Energy Policy | Robert P. Murphy

okay so what I'm talking about today is energy policy and this my consulting job a large chunk of it I work for the Institute for energy research so let me just plug them on thing if you're interested in the stuff that I'm bringing up here and you want a resource to go to it's primarily for us energy facts but it's also you know these issues are relevant for people in other countries as well but it's this is one long phrase Institute for energy research org is there a website and so that's I'm their senior economist that's one of my titles and so a lot of what I'm talking about here is I'm just relaying some of the things that I've picked up consulting for them so this a lot of stuff I'm going to do here is it's all very free-market economics of and it's consistent with the Austrian school approach but it's a lot of these things are just like topical policy issues that they thought would be interesting for me to share with some of you with you guys today okay if you've seen my other lecture the same problem happened it's not that I'm saying everything is equally important it's just that the Roman numerals didn't carry through which is supposed to be one two three four so here's the outline of what we're doing today I'm going to talk about energy supplies how to think about that from a free market perspective of the claims of market failure in the energy sector we're gonna talk briefly about fuel economy standards see the trade-offs there and then I'm gonna spend a good chunk of the lecture on this issue of the social cost of carbon that's where I've done a lot of my research I've gone and testified before the House and Senate on these matters and so this this is where I know a lot of of the my new should so I want to just give you guys an understanding of how this energy debate is unfolding at least in the United States until to my knowledge it's similar in other industrialized countries okay so a lot of these charts that I'm going over right now they come from I know if you can read in the back there this is energy the master resource that's the the title of the book the author of this is the guy who called Robert Bradley just as it sounds that's how you spell it and what's interesting about him is he got his ph.d Marie Rothberg was his chair for his committee but he didn't go to UNLV what happened was Bradley was a student and was gonna get a PhD and I don't know if it was economics or political economy or some hybrid like that and he was an Austrian Robert Bradley was and so he wanted Rathbun to be his chairperson and the school where Bradley was going allowed you to pick somebody from outside the school to be your chair so that's so Robert Braley is one of the few people I think that has a PhD that Murray Rothbard was technically the person overseeing seeing it so anyway and this stuff is all online for free the PDFs if you want to go look at more of this so let me just go over some of these basic facts why he calls the energy the master resource that's a take-off from Julian Simon's book the ultimate resource okay so in case you don't know that name you probably should let me just throw it out there it's Julian Simon as again as it spell it as it sounds and what Simon's point was is that in this Malthusian after the economist Thomas Malthus so there's this Malthusian mindset of scarcity and that carries over so Simon was talking about it more generally that people there are a lot of people wringing their hands over oh my gosh poor mother earth can't support these teeming billions of people we got too many people running around and so we need the government to crack down on population growth we need to wag our fingers at people say hey stop having so many kids stop consuming so much you know every time you have a gallon of gasoline that you burn that's one Gail and less for somebody else you know that sort of mentality that was very pervasive certainly in the United States and I gather in other countries as well and so everybody you know has just been scared and guilt-tripped into thinking oh I need to conserve I need to conserve I can't be so wasteful we Americans are so wasteful you'll see statistics about the Americans are such a such percentage of the world population yet they consume this many of the resources you see all kinds of statistics like that growing up in the United States that make you feel really horrible about being an American don't get me wrong there's plenty reasons to be ashamed of being an American but not for those reasons all right I probably can't find any of your countries on a map for example but but these yeah this this claim that oh my gosh Americans are this greedy a group that's consuming all these resources that's very typical and again the idea that there are too many people walking around and we're just gonna overload poor mother earth she can't support all this all right and naturally how do we solve these problems it's not enough just to write books and warn people you need the government to come in and enforce your notion of morality or sustainability so Julian Simon in his book the ultimate resource he was saying the ultimate resource is not the the physical things because the the Malthusian mindset was focusing on just oh there's limited resources here and if we use it up too quickly what are our great-grandchildren gonna do because they're not gonna have anything to use for how are they gonna have an economy we use of all the resources now and so Julian Simon's approach with the ultimate resource was to say no don't worry about these tangible things the ultimate resource is the human mind and human creativity that really where resources come from economically is knowing how to use the physical world a material world to create things that then humans value and so that it's that creativity and entrepreneurship that is the ultimate resource and so Robert Bradley you know loved that angle I love that insight and so that's where he Mouse's energy the master resources partly tribute to Julian Simon's viewpoint one way I like to crystallize I don't remember if I made this up or if I just stole it from somebody but its intellectual property so we don't believe in that anyway is the the way I try to criss crystallize the difference is the Malthusian look around and see people and they think oh look at all these bellies right how are we gonna feed all these people whereas someone in Julian Simon's men framework looks around and says look at all these minds imagine the wonderful discoveries these people are that guy might cure cancer right that person might figure out a new way to produce energy okay and then the thing too is with a lot of you know something the nature of technological discoveries is once just one person thinks of it everybody else can copy it alright so it only takes one person to figure out how to cure cancer and then whether there's 200 people alive or two trillion that cure can get multiplied and spread around very quickly all right and so that's the sense in which if you're worried about the earth running out of food or oh my gosh where we gonna put all these people well actually maybe the right solution is to say well let's have as many kids as possible because maybe one of our grandkids is gonna figure out how to make a cheap way to make ocean or cities that float on the ocean you know he'll come up with some or she will come up with some discovery that will make that very cost-effective whereas right now would be too expensive to try to just put millions of people floating around on the oceans all right so that's that's the difference in mentality and you see empirically that Julian Simon's approach pans out so that's what Robert Bradley is doing here in this slide