...We won’t have productive conversations in Congress about climate policy until the pro-“action” (i.e. pro-tax, pro-regulation) side starts acknowledging some basic realities:
(1) Affordable, abundant energy is a blessing, not a curse. As Cato Institute scholar Indur Goklany explains in a recent study, fossil fuels, by dramatically increasing the productivity of food production, distribution, and storage, “saved humanity from nature and nature from humanity.” The same fossil-fueled productivity gains that emancipated mankind from the Malthusian trap of overpopulation and famine also helped spare 2.3 billion hectares of habitat (an area the size of the U.S., Canada, and India combined) that would otherwise have to be converted to cropland to maintain today’s farm output.
Fossil fuels have been and remain the chief energy source of a “cycle of progress” in which economic growth, technological change, human capital formation, and freer trade co-evolve and mutually reinforce each other. If “action” advocates want to be taken seriously, they must stop demonizing these still vital sources of human and environmental well-being.
(2) Carbon mitigation schemes make nations and consumers poorer, not richer. Heritage Foundation economists David Kreutzer and Nicholas Loris compared household income, utility bills, gasoline prices, and job creation in two policy scenarios (“side cases”) in the EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2012. Compared to the “no greenhouse gas concern” case, the $25/ton carbon tax case cut the income of a family of four by $1,900 per year in 2016, increased the family-of-four energy bill by more than $500 per year (not counting the cost of gasoline), and reduced employment by more than 1 million jobs in 2016 alone. If “action” advocates want to be taken seriously, they must stop pretending that carbon mitigation schemes are “win-win.”
(3) Carbon mitigation policies have social costs. Livelihoods, living standards, and life expectancy are linked by more than etymology. Given the continuing indispensability of fossil fuels to human flourishing and the mortality risks of poverty and unemployment, carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, and renewable energy mandates can easily do more harm than good to public health. If “action” advocates want to be taken seriously, they must stop ignoring the social costs of carbon mitigation.
(4) We can’t get there from here. Because affordable energy is vital to prosperity and much of the world is energy poor, it would be economically ruinous and, thus, politically suicidal to make people abandon fossil fuels before cheaper alternative energies are available. In “Rethinking Wedges,” Davis et al. (2013) conclude that “Current technologies and systems cannot provide the amounts of carbon-free energy needed soon enough or affordably enough” to meet projected global energy demand and stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations at 500 parts per million. If “action” advocates want to be taken seriously, they must stop pretending that the only or main thing lacking to “solve” the “climate crisis” is political will.
(5) Many findings in climate science are reassuring, not alarming. For many years, the “action” crowd’s constant refrain has been that climate change is “even worse” than scientists previously believed – as if all news in climate science must inevitably be bad news. This once-fashionable narrative is no longer credible.
One reason is simply that “it’s worse than we predicted” is hard to square with a 15-year period of no-net warming. The long pause in warming is a development most scientists did not predict and struggle to explain. Whatever the underlying causes, the observed warming rate over the past 15 years is lower than the IPCC’s best estimate, as this graph by NASA scientist Roy Spencer clearly shows...
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