A problem with politics in general - and current politcal power holders in particular - is that the objective is not to develop policies that benefit society, it is to sell whatever policies a political group sees as most beneficial to itself, society be damned.

The problem with cap and trade lies not in economic theory, but in political realities. Cap and trade cannot work in the real world -- Krugman's means cannot achieve the ends he seeks. He just assumes policy success, which is easy to do in theoretical arguments, but pretty far from the real world where we actually have to live with the policies that emerge from the messy legislative process.

If cap and trade cannot work, then it would be logical that we should be exploring other means to reducing emission. But instead, Krugman tries to shut down any discussion of alternative approaches by saying that if you don't accept his means, then you must not accept his ends. Krugman is ironically contributing the the very policy failure he seeks to avoid. Nothing like some messy facts to trouble an elegant theory.

Why are we so kind to these dullards? The theory isn't elegant, it's simplistic, a childish fantasy. That's a strange definition of elegance.

I read a similarly nonsensical view yesterday in which it was argued that our uncertainties about climate science and predicted climate change should cause us to take ever more precipitous action to mitigate the uncertain problem, by which they only mean bureaucratic machinations, protocols and aspirational agreements. This is the old "then a miracle occurs" type of fuzzy reasoning. It assumes that there is some magical bureaucratic action that can be taken that makes things better rather than simply drifting the problem focus elsewhere and making them worse on balance, though the evidence shows this to be exceedingly unlikely and current and past efforts have indeed made things worse while crufting society up with impediments to future useful action. Like Krugman's silly ideas, this is another contribution to policy failure.

This type of thinking - the use of various pseudo-reasoned arguments to justify pre-existing biases - is stock-in-trade in advocacy of the socio-cultural as well as the political sort. It has the same degrading effects. The folly of "organic" - discussed in the previous post - has impeded progress in improving agriculture and food not least by drowning out information about more sensible improvements. Though loud, the advocates are not solely or even chiefly concerned with the subjects they exploit: they have ulterior political motives that rule some of the most useful improvements out of bounds since they do not advance the political agenda.

With climate issues the most effective and achievable actions - increased use of nuclear power and air capture of carbon - do not advance the politics of activists, so they are fought against. Advancement of nuclear power technology has been stifled for decades, and air capture research has been neglected though it is already arguably cost competitive and can only grow cheaper with time and experience. In both cases the agenda of activists - hunkering down, using less energy, stricter social control, etc. - is irrelevant at best and would be set back by these superior technologies.

As noted many times before, activists are the greatest threat we face since they obstruct efforts to deal with real threats.