Climate pressure tactics

Nov. 20, 2006
As though uncertainty over promised benefits didn’t provide reason enough to be skeptical, climate alarmists are undermining their agenda with pressure tactics designed to squelch rather than win arguments.

As though uncertainty over promised benefits didn’t provide reason enough to be skeptical, climate alarmists are undermining their agenda with pressure tactics designed to squelch rather than win arguments. By now, futility of the clumsily fabricated Kyoto Protocol is obvious. Repeated claims about a “consensus” of scientists have degenerated into discredited propaganda. And former US Vice-President Al Gore’s sermons about the moral imperative of believing whatever he says about global warming speak for themselves.

By nature, however, zeal never rests. A portion of humanity has convinced itself that people are warming the climate dangerously. So it demands that all of humanity change behavior. It declares scientific arguments to have been settled in its favor and rejects suggestions to the contrary as apostasy. It scoffs at precautionary suggestions that differ from its own.

These are not the persuasive activities of groups comfortable with the logic of their position. They seem, in fact, desperately manipulative. And they characterize two decades of global warming politics.

New gambits

Most visible in a new round of pressure gambits is a report by Nicholas Stern, head of the UK Government Economic Service and former chief economist of the World Bank. The report claims that failure to act on climate change will generate costs and risks equivalent to at least 5%/year of global gross domestic product, “now and forever,” and perhaps 20%/year or more. And it says the cost of avoiding the worst effects of climate change, requiring cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions of 25% between now and 2050 “and perhaps much more,” can be held to 1%/year of global GDP.

Who wouldn’t invest 1%/year of economic output to avoid 20%/year of cost? But the deal’s not that good. Critics of the 575-page Stern Report point to flaws, including reliance on worst-case assumptions about climate change, problems with cost estimates, and sparse attention to the possible benefits of climate change and to remediation strategies other than forced cuts in carbon emissions.

Hard on the heels of the Stern Report came a proposal from French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin that the European Union impose a carbon tax on imports from countries rejecting international efforts to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. The blending of policy imperialism with protectionist greed is clever. It probably deserves sacramental status in Gore’s moral scheme.

More insidious is an effort in the US to force regulation of greenhouse gases as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act (CAA). The Supreme Court soon will hear arguments in a case challenging the US Environmental Protection Agency’s refusal to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases as CAA pollutants. Environmental groups, the governments of 12 states, and three cities want EPA to impose the regulation under a section calling on the government to act on “any air pollutant” that can “reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” EPA says the authority doesn’t apply to greenhouse gases.

The plaintiff’s argument asserts its conclusions. Contrary to alarmist propaganda, the question about climate-change danger to public health remains open. And equating CO2, a natural substance essential to life, with pollutants addressed by CAA is spurious. Plaintiffs are trying to accomplish in court what they haven’t achieved in politics. Characteristically, they’re also trying to foreclose debate on the need for costly remedy and on policy options that differ from the mandates and taxes they favor.

Kyoto alternative

A Kyoto alternative received support Nov. 14 in a press briefing by Margo Thorning, managing director of the International Council on Capital Formation. Thorning called the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP) preferable to Kyoto, in part because it allows for economic growth. Signed last year by India, China, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and the US, the APP relies on technological development, technical transfer, and international consensus. Thorning cited a recent study done for ICCF that concluded the APP can outperform Kyoto in cuts of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

To alarmists, however, emissions cuts unassociated with the manipulation of people by governments seem not to matter. If alarmists have their way, in fact, prospects for such cuts will receive no attention at all.