so he's shown the labor time needed for energy so it's true there is a certain sense in which every time you burn a gallon of gasoline you're ultimately drawing down the Earth's finite stockpile but that's not really economically what the relevant issue is and so if you look at it instead in terms of if you're worried about is population growing too quickly do we had just too many people running around Julian Simon said well if that's if that is the case if there really were the Malthusian world the way that would manifest itself in terms of market prices is that labor your wages would go down while the prices of the raw materials would go up right because the raw materials are becoming more scarce whereas labour would be superfluous if it really were the case that oh man we just have too many people now we got a slower rate of population growth and so you would expect to see empirically that workers an hour of a workers labor would buy you less and less in the marketplace if it really were the case that we just population we're growing unsustainably quickly but of course you see the exact opposite that for various reasons and of course you guys know having been here now and you're outside reading you can come up with why free open competitive markets lead to this outcome but whatever the explanation this is just what the facts are over time so this starts in nineteen twenty and goes up through 2000 you can see for example gasoline the minutes of average workers labor needed to purchase a gallon gasoline was 32 minutes okay so it just make sure you understand what this is saying what that means is back in 1920 the average workers wage compared to the average price of a gallon of gasoline I think this is for the United States it took you had to work for a little bit over half an hour in order to earn enough wages to then go buy a gallon of gasoline whereas that has plummeted such that in 2000 it was about you had to work six minutes in order to earn the wage rate necessary to then go buy a gallon of gasoline okay so even though in a chemical or physical sense yes the earth is unable to produce as many gallons of gasoline technologically in the year 2000 is in 1920 because as far as we know Martians weren't giving us crude oil in between nonetheless it was economically easier for a worker to go get a gallon of gasoline alright and also what Rob doesn't have on this slide is that a gallon of gasoline now gets you farther than it would have back that in 1920 because cars are more fuel efficient as well alright so it's not merely just the amount of Labor you need to expend to obtain a physical gallon of gasoline but then what you can do with it now is multiply it a lot more compared to what it was in 1920 so Rob Bradley's point is economically speaking gasoline has become more plentiful has become less scarce over time so the male thew Z and mindset is exactly backwards and you can see a similar thing with electricity how many minutes you had to work to earn the wages necessary to buy a kilowatt hour of electricity it was 8 back in 1920 and then plummeted to about 0.2 by night or about the year 2000 okay let me spend some time on this because this is also counterintuitive at first so it's this issue of oil reserves so the specific metric here is billions of barrels of word world crude oil but the specific category we're talking about is proven reserves all right and so back in 1944 this ye means year and year end of 1944 the official tally for worldwide crude oil proved reserves was 51 billion barrels that's what they would have reported back then if people said hey what's worldwide what's approved reserve right now crude oil they was at 51 billion barrels if you ask the same question in at the end of 2003 the answer would have been oh right now worldwide crude reserves of Prudhoe oil proved reserves of crude oil we have about 1.3 trillion barrels all right 1266 billion well about 1.3 trillion so the proved reserves increased by 25 times and that doesn't count the fact that as you may know between 1944 and 2003 humans did burn a few gallons or barrels of crude oil here and there in particularly they burned 917 billion okay so make sure you understand this is the existing inventory that they know about this isn't saying how much did we go through during that time this is saying right now snapshot in 2003 how much oil is in the ground that we are confident and know about that our geologists and seismologist have located in the you know in the employ of oil companies and government surveying agencies it's about 1.3 trillion so it increased 25 times even though during that same time interval globally this is how much crude oil was taken out of the ground and consumed refined into gasoline and other fuels and so forth okay so how is that possible because at first that seems physically impossible it's because this concept of prude reserves does not mean how much oil is literally contained within planet earth no it has a much more specific meaning an indefinite meaning that these are oil deposits where experts from again from the oil companies and certain government agencies go out and they have various techniques that have improved over time you know but way back in the early 1940s they use different techniques now they have you know planes using different measurements and satellites that give them a more accurate idea and they go out and they try to locate oil deposits right major oil companies they need to no when this well that we have runs dry where are we gonna start drilling to replace that okay cuz it's not that it's the same wells all the time they they use them up and then they go and drill other places and as time passes they go out deep-sea oil rigs they've come up with new ways to tap into oil deposits that may have been uh NECA nama chol to tap into back in the 60s let's say okay so the point is that humanity has located and now has on deck a lot more twenty five times more than it did back then and so if you stop and think about that actually makes perfect sense it's for an analogy it would be if the little kid goes into the pantry of his house and he looks and sees that they have half a box of Cheerios left and then he realizes wait a minute I eat a bowl of Cheerios every day and so mom and dad we better stop eating Cheerios so fast because of this rate we're gonna run out of Cheerios next Tuesday and so I got it now just cut myself down to half a bowl a day because you know I don't want to run out Shiro's next Tuesday and of course that mentality of that finite mindset the mom would just say well no if that happens we just go to the store and get more you know you're just focusing on the amount of Cheerios in the pantry is not the right thing to be looking at we can just go fill it up as that runs down so it's the same thing here that the oil companies make forecasts and they know as the the located crew proven reserves out there is those get drained down then it makes sense it's profitable then spend money to go do more research and exploration okay cuz that that's a business right an oil company has to make decisions about what to do they could spend money looking into ways to you know make the refinery process more efficient there's all kinds of things they could spend their money they can just go invest in bonds and what-have-you and one possible thing is should we spend an extra ten million dollars sending out more you know getting more satellite coverage or going in and sending out a ship in the ocean and exploring or drilling leasing land from the federal government in a certain area where we've found oil before right you know near there and drilling test wells and seeing do we think there's oil down there okay so they have to spend like they