Global Nonsense

As we huddled in the Kansas City airport, the sleeting rain turned to blowing snow and flights were being cancelled left and right. Many travelers had waited all day in the airport only to learn at 6PM that they needed to find a place to stay the night. Linda and I were lucky that our Midwest Air jet was on a round trip to Los Angeles and we were able to leave for home before KCI was socked in. We would have welcomed some global warming as we waited on the runway for our plane to be de-iced.

Do you know that 2007 has been a year of global cooling. The Southern Hemisphere experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Brazil and Peru hundreds of people died from exposure to the record cold. Extreme cold weather is occurring worldwide. Yet global warming hysteria prevails. From a Washington Times article by David Deming (Dec. 19): “If you think any of the preceding facts can falsify global warming, you're hopelessly naive. Nothing creates cognitive dissonance in the mind of a true believer. In 2005, a Canadian Greenpeace representative explained ‘global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter.’ In other words, all weather variations are evidence for global warming. I can't make this stuff up.”

In a Real Clear Politics article (12/18/07) former Democratic NYC mayor Ed Koch asks “Does Gore Know What He's Talking About?” Among the relevant points in Koch’s piece is the fact that "China will surpass the United States in 2009, nearly a decade ahead of previous predictions, as the biggest emitter of the main gas linked to global warming." Said Lu Xuedu, the deputy director general of the Chinese Office of Global Environmental Affairs, "You cannot tell people who are struggling to earn enough to eat that they need to reduce their emissions." Then from the Wall Street Journal: "Under the vaunted Kyoto, from 2000 to 2004, Europe managed to increase its emissions by 2.3% over 1995 to 2000. Meanwhile in the U.S., under the president's oh-so-unserious plan, U.S. emissions from 2000 to 2004 were 8% lower than in the prior period."

While the “advanced” nations (primarily Euroland) fret about the threat of environmental disaster and the undeveloped nations dream of wealth transfers from the wealthy ones (especially the U.S.) Andrew Lilico (Conservative Home, 12/18/07) notes that even if humans are causing the planet to heat up, it is a classic error in policy formulation to assume we should stop doing so. “When formulating policy, we should always bear in mind a number of principles:”

1. It does not follow, from the mere fact that we can tell a story that something is wrong that anything needs to be done about it. It is only once we have a compelling account of why the market cannot solve these problems that our analysis even gets going.

2. It does not follow from the mere fact that there is a problem that the Market cannot address, that intervention by the government can address the problem any better.

3. It does not follow from the fact that the government could, in principle, intervene to make things better, that any particular intervention is actually one that makes this problem better.

4. And finally, even if a specific intervention would, indeed, make things better, it does not follow either that it is the best intervention available or that it will not have other impacts (costs and risks) that are worse than the problem it is trying to solve.

Lilico notes that climate models and associated economic analyses suggest that without mitigation the costs of climate change might be perhaps 5% of GDP in 2100. To place this in context, people in 2100 are expected to be five times as wealthy as today. So the effect of unmitigated global warming is that they will only be 4.75 times as rich as us. Horrors!

He concludes: “Mainstream climate models do not predict that the world will end. Consequently we are not faced with a desperate race against time in which we aim just to do as much as we possibly can, hoping that tomorrow we will be able to do more. Rather, we are in the situation of normal policymaking, in which it may well be that there is a policy intervention that makes the world a better place by reducing the impact of climate change at fairly low cost, but each intervention needs to be judged on its own merits.”

But the politicians and the global warming industrialists do not see it that way. They prefer to impose government sanctions and to hell with the economic consequences.

A favorite of the European community and now the U.S. Congress is the “Cap and Trade” scheme. Yet Neil O’Brien of Open Europe calls the scheme a failure (OnPoint with Monica Trauzzi, 12/5/07).

Monica Trauzzi: So what's the core issue with the E.U. emission trading scheme?

Neil O'Brien: Well, I suppose the core issue really is that it hasn't reduced emissions. So, in the first year of it working, for example in the UK, emissions have actually gone up by 3.6 percent.

Monica Trauzzi: Hasn't this trading system provided clarity for businesses though?

Neil O'Brien: No. I mean that's one of the criticisms of it. It's exactly that you don't get certainty. If you have an emissions trading system there, the fundamental thing about it is you're accepting that the price of carbon is going to move around. It's going to be volatile. In Europe the price of carbon has crashed hugely from being about €33 a ton down to just a couple of euro cents a ton. So there's no real incentive to reduce pollution at all. And a lot of people got really badly burned.

Monica Trauzzi: Qualify the success of the trading system then. Is it a total failure or are there some redeeming qualities?

