>I'd say having 70% of the information, something like that.
This is still missing the point. This means that you need only 31% of science to continue burning carbon, but you need 70% to stop burning carbon. You have created an asymmetry that's not justified by anything (let alone science). Public policy cannot be agnostic about the science. It's not possible.
If you say "let's wait" you're saying "it's safe to keep doing what we're doing" even though you don't have any justification for that.
To put it really simply, you've created a default bias. There is no reason to assume the default is better than a given alternative. It needs to be justified. If you can justify it, fine and good, let's do it. But no one has.
As I responded elsewhere in this thread, by this criterion, we should stop pretty much everything we are doing. Which is not a viable option, never has been, and never will be.
No, I'm not saying this. I'm saying we need to stop pretending its sustainable to keep burning carbon at the rates we are. It's not sustainable and we need to take painful steps immediately to stop this.
It does not mean we need to "stop doing pretty much everything we're doing". Not sure where you get that idea. It means we need to stop allowing every Cletus in Kentucky to buy an F-350 and pay $1.89 for a gallon of gas to cruise 56 miles to the local Walmart to buy factory farmed beef and a bunch of plastic sh!t shipped across the globe from 12 different parts of China.
The idea is we should live in reality, not that we shouldn't live.
Because your own stated criterion is that we need to be able to justify what we're currently doing based on scientific knowledge. We cannot justify most of the things we're currently doing on that basis.
> The idea is we should live in reality
We apparently don't agree on what "reality" actually is, at least with respect to how much of an emergency CO2 emissions are. You think they're a dire emergency. I think they're not an emergency at all. You will, I take it, claim to justify your belief that they are a dire emergency based on some kind of scientific knowledge. But it isn't. Nobody has a good enough predictive track record about the climate to make such a claim. So this claimed "knowledge" isn't actually knowledge at all; it's just people's beliefs and hypotheses and speculations. And that isn't a good enough basis to dictate public policy to everyone. Which is one of the key points the article we are discussing in this thread is making.
Exactly my point. Why do you think we need to have a higher justification for good ideas (engaging in sustainable behavior) than for bad ideas (engaging in unsustainable behavior)?
>We apparently don't agree on what "reality" actually is, at least with respect to how much of an emergency CO2 emissions are. You think they're a dire emergency.
>Which is one of the key points the article we are discussing in this thread is making.
And the point you're still missing is that not doing anything to stop risky behavior is making an assumption that it is safe to continue the risky behavior. That assumption is not grounded in anything.
You're misstating the alternatives. We're talking about public policy. The alternatives for public policy are "don't dictate what everyone must do in area X" or "dictate what everyone must do in area X". The former does not need a "higher justification". The latter does.
No.
>We're talking about public policy.
Yes.
>The alternatives for public policy are "don't dictate what everyone must do in area X" or "dictate what everyone must do in area X".
The world is not this simple. Regardless, we must dictate that people cannot inflict externalities on third parties without compensation.
>The former does not need a "higher justification". The latter does.
Where are you getting this idea? You're just stating a conclusion without any support. I can do that too:
You are wrong, I am right. You need to scientifically justify acts that have harmful externalities. You do not need to justify harmful acts that restrict harmful externalities.
Wow, this is easy! I should have been arguing like this all along!
I disagree. Individual people and businesses often need to make decisions with incomplete information, but individual people's or businesses' decisions are only about their own actions, not about everybody else's. But public policy decisions affect everybody, so the criterion needs to be a lot stricter for how complete the information needs to be and how confident we need to be in our knowledge before we impose a public policy on everybody.
> You've got to take calculated risks sometimes.
The idea that public "leaders" should be able to take calculated risks with everybody else's money (and lives) is, IMO, pernicious. This is exactly the mentality that has created so much mess in the world throughout history. No, "leaders" should not take calculated risks that affect everybody.
There's a certain symmetry to, say, FDR in the USA suggesting "maybe we should consider a new public policy restricting certain private business activities" with his New Deal and, say, Lenin in the USSR suggesting "maybe we should consider a new public policy allowing certain private business activities" with his New Economic Plan.
It seems like most of the users here have acknowledged that both of these constitute public policy changes. In fact, we could even imagine a scenario where passing one act is equivalent to repealing the other.
To say that both changes would require extremely high confidence, just "because they affect everybody", doesn't seem rational on this regard. Either the evidence supports one thing over the other, or it doesn't.
But I think you're taking a different view -- that there's a default anarchy / state of nature policy, that should be favoured with a very high prior, and any policy to deviate from it would require a much higher certainty than doing the opposite. Is that your position?
Again, your own logic destroys your argument.
We have made public policy decisions that heavily subsidize oil, cars, lowered air quality, etc.
These decisions affect everyone not just car drivers. These decisions were not based on complete information (in fact, we had very limited knowledge of global warming, air pollution, etc. when we made public policy decisions to favor air pollution).
>The idea that public "leaders" should be able to take calculated risks with everybody else's money (and lives) is, IMO, pernicious. This is exactly the mentality that has created so much mess in the world throughout history. No, "leaders" should not take calculated risks that affect everybody.
So why should Cletus who like to roll coal on Tesla drivers be able to take uncalculated risks that affect everybody?
I seriously think you don't understand what externalities are.
Yes, and I have already said that I oppose those decisions. The government should not be playing favorites.
> why should Cletus who like to roll coal on Tesla drivers be able to take uncalculated risks that affect everybody?
Cletus' behavior doesn't affect everybody; it only affects the few people who are within range of his coal rolling.
So you agree that government should stop subsidizing roads and suburbs?
>Cletus' behavior doesn't affect everybody; it only affects the few people who are within range of his coal rolling.
Actually air doesn't work this way. Pollution can and does carry for hundreds of miles.
But we can proceed with your fictional conception of aerodynamics.
How are the people that Cletus rolled coal on supposed to get compensated for their loss?
Otherwise, it is too slow to act to prevent future problems.
In that regard, I feel it's best paralleled with business. Business decisions are often made with incomplete information, to get a competitive advantage. But you always need to weigh the risk/reward potential.
Feel it's the same for public policy. Depending on the potential risk of a particular policy, pitched against the level of confidence in the information that supports it, and you can arrive at a decision. I don't think it make sense to say, always wait for the confidence level to be approaching 100%. You've got to take calculated risks sometimes.