I don’t expect a politician to literally want more regulation sa a terminal goal. However, I expect a politician to have terminal goals, such as doing better in the bureaucracy, signalling power to other politicians, etc. which more regulation helps him achieve. Bureaucracies given a chance to expand to encompass more regulation will take it.
It looks to me as if you’re mixing up two things that sound almost the same but are actually importantly different. (1) An actual preference for there to be more regulation. (2) A tendency to make there be more regulation. I agree that politicians are likely to have #2 because it may boost their status if their name is on lots of laws. But I don’t think that implies #1, and it’s #1 rather than #2 that I can imagine being responsible for insincere professions of belief in and concern about anthropogenic climate change.
I would expect #2 to manifest as politicians liking to introduce laws about whatever they happen to think important, or whatever they expect their voters to be impressed by. If you’re a politician with a severe case of #2 and not otherwise inclined to think climate change is a big deal, there’s no need for you to jump on the bandwagon just in order to have regulations to introduce. It’s not like there’s a shortage of other things to regulate. (Or, for some sorts of politician, to deregulate. That can go down well with voters and senior party officials too.)
In any case, I realise I’m not quite sure why we’re talking about politicians in any case. Do you have the impression that there is much push for action on climate change coming from politicians? It doesn’t look that way to me. I mean, for sure some politicians are saying there should be action on climate change, but I think there has consistently been less political support for such action than climate scientists’ analyses would lead one to expect.
There’s one obvious high-profile exception, namely Al Gore who has been unusually active in promoting action against climate change, and who (so I gather) has if anything overstated rather than understated the case in comparison to what actual experts would say. But this doesn’t seem well explained in terms of political considerations like “doing better in the bureaucracy” or “signalling power to other politicians”; Gore seems pretty clearly to be out of politics now. (I dunno, maybe he’ll surprise everyone by running for president in 2020 or something, but I bet he won’t. Aside from everything else, he’d be as old in 2020 as McCain was in 2008, and McCain’s age clearly hurt him.)
Do you have the impression that there is much push for action on climate change coming from politicians?
There seems to be much push for political solutions. Even if it’s not a politician who pushes for the solution, the people pushing for the solution generally benefit from increasing their side’s political power, and that includes proposing solutions that politicians on their side want because of other incentives.
There’s also interplay between different causes (if you can pull off a carbon tax, that increases the respectibility of taxes as solutions, which may help your side if your side also proposes taxes as solutions to other problems).
As I say, it looks to me as if politicians have generally favoured less intervention than the scientific consensus has seemed to warrant, which would be the exact opposite of what your analysis would predict. But I don’t have any very compelling evidence for this. How about you?
What matters here is the direction, not the end value. The idea is that politicians favor more intervention than we actually have, even if they favor less intervention than the scientific consensus. If so, then people allied with the politicians benefit from supporting intervention.
(Also, I don’t actually believe there is a scientific consensus on how much intervention is needed. That’s inherently a political question; it depends on how to value various tradeoffs, what you think the chance is of a policy being abused, etc. It’s like asking if there’s a scientific consensus about what to do to stop hunger.)
If we’re trying to assess the theory that AGW policies are strongly perturbed by politicians’ alleged desire to increase taxes and regulation, then we need to compare actual AGW policies with a baseline estimate that ignores the effects of that desire. There’s no point comparing against doing nothing, unless we know there’s no reason to do anything. (“The captain of this ship says there’s a big iceberg ahead and we have to steer to the left, but I think he’s mostly steering left because he likes the view in that direction. And look, we’re veering way further to the left than we would if we just kept going in a straight line—clearly that shows he’s biased.” Compare that with ”… way further to the left than I think we need to do avoid the iceberg I can see ahead”, which of course might be wrong if I am inexpert concerning either icebergs or steering but is at least trying to address the right question.)
I don’t actually believe there is a scientific consensus on how much intervention is needed.
I didn’t say there is (and agree that there probably isn’t, though there might e.g. be a scientific consensus that the answer is “more than we’re doing now”). By “less than the scientific consensus has seemed to warrant” I mean: look at what the scientists say about the likely climatic outcome of business as usual and of various levels of intervention, look at what politicians are actually doing, and consider whether it’s credible that this is close to optimal given any reasonable set of priorities. In general you’d expect this to be really hard because there are lots of difficult things to evaluate, but the politicians have made it easier by keeping the level of intervention almost indistinguishable from zero.
If we’re trying to assess the theory that AGW policies are strongly perturbed by politicians’ alleged desire to increase taxes and regulation, then we need to compare actual AGW policies with a baseline estimate that ignores the effects of that desire.
Yes, but the baseline itself is relative to the current situation. Politicians want to regulate more than the regulation we actually have, so if you also want to increase regulation to more than we have, that benefits politicians. It may be true that you want an end point far beyond what the politician wants, but that’s going to be irrelevant unless your push has some reasonable chance of going that far, which it probably doesn’t.
