You Can’t Fix A Hurricane With Climate Policy
For those of you in the path of Sandy, I hope life is starting to return to normal. Part of the disaster’s fallout was an effort by the left to use Sandy to push a green agenda. Holman Jenkins properly mocks that attempt in a recent column:
When the high tide of political enthusiasm for climate action began to recede around the time of Al Gore’s Nobel, it receded for good reason, and not because of Republican intransigence, or any “climategate” email scandal, or even because of the inconvenient absence of warming from the temperature record after 1998.
The moment passed because even a political system as prodigal as ours could not bridge the chasm between costs and benefits. Even many Democrats were stopped in their tracks by the question: How much should we spend on climate change in order to have no effect on climate change? Likewise, whatever the truth of man’s role in global warming, whatever the merits of regulating CO2, making climate policy the answer to hurricanes can’t be anything but a fraud on the public. Doing so, literally, is like proposing to spend trillions to reduce by an inch or two an 11-foot storm surge that might occur sometime in the next century.
4 Comments to “You Can’t Fix A Hurricane With Climate Policy”
What if it isn’t a hoax? What if, by pouring CO2 into the atmosphere, we are creating a world that won’t sustain human civilization as we know it? Is it really such a bad idea to make some changes now, just in case climate change is real, because even though we’ll be dead, do we want our children and grand-children to have to live through these horrors? And say it is a hoax, and we have developed our alternative energy resources sooner than necessary (because eventually, we will run out of fossil fuels), does that really hurt us? The election tomorrow may be our best chance to reverse the damaging effects of climate change. Vote for the future of our planet.
Let’s pretend for a moment that man-made climate change is NOT a hoax. How does reverting back to medieval times or earlier (in a technological sense) solve the problem? Make no mistake about it - the ONLY solutions being offered (especially from the left) involve ABANDONING technology. And attempting to develop “alternative” energy before they’re necessary or feasible (and by force, which is what government does) is a tremendous waste of money and resources, and is immoral as well.
The only way to deal with climate change, no matter HOW it occurs, is through FREEDOM - freedom of individuals to conduct research and develop new technologies and methods of coping with our environment. It’s useful to note that the world’s biggest polluters are the least developed technologically (AND the most statist politically). This is no accident.
So what we need, then, is political and economic freedom. Which candidate do you think is better suited to provide it?
Maggie: Fossil fuels are an incredible net benefit to all of us. Dramatic cuts in their use would cause immediate, not eventual, horrors. No one is preventing “alternative” energy from being developed, but none have been found to be viable, despite billions of dollars in government money being pumped into them. I highly recommend you check out the resources available here: http://industrialprogress.net/. And tonight, there will be a great debate, broadcast live, on this very topic: http://fossilfueldebate.com/
Yes, Ms. McGreen. It DOES hurt us. That’s the point. Every dollar spent on green schemes, WHETHER JUSTIFIED OR NOT, is a dollar not spent on our precious “children and grand-children”, who will have to live through the REAL horrors of a reduced standard of living. This reduced standard of living does not simply mean they won’t get their latest tech gizmo. It means living in an economy burdened by onerous “green” regulations. It means stopping the construction of a factory which would employ and feed and clothe and educate countless employees, because of an endangered slug, for example). It means $10 a gallon gasoline. It means $20 light bulbs. It means an increased price in everything that requires energy to create, which is to say, everything.
It means struggling more for the basic necessities of life and less for the luxuries. It means living more like how our precious forefathers did, who lived without the benefits of the industrial revolution, when life was nasty, brutish, and short.
Whether you think this is a price worth paying, if you are intellectually honest, you will recognize (as the more extremist eco-warriors do) that it DOES HURT.
As for your convenient “what if” trick. . .
What if the climate ISN’T changing?
What if the change is cyclic?
What if the change isn’t because of man?
What if it is a change for the better? (Ask any eco-warrior what the Earth’s ideal average temperature is, and watch them stutter. What if a warmer Earth means more arable land? More wildlife in the more northern latitudes? Less fossil fuels burnt for winter home heating?)
What if the change isn’t catastrophic, as the Al Gores of the world would have you believe?
What if we’re beyond the tipping point, as the Al Gores of the world would have you believe? (If it is, what’s it matter?)
And the most important:
What if by trying to solve the problem through Big Government, we make the problem worse?
Hmm?