don't know they're not sure that's they have to go explore and that cost money and so it's a cost-benefit calculation to see is it worth right now spending more to go find more oil alright so that's the way it works and again this this actually when you read when you think through this makes total sense because you know why would it go up why is it not just replacing to keep it steady because annual consumption of crude oil has gone way up from here to here right and so if you looked at a retail store for example a store that I don't know sells toys let's say not only would they do more business as you get into November and December because the Christmas holiday not only would they sell more toys in November and December compared to like August but probably the amount of toys in their inventory even the number of weeks of toys in their inventory would probably be bigger certainly going into the Christmas season and maybe even afterward because as their turnover increases they want to bulk up to make sure they don't get caught and run out you don't have people wanting to buy the toy and then it's not that they don't have it in stock right so they might even quite rationally bulk up their inventory and even have a greater number of you know weeks of toys based on current selling rates as they go into a busy period the same thing here it rationally makes sense that oil company as the rate of consumption from their end clients goes up they want to inhale enlarge the buffer that they have of oil that they know is there and it just will take a few years to get the you know to get it into the pipeline as it were or quite literally to get into the pipeline okay so that's make sure you understand that to give you a specific example of this in 1980 and to see why the Malthusian mindset is very misleading in the year 1980 if you looked at the amount of proven worldwide crude reserves and then looked at the worldwide consumption of crude that year and divided the answer was about 25 and so conservationists people who were worried about capitalism in the energy it's and how we need to the government to enforce conservation they might write letters to the editor or have op-ed pieces throwing around statistics saying things like the earth right now only has 25 years left of oil okay and again what they mean by that phrase is the amount of oil reserves we know about crude oil reserves then compared to how much are we using this year and oh my gosh we only have 25 times that so we only have 25 years left of oil and so they would lead people to believe that the earth would have run out of oil and around the Year 2005 okay does everyone remember when we all ran out of oil in 2005 right and that's why we stopped using oil we had to switch to electric cars all right so that's obviously not what happened - so I'm trying to get you to see what's were utterly misleading about that statistic and you'll see those kind of statistics all the time okay this question and will we run out of oil that's actually a very interesting question I'm gonna let me just explain this slide you can see the the empirical facts but then I want to walk you through the logic of it cuz it's actually a really interesting theoretical question you see how markets work okay so as far as the slide goes I realized in the back you might not be able to totally see this by the way just so you guys in case they didn't announce that all of our powerpoints are accessible somewhere all right that part doesn't help you right but I need a more specific answer than that but yep okay okay okay so if you ever would need to see a slider when I saw some people come up taking pictures I mean you can do that if you want but there's also you can get the actual slide so you can see here based on the act on the the type of resource you're talking about there's there's plenty of leaven so these these statistics say year's worth well obviously it's not that you go and look in the ground and there's a year's worth of oil like that that dimension what does that mean no there's physical amounts that they know about and then they're saying based on this year's current rate of consumption and you divide that's where they're coming up with this metric year's worth so in terms of crude oil it was about 40 years that not again this chart I think was circa 2003 so then the numbers are in the same ballpark they might have moved a little bit this is I'm just grabbing this because I like the way Rob presented it in his book crude oil resource so Reese source is a broader definition from the term reserves so resources is broader meaning seismologists and geologists they've there they think that the oil is there but they're not as confident it's a broader range of confidence this one in particular or my laser go this one means like they they even have current market prices they can bring it to market and everything and some of these broader categories mean well it wouldn't be profitable to do so but we know the oil is there okay so you can see how it goes up depending on how broad you want to make it and back when Rob produced this this idea of shale oil was not as economically feasible to develop whereas now with innovations in hydraulic fracturing or which is called fracking and horizontal drilling you know were they so they can drill down and then make the thing take a right angle and go this way and tap into deposits that otherwise would have been hard to reach that's part of what's going on in this you may have heard like the boom in shale and so forth so that's what's what's happening there so you can see there's plenty of resources and also if you're curious if you go to a er's website the institute for energy research org and you look up it's it's called hard facts F a CTS and it just has a hole and it's it's um and there's also a we type in North American inventory so there are different reports that I ER has published just documenting the tremendous amount of reserves that the US has in fact like do you guys know that the US is poised to become the leading oil producer in the world okay that that would have been inconceivable 15 years ago where people were worried about the u.s. running out of oil oh my gosh we're importing all this stuff from the Middle East we have to wean ourselves from oil because those you know it's war-torn region over there and now the u.s. is poised to become you know a greater X even oil exporter than many of those places did you have a question a huge difference in years No ah I would have known that before I don't know I need to go check that I I don't know off the top my head and I want to make up something that's wrong so there you go it would take me 75,000 years to locate the answer for you okay let's see here okay so this question of will we run out of oil the so the theoretical issue of that let me just walk you through that the analysis here if you want to see it's spell out more copies gonna run through it really quickly for you guys I have an econ lib article it's called I think it just called oil prices so if you go to Google and do Robert Murphy oil prices it's probably one of the top hits but it's at econ liborg and I just walked through the logic of this in particular the The Economist Harold Hotelling and the way he analyzed the economics of exhaustible resources or depletable resources alright so let me just walk you through that so thus far I've kind of shown you it's wrong to think about even something that's a finite depletable resource like natural gas stockpiles or crude oil in contrast to solar which people say oh it's solar so it's renewable that's why it's great cuz we're not going to run out where is we don't want to be dependent on crude oil because that's gonna run out right that's