Tag Archives: climate change

Cap and Trade and Rightward Drift

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It is, as always, both amazing and dispiriting to see how well orchestrated the right wing noise machine is, this time with regard to what to a man pundits and politicians on the right now refer to as “cap and tax.” One of the amazing things on display here is the amount of rightward drift the country’s political class has experienced over even the last twenty years.

Cap and trade got its start as a market-oriented Republican counterproposal to Democrats’ more standard-issue regulatory approach to controlling pollution. When cap and trade was introduced to the mainstream political discourse as part of the 1990 Clean Air Act as a means to control SO2 emissions and the resultant acid rain, and then first discussed as a means to control greenhouse gasses as well, the reaction among Democrats and the left was revulsion and rejection. If pollution is so bad, then we should just outlaw or limit it, rather than allow corporations to purchase pollution vouchers.

Republicans countered with the usual critique of the regulatory approach: that broad mandates of bureaucrats lacking the expertise of managers on sight will result in the variable plants of the country having to adopt means from a relatively small menu, which in many instances would not be the best one for that plant or corporation’s circumstance. On the affirmative, they argued that a market-based solution would allow managers and experts close to the problem to determine what the most cost-effective means of adaptation to a lower overall emissions economy would be. Plants or corporations with a substantial retooling burden would be able to purchase time to alter their consumption pattern. High-pollution, but high-value activities would have a kind of exemption in the market means of greater expense. Where the burden of both the new cost structure and adaptation was too great, the creative destruction of the market would naturally select the best alternatives.

(I am generally very amenable to this sort of systems-type solution to problems.)

It’s no surprise that there is not a universal embrace among Republicans of a Bush, Sr. administration policy proposal. The right was never all on-board with cap and trade in the early 1990s. The sector of the polity opposed to action on climate change spans a variety of factions and epistemologies. And the right has always been skeptical of George H.W. Bush, Sr. The “Read my lips: No new taxes” pledge and the selection of Dan Quayle as a running mate were maneuvers meant to claim the mantle of Ronald Reagan by the politician who in the 1980 primaries had coined the term “voodoo economics.” But that the contemporary right now disavows George H.W. Bush, Sr. — along with Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and increasingly George W. Bush, Jr. — as not true conservatives, or Republicans In Name Only, while a proposal of the Bush, Sr. administration, roundly rejected by Democrats at the time, has become the policy preference of the Democrats today, should be telling as to the direction of party drift.

As Clinton said early on in his presidency (Woodward, Bob, The Agenda [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994] p. 161),

I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans. We’re Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans.

This is a very astute observation and testimony to the enduring power of the Reagan revolution in U.S. politics. Today there is only one president that Republicans admire. Meanwhile, that old tradition of Republicanism represented by the rest of the Republican presidents has been taken over by the Democratic party — no longer the party of Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson, now the party of Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush, Sr.

Carbon Offsets

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Ezra Klein — a meat eater and a foodie, mind you — has had a lot to say about meat consumption as of late. Back in May he went so far as to say, “If I had more will power I’d be a vegetarian” (“View From a Herbivore,” TAPPED, The American Prospect, 8 May 2008). Today (“Why It’s Worth Talking About Meat,” ibid., 21 July 2008) he links to The PB&J Campaign that has the following grouping of factoids:

Each time you have a plant-based lunch like a PB&J you’ll reduce your carbon footprint by the equivalent of 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions over an average animal-based lunch like a hamburger, a tuna sandwich, grilled cheese, or chicken nuggets. For dinner you save 2.8 pounds and for breakfast 2.0 pounds of emissions.

Those 2.5 pounds of emissions at lunch are about forty percent of the greenhouse gas emissions you’d save driving around for the day in a hybrid instead of a standard sedan.

Hey, that’s pretty cool! Forget about planting a tree: I think I’m going to start positioning myself as a carbon offset! Wanna eat a Big Mack but feel kinda bad about it? Give me five dollars — PayPal button up in the corner — and count on me eating a block of tofu or an undressed salad to make up for your extra 2.5 pounds of carbon. And if you commuted to work and know you’re part of the problem, send ten and rest assured that I rode my bike to work in your stead. But if you play too many video games, I’m not tuning off my computer for you at any pricelevel.

On a related note I have been chuckling to myself and brandishing Will Wilkinson’s comment on why he bikes to work for some days now (“Bikes vs. Cars,” The Fly Bottle, 9 July 2008):

I honestly don’t give a fig about my carbon footprint (and anyway, since I’m not a breeder, I really should get carbon carte blanche).

So while I’m at it, if you have made more of us miserable ecosystem-trammelers and know it was just a guilty pleasure (what, a mirror not good enough for you?), then send money and I will refrain from procreative sex as a carbon offset for your brood.

Climate Change Comes to Flyover Country

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Flooding in downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 13 June 2008

We’re not even getting the worst of it, just the feeble remnants, but still, the waves of storms that have been blowing through D.C. have been terrifying, violent, disruptive events. They have been apocalyptic, with the sky darkening and the air becoming restless as the storm approaches. Last week the street lights all came on at three o’clock in the afternoon, so dark had it become. We all gathered at the windows watching the oncoming storm in amazement. We looked across to the neighboring building where the occupants of nearly all eleven floors gathered at their windows too. I’ve lived in D.C. for five years now and I have never seen storms so violent as these.

A few days ago S. said that it turns out that New Orleans wasn’t the U.S. city that got wiped off the map, but rather, merely the first U.S. city to be wiped of the map. And in the perverse logic of the greenhouse effect, where the weather becomes not generally hotter or colder or wetter or dryer, but variably more extreme in every direction, I’ll bet by August the news of flooding has been replaced by stories of drought and wildfire.

It was pretty easy for middle-American public figures to be smug about climate change when it was just sinful, elitist coastal cities that were going to be destroyed by rising sea levels. But it turns out that the gods make no distinctions among we mortals between the righteous and the wicked. Climate change will come to the heartland just as much as it will to the decadent coastal cities.

Just as in Iraq, people tend to contrast the costs of a change in direction with the costs of doing nothing as if doing nothing were free. There are no costs to the status quo. The right digs out all these numbers about the drag on the economy of various plans to prevent climate change, but it is presented as if it were an absolute, rather than a comparative cost. Do nothing and continue along that same unencumbered glide-path to prosperity; change direction and it’s the road to serfdom. In fact, there has even been a spate of articles as of late on how climate change is going to be an economic boon — at least for some. But one no longer needs a month of simulation time on a supercomputer — a window and a cable subscription will suffice — to see that there are coasts to doing nothing.