by Jeff Gillman
States have instituted their own emissions trading programs and empowered their public utility commissions to reward those utilities that increase their offerings of renewable or low-carbon fuels, or develop programs to reduce energy consumption. Six New England states have set regionwide standards with five Canadian provinces. Agricultural states have encouraged farmers to follow conservation tillage practices, which hold more carbon in the soil, thereby decreasing greenhouse gases. (States were promoting conservation tillage anyway, to reduce operating costs and soil erosion).
California has traditionally been a national leader in environmental policy and has continued this innovation in its climate change policy. It adopted regulations covering greenhouse emissions from cars in 2004, created a statewide cap on carbon emissions in 2006, and passed a green building code in 2008. The consequences of these actions are significant. California is the world’s eighth largest economy and releases more greenhouse gases per year than many nations, as do other states as well. States that create effective policies to reduce emissions at acceptable cost to the economy also provide models for federal policies on climate change.
Local governments have set goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote carbon sequestration by setting more stringent building codes, planting trees, improving mass transportation, reducing energy use, and increasing the use of renewable energy sources. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg even proposed that drivers pay a “congestion fee” to drive in certain sections of Manhattan at certain times in order to increase the use of public transportation. Although this plan was rejected by the state legislature, Bloomberg did succeed in requiring cab drivers (as well as the city government) to purchase environmentally friendly vehicles.
The Political Dynamics
Global warming burst abruptly onto the political agenda in 1988 during an extremely hot summer. Time magazine capped off the year with a twist on its custom of naming the person of the year by instead naming the “Endangered Earth” as the “Planet of the Year.” And the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as a science “court” to evaluate scientific issues regarding climate change. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, scientists dominated the early discussions. Climate change was still a new issue and the question was, what is happening? Public officials and the public itself were still trying to understand the basics. But economics replaced science in the forefront of the debate once the question became, what do we do about it?
Even if politicians broadly accepted that warming is occurring and that humans are causing it, they can still disagree about whether the threat is dangerous enough to warrant spending money to tackle it. Policymakers are faced with a sticky situation. If they react, there is a good chance that they will overreact and impose substantial burdens on the economy but produce few measurable environmental impacts. On the other hand, if they don’t react because there is no immediate crisis, then there is a chance that they will allow massive, long-term environmental damage and human displacement to occur. Policymakers must decide whether they prefer the risks of inaction or overreaction. In the end, the lack of scientific unanimity or an immediate and incontrovertible crisis makes it easier not to act, and to hope that we can adapt to whatever changes occur.
THOUGH there may be, as political scientist Lamont Hempel describes it, a “tentative and fragile scientific consensus” on the cause and effect relationship between greenhouse gases and climate change, there is enough uncertainty and sufficient opposing scientific voices that policymakers have reason to be cautious as they make decisions. Beyond the divergence of scientific analyses, predicting the effects of climate change on our economy isn’t easy, and neither is predicting exactly what will happen if we pass laws that control greenhouse gas emissions. Likewise, anticipating human adaptations to climate change is difficult. Policymakers want to be able to predict demographic, economic, technological, and social trends–and the interactions among all of them. Any analysis this complex is bound to be plagued with uncertainty, and small variations in how the predictions are made can produce substantial differences in the final result. With such divergent scientific and economic analyses available, politicians are free to pick and choose only those results that fit their ideological predispositions and the desires of their constituencies.
Greenhouse gases are emitted from many different sources, so regulating only factories and utilities would not have much of an effect (as with nonpoint source pollution, discussed in the chapter on fertilizers). Furthermore, technologies such as smokestack scrubbers, which the U.S. government has mandated factories install for other air pollutants, do not work for carbon dioxide, methane, and other prominent greenhouse gases. If imposing the costs of environmental cleanup on the easiest targets (various industries) is ineffective, policy-makers must ask the rest of us to do our part. That’s where the real political challenges appear.
Because greenhouse gases are invisible, often occur naturally, and do not produce incidents of clear-cut environmental disaster (like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill or Love Canal), it makes it hard to rally politicians and the public against the villains who emit them. The public sides with environmentalists when confronted with obvious environmental disasters, but it is harder to get the public to demand action on long-term trends like global climate change. Besides, we are the “villains”! Even straightforward and less expensive approaches to limiting greenhouse gas emissions, such as conserving energy, could force significant changes in our energy-intensive American lifestyle—from our love affair with cars to our overly heated and air-conditioned buildings. Politicians are loath to impose such costs directly on their constituents, particularly when any direct benefits of slowing global warming are hard to predict. This is especially true when Americans would pay a price, while newly industrializing countries would not face the same emissions cuts and consequent social costs (as would have occurred if the United States had approved the Kyoto Protocol).
