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Global Warming – Pound Wise and Penny Foolish
The Wall Street Journal ran an article about how some Senators are asking the Oil Industry to stop resisting efforts to curb Global Warming.
The WSJ articles says:
“Every dogma has its day, and we’ve lived long enough to see more than one “consensus” blown apart within a few years of “everyone knowing” it was true. In recent decades environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they’ve made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it’s useful to have a few folks outside the “consensus” asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.”
My frame of mind is that we should increasingly contain emissions into the environment, just in case. Whether it is proven or not, it stands to reason that more and more people dumping waste into our “Commons” is not wise in the long term. And it would be better to get some momentum towards a solution now while the intervention is relatively cheap and incremental rather than to wait for a catastrophe.
Increasingly there seems to be reports that environmental efficiency is also economic efficiency.
Why not be pound wise and penny foolish for a change.
20 Responses to “Global Warming – Pound Wise and Penny Foolish”
“My frame of mind is that we should increasingly contain emissions into the environment, just in case.”
Exactly — the way I see it, when it’s 90 degrees out in July you don’t wear a sweater. It may not be your fault that it’s hot outside — the earth goes through a natural annual warming cycle and all. But you don’t exacerbate the problem.
And as Paul pointed out, even if some people don’t even agree that there is a serious warming trend (which I think is obvious, but still…), there are OTHER reasons for curtailing emissions: a cleaner environment, plus one important reason that he didn’t mention, decreasing dependence on oil rich nations and the national security implications of that.
I don’t understand why the Auto, oil, &gas industries have such a fit when anyone tries to increase emission/efficiency standards. They cry about cost of the equipment, but they really just pass the costs onto the customers so it’s just a wash to them.
The link I refer to in the post is really an inspiring desciption by an environmental economist of what is possible.
It is win-win-win-win-win…
Rambie,
True, but higher cost vehicles means that people will put off buying new cars so it will affect the industries bottom line. The manufacturers won’t eat the cost built in to each car, but they will have lost revenues when sales volume goes down.
That’s fine, but there’s a significant distinction between taking a few relatively inexpensive precautions on the one hand and devoting billions and billions of dollars of our limited resources on this particular alleged problem, instead of other problems we face, such as AIDS, terrorism, cancer, heart disease, etc., etc., etc.
At any rate, the atual point of the Wall Street Journal column was to point out the extortion attempts by some Senators to foreclose debate on global warming, by pressuring ExxonMobile to stop funding research aimed at countering some of the “World Is Ending” apocalyptic announcements made by global warming proponents. In other words, the Senators said: “we don’t like what you’re saying, and we can’t defeat your arguments scientifically, so just shut up already, or we’ll hold some more tobacco-like hearings to see how you like it when Congress turns its attention to you.”
Regardless of the merits of the global warming hypothesis, the issue at play here is abuse of power. These two senators are so sure of their belief in the global warming hypothesis that they feel justified in sending a letter in effect ordering ExxonMobil to give up its own rights lest the senators target them like “big tobacco”. That’s not argument, it is coercion and it is hostile to any ideal of democratic OR scientific debate.
True and it is disappointing that Snowe was part of this. I have been looking at her with interest as a presidential candidate for ’08 and her pro-environment stance as a Republican is refreshing: but not if she is going to use tactics like this.
From the Senators letter:
It seems to me that the Senators are convinced that the science is compelling that we have a problem, and that the only reason ExxonMobil is spending money to refute it is to delay any impact on their corporate health.
Exxonmobil has a right to manipulate public opinion to protect itself. And the Senators have a duty to call a spade a spade and move forward in the public interest based on the consensus opinion of a credible scientific community.
I think that Exxonmobil is acting stupidly and could just as easily become the 800# gorilla in the renewable energy and conservation industry. They remind me of the shortsightedness of the US Car manufacturers in resisting the forces that allowed Toyota to thrive.
What about getting a consortium of environmentalists and scientists together with a group of progressive donors? Maybe money could be raised to help the auto industry go through this transition. The best and brightest could put their heads together? I’d model it after some of the global initiatives that have recently raised so much money, and of course the donors would get tax breaks.
Weren’t there interventions to prevent some of the disasters the WSJ mocks for not occurring?
Wasn’t there a so-called Green Revolution, that improved agricultural yields and, as such, prevented famines and population crash?
Haven’t more damaging pesticides been replaced with less damaging ones?
Really, isn’t the WSJ pushing the worst kind of ignorant-and-proud-of-it cynicism?
We already have the technology to bring our emissions down below 1970 levels, the question is: do we have the political will to implement it?
For a long time the skeptics cried about high fuel prices if we attempt to stop global warming. Yet those high prices are here anyway. We have nothing to lose at this point.
