The politicization of the Global Warming debate has led to great confusion about what the real issues are.
After all, who can dispute the importance of caring for natural resources? Of avoiding pollution? Of developing alternative sources of energy. This is not where the debate lies.
There isn't even real debate over the existence of climate change. The questions here amount to understanding whether recent climate change has been significant, whether it will continue, and how it was caused. But these issues are not the ones that we should pay attention to either, because they are scientific ones and we do not yet have a definitive grasp on the issue.
The great question that should be of concern to you and me is what the proper role of government is, and that is the purpose of this post. I'm writing in an airport lounge in Atlanta, the busiest airport in the United States, an epicenter of carbon emissions.
In his address to Congress, President Obama described his plan to implement carbon taxes, a system of cap and trade. As is the case with most tax proposals, the implication is that the offending businesses will be affected, promoting social change in a way that has little or no effect on the everyman. This is simply untrue. The higher costs of carbon taxes will be passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices and higher unemployment across affected industries. Some erstwhile supporters of cap and trade have seen it take on a conceptual form they are less comfortable with, and may now become opposed. This just proves that attempts to paint companies like ExxonMobil as having accepted their role in climate change due to their acceptance of cap and trade is inaccurate. ExxonMobil's incentive to participate has been based more on their desire to help craft the regime. To remain opposed might have left them and others out in the cold. Now that Congressional Democrats are at their feistiest those large entities will probably be left out anyway.
But again, let's come back to the core question- what is the role of government?
I want to lay out some assumptions:
- Government has finite resources. Although revenues may increase in absolute terms, by and large a focus on one area will lead resources away from another.
- Government resources should be used in the public good, both long and short-term.
I think these are generally accepted principles. It is on item two that the most serious disagreement lies with regard to its implementation.
People like Bjorn Lomborg have argued that the best use of government resources are in those areas where we will derive the greatest return on that investment. This includes clean water initiatives to reduce child mortality. This is a tremendous problem, and completely preventable. It's diagnosis relies on no shaky data, on no fake consensus. This is not to say that the government should ignore environmental concerns, but the money should go where they can have the greatest impact, and combating climate change just doesn't meet that standard.
Not that you would know it from watching Al Gore and his fellow warming alarmists. Despite many opportunities to give his critics a fair debate,
Gore continues to assert that we near a point of no return. This kind of fear-mongering has never led to ideal outcomes- the Patriot Act, TARP, and the recent fiscal stimulus are good examples. You can view the video below to see if Gore is willing to respond to an honest intellectual debate:
I care about providing a clean and beautiful earth to those that follow me, but with finite government resources we are right to be exceedingly careful about how those are used. The debate continues.
