When I get my copy of SuperFreakonomics I'm going to keep my eyes open because I've heard a rumor, reinforced below, that it says that policies that raise the price of carbon-intensive stuff won't work in cutting carbon consumption and production. In other words, incentives don't matter. This isn't the message that I received from the first book.
Sorry, I can't help myself (Asking people to reduce their carbon emissions is a noble invitation, but as incentives go, it isn't a strong one):
Levitt and Dubner may have nothing to say about the financial crisis, but they have much to say about climate change, and why, in their analysis, economics shows that trying to change people's polluting behaviour is utterly pointless. The real solution, they maintain, involves pumping large quantities of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere through an 18-mile-long hose, of which more later. "We could end this debate and be done with it," Levitt says, with a sigh, "and move on to problems that are harder to solve."
...
People will object to this, they acknowledge .... But to Levitt and Dubner, such objections are pure emotionalism. Their job, as dispassionate analysts, is to take a cold-eyed look at how things really are, not how we would like them to be, and to deliver difficult truths with no regard for hurt feelings. "The data," they write, in the kind of phrase that recurs throughout Superfreakonomics, "don't lie."
...
The problem with trying to reduce carbon emissions, they argue, is that the incentives are all wrong. Too many of the benefits are "externalities", from which the people making the sacrifices will never benefit – and the whole history of economics demonstrates that such completely unself-interested behaviour is impossible to implement on a large scale, especially when so many people suspect that their sacrifice would not, in fact, make a significant difference to the outcome. "Behaviour change is hopeless," Levitt says. "It's just completely pointless to think that you're going to get six billion people, the poorest people around and the richest people around, to work together, when every individual person has no impact on the problem. That's a fundamental issue that economists have thought about, and recognised the hopelessness of, for hundreds of years . . . One thing we know is that I'm not going to sacrifice, materially, my own life, to help an anonymous person in Bangladesh who might not even have been born yet, when I know that there will be no help for that person anyway." Calling on people to reduce their carbon emissions, the authors write, "is a noble invitation. But as incentives go, it's not a very strong one."
Dang, I wish my book would arrive so I can investigate the type of voluntary, sans incentives, policy that Levitt and Dubner have in mind. It doesn't sound like a carbon tax or cap-and-trade.
