Paul Krugman: Don’t believe climate change deniers; it’s easy being green

4:16 PM Friday, September 25, 2009

Have you enjoyed the debate over health care reform? Have you been impressed by the civility of the discussion and the intellectual honesty of reform opponents?

If so, you’ll love the next big debate: The fight over climate change.

The House has already passed a fairly strong cap-and-trade climate bill, the Waxman-Markey act. If it becomes law, it would eventually lead to sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But on climate change, as on health care, the sticking point will be the Senate. And the usual suspects are doing their best to prevent action.

Some of them still claim that there’s no such thing as global warming, or at least that the evidence isn’t yet conclusive. But that argument is wearing thin — as thin as the Arctic pack ice, which has diminished to the point that shipping companies are opening up new routes through the formerly impassable seas north of Siberia.

Even corporations are losing patience with the deniers: Pacific Gas and Electric has canceled its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest over the chamber’s “disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality” of climate change.

So the main argument against climate action probably won’t be the claim that global warming is a myth. It will be the argument that doing anything to limit global warming would destroy the economy.

Claims of immense economic damage from climate legislation are as bogus, in their own way, as climate-change denial. Saving the planet won’t come free (although the early stages of conservation actually might). But it won’t cost all that much either.

How do we know this? First, the evidence suggests that we’re wasting a lot of energy right now. That is, we’re burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas in ways that don’t actually enhance our standard of living — a phenomenon known in the research literature as the “energy-efficiency gap.” The existence of this gap suggests that policies promoting energy conservation could, up to a point, actually make consumers richer.

Second, the best available economic analyses suggest that even deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would impose only modest costs on the average family. Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office released an analysis of the effects of Waxman-Markey, concluding that in 2020 the bill would cost the average family only $160 a year, or 0.2 percent of income. That’s roughly the cost of a postage stamp a day.

By 2050, when the emissions limit would be much tighter, the burden would rise to 1.2 percent of income. But the budget office also predicts that real GDP will be about two-and-a-half times larger in 2050 than it is today, so that GDP per person will rise by about 80 percent. The cost of climate protection would barely make a dent in that growth. And all of this, of course, ignores the benefits of limiting global warming.

Are the opponents of cap-and-trade relying on different studies that reach fundamentally different conclusions? No, not really. Last spring the Heritage Foundation put out a report claiming that Waxman-Markey would lead to huge job losses, but the study was so obviously absurd that I’ve hardly seen anyone cite it.

Instead, the campaign against saving the planet rests mainly on lies.

Last week Glenn Beck informed his audience of a “buried” Obama administration study showing that Waxman-Markey would actually cost the average family $1,787 per year. No such study exists.

But we shouldn’t be too hard on Beck. Similarly false claims about the cost of Waxman-Markey have been circulated by many supposed experts.

The polarization of our political discourse has forced self-proclaimed “centrists” to choose sides — and many of them have apparently decided that partisan opposition to President Barack Obama trumps any concerns about intellectual honesty.

The claim that climate legislation will kill the economy deserves the same disdain as the claim that global warming is a hoax. The truth is that it’s relatively easy being green.

Paul Krugman writes for The New York Times.

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I'm not a climatologist, and neither is Pachauri! He was an engineer for the railroad...not exactly a strong climate background. It is more than coincidence that the IPCC picked an economist to be their president. The UN, in concert with progressives is by and large committed to weakening the US, and GW is just a way to do it.

BHOisCZARY!
9:45 AM, 9/29/2009

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First, deal with the science. Second, Pachauri is an engineer and economist. Third, he was picked by bush to replace the "alarmist" scientist:

http://www.newscientist.com/article...

But, you knew all that already, didn't you? You're a climatologist yourself.

drunken orangetree
7:21 AM, 9/29/2009

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Ah yes, the IPCC, whose president,Rajendra Pachauri, is an ECONOMIST! Hmmmmm. Not to mention his homeland (India)will not go along with GW regulations. At a GW debate, Dr. William Schlesinger admitted that he thought “something on the order of 20 percent [of IPCC members] have had some dealing with climate." This is a UN body, which tells me all I need to know. Using them as a reference only bolsters my claim; it's all about economic "justice."

BHOisCZARY!
10:12 PM, 9/28/2009

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Nothing to prove that people are causing climate change except a bunch of scientific evidence:

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-r...

But, I'm sure you highly qualified climatologists will be able to refute these arguments.

drunken orangetree
6:59 PM, 9/28/2009

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Climate change is perpetual. It has been changing since the Earth as formed. Life in differnt forms has come and gone on this planet. Eventually, mankind will disappear as well and there is nothing we can do to stop it, delay it, or speed it up. To believe otherwise is either arrogant or naive.
There are billions of years worth of data that proves climate change, but none of it proves that mankind has anything to do with it.

Jeff
4:28 PM, 9/28/2009

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