the kind of argument you hear which just first of all just think through that that they're saying we need the government to force us to stop using cars that rely on gasoline because that only works if you get croute you and use crude oil and refined into gasoline why don't we switch to electric cars because then we can use the Sun or other renewable energy sources so they're they're forcing you to stop using gasoline now or in the near future because otherwise left to its own devices the market would have us using it until we would run out and at that point we would have to switch to electric cars you get what I'm saying it's like because they're afraid of some awful thing that might happen in 50 years they're making the awful thing happen right now alright so so that's that's one issue beyond so what I'm trying to get you to see is even beyond the issues that I was bringing up like in this slide and the one before about how yeah it's technically the amount of crude oil on earth is finite but it's misleading to think of it like that because entrepreneurs have to go find it so practically speaking it's you can treat the existence of crude oil deposits just like how many apples you have to pick or you can just plant more apple trees and the same token by the same token economically it's fine if you analyze even stock piles of oil and natural gas like that because you can just go find more but even I just want to push the logic to his experience suppose all the oil all the crude oil in the world literally were in just a giant Basin and we knew where it was and so you had whatever 10 trillion barrels and that was it there was not a single drop of crude oil anywhere else on earth and you know we couldn't get some from asteroids or whatever that was it that was all humanity ever had to use and everybody was dead certain about that fact just walk through the logic how would that play out and what would be the and one is suppose one guy owns it ok may actually one woman owns it let's not be sexist ok one woman owns all that and and so now the question is you know what rate will she sell off barrels of that and so this guy Harold Hotelling walked through the logic of that problem and so let me just give you some insight into that listening to the most naive anti capitalists environmentalist types would say Oh markets are extremely short-sighted they just chase the dollar and they don't think about the future and so she would sell all trillion barrels this year and you can realize you know then we'd run out next year we had nothing left and you really will know that's that can't be right because anybody with even halfway common sense would realize if there were no oil next year or just like a little bit well then clearly the market price would be far higher than than if you tried to dump all 10 trillion barrels this year right to sell 10 trillion barrel you'd have to hit you know sell it for a penny a barrel or something to get rid of it whereas next year the price would zoom up to a thousand dollars a barrel if there was barely any oil left ok so you see that that can't be right so you start thinking through the logic and the optimal thing to do using mainstream neoclassical assumptions and so forth and perfect certainty in equilibrium it turns out that the rate at which the owner of this fixed research would sell it off would maximize the current market value so it involves interest rates and things like that it's a little bit of a complicated problem but the point is on the margin if the owner is trying to decide ok I could take one more barrel out and sell it or leave it in the pool and the basin and let a year another year go by it would have to be that if you could sell it now let's say the market price is $100 and the interest rates 5% the choice would be okay I could take this marginal barrel now sell it for $100 cash or I could leave it in the basin in wait a year and it would have to be the case that the spot price of oil would rise by 5% so that that same barrel on the margin I would be just indifferent okay again we're using neoclassical calculus issues here just to get you to see the logic of it the point is you would keep selling until the point at which that marginal barrel you would be indifferent between selling it now for cash or letting it sit in your possession and a year pass okay so you can see there that in equilibrium the owner would project and say well what're all prices gonna do all right so that's the the logic of that isolated case and so you can see they wouldn't just use it all right now and in fact if you just walk through I'm not gonna take the time here to do it but a lot of the things that the environmentalist you know the naive anti-capitalist environmental so would want you to do actually market prices capture that so you say oh but I'm worried about our great-great-grandchildren what if they don't have any oil well what would the price be then if there were only two get two barrels of crude left in 300 years the market price would be really high if they were still using oil at that point and so then you can just work your way backwards and realize that market prices give you that outcome the reason you so the reason you're not selling now is the owner isn't out of altruism for future generations it's because you realize I can earn a higher rate of return by holding it off the market because prices are gonna move in a certain way and you can say oh well that's kind of arbitrary and isn't it isn't that acting a lot from the entrepreneurs well there are things like futures markets and even more sophisticated derivatives like putting call options and crazy or more exotic things if you want to read up on that aspect of it I have a mises.org article called the social function of futures markets I think is the title and there I go through an oil example and spell out what I'm telling you right here so you can see how is it that if some people think the markets using oil too quickly or people are being too optimistic about how much oil they think we have and actually I think we're gonna run out of oil and be surprised compared to what everybody else thinks well then you would have an incentive the way you could profit from that knowledge if you're right is you could go buy oil futures or you could buy oil call options or things are even more exotic derivatives and then you would profit from there and it's not just that you make money off of our suffering the very act of you doing that would push up the spot price of oil today and so it would cause people to economize more so people would have an incentive to go you know people who are on the margin between buying an electric car versus buying a conventional gas-powered car if if crude oil goes up in price and so gas prices go up the pump now you're more likely to buy the electric car okay so all the kind of things that environmentalists worry about market prices can handle that stuff and in fact do soar in a much more efficient way than presumably a politician who just has to get reelected every few years right there you have a built-in incentive to really consider the desires of future generations because of their spending so it's not out of altruism it's just the issue of consumer sovereignty the way Mises talked about it okay so let me just round out that to sketch to this issue of will we run out of oil my answer is no of course we won't but that statement is neither optimistic nor pessimistic because if you think through the logic of that you know you have the 10 shilling barrels in the basin and then an equilibrium it starts getting drawn down what would happen is the amount that the total amount we had used would go like this you know from your perspective so like if this is 10 