California’s legislation that is supposedly the rock in David’s slingshot which will help bring down the Goliath of global warming is in fact a pointless stunt that is based on wild imaginings, will do nothing to lessen the heating of the Earth and could impoverish California.
It’s a joke, my friends, a political travesty, and if California remains relatively unscathed, it will be because elected officials and bureaucrats ultimately will find ways to dodge the law’s imperatives, just as signatories to the Kyoto protocol have found ways to dodge that treaty’s obligations. They are not cutting greenhouse gas emissions as pledged. They are increasing those emissions because the alternative is gross economic hardship that would avail nothing.
The California legislation calling for reductions of these emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 depends for its success on technologies that don’t yet exist, which datum in and of itself should make any reasonable citizen of that state ponder the hubris and vacuousness — the downright looniness— that would lead elected officials to think they can mandate breakthrough innovations. If that’s a possibility, let’s do it for all sorts of human issues. Let’s pass bills curing all illness by whatever date we like. Why, what legislator could be so callous as to hold back?
The pretense is that the legislation relies on the free market because industries would be allowed to trade emission credits with each other and new companies would spring up to meet the demands for those technologies no one has figured out yet. It’s an interesting definition of market freedom to put the fate of businesses in the hands of central planners who will be fashioning the details of how to punish those that don’t salute, perhaps because it would mean financial devastation. For some businesses, the answer would be to flee to some sane state, perhaps soon to be followed by Californians tired of ultra-high energy prices they cannot afford.
For all of these faults in the legislation, you might still credit the legislators voting for it with some degree of informed good will if there were a solid argument to be made that the action had any likelihood at all of deterring global warming. When you start considering the extent of gases already in the atmosphere, the amount that will be added over the years before there would be reductions in the emitted amounts (assuming success), the increases we are facing in world population and energy use, it is an absurdity to think that one state — even a very big, very rich one — could make a difference.
The United States as a whole could adopt such a plan, and in the absence of new, effective, inexpensive, economy-spurring technologies making the whole industrialized world eager to follow suit, you would not affect the extent of warming that we keep hearing about from those who are most alarmed. The technology must come first. As the columnist Robert J. Samuelson has perceptively written after looking at the issue of sure-fire energy growth and the terrible pain of emission restrictions, some have made a “moral crusade” out of an issue that is “really an engineering problem.”
While I, myself, doubt that human-induced, catastrophic warming is anything close to a certainty — there are top climatologists who seriously question the thesis and few who claim unquestionable knowledge — it’s clear to me that the incentives for technological advances in the field are plentiful, that millions of dollars and Nobel Prizes await those who come up with answers. We don’t need capricious California to save us.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies.
