November 2007

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held two more hearings this week on the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, S. 2191.  Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) has announced that she wants to mark up the bill in full committee on December 5th.  Greenwire’s Darren Samuelsohn reported that Boxer said she had “some terrific ideas” for improving the bill, but wasn’t sure how many she could get adopted in committee.  As far as I can tell, most of her ideas would raise the targets that must be achieved by the cap-and-trade scheme that is the centerpiece of the bill.

Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) has said that he isn’t against trying to raise the long-term mandatory targets in his bill, but doesn’t think it’s practical to raise the short-term target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020.  Lieberman here is being politically at least semi-astute.  The long-term target in 2050 has little real significance and poses no political risks, but Lieberman has already admitted that his bill will be very costly at least in the short term.

U. S. greenhouse gas emissions have been increasing at about one per cent per year since the Kyoto baseline year of 1990.  Population has also been increasing at about one per cent per year, which means that per capita emissions have remained steady.  During the same period, the U. S. economic has been growing by about three per cent for every one per cent increase in emissions.  I don’t see how the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill is going to reverse emissions growth without putting the U. S. economy into an ongoing recession, unless of course population starts to go down.    

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said earlier this month that she still hopes to get a compromise (anti-)energy bill to the floor before the two-week Thanksgiving recess.  Greenwire reported the following astonishing statement by Pelosi: "The price at the pump is just staggering for America's families, and we would like to have had something by then.”  Since the House and Senate anti-energy bills together would raise gasoline, food, auto, appliance, and electricity prices, I’m pleased to report that the House was not able to bring a compromise bill to the floor before the recess.

Perhaps you've heard have heard that the state of California sued EPA for permission to impose more stringent vehicular carbon dioxide emissions. It’s a convoluted legal case, and I won’t go in to it here. Suffice it to say, California politicians want to force automakers to make cars and trucks more fuel efficient, but EPA hasn't decided yet whether to let the state do so. 

Not that it matters. According to USA Today, even if Sacramento lawmakers got what they wanted, and every car sold in 2009 conformed to their standard, “a new midsize coal plant would emit enough carbon dioxide in just 8 months to negate the laws impact.”

Remember: China’s building a new coal fired power plant every week.

Invoking the allegedly catastrophic impacts of future global warming on developing countries, Yvo de Boer, the U.N.’s top climate official, warned that, “Failing to recognize the urgency of this message and act upon it would be nothing less than criminally responsible.”

But is it responsible for policymakers to leap before they look? A report by the Boston-based Clean Air Task Force finds that deforestation in tropical Asia, spurred by one of Europe’s global warming policies—its Bio-fuel Directive—is releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. This and other reports (see here and here) leave no doubt that some “urgent action” on climate change contributes to global warming!

When policymakers leap before they look, they may not only increase global emissions, they may harm the poorest of the poor—the professed object of their concern. De Boer should have a chat with his colleague Jean Ziegler, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the right of food. Ziegler recently denounced bio-fuel mandates as a “crime against humanity” because they inflate food prices and thus increase world hunger.

If global warming activists care about poor people, then they should do nothing to hinder development in poor countries. Since trade is a powerful force for development, they should do nothing to hinder exports from poor countries. But as far back as 2004, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for carbon tariffs on imports from countries not subject to Kyoto’s emissions limits. Such countries include the United States and Australia, of course, but also every developing country.

Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) made a big splash in recent years by sponsoring global warming legislation. A bill he introduced this year would authorize the president to impose carbon tariffs on goods from high-growth, high-carbon developing countries like China and India.

Looking ahead to the upcoming climate negotiations in Bali, Indonesia, Greenpeace is urging the Government of India to impose a special carbon tax on the richest 150 million Indians. Maybe Greenpeace hasn’t heard: Poor people don’t create jobs; rich people do. Tax-the-rich schemes—green or red—hurt poor people the most! 

Is it only “rich Indians” or China that eco-activists seek to punish with carbon taxes or trade barriers? Sadly, no. British activists are lobbying supermarkets to keep Kenyan fresh fruits, vegetables, and flowers off the shelves. To remain fresh, the produce must be flown Kenya to Britain, and air transport of fossil-intensive. That makes this farm practice “unsustainable” in the eyes of eco-activists—even though the $200 million in annual sales Kenyan farmers enjoy in the UK sustains 135,000 jobs in Kenya’s rural villages.

If you read only one technical paper this year on global warming and development, I heartily recommend this one by Indur Goklany of the U.S. Department of Interior. Goklany makes a powerful case that human welfare is highest in the UN’s warmest-but-richest development scenario, in which people are free to exploit fossil energy resources for development, and lower in cooler-but-poorer scenarios in which governments penalize carbon-energy or otherwise restrict trade and growth.