The right and climate

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are cooing over Jim Manzi's recent cover story on climate in The National Review. Ross calls it, "one of the smartest right-of-center policy manifestos I've read in a long time," while Reihan proclaims, "I think it may be the best thing to have appeared in the right-of-center press in ages." And I say it's pretty hilarious that these pronouncements are actually offered as earnest notes of flattery.

It's actually damnation by faint praise, and deservedly so. To Manzi, climate change isn't a crisis. It's a minor risk that should be addressed in fairly minor ways, because he has faith in this idea:

Any change, including pumping out more CO2, kicks off an incredibly complicated set of feedback effects. Some of these will tend to magnify the greenhouse-warming impact, and others will tend to reduce it. Famously, as the atmosphere heats up, polar ice caps tend to melt; this in turn causes further heating. On the other hand, more CO2 should lead to faster plant growth; this pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere and therefore reduces warming.

I could go into fairly extensive detail about why the idea that there are counterbalancing feedback loops is bogus, but, of course, nobody who seriously studies the issue believes this is true. Occasionally you will read a conservative suggest that there's no way to know where the feedback loops will lead us, mention the plant-life feedback as an example, and leave it at that. Which is... exactly what Manzi's done here.

Here's a bit of center right thinking on how best to approach the climate process: "The British entrepreneur Richard Branson has offered a $25 million prize to anyone who demonstrates a device that removes carbon from the atmosphere; what if the U.S. government upped the ante to $1 billion and pledged to make any resulting technology freely available to the world?"

Great! I'm all for this! We'll just float a carbon tax to pay for the development and distribution of these technologies, so that if this doesn't pan out, we're not 20 years down the line having done nothing to change our consumption patterns. It's pretty simple, eh? Well, it would be if this was actually center right thinking about climate change. What it is instead is the common sense approach that just happens to only be supported by liberals (and a handful of conservatives who finally get it). The center-right idea is to fund a bit of science and hope for the best: "a much more sensible strategy to deal with climate risk would emphasize technology rather than taxes."

And yet this may indeed be the finest piece of policy writing we've seen on the center-right in years, because it at least goes as far as acknowledging that there's a problem that will require some sort of action to fix. Typical right and center-right policy ignores the existence of major problems (the uninsured, say, or inequality) altogether and instead pushes onward with the sort of ideology-only plans (repealing CHIP, cutting taxes) that have created or darkened the nightmares to begin with.

What has to be done to deal with climate change is well understood, and is uncontroversial basically everywhere outside of right-wing circles in Washington: The U.S. has to reduce emissions 60-80 percent by 2050 and the world has to cut emissions in half in the same amount of time, or we'll pass the points of no return on a number of dangerous indicators and make the world a much less kind place to live. We can either seriously attempt to achieve that goal--with a detailed plan that stewards emissions downward the whole way--or we can do any of the things conservatives suggest--which range from nothing all the way up to Manzi's plan--and fail. Those are the options. And there's much more riding on the question of which path we follow than this irresponsible thought from Ross:

Conservatives will find a sensible blueprint for moving from the denialist fringe to the political mainstream, and liberals will get a taste of how a wised-up, heads-out-of-the-sand Right could kick their ass on the issue.