Neil O'Brien: This sounds like a hard thing to say, but really it is at the moment a total failure. It's not reducing emissions. It's very costly. I mean just the administrative burden of running it is about a billion euros a year, so in the U.S. it would be something roughly comparable.

Monica Trauzzi: So, domestically, do you see red flags here with the U.S. Lieberman-Warner bill? Based on what you've seen in Europe are you concerned?

Neil O'Brien: I would be concerned for your sake because what you're trying to do is even more complicated than what we've done and we've not managed to make our system work. It's just fundamentally a tricky thing to do. Lieberman-Warner is more complicated in two different ways. Firstly, you have this very overt move to import 15 percent of credits from abroad. So until the 2020s you're talking about not making any emission reductions through the scheme yourself. You're going to be paying people in China to make emissions reductions. And secondly, getting the right allocation is fundamentally tricky because it involves policymakers trying to guess the future of energy prices, the future of the growth of the economy, the future of technology change for the several years ahead. And in the proposal of Lieberman-Warner they're trying to guess all those kinds of variables over a period going to 2050. I would anticipate an even more volatile or uncertain price within the American system than the E.U. one, which is going to make it very, very hard for businesses to invest. And so you won't get the kind of technological innovation that is the whole point of this exercise.

It’s all Nonsense!

Bali, the War on Poverty

Joining the Democratic Party with the JFK election, I was proud to be a Kennedy Liberal. The president stood for strength in foreign affairs and for patriotism. “Ask not what your country can do for you …” resounded in my soul, and “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty” made me proud to be an American. When John Kennedy was assassinated my friends and I were crushed. We were also worried about the unattractive Lyndon Johnson; would he take the country on the course mapped out by our hero?

We were surprised by Johnson’s leadership in the civil rights movement. But being of draft age we were horrified by the interminable Vietnam War. Why wouldn’t Johnson just bomb the hell out of Hanoi? A little nuke should have done the trick, as we know from General Jiap’s memoirs.

While losing the Vietnam War, Johnson’s bright guys began another war, the War on Poverty. Having set the colossal forces of government in action, the intellectual elites found it impossible to admit that they were losing and that their methods were actually making matters worse.

The Democratic Party continued changing over the years, and not for the better. The op-ed article “The Gentry Liberals” by Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel in the Los Angeles Times (12/2/07) explains that the Democrat leadership today is “more concerned with global warming and gay rights than with lunch-pail Joes.” Kotkin and Siegel trace the change to the ascendance in the Democratic Party hierarchy of an “intelligent aristocracy” whose governance would be guided by “enlightened policy.”

David Halberstam wrote about “the best and the brightest” brought into the JFK/LBJ administrations who arrogantly insisted on pursuing "brilliant policies that defied common sense." Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called these academic liberals “the vital center” but they never occupied the center and their progeny today push the envelope of the left wing. They obsess over abortion rights, gay marriage, global warming and the habeas corpus rights of war criminals while the middle class and the political center worry about terrorism, job security, affordable housing and the rising cost of education and energy.

According to Kotkin and Siegel, it is the “green tint” that distances liberals furthest from the values and interests of the middle and working (aka lower) classes. Furthermore, the crusade to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by forcing the US to adhere to the Kyoto/Bali protocols is bound to end up hurting the middle and working classes economically. Rich liberals like Al Gore can afford to buy expensive hybrid cars (Al drives a Lexus LS 600h that gets 1 mpg less than its non-hybrid brother, but has a heck of a lot more horses.) and pay $5 for a gallon of gas.

With Kyoto petering out to no good effect, the global warming industries are gathering the UN-190 in Bali to divvy up the loot sure to be generated from trading carbon credits and the like. A recent New York Times editorial claims that the US cannot expect other countries to cut greenhouse emissions “unless it acts decisively at home.” Of course this is wrong on two counts. The EU countries will continue their cap-and-trade ways whatever the US does because (1) they love socialism and (2) it is the only way they can feel superior to the US. The developing nations, conversely, will happily accept subsidies from the rest of us while accelerating their production and use of fossil fuels. The Chinese are on track to build one coal-fired power plant per week for the next 10 years no matter what the US does.

As Phil Valentine notes “global warming is being used as a template to rob from the rich nations and give to the poor ones.” The UN issued a report last week that baldly admitted the truth: developed nations will need to cough up about $86 Billion per year to “strengthen the capacity of vulnerable people.” Of course most of that dough will be “skimmed off by tinhorn dictators, the same rabble that runs the U.N.” Brazil’s lefty president wants the US to pay to stop Brazil from cutting down their rain forests: “In Bali, we are going to very seriously discuss the price rich countries have to pay so that poorer countries can preserve their forests.”

Ironically, this Kyoto/Bali juncture comes at a time when the US carbon dioxide emissions are actually down 1.5 percent. I wonder if the “Gentry Liberals” know that.