“They have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing.” So the French statesman Talleyrand supposedly said of the pre-revolution monarchy. The words apply equally well to that bastion of libertarianism, the Cato Institute.
Over the years I have debated one of their senior scholars, Jerry Taylor, many times. He is probably the craftiest debater that the delayer/inactivist side has. But since, like all delayers, his positions are frozen in stone by his ideology, those positions inevitably become farther and farther disengaged from the reality of a (climate) changing world and hence less and less compelling. That is most clearly evident in my latest debate with him, online at Google’s new Knol site (aka the would-be Wikipedia killer).
My original post is “Jumpstarting the Transition to Clean Energy.” Taylor’s rebuttal is here. You see the typical rigid libertarian worldview sprinkled throughout:
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that global warming is a serious problem and that reducing emissions is cheaper than adapting to climate changes. Neither argument is persuasive to us….
It’s not altogether obvious to us that oil is becoming scarcer…. Regardless, if and when oil begins to disappear — or more accurately, if and when market actors believe the oil scarcity is on the horizon — oil prices will go up accordingly and the market will adjust without any need for government assistance. So while “peak-oil” arguments come and go with the related booms and busts in oil markets, there is no need for a policy argument about oil depletion.
In short, global warming isn’t a problem, and peak oil, if it ever occurs, is self-correcting. What a blissful world the Cato folk live in. Either problems don’t exist or the all-powerful, all-knowing free market will fix them. Now you might think that recent events would cause Cato scholars to at least slightly temper their blind faith in the power of greed to set all things right. But you would be wrong. Indeed, the most jaw-dropping paragraph in Taylor’s “rebuttal” is the last one:
We return then to our original argument. To wit, we know that, as a general matter, free markets work better than socialism. We know that market allocation of goods and services leads to better economic outcomes than political allocation of the same. Only if there is a market failure — that is, only if there is something peculiar about energy markets that makes prices “wrong” — is there intellectual room for the argument that government intervention will improve efficiency. We are still waiting for that argument from Joe.
Seriously. The lines in boldface are not some parody by The Onion. Okay, you knew that because those lines weren’t (intentionally) funny. But just click here if you don’t believe me that a real live person wrote that paragraph in an effort to persuade people to his point of view. My response:
Jerry says this with a very straight face in spite of recent events that should have ended forever the notion that the unfettered marketplace always knows best. In fact, the unfettered market has brought us to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Had the federal government combined with the world’s other major governments not acted quickly, the entire financial system would almost certainly have collapsed under the unrestrained greed of brand-name market actors who had, until now, been considered incredibly sophisticated.
For Jerry, Cato, and libertarians the choice is between some abstract free-market or socialism. For the rest of us, the choice is between catastrophic climate impacts and intelligent government-led investments in clean energy. I have again and again described the market failure. More importantly, so have our leading scientists. I agree with the world’s leading climate scientists that we need to keep carbon dioxide concentrations at or below 450 parts per million, which means global emissions must peak around 2020-2025, and we need a 50% cut in global carbon dioxide emissions from current levels by mid-century. It also means this country (and all industrialized nations) must return to 1990 levels of emissions by 2020 and achieve an 80% cut by midcentury, which US politicians from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Barack Obama have embraced. I support such domestic action and international action, and I have repeatedly proposed both near-term and medium-term strategies to get there.
It is time for Jerry and Cato to stop dancing around this central issue. What carbon dioxide concentrations target does Jerry propose? What emissions target does Jerry propose for the nation and the world both by 2020 and 2050? What climate policies should the nation and the world adopt to achieve those targets? If he won’t answer those questions, then he is embracing unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions, and those interested in avoiding catastrophic climate impacts will need to look elsewhere than Cato.
Let me also excerpt here my brief rebuttal to Taylor’s dangerous to do-nothing approach on peak oil:
The “market” in oil consumption doesn’t actually adjust quickly because our transportation system is 97% dependent on oil. You simply cannot change the transportation system or the fuel delivery system fast enough to avoid devastating economic impacts.
Replacing oil in the transportation sector requires strong government action two decades before a peak because of the time needed to replace vehicles and fuel infrastructure. That was the conclusion of a major study funded by the Department of Energy in 2005 — yes, the Bush DOE — on “Peaking of World Oil Production.” The report notes: “The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.”
The same central point is true about global warming. Act now, or face very harsh consequences. The global warming situation is, however, much worse than the peak oil situation, since when the climate changes, it does so irreversibly on a timescale of millennia.
My full reply to Taylor is here, “Cato proposes a do-nothing energy and climate strategy.”
Related Posts:
- The Deniers are winning, but only with the GOP
- CEI campaigns to destroy the climate for centuries
- Who are the Denyers and Court Jesters?
- Krauthammer’s strange denier talk points, Part 1: Newton’s laws were “overthrown”
- Part 2: The real reason conservatives don’t believe in climate science
- Can This Planet Be Saved? Not if conservatives rule
- George Will nails the difference between conservatives and progressives
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
So the Federal Reserve — the central bank that holds a monopoly on the U.S. currency and held interest rates below the rate of inflation for years leading up to the housing bubble (and the earlier dot-com bubble), to the benefit of their investment bank buddies and to the detriment of everyone else — is an example of the free market in action? And in what way are the government-backed corporations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which — despite Republican attempts to pass the blame off on to minorities — primarily served the interests of Wall Street traders, to disastrous effect, an example of the “free market”?
