What if someone came along and said he could take away the things we’re most afraid of? What if the way to assuage our fears came not from two prescriptions, but a single, bitter pill?
In the 21st century, two existential threats make Americans tremble like nothing else: terrorism and climate change. The recently released 2007 National Intelligence Estimate warns that al Qaeda has regenerated its “attack capability.” Meanwhile, the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Summary for Policymakers suggests Florida could soon be swimming.
Ironically, our fears tend to be rather partisan: Terrorism scares more people on the right, while climate change panics the left. It seems both ideological wings have forgotten FDR’s admonition that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
But since many Americans are already in fear’s grip, some have found opportunity therein. Politicians and their interest-seekers promise to take away our fears. But at what price?
Once we give them power, they claim, we need only give up one last thing: inexpensive energy. You see, the apparent solution to our worst fears lies simply in weaning ourselves from oil.
Those on the right reason that “energy independence” will make us less vulnerable to terrorists because if we curb our imports from the Middle East, fewer revenues will be siphoned off to fund jihadis. For those on the left, using less oil — any amount less — will at least mitigate the coming climate catastrophe.
I don’t intend to claim that Americans’ fears are irrational though they may be to varying degrees. Rather, the idea of the U.S. weaning itself from fossil fuels through government intervention is. So let’s just suppose that both of these existential fears have considerable basis in fact.
First, international oil markets are fiercely competitive. Global carbon taxes or cap-and-trade schemes would therefore become like one big Prisoner’s Dilemma. In other words, for any oil-weaning policy to work, we’d have to have global unanimity.
But just like us, the fastest-growing economies of the world use oil as their lifeblood. So China and India are not about to make any promises they can’t keep. Or if they do, they won’t keep them. So the U.S. will have shot itself in the proverbial foot if it sticks to an economically crippling carbon scheme while Beijing and New Delhi reap the benefits of less expensive oil that we’ve foregone.
All the while, the climate keeps changing and the terrorists still skim oil funds. What will we have achieved?
Second, it’s not clear — even if we could hurt the Middle East economically by using more domestic energy sources — that having more young jobless Muslims would be that great for the global climate of terrorism. So while we’d like to think we can suspend global energy trade to the detriment of terrorists, that’s simply a mirage.
So what do we do? We can’t simply tell people they have no reason to be afraid. We have a consensus of terror experts who say al Qaeda is gearing up for more attacks. We have a consensus of highly subsidized climate experts warning us about the theoretical harms caused by climate change. If we are going to trust experts, let’s at least listen to the consensus of economists who say that interrupting global energy trade while hobbling domestic energy — and thus, the economy — is abad idea.
As recently as 2006, a group of economists known as the Copenhagen Consensus — including a number of Nobel laureates — concluded that carbon taxes ranked last in terms of global economic priorities, behind issues like communicable disease, water, sanitation, education and migration. Dead last. In other words, the costs severely outweigh the benefits.
Simply put: There is no climate policy that could curb greenhouse gases enough to slow global warming to any appreciable degree without ruining the global economy.
There are scary things to face in a changing and dynamic world, to be sure. But we will be better able to confront such changes when we are vigilant and adaptive. And vigilance and adaptability are best enhanced by prosperity.
Low-impact, feel-good measures like biofuel subsidies and carbon taxes will only hurt us economically, making us more vulnerable to any threat we might face. But keeping government out of the economy — particularly the energy sector — gives us a better shot at staying wealthy and healthy.
Max Borders is an adjunct scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis.
