Jun 27 2009, 3:49PM
A Predictably Liberal Take on Global Warming
Jim Manzi slaps me with two charges of being a predictable liberal and one (implicit) charge of being insufficiently familiar with the blogging oeuvre of Jim Manzi. Your honor, I'd like to contest one of those charges. Manzi says I claim the science "now says things will be even worse than we previously thought," as a way to "inflate the analyzed costs of global warming." I think that pretty adeptly misses the point of my last post, so let me try making it again.
Once more: I don't think making a compelling case for regulating carbon emissions requires cherrypicking the most apocalyptic warming estimate. (The cherrypicking is sufficient but not necessary.) Even if we maximize the shared space of factual agreement -- by looking at the uncontroversial 2007 IPCC report -- it's fairly easy to find a compelling case for regulating emissions. That case doesn't rest on the prediction of a world in which Manhattan is underwater and global output -- much less American output -- falls by 10 or 15 percent. The case for regulation rests on those things happening to developing nations that are (1) less responsible for and (2) less able to adapt to climate change.
Is that a predictable, moralistic, high-horse liberal crusade? Yup. But, happily and naturally, being predictable doesn't imply being wrong. And I don't even get the sense that Manzi thinks the crusade is "wrong." He just thinks it's "not as obvious" as I suggest. Well, inquiring minds can decide for themselves. Here's a link to the latest IPCC report. Give it a read.
Picture of some predictable liberal via Wikimedia Commons.
No matter how serious you think warming is, you should at least think about the problems with this argument. Not only, what if warming is overestimated, but what if cap and trade can't be sold to the third world.
If that's the future, what's the point of doing this?
And you refuse to consider the side effects of cap and trade. Whole industries like wind and solar will be formed based on nothing more than government subsidies. Other industries will be distorted or shut down based on nothing more than government penalties.
And that since they are giving away permits, the best way for a polluting industry to proceed is not to improve its process, but to increase its lobbying efforts.
None of that seems to bother you at all.
Yes, I think the concerns here are overstated. I do think I've tried to express my disappoinment re this bill in other posts -- and in case that's been unclear let me say for the record that the bill will impose costs and has many unseemly rent-seeking provisions that I wish it didn't have.
But I really do think the economic logic cuts in only one direction here. If you believe, as I do, that individual market actors are creating externalities, then we will end up with a suboptimal social outcome. It is absolutely the proper place of government to create some mechanism for having individual consumers and firms internalize those costs.
As I read it, the serious disagreement here is one of degree, not kind: ie, When does the social cost become prohibitive? And how drastically should we try to curtail that social cost? That disagreement should not obscure the fact that this is a textbook case of when government can and should intervene in the market.
Conor
The problem is that you are ignoring major factors when you do your cost/benefit analysis.
You put the compliance cost on one side (using these CBO estimates which I think are unrealistically low) and assume a huge benefit based on nothing but climate model projections.
You are ignoring all the costs associated with rent-seeking, and with government control over sectors of the economy. You are ignoring that benefits are reduced if companies flee the U.S., or if cap and trade can't be extended worldwide.
You regard these as quibbles, since we "did the best we could" on the legislation. But they are still real factors which change the cost/benefits.
If you account for those factors, this legislation goes from negative (for us, since warming won't cost us much) to very negative (since government subsidies and control will be impossible to get rid of.)
Global warming will eventually be solved by some technical development, like a better battery, a cheap CO2 sequestration technology, a more efficient solar panel, some biotech solution, or perhaps cheaper nuclear power.
The incentives are already there for any of those things to happen. In the meantime, cap and trade and other government programs will impose a hair shirt solution on us all, just to score political points with Greens. It won't accelerate the technology a bit, and will weaken the rest of the economy.
It's pointless.
CBO is unrealistically low? Wow, well I'm glad we have an expert here. I guess you've been reading the heritage propaganda.
Why are government controls impossible to get rid of. You create an economic incentive, like co-pay, like welfare reform, like consumption tax, like a host of other incentives which guide consumption and once everyone moves from carbon to green no one is under any carbon regulation anymore. As for subsidies, do you really think if the entire nation ran on ethanol that the government would still be subsidizing it? really? There would be no subsidies in a world that switches to green technology.
He's not ignoring anything. If the CBO thought that so much industry would flee to other countries that it would significantly hurt the GDP then they would certainly account for this.
As for "solving" global warming by a technological development, it is VERY CLEAR that you have no science cred. Maybe you know the drop in C02 emissions of complete adoption to battery power cars, or the current efficiency of photovoltaics. And funny you bring up nuclear power. There's a certain European country that has 5 times less emissions per capita using nuclear. Hmmm, I wonder how they got it to work?
Whether or not other countries adopt cap-and-trade is immaterial. The US puts out a 5th of the total C02, and we can make a big dent.
If you saw someone drowning in a shallow pond, you would save them even if it meant getting your clothes muddy, right? And this doesn't matter if they are on the other side of the world, right? Well we are talking about real GDP, and many many real lives of the most vulnerable that that will cost us very little, (and based on the most recent CBO esitmates might result in a net benefit of 40 dollars per household.) All we need to do is get a little muddy.