that samples are essentially independent, and they're nothing like that. The list is:

• Physical exercise of all kinds - definitely positive - this isn't really surprising, as this is something that's highly enjoyable once started, but it takes effort to begin, so the hyperbolic discounting excuse applies
• With video games it's mixed. First person shooter games like online Modern Warfare 2 have positive correlations, but Total War games negatively correlate with my end-of-the-day satisfaction, even though they're not really frustrating or anything most of the time.
• Cleaning up my GTD system - definitely positive
• Being productive at work, and in general getting done things I want to get done, especially the long postponed ones - definitely positive
• Reduction in caffeine consumption - mildly negative, but that doesn't really imply anything about long term effects of different levels of caffeine, and it wasn't even as bad as I expected
• Watching TV series, and reading books - mildly negative; this might be a false result, or the effect might be real but minor, in any case - there's no reason to do much more of those
• And the largest and rather surprising correlation - spending more time online has a huge negative correlation with my satisfaction levels

Now there standard economics 101 disclaimer applies - these measures are necessarily marginal - so finding out that I'm better off exercising more and Internetting less implies only that I would be better off exercising a bit more than now, and Internetting a bit less than now, and it's more likely than at some point increasing amount of exercise and decreasing Internet use will make me worse off.

It's an interesting find that I seem to actually enjoy my work - I should probably put that one in my CV for future reference. And it's nice to get some insight on what kinds of recreational activities work better for me than others (due to small sample size less repeatable events like those involving interaction with other people not included). But the big find is that Internet is bad for me, and let's focus on that.

What is Internet good for?

Do you remember what life was before the Internet? It was horrible! We had to copy games from friends on stacks of floppies instead of just bittorrenting them! But really, what good is Internet for?

• Email and IM are always far superior means of communication than phone calls (I really hate those, they should all die in fire); and are so much faster and easier than driving all the way to meet someone in person that they usually win, even if the throughput is somewhat less.
  
• There's shopping - at which Internet really excels, most of the time. At least when you know exactly what you want, otherwise not so much.
• There is information - but I'm far from happy about it. For some kinds of thing that you want to find, if they follow "keyword keyword of keyword" pattern, you can usually google or bing it out in seconds. Otherwise, all search engines become nearly useless, even if this information is somewhere. And it requires a lot of knowledge to turn a problem into unique keywords - very often you know little more than "X doesn't work", or "I'm not happy about Y", and search engines won't help you with those at all. This assumes information is even online in the first place - as very often it's not - it's really sad how nearly all research papers have been successfully pay-walled. It seems that "information wants to be free" only when the information in question is something on the top 100 bestsellers list of one kind or another, and not to the long tail which contains most of the real value.
• There's Google Maps and similar sites, which are far superior to paper maps.
• There are some funny things online - but they're swamped by such amounts of unfunny repetitive material that I really doubt Internet is even good for that. I dare you, go to let's say /r/funny on reddit - which is supposedly about the most recent funny stuff online (or at least reddittors seem to believe they find stuff first, and everyone else copies stuff from them) - and how many things you'll find there that will make you laugh, and are not nearly ancient? And it's the same on nearly every other place which is supposedly filled with funny stuff. People keep going there because occasionally something good turns out, but it's so rare it's probably not worth it.
• There are news - and again the flood problem applies. I'm yet to find any RSS feed with only important news. Everyone seems to believe the right way to do news online is to just throw 10+ trivia items a day - Obama said something, one minor celebrity divorced another minor celebrity, stock prices decreased somewhere, IDF shot a few unarmed civilians somewhere else - as if knowing things like these made you better off in any way. The choice is to either get ridiculous amount of political trivia, or just ignore the news altogether.
• There are all kinds of social networking sites - and I'm increasingly doubting their value. I have a Facebook account (and accounts on some other sites) and I might even use it occasionally, but I don't see that my life would be that much worse if Facebook and the rest didn't exist.
• There are blogs, wikis, and similar places where you can contribute your knowledge, which can give tremendous amount of satisfaction to the contributor. If you add them all up, they provide a lot of value for readers as long as search engines manage to find a relevant blog post or wiki article, which is always in doubt. On the other hand, I have serious doubts about reading everything on a blog, or unfocused browsing on wikis. I haven't yet seen a blog which had consistently good posts - much less consistently good and relevant to my interests.
• There are online video games, for some things playing with people is more fun than playing against computer.

These seem to cover the main points. And what's obvious is that the most valuable online activities - email, highly focused search, shopping, maps - take rather little time. On the other hand, the ones that take a lot of time - like all the reddits, forums, social sites, wikis, blogs, etc. - don't provide that terribly much value per time spent.


Unless you actually measure how you use internet, it's really easy to overestimate how much value spending time on it gives you - as you're far more likely to remember the high points which didn't really take long - as opposed to relatively pointless activities which took most of your online time. Human memory just works like that.


This distinction would be pointless if it was impossible to make a distinction between the two - if reduction in the bad kind of internet use required essentially proportional reduction in the good kind. Fortunately it seems to me that this is fairly straightforward - good things like email (this of course assuming you have a working spam filter / and all mailing lists etc. go somewhere else than your inbox), shopping, maps, directed search - have different entry points than less useful things like social sites, wikis, news, and funnies etc. Sometime you'll look for something specific and in the process accidentally fall into a wiki trap, but this shouldn't be too common with some self-awareness. Much more often you waste a ridiculous amount of time by wanting to "quickly check if there's anything good on X" and having hyperbolic discounting ("just one more link") turn that into a disaster.

It doesn't mean reducing your lolcat consumption to zero - only that you should force yourself to make an up-front decision "I'm start looking at funnies now, even though I know well enough it will probably take the next few hours" and having a realistic idea how good this time will be; instead of fooling yourself it will be quick and only filled with the good stuff, as seems typical now.

tl;dr - using internet only when you have clear goal, and not for vague "maybe there's something good" is good for you.

Greeks can pay, Greeks will pay

Most normal blogs' favourite countries to rant about is US, or Israel, or China, or something like that. Not on this blog - my number one target, at least for the last month - is Greece. And I'm really shocked that some of the otherwise sane people I know buy into the whole "can't pay, won't pay" nonsense, so I wrote this short post explaining how it all really works.

Basics of money lending

Let's get back to basics. Why would anybody lend anybody else their money? The most common reason is they want to get even more money back. Now this is in no way the only reason - people routinely lend money to their family members and friends, IMF lends money to countries facing collapse, USA and Soviet Union lent money to support whichever dictator seemed more aligned with their interest, Europe lends money to shit-poor countries out of pity, AIG lent itself taxpayers' money by bribes and threats, and CIA lent money to Osama bin Laden because they're idiots - but while these are all very important cases, most money in the world is lent for profit motive.

