[TheMercenary]

A more realistic assessment.

This paper assesses the prospects for implementing greenhouse gas controls in the United States. One basic fact frames the analysis. Namely, controls stringent enough to actually stop global climate change would as yet still cost more than the damage expected from climate change. Although a modest level of emission control could yield more benefits than costs, even modest controls face formidable political challenges. The opponents of emission controls hold great organizational advantages over the proponents. To be sure, a strong surge of public sentiment might politically overwhelm all these objections and barriers. But public support for emission controls is too tepid for that to be likely any time soon. Moreover, overcoming these domestic problems, could it be done, would be only the first step toward a viable international control regime, without which national controls would be futile. And the anarchic nature of the international system makes global environmental agreements notoriously difficult to reach, to sustain, and to enforce.

Forces operating beyond the narrow arena of national and international environmental policy will also heavily influence the prospects for emission controls. Several likely trends suggest that these prospects are ebbing rather than rising. Predictable national security and fiscal policy challenges may well out-compete the climate issue for both public attention and economic resources. At the same time, the emerging globalization of the natural gas market will spark new conflicts between the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and that of decreasing America's dependence on foreign energy.

Other factors, though, have been cited as reasons for hoping that this unfavorable tide could be stemmed and even reversed. One of these, a possible disruption of Persian Gulf energy supplies would—on closer investigation—have quite unfavorable implications for the prospects of U.S. emission controls. Other factors could indeed enhance the prospects for emission controls, e.g., a large, favorable partisan shift, important scientific breakthroughs, or diplomatic pressure from Europe. Although these possibilities cannot be ruled out, they are too speculative to form the basis for an adequate strategy for managing climate policy. The realistic political response is simply to admit that the current and likely future political constellation of forces is unfavorable to the implementation of all but modest emission controls and to adjust the goals of climate policy to match the political realities. An explicitly Fabian strategy would eliminate the benefit-cost problem because gradually slowing the growth of emissions would cost far less than Kyoto-like rapid emission reductions. And such a policy could also be shaped to achieve non-climate benefits. Concretely, linking mandatory emission controls to a plan for "tax shift" promises political and economic advantages. And emission controls may actually confer useful diplomatic benefits on the United States.

http://www.earthscape.org/pmain/sites/cpc.html