I don’t expect a politician to literally want more regulation sa a terminal goal. However, I expect a politician to have terminal goals, such as doing better in the bureaucracy, signalling power to other politicians, etc. which more regulation helps him achieve. Bureaucracies given a chance to expand to encompass more regulation will take it.
It looks to me as if you’re mixing up two things that sound almost the same but are actually importantly different. (1) An actual preference for there to be more regulation. (2) A tendency to make there be more regulation. I agree that politicians are likely to have #2 because it may boost their status if their name is on lots of laws. But I don’t think that implies #1, and it’s #1 rather than #2 that I can imagine being responsible for insincere professions of belief in and concern about anthropogenic climate change.
I would expect #2 to manifest as politicians liking to introduce laws about whatever they happen to think important, or whatever they expect their voters to be impressed by. If you’re a politician with a severe case of #2 and not otherwise inclined to think climate change is a big deal, there’s no need for you to jump on the bandwagon just in order to have regulations to introduce. It’s not like there’s a shortage of other things to regulate. (Or, for some sorts of politician, to deregulate. That can go down well with voters and senior party officials too.)
In any case, I realise I’m not quite sure why we’re talking about politicians in any case. Do you have the impression that there is much push for action on climate change coming from politicians? It doesn’t look that way to me. I mean, for sure some politicians are saying there should be action on climate change, but I think there has consistently been less political support for such action than climate scientists’ analyses would lead one to expect.
There’s one obvious high-profile exception, namely Al Gore who has been unusually active in promoting action against climate change, and who (so I gather) has if anything overstated rather than understated the case in comparison to what actual experts would say. But this doesn’t seem well explained in terms of political considerations like “doing better in the bureaucracy” or “signalling power to other politicians”; Gore seems pretty clearly to be out of politics now. (I dunno, maybe he’ll surprise everyone by running for president in 2020 or something, but I bet he won’t. Aside from everything else, he’d be as old in 2020 as McCain was in 2008, and McCain’s age clearly hurt him.)
[EDITED to fix an inconsequential typo.]
There seems to be much push for political solutions. Even if it’s not a politician who pushes for the solution, the people pushing for the solution generally benefit from increasing their side’s political power, and that includes proposing solutions that politicians on their side want because of other incentives.
There’s also interplay between different causes (if you can pull off a carbon tax, that increases the respectibility of taxes as solutions, which may help your side if your side also proposes taxes as solutions to other problems).
As I say, it looks to me as if politicians have generally favoured less intervention than the scientific consensus has seemed to warrant, which would be the exact opposite of what your analysis would predict. But I don’t have any very compelling evidence for this. How about you?
What matters here is the direction, not the end value. The idea is that politicians favor more intervention than we actually have, even if they favor less intervention than the scientific consensus. If so, then people allied with the politicians benefit from supporting intervention.
(Also, I don’t actually believe there is a scientific consensus on how much intervention is needed. That’s inherently a political question; it depends on how to value various tradeoffs, what you think the chance is of a policy being abused, etc. It’s like asking if there’s a scientific consensus about what to do to stop hunger.)
If we’re trying to assess the theory that AGW policies are strongly perturbed by politicians’ alleged desire to increase taxes and regulation, then we need to compare actual AGW policies with a baseline estimate that ignores the effects of that desire. There’s no point comparing against doing nothing, unless we know there’s no reason to do anything. (“The captain of this ship says there’s a big iceberg ahead and we have to steer to the left, but I think he’s mostly steering left because he likes the view in that direction. And look, we’re veering way further to the left than we would if we just kept going in a straight line—clearly that shows he’s biased.” Compare that with ”… way further to the left than I think we need to do avoid the iceberg I can see ahead”, which of course might be wrong if I am inexpert concerning either icebergs or steering but is at least trying to address the right question.)
I didn’t say there is (and agree that there probably isn’t, though there might e.g. be a scientific consensus that the answer is “more than we’re doing now”). By “less than the scientific consensus has seemed to warrant” I mean: look at what the scientists say about the likely climatic outcome of business as usual and of various levels of intervention, look at what politicians are actually doing, and consider whether it’s credible that this is close to optimal given any reasonable set of priorities. In general you’d expect this to be really hard because there are lots of difficult things to evaluate, but the politicians have made it easier by keeping the level of intervention almost indistinguishable from zero.
Yes, but the baseline itself is relative to the current situation. Politicians want to regulate more than the regulation we actually have, so if you also want to increase regulation to more than we have, that benefits politicians. It may be true that you want an end point far beyond what the politician wants, but that’s going to be irrelevant unless your push has some reasonable chance of going that far, which it probably doesn’t.