This profit-motivated lending is not only largest in volume - it's also most reliable. Political will can evaporate overnight - ask South Vietnam or Cuba if you don't believe me - but speculators can be reasonably counted on to keep lending as long as it makes business sense. Even in the middle of the latest recession and the Great Depression solvent borrowers had no trouble getting loans - the problem was sudden decrease in solvency, not disappearance of the profit motive.


Political and charitable lending is highly complicated and varied form case to case, but for-profit lending is quite straightforward from game theoretic point of view:

• Lender decides to give borrower money or not
• Then borrower decides to repay or not
• Because borrower would much rather get money, and not repay it - no lender would be willing to lend anything without some pretty hard assurance of seeing their money back
• On the other hand, as repayment might be impossible due to objective circumstances, borrowers would be unwilling to provide too much assurance
• Level of assurance is based on balance of these two factors.

And what forms of assurance are available? For private individuals there's debtors' prison - a barbaric institution which is still used in child support and tax cases - not coincidentally both being the kind of "debt" which is incurred unwillingly, where the "borrower" has no leverage whatsoever.

Another assurance is forceful confiscation of property, and various kinds of physical abuse - these were routinely used as international debt collection in 19th century, see Egypt, and Haiti for examples - but these rarely happen these days.

Yes, lenders could try to sue Greece or another unwilling country in foreign or domestic courts, but it would be mostly a PR stunt, and they wouldn't even get enough to cover their legal costs. If a country doesn't want to pay, lenders cannot do shit.

Hamster showing what debtors' prison looks like

The final assurance

So what keeps borrowers repaying and lenders borrowing? It's lenders not being stupid. They know very well that if someone didn't honour their debts in the past, they're unlikely to do so in the future - so if you tell the banks to go fuck themselves, you saved yourself a huge pile of money, but you have no chance of getting any money from them in the future. 

When you think about it - it's a pretty weak assurance - it only works when the country is moderately-screwed-up:

• If country's economic situation is truly screwed up - they won't be able to repay - so banks lose
• If country's economic situation is bad but not horrible (like most countries now) - they cannot afford losing their credit lines - so they keep repaying - and banks win
• If country's economic situation is some awesome they don't care about future loans - they can tell banks to go fuck themselves - and banks lose too!

Fortunately for banks, the last case is very difficult to achieve - not only you need zero deficit (before interest) now - something already very hard - you need to be certain of being able to keep this zero deficit essentially indefinitely. Recessions, commodity price fluctuations, wars, terrorist attacks, aging population, floods, tsunamis, volcanoes, epidemics, electing Conservatives, and plenty of other natural disasters can screw your budget essentially overnight - all sending you crawling back to the banks begging for money. And bankers will remember what happened to their old loans.

I cannot think of any country in the world which is financially healthy enough to pull that off. What makes it even less likely is that countries with most balanced budgets tend to have lowest debt levels and borrowing costs as a rule (debts are results of past performance, and past performance is the best predictor of future performance there is) - so for them repaying debts is nearly painless, and provides good insurance in case something screws their economies in the future.

Essentially the only case in which a country can tell the bankers to fuck off, and has debts high enough to make it worthwhile - is one which used to be horribly mismanaged for many decades, and then turned into one of the healthiest economies in the world essentially overnight.

Does it sound like Greece? If you believe so, I have some sovereign debt credit default swaps that you might be interested in.

Greeks simply cannot afford not paying. They can negotiate better terms of repayment, and get some help from EU and IMF, but essentially they will have to get their country in order - cut their bloated civil service and bloated military, cut - and repay their debts, because they simply cannot afford losing their credit lines. And so they will pay.

The real reason behind Greek economic problems

According to CIA, right now Greece has GDP of $405.7bln, and debt of $552.8bln (136%) - not even counting debt hidden thanks to Goldman Sachs shenanigans. It got into massive debt by spending too much and taxing too little. But everyone seems to forget what it spent so much money on. Here's the real reason:

Greece spends far higher percentage of GDP on military than any EU country; higher than US, Russia, and any even remotely sane country in the world.

Greece spends completely insane 4.3% of its GDP on military - that not even counting forced unpaid labour system - if every soldier was actually paid the number would be even higher - and it definitely severely damages economy by taking people at their most productive age away from useful activities like studying or working.

And what's their track record?

• They obviously lost during the Second World War, but so did everyone else, and then they proceeded to...
• Have a Civil War 1944-1949! The first major success of Greek military was murdering fellow Greeks, with British and American assistance.
• The Civil War being won, the army still felt like shooting some people but didn't have balls enough to face another real army, so not soon later, in 1967, they overthrew the government to kill even more Greeks (they especially loved killing students). With CIA involvement of course, like most Cold War right wing military coups.
• What did the military junta do after they ran out of people to kill in Greece? By sponsoring a military coup attempt in Cyprus with annexation of it into Greece as the ultimate goal. That failed spectacularly, as Turkey would have none of it, and moved its army to annex Northern Cyprus. The fiasco caused collapse of Greek military regime.
• So what did Greeks do after that? Dissolve or at least drastically reduce the army whose only occupation was shooting at their compatriots and unsuccessfully trying to occupy other countries? Of course not - they kept spending insane amount of money and forced unpaid labour on it!

Let's look at list of countries by military expenditure, some notable cases.

• Greece - 4.3% - way too fucking high, never won a war, killed fuckloads of Greeks
• USA - 4.06% - while being involved in countless genuine wars
• Russian - 3.9% - you're clearly spending far too much if even Russia is saner than you
• South Korea - 2.7% - and they're next to a nuclear-armed madmen just waiting for the best time to hit them
• France - 2.6% - second highest in EU, manage to have built third largest nuclear arsenal for that
• UK - 2.4% - and that includes nuclear arsenal and they even manage to win a war every now and then without American support
• Taiwan - 2.2% - they clearly don't care about Chinese
• EU average - only 1.69%
• People's Republic of China - 1.7% - they're clearly all hippie peaceniks!
• Japan - 0.8% - being in reach of North Koreans nukes? We just love our animes and do not care about such things!

There is absolutely no reason why the miserable failure that Greek military is should cost anywhere near as much as it does. And don't even try to mention of Turkey - Greece is part of NATO and has all the NATO guarantees; Turkey was never remotely interested in invading Greece; and their Greek-military-initiated confrontation over Cyprus already resulted in massive failure of Greek military.

Imagine that instead of insane 4.3% of GDP Greece spent only 1.7% of GDP in it, like a typical EU country. Over the last 20 years (before that there was Cold War, which was seriously overrated but let's excuse that), it would save them 52% of GDP - moving them from the list of bankrupt countries to the list of fairly average countries struggling with the recession. But there's more! All that 52% of GDP incurred compound interest. Average long term interest rates are about 6%/year nominal, so 1bln drachmas spent in 1990 grew all the way up to 3.2bln drachmas now (or however many euros that is). Even worse - countries which are deeper in debt have to pay much higher interest rates.

