Re: “Is the cost of pending climate change legislation too high?,” Sept. 15 editorial page PointCounterpoint.
The PointCounterpoint gave us two sides of the cap-and-trade issue. They were both wrong.
David Ridenour made the worst mistake. He claimed that climate control would “gut the economy.” This has superficial appeal, but only because we measure the size of the “economy” incorrectly. We don’t charge ourselves for the damage we do to the environment.
This is like a business ignoring depreciation when it reports its profits.
As we currently measure the “economy,” we could make it much larger by abandoning all environmental controls and polluting at will. This would yield an impressive spurt of “economic growth.” But we’d have to live with the mess — if we could survive it.
If Ridenour is a “conservative,” he’s lost his ideological way. There is nothing conservative about taking something which doesn’t belong to you, whether it’s a candy bar from the corner store or the temperate environment which we all share. The truly conservative approach is simple, clear and compelling: You should clean up after yourself. It’s good parenting and it’s good public policy.
Wayne Madsen asserts that, if we do clean up, it will create a lot of jobs. It will certainly take a lot of work, and lots of people will get paid for it. But this doesn’t mean we’ll get more material wealth as well as a clean environment. If it did, we could spend half of our time polluting, half remediating and live fabulously. Obviously, this is absurd.
It doesn’t even mean that controlling climate change will be mostly painless. We’ve been making a mess of the climate for a long time. It is going to take lots of resources to fix that. These resources will not be available for our enjoyment in other pursuits. As far as those other pursuits are concerned, we may have to live less well in the moment if we’re to live more sustainably.
Our options are clear: We can enjoy a temporary sense of material well-being while destroying the climate on which it depends. Or we can take responsibility for our actions and accept their uncomfortable consequences. Which of these is the liberal choice, and which the conservative?
Jeffrey S. Zax is a professor and associate chair of the Undergraduate Program in the Department of Economics, University of Colorado Boulder.