trillion and this is zero it would go like this and it would just asymptotically approach 10 trillion or in other words the that Basin would just shrink down but it would never quite run out because the price would just keep going up and up and so that it you know at the end there would just get far more expensive and so everybody who used oil as its price went up would naturally just start shifting into other options okay so that to say we would never totally run out doesn't mean oh so everything is fine it's consistent II there was catastrophe or with you know a great standard of living because we're finding out other technologies to replace crude oil okay let me skip it so the same thing in terms of coal in particular in North America there's just an outrageous amount of coal that could literally power what we're doing for centuries at current rates of consumption okay let me skip this slide I don't I get bogged down okay government and energy markets so there are many claims of market failure to justify government intervention in specific areas for example having a natural monopoly in electricity and natural gas deliveries so the idea here so what I'm trying to e-2c is if you read mainstream economics books they're more sophisticated than just the naive environmentalist and by the way you can be a free-market economist and being environmentalist so I don't mean to be denigrating somebody who really loves nature I think Walter block even has a collection of essays called free-market environmentalism and so when I'm saying environmentalists in this lecture I'm just using it for shorthand I'm sure you guys know the mind said that I mean that people who think that capitalism is inherently antithetical to the preservation of nature and so forth okay so as far as but beyond that sort of naive men tell you just think oh by definition anybody who cares about money is gonna then just start dumping chemicals in a river there's if you guys do you know Captain Planet does that mean anything to you guys okay that was for those who don't know there was this cartoon when I was younger and I guess I don't know if they I hope that I was hoping it would be canceled and it's the character the guy's the hero Captain Planet in the villain is you know these guy like businessmen and they derive it's not that they're trying to make money and all shucks we have to pollute as an offshoot of making money it's no they they enjoy destroying nature like they they're like you know mr. burns so okay so in contrast to that mentality there are your mainstream economists could give you more sophisticated reasons for why they claim government should be involved in energy markets whereas they wouldn't say government has a role in providing cans of tuna fish or something so you know what what sorts of arguments could they give well one standard one is to say that there's natural monopolies in things like delivering electricity and natural gas to individual homes okay so the the idea is they're gonna say look if we just left it wide open to the market there would be sixteen different utility companies with different lines bringing natural gas to various homes and that would clearly be inefficient and so what would happen then is one company that had you know more market share had access to better financing would offer to buy out all of its rivals because it would be crazy for them to be digging you know different pipelines to different homes in the same neighborhood on the same street that would be crazy and so instead one company will find it advantageous to buy out all of its rivals and so there'll be natural monopolies providing all the electricity or natural gas service but then as we know using mainstream price theory if there's a monopoly well then you know where they do marginal benefit marginal cost is not the socially optimal point la-di-da-di-da T and so price is higher than it should be in the quantity produced is lower than it would be in a perfectly competitive market okay so that's the standard argument I think Tom DiLorenzo it you know gave you guys a lecture if you went to that one about the problems with that logic but that's what the argument is so what I want to make the point is beyond the stuff that Rothberg points out in man economy and state taking this idea just head-on if you haven't read that I encourage you to so Rothbart and man economy and state has a whole section where he just obliterates the very No of a free market monopoly price he just says that that's nonsensical but even if you conceded that okay yeah there is a sense in which letting the market provide these services wouldn't work out as well compared to you know something like wheat production where there's many sellers and so forth and all the characteristics that we associate with perfectly competitive markets even if you conceded that still that wouldn't mean therefore because there's these bottlenecks are because there's these imperfections in the markets provision of electricity and natural gas to individual homes it wouldn't follow that therefore the government should come in and since there's gonna be a natural monopoly we might as well have the government run it right cuz that's what they're saying I mean that's kind of sick if you think about it that yeah there's gonna be a natural monopoly so given that we're gonna have it why would we have these these capitalists do it you know my local politician well that's the guy I want to trust with my electricity service you know I want to keep prices down so that's why I want the politicians involved right that's what that's what they're saying which makes no sense but that's the argument okay so there's the issues of incentives in the calculation problem let me just explain I'm sure you guys have heard this but it helps to reiterate it especially since for some of you this might be this week might be the first time you've really been exposed to these ideas so let me just take a moment why am i distinguishing an incentive problem from a calculation problem by the incentive problem and I'm talking about central planning here or socialism so my point is it's not just these issues the critique of socialism and why do we have markets allocate resources rather than a socialist central planning board that logic once you see it isn't merely restricted to outright full-blown central planning by the you know Soviet board it also applies if whenever the government tries to run a certain enterprise especially if it doesn't just do it as a business you know I mean like if it's if it's taking in revenue in through taxes and then providing services so the further remove that is from the market the more it resembles just outright socialism and so you see these arguments apply so distinction between an incentive problem a calculation problem an incentive problem just means if they're elected officials for example and people are complaining because hey my my electricity bill is in work or orgies when there's a storm and my power goes out it takes the utility company three days to come here and fix it that's outrageous you can't just fire them and get somebody else if the government's granted one agency a local monopoly right and you're probably not going to change your vote for who the mayor is next election because of that one time there was a storm and your power was out for three days because there's all sorts of things that you're mad about or that you care about when it comes up to the electoral or the election for mayor you know maybe you care because the police shot some teenager and that's the thing that bothers yours there's all sorts of reasons you could be mad at one government party versus another so the point is the depite the political people have less