Let's Pretend

The "pageant" masquerading as environmental debate

Virginia Postrel from the March 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

No one seemed much interested in the scientific questions, many of which are still in play. You could pretty much predict what people would say about science by finding out what they thought about completely unrelated questions: about mar-kets, about industrial civilization, about America, about oranges in the winter.

The whole thing was very disquieting, a struggle between competing world views decked out as a way of solving a technical problem. The diplomats provided the technocratic cover, pretending that "sacrifice, struggle, and a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary." All the while, Greenpeace and its fossil-fuel enemies were arguing the opposite point.

In the end, the sleepless delegates came up with a treaty whose consequences are murky, to be determined in a later round of negotiations and, as important, by the actions of the U.S. Senate. The treaty takes the advice of economists, who, accepting the goal as problem solving rather than social transformation, recommended a trading program that lets advanced countries buy emissions credits from less-developed nations. The idea is that it's more efficient to bring well-understood emissions-reducing equipment to, say, China, which is still using highly polluting technologies, than it is to invent brand-new equipment
and processes in the United States. This practical approach was immediately denounced as "immoral" by environmental puritans and anti-market technocrats.

Even on economics, a lot of pretending went on in Kyoto. It was common to hear that the United States can cut carbon-dioxide emissions without hurting economic growth, that the benefits might even outweigh the costs. The rest of the story was omitted: Those rosy projections assume a carbon tax to deter emissions offset by a huge reduction in taxes on capital. Dale Jorgenson, the Harvard economist who rallied economists to the no-cost side, writes that "reducing the tax burden on capital by substituting other forms of taxation would produce similar [growth] effects with no effect on emissions of greenhouse gases." In other words, cutting greenhouse gases is in fact expensive. The whole cost-free approach depends on a tax cut the Clinton administration would never in a million years support.

Of course, quibbles like these don't matter when you're putting on a pageant. The whole point is to look and sound good --to seem concerned about the urgency of the "environmental crisis." The last thing you want to do is take environmental rhetoric seriously. That would be crazy.

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