Cap and Trade: All Cost, No Benefit
President Obama and the Congress are stuck between a rock and hard place on this climate change bill the House just passed last Friday. Via the Washington Post.
GOP congressional leaders have criticized the legislation, saying it would sharply increase electricity and gasoline costs for American households, and ship millions of jobs overseas. Yesterday on “Fox News Sunday,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called the bill a “light-switch tax” and said, “I don’t think putting clamps on our economy when you know the Chinese and the Indians are not going to do it is a good idea.”
Obama said the bill’s foes were seeking to “get political gain by scaring the bejesus out of people.”
Many liberals have also opposed the bill, saying it gives too much to big energy industries and farm interests, which wrangled some last-minute changes that could make it easier for farmers to meet emission limits through the use of offsets based on tilling techniques. The latter concession most worries environmentalists because, depending on how the offsets are administered, it could undermine the solidity of the cap.
The President and members of Congress seem to understand that if they make a bill drastic enough to do what the activists say we need to do, it will decimate the economy along with any chance of their reelection. Instead, we get this half-hearted effort that will produce no benefit, environmental or otherwise, but at least it will damage an already suffering economy.
Even if we do everything Al Gore and the activists want, it’s still very unlikely to produce any benefit. Several things must go right:
- The scientific conclusions, including the impending disasters, of the AGW advocates must be correct.
- Their solution (i.e. the emissions cutting goals) must be correct to fix the problem.
- All countries, including China and India, must cooperate.
- All countries need to go all the way and achieve the goals. No half-hearted efforts.
Number 1 is in dispute among scientists. As a layperson, I see myself as a juror in a trial. Mankind is innocent until proven guilty, but I’m open to hearing the arguments. Over the past few years, I’ve leaned more towards the skeptics. The alarming unscientific behavior among the global warming elites does not impress me. The burden of proof is on them and I can’t be convinced to spend trillions of dollars on a solution to a problem given the group think, intimidation, demonization, and hypocrisy so many of them have committed. I simply can’t trust that these guys will accept data that contradicts what they’ve come to believe.
Number 2 is also in dispute. Some say it’s already too late. If computer models are any indication, they have no reliable way of modeling the effects of their solutions. After all, the earth is an extremely complex system.
Number 3- well, good luck. But even if that happens, there’s still number 4. Just look at Europe. People won’t be willing to throw themselves into an economic depression over this. In most countries, it would be nothing more than a lame feel-good effort to boast that we’re “doing something.”
If the catastrophes do indeed occur, at least we’ll be poorer and thus less able to cope with them. The irony is that by destroying economic behavior, we may never know what innovations we miss out on, and that includes energy technology. The first thing that companies cut in bad economies is research and development. If a silver bullet, such as controlled nuclear fusion, is to come along, it won’t come from a third-world country, nor will it come from us if we impoverish ourselves.
My solution: keep the economy strong so research and development can continue and we can develop ways to cope with the catastrophes should they happen.
By the way, Paul Krugman thinks I’m a traitor.
And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.
And gosh, I thought economists wanted me to think in terms of costs and benefits. Now I’m committing treason for doing so.
UPDATE: I came across an article in the Washington Post with the same title as this blog post written two days later. No, I am not Michael Feldstein and it is very unlikely that he copied the title from me. I guess some titles are simply too obvious.
It is a pretty good article that I would recommend reading. It explains in simple terms how the bill would work and why it’s flawed, even if the science itself is flawless.
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