GLOBAL WARMING AND HASTY TAXES

Science should inform, not frighten. A frightened European Community executive body nevertheless has called for stiff energy taxes designed to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. What's worse, officials of the body, the European Commission, are evangelizing their folly. They want the U.S. and other non-EC industrialized nations to match the mistake. Viewed against real science-the kind that informs-the spectacle would be comic if it were not so potentially costly.

Oct. 14, 1991

3 min read

The commission proposes to start taxing all energy in 1993. Rates would vary from one energy source to another, depending on degrees Of CO2 emissions. For oil, the rate would start at $3/bbl and climb each year to a maximum of $10/bbl in 2000. The top rate for nuclear energy would be $5/bbl of oil equivalent. A side benefit of taxing all energy, the commission says, would be to reduce energy consumption overall.

Neither objective-reducing CO2 emissions or blindly cutting energy use-warrants the economic blow that the commission would inflict on Europeans and prescribe for others.

EASING GLOBAL WARMING

The reason to reduce CO2 emissions is, of course, to ease global warming. Popular wisdom has it that a buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere, largely resulting from fossil fuel combustion, has warmed the atmosphere and will do so at increasing and alarming rates in the future. If scientific evidence supported the popular wisdom, a tax on CO2 emitting fuels might indeed be in order.

Popular wisdom, however, derives its support not from scientific evidence but from computer simulations. Scientific evidence indicates that this century's minor warming occurred prior to 1940, before CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere began to increase significantly. During 1940-70, the planet seems to have cooled. During the 1980s, global temperatures changed little.

In the period when computer simulations say warming should have been most rapid, therefore, precisely the opposite occurred. Furthermore, there has been no warming in the high latitudes and no significant difference in the temperature changes in the northern and southern hemispheres, as computer simulations predict.

Something is wrong with the computer simulations that have so frightened people about global warming. Something is wrong with popular wisdom.

UNCERTAIN EFFECTS

To be sure, CO2 concentrations are rising. But the phenomenon may not raise global temperatures. it seems not to be doing so now, contrary to computer simulations that cannot begin to account for all the adjustments that the planet can make. What's more, a CO2 buildup may not be a bad thing. Dixy Lee Ray, scientist, former governor of Washington, and author of a recently published book on global warming and other environmental hobgoblins, says the planet may have been starved of CO2 for the past several hundred millennia. More CO2 in the air would promote plant life and thus might help resolve the tragedy of human hunger.

So why-other than to satisfy the strange but politically prevalent need to make others change behavior-create extra costs for fuels that produce CO2? The likelihood that science will substantiate the global warming phenomenon seems to be diminishing. Precautionary economic sacrifice makes no sense.

One thing is certain about the European Commission's proposal. If Europeans do eventually have to sacrifice their wealth to advocacy science and manufactured fear, and if decades from now a luxuriant planet is no warmer than it was before, the energy levy will not go away. Much less is known about global climactic phenomena than about humans with authority to spend their neighbors' money.