Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Anne Applebaum makes a strange argument against global warming treaties:

The truth is that carbon emissions will not be reduced by international bureaucrats, however well-meaning, sitting in a room and signing a piece of paper. Nor will they be reduced by public relations campaigns or by Oscar-winning documentaries. Above all, they will not be reduced by a complex treaty that neither the United Nations nor anyone else can possibly supervise, particularly not a treaty that effectively punishes those countries that abide by it and ignores everyone else. They can be reduced, however, by the efforts of entrepreneurs like Pickens. If he and others can find economically viable ways to produce clean energy, the problem will solve itself without the aid of a single international conference. To put it differently, the first solar-power billionaire will have many, many imitators.

And how, Ms. Applebaum, will the nations of the world provide the incentives for these hypothetical solar power billionaires?  By “slap[ping] higher taxes on fossil fuels in their countries.”

I think we can all agree that it would be nice if every country had a tax on carbon that both lead to decreased emissions and spurred the creation of breakthrough alternative energy technology. But they don’t, and that’s where all the action is.

And although Applebaum says that global warming is a big problem and that she really, really wants a stronger response to it from the world’s government, she seems strangely hostile to any of the methods that advocates use to get publics and governments to adopt their favored polices.  The thing is, those “public relations campaigns” and “Oscar winning documentaries” are how one goes about convincing the  public and policymakers that it’s worth incurring the short term cost of carbon caps and taxes for the long-term benefit of the world not melting down.

Also, the reason people who work on global warming want an international treaty that establishes caps for everyone’s carbon emissions is because many governments don’t see the point of taking a short-term economically negative, politically controversial stand on global warming without some assurances that there will be coordinated global so that their carbon policy won’t be for naught. Ultimately, the reason we have the treaties, the documentaries, and the PR campaigns is to convince policymakers to put caps on carbon, increase the price of carbon and invest in alternative energy — all of which Applebaum seems to support.

I think the real question isn’t whether or not Applebaum’s column makes any sense — it doesn’t — but why she wrote it. After all, she agrees with the mainstream consensus among people conerned about global warming that we need to get the incentives right to spur alternative energy advancements. But because it’s de rigueur for columnists to make a big show of disagreeing with some aspect of any consensus, especially liberal ones, Applebaum ends up sounding very strange.