Why not make a cutoff date for all gasoline-powered cars, trucks, SUVs etc to be hybrids? Across the board, existing technology, in mass production so it’s a lot cheaper. Just this movement alone would not only clean up the air, but completely drop our need for oil from the Middle East as well. It’s a win-win.
And only recently they discovered that the climate didn’t warm up as much as some models predicted in the 60s, 70s, and 80s possibly as a result of soot and other emissions cut back by the Clean Air Act, such that once the CAA was passed, and the air was cleaner, the cooling effect of the darker particulate matter previously being released was lessened or reversed.
What we don’t know is at least as large as what we do know. You can claim that Exxon is biased, but I see plenty of evidence that the “referreed journals” are biased as well, that anybody who doesn’t parrot the party line on climate change is not given much voice in the scientific community. So the Senators can believe all they want, but they shouldn’t be threating to use the coercive power of government to silence dissenting voices, even if those dissenting voices come from a (GASP) for profit company.
There is always metaphysical doubt that you can never know anything with absolute certainty.
At some point our leaders need to decide when something evolves from opinion to accepted fact, and then base policy on those facts.
If in the future it is discovered that global warming was not as imminent as first thought we can decide as a society if we should back off the oil industry and allow for greater flexibility in emissions.
But I am not in favor of waiting until an irreversible process starts that ends life as we know it.
While I generally agree with the predictions of Global Warming and humanities role in it, I think we should be careful with “just in case” type of law making. It is an extremely conservative type of policy making which leads to many types of knee jerk reactions.
Gay families MIGHT hurt the institution of marriage, so we better make it illegal, just in case.
We MIGHT need to invade another country, so we better reinstitute the draft now, just in case.
There MIGHT be a terrorist inside the US, so we should tap everyone’s phones, just in case.
I think you should be honest with yourself that you want to make a law simply because you feel that it is good, not because there is any overwhelming, scientific consensus about it.
Kevin H,
I generally agree with your reluctant to act “just in case”.
But it seems to me that a growing majority believes that this is an extreme situation in which failure to act could allow a life altering catastrophic tragedy.
It also makes me feel good that there is overwhelming scientific consensus that unchecked discharge of waste into the environment is not healthy for the environment or us. Plus the simple common sense that it is easier to deal with a problem while it is still relatively small.
If we had gradually begun to move towards energy independence in the 1970′s some of the huge problems we have now would be minor ones.
Paul, that would be fine if the point of this WSJ article was to say why we shouldn’t take much action right now. But that’s not what the Journal column is about. Do you support Sen. Snowe and Sen. Rockefeller’s use of the power of their offices to intimidate ExxonMobile not to fund research into the subject of human-caused global warming?
I am sort of OK with the Senator’s letter.
I think they are asking the largest corporation in the world with record setting profits to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. That if they cooperate they can anticipate support for their transition to a more environmentally friendly business model. Otherwise they may not find the Senators friendly.
If you believe that Global warming is an imminent treat to humanity then the letter is not so unreasonable.
If you believe that the research ExxonMobil paid for is credible then the letter seems heavy handed.
I find it rich that Jay Rockefeller would be involved with this considering where his family made their money. Maybe he should contribute to the funding of this research.
I just hope that this works out, we should know next year.
Of course Pat is completely misrepresenting what the letter asks for. Did you even read it? Do you even really know what ExxonMobil does? They don’t fund any actual research that might disprove AGW. They just fund groups that put out disinformation on the subject based on purposefully misleading claims.
As far as your claim that it is prejudice that results in anti-AGW papers being printed how do you know this? Because of the claims of the kinds of groups that ExxonMobil has funded? Do you even know how these journals work? If there are no papers that meet certain criteria for credibility they can’t publish them. A lack of papers disagreeing with the idea of AGW proves nothing. You have to have credible research contradicting it to get published. They can’t publish something that doesn’t exist or publish a weak paper just to “balance things out”. They aren’t the general press that will worry about looking unbalanced and therefore choose to publish a paper that is complete dreck just to look “fair and balanced”.
And if you’re going to pay attention to the WSJ on this issue remember that they have never published anything that wasn’t highly critical of the idea of AGW. Ever. Yet you complain about the scientific journals unfairness. In addition there are several very basic errors in the story that are so basic that I have to assume that they are done on purpose. At one point the column claims that the only opposition to all of those doom-saying terminally incorrect environmentalists is the CEI. Less than a minute with any decent search engine reveals that as a falsehood. In addition they not only cite things that environmentalists weren’t wrong about but as other posters noted, actions were taken to head them off. They bring up once again the bugaboo of a supposed vast belief that global cooling was the false alarm of the Seventies believed in by the same scientists who are whining about warming now. Read the article and links found at realclimate.org about that myth.
Yes, those evil Senators must be stopped when they tell ExxonMobil to quit funding people whose basic function is to lie to the American public. How dare they?