I recently came across an article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times International Weekly.1 It was a fascinating take on climate control and part of it reads like so:
Maybe it's me, but the right-wing cries of outrage over the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) proposed rules on carbon seem oddly muted and unfocused. I mean, these are the people who managed to create national outrage over nonexistent death panels. Now the Obama administration is doing something that really will impose some pain on some people. Where are the fake horror stories?
The attacks on the new rules mainly involve the three Cs: conspiracy, cost and China. That is, right wingers claim that there isn't any global warming, that it's all a hoax promulgated by thousands of scientists around the world; that taking action to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions would devastate the economy; and that, anyway, United States policy can't accomplish anything because China will just go on spewing stuff into the atmosphere.
On cost: It's reasonable to argue that new rules aimed at limiting emissions would have some negative effect on G.D.P. and family incomes. Even that isn't necessarily true. Regulations that require new investment could end up creating jobs. Still, the odds are that the E.P.A.'s actions will hurt just a little.
Contentions that the effects will be devastating are not just wrong, they are inconsistent with what the conservatives claim to believe. They are caught on the horns of a dilemma - when asked how the economy will cope with restricted supplies of resources they respond optimistically that the marketplace will provide the solutions. Their faith in the market drops, however when limits on pollution are announced - limits that would largely be imposed in market friendly ways such as cap-and-trade systems. Oddly, conservatives now insist that businesses will all of a sudden be unable to adjust, that there are no alternatives to doing everything exactly as they do it currently.
Until now, the right wing climate craziness has primarily been focused on attacking the science, and in quite a spectacular fashion I must add. At this point the endorsement (found in 97% of their literature) that climate change is a gargantuan pack of lies is the product of a vast international conspiracy. As the Obama administration moves toward actually doing something based on scientific fact, people should brace for a push from the right for crazy climate economics.
In a piece written by Mr. Krugman on May 11 2014, he stated:2
You can get a taste of what's coming in the dissenting opinions from a recent Supreme Court ruling on power-plant pollution. A majority of the justices agreed that the E.P.A. has the right to regulate smog from coal-fired power plants, which drifts across state lines. But Justice Antonin Scalia didn't just dissent; he suggested that the E.P.A.'s proposed rule - which would tie the size of required smog reductions to cost - reflected the Marxist concept of "from each according to his ability." Taking cost into consideration is Marxist? Who knew?
And you can just imagine what will happen when the E.P.A., buoyed by the smog ruling, moves on to regulation of Greenhouse gas emissions.
Crazy economics?
First, any effort to limit pollution denounced as a tyrannical act. Pollution wasn't always a deeply partisan issue: Economists in the George W. Bush administration wrote paeans to market based' pollution controls and in 2008 John McCain made proposals for cap-and-trade limits on greenhouse gases part of his presidential campaign. But when House Democrats actually passed a cap-and-trade bill in 2009, it was attacked as, you guessed it, Marxist.
Second, we'll see claims that any effort to limit emissions will have what Senator Marco Rubio is already calling a devastating impact on our economy.'
Why is this crazy? Normally conservatives extol the magic of markets and the adaptability of the private sector, which is supposedly able to transcend with ease any constraints posed by, say, limited supplies of natural resources. But as soon as anyone proposes adding a few limits to reflect environmental issues - such as a cap on carbon emissions - those all-capable corporations supposedly lose any ability to cope with change.
So the coming firestorm over new power-plant regulations won't be a genuine debate - just as there isn't a genuine debate about climate science. Instead, the airwaves will be filled with conspiracy theories and wild claims about costs, all of which should be ignored. Climate policy may finally be getting somewhere; let's not let crazy climate economics get in the way.
That doesn't appear to be realistic, and it's not what careful analysis says. It's not even what studies paid for by opponents of climate action say. The United States Chamber of Commerce commissioned a report intended to show the terrible costs of the E.P.A. policy - a report that made the least favourable assumptions possible. Even with that the numbers that came out were embarrassingly small. In short, coming down hard on coal simply won't cripple the U.S. economy.
The other side of the coin is the international aspect. Currently the U.S. accounts for 17 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions while China dumps 27 percent - a number that's rapidly rising. It's painfully clear that America acting alone can't save the planet. International cooperation is the only way. It is that, however, that tells the U.S. they need the new policy. The country can't take the moral high-ground against emissions while sitting on its hands and doing nothing. The only way the game will begin in Europe and Japan is when America gets going.
That leaves China. Many cynics declare that China will simply go ahead and burn any coal that others don't. But China is enormously dependent on access to advanced-country markets - a lot of the coal it burns can be attributed, directly or indirectly, to its export business - and it knows that it would put this access at risk if it refused to play any role in protecting the planet. On top of that, if and when wealthy countries take serious action to limit GHGs, they're likely to start imposing carbon tariffs' on goods imported from countries that aren't taking similar action. Such tariffs should be legal under existing trade rules - the World Trade Organization would probably declare that carbon limits are effectively a tax on consumers, which can be levied on imports as well as domestic production. Furthermore, trade rules do give special consideration to environmental protection. So China would find itself with strong incentives to start limiting emissions.
The new carbon policy, then, is supposed to be the beginning, not the end, a domino that, once pushed over, should start a chain reaction that leads, finally, to global steps to limit climate change. Do we know that it will work? Of course not. But it's vital that we try.
1 Krugman, P. "The Climate Domino." New York Times International Weekly. (June 15 2014):
2 Krugman, P. "Crazy Climate Economics." New York Times Weekly. (May 11 2014):
