Tiglons and Ligers, Oh My!

"The evidence is overwhelming that manufacturers are creating excess HFC-23 simply to destroy it and earn carbon credits," said Mark Roberts of the Environmental Investigation Agency, a research and advocacy group. "This is the biggest environmental scandal in history and makes an absolute mockery of international efforts to combat climate change."

This appeared as part of an article in the Huffington Post. HFC-23 is a particularly dirty carbon producer and the implication is that the production of carbon--even if that production is peripheral or has no relation to the industry in question at all--has become a separate pursuit of companies so they can be paid not to produce it.

The question is why is anyone surprised? A distortion in the market, a tilt of the playing field, has been created to reward some and not others, to benefit specific behavior that has only an accounting advantage, like depreciating steel plants but not investing to produce steel. People will rush in to take advantage of the bias. These Rube Goldberg economics probably work sometimes but rarely. Raise the minimum wage to benefit minimum wage workers: Decrease the number of minimum wage jobs. Subsidize ethanol to decrease the use of petroleum: Petroleum use increases to produce the ethanol. Balance the earnings between big earners like the Yankees and lesser teams: Pittsburgh Pirates. Decrease the spreads in the stock market trades to stabilize the market: Flash crash. In this instance, businesses will be paid not to produce something, ergo, they will produce as much of it as they can first. This will produce more of the offending substance and eventually leech more money out of the payback system and make it less effective.

Notice that a system, once interfered with--even with the best of intentions-- changes into something else. A minimum wage job changes a valuable employee into an economic burden on his employer. An energy producer produces fertilizer and proportionally less petroleum for energy. The efficient farmer becomes a part-time food producer and a grossly inefficient energy producer. Several good baseball teams create and underwrite a new strange game the Pittsburgh Pirates play. Decreasing the profit in stock trades by market maker intermediaries creates a market where only high volume computer trading is profitable. It is reminiscent of hybridization. A mule is neither a horse nor a donkey. It is new.

But it is close. Close. And that is the point. No chef would substitute salt for sugar because it was close in appearence; he knows there is more to it than that. But somehow intellegent people feel thay can mix-and-match economic and political components without fear. Administrators and legislators create programs in reaction to problems and it is like adding a unique, foreign piece to a puzzle. Everything changes. Now, with the new piece, nothing fits and the puzzle becomes something else, neither the problem nor the solution but something else. A mule that can not run like a horse, a tiglon very distinct from its parents and from a liger.

It's not "close enough for government work"; it's a new explanation, a new excuse. It's the excuse Heisenberg has cursed us with that justifies our compromises: The imprecision of our times.

But we have to do something, don't we?