More climate

I wanted to squeeze in more about Reihan's post into my previous entry, but it didn't really fit anywhere. So this point will have to stand alone. Reihan says:

The costs of climate change are uncertain, unpredictable, very diffuse, and (mostly) in the future. Someone like me, obsessed with the future and not averse to intervention, is strongly inclined to take action, indeed to take sweeping action. Someone who works in the automobile industry, or someone who is very tax-sensitive, will likely feel otherwise....

if a Democrat claims that climate change is real and that we ought to take serious action, a voter, particularly an upper-middle-class voter, can rest assured that he is both slightly more righteous for supporting him and that nothing will actually happen: there will be no tax increase, there will be no cap-and-trade system. Chan[c]es are you won't even get increased CAFE standards....

[I]f a Republican says, "I agree that climate change is happening, but this 'serious action' means serious economic pain. Instead, let's just paint our roofs white, feed our cows grass, and keep studying the issue When she takes this tack, she shifts the focus from "they're Luddites / we're enlightened" to a terrain where Republicans are generally more comfortable: "they're tax-increasers / we're tax-decreasers."

This is always maddening. Because it neglects the obvious point that people who work in the automobile industry (or in oil or in coal) ought not be allowed--as they are so undemocratically--to determine the course of our national energy policy and, indeed, the future climate of the Earth. What's really standing in the way here are political interests on the right--the lobbies that represent those auto industry workers and the Republicans (and sometimes Democrats) who take their money.

Reihan may be right when he says that liberals will attempt unsuccessfully to really solve the problem, accomplish nothing instead, and that the world will perish as a result. The correct response to this possibility, though, is to help make it so that we really solve the problem, and not to elect the people who are the ones blocking real action to begin with, while proposing plans that are utterly inadequate if the hope is to actually fix things.