Cap 'n Trade: The Political Calculus

Let's begin with that aforementioned Brick Wall, otherwise known as climate change-deniers, otherwise known as almost the entire Republican Party. I never understand how people can have such uniform opinions of the world. For instance, why because you own a gun and think abortion is a poor moral decision, do you also think the entire scientific community is making up climate change? Someone, please explain.

As I've said before, we--meaning people with our head's not firmly embedded in our own asses--need to start treating climate change deniers like we do racists. As in, we can't lend legitimacy to anything they say. Whatever you think of the Democratic Party or Barack Obama, they are least dealing semi-seriously with, you know, actual issues of deadly severity. Whereas the Republicans seem in all seriousness to be suggesting that we fix our climate problem by drilling for more oil off-shore.

By enacting a cap and trade program--no matter how difficult it is to do, and it does look like it's going to be a bitch--climate change-deniers will be placed in a box. Once it's established, a cap and trade program will create industries with a vested interest in making money off a program of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And yes, they will hire lobbyists.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

The great thing about the moral blindness of capitalism is that if you get it working for you, people following money like lemmings will do wonders. The entire rise of the Chinese and Indian middle class happened essentially because corporations wanted cheaper labor. The aim of the multi-national corporations was not to raise living standards in the developing world, but they did so simply by being greedy, money-sucking jerks.

The same possibility awaits a cap and trade program. Structured soundly, cap and trade will create a way for people to make money by lowering the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. For once, someone will see a dollar in saving the environment rather than screwing it. An anti-greenhouse gas lobby (other than granola-munching, hemp-necklace-wearing environmentalists) will arise.

There is another, more obvious reason we need some kind of climate change bill, and that is leadership.

If you're reading this blog, than you likely live in "America." Other than making awesome Levi's jeans commercials from Walt Whitman recordings, we are good at producing greenhouse gasses. A lot of greenhouse gasses.

According to the World Resources Institute, since the mid-1800s, the U.S. is responsible for 29% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, the primary manmade greenhouse gas. This is only 2% less than the world's bottom 176 carbon dioxide producing countries. Rounding out the top five emitters, we have China (11%), Russia (9%), Germany (5%) and Japan (5%).

Number six? If it were a country, it would be Texas (they need a lot of juice to execute innocent people).

The point is that we really broke this bastard, so it's only fair and/or makes logical sense for us to lead the fight to fix it.

That means we're going to have to bite the bullet and prove to the world that we're serious about cutting our emissions. Eventually, we are going to have to go to China and India and the rest of the developing world and say, "See how hard we're working? Time to get on board." Eventually, we're also going to have to owe up to our "climate debt," which means helping the rest of the world skip a step and develop using cleaner technologies.

Furthermore, everyone is pretty much staring at us, waiting for us to act. The much-hyped climate talks coming up in Copenhagen in December are going to be waste of everyone's time largely due to the fact that the U.S. couldn't get any kind of legislation enacted in the last year. Largely due to the food fight over the health care bill, Obama has not been able to stump for the cap and trade bill the way he absolutely must if he's going to sell it to a recalcitrant, uninformed public.

However, it's a pretty simple "If we wanna do this, then we gotta do that" equation. If we want to arrest climate change before it gets mind-f***ingly out of hand (because it's going to get just plain "out of hand" no matter what; more on that in a future post), then we have to get the entire world on board with reducing GHG emissions. If we want to get the world on board with reducing emissions, then we have to prove we're serious about reducing our own. If we want to reduce our own, we have to put a mechanism in place to begin that process.

Politically, the point is to avoid what Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner claim is a better way to tackle climate change in their widely-panned book "Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance."

As climate modeler for the British Antarctic Survey William Connelly put it in his review, "There is a grain of sense in there, but so badly wrapped in trash it is nearly unfindable."

Other than having all of their science trashed by the scientific community (including one of the scientists they quote), Levitt and Dubner have pulled into the realm of the mainstream the idea of geo-engineering.

Geo-engineering is all of the following: far from science fiction, absolutely terrifying and possibly necessary.

I'll probably tackle geo-engineering in some future post, but let's hypothetically say that there is some quick-fix solution to bounce the sun's rays away from the planet and cool us off a bit--the point is that the world will still, at some point, have to figure out a way to live without pouring heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere. This is something we should have gotten started on 20 years ago and can't afford to put off any longer.

In other words, no matter what the future holds for the world environmentally and economically, at some point we are all going to have to wake up to the reality that--one way or another--we will need to start living a more carbon-neutral lifestyle, and we must find a politically viable way to do that.

Better to get started now slowly than later painfully.