Here I was under the impression that the “Progressive Era” ended laissez faire in the United States, and that the New Deal, again, limited the supposed excesses of laissez faire and saved capitalism from itself. If so, then how can the last 8 years of the Bush administration — which expanded the size of government more than any previous administration in history — be an example of laissez faire in action? How, pray tell, is the doctrine of socializing the risks while privatizing the profits congruous with free market principles? (I’d also point out that the government’s own financial shenanigans — like billions in taxpayer dollars that somehow manage to “vanish”, with zero accountability, every year — would make Enron’s former accountants blush.)
To say the criminals in the White House were ideologically committed to the free market is nonsense, and much too kind to a group of men and women who, in a just world, would be awaiting their trials at the Hague. The gang that brought us the Iraq war has no problem with government intervention in the marketplace so long as it benefits their corporate backers (see: interest rates, Federal Reserve & nuclear subsidies, for starters).
Whether one thinks a laissez-faire free market is the best system or not is beside the point. No doubt the Bush administration has cloaked its actions in the rhetoric of a free market (openly speaking of economic exploitation and the transfer of wealth from middle to the upper-class just isn’t as politically attractive), the Republican Party has always been committed to corporatism — rule by and for the corporate elite — under the auspices of a “market system.”
As for climate change, hasn’t it been the U.S. government burning all those fossil fuels in the Middle East — consuming more energy than any other country or corporation in the world — and subsidizing oil consumption by socializing security and transportation costs? Wasn’t it the government that — with the help of eminent domain — kicked thousands of largely poor households off their land to build the interstate highway system, leading to the atomistic, car-dependent culture the U.S. has today? Hasn’t it been government policy to enforce zoning rules that have discouraged mixed use development, leading to towns where the supermarket is 20 miles away from the residential areas?
And hasn’t the government been subsidizing corn ethanol — while imposing tariffs on the more environmentally friendly Brazilian sugar ethanol — in the name of promoting “energy independence” and fighting climate change for years? What makes you think that the election of Barack Obama will all of a sudden end decades of ill-considered and counterproductive policies? Are we to assume the fossil fuel and nuclear industries — and their legions of high-paid lobbyists — are merely to disappear?
(And before I get the juvenile “denier” or “delayer” label, I’m of the opinion that climate change illustrates the “tragedy of the commons”, and would be all for internalizing the costs of emitting CO2 in the price of fossil fuels.)
I’d suggest examining your own rigid, ideological commitment to the state as the be-all and end-all of human development before drafting another typically condescending post attacking people like Jim Hansen for not sharing your unrelenting faith in the power and majesty of the U.S. government and in the ability of omnipotent technocrats such as yourself to determine how every penny in energy-sector investments should be spent.
NCF, the current financial crisis is a direct result of the re-appeal of the Glass-Steagull acts, and other deregulation of the finance industry. Without that deregulation, neither the enormous leveraging nor the merging of investment and deposit banks would have been legal. Nor would it have been so easy to sign up high-risk borrowers for mortgages and other loans. There would have been little or no bubble, and little or no crash.
(Note: Unlike Joe, I do not believe the ‘bailout’ law helped anything. In fact – I suspect that its failure to restore those regulations, its de facto lack of transparency, its failure to require a writing down of the loans, and its failure to seek removal of executives who made decisions that contributed to the crisis – will make it a law that rewards bad decisions, and thus worsens the crisis. It is not an accident that all but one of the finance institutions so far receiving bailout dollars have already spent all or nearly all the money they received on bonuses for the same executives who helped caused the crisis.)
I’m in the oil business and I have thought for years that the more socialist governments are much better poised to deal with the looming problems for oil. In our system, delusion is just too darn cheap to come by.
So the government had policies in the past that meant that more carbon fuels were used for energy. That does not change the realities of today, that global warming from more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is going to change our climate to warmer and not to desireable temperatures. If the government policies led to more carbon fuel use, then it would be even more of respondsibility that they do something about it to make up for their bad choice. You do not get to say, see government is bad and then think you made an important point. You still have not fixed the larger problem of global warming.
Some might argue that carbon taxes are the way to go. I guess that is what is meant when someone writes they are all for ‘internalizing the costs of CO2 in the price of fossil fuels.’ Does that mean you are then going to work to have a carbon tax so we can internalize those costs? I’m guessing probably not. Most only want to win debating points and if you found something that may seem easier than what the other debater advocated, you thought you made your point. But then work towards getting a tax on carbon. Not so easy.
Idealogy and practicality. We can be idealogical in our view of the world, but what is it that will actually solve the problem is what we have to ask ourselves. Doing the things that govenments can do relatively quickly such as renewable energy mandates is something that can do some good. Putting a carbon tax on carbon fuels would do some good to, but it is harder to do. We are at the point of ‘all of the above,’ we need to do most things that we reasonably can do.
Recently former federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was testifying in Congress and said that this financial crisis changed his view of the world. Some of his philosophy was at least partly libertarian as I have read. He didn’t foresee that bankers would not have enough self interest to do the right thing as far as risk. Well, I could have told him he should just go to an all you can eat food buffet and watch all the overweight people, they also aren’t doing what they should as far as risk.
This global warming problem should change our world view just as Greenspan changed his world view about the financial crisis. This is not where we can become idealogical about what we have to do, we need to be practical and have a more all of the above type attitude to solving this problem. If its a stronger building code for more insulation, do that. If its higher vehicle fuel standards, do that. If it’s spending some money to get batteries and battery vehicles built, do that. If it’s to get renewables built, do that. Can we do to much or the wrong thing and have pushback, certainly, let’s be smart about what we try to do, but we still have to do more than we are doing now.
Solving the global warming problem is the main thing and we need an all of the above, do what works approach.
The previous post should have said ‘undesirable temperatures,’ not desirable temperatures.
[JR: Are you sure about that?]
So when will Cato’s Alan Greenspan moment occur? Hopefully well before we begin the immediate transition to lower our carbon dioxide output.