More Carbon to Fight Global Briskness

Ace notes the U.N. finding that 2008 is likely to be a cool year — a trend that has now lasted for a full decade. He sarcastically comments that ‘this is all just further evidence that the earth is boiling over.’ But Ace misses the essential basis of apocalyptic environmentalism. It’s not that the Earth is warming, it’s that human beings are doing something that screws up the planet, and therefore we must make costly and uncomfortable changes to our lifestyle. That was the solution when scientists feared a new ice age, and it’s true now when we’re concerned about
global warming

climate change
global briskness. The proper question then is whether the time has come to adopt a complex and expensive new command-and-control regulatory regime designed to force greater carbon emissions, in an effort to stabilize world temperatures before the planet gets too brisk. Perhaps it’s time to mothball nuclear energy again, since it emits no greenhouse gases. Maybe it’s time to tell manufacturers to retire the emissions controls that they adopted within the last decade, and switch to state-of-the-art production techniques from 1950. Maybe people should be forbidden to purchase cars that get better than 20 miles to the gallon. While this may sound extreme — largely in conflict with what we’ve been told the last 10 years — it still accomplishes a critical goal: it makes us feel guilty and costs us an arm and a leg.