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Right-Wing Punditry & Green Cheese Science

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

I alternately envy and pity regular op-ed columnists whose punditry is syndicated by the millions of copies in U.S. daily newspapers. On one hand, imagine all that wonderful news space and all those willing eyes. On the other hand, imagine the angst of coming up with faux wisdom several times a week and trying to make it sound fresh and profound.

Every day I try to read a few pundits who are guaranteed to disagree with me. As a long-time devotee of Thomas Jefferson, I believe that to have an honest debate, we must suffer the opinions of those who disagree with us. We even (occasionally) may learn something.

Of late, I have been reading right-wing pundits on global warming, finding reason once again to remind myself that carbon dioxide and methane have no politics. CO2 and methane don’t care if we believe in the importance of global warming or not. They are not having a debate with us. All they do is hold heat in the atmosphere. And while it’s true (weather being weather) that other influences do come into play with regards to global warming, injecting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will increase temperatures.

The New Commies

The basic science of global warming intrudes only rarely in the op-ed debates. If we get any science at all, it’s the moon-is-madeof- green-cheese variety. More likely I will run into the John Birch Society’s signature nightmare from the 1950s that stars the United Nations in a plot to enslave the people of the United States, updated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cast as the New Commies. Or, as George F. Will put it so succinctly: “Today’s ‘green left’ is yesterday’s ‘red left,’ revised,” using pessimism about the future as an unjustified excuse for government curtailment of individual freedom to exploit and pollute. Carbon dioxide is thus exonerated by facile (and rather simplistic) historical irony, without the slightest bow to geophysics. If carbon dioxide had a sense of humor, it would get a belly laugh out of this. Will strikes me as a reasonably intelligent fellow, a wonderful word-spinner, but his global-warming science is strictly green cheese.

Right-wing pundit Cal Thomas argues that global warming amounts to nothing more than a “cult” that “ignores evidence,” an excuse for liberals to expand the reach of government into peoples’ lives. “Growing numbers of atmospheric scientists and others with related expertise are emerging from the global-warming cult and testifying to their conversions. They are mostly ignored by the press and politicians who have embraced the cultists’ doctrines,” he argues. The carbon dioxide is chuckling, Cal! No ‘thermal inertia’ for him, no ‘feedback loops’ — just hard-right ideology. And he thinks someone else is displaying allegiance to a cult.

Dissing Carbon Taxes

The columnist Robert Samuelson, who specializes in economics, argues, a “cap-and-trade” scheme will amount to a tax on fossil- fuel energy as a market device to reduce its use. Just call It “capand- tax,” he moans. And who, after all, wants to pay taxes? In a perfect world, the streets would pave themselves.

If Samuelson is worried about a tax running around under the guise of a futures market in carbon, we could institute a straight-up carbon-dioxide tax. Such things are done in Europe. But I doubt the wise-guy pundits would like that, either. Tax favors for oil companies are more their style.

Samuelson makes the use of taxation to reward or penalize certain types of human behavior sounds like an evil new idea. And yet what, dear writer, is an oildepletion allowance? What is a tax deduction for charitable contributions? Of course cap-and-trade is a tax, and its stated purpose is to reduce our production of carbon dioxide. It is far better to tax something we do not want (greenhouse gases) than activity we would rather encourage, such as human labor. Samuelson misses the example of Sweden, which has replaced a large proportion of its income tax with energy taxes.

Rapidly rising prices for fossil fuels — from coal-fired power to gasoline — already are altering the market in favor of alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power. Wind power is already less expensive than fossil-fuel sources under some conditions. Cap-and-trade will encourage this necessary trend, by requiring payment to pollute, and raising the price over time.

The Special-Interest Dance

As soon as the United States Congress began to seriously consider taxing carbon emissions, various industries involved in the Climate Action Partnership (CAP) began to jockey in favor of their interests. While major industries supported curbs in principle, specifics varied widely. The raw truth is that dealing with global warming will reward some industries and penalize others. Get used to it.

In January 2007, the CAP endorsed reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 60 to 80 percent by 2050, supporting climate scientists’ views at that time. These days, the favored scientific figure for carbon emissions in 2050 is zero. That was the easy part. Next came the particulars — practice versus theory. Consensus proved elusive. Should carbon allowances be given away to companies that emit carbon dioxide, such as utilities, or auctioned at a price from the beginning? This and other debates have stymied negotiations over policy and regulations. In Europe, permission to emit a ton of CO2 already was selling for about $26 in 2008; at that level, the carbon dioxide emitted in the United States would be worth about $220 billion a year.

By 2008, trade groups were readying ad campaigns against cap-and-trade. One ad, produced by the United States Chamber of Commerce, was described in the Washington Post as showing “a man cooking breakfast over candles in a cold, darkened house, then jogging to work on empty highways, asking: ‘Is this really how Americans want to live?’”

Samuelson seems to be something of a climatic fatalist, who believes that reducing carbon emissions by penalizing its production “promises to be hard and perhaps futile.” He seems not to mind leaving our children a hot, miserable world. Or, perhaps, he thinks it is a hoax or a cult. Or that we can continue to add to the atmosphere’s greenhouse-gas overload without causing any real environmental problems — ‘green-cheese’ science.

It’s a dangerous tack these right-wing pundits are advising. Conducting business as usual will ensure a climate out of control.

Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Johansen is the author of the three-volume “Global Warming in the Twenty-First Century” (Praeger, 2006).