Now exact calculations would require far too much data gathering, so I won't bother at the moment, but one thing is clear even from this:

The only reason Greece is in such crisis now is because they have ridiculously oversized army. The main requirement of any bailout package should be massive reduction in size and cost of their armed forces.

A modest proposal for climate change treaty

For a moment, let's forget questions like whether rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions would be sensible or even possible, and about alternative approaches. What can we do if we're serious about reducing emissions really fast? Let's use perfectly logical method of elimination to see what's left once we eliminate the impossible.

First, it should be obvious that no country has either interest or ability to do it on its own, or even together with a small group of other countries. Let's say even as much as half of the world, at enormous cost, overhauled its economy to be entirely emission-free by the next year. Suddenly the world would have immense amounts of oil, coal, and gas without anyone there wanting to buy them. The price would drop, demand from the still-emitting part of the world would increase, and new equilibrium would be established - not necessarily at emission levels so significantly lower. As an added bonus, a lot of manufacturing and other carbon-intense industries would simply move - yes there are tax solutions to reduce this part, but modern governments are incapable of dealing with even outright tax fraud by major corporations, so I'm highly skeptical about that; and in any case it's only one part of the problem.

Kittens in poor countries will emit more CO₂ as they get basics like fresh water

What's worse - however small was the interest that the emitting countries had before, now their economies are much more dependent on cheap fossil fuels than before; they have new carbon-intense industries; and with emissions reduced by someone else they care even less about global warming than before. Just in case you think this scenario is purely hypothetical, stupid, and there's no chance of it happening - we had a mild version of it called Kyoto Protocol. Some developed countries agreed to barely stop increase in their emissions, and everyone else took advantage of the suckers. Total world emissions increased by 41.7% 1992-2008, with China's and India's more than doubling. America had a boom for SUVs and increased its emissions by 16.8% even though they could have cheaply avoided it all by just better fuel standards. Meanwhile a lot of manufacturing moved to countries without emission limits (Kyoto Protocol wasn't the main reason for it, but its clear which way its influence went on the margin).

Meanwhile kittens in rich countries emit CO₂ by driving big cars

And don't even hope for voluntary drastic reductions in emissions - China promised to increase its emissions by only 40% by 2020... and that's considered major progress. India won't even promise constrained increase - anyone wants to bet how much time it will take till their emissions double? Obama is free promise whatever he wants, he won't be able to pass anything meaningful through lobbyist-dominated Senate, and whatever little he manages to get passed, Palin's administration will revert anyway.

Such piecemeal solutions just won't do. We need to have everybody on board - either voluntarily or by force. We can temporarily excuse very small or very poor countries, but there's simply no way to have a meaningful reduction treaty without developing countries like Indonesia and Pakistan on board. Unfortunately we cannot really force them to comply. If everyone else was cutting their emissions except for Sierra Leone, they could be beaten into submission with some economic sanctions or a few cluster bombs. Oh yes, I'm curious how willing are pro-emission-cutting folks to bomb countries which continue emitting? But even if we're willing to bomb, short of World War III there's no way to force China or India to do anything, and good luck with even mid-sized countries like Algeria and Brazil.

Unfortunately the set of countries hardest to force into agreeing to severe emission limits is almost exactly the set of countries which emit the most and whose agreement we most need. Now while it wouldn't be entirely impossible for such countries to agree to severe limits out of concern for planetary common good, it's about as likely as a bird baguette-bombing LHC. One such event per century and we already had ours. No, any realistic treaty must pander to biggest emitters. And here's my modest proposal:

Let's make the best estimate of what everyone's 2010-2020 emissions would be without a treaty. Subtract desired percentage. That's how much permits everyone gets, now go and trade.

Yes, it means rich countries get to emit a lot more than poor countries. And less efficient countries like Australia get to emit more than more efficient counties like Japan. And countries which were going to cut anyway like EU get to emit less than countries which weren't that committed like USA. It really sucks. But do you think you can have them agree to such limits otherwise? If poor countries want to increase their emissions - and they'd all love to do that, they will have to buy emission permits, with hard money. By the way targeting 2020's emissions or such is necessary as there's no way to get India to agree to 2010's emissions, let alone EU's favourite 1990's level - well we could bribe them, but then we can as well give them emission permits as a bribe.

It would have to be enforced hard - every country which tries to emit past their limits must be made to suffer. Because the treaty is advantageous to all powerful countries, as long as the poor countries are divided it wouldn't be too hard to enforce - definitely not anywhere as hard as enforcing it against China or USA. Threat of economy-crippling trade sanctions would absolutely necessary, they would most likely have to be actually applied a few times or the threat wouldn't work. It might very well require some bombing or even an outright invasion every now and then. But surely, there will be plenty of volunteers to fight for the planet, right?

Volunteers to invade countries emitting too much CO₂, artist's conception

Now the Guardian/New York Times reading crowd will surely reply "what about social justice" and nonsense like that. But first - how likely is it that Chinese Politburo or American Senate or Indian voters wanting to finally get their Tata Nanos are going to care about your idea of social justice? You can probably guilt them into parting with some of their money or emission permits, but there are hard limits on how much you can get - they have all the power, and countries like Tuvalu have none. And second, I find social justice arguments unconvincing and annoying. Some arbitrary class of people - in this case those who happen to be born in developed countries now - are blamed for what their grandparents did. Somehow this is always selective liberal self-hatred - you'll never see the New York Times blaming modern Arabs for their ancestors running African slave trade, but affirmative action following the same logic against white people is somehow considered fine. And only negative externalities of Western economic growth are considered!

What are total externalities of Western economic growth, starting from Industrial Revolution and its coal? Yes, carbon dioxide levels in atmosphere increased, and so did sea levels; but standards of living of everyone are drastically better than they were in 1800, not only in rich countries. Back then an average Indians lived 25 years (it's 65 now), one baby in three didn't last until its first birthday, hereditary dictators ruled the world, nobody could read, people were forced to marry their cousins at age of 12, and wars were a constant fact of life. Now we're all healthier, richer, safer, longer-living, and more free than ever. We're even far smarter than our ancestors, all thanks to modern economy!

You think it would be better to be a Medieval serf in a low-carbon economy than live with some temperature increase? If so, there are still a few places where you can fulfill your serf dream. If not, stop the bullshit that industrial development had net negative externalities. They were highly positive, and in fact it would be more "socially just" for poor countries using technology developed by us to pay us - something they will actually do if my modest proposal passes.

Poverty begets corruption. Corruption begets poverty.

On the other hand giving poor countries huge emission permits is not only politically unrealistic, it would also have severe consequences. Poor countries have almost all highly corrupt governments. Giving Angola free money or valuable emission permits wouldn't do much good to an average Angolan, but would surely make their politicians rich. It might also start a few coups, as which general could let an opportunity to get a tens of billions of dollars pass just like that. We have long history of throwing money at the problem - and it doesn't matter if it's aid, loans, or payment for oil and other resources - the end result is authoritarian corrupt governments and frequent military coups.

