GlobalWarming.org

The environment secretary, Hilary Benn, yesterday called on the US to agree to mandatory goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, warning that the alternative was dangerous climate change.
But he stopped short of calling for binding emissions targets for China's growing economy. "China in the end will have to decide what they are going to contribute," he said.

"We strongly believe that no adaptation plan or strategy would be effective without enhanced financing and greater technological support and access for developing countries," Pakistani Environment Minister Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat said at the one-day summit.

The battle to beat climate change has come down to one weapon — the price of carbon. And analysts say it is not working.

Are you a carbon-using Christian? Feeling guilty about all that carbon dioxide (CO2) you pump into the atmosphere by such awful things as breathing, heating and cooling your home, lighting your work or study space, or driving to church? Now, like traditional sinners whose only mistake was breaking the Ten Commandments, you can atone for your carbon sins by buying carbon offsets from the Evangelical Climate Initiative — though I thought it was pre-Reformation Roman Catholicism, not Protestant evangelicalism, that endorsed indulgences.

The fallacious idea that one can make jobs by destroying others is a variation of Bastiat's Broken Window fallacy. As Bastiat explained, imagine some shopkeepers get their windows broken by a rock-throwing child. At first, people sympathize with the shopkeepers, until someone suggests that the broken windows really aren't that bad. After all, they "create work" for the glazier, who might buy food, benefiting the grocer, or clothes, benefiting the tailor. If enough windows are broken, the glazier might even hire an assistant, creating a new job. Did the child then do a public service by breaking the windows? Would it be good public policy to simply break windows at random? No, because what's not seen in this scenario is what the shopkeepers would have done with the money that they've had to use to fix their windows. If they hadn't needed to fix the windows, the shopkeepers would have put the money to work in their shops, buying more stock from their suppliers, or perhaps adding a coffee-bar, or hiring new stock-people. Before the child's action, the shopkeepers had the economic value of their windows and the money to hire a new assistant or buy more goods. After the child's action, the shopkeepers have their new windows but no new assistant or new goods, and society, as a whole, has lost the value of the old set of windows.

If you happen to catch Arnold Schwarzenegger’s speech to the UN on climate change today, please remember that the governator is full of it. Once again, the movie star turned politician will tell a crowd of policy-makers that fixing the climate will be a boon to the economy. It’s not, and he knows it.

Unfortunately, his false promises are catching on. Republican governors Charlie Crist (FL) and Tim Pawlenty (MN) have echoed Schwarzenegger’s claims. And in today’s Financial Times, Bill Clinton spoke of climate change mitigation policy and said, “there is way more economic opportunity than cost here.”

There isn’t. The fact of the matter is that energy use is causally linked with economic production, and emissions are the byproduct of energy use. Therefore, if you curb emissions, you necessarily curb economic productivity. That's why independent studies estimate reducing emissions would cost the US economy almost 2 trillion dollars.

We can reduce emissions, by developing non-fossil fuel energy sources. But it will be expensive. By distorting the truth about the costs of reducing emissions, Schwarzenegger creates unfounded expectations.

Would you believe that the weather in Indiana could trigger popular unrest in China? Global demand for fuel made out of food is growing so fast that grain supplies are becoming dangerously thin. In this market, a hiccup in agricultural production — like a drought in America’s Corn Belt — could cause food prices to skyrocket in countries like China that depend on food imports. When poor urbanites in developing nations suddenly cannot afford to eat, they just might take to the streets in anger.

Amid a mounting sense of urgency about the need for action to slow climate change, President Bush this week will be playing what is, for him, an unusually prominent role in high-level diplomatic meetings on how to confront global warming.