Climate Activists Stumble on Stubborn Facts

“Facts are stubborn things,” remarked John Adams 239 years ago. And so they remain. Which is why President Obama and the world’s leaders can’t agree on what to do to prevent the disastrous consequences of the global warming they have persuaded themselves is our fate.

The first fact that has proved stubborn is that national interests, including the survival instincts of national leaders, trump international cooperation every time. Although we and other nations might adopt national ceilings on CO2 emissions, we are unlikely to sign on to a legally binding treaty to enforce those limits, which has unnamed officials of the European Union accusing the US of standing in the way of an international agreement, and of attaching a lower priority to emissions control than does the EU. Good thing!

In lieu of agreeing to an international treaty, and ceding sovereignty when world’s leaders gather in Copenhagen in December, Obama—if he decides to attend—will tout the steps he is taking to subsidize green energy and promote energy efficiency. China will promise only to keep the increase in its emissions below the rate of increase in its national output, which means lots more emissions. And there will be no effective international enforcement authority. Another good thing.

National sovereignty is not the only stubborn fact in the way of a binding agreement. The other is that jobs trump environment, and emissions restrictions might stifle economic growth. No surprise that emissions have fallen 40 percent in this recession: shuttered factories don’t produce emissions -- or anything else, least of all jobs.

True, the world’s leaders talk about all the jobs that will be created by green power—all those subsidized solar panels to be built, all those subsidized wind machines to be constructed. But no country has ever built enduring prosperity on subsidies for inefficient production processes. If that were possible, a nation could prohibit the use of energy-consuming machines on farms, and create thousands—millions—of jobs by regressing to the back-breaking labor of the bad old days. Hardly the route to rising living standards.

The third stubborn fact that confronts those who agree with UN general Secretary Ban Ki-Moon that “climate change is the pre-eminent geopolitical and economic issue of the 21st century” is that the data do not unambiguously suggest that the earth is warming. “Global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years”, making it difficult to persuade policy makers, unable to grasp “scientific nuances,” that the recent past “has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gasses…” reports the very green New York Times. Poor, dumb policymakers!

None of this means that it would be unwise to take prudential steps to curb the use of some fossil fuels, perhaps by removing subsidies to their production, as the President proposes. There are good security reasons for reducing reliance on oil from countries that are either unstable or led by anti-American demagogues. There are good reasons to fund research into carbon sequesterization that would make the burning of our huge coal resources less emission intensive. There are good reasons to believe that wind and solar have a place in many nations’ energy futures. And there certainly is good reason to believe that it would be a good thing if emission-free nuclear power were no longer the plaything of scare-mongering politicians and activists.

There might even be good reasons to confront directly what the UN bureaucrats are trying to conceal. They have long sought to have a larger portion of the developed world’s income redistributed to poor nations, and now see taxes on emissions in advanced economies as a source of the funds for such international income redistribution. If the developing nations clean up corruption and waste, some sort of private-sector, government partnerships might just make development aid effective, although in those circumstances private investment would increase sharply, reducing the need for handouts.

So fear not when you read the some international conference on the environment has “failed”. It hasn’t. It has had to adjust to stubborn facts. Not a bad thing.

Dr. Stelzer, director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, is a columnist for the Sunday Times of London. A former managing director of investment banking firm Rothschild, Inc., he earned his doctorate in economics from Cornell.