EDITORIAL: Energy: A complicated argument
(Source: Columbia Daily Tribune)
Feb. 16–Two University of Missouri profs recently returned from the climate change summit in Copenhagen saying they were disappointed by what they regarded as its lack of progress. The big nations, including the United States, were not willing to agree to a binding plan for seriously reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The professors are believers in what they call “settled science,” affirming a pattern of man-made global warming threatening many areas and peoples of the world.
Writing Sunday in these pages, the director of the sustainable development program at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund expressed a similar agenda based on an argument intended to appeal to the economic development gene in all of us: Alternative energy is becoming a huge economic niche that the United States is failing to exploit. Most solar panels and wind turbines are being built in other nations.
You don’t have to be a global warming skeptic, which many people of reasonable intelligence are these days, to question a headlong move into alternative forms of energy as primary sources. What proponents fail to stress is that alternative energy industries and generation are sustained with large public subsidies or plans such as “cap-and-trade,” involving big costs to an industrial nation with cheaper sources of coal and oil and natural gas.
No matter how appealing to promoters of renewable energy, it simply is unrealistic to expect the United States to impose such costs, which visit on every citizen, not just commercial energy users. The plague of global warming is not as evident as the smog in Los Angeles once was.
Subsidies are necessary to launch new technology, and increasing use of renewables is a good thing, but improvements in more efficient sources of energy can be even more effective. If we want to save the environment and fight global warming with public subsidies, we will get much more bang for the buck supporting increased nuclear power generation.
The big debate over global warming is not whether it is occurring but how best to react, starting with an honest assessment of likely effects and whether a feasible cure lies in unrealistic expectations limiting the use of fossil fuels. We have made great strides in cleaning the atmosphere and should keep at it. Increasing use of wind, solar, hydro and other clean sources of energy should be encouraged. Expecting these sources to become primary by quelling the use of more efficient fuels is a pipe dream and the wrong place to focus intended climatic fixes.
If the Maldives and lower Manhattan are destined to go under water, we won’t be able to avert that outcome with a Copenhagen greenhouse gas policy. When and if such threats become real, we’ll be obliged to take protective action for the particular problems at hand. Meanwhile, most of us are not yet ready to believe such dire promises warrant the prohibitionist policies being promoted by the most ardent climate worriers.