There's one more issue here. With perfect knowledge carbon tax and carbon permits are equivalent. But our knowledge of the future is highly uncertain - carbon tax means unknown emissions but known price - and is in every way better for the economy, as predictable long term prices make investments in reducing emissions safer; while carbon permits make emission known but price highly unpredictable. Now's the good bit - if technology optimists like Krugman and the entire Guardian/New York Times crows are right, permits will get very cheap very quickly, so amount of money poor countries will have to pay will be fairly insignificant - they might be even better off on the net thanks to new technology developed thanks to incentives for emission cutting. It's not entirely implausible, as that's what happened with sulphur dioxide cap and trade. On the other hand if energy pessimist like me are right, and technological progress will be too slow, poor countries will have to pay a lot. But that shouldn't concern you because you don't believe it could possibly happen, right?

Libertarianism is externality denialism

Yesterday I wrote about libertarian blogosphere, skimming 5 posts each from what is supposedly top 20 libertarian blogs.

There seems to have been quite a few angry reactions, which I will partially address in this post.

Methodology

All ways of discussing politics are flawed, and so was the method I used. But it was hopefully flawed in a different way. It was a methodological experiment.

As my attitude towards libertarianism is not difficult to figure out, I tried to limit my bias by relying on someone else's list of top libertarian blogs, and use transparent selection procedure. At first I wanted to just take the most recent 5 posts from each blog, but there were too many link-only posts, personal stuff, meta-information, and such, which I believed would only introduce noise to the results. I didn't establish clean-cut criteria for selecting which posts qualify for inclusion, so a few decisions might have been somewhat dubious. It's inevitable when something new is tried, and I don't think it affects the results significantly. From one of the comments:

I can only assume that a certain amount of skimming was involved in garnering your links as it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that smoking would feature high. Freedom2Choose is a grass roots pro-choice organisation, set up with the express purpose of opposing bans on lifestyle choices (and before you follow the usual line - no, no funding except from working class members who are angry about the increasing restrictions and bans). The subject would therefore be naturally prominent. The Frank Davis blog was set up expressly in anger at the smoking ban (the clue is the fact that his sub-title is "Banging on about the smoking ban"), and seeing as libertarians oppose authoritarianism, and that the UK ban is as authoritarian a policy as we have seen recently, of course it's going to figure.

I assume the top 20 list is representative of libertarian blogosphere. Pro-smoking articles appeared on 4 different blogs on this list, so it's not accidental inclusion of just one or two smoking-centric blogs. And unlike with climate change which is in news right now, and therefore overrepresented, nothing new is happening that's related to smoking, so I doubt this is an artifact - smoking seems to be quite solidly one of the big libertarian subjects.

Externality denialism

One thing which I observed in both original posts, and in feedback comments I got was persistent denial of existence of externalities.

This is economics 101 diagram of any economic activity - a firm produces a product, which it gives to consumer for their money. Both production and consumption have some external costs and benefits, which they impose on others regardless of their wishes.

Libertarians are really uncomfortable with economics - at least with anything resembling modern science - they sure have their own folk version of it. They pretend that red part of the diagram doesn't exist. The thinking seems to be something like:

• I feel that governments are always and without exceptions evil
• If externalities existed, governments would actually be useful
• So I won't believe in existence of externalities
  

It starts with values, and ends with statement about reality, as if the nature cared about your values. It is of course logically invalid, but humans are extremely prone to this kind of rationalizations.

Disregarding artificial controversy influenced to large extent by industrial interests (tobacco industry was the leader of this, and this is extremely well documented), science is quite sure about existence of health risks of second hand smoking, anthropogenic climate change, and such. And equally real is plain irritation of non-smokers due to people smoking in their faces. But these facts are very uncomfortable to libertarian position, so you can find arguments like these:

You will also not find one of those posts disputing the link between smoking and cancer. Passive smoking and cancer, yes, simply for the reason that there are hugely more studies showing it to be a construct of the hysterical anti-smoking lobby shilling for the superrich pharmaceutical companies (thought you were against such things?). That debate is nowhere near over as many would have you believe.

Not one post I have read on any of the aforementioned blogs talks of non-smokers being denied the right 'not to have smoke blown in their faces'.

The fact that you use the phrase "climate change denial" shows that you believe the AGW hypothesis. Fair enough. However, if you do not believe the hypothesis (or think that it is pretty darn suspect) then cap-and-trade—for all its internalising of externalities—is a total nonsense because CO2 does not do damage to the environment (in fact, it's actively beneficial because it helps trees and plants grow). Do you see?

They not only disagree with particular solutions, such as smoking bans, or cap&trade - but deny existence of externalities in the first place.

Externalities and the Pigou Club

The mainstream economic position is that externalities are not only real but very important, and the best way to deal with them is internalizing them, usually by appropriate taxes or subsidies, or mostly equivalent ways such as cap&trade, which strangely some consider Pigovian, and some don't:

While Pigovian taxes are economically-preferred way to deal with externalities, they're not the only way and that's due to the second big concept which libertarians pretend doesn't exist - transaction costs.

Transaction costs

Now I'll get quite far away from the main subject. Smoking is harmful to others, but amount of harm depends on circumstances - smoking in your own home without anyone around is less harmful than smoking inside a train filled with people. Standard Pigovian solution would be taxing different contexts of smoking at different levels, but such scheme would be highly impractical.

Driving is also harmful to others - not only due to greenhouse gases emissions and straightforward pollution, but also because of traffic congestion it generates. Taxing driving on a rural road differently from driving in rush hours in Central London would be a good idea, and it would also be highly impractical. This is actually attempted in spite of impracticality, and very high costs of running the system with the scheme barely breaking even if capital costs are included.

So every now and then economic analysis would advise doing something more brutal than just taxation - like an outright smoking ban in public places, ban on leaded gasoline, or my favourite ban on leaded solders. Sometimes no realistic method of Pigovian taxation can be implemented, and so direct regulation is necessary.

Standard anti-Pigovian arguments

Mankiw described 4 basic reasons why someone could be against Pigovian Taxation in a logical flowchart.

1. You deny the existence of these externalities as a type of market failure. Perhaps you think you live in a Coasian fantasy world where people bargain without transaction costs to reach efficient allocations. (Note: I am not suggesting that Coase himself thought we lived in such a world—he considered it only a useful thought experiment.)

2. You recognize the externalities but you don’t think the government should try to respond to them. You are such a believer in small government that you are willing to live with inferior economic outcomes, such as pollution and congestion.

