During the recent debates about greenhouse gases statements have been made about not making an effort on greenhouse gases before large emitters like China and India make some effort.

Of course, China and India are large greenhouse emitters because they are large countries, each with around a billion inhabitants. This is largely due to arbitrary political boundaries, if we look at the India State of Kerala (just as valid a unit of analysis) we would get a different picture for its 31m inhabitants.

Thus the best thing to do is look at emissions per person. Any sensible global scheme for stabilising the emission of greenhouse gases would involve a standard emission target per person across the world. Any alternative, such as allowing US citizens higher emissions than allowed in India or China would be a pretty hard argument to put forward.

So in this context how does the argument that we should not take any action before India and China do stack up?

Information on emissions per person is available on this Wikipedia page.

The data a bit old, from 2000, but serves the purpose.

The emissions for Australia are 25.9 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person, for the United States it is 22.9 tonnes per person.

In China 3.9 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person and in India it is 1.8 tonnes.

China and India are way below developed countries levels of emissions.

The emission reductions required in the developed world are so far in advance of what the developing countries need to achieve. We need to get started way before them if we are going to achieve our objective, and it is not necessary or practicable to wait for them before undertaken to reduce developed world emission.

BONUS POINT:

My understanding of the global warming issue is that it a very significant environmental disaster confronting us. The whole “waiting for India and China” negotiating strategy must by definition be based around an argument that if agreement is not reached we will just abandon attempts to reduce emissions and let global warming occur. This “waiting” argument seems to equate global warming more with an argument about whether to go down to the shops to get some milk, rather than a massive environmental disaster where if we all don’t start bailing soon the entire ship is going to sink. In that circumstance it is not in the best interest of anyone to sit around saying “you start bailing first”, “no you!” Just grab a bucket and get at it!

The Language Log has more mistranslations, this time of food items.

My favourite:

Phil’s strength assists the flavour of sauced justice

I found the photo at the front of this page to quite enticing. I don’t quite know why.

Watching Channel 7, they had the preview for the nightly News, summarising the stories for the evening. For one story the announcer stated “Angelina Jolie’s Twins have arrived” with this photo:

I had a good chuckle at that one.

The following video has been floating around the intertubes for some time now (probably years) but I have only come across it recently and so would like to add my name to the list of millions around the world who have shared the video.

As Ezra Klein at The American Prospect states when he posted it “This isn’t like the other videos I post. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. If you have seen it, watch it again. Its good for the soul.”

As an aside, I agree with Ezra that it is good for the soul, which is a little confusing since there is no such thing as a “soul” (I think we need to come up with a new word for that thing we mean when we talk about our experience of joy, of self-worth and our interactions with our fellow human beings).

The New York Times has an article that discusses the phenomena of the video.

I thought it would be a good idea to make a comedy about Global Warming, it would surely be a good way of getting at the topic.

But now I have found out that Someone Stole My Idea!

http://www.sizzlethemovie.com/

This article provides an interesting analysis of the cost of SMS messages. While it is US based it equally applies to Australia.

Given the low cost of data transmission, the cost of SMS messages should be vanishingly small, yet the telco’s charge rates that are millions of times higher than comparable services. An SMS message costs 20 cents for a quarter of a kilobyte, yet you can get gigabytes of wireless internet data for tens of dollars (the gigabyte is a million times the size of a kilobyte).

The telco’s are truly ripping off consumers, the more interesting question though is – why are they getting away with it? I think the answer is that consumers do not think in kilobytes and gigabytes. They do not compare the technological capabilities of the alternate communication methods, but rather they consider the personal benefit they receive from the technology. The SMS is personally useful, so consumer are willing to pay for it. Who cares about some esoteric techie’s analysis of bandwidth?

And this all makes economic sense (that’s the difference between economics and engineering). The big elephant in the room is, however, why doesn’t competition drive down the cost? Why doesn’t some telco attract new customers by introducing low cost SMS?

Because they all know what a golden egg laying goose it is and none want to kill it off. It is a kind of zero sum game, you could start offering low cost SMS but the other firms could instantly match it, and they would all be instantly worse off.

As Adam Smith said:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is im-possible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

But you do not need to even meet together to arrive at an understanding. You do not need to discuss or debate, but if everyone in the industry knows what is happening, the outcome can still be as bad.

The ACCC goes after collusion cases, but it has to prove actually documented agreements to fix prices. But in this case, it is unlikely that any such documentation exists. But still surely there is a case for regulation?

Language Log has a good example of a language translation error here.