The Politics of Climate Change

Last week, George Will used the listing of the polar bear as "threatened" as the basis for a sharp assessment of green politics. His column deservesto be read in its entirety, but here's a taste.

Today's "green left" is the old "red left" revised. Marx, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist, prophesied deepening class conflict but thought that history's violent dialectic would culminate in a revolution that would usher in material abundance and such spontaneous cooperation that the state would wither away.

The green left preaches pessimism: Ineluctable scarcities (of energy, food, animal habitat, humans' living space) will require a perpetual regime of comprehensive rationing. The green left understands that the direct route to government control of almost everything is to stigmatize, as a planetary menace, something involved in almost everything -- carbon.

Sound harsh? Consider K.C. Golden's op-ed in today's Seattle Times. He writes in support of the Climate Security Act (aka the Lieberman-Warner bill). The National Association of Manufacturers, with which AWB is associated, has published an analysis of the proposed legislation, concluding:

...if passed into law, [the bill] would have a profound economic impact on U.S. businesses, consumers and governments nationally and in all 50 states. A sampling of the national findings includes:

o Gross Domestic Product (GDP) losses of $151 billion to $210 billion in 2020 and $631 billion to $669 billion per year in 2030
o Employment losses of 1.2 million to 1.8 million jobs in 2020 and 3 million to 4 million jobs in 2030
o Household income losses of $739 to $2,927 per year in 2020 and $4,022 to $6,752 per year in 2030
o Electricity price increases of 28% to 33% by 2020 and 101% to 129% by 2030
o Gasoline price increases (per gallon) of 20% to 69% by 2020 and 77% to 145% by 2030

Golden, of course, doesn't reference those figures, but opines that the bill is, at best, just a good first step:

The vote on the Climate Security Act marks an important whistle-stop on the train to real climate solutions.

He favors

a full-throated roar of solutions, not a soft whimper of palliatives

Sounds ambitious. And how can you argue with logic like this?

The frequency of major floods like this winter's devastation in Southwest Washington has increased by 300 to 700 percent on every continent except Australia since the 1950s. No one of these events can be ascribed to global warming, but the trend is hardly a coincidence.

None of them can be ascribed to climate change, but all of them can be? "Hardly a coincidence" falls short of "settled science," doesn't it?

Oh well. Power Line has a nice post on just how complicated the proposed legislation is, with a link to the U.S. Chamber.

See also Eric Earling's post at Sound Politics on climate change politics in the gubernatorial race here.

More The good folks at Sightline Daily report that Robert Reich has joined the fray, talking about "climate fairness." Golden's piece also made "be fair" one of the three things national climate policy must do well.

As in tax debates, when the discussion turns to what's fair, beware. In the eyes of the beholder and all that.