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June 16, 2006

The Whole Truth

One of the reasons global warming adherents often are assumed to be exaggerating or even lying about the dangers of global warming is because they have an unfortunate tendency not to engage on all fronts. Elizabeth Kolbert's essay on why Americans don't subscribe to the global warming consensus offers a prime example of this. In the course of explaining that Americans aren't doing anything about global warming because they don't want to give up their luxuries, Kolbert throws out this observation:

The [United States] is one of only two industrialised nations that has rejected the Kyoto Protocol and, with it, mandatory emissions cuts. (The other is Australia.)

This statement is factually accurate, as long as we consider China and India non-industrialized nations. But factual accuracy aside, it is misleading in that it fails to address the elephant in the room: even if the United States reduces its carbon emissions to zero, economic growth in China and India will create far more CO2 than the U.S. currently does. If you're serious in your belief that global warming could be catastrophic for humanity and must therefore be stopped if possible, then American carbon emissions are only one part of the puzzle, and a part that will decline with the passage of time. While it's true that of those three nations, the U.S. is the only one that is currently likely to do anything about carbon emissions, the failure to even mention the rather significant problem that China and India pose seems curious at best.

Assuming the consensus on global warming is accurate, we have two options in front of us (and there is a continuum between the two, so it is not an either/or choice). We can attempt to stop global warming by eliminating our greenhouse gas emissions, we can attempt to prepare to mitigate the problems global warming causes, or we can do some combination of the two (reduce some emissions while concurrently taking mitigation measures to eliminate threats to human beings caused by global warming). Ms. Kolbert's preferred solution is clearly to try to eliminate the problem by eliminating greenhouse gas emissions, yet her essay says nothing of the fact that even if Americans do agree to her prescription of "many small-scale adjustments (no more heated towel racks) and also a great many more substantial ones: changes in energy consumption, energy production, patterns of land use, transportation systems, international relations."

Some people on the right believe that global warming is just an attempt to kneecap the American economy to drag us back to the pack, a kind of egalitarianism writ large. This isn't helped by the fact a lot of the people who are trying to sell global warming also are proponents of arguments about the unfairness of America using such a large fraction of the world's energy relative to populations (who, exactly, does that hurt? If I turn off a light switch in my house, will that electricity suddenly become magically available to some impoverished country?). If proponents of global warming really hope to convince the skeptics, they might begin by addressing all of the problem, and not focusing their energy on the United States as if it were the root of all evil.

Update: Ron Bailey points out similar phenomena in Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth.