On Black Friday, the Trump administration released a report on climate change. The numbers reaffirmed the projections released earlier this year by the United Nations: The planet is warming, and the results will be devastating, in many cases irreversible.
The report, however, is not hopeless. The worst-case scenario can still be avoided, but only if we are able to sharply curtail emissions and take steps to adapt to a warming planet.
That prescription necessitates government intervention. Wary of government power, conservatives and libertarians are right to be skeptical. But as Josiah Neeley, the director of Energy Policy at the R Street Institute points out, even Milton Friedman noted that “there’s always a case for the government [to act] to some extent when what two people do affects a third party.”
Environmental protection fits that description perfectly, as Friedman himself said during his own lifetime. No, he did not prescribe the wholesale transfer of economic and social control to the government. Rather, he saw limited roles for intervention, and at the very least would have supported the elimination of subsidies for things like environmentally unfriendly fuels and the environmentally destructive processes of big sugar production and other deleterious industrial activity.
The timeline for intervening, however, is limited. As with the discussion of entitlement reform, failure to act now will necessitate more draconian and invasive interventions later. That leaves an option not between more or less government now, but between less government and even more government in the future.
Of course, there will be some who, like President Trump, argue that the United States should not subject itself to greater controls so long as larger polluters like China (and soon India) are unwilling to rein in their emissions. And yes, China’s increase in total carbon emissions this century is greater than total U.S. emissions, and it also more than cancels out all carbon reductions by the U.S. and the European Union combined since they hit their respective peaks.
But on a per capita basis, Americans are still emitting more than twice as much as the Chinese. The U.S. led the world in carbon reductions last year without destroying its economy. With modest intervention, there is a large and meaningful reduction that we can still make as countries like China and India catch up technologically.
Like it or not, we all share the same planet. Cutting emissions and adapting to changes is probably not going to be a particularly pleasant process. But, the sooner we start to take climate change and our response seriously, the less invasive government controls will be needed. For conservatives, that should be reason enough to support more aggressive polices — never mind the clear long-term economic cost of not taking action.