incentive to make sure that the agency to whom they give or to which they give them monopolies is satisfying its customers whereas if it's a private business then they do have more incentive to provide customer service and to watch costs and things like that beyond that though is the calculation problem and so there you're saying even if we concede for the sake of argument that the people in charge have nothing but your best interests at heart and they're doing you know they lay awake at night saying how can I keep people happier with their natural gas service you know even if they were doing that and then even if they bring in all the best experts to advise them and say you know there's various ways we could deliver natural gas to these homes you know we could build pipelines onto the ground we could do this we could do that you know there's all sorts of things we could do here are the options nonetheless the further you get removed from genuine market prices an open entry and competition the less they know even after the fact are we doing this in a sensible way are we making an efficient use of resources they honestly wouldn't know the further they get removed from genuine market prices because again the test is profit and loss and so if the government's taking over more and more areas of that then they don't have market prices they don't have that feedback so they just don't know they can look mechanically it well we're using this much steel this much blah blah blah this much labor power and we're providing this many units of natural gas to our customers but they would they say is that a good thing or a bad thing they would have no way of knowing okay so do beer companies have rolling blackouts in the summer have you ever heard of that right has any beer company or any bottled water company ever announced whoa people are drinking way too much of our product it's the end of July and so we urge everybody to just have one beer from now on right no that's not what they do they love it when people are buying they're probably it's real hot out and their people are rushing to buy more of their product whereas with government monopolized utility services that is what happens that you will get lectured you have radio spots and so forth in the mayor or somebody will come on the person running the local utility regulation bore a regulatory board will say you know it's it's so hot out right now people are using water please conserve you know think about you know don't water your lawn don't wash your car right now just reserve it for essential uses you might even say you know don't take a shower everyday things like that so that's what they did in fact in some places it's not just a helpful suggestion they will actually post you know if there's an actual water shortage and they know they'll have some official bureaucratic way of defining when that is and they will have specific rules about I'm not making this stuff up in case you haven't encountered this they'll have things like you're only allowed to water your lawn if your house is an even number and it's a Wednesday you know things look crazy arbitrary rules like that because they have to artificially contain the consumption of water why because they're not letting the price of water rise to its market-clearing level okay so that's the fundamental difference I mean I hope you can agree with me that there is this crazy difference in outcomes but what's the source of it the ultimate source is they're not letting the market price cliff form alright that they're holding a price down and that's why the public foolishly would support government intervention in these markets the average person if you said hey should there be a totally open free market in water they would say no because water is essential that's crazy I want to make sure I have access to water and now you know I don't want some monopolist charging me $1,000 a gallon cuz he has to because I you know otherwise I'll die if and I'm water so if you let the market do it I'd had to pay all my money for water and of course that's not what would happen because yeah it's easy to get people water and that's the water would be much cheaper if it were totally delivered by the market and you wouldn't have this craziness of the supply being interrupted at the very moment when you want it the most right it's not that your air conditioning goes out in the winter is the air conditioning goes out in August first when everyone's sweltering ok so let me I'll kind of run out of time let me skip some of this stuff ok trade-off in cafe standards so this stands for corporate average fuel economy and so what this means in the United States these are regulations that the US government puts to mandate certain minimum fuel economy standards and automobiles and light trucks and other vehicles so the idea is the government saying to car manufacturers we don't like the number of the miles per gallon or what you guys would say kilometers per liter is that what you would say in Europe that you get for gasoline in the vehicles that the market would choose and so we're gonna in strays it so it forces automobile manufacturers if you're selling in a US market to make the engines more fuel efficient meaning they get more miles for every gallon of gasoline they burn than would otherwise be the market outcome okay so I mean there's lots of problem what's the rationale it used to be to conserve energy like back in the late 70s and early 80s it's because if you remember the history there in the middle of the 70s there was the the OPEC embargo against the United States and so Americans became very concerned about our dependence on foreign oil and so that was this was part of that the response that to say oh we're gonna wean ourselves off of oil consumption by making our automobiles more fuel efficient and we don't like the pace at which the markets innovating the government's gonna speed up the process now in more recent years the rationale has shifted to climate change to say well if you emit more co2 then that causes climate change and so therefore we want to force cars to emit less co2 for given traveling distances okay so what hands up happening well one of the ways the manufacturers comply with that they meet the objective is they make the car lighter because you just think about it how are you gonna make a car get more fuel-efficient you make it lighter than it otherwise would have been had just consumer preferences dictated the combination of attributes because remember other things equal consumers would want to buy a car that's more fuel-efficient but the point is there's trade-offs that if you make it more fuel-efficient other things equal it's going to be lighter you know or there's other considerations maybe the designs not going to be is aesthetically pleasing and so forth so there's trade-offs and so if the originally were at an optimum given consumer preferences and now the government comes along and says ok and there's one dimension of fuel economy we we're going to tighten the screws now what well the car is partly going to get more expensive that's one dimension that's going to get worse than the consumers point of view but another one to try to contain the increase in the price of the car is to just make the thing lighter ok and so what does that mean well now if cars want to get into accidents with each other if they're lighter other things equal more people die and so there have been estimates to try to assess that impact and so I've seen some range from 40 mm up to 125,000 traffic fatalities okay so in a very real sense these standards it's not merely that it makes cars more expensive than the otherwise would be it actually results in many tens of thousands of people dying who