Dear Cato: Climate Action Delayed Is Climate Action Denied

It might be easy to imagine that the folks at the Cato Institute aren’t as bad as some other “think tanks” that work at the denial of the science that reveals and explains the phenomenon of global warming. After all, right up front, on their web page on global warming, they clearly say, “Global warming is indeed real, and human activity has been a contributor since 1975.”

OK, before we go any further, the part about 1975 is a little weird. Does the Cato Institute demarcate the start of our warming of the globe to when “Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting” hit the airwaves? Or do they want to pin it on the start of Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign? The Cato Institute has never liked Jimmy Carter.  Just to be clear, we’ve been warming the world since we started burning fossil fuels, more like 1750 instead of 1975. But I’m not going to ding them for being off by about 225 years.

            The rest of the sentence is something that seems incredibly reasonable coming from a “think tank” that was started in part by Charles Koch and whose purpose is to support oil industries and an economy based on the extraction and use of fossil fuels. They acknowledge that global warming is real and we’re part of the problem. Wow! How reasonable. These folks sound like they’ve done their homework and are willing to follow through and do their part to reduce carbon emissions.

            That’s the way it seems until you read the rest of what Cato has to say:

But global warming is also a very complicated and difficult issue that can provoke very unwise policy in response to political pressure. Although there are many different legislative proposals for substantial reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, there is no operational or tested suite of technologies that can accomplish the goals of such legislation.

Fortunately, and contrary to much of the rhetoric surrounding climate change, there is ample time to develop such technologies, which will require substantial capital investment by individuals.

Where do I start with this? Global warming is “very complicated.” OK, I guess it is. What does that have to do with reducing carbon emissions? In some cases it might be complicated, and in others it might be quite simple. The other red flag here is the use of the word “provoke,” which can simply mean to stir to action, but also carries the connotation of inciting anger and rashness, and here in this case insinuates that climate policy may not be well thought out or poorly designed.

And while the phrase about “no operational or tested suite of technologies” that can accomplish the goals of climate change legislation has a germ of truth to it—we are, after all, on untested territory here with global warming. We have never tossed up tons and tons of carbon in the air and substantially warmed the entire earth—that does not mean that we should not work to remedy the tight spot that we’ve put ourselves in. I could cite a hundred examples of the past, from Columbus to Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon, to illustrate that although we sometimes find ourselves in uncharted territory, we can still be successful in our efforts.

And renewable energy, hybrid cars, and other technologies that are to help us reduce or mitigate climate change are only part of the solution. A lot of economists will tell you that the easiest way to bring about reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is a carbon tax. A carbon tax can be simple, designed to be fair to the poor and lower classes, and be quite effective in making all of our carbon footprints smaller and smaller.

As the Cato Institute wraps things up, they swerve into outright falsehood when they say that there is plenty of time to develop the technologies to stave off global warming. This is risible. We have pushed the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere up to 400 ppm, the planet is sufficiently warmed, and we are seeing some of the consequences of the forcing caused by all this new carbon dioxide in the air. Glaciers melt, the oceans rise, and our weather patterns are changing.

The Cato Institute tries to come off as being responsible and reasonable, acknowledging our contributions to climate change. But they are as bad as any of the organizations or industry hired guns who deny the link between our carbon emissions and a warmer world. They remind me of the “responsible voices” who claimed that they themselves were not racists yet were quick to caution Martin Luther King that he was asking for too much too quickly.

In his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, King clarified what was at the core of this delaying tactic. In the letter he wrote, “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

And so it is with Cato. Their “ample time” is the same as the racist “Wait.” Saying that we should take our time to work on climate change means that they don’t ever want to work on climate change. Their “ample time” rings in the ears of Alaskan natives loosing their towns and homes; it rings in the ears of Filipinos whose homes and villages were ravaged by Haiyan; it rings in the ears of all of us whose food, water, and safety is jeopardized by global warming with piercing familiarity.

The World Warms As Australia's New Government Promises to Drop National Carbon Tax

For global warming there are two competing truisms. The first truism is that the most efficient and effective means of reducing carbon emissions is through a carbon tax. The basic economic rule is that people buy less of something when it’s more expensive. And a tax on carbon would make all things reliant on carbon emissions—gasoline, electricity, etc.—more expensive. Folks would buy less of this stuff and there would be less carbon thrown into the air.

