US Rep. Ed Markey (D–Mass.) deployed the d–word as he opened subcommittee hearings on legislation calling for aggressive action on climate change. The d–word is denial—the political crime of wondering out loud if human beings really should try to reengineer the climate. Punishment for this offense is ostracism.
“The time for delay and denial and inaction has come to an end,” Markey declared Apr. 21 before his Energy and Environment Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee began hearing testimony on the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Markey and Henry Waxman of California, chairman of the full committee, sponsor the bill. They of course displaced John Dingell of Michigan as committee chair and Rick Boucher of Virginia as the subcommittee leader, whom environmental extremists found too soft on global warming. “It’s time,” Markey said, “to put Americans back to work in the jobs needed to bring about the age of the clean energy economy.”
Pressure to act
Markey may think it’s time to do these things in part because of pressure to act from the administration of President Barack Obama. On Apr. 13, Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change, said the administration wants legislation in hand when its emissaries attend an international conference on climate change in Copenhagen at the end of the year. Four days after she spoke, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed to find that “greenhouse gases in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” The stipulation, sanctioned by a 2007 ruling of the Supreme Court, would enable EPA to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act—and thus to gain unprecedented control over individual lives and the national economy.
EPA’s finding of “endangerment” came as no surprise. But its timing, so soon after Browner’s articulation of Executive Branch wishes and so soon before Markey’s hearings, sent a clear message to Congress: It’s your way—by December—or our way. The squeeze leaves little time for deliberation of a proposal that amounts to nothing less than overhaul of the US economy. And it leaves no room for disagreement—or what some dismiss as denial. The ruling elite has decided to manipulate emissions of greenhouse gases, and there will be no further discussion about the need for or wisdom of doing so.
Denial of a different type is fiercely at work here. It relates to cost.
At this point, arguments over details are distractions. The central mechanism of climate adjustment almost surely will be a cap on emissions accompanied by a system for trading emission allowances. The allowances might be auctioned at the start of the program or distributed at low or no initial cost. The difference has to do more with timing than with the existence or amount of cost. Fundamentally, any system to control emissions of greenhouse gases must lower use of cheap energy and raise use of expensive substitutes. This formula yields cost. And inevitable inefficiencies of implementation, including the corruption certain to find its way to the trading of emissions allowances, will amplify the effect.
EPA chimed in quaintly on cost the day before Markey opened his hearings. The Waxman–Markey bill, it said, would lower average annual household consumption—raise cost—by $98–140/year on a discounted basis due to elevated energy prices, price changes for other goods and services, and “impacts on wages and returns to capital.” But the estimate assumes the government returns most program revenue to households. “A policy that failed to return revenues from the program to consumers would lead to substantially larger losses in consumption,” EPA warned.
More denial?
So it seems worth asking, at this moment in American history, how readily a government choking on self–imposed debt will part with money flowing to it from any source. Or does the question represent evidence of denial and thereby disqualify itself from serious attention?
Panic over global warming is about to subject a teetering US economy to extra and possibly extreme peril. It’s not too soon to apportion blame.