3. You recognize the externalities, think the government should try to correct them, but think the current low taxes we put on gasoline are sufficient. In this case, you have weighed and rejected the evidence, such as that of Parry and Small, that higher Pigovian would be optimal. (Parry and Small calculate an optimal tax of $1.01 for the United States in today's dollars. After my proposed phase-in of a $1 hike, the U.S. tax would be $1.40. Assuming 10 years of 3 percent inflation, the tax in real terms would approach almost exactly what Parry and Small recommend. By the way, the published version of Parry and Small was in the American Economic Review, September 2005.)

4. You recognize the externalities but think the government should try to correct the market failure through regulations (such as CAFE standards) or through market-based solutions that do not raise government revenue (such as cap-and-trade systems). Perhaps you are concerned that government would waste the extra revenue on useless government programs.

It's definitely possible to make an intelligent case against Pigovian taxes, based on #2, #3, #4, or some more creative argument - here's one by Bryan Caplan, here's another by Arnold Kling. My problem is not libertarian conclusions (that internalizing externalities is bad), but that they take the #1 route of living in fantasy land in which externalities don't exist.

Back on-topic

I strayed quite far off-topic, but off-topic asides are as central to my blogging as cats. This extended writing on externalities is due to libertarian blogosphere's obsession with externality denial - climate and smoking posts together constitute 41% of all posts.

The second most popular subject is taxation - quite related to the first one, as the point of government is largely taxing and subsidizing in a way that corrects market failures, and running parts of the economy which market is particularly bad at running - such as police, healthcare, pensions, social security and such. And at least in Britain the train system, which seems private companies seems to be completely incapable of running compared to Deutsche Bahn or even TFL.

Now it's perfectly fine position to support lower or higher levels of taxation, deficits, or spending. But what libertarians care most about?

• Lowering taxes on rich bankers, and other super-rich, even though their very jobs exist only thanks to taxpayers' bailouts. This increases deficits, which leads to...
  
• lowering deficits by layoffs and pay cuts in public sector, reducing welfare payments and such.
  

And we end up with massive transfer of wealth from everyone else to the super-rich. If that's not shilling, what is it?

By the way I'm surprised that my post was misunderstood - I wasn't trying to find out if libertarian blogosphere is any good, but mainly what it writes about. My finding that I find it boring was coincidental.

Timing of peak CO2 emissions

I previously argued (1, 2, 3) that we can expect peak CO2 emissions around 2050. Copenhagen summit draft calls for peaking before 2020. Now it's not entirely impossible, but I would say it's quite unlikely.

Here's a quick list of my assumptions, and how timing of the peak, size of warming, and likelihood of geoengineering would change if they were wrong:

• Economic development of poor countries - faster development means more emissions. As this is the main driver of energy demand for the next few decades in my analysis, much slower development of poor countries will indeed move the peak a lot earlier. The consequence of slower growth is economic genocide, and it's far worse than anything climate change could do, with or without geoengineering. It's not a theoretical possibility, economic genocide is happening right now.
• Correctness of climate science - putting Climategate fraud accusations entirely aside, IPCC has ridiculously wide confidence intervals. Their A1 scenario which is closest to what I describe here expects likely temperature growth to be between 1.4C and 6.4C by 2010, and their likely means merely a 66% confidence interval. If you know anything about science, "95% confidence" turns out to be wrong more often than not, and these estimates are merely scenarios conditional on countless assumptions, not actual forecasts. So what IPCC is saying is essentially "it will get hotter, we have no idea whatsoever by how much". If warming turns out to be on the low end of IPCC estimates, we'll likely see slower adoption of technologies to reduce CO2 emissions, and no geoengineering. If warming turns out to be on the high end of IPCC estimates, we'll likely see faster adoption of emission-reducing technologies, and massive scale geoengineering will be as inevitable as I predict. This is not as relevant as it seems as timing of CO2 peak depends on decisions we'll make in the next few decades, long before we find out 2100's warming.
  
• Technological progress - faster technological progress can result in lower emissions. If we get breakthroughs in cheap solar energy, battery technology, algae biofuels and such, it might result in much faster peak, maybe even before 2020. But I wouldn't rely on this, a lot of money was spent on these technologies and progress has been slow - what we need is not just some incremental progress which we'll undoubtedly see, but huge breakthroughs and really fast.
  
• Multicentric world - if we had a world government, we could just take a vote, set up whichever emission caps or taxes we wished, problem solved. If we had a small number of important powers like we do now, we could get them to agree on some flawed solution. But the world seems to be evolving towards multicentricity - right now only US, EU, and China matter, plus maybe Japan, India, and Russia a bit - but in the future other countries will probably count a lot too - and the more players you have, the harder it will be to reach meaningful agreement.
• Economic development of rich countries - CO2 emissions per capita don't increase significantly past certain level of income, so it won't matter much either way.
  
• Demographic growth - faster growth means more emissions, but uncertainty about 2050 population isn't that high, so it can only have modest effect.
• Attitude towards nuclear energy - if people become more supportive of nuclear energy, it will reduce CO2 emissions somewhat.
• Policy of US, China, India, and the entire developing world - matters a lot, as they are current and future main emitters, they have a lot of demographic and/or economic growth ahead, and it's highly uncertain what their policies will be.
• Policy of EU - matters very little, as EU is already highly efficient for GDP it has, has little economic or demographic growth, and it can be relied on to do further reductions no matter what others will do.
  

Politics

And regardless of those, the most important factor is politics - global warming is a very unusual situation in which not only everybody's emissions affect everybody equally (straightforward externality / tragedy of commons), but also everybody's current emissions only affect people living in far future. We're asking for 2009's Americans to make significant sacrifices for the sake of 2100's Bangladeshis. 3000's Bangladeshis even, as IPCC says that "anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium".

Let's take an outside view, and make a reference class forecast - in situations in which current sacrifices of people living in one country could make a difference to people living in entirely unrelated country a century ahead - how often were the sacrifices made? To the best of my knowledge the answer is a reliable never. It just doesn't happen. If one country like EU now (and to not that significant extent) were to sacrifice money to limit its emissions, others would just take advantage of cheaper fossil fuels due to reduced demand and burn more of it.


In theory a global carbon emission market could be established, but good luck getting everyone to agree on allocation of emission rights, or income from their sales. The more severe the cuts, the more expensive will emission rights get, and the worse will the fight be. If we allocate most rights to rich countries, poor countries will correctly complain that it hinders their economic development. If we allocate most rights to poor countries, it will amount to massive transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor, and good luck getting voters to agree to that.

We're talking about tens of trillions of dollars. It's not a metaphor, just the proposed American system is estimated to be valued $80bln / year - $80bln times 40 years and 5x (world emissions / American emissions), it will be worth $16 trillion, and growing as supply gets restricted and demand grows due to economic development. How will these tens of trillions of dollars in either emission rights or auction profit receipts be allocated? Yes, good luck with that.

The alternative is not caring about greenhouse gases emissions, and geo-engineering the temperature growth away if need be.

