Re: [Phys-L] carbon wars

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 10/07/2014 04:08 PM, Anthony Lapinski wrote:
> They
> said that Antarctica is 50% larger in area than Australia, and the ice
> is about 3 km thick. And if all the ice in Antarctica melted, global sea
> levels would rise about 60 m. It's already happening...

Right.

Let's play out that scenario and see where it leads.

There are 160 million people in Bangladesh, the 
vast majority of whom live at elevations of less 
than 40 meters.  I don't know for sure, but I
suspect more than half of them are below 10 meters.
The capital, Dhaka, is at 4 meters, even though it 
is quite far inland.

Furthermore, your home doesn't need to be under water 
/all/ of the time to be uninhabitable.  But let's not
focus on that;  you could solve that problem by putting
the house up on enormous stilts.  Alas, even then you
would still have a problem if your /farm/ gets inundated
with salt water at frequent intervals.

It's not easy and not particularly worthwhile to come
up with scenarios where the entire planet becomes
uninhabitable.  In contrast, you can easily come 
up with scenarios where most of Bangladesh becomes 
uninhabitable.

So let's take the next step.  You've got 160 million
displaced persons.  Where are you going to put them?
Hypothetically you could relocate them to Saudi
Arabia.  That would produce a population density
/lower/ then where they came from.  The Saudis
probably wouldn't like it much ... but it would be 
somewhat fitting because the Saudis have benefited
from selling the fossil fuel that caused the problem.
One slight problem:  No water.  It's ironic that
there could be unprecedented flooding in one place
and drought in another, but that sort of thing is
entirely to be expected based on existing models
of climate change.

Another hypothesis is that you could move them all to 
Saskatchewan.  That's about six times the size of
Bangladesh.   A little warming would make Saskatchewan 
more congenial.  There would however be a problem finding 
employment for 160 million people whose way of life has 
been completely upended.

Then there are the fatalities.  Ask any anthropologist:
If you relocate 160 million people at least a few
million of them are going to die.  That's just what
happens.  The BP oil company got into big trouble
when 11 crewmen died on the Deepwater Horizon platform.
Ask them how they would like to have the blood of a
few million people on their hands.

I have only the vaguest idea how much it would cost
to resettle all the Bangladeshis, including new houses,
new schools, new roads, new utilities, new farmland,
new farming equipment, new farming skills, et cetera.
It's gonna be many trillions of dollars for sure.
For some perspective, the /direct/ cost of Hurricane
Katrina was over 100 billion dollars, and it involved
far fewer people and less extreme destruction.

If you grind through the numbers, it comes to several
cents per gallon of gasoline, just for this one part
of the problem.  Then there are other parts of the
problem, such as large parts of the NYC area being
underwater, large parts of the London area being
underwater, et cetera.  More trillions.  Lots more
trillions.

Putting it all together, one concludes that we are
seriously underpaying for our fossil fuels ... not by 
an infinite amount, but by a lot.  I'm not knowledgeable
enough to come up with an exact figure.  Consider
this email to be a sketchy outline.

It's a weird kind of deficit spending:  It's like 
buying stuff on credit, without any thought given to
paying off the loan.  It's particularly weird because
the bill will come due far removed in time and distance
from where the good were purchased.

The additional cost may be of a size that people might
choose to just pay it.  At that point we have another
whole can of worms:   To whom do they pay it, and how?
Do they put it into what we might call a "sinking fund" 
(in more ways than one) held in trust for the people 
who need to be resettled?  Who controls the payouts?
I have no idea.

It strikes me as bizarre that the same zealots who 
claim to be inexorably opposed to deficit spending
are inexorably in favor of drill-baby-drill, ignoring
and denying the enormous liabilities it incurs.

Here's another bit of sand in the gears:  As things now
stand, a displaced person who is fleeing the sudden
violence and destruction of war is afforded a number
of strong protections under international law.  In
contrast, the developed nations are in effect waging
slow-motion war against Bangladesh, but since it is
happening slowly the migrants have no legal rights
whatsoever.  India has recently built an enormous border
fence, and would be within its legal rights to turn
people away at gunpoint, telling them to go home and 
drown.  The morality of this is a separate question.

It must be emphasized that forcing the fossil-carbon
industry to internalize even part of hitherto-external 
climate-related costs would have a dramatic effect -- 
indirect but dramatic.  AFAICT it wouldn't make fossil 
carbon fuels directly unaffordable, but it would make 
them much less competitive against renewables such as 
biofuels and solar electricity.

And that is one of the factors that will bring about
the carbon wars!  The existing reserves of fossil 
carbon are concentrated in the hands of a few very 
powerful actors.  If you try to do anything that 
devalues their assets, they will kill you.

There are many remarks that can be made upon this
situation, and many labels that can be applied.
For example, this situation qualifies as what 
economists call a /market failure/.  That is to
say, market forces have not led to a market price 
that reflects the true value and true cost of the 
product.