Lynne Kiesling at Knowledge Problem considers some of the issues facing environmentalism.

Harvard economist Ed Glaeser has a nice column in today's Boston Globe in which he proposes a "road map for environmentalism" (HT to Greg Mankiw). I think it's a thoughtful and substantially correct analysis and pragmatic set of proposals; in particular, his emphasis on the importance of rethinking current policies and the extent to which they fail to meet our objectives:

But smart environmentalism doesn't just mean more government programs, it also means rethinking current policies. Our emissions policy, which requires regular emissions tests for newer vehicles, is expensive to operate and poorly designed to fight climate change. After all, it does nothing to induce less driving. Even more problematically, by letting owners of older cars off the hook, the current system imposes costs on the Prius driver but exempts the drivers of the vintage gas guzzlers that create the most emissions. We should require different emissions tests and even higher emission taxes for older cars that generate higher environmental costs.

This is complete nonsense as climate change policy. It would have no effect at all. It might qualify as a "thoughtful and substantially correct analysis and pragmatic set of proposals" from a political perspective, but this is a measure of the degraded state of current politics.

This is the real problem with environmentalism too. It isn't rooted in reality, it's merely politics. The environment isn't involved except as an abstraction that has almost nothing to do with the physical environment. The map that Glaeser draws has no relation to the territory it purports to map.

All of his ideas and proposals would at best save little green teacups of emissions while the atmospheric concentrations of emissions grow ever higher, at an ever greater rate.

Between 2000 and 2004, worldwide CO2 emissions increased at a rate that is over three times the rate during the 1990s—the rate increased from 1.1 % per year during the 1990s to 3.1% per year in the early 2000s. The research, published in the early on-line edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* May 21-25, also found that the accelerating growth rate is largely due to the increasing energy intensity of economic activity (the energy required to produce a unit of gross domestic product) and the carbon intensity of the energy system (the amount of carbon per unit of energy), coupled with increases in population and in per-capita gross domestic product. “No region is decarbonising its energy supply,” states the study. . .

The acceleration of carbon emissions is greatest in the exploding economies of developing regions, particularly China, where the increases mainly reflect increasing per capita gross domestic product. . .

Between 2000 and 2004 the developing countries accounted for a large majority of the growth in emissions, even though they contribute only about 40% of total emissions. In 2004, 73% of the growth in global emissions came from the developing and least developed economies, comprising 80% of the world’s population.

Glaeser completely fails to grasp the implications and so make useful proposals.

The fight against climate change requires us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The most effective way to reduce emissions is to charge people for the social costs of their actions with a carbon tax. A significant carbon tax would be painful -- gas will cost more at the pump -- but it is never easy to change behavior, and change behavior we must.

The big challenge in reducing greenhouse gases is to reduce the growth of emissions in rapidly developing economies like China and India. I suspect this will require Europe and the United States to create incentives for these places to reduce emissions. One possible course of action is for American and European carbon taxes to provide funding that could be used to reward poorer countries for cutting emissions.

Reductions in developed world emissions due to a carbon tax would be trivial. Payments to developing countries would be appreciated, and might even result in trivial reductions there too. But none of this would help with climate change reality. Emissions would still rise, at an ever higher rate. More importantly, concentrations would continue to rise as the accumulated emissions of the decades linger in the atmosphere.

Emissions aren't the problem, and politics isn't the solution. Concentrations are the problem, and technology is the solution. We have to clean up existing atmospheric carbon, and that will take some novel technologies. The need for cleanup will persist since emissions will continue for a long time to come as we develop new energy systems.

A map that covered that territory might be of use for environmentalism, but then it wouldn't be the old comfy, irrelevant environmentalism of fantasy spaces that we have always known. And that would be troublesome for politicians and economists, often the same thing, since they would have greatly diminished roles.

Update:

It is becoming increasingly obvious that twisting our societies into knots with ill-considered regulations, taxes, subsidies and behaviors in pursuit of climate related environmentalist illusions is a waste or worse.

Since 1981, the percentage of atmospheric carbon dioxide that the Southern Ocean can hold has decreased, the researchers report in a study published online by Science. . .

If humans can bring carbon dioxide emissions under control in the long term, the world's oceans are predicted to sequester between 70% and 80% of the total net anthropogenic emissions of the industrial era.

The main cause of the changes seems to be a relatively rapid increase in average wind strengths over the Southern Ocean, Le Quéré and her team report. These stronger winds, thought to be driven by the depletion of the ozone layer over Antarctic regions, churn up the ocean and bring more dissolved carbon up from the depths.

This was unexpected, says Le Quéré. But when the researchers plugged their data into a computer model and removed these stronger winds, they did indeed find that much of the observed reduction in the carbon sink disappeared. . .

The Southern Ocean is the only body of water for which this trend has been definitely spotted and quantified, says Le Quéré, although shorter-term studies suggest that a similar process may be occurring in the North Atlantic.

If the phenomenon is happening world-wide, this would undoubtedly affect efforts to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gases.

A reduction in sink capacities will make it harder for international efforts, such as carbon trading and changes in methods of energy generation, to set achievable targets for stabilizing greenhouse-gas levels.

Targets for emissions levels based on naive models, and the policies implemented or proposed to achieve those targets, are faith based initiatives intended to comfort believers, but they won't do any good in the real world.