Halloween is approaching, and unless we miss our guess, the apparition now floating into view is the great global-warming pumpkin, looming up out of the policy patch.
We've been reading for some time now about how torn Bill Clinton has been over choosing up sides between his administration's carbon-dioxide/polar icecap hard-liners on one side and economists counseling caution on the other. So yesterday Mr. Clinton donned his Charlie Brown mask and announced a proposal on global warming that was intended to be likable, but probably will make him few real friends.
Environmentalists of the Greenpeace variety will squawk that the 2010 deadline is too slow, while oil, gas and manufacturing interests will dump on the "binding" reductions. In any event, Mr. Clinton finally has himself an official U.S. "position" for the December negotiations in Kyoto to shape a global-warming treaty.
Now we realize that a great deal of serious mental energy has been devoted to this subject. Some of the great hotel bills of our time have been run up by climate scientists and policy types gathered at various venues around the globe to debate the accuracy of computers crunching the global-warming data inputs. We welcome such debates. This one no doubt is teaching everyone a lot about massive computing strategies.
But given various experiences we've had in the Clinton pumpkin patch the past five years, we're inclined to look past the usual who's right and who's wrong of this arcane subject to try to get a better idea of just how a public-policy problem said to be 100 years in the future became so prominent now.
Insofar as most of us will be in the hereafter by the time northern Michigan turns into the Mojave Desert, our thoughts turned first to religion. Environmentalism likes to think of itself as a movement grounded in various scientific disciplines, such as ecology, but it is fundamentally rooted in the religious impulse. Save the earth, save the whales, save the rain forests. Daily life being the time-consuming thing it's become--ferrying kids to soccer games, tracking the family mutual funds, holding a job--it might otherwise be tough getting too many people whipped up over, say, carbon dioxide levels in the upper atmosphere. But if the issue is presented as, say, doom, then global warming becomes something that just might re-energize the environmental movement.
Environmentalists of course resent this characterization, but they're the ones always saying we "can't wait" for scientists to reach a consensus on endangered species one day and greenhouse gas emissions the next. Anytime we hear someone saying we "can't wait" for the public-policy process to slog forward, it's safe to assume we've left the realm of mere politics for the higher reaches of a new religion.
At the same time, the politicians will always be with us. Nothing particularly spiritual about their needs, so how to explain that a whopping 150 counties' politicos will show up in Kyoto, Japan, to cut a deal on global warming. This one's pretty easy. Global warming is a new revenue base. It's something to tax.
Whatever the state of the polar ice caps, the one thing that truly does seem to be melting in our time is the global electorate's enthusiasm for politicians' tax-driven public crusades, most of which don't work very well anymore. So with voters increasingly resistant to higher levels of direct taxation, the politicians have begun looking for techniques to get the money in roundabout ways, such as taxing industrial activity branded as evil. Global warming, you may have read, is evil. One way or another, you will pay to clean it up.
Crude impositions won't fly, so yesterday Bill Clinton showed his global confreres how a sophisticated politician does it. The president proposed a $5 billion set of tax breaks and credits for companies investing in greenhouse gas remission. Even so, any such effort will net out as higher production costs, which will be passed on. And for relatively smaller concerns unable to access the tax credits by throwing capital at whatever technologies the regulators approve, this is a tax increase.
Long ago, in 1993 to be exact, life was so much simpler. That was when Bill Clinton, citing similar environmental goals, proposed a BTU tax on energy use. The public understood the BTU tax. It crashed and burned. Now the very same environmentalists and politicians are back with global warming, something no one fully understands. The betting seems to be that if people won't pay taxes for what they know, maybe they'll do it on faith alone.
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