The First Step's a Doozy
Charles Dodgson comments on my post about Bjorn Lomborg and the Kyoto treaty, pointing out that one of Lomborg's criticisms is that, despite the cost, Kyoto wouldn't help much. He asks, reasonably enough, why I think that compromising on a treaty that does less than the Kyoto treaty would've would do any good.
The point is that politics is an incremental process. In some ways, this is the same point that Lomborg misses with his criticism-- the Kyoto reductions were never intended to be an end unto themselves, and have always been thought of (at least by the people I know who spend a lot of time thinking about these issues) as a first step. A small reduction is better than no reduction, and if nothing else, it buys some time to work for further reductions.
If you're out in the woods, and lop your foot off with an axe, putting a tourniquet on your leg won't be enough to save your life-- you still need to get medical attention. However, the fact that you don't have a trauma team standing by is no reason to reject the imperfect solution of slapping on a tourniquet and trying to get to the hospital. In the same way, the absence of a perfect solution to the problem of global warming doesn't mean we should reject imperfect solutions-- whether they're Kyoto or something less. You do whatever you can right now, and hope that buys you enough time to find a better solution.
The biggest advantage of getting some sort of compromise reduction would not be the reduction itself, so much as the admission that working to reduce CO2 emissions is something that's worth doing. It would require an acceptance, however grudging, of the fact that dumping a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere is probably not the best of ideas. Currently, we don't even have that-- the anti-environmentalist party platform has two planks: one is "human activity has nothing to do with global warming," the other is "Kyoto would wreck the economy and wouldn't help anyway." Some compromise reduction, however symbolic it might end up being, would weaken if not remove the first of those. That's progress.
(Note, too, that I don't really believe we're footless and bleeding in a forest, here. All the respectable science I've seen on the issue points to a warming trend, and suggests that human activity is partially to blame. However, the trend being observed is much milder than the more apocalyptic versions some activists would have you believe. Global warming is a problem that will need to be dealt with, but it's not a panic-time crisis, not yet. We need to find a solution, but we've got plenty of time to look for one, provided we start looking.)
The sensible approach would be to hammer out some sort of compromise, and get some reduction in CO2 emissions. And when that fails to wreck the economy, or cripple American industry-- and it won't wreck the economy, or cripple American industry-- then work on a further reduction, and so on. Get business and industry to agree that there is a problem, and start working on something to solve it. If nothing else, that gets the process started. And it should be made clear from the beginning that this is a process, and that whatever compromise is reached is only the first step in that process-- there isn't a one-step miracle cure, here, and it's important not to be seen as peddling one (if nothing else, that leaves you open to the attack Lomborg is using...).
(And who knows, when we force power plants and factories to actually reduce CO2 emissions, some bright businessman may find a way to make money off it-- turn the carbon into diamonds, or pencil leads, or nanotubes for superconducting wires, or whatever-- and improve rather than cripple the economy. Again, it's amusing to note that some of the same people who tout the unlimited power of free markets and technology to find an answer to the problem of running out of fossil fuels ("When oil gets short, other sources of power will become competitive, and we'll find another way to keep things running") turn around and become the next thing to Luddites when it comes to emissions. The cognitive dissonance involved in believing that technology will find a way to make energy production cheap, but can't possibly find a way to reduce CO2 emissions that won't be ruinously expensive is pretty impressive...)
The problem with the Kyoto-or-bust approach is that it allows the opponents to stonewall, and refuse to even admit there's a problem, let alone start the process of fixing it. So we've got a stalemate-- worse than that, really, because maintaining the status quo is a complete victory for environmentalism's opponents. A compromise from the Kyoto position would be only a partial victory for the environmental movement, but a partial victory is better than a total defeat, which is what Kyoto-or-bust is getting.
Posted at 1:47 PM | link |