It’s also true that some of the environmental consequences from the emission of greenhouse gases and other pollutants fall outside a politician’s home base, or even outside the country. In 2009 a report from CARE International, in conjunction with a number of other agencies, explained why, as the world gets warmer, poorer countries will be disproportionately affected. Many poorer nations are coastal and very close to sea level, and would be subject to flooding as the oceans rise; countries with large arid regions that are not able to farm as efficiently as others may be under more pressure as rains become even more scarce; and poorer countries have less of an ability to react to natural disasters.
INACTIVITY by politicians is also the result of a public that is ambivalent about climate change. On one hand, according to Gallup polls, a clear majority agrees that it is a serious problem. On the other hand, in a July 2009 Gallup poll, only 2 percent rated it as the most important issue for the government to address and the one-third of the public that “worries” about it has remained steady in Gallup polls since 1990. In fact, global warming ranked last out of eight environmental concerns, and environmental issues in general declined in their importance relative to economic growth during the 2000s. Without public pressure to act, politicians have every incentive to avoid taking any potentially costly risks to address climate change.
In many ways, global warming exemplifies the fundamental challenge of environmental issues. It’s hard to coordinate action among multiple players when each is trying to assure that everyone else is bearing at least as much of the cost as they are. Even if each player knows that they will benefit in the long run, each prefers to avoid paying any of the cost if they can stick someone else with the bill. The United States is worried that it will pay the greatest cost of an international treaty while letting competitors in developing countries (China, India, Brazil) off the hook. The problem, of course, is that it’s hard to develop a method of distributing the cost that everyone will see as fair. Some countries—and some U.S. states—have econo
mies that are more dependent on coal and heavy manufacturing than others. In their eyes, climate change proposals that restrict their industries place a disproportionate cost on them and give polluters an incentive to move to countries with fewer restrictions.
Similar dynamics were present in passing clean air and clean water laws in the United States, though it’s easy to forget that history now that we take those laws for granted. Until the 1970s, state and local governments had most of the responsibility for developing environmental rules about land and water use. Unfortunately, they had a hard time addressing environmental problems because taking action usually meant confronting a major local employer who was also a major source of jobs, civic philanthropy, and political support. If a local government attempted to regulate the employer, it could threaten to move, shut down, or recruit and fund more supportive politicians. None of these options looked very good to politicians, and made local governments hesitate to do anything without extremely strong backing from the public and from an influential sector of the business community. It took intervention by the federal government in the form of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act to ensure that everyone paid a share of the cost and received a share of the benefits. Now we hear the same concerns about dealing with the costs of climate change.
POLITICIANS are most likely to respond to their constituents who are most active on an issue and who write, call, and show up at town hall meetings to voice their opinions. Business owners and their employees will mobilize to fight for their jobs and will threaten to vote against politicians who help to pass legislation that risks their livelihoods. In the political fight over global warming, there are lots of states and congressional districts that produce coal and natural gas and don’t want environmental restrictions. The people who might benefit from future green jobs don’t have those jobs yet, so they won’t mobilize to support legislation. And the people of less developed countries, who are likely to bear the brunt of the effects of global warming, obviously can’t vote here. Even politicians who publicly support climate change legislation will usually leave themselves a critical caveat: they will vote for legislation if they are able to get provisions in the legislation that help to protect the particular industries in their states or districts that would be most negatively affected by the legislation. Thus, the climate change bill that passed the House of Representatives in 2009 gave free carbon emission permits to approximately 80 percent of businesses that would otherwise have had to buy them in the capand-trade system that the bill established. Such mass exemptions were necessary to gain enough votes to pass the bill, and even then, it passed by the narrowest of margins. While the climate change debate in Washington may appear to be about science, its passage was based on protecting economic interests (jobs) in a representative’s or senator’s own district or state.
The politics of the environment is polarized, and the attention given to global warming—and environmental issues generally—shifts dramatically depending on which party controls Congress and the presidency. Democrats tend to make environmental issues a priority; Republicans react more skeptically out of a concern over the cost to business and government. For example, Republicans in the House of Representatives never brought climate change legislation to the House floor for debate while they held the majority between 1995 and 2007. Similarly, the fate of environmental legislation in the U.S. Senate shifted dramatically in 2003, when Republicans regained majority control, and the chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works committee shifted from environmentalist Jim Jeffords, an Independent from Vermont, to climate change critic James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican. All of a sudden, environmental groups were invited to testify much less frequently on their views of the consequences of proposed legislation to control carbon dioxide emissions. Similar shifts have occurred in the executive branch. When Republican George W. Bush (2001–2009) succeeded Democrat Bill Clinton (1993–2001), for example, the number of published regulations fell by more than 50 percent at the FDA and by 57 percent at the EPA. The agencies also withdrew numerous regulations that had been proposed but not finalized during the Clinton administration. Not coincidently, climate change legislation first passed the House in 2009 after the Democrats had regained majority control of Congress, and a Democratic president, Barack Obama, made it a priority.
