Bogus Gold

Yesterday, Mitch Berg pointed out an article in the City Journal by Peter Huber which builds a persuasive case that the proper path to controlling carbon in the atmosphere is not by trying to control emissions but rather to "sink it" into the soil.

The whole thing is worth a read, but for my purposes I'll jump to his conclusion:

If we do need to do something serious about carbon, the sequestration of carbon after it’s burned is the one approach that accepts the growth of carbon emissions as an inescapable fact of the twenty-first century. And it’s the one approach that the rest of the world can embrace, too, here and now, because it begins with improving land use, which can lead directly and quickly to greater prosperity. If, on the other hand, we persist in building green bridges to nowhere, we will make things worse, not better. Good intentions aren’t enough. Turned into ineffectual action, they can cost the earth and accelerate its ruin at the same time.

This brings out another element of the modern Global Warming Alarmism movement which deserves more scrutiny - even to the extent you believe in the validity of their science and the certainty of their predictions, the main Alarmists aren't acting in a sensible manner in the approach to their own stated problem.

Huber isn't the first to notice it. The last major heretic to part from Global Warming Alarmism was - and remains - a believer in the human causation of global warming by means of carbon emissions. Despite his popular moniker as the "skeptical environmentalist," it wasn't anthropogenic global warming itself bearing the brunt of Bjørn Lomborg's skepticism, but rather the appropriate societal response to it.

There are key distinctions between Huber and Lomborg's approach, but I don't think either one is likely to make a dent in the iron-clad thoughts driving the alarmists. Nevertheless it's interesting to examine their positions.

Lomborg concluded that the cost of adapting to the worst case scenarios of Global Warming considered by the IPCC was significantly less than the cost of trying to prevent it from occurring. This created immediate outrage among the Alarmists for a host of reasons, but in summary it would seem Lomborg doesn't share one of the fundamental beliefs of New Environmentalism - that humans are an affliction to the planet. Lomborg's numbers showing how mankind could adapt to planetary warming didn't address the Alarmist core conviction, that it is morally wrong for mankind to cause climate change - intended or not. Point taken, if still not conceded by those who don't share this moral opinion.

Huber, however, takes a fundamentally different track. He proposes that prevention is still the proper goal, but makes the case that attempting to control carbon emissions will be an ineffective means to achieving it.

Lomborg was villified, demonized and continues his pariah-like existence among the left, but then as I noted above, his was implicitly a moral error to the Alarmists as much as anything else. Huber makes the genuflections to the proper moral issues, but I suspect he will simply be ignored.

But this raises an interesting point: Even to the extent the Alarmists are right about the imminent peril of global warming, their proposed response to it makes little sense. Why even bother going the route by which you plan to control the emission of something that is so fundamental to economic activity on a worldwide scale? The achievability of that kind of universal sacrifice would strain credulity no matter what disaster loomed. And, as both Lomborg and Huber in different ways have identified, it's not like that is the only possible response.

There's an old saying: When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. But that doesn't explain this situation, because there are lots more tools than the proverbial hammer available. Yet we're apparently going to pound away all the same.

What is it that drives ostensibly rational people to fixate not only on the certainty of a problem, but also embrace a seemingly irrational inflexibility in their available means to address it? And, more importantly, how long can such a stubborn consensus hold sway among the governments of the world?