Why CO2 emissions will not fall before 2050

In my previous posts I explained why emissions are unlikely to fall below current levels before 2050, and why due to peak heating occurring long after peak emissions we do have a very long term problem. Conclusion being - geoengineering is pretty much inevitable.

In this post I'd like to talk about two things - what the world will look like in 2050, and the Climategate.

First, the Climategate. As shown by the leak, scientists from East Anglia University engaged in some highly unethical practice, such as knowingly fudging data to support their thesis, violating FOIA and hiding data to the point of deleting it to avoid release, and organized bullying campaigns against scientists with the opposite views. This makes them bad persons, and if God existed, they'd suffer in Purgatory for it / or got shitty reincarnation in the next life / or something like that. Fortunately for them there is no God, so they will get off scot-free with it.

But this behaviour, while highly unethical, doesn't really seem to change the main conclusion of IPCC reports that anthropogenic releases of greenhouse gases have caused significant warming, and are likely to cause a lot more in the future.

The only consequences for climate predictions I can think of is that it might damage people's opinion of credibility of climate change science disproportionally to the breach of proper scientific practice (which did occur, but were fairly minor), thus reducing political will to act on climate change, and increasing the problem. But then, I doubt the damage will be that big.


Now to the main subject - world in 2050. There's no question that we'll stop emitting ever increasing amounts of greenhouse gases at some point. We already have at least four ways to entirely solve the problem even without any significant technological breakthroughs: nuclear, solar thermal, solar photovoltaic, and wind. But the question of when is a big one, and I doubt it will happen soon.


As I wrote in previous blog posts, in 2050 population will be around 9-10 billion, per capita GDP will be around current EU levels, and so will per capita energy use. But energy use and carbon emissions are not that closely connected - there are gains to be made in efficiency, both nuclear and renewables emit little in terms of greenhouse gases, so that doesn't directly imply much about per capita CO2 emissions (nor emissions of other greenhouse gases).

Let's make a simple table - what would have to change for 2050's CO2 emissions to be equal to 2009's CO2 emissions. For simplicity let's assume every country's per capita emissions will be the same for now. If some countries don't take their share of the burden, others will have to.

Country	Population (mln)			CO2 emissions (mln ton)			CO2 emissions per capita (ton/person)
	2009	2050	Change	2009	2050	Change	2009	2050	Change
China	1334 [19.6%]	1462 [15.7%]	+9.6%	6103 [21.5%]	4458 [15.7%]	-27.0%	4.57	3.05	-33.3%
USA	308 [4.5%]	397 [4.3%]	+28.9%	5752 [20.2%]	1210 [4.3%]	-79.0%	18.68	3.05	-83.7%
EU-27	499 [7.3%]	424 [4.5%]	-15.0%	3914 [13.8%]	1293 [4.5%]	-67.0%	7.84	3.05	-61.1%
Russia	141 [2.1%]	104 [1.1%]	-26.2%	1564 [5.5%]	317 [1.1%]	-79.7%	11.09	3.05	-72.5%
India	1173 [17.3%]	1572 [16.9%]	+34.0%	1510 [5.3%]	4794 [16.9%]	+217.5%	1.29	3.05	+136.9%
Japan	127 [1.9%]	109 [1.2%]	-14.2%	1293 [4.5%]	332 [1.2%]	-74.3%	10.18	3.05	-70.1%
Other countries	3214 [47.3%]	5253 [56.4%]	+63.4%	8293 [29.2%]	16021 [56.4%]	+93.2%	2.58	3.05	+18.2%
World	6799 [100.0%]	9322 [100.0%]	+37.1%	28431 [100.0%]	28431 [100.0%]	+0.0%	4.18	3.05	-27.1%

Data sources: emissions, population projections. EU-27 is used as European Union will most likely expand before 2050, and I don't want considerations like that to complicate matters.

Right now just six big entities - China, India, USA, EU-27, Russia, and Japan - emit over 70% of global CO2. But poor countries will develop, and this means more emissions. India's emissions are ridiculously low now - due to poverty - but once Indians get richer they will want cars. They will want pretty things. This will use energy, and this will emit CO2. The same story will take place in the "rest of the world" category (which unfortunately mixes small rich countries with big poor countries, obscuring the change).

What kind of emission cuts will the big emitters have to do just to counteract population growth of the world and economic growth of poor countries? Assuming the burden will be equally shared, USA will have to cut by 83.7%, or to 1/6th of current per capita levels. EU, Japan, and Russia will have to cut by about 2/3 per capita, and even China will have to cut by 1/3 per capita, in spite of so much economic development still being ahead of them! Other countries will have a mix of increases for the poor, and very significant decreases for the rich.

Now how likely is this scenario? I quite doubt we'll actually achieve equal sharing of burden.  Cuts for developed countries people talk about tend to be around 15% levels by 2025, so presumably around 40% by 2050, and even these are best case scenarios.

Intrade thinks that odds of any cap and trade system being established in USA by 2011 is about 50:50, and that says nothing about levels of caps, and severity of loopholes passed due to industrial lobbyists' money. After that it's Palin's administration as Krugman says, so don't hope for any meaningful limits. In general, people vote for current party when economy is good, and vote against current party when economy is bad, no matter who's guilty. Current predictions of American unemployment for 2012 are so high, that Democrats are very likely to be voted out of power unless they get their act together.


Anyway, 40% by 2050 is nowhere near enough to even keep 2050's emissions equal to 2009's! So rich countries, especially USA, are not providing the leadership here. What are the chances that poor countries will voluntarily take most of the burden of reducing carbon emissions all on their own? I'd say extremely slim.

And, most importantly... even if reductions from the table did happen, and 2050's emissions were at 2009 levels and falling, this still leaves us with massive global warming problem as peak warming happens long after peak concentrations, and peak concentrations happen long after peak emissions.

What brings us to where we started - there's simply no realistic scenario under which geoengineering can be avoided.

Inevitability of geoengineering

I want to write a quick post showing some arguments about inevitability of large scale geoengineering which I find extremely convincing. I'm sure I won't convince that many people, most have made up their minds already.

First, look at list of countries by CO2 emissions. In 2006 global emissions were 28.43 billion tons per 6.55 billion people, or 4.34 ton/person. World population is still growing and is estimated to stabilize at levels around 9.5 billion for 2050-2100, which is the time in question.

Now let's see what would happen if everyone got to current European standards of living, and European CO2 emissions, which are 7.84 tons/person. This would result in CO2 emissions of 74.5 billion tons, or 2.6x times current levels. This number is already quite optimistic - it makes a huge assumption that all countries with higher CO2 emissions like US, Japan, Canada, Australia, Russia etc. scale them down quite considerably.

Now a brief discussion is in order on why numbers like that are relevant. First, I assume that there won't be a massive genocide, or nuclear warfare, or pandemic, or anything else that could drastically reduce population levels. The last time there was a significant reduction in population levels was 1340s. None of the world wars, or any other events even stopped population growth - in fact people tend to reproduce a lot more during times of crisis, than during times of peace and prosperity, so it would need to be the biggest war, pandemic, or other kind of failure in history to significantly reduce population levels. This assumption is probably the safest.