Policy Option One: Leave Things as They Are
The best reason to avoid controlling carbon emissions is that, economically, it would be too expensive. Estimates of how much it would cost our economy to implement Kyoto-like protocols to reduce carbon dioxide emissions vary greatly, but there is no question that it would hurt our economy to some extent and put a damper on energy availability. The result would be higher energy bills, and the cost of everything else would go up as well.
Currently, there is some state and local legislation that regulates carbon dioxide emissions (though the EPA could issue regulations, since carbon dioxide can now be considered a pollutant). We should leave it at that.
There is a strong possibility that the data supporting the catastrophic claims made by those who believe that global warming will irrevocably damage this planet has been misinterpreted or is simply false. The assumption that carbon dioxide is associated in a meaningful way with global warming is nothing more than an educated guess. And even if global warming is caused by humans and is altering the earth’s climate, we should accept the cost and benefits of just letting it be, as compared to the cost and effort of trying to change it. Our use of fossil fuels will decrease over the years because it must—they’re a finite resource. With global warming, there is the potential for some crops to grow better, and it may even be healthier for humans, since more people die every year from cold than from heat.
If there are positive consequences of climate change, we can take advantage of them. The best approach to any negative effects is to adapt to them, if and when it becomes necessary. If the seas start to rise, we can build sea walls to protect critical developed areas. We can use zoning in coastal areas and flood plains to prevent additional development in those risky areas. We can beef up our public health and emergency services planning and personnel. We can provide expertise, technologies, and aid to poor countries that are more severely affected.
Rather than spending money on hypothetical predictions or trying to prevent changes that we may or may not be able to prevent, our efforts are better spent on actual problems as they arise. It’s entirely possible that controlling these problems may be cheaper, perhaps much cheaper, than trying to reduce our carbon emissions. Even if carbon dioxide is causing major problems, our efforts to control high levels of this gas now won’t prevent problems in the near future. The most optimistic scientists think that it will take decades just to stabilize, let alone reduce, the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
Right-Wing Rating We don’t need our industries competing with foreign countries on a playing field that isn’t level, especially when we haven’t even proven that carbon dioxide emissions can cause the catastrophes that environmental radicals claim. Once again, they are crying “wolf.” We shouldn’t damage our economy on the basis of highly uncertain computer projections of climate change fifty years or more from now.
Left-Wing Rating The evidence that climate change is already affecting humans and ecosystems is real. Every scientific objection raised by skeptics has been answered; they just ignore the results or discover a new objection. If we don’t do something about climate change now, we’ll all pay the price eventually. It’s less expensive and less disruptive to act now than to wait until the effects of global warming are severe.
Policy Option Two: Pass Laws to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Our federal government has the power to create laws requiring the EPA and other agencies to develop policies that would greatly increase control of greenhouse emissions. Since the courts decided that carbon dioxide can be considered a pollutant, the EPA can now act to restrict emissions. The IPCC has found that certain natural disasters
may, in part, have been due to global warming, and there is evidence that global warming will cause worldwide hardships, particularly in less developed countries.
The best way for the government to control these carbon dioxide emissions is to tax them. This approach allows our industries to find the most cost-effective ways to decrease emissions in order to save money on taxes. It also would get businesses and consumers to conserve energy, which is good for our economy and our national security, since we’d be less reliant on oil-rich dictators in unstable parts of the world.
Even though the cost of carbon is going up as our resources become depleted, the government can speed this inflationary process by taxing people and/or industries based on the amount of carbon dioxide they release, or by fining them if they release more than a given amount, or even by shutting down industries that release more than the EPA (or, potentially, another regulatory agency) allows. By artificially making carbon more expensive through legislation, we will really just be accelerating something that would eventually happen anyway. Over time, we will need to find alternatives to fossil fuels, so why not do it sooner rather than later? Carbon dioxide affects more than global warming, it also has the potential to shift the balance in favor of weeds over crops, and decrease the pH of the world’s oceans, both of which could have catastrophic effects.