US Treasury Sec. Jacob L. Lew has an unenviable job. Apparently, he has been placed in charge of marketing the economic dimensions of President Barack Obama's campaign against climate change. So the official responsible for promoting economic growth and managing national finances must say things like this, at a Brookings Institute forum on Sept. 22: "As an economic matter, the cost of inaction [on climate change] is far greater than the cost of action."
That's quite a statement. "Action," of course, means replacing low-cost, abundant energy with high-cost, scarcer alternatives. And action sufficient to affect globally averaged temperature doesn't mean adjustment at the edges of energy consumption. Influencing temperature, if it's possible, requires bottom-to-top energy transition-from cheap to expensive. The "cost of action" thus would be very high. And the oft-promised offsets-green jobs, government-sponsored infrastructure-are delusional. Natural laws provide no painless route to a low-carbon energy utopia. Indeed, the certain, immense costs of Lew's "action" would not survive the inevitable political backlash.
Cost of inaction
And the Treasury secretary's "cost of inaction" is questionable. According to the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Lew told the Brookings group, if observed warming above preindustrial levels reached 3° C. instead of 2° C., "there could be a 1% decrease in global output annually." Really? Against the costs of foreswearing not only cheap energy in large amounts but also wealth from developing oil, gas, and coal resources, that seems minor.
The rest of Lew's argument amounts to blaming fossil energy for weather. Floods and drought threaten crops and livestock productivity in parts of the country. "The extreme climate conditions that we are facing now and expect to face in coming decades" jeopardize water and sewer systems, power plants and grids, and roads and airports designed for greater clemency. Superstorm Sandy closed tunnels and bridges and flooded parts of the subway system in New York City. High temperatures and pollution degrade health. "Extreme heat will also lead to more health-related illness," Lew said. "When the federal government has to step in and do things like provide disaster relief, crop and flood insurance, protection from wildfires, and health care, taxpayers pay the cost."
Lew made no attempt to isolate the human influence in these phenomena or, beyond that, the role of human use of fossil energy. Doing so is impossible. People certainly affect climate, especially by burning oil, gas, and coal. They must contribute something to observed warming. But Superstorm Sandy, floods, drought, wildfires, and all the rest have origins in much more than the carbon dioxide released by human activity. And about most of those origins, people can do precious little. They can, however, impoverish themselves by pretending otherwise.
Lew, of course, was laying the intellectual groundwork-such as it was-for Obama's speech on climate change a day later at the United Nations. "We cannot condemn our children, and their children, to a future that is beyond their capacity to repair," the president declared. "Not when we have the means-the technological innovation and the scientific imagination-to begin the work of repairing it right now."
Arguments failing
This is typical. The old arguments are failing. The economic case Lew tried to make crumbles as prosperity yields to political ambition where governments, such as in Australia and parts of Europe and Canada, first sacrificed their economies to climate leadership and now suffer politically. And science becomes less and less compelling as temperature measurements discredit theories underlying fear of more and more "extreme heat." With observable reality eroding his program, Obama thus tries a popular tactic of modern propaganda, appealing to "our children."
If climate change represents a serious threat-and it might-the subject deserves serious discussion, including about the physics of climate and energy and about real costs borne by real people. Speeches like those by Lew and Obama, with their assertions so starkly in conflict with simple experience, don't meet that standard.