The second assumption is that the rest of the world will grow quite quickly. World GDP/capita is currently $9,774 PPP. EU GDP per capita is $30,513 PPP. If world economy grows at per capita rate of 2.8%, then by 2050 world average GDP will reach current EU levels. This coincidentally is almost exactly annual per capita growth rate of the world economy of the last 30 years. Unlike with population, where predictions are quite solid, here there are more reasons why growth could be significantly slower, or significantly faster than predicted. We just had a completely unexpected global recession for a fairly obvious example. And not so long ago we had massive completely unexpected boom in China and then India, so it can go both unexpectedly badly and unexpectedly well. Still, 2.8% is a pretty decent first estimate.

I want to write a bit more on the subject of economy. Many people are sceptical about the idea that the "poor" countries will ever attain levels of economic development seen in rich countries. But the rich-poor divide is illusory. As you can see yourself with Gapminder, the divide is long gone and most countries are in the middle. World average life expectancy today is higher than in most richest countries in 1950s years ago. World average life expectancy in all but one countries is higher than world average 100 years ago - all that in spite of wars, malnutrition, malaria, HIV, and lack of clean water in many of them! Life in countries considered by many to be "permanently poor" is vastly better than it was in Europe of your grandfathers, and rapidly improving. To think it will somehow suddenly stop is to ignore history.

Development can happen extremely rapidly - world's largest CO2 emitter has been China for a few years now, per capita emissions of which increased by factor of x2.2 between 1990-2006. Likewise for India, growth was x1.6 during that time. Even for big countries not typically associated with rapid growth you have high growth - x4 for Vietnam, x2.4 for Thailand, x2.3 for Malaysia, x1.9 for Indonesia, x1.5 for Pakistan, x1.4 for Brazil and Nigeria and so on (and these are all per capita rates, their total emissions increased far more). Developing countries are catching up fast.

Let's look at past performance of world CO2 emissions. Between 1992-2007, world's emissions increased by 38% - mostly driven by rapidly developing countries like China and India. Even developed countries weren't terribly successful - US and Japan had significant increases in emissions, and EU's stayed pretty much even, and nominally decreased mostly due to early-90s' collapse of heavy industry in former communist member countries. Even if developed countries got their act together and implemented reductions that were agreed on in Kyoto Protocol, they would still be swamped by just Chinese increases, resulting in net emission increases.

And the outlook for the next couple of decades doesn't look terribly promising. Intrade markets, thin as they are (and forgive me lack of links, but their website is virtually unlinkable), think it's extremely unlikely that China and India will agree to any CO2 limits anytime soon, and have pretty low opinion on what reductions developed countries will agree to - chance of agreeing to 10% reduction by 2025 seems to be about even, and there's quite a big difference between agreement and implementation (especially due to possibility of accounting shenanigans of land use changes and such), and such reductions would be swamped by developing countries increase. And in any case the 74.5 billion tons number already assumes that developed countries average will get reduced to current EU levels.

If you hope on peak oil to make 74.5 billion tons/year kind of number impossible, not only peak oil doesn't seem to be happening, coal production grows insanely fast, and estimates of "peak coal" talk about mid 22nd century.

Alternatives to 74.5 billion tons a year

So with business-as-usual, we'll be emitting enough CO2 to get the entire planet stir-fried. What would be alternatives?

First, either outright genocide or indirect genocide by limiting economic growth of developing nations - remember that poverty kills hundreds of millions of innocent people and causes vast suffering. Not only is it unlikely to happen, it would be probably the worst scenario of all.

Second, learn to live in a warmer world. This isn't necessarily going to be as bad. It's hard to imagine anyone who would like to have their children die of malaria and diarrhea just to satisfy some rich smug liberals. People who measure costs of limiting CO2 emissions usually focus on limits in States, or EU - but this is nonsense! Big increases don't come from SUVs, but from bringing poor people to more civilized standards of living, and limiting that would be disastrous. Costs of just taking global warming would be much less than the genocide that would ensue to keep poor people in their place. I think this scenario isn't entirely implausible - there were quite a few cases in history where international cooperation completely collapsed, and in externalities cases like CO2 emissions, this is a possible result.

The third solution, and we're getting somewhere now, would be to sever the link between GDP and CO2 emissions. This is surprisingly hard. Yes, it's trivial to move from Hummer to Prius, but the problem is people who cannot afford either yet, but will want some means of transportation eventually. And they will want electricity - coming from coal most likely. The alternatives look pretty bleak - nuclear power, and large-scale hydroelectricity, both provide only 3% of total primary energy use now (or about 15% of electricity each). All fancy types of renewable energy together don't even add up to 1%. A surprisingly large amount of energy is "traditional biomass", or wood and agricultural waste used for heating and cooking (but then, estimates of it seem to vary wildly). Other than that, right now we're entirely dependent on fossil fuels.

A popular idea of high standards of living without corresponding increase in energy use seems pretty unlikely to me. Yes, we might be able to break the correspondence at some point, but energy use per capita in poor countries is so low, it's simply bound to drastically increase.

Much more promising path is energy generation without fossil fuels. Our best chance so far was with nuclear power. Unfortunately we suddenly stopped what looked like extremely rapid exponential growth in late 1980s after Chernobyl disaster - estimated 4000 people will die due to increased radiation exposure (much higher estimates based on linear no-threshold model can be safely ignored, as LNT model is known to be empirically completely wrong).
By ridiculously naive estimations, if this growth continued exponentially as it seemed to have up to Chernobyl, nuclear energy would provide around 20% of total energy production today, or half of all oil could be eliminated. Now this kind of extrapolation is ridiculously naive, but you should give it some thought.

So could we switch to nuclear at ridiculously rapid pace? We would need over 50 times as much nuclear capacity to generate enough energy to cover increased energy use by 2050, what seems ridiculously optimistic by any standards, not to mention nuclear proliferation issues. It looks somewhat less ridiculous when expressed as 10% a year growth (or doubling every 7 years like pre-Chernobyl), but it's just not going to happen.
There aren't that many renewable options. Current global energy consumption is 15 TW, and it will be about 39TW by 2050 by extrapolation. The only large scale renewable energy source we use, hydroelectricity, is nowhere close to our needs, and neither is geothermal really, if we look at what small fraction of it we can practically extract thanks to high local concentrations. We're left with just two then - wind, and solar. We would need to use 5% of all wind energy of Earth to fill the energy gap.

In 2008 wind power had 121GW of installed peak "capacity", and produced 260 TWh of energy (what corresponds to 30GW of actual production). It would require order of 1000x increase in wind power, or 19% a year growth, to make it fill the energy gap. And the actual growth is actually fast enough at 29% in 2008. But there are clear diminishing returns here - best locations will be taken, and massive subsidies cannot really scale to TW levels.

