Global warming realists (that is, those who don’t buy the Al Gore-like catastrophism because they see the earth is no warmer than it was 12 years ago) often make great economic arguments against energy taxes, but too many of them stop short of addressing the science. They shouldn’t.
The costs demand attention. President Obama’s economic advisers admit that their boss’s proposed cap-and-trade scheme – which will indirectly tax greenhouse gas emissions (mostly from electrical utilities’ coal-fired power plants) that exceed a yet-undetermined limit – will hit Americans up for an additional $2 trillion over the next eight years. A more straightforward carbon tax would lead to similar pain. These consequences should be highlighted often.
But many who make these points – like those in conservative talk radio or some taxpayer activist groups – don’t go far enough. If I had a dime for every friend I have among global warming skeptics who say, “we don’t want to get into the science…we want to talk about the economics,” I would have a lot of dimes.
I understand. I wasn’t the world’s greatest science student, but now that I’m in the middle of climate change politics, I see that only telling the cost side only tells half.
It’s not hard, really. You can follow the economic argument against greenhouse gas mitigation right into the science. Every business transaction an individual makes takes into account two questions: What is the cost, and what is the benefit derived from that potential expenditure?
With greenhouse gas mitigation, we’ve talked plenty about the financial hit. Whether you’re: taxing carbon fuels directly; or subsidizing cleaner substitutes like wind, solar or biofuels; or subsidizing not-yet-ready technologies like carbon capture and storage, the costs are steep.
But that leaves unanswered questions for the lesser informed public about the other side of the ledger: What are the benefits? And do the benefits outweigh the costs, even with their heavy price?
Answering these questions means science must be addressed, because the alarmists’ wished-for solutions imply that something will change in the atmosphere – and thus affect global warming – because of the proposed carbon-constraining policies. This is when the alarmists run away from the science they so adamantly claim that they stand behind.
How? Because they cannot explain how much greenhouse gas reduction – in whatever quantities they propose – will cause global temperatures to change. For all their jargon-filled technological conversations about how to “solve the problem,” they only measure their goals in terms of emissions averted or stopped – usually quantified in “million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent,” or MMtCO2e. How’s that for an absurd, beside-the-point acronym?
These whimsical planet-saving discussions have been held in more than half the states in the country, among bureaucrat- and lobbyist-laden government study panels, all purportedly to avert global warming. Yet these so-called climate commission members never ask climate scientists or economists what they think.
So the science argument is as easy as asking these alarmists: What will the climate do when we lower MMtCO2e’s? Can you doomsayers who so haughtily and demandingly chant “Science! Science! Science!” tell us how your plans will lower temps, save sea levels, and spare species?
They never answer, so you can conclude that the “benefit” side of the ledger is zero. It’s an easy science class: show up, stump the teacher(s), and get an “A.”
Paul Chesser is director of Climate Strategies Watch (climatestrategieswatch.com) a free-market, limited-government project that assesses global warming commissions in the states.