otherwise would not have died ok let me spend the last 10 minutes or so here on the climate change debate cuz this again this is where I've done the most of research myself and my consulting business so the the issue here is what's called the social cost of carbon or the SCC and so what that is the definition of it it's an estimate of the Tai's damages associated with an incremental increase in carbon emissions in a given year all right so the idea is you guys know what the greenhouse effect is but let me just run through it real quickly so the idea is carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases humans emit them through various operations business operations driving their vehicles and so on that accumulates in the atmosphere so that raises the co2 content of Earth's atmosphere and then concentrations of other gases as well so that when sunlight comes in but the light can go through but then when it hits the earth and bounces off and now turns into infrared you know it can't get out so it's like the greenness it's like when you go into your car and the windows have been in rolled up you get in there and sweltering even though it's much hotter in your car then the outside air it's the same principle right because this suddenly I can get in your windows and warms up the air inside and then it can't get out so that's what's happening to the earth and so the the claim is there's this huge negative externality that when you emit co2 you are unwittingly making the earth warmer and the real kicker and this is it's not gonna really manifest itself until many decades in the future so it's really you know our grandkids that we're really screwing over every time we emit this ton of carbon dioxide so the way to quantify this what the actual negative externality is what they're saying by definition the social cost of carbon is saying you emit one ton of co2 today and then we're going to project centuries into the future and figure out how much warmer on the margin is earth going to be because you did that and then we're going to quantify all of the the net harms that's going to cause the people and then we're going to discount those to the present and come up with a present discounted value of that damage okay because in principle some of what you're doing is affecting people in 300 years okay so if it causes 10,000 antwort dollars worth of damage in 300 years it's not ten thousand dollars today we're discounting it because we're scientists right we're not gonna do something crazy all right this is all logical right so they discount it and then so they come up with a number so that's what the number means the social cost of in 2014 than is saying if you emitted a ton of co2 today how much the present discounted value of all that future damage on the margin okay where is the social cut right now to us to say the social cost of carbon in 2050 means based on our forecasts of what's going to happen right now when we picture someone in 2050 doing that then what damage is that going to do and then at that point in 2050 what's the present discounted value gonna be okay so that's that's the nomenclature that's the convention when they report that stuff okay so by the way just a little tidbit social cost of carbon usually now is reported in terms of carbon dioxide but back originally in the in the economics literature as opposed like the policy debates it was quoted in terms of carbon ok so just you know think of your chemistry carbon is three point six seven times has has more carbon than carbon dioxide right because a molecule of carbon dioxide is diluted by the oxygen yet I'm saying so if you see people quoting things like an economics journals especially if it's from a few decades ago they will probably say oh I recommend a carbon tax of such-and-such and it'll be a much bigger number because they're talking about per ton of carbon whereas nowadays number the number will probably be divided by three point six seven because they're talking about carbon dioxide and that's not a coincidence because they didn't want the number to be too high and scare people you see what I'm saying like if they quoted the number the tax per ton of carbon the number is three point six seven bigger and that scares people and so no no we're just quote you know this is the tax on carbon dioxide even though it's the same thing okay I'm kind of cynical about this stuff okay why is this important because already they are using these estimates of the social cost of carbon so the federal government has Commission's work stops or studies working groups they go out and they estimate the social cost of carbon for various years and so now when they issue in federal agencies like the EPA or the Department of Transportation or whatever issue some new regulation and if you guys don't know this the stuff they do they have regulations for microwaves in your house when they're on standby how much energy they use there are federal regulations regulating that in the interest of combating climate change just so you know so the government's on the job protecting our grandkids so how do they do this so they have to buy regulation they have to provide cost-benefit analyses of those regulations and so now if you have any regulation that could be remotely construed as restricting co2 emissions you now have all these benefits right because you can just say oh in 2035 co2 emissions will be such-and-such tons less than they otherwise would be if it weren't for this regulation we're proposing and so we're gonna multiply that number of tons savings by the social cost of carbon in the year when I say 2030 and that's the dollar savings that you're alone from this regulation just because of the issue of co2 emissions alright so that's the logic that they're using and so they're already doing that they are trying to justify federal regulations using this stuff and then in the economics ledger the social cost of carbon is related to an optimal carbon tax or a cap and trade program okay I'm running a little bit out of time here so I'm going to go a little bit quickly through this stuff a carbon tax is just what it sounds like the government levies and explicit tax based on how much carbon dioxide you admit it's just related to the idea a seep agoos idea of a negative externality so just like if a factory is dumping pollutants into a river and the standard pigouvian approach says put a tax on it by the same token if we agree technologically speaking that or with the atmospheric science whatever you want to call it that emitting co2 in the atmosphere causes harms to third parties who aren't privy to that transaction well then the standard pigouvian approaches oh you should tax that and make them internalize the externality a similar thing is a cap-and-trade program where instead of taxing the activity instead the government decides this is many permits we're gonna issue for this year this is how many tons of co2 are gonna be permis are allowed to be emitted and then we're gonna just hand those things out to people or sell them or auction them off and then people can trade them so if one group wants to emit more co2 than they have permits for they go into the market and buy permits from other people who then restrict their emissions and sell the permits okay so in under conditions of perfect certainty and things like that these two approaches are largely equivalent in the real world there's reasons you would prefer one versus the other if you were gonna do this it gets kind of technical in the q1 you know later if you want to ask me I can go through a but I want to skip it right now it's too it's too technical okay to give you a ballpark idea these are the numbers the White House working group put out in May of 2013 for