How to solve climate change

Ms. Thunberg has invited some friends to tell us all how to deal with climate change. As we’d expect there’s very little actual thought here, more the repetition of previous positions. Very much a set of calls to do what the individual wants whether climate change exists or not, whether it’s a problem or not and whether that action would solve climate change or not.

Ms. Klein tells us to beat transnational capital (now, there’s a surprise, right?), Mr. McKibben to stop using fire. The health care guy says health care should be green, Mr. Piketty says tax the rich, a couple of climate justice folk say equity and justice is the solution and Mike Berners-Lee (no, not Tim, but Mike) says honesty in politics would be a good idea. We agree with that last one, obviously, even as we think it’s the least achievable of those desires.

None of these are specific to climate change. Mr. Piketty says tax the rich as the solution to the Sun rising in the East each day. Ms. Klein has become a transnational brand by railing against the brands created by transnational capitalism. And so on.

Our real ire, rather than just snide observation, is reserved for this from Greenpeace:

In our throwaway society, it feels as if we’re facing an avalanche of disposable plastic. One simple idea holds the key to turning this around: reuse. The practice was embedded for generations in so many cultures across the globe, yet the corporate world has made us forget those traditions and the value we place in objects that have taken natural resources and energy to produce. We need to shift to reusable packaging that stays in circulation – used, washed, reused and, crucially, out of the environment. The status quo simply isn’t working: we need to embrace the innovations that will allow reuse to flourish in the modern world.

This is not just the repetition of what Greenpeace would be saying anyway - recycle more! - whatever the subject under discussion it’s also, with climate change, often counterproductive. Assume, as they do, that we need to reduce resource use. OK, therefore we should recycle where that reduces resource use and not recycle where recycling increases resource use.

For example, we recycle must of the world’s usage of aluminium metal. Not because the ore, bauxite is particularly scarce, nor because alumina is difficult to source. But because that process of transforming alumina (Al203, or aluminium oxide) into aluminium metal uses some $1,000 per tonne or so of electricity. Remelting already extant aluminium uses perhaps $50 of electricity. So, what is actually recycled is that $950 per tonne of electricity.

Also, we calculate this by seeing that secondary aluminium - what the recycled stuff is called - is cheaper than primary. That it is cheaper shows us that fewer resources are being used. This is also why people like scrap merchants will pay for aluminium to be recycled. That is, our price system already tells us what to do here.

Just as we do not recycle the neodymium from hard drive magnets. Each hard drive might contain a few grammes of that rare earth metal, each magnet might therefore be worth - as pure metal value - twenty or thirty cents. The costs of a) pulling the magnet out of the hard drive and b) collecting enough of them in the same place to recycle them (we’d want perhaps one such plant per continent, continents are large places) are higher than that metal value. This is also - prices work, d’ye see, they’re information - proof that recycling hard drive magnets uses more resources more than digging up a bit more of Gaia to make primary neodymium.

So, recycle aluminium, don’t recycle hard drive magnets. We’ve already got that selection method of how to organise the world so as to minimise resource use.

Recycling those things that use more resources than starting afresh would do is known as being more wasteful of resources. But Greenpeace urges us to be more wasteful of resources in order to solve climate change. Not because it will solve climate change, but because Greenpeace always says we should recycle more - as with Mr. Piketty that’s their reaction to the Sun rising in the East each morning.

As to Mr. Piketty, of course he’s wrong here. The solution to climate change is innovation. Just everyone is saying that we need to change the way we do things. Great, that’s what innovation is. People who successfully innovate get very rich. This logic works the other way too - in order to encourage innovation we want to allow people to get very rich by successfully innovating.

It might even be true that taxing the extant rich is a useful place to go get money. But that inevitably damages the incentives to try to get rich by innovating. So, higher taxes on those getting rich by that desired green innovation is counterproductive, it militates against solving climate change.

But then we did pretty much insist, up at the top there, that everyone is talking their own book, promoting the bees buzzing in their own bonnets rather than actually trying to solve climate change, didn’t we?

Maybe Ms. Thunberg should have stayed in school so that she was informationally equipped to evaluate the ideas of her friends a little more?