Two of the world's best conservative columnists write at the very liberal New York Times. I often draw attention to David Brooks' work. Also worth bookmarking is Ross Douthat for his column and for his Evaluations blog.
He has recently written two very thoughtful pieces on the (American) Right and climate change.
In this piece he appears to side with Bjorn Lomborg in arguing that we should not be fighting climate change with immature technologies but should be helping the third world to become richer:
"It’s possible that the best thing to do about a warming earth — for now, at least — is relatively little. This is the view advanced by famous global-warming heretics like Bjorn Lomborg and Freeman Dyson; in recent online debates, it has been championed by Jim Manzi, the American right’s most persuasive critic of climate-change legislation.
Their perspective is grounded, in part, on the assumption that a warmer world will also be a richer world — and that economic development is likely to do more for the wretched of the earth than a growth-slowing regulatory regime. But it’s also grounded in skepticism that such a regime is possible. Any attempt to legislate our way to a cooler earth, the argument goes, will inevitably resemble the package of cap-and-trade emission restrictions that passed the House last year: a Rube Goldberg contraption whose buy-offs and giveaways swamped its original purpose.
Liberals disagree, of course. They think the skeptics underestimate the potential for catastrophe, and overestimate the costs of regulation. They, too, look to the past for lessons, but their model is the Clean Air Act and its various modifications, which reduced domestic air pollution relatively cheaply. But the Clean Air Act didn’t require collective action on a global scale — the kind of action that last year’s Copenhagen conference placed ever further out of reach. What’s more, a crucial technology, the catalytic converter, was already on the way as the act’s provisions went into effect. Cap-and-trade is more of a leap in the dark."
The second Douthat piece on green issues worth highlighting appears on his blog. Drawing on a Bloomberg report, he notes that oil, gas, and coal get 12 times as much government support ($557bn) - across the world - as renewable energies ($46bn). Douthat argues that greens and free market conservatives should work towards a policy environment where fossil fuels lose their subsidy rather than renewables get more and more.
So, in summary, Douthat is reaching towards a position that I can certainly support:
- Global warming IS happening* but because of immature technologies and a lack of international will we can't do much about it.
- Measures to reduce our carbon footprint should be pursued but only if they achieve other objectives, particularly reducing household bills (via better energy conservation) or more security of electricity supply (by building nuclear as well as fossil fuel-powered generating capacity).
- The priority of policymakers should be to help the third world to become richer so that they can tackle their immediate life and death challenges and also, where necessary, have the wealth to deal with extreme weather.
- In the meantime we should ensure a level playing field between energy sources and that should involve a levelling down, not up, of subsidies.