the social cost of carbon at various years so you can see it goes up as it gets later in the years and that's for two reasons one is like in 2050 if you emit a ton of co2 then the idea is at that moment you will be causing seventy one dollars worth of future damages to Earthlings present discounted value as of the year 2050 whereas in 2010 it was only thirty three dollars so why is it going up so much two reasons one is the harm there more co2 would have been emitted by this point and so the global greenhouse effect is worse and so on the margin putting out more co2 is even more harmful so that's one reason the other thing is that you're closer now to all those bad damages alright so cuz back here most of the bad damages aren't kicking in for another 50 years at least whereas here in the world of the computer simulation you're already starting to experience that the harms and so that since they're closer they get discounted less heavily okay so that's why they go up so again right now the federal government is using these numbers in cost benefit assessments of proposed regulations and that's how they're deriving social benefits if they restrict emissions because they're saying like in the year 2030 a ton of co2 dings humanity by fifty three dollars and so if you somehow reduce it you just saved everybody fifty two dollars and so that's a benefit okay now that you understand how this is being used let me just take the last few minutes to show you something that might surprise you you've probably heard the science is settled you know the IPCC the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the consensus of scientists on this and anybody who disputes this stuff is a denier or they actually use the term a climate denier of course giving you no alluding to a Holocaust denier right and so that's the terminology they use and so the stuff I'm going to show you might surprise you okay first of all using the peer-reviewed literature there are plenty of models suggesting that there's initial benefits of global warming okay so this comes from a compendium by this guy Richard toll tol and he's one of the pioneers in the field and so he I think he revised this graph since then but I'm just showing he was qualitatively you can see he was looking at various estimates and so this is showing climate change by degrees centigrade and so this zero line these are hard or these are our benefits okay and so the point was up until about two point to five degrees centigrade global warming for a lot of these models was showing benefits and only eventually that it that it turned down so why would there be benefits well you think about it if it were the case that right now any global warming was automatically conferring net harms that would be kind of a coincidence that would mean right now the earth was like at the optimal climate you know or the optimal temperature and so there's no reason to expect other things equal why if it got a little bit warmer why would that all of a sudden make us worse off maybe it would make us better off and so if you go through and quantify you can come with all sorts of benefits from having a warmer planet that you know there's certain regions where they can plant crops at different times things like that there's fewer people will die from cold in the winter stuff like that so it's not obvious that it should just be negative consequences if the earth gets a little bit warmer so that's just again that's what's in the literature that there's plenty of studies that found now for moderate degrees of warming it actually would confer net benefits and so if that were true you would want to subsidize co2 emissions using the pigouvian logic alright say these these coal-fired power plant operators are selfishly not taking into account the full benefits of emitting co2 and we need to subsidize them because capitalism doesn't work ok here is sotol at a different paper in 2011 gave a list of different estimates of the social cost of carbon in the published literature over time and so each dot represents a point estimate of what the social cost of carbon was so notice the points get more dispersed as time passes and look at like this in 2005 look at the huge range it goes from 120 dollars down to a negative amounts these negative ones mean the social benefit of carbon emissions okay so my point in this is this if you ask chemists to show the estimates of the charge on an electron it wouldn't look like this it would be extremely focused because they're all pretty sure as to what the charge on an electron is and there you know disagreeing on the one hundredth decimal place or something like that where as you can see they're all over the map here because there's different assumptions just the nature of what does it mean when they estimate the social cost of carbon they have a computer that simulates the earth that the economy and the climate for three hundred years and then discounts all that's I mean so there's all kinds of assumptions they put into that all right they don't even know what GDP is gonna be next quarter and yet there's assumptions made about the economy in three hundred years and that's that's how they come up with these numbers so it's not surprising that they're all over the map and it's not because these people it's not because oh these guys are lying and these guys are communists and these guys are great free market economists probably they're all communist or these guys in this field but but the point my point is in this stuff especially you know in general you know you if you want to hire me as a consultant I can give you any number you want right maybe I'm see you know obviously certain things I wouldn't do it because I'd have moral problems with it but you can come up with a model that spits out just about anything and you're not even lying because in economics the way they do those simulations and the things they to make assumptions and you know well if I assume this the answer is gonna go like that and so if the client wants the answer to go like that I'm gonna assume that right so that's how that's how it works okay let me hang on let me see here okay let me just do one more thing and then I'll let you guys out of here okay let me just focus on this slide last thing okay there's plenty of stuff wrong with this let me focus on one issue global versus domestic the federal regulations require that the government report cost-benefit analyses in terms of impact on Americans and so if you think about what I was saying that the social cost of carbon was not that's a global figure they're looking at impacts on humanity so they just flat-out ignored what the Office of Management and budgets own rule was when they reported this stuff and if you actually did what the rule said you could see what it actually would be right it's it's like 10% you know there's a range they gave but if you adjusted their official figures based on the impact to Americans and so that's just one point to say that you know in terms of cost-benefit for Americans these rules don't pass that test even on the face of it okay so imagine that the government doesn't even follow its own rules I hope you guys were sitting down for that okay I'm out of time thanks guys you you

Channel: misesmedia

Views: 8,990

Rating: 4.8936172 out of 5

Keywords: Robert P. Murphy (Academic), Energy (Industry), Energy Policy (Literature Subject), Austrian School, Property, Mises, Rothbard, Ludwig Von Mises Institute (Organization), University, Government, Economy

Id: ZwfXGKrGzAM

Length: 61min 26sec (3686 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 26 2014

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Does anyone else find the smug face in the thumbnail absolutely hilarious?