Here’s what policy-makers should not do if they are concerned about the United Nation’s latest report on global warming and want to make the planet less vulnerable to the possibilities of disaster in the decades and centuries ahead.
They should not come up with ideas that will exact enormous economic pain while producing only marginal benefits. Do that, and you’ll never get some nations aboard in the first place and most of those that do come aboard will evade the obligations they agreed to. If some do in fact follow through and suffer and see nothing on the anti-warming scoreboard, you will have made future enthusiasm for proffered answers less likely.
Take a look at the Kyoto treaty, and you will see something very much of this failure-inviting kind, a malformed product of international, overly eager, bureaucratic compromise that would have been particularly punishing and unfair to the United States. Even before George W. Bush was elected president, Congress decided by 95 to nothing it didn’t even want to consider a pact whose lack of credibility can be summed up by a simple fact: It did not apply to two of the major sources of greenhouse gases in the decades ahead, China and India.
To date, Kyoto has produced more heroic pretensions than actual results. The ratifying nations are not speeding happily toward their goals, but just every now and then looking up to notice they aren’t close. That’s wise if hypocritical: The risk of economic mayhem is hardly worth the minimal impact on thermometers a half century from now, when magnifying glasses would be necessary to see the slight difference even total compliance would make.
Better answers reside in turning to some straightforward measures that could serve the fight against pollution and for energy independence even if there were no hint of warming.
So: Rely more on nuclear power; further explore coal gasification; dump trade restrictions on importing sugar-based ethanol from Brazil; impose higher taxes on the consumption of fossil fuels as evidence of need requires; continue to engage with China and India in the search for solutions; encourage research and development of alternative fuels; be respectful enough of history to know that a free market will respond with technological innovations, and understand that we will never solve the problem without them. Right now, we just don’t have tools adequate to the task, as Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia points out.
It would not hurt as we march in this direction to understand that some warming problems can be met by adaptation as we go along and to keep in mind that scientist-dissenters to the theme of catastrophic, human-induced global warming are hardly the bought souls or criminals against humanity that irresponsible critics insist they are, but brave, bright, honest people whose skepticism might yet prove right. We are not dealing in certainties in the U.N.’s list of probabilities, but on deductions that may be in error because of the many unknowns and the ideological proclivities of some of the study’s participants.
But not to do the best thinking we can in response to those hundreds of scientists involved in the study would be both imprudent and unfair to those who might suffer most drastically if the predictions are correct and there is something meaningful we ultimately can do. We should be prepared for sacrifice, but remain calm and practical, refusing to commit economic suicide despite the contrary pleas of greenies: We must avoid the socialist, self-defeating, Kyoto-like controls that are finally nothing more than gestures both futile and harmful.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He may be reached at [email protected]
