"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Thursday, June 26, 2008

You’ve got to love Doctor Lomborg:

Many people believe that everyone has a moral obligation to ask how we can best combat climate change. Attempts to curb carbon emissions along the lines of the bill now pending are a poor answer compared with other options.

Consider that today, solar panels are one-tenth as efficient as the cheapest fossil fuels. Only the very wealthy can afford them. Many “green” approaches do little more than make rich people feel they are helping the planet. We can’t avoid climate change by forcing a few more inefficient solar panels onto rooftops.

The answer is to dramatically increase research and development so that solar panels become cheaper than fossil fuels sooner rather than later. Imagine if solar panels became cheaper than fossil fuels by 2050: We would have solved the problem of global warming, because switching to the environmentally friendly option wouldn’t be the preserve of rich Westerners.

This message was recently backed up by the findings of the Copenhagen Consensus project, which gathered eight of the world’s top economists—including five Nobel laureates—to examine research on the best ways to tackle 10 global challenges: air pollution, conflict, disease, global warming, hunger and malnutrition, lack of education, gender inequity, lack of water and sanitation, terrorism, and trade barriers.

These experts looked at the costs and benefits of different responses to each challenge. Their goal was to create a prioritized list showing how money could best be spent combating these problems.

The panel concluded that the least effective use of resources in slowing global warming would come from simply cutting carbon dioxide emissions.

Research for the project was done by a lead author of the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the group that shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize with former vice president Al Gore—who noted that spending $800 billion over 100 years solely on mitigating emissions would reduce inevitable temperature increases by just 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century. Even accounting for the key environmental damage from warming, we would lose money, with avoided damage of just $685 billion for our $800 billion investment.

The economists didn’t conclude that the world should ignore the effects of climate change. They pointed out that a better response than cutting emissions would be to dramatically increase research and development on low-carbon energy—such as solar panels and second-generation biofuels.

A big problem with the global warming policies being proposed is that they pledge to battle global warming a long time from now.  The goal of the stupid cap-and-trade law was to reduce emissions by 2050, when most of the authors of the legislation will be, technically speaking, dead.

There are much more constructive things to do and they can be done very cheaply and they can done right now.  We could invest money and resources in reducing industrial methane emissions around the world.  Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and is pure pollutant.  Eliminating industrial methane emissions would be like taking every car off the road forever and would have little impact on wealth.  We could invest in R&D on solar power and nuclear fusion.  We could pass tougher mileage standards—real standards, not the kind that can be met by having one car that nobody buys but gets 50 mpg.

But mostly, we can let the market go nuts.  The high price of oil has not only cut our driving but forced the automakers to invest heavily in more efficient cars.  The high price of food is shifting the world’s diet slightly more vegetarian, which cuts down on livestock methane.  A kick of federal money would help, but it’s not that necessary.

But then again, technical innovation, industrial might, scientific research.  These are all very good.  But they don’t meet the goal of demonizing business, stunting economic growth and lavishing power on the federal government.  For a lot of the greens—and a lot of our politicians—global warming is simply a means to that end.