On Tuesday, Congress began its first-ever hearings on a plan to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency initiated the process to let loose the dogs of the Clean Air Act on serial emitters of greenhouse gases, declaring those gases a “threat to human health and safety.”
Both moves are generating flak from the other side: The cap-and-trade proposal in Congress is being called “liberal elitism,” and the EPA decision “alarmist,” even “fascist” in some circles.
This vitriolic language mostly represents the bombed-out husk of the remaining conservative movement; while still powerful, most can agree it pales in comparison to that of Ronald Reagan’s day. Desperate and running scared, conservative stalwarts are testing the relatively nascent forces of environmentalism, despite those forces’ overwhelmingly apparent rise in both consumer demand and political power.
To be fair, they have a decent argument. Regulating carbon dioxide emissions and putting an economic price on climate-disfiguring pollution will likely bankrupt the energy industry as we know it. Coal, oil, even natural gas simply will not be economically feasible if the industries are forced to pay the full costs of production, and to pass that cost on to the rational consumer. Indeed, this bankruptcy will cost Americans jobs in these industries, and this factor must not be ignored. It wouldn’t just bring down the oil tycoon “fat cats” – it might pull food from the table of middle-class coal and gas employees. We cannot trivialize this catastrophic prospect.
Further, in a classic paradox of environmental consciousness, the EPA decision manages to be as disingenuous as it is unassailable: Carbon dioxide is critical to plants and poses no immediate threat if inhaled. In fact, we inhale – and certainly exhale – tons of it every day, with no real harm. Carbon dioxide’s threat to public health and safety, as envisioned by the Clean Air Act’s framers, would be a feat to establish. Yet overwhelming scientific evidence makes clear that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide not only tinkers with the temperature of Earth, it might threaten our very survival as a species by potentially destabilizing the ecosystem upon which we depend entirely for life.
And this, of course, brings us to core problem of this whole debate: It isn’t really a debate. Negotiations with natural limits are one of those “whether you like it or not” type of issues. The environment makes the rules and we either adapt or die, as unfair – even “fascist” – as that might seem. The reasoning for this is self-evident: Every part of our bodies, every essence to our substance, came first from the environment, and to the environment shall return. If the environment collapses, or simply changes in some significant way, then we, and all of our dreams of a beautiful free market economy, will also collapse. This unpleasant fact is humbling indeed, but it is indisputably a fact.
How this reality applies most directly to the case of fossil fuels is that it is not up to the government regulators or any other human institution whether the industry will fail. It is because those fuels, fundamentally, consist entirely of natural stores of ancient sunlight, and are limited by nature. They will not be replenished within a millennium, let alone a century. So inevitably, in the not-too-distant future, we must solve this problem. Cap and trade is an attempt at a market solution. Instead of simply prohibiting carbon pollution – which would be fair to do, as no one is entitled to pollute – cap and trade is a compromise that seeks to economically incentivize carbon-cutting innovation. The goal here is, in part, to find new work for those eventually put out by the exhaustion of fossil fuels before this inevitability actually occurs, and to find new energy for human society in the process.
Those against it are arguing largely for their continued “right” to profit from a huge negative externality that has perverted both the market and the environment and that will, one way or another, come to an end. They are arguing, honestly, to preserve a market inefficiency.
The odd problem environmentalists have is that the entire project of industrialization – the free market as we, our parents, and our grandparents have known it – has been financed on this externality. Everyone is therefore affected. Cap and trade is much more than an obscure hippie proposal. If effective, it could impact the most substantial shift of society since industrialization. It is hard to say if we realize the magnitude of this, let alone if we are ready for it.
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End of an externality
Daily Emerald
April 22, 2009
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