            The most common approach around carbon taxes is levying them on industries that are heavy users of fossil fuels, mostly the electric utilities, with the increased costs passed on to consumers. These taxes can be finessed, with rebates going to lower income individuals to mitigate their hardship from these taxes. A good thing about a carbon tax is that the revenue can be used to promote cleaner and greener energy options.

            The other truism is that people hate to pay taxes. It doesn’t matter what sort of tax it might be, an income tax, a carbon tax, a sales, tax, folks hate to pay taxes.

            We just saw the clash of these truisms play themselves out in Australia, where the recent elections delivered a whopping blow to the Labor Party that had been in power for the past six years. The new Prime Minister-elect, Tony Abbott, proclaimed in his acceptance speech that one of his prime objectives once he is in office is an end to Australia’s carbon tax.

            Down under the carbon tax has not been around a long time, only about a year. In its short life it proved to be, as with all taxes, unpopular. It was one of the issues that Abbott used to hammer the Labor Party in his campaigning.

            This was not a single-issue election. The Labor Party might have been voted out anyway. In power, the Labor Party was unstable and prone to internal bickering, although their popularity increased when Kevin Rudd, who had been Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, replaced Prime Minister Julia Gillard in something of an internal party coup in the past few months.

            The death of Australia’s carbon tax is nonetheless disconcerting. The planet, and humanity, will be in a lot better shape if human beings reduce their use of fossil fuels, but we’re not going to magically do that sort of thing without being prodded to do so. Despite the good that a carbon tax might be able to do for us, we just don’t like being prodded.

GOP (And Others) Still Denying or Ignoring Global Warming

I have not given up hope, but I’m beginning to think that the GOP and certain other politicians would rather die than to acknowledge global warming.

According to this story on NPR, there is a great amount of support for a federal carbon tax. A carbon tax is one of the most effective and simplest means of reducing CO2 emissions. Everything that a company or a person uses as a fuel that throws carbon up in the air—diesel, coal, gasoline, natural gas, etc.—would have a tax. The tax would be based on how much carbon that particular fuel would put in the atmosphere. Coal would have a higher tax rate than, say, natural gas, because it makes more carbon dioxide than natural gas when it is burned. At a recent Senate panel considering a carbon tax, however, GOP members disputed that global warming is even happening.

The Keeling Curve from Scripps Institute of Oceanography

Average Temperature by Decade
This is the science, ignore it at your peril.

And Joe Manchin, a Democrat but one from the coal producing state of West Virginia, was the only Democrat to vote against the confirmation of Gina McCarthy to head the EPA. McCarthy, a highly qualified public administrator who has worked for both Democrats and Republicans, was confirmed after the Senate reached a deal averting the “nuclear option” and ending the GOP filibuster that had been holding up her confirmation. Explaining his vote, Manchin actually praised McCarthy, saying:

In fact, it’s not hard to imagine that she could have been nominated to be EPA Administrator by Mitt Romney if he had won the 2012 Presidential election. After all, she advised him on climate change when he was Governor of Massachusetts.

As Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette points out, Manchin, while he is railing against the EPA and espousing a “common sense” approach to energy policy, completely leaves out any mention or consideration of global warming and greenhouse gasses.

Today's GOP: "Please just make that horrible science and nasty global warming go away!"

Barbara Boxer Introduces Carbon Tax Legislation

Cap and trade has been the more business friendly and, by that default, the most politically feasible manner in which to begin controlling carbon emissions. But Senator Barbara Boxer of California has introduced a carbon tax bill, which is far more direct and, if implemented, more likely to achieve the desired results of reducing our country’s carbon emissions.

            Under her bill, companies would pay $20 per ton of carbon or methane emitted, with the tax increasing by 5.6 percent each year for the next ten years. Money from the tax would go towards energy research and weatherizing homes.

            Manik Roy, of the non-partisan Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, says that the bill has a snowball’s chance in a global warming world of passing as stand-alone legislation, but Democrats might be able to get the bill passed by attaching the bill to business friendly legislation that lowers some taxes.

            Hats off to Barbara Boxer. Although it is an uphill battle, I believe that within the next few years a national carbon tax will become part of our country’s energy policy.