Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The European Union initiated its Emissions Trading Scheme in 2005. This was the first large-scale such trading scheme in the world. The idea was to reduce the greenhouse emissions of Europe’s industries in a market-rational manner, and to offer the rest of the world an example of how that is done. The ETS is also known as the cap-and-trade system. That phrase suggests the good news/bad news split for markets. Bad news: there are regulatory caps on the total amount of specified gases that may be released. Good news: any particular installation can buy allowances from others to cover otherwise prohibited emissions. As a basic matter of economic theory, these allowances should be traded toward their highest and best use, ensuring that the system over all is more efficient than any command and control approach to the problem could be. Does it work? And for whom? The system has in fact drawn imitation, in both New Zealand and in Australia. In the U.S., California has its own cap-a...

In contrast to my usual practice, this time I'm putting the blog entry's image at the bottom of the page. Pretty wild and crazy of me, eh? Resuming discussion of the same law we discussed yesterday. As a historical observation, it has its name because Jozef Stefan inferred it from experimental evidence in 1879, five years before Ludwig Boltzmann derived it in theoretical fashion. The law is of considerable importance to certain contemporary issues, because the Earth itself, including its atmosphere, can be considered for purposes of prediction as a "gray box" of the sort I discussed in the last post. If we know how much radiation the earth is receiving from the sun, and we know how much of that energy is reflected away, vis-à-vis how much is absorbed, we should be able to say something about the heat of this box, this planetary system, as a whole. The International Panel on Climate Change says that 30% of the sun's energy is reflected away, the remainder is...