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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/opinion/krugman-crazy-climate-economics.html?_r=0
Everywhere
you look these days, you see Marxism on the rise. Well, O.K., maybe you
don’t — but conservatives do. If you so much as mention income
inequality, you’ll be denounced as the second coming of Joseph Stalin;
Rick Santorum has declared that any use of the word “class” is “Marxism talk.” In the right’s eyes, sinister motives lurk everywhere — for example, George Will says
the only reason progressives favor trains is their goal of “diminishing
Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to
collectivism.”
So it goes without saying that Obamacare, based on ideas originally developed at the Heritage Foundation, is a Marxist scheme — why, requiring that people purchase insurance is practically the same as sending them to gulags.
And just wait until the Environmental Protection Agency announces rules intended to slow the pace of climate change.
Until
now, the right’s climate craziness has mainly been focused on attacking
the science. And it has been quite a spectacle: At this point almost
all card-carrying conservatives endorse the view that climate change is a
gigantic hoax, that thousands of research papers showing a warming
planet — 97 percent
of the literature — are the product of a vast international conspiracy.
But as the Obama administration moves toward actually doing something
based on that science, crazy climate economics will come into its own.
You
can already get a taste of what’s coming in the dissenting opinions
from a recent Supreme Court ruling on power-plant pollution. A majority
of the justices agreed that the E.P.A. has the right to regulate smog
from coal-fired power plants, which drifts across state lines. But
Justice Scalia didn’t just dissent; he suggested
that the E.P.A.’s proposed rule — which would tie the size of required
smog reductions to cost — reflected the Marxist concept of “from each
according to his ability.” Taking cost into consideration is Marxist?
Who knew?
And
you can just imagine what will happen when the E.P.A., buoyed by the
smog ruling, moves on to regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.
What do I mean by crazy climate economics?
First,
we’ll see any effort to limit pollution denounced as a tyrannical act.
Pollution wasn’t always a deeply partisan issue: Economists in the
George W. Bush administration wrote paeans to “market based” pollution controls, and in 2008 John McCain made proposals for cap-and-trade limits
on greenhouse gases part of his presidential campaign. But when House
Democrats actually passed a cap-and-trade bill in 2009, it was attacked
as, you guessed it, Marxist. And these days Republicans come out in
force to oppose even the most obviously needed regulations, like the
plan to reduce the pollution that’s killing Chesapeake Bay.
Second, we’ll see claims that any effort to limit emissions will have what Senator Marco Rubio is already calling “a devastating impact on our economy.”
Why
is this crazy? Normally, conservatives extol the magic of markets and
the adaptability of the private sector, which is supposedly able to
transcend with ease any constraints posed by, say, limited supplies of
natural resources. But as soon as anyone proposes adding a few limits to
reflect environmental issues — such as a cap on carbon emissions —
those all-capable corporations supposedly lose any ability to cope with
change.
Now,
the rules the E.P.A. is likely to impose won’t give the private sector
as much flexibility as it would have had in dealing with an economywide
carbon cap or emissions tax. But Republicans have only themselves to
blame: Their scorched-earth opposition to any kind of climate policy has
left executive action by the White House as the only route forward.
Furthermore,
it turns out that focusing climate policy on coal-fired power plants
isn’t bad as a first step. Such plants aren’t the only source of
greenhouse gas emissions, but they’re a large part of the problem — and
the best estimates we have of the path forward suggest that reducing power-plant emissions will be a large part of any solution.
What
about the argument that unilateral U.S. action won’t work, because
China is the real problem? It’s true that we’re no longer No. 1 in
greenhouse gases — but we’re still a strong No. 2.
Furthermore, U.S. action on climate is a necessary first step toward a
broader international agreement, which will surely include sanctions on
countries that don’t participate.
So
the coming firestorm over new power-plant regulations won’t be a
genuine debate — just as there isn’t a genuine debate about climate
science. Instead, the airwaves will be filled with conspiracy theories
and wild claims about costs, all of which should be ignored. Climate
policy may finally be getting somewhere; let’s not let crazy climate
economics get in the way.
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