Global Warming and Government Regulations

by Austin Raynor

On Saturday the much-hyped Copenhagen conference ended, thankfully, without anything having been accomplished. A vague, inconclusive agreement was “noted,” but not signed; nations decided to “enhance (their) long-term cooperative action to combat climate change” without agreeing to any specific emissions targets.

Pledges to send money to developing countries were similarly vague. Dubbed the “Copenhagen Accord,” the agreement was non-binding; one Chinese negotiator even went so far as to say, “It’s not a treaty. It’s not going to be signed or agreed to.”

While the tepid reception in some quarters indicates the disappointment among those who favor a global environmentalist regime, for the rest of us, the ongoing legislative indecision of the climate elite is a boon. The science of global warming is far from settled but what is clear is that cumbersome governmental regulations, from an environmental standpoint, will be at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive.

According to the Cato Institute, when you take into account readings from both thermometers and satellites, there has actually been no net increase in global surface temperatures in a decade. In the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, one climate scientist referred to global warming proponents’ inability to explain this plateau as a “travesty.”

Despite this disparity between the reality and what their climate models predict, such scientists continue to proclaim their ability to accurately estimate temperatures a century from now. Global climate fluctuations involve an immense number of variables and there is no indication that scientists are capable of competently leveraging these to craft dependable models.

In the 1970s there was a general scientific panic over global cooling (Newsweek reported that global cooling had “taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average”), with some scientists even advocating covering the polar ice caps in black soot to intentionally melt them.

In short, the science is inconclusive at best, and we’ve been wrong before. However, most scientists do agree that there has been some degree of warming in the Earth’s average surface temperature over the past century. The question then, is, can anything be done to stem this trend?

And, in this case, the science regarding the effects of governmental regulations—domestic or international—is perfectly clear. For instance, according to FreedomWorks, an extremely aggressive domestic cap and trade program would produce no more than a 0.07 degrees Celsius reduction in the Earth’s temperature by 2050. We do not even possess scientific instruments precise enough to measure this change.

But the costs would be tremendous. The cost of a unilateral cap and trade initiative, for example, is estimated at up to four percent of global gross domestic product; in the U.S. alone this would amount to $560 billion annually. The effects of such economic dampening make their presence felt in a variety of ways: higher taxes, fewer jobs, less growth.

The cost of the Waxman-Markey legislation, the climate bill currently under consideration in Congress, would be approximately $1,761 per family, or the equivalent of hiking all personal income taxes by fifteen percent. Energy companies will be forced to pay billions for carbon credits. This dries up the profit needed to engage in research and development.

A technological revolution is the only avenue for defeating our dependence on fossil fuels. And the way to spur innovation is to make an industry more profitable, not less so. It may even be the case that atmospheric conditions can be altered simply and cheaply.

Consider, for instance, the suggestion by Dubner and Levitt, authors of Superfreakonomics, that we pump sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere through a hose attached to a fighter jet in order to mimic the effects of Mount Pinatubo’s massive eruption in 1991, which shot so much sulfuric ash into the atmosphere that the earth’s temperature cooled an entire degree for several years.

If climate change is indeed a threat—a claim yet to be verified—it is the ingenuity and flexibility of the market that must be marshaled to combat it. Broad regulations, by reducing industry profitability and thus restricting funding for research and development, will in the long run do little more than hamper our ability to deal with a threat as complex and poorly understood as anthropogenic global warming.