The other alternative is solar power. Just Earth-based solar is so plentiful that using even 0.02% of solar power now, or 0.045% of it in 2050, we can replace all of world's energy use. And it doesn't stop there, with space-based solar we can get numbers many many orders of magnitude larger. It would sort of need a space elevator, but we might get there by 2200.

Anyway, while solar is undoubtedly our long term future, it doesn't look that bright in the short term. There's only 15GW of solar thermal installed, and mere 0.6GW of solar thermal. And these are capacity numbers. We're talking x10,000 increase to cover the energy gap, or 25% a year increase, or x200,000, 35% per year for solar thermal. Now these numbers are actually what we see now, but as I said for wind, these are all based on massive subsidies, and there's no evidence that they're scalable to TW range at all.

By the way all this is based on assumptions that all energy is basically equal, and all greenhouse gas emissions is energy production. Neither of these are true - electricity is relatively easy to replace with renewables, at least if we ignore their intermittent character, but transportation much less so. And even with 100% solar electricity-based economy, there would still be some significant sources of greenhouse gases like methane from agriculture - so whatever we estimate here is bound to be overly optimistic.

With all this said, thanks to better energy efficiency, and widespread use of renewables, it's quite likely that humanity energy use by 2050 will be much lower than baseline number of 74.5 billion tons a year. On the other hand expecting it to be vastly lower than current emissions is just extremely unlikely.

And here comes the final solution - without genocides, without unexpected revolution in either nuclear power or renewables, we will have much more CO2 in atmosphere in 2050 than now. And due to massive lag it has, it will keep warming Earth for a very long time after we finally get our emissions to decrease. So if we cannot agree to live in warmer world, we have to geo-engineer to survive the next century without massive and irreversible environmental change.

Nature did some real life large scale geoengineering testing for us, and it works without major side effects (you probably haven't even noticed the experiment in 1991). Economic estimations put it in ridiculously cheap range - some schemes are estimated to cost just 375 million dollar a year, or just 17,000 Toyota Priuses (seems like a highly relevant unit of measurement) - for comparison replacing every American car with a Prius would cost 5 trillion USD, and it would still do very little towards limiting global CO2 emissions. And stratospheric sulphur isn't the only solution, just the one we have best data on (by the way it's not about polluting more, only about moving less than 1% of existing pollution to higher layers of atmosphere).

So the alternatives are:

• Outright genocide
• Indirect genocide by forced poverty
  
• Accepting the warming
• Increase in nuclear or renewable energy far beyond anything that can be realistically expected in this timeframe
  
• Geoengineering

Guess which one is the least bad?

Now I just need to blog on abortion, and I win blogging controversy bingo.

Relax, fuel is cheap

As a proud Cornucopian I'm tired of baseless claims of neo-Malthusian peakniks that cheap oil is over and it's time to eat dirt and die.

If you think I'm exaggerating, and haven't been on the Internet for the last five years or so here's a typical example of a Peaknik Doomsdayer:

Peak Oil. It's bigger than terrorism, global warming or genocide. It's the end of your way of life. [...] Which means if you don't live by your farm, no food for you. There won't be much food anyway. [...] 4 billion people will not survive. [...] So what can you do to prevent peak oil? Nothing. Seriously, nothing.

Fortunately these claims don't withstand scrutiny. Fuel is much more affordable than anytime in the history except for 1990s where it was not only very affordable but insanely cheap.

I hereby present my Fuel Affordability Index, which compares fuel affordability to standard of 100.0 in 1975. Fuel affordability calculates how many miles you can go on average salary. To calculate it you multiply new car fuel efficiency in mpg, gdp per capita and divide by crude oil prices. We can dispute stuff like gdp per capita vs median household income, crude oil prices vs retail gas prices, new car vs average car fuel efficiency and so on but they don't fundamentally affect conclusions so I just took whatever was easiest to find. Data is for USA, mostly because I couldn't find historical fuel efficiencies for any other country. I guess the conclusion would be even stronger for EU as European cars are more energy efficient and strong euro makes crude oil cheaper than in US.

Year	Fuel Affordability	GDP per capita	Fuel efficiency	Crude oil prices
1975	100	$19,962	13.5	$47.63
1976	113	$20,826	14.9	$48.36
1977	119	$21,570	15.6	$49.88
1978	140	$22,531	16.9	$48.17
1979	97	$22,987	17.2	$71.96
1980	84	$22,666	20.0	$95.50
1981	105	$23,011	21.4	$82.70
1982	126	$22,350	22.2	$69.33
1983	147	$23,148	22.1	$61.34
1984	168	$24,598	22.4	$58.14
1985	196	$25,386	23.0	$52.56
1986	394	$26,028	23.7	$27.66
1987	342	$26,668	23.8	$32.81
1988	443	$27,519	24.1	$26.45
1989	381	$28,226	23.7	$31.05
1990	315	$28,435	23.3	$37.17
1991	372	$28,011	23.4	$31.15
1992	405	$28,559	23.1	$28.81
1993	493	$28,943	23.5	$24.36
1994	552	$29,744	23.3	$22.19
1995	540	$30,131	23.4	$23.09
1996	465	$30,886	23.3	$27.38
1997	541	$31,891	23.4	$24.40
1998	885	$32,837	23.4	$15.35
1999	662	$33,908	23.0	$20.83
2000	421	$34,770	22.9	$33.39
2001	517	$34,701	23.0	$27.29
2002	536	$34,931	23.1	$26.61
2003	460	$35,479	23.2	$31.62
2004	356	$36,433	23.1	$41.84
2005	287	$37,206	23.5	$53.77
2006	257	$37,928	23.3	$60.73
2007	244	$38,340	23.4	$64.92

Notes: Crude oil prices adjusted to 2007 dollars. GDP per capita in 2000 dollars. Different basis doesn't affect the results as only ratio is taken. Fuel efficiency is combined urban+highway, for all cars except trucks (so if I understand it correctly without SUVs too).

As you can see fuel is much more affordable than in 1970s or early 1980s. So as the civilization in 1970s very much existed, it will continue at current fuel prices, or even at prices significantly higher than current. One thing I expect to start happening about now is further increase in average car fuel economy - as soon as fuel became cheap in mid 1980s cars stopped improving, but hybrids are much better than 23.4 - the popular Toyota Prius has combined mpg of 46 - almost double the current average.

Even if people keep buying the same cars and the economy stays stagnant fuel would have to become 2.44 times as expensive in order to bring fuel affordability back to 1970s level (which if you're old enough to remember, weren't end of civilization). If people start buying hybrids (and they will) and economy grows at 3% a year (and it will) for the next 10 years, even $420 barrel won't reduce fuel affordability to below-1970s level.

Relax, fuel is cheap.