Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

Paul Krugman is very smart.   But here’s why you can’t trust him:

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

[...]

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Okay, so this is a perfect mirror of the PATRIOT Act.  Existential threat posited by supporters?  Check!  Bill that does lots of things but might not help?  Check.  Accusing those who vote against of being traitors?  Check.  Immediate association of “no” votes with “denial of problem?”  Check.  We’ve even got more reasonable individuals complaining about casual use of the word “treason” while still accepting that a problem exists.

But the most hilarious part is:

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Krugman even knows what he’s doing!  This is the problem, and what makes someone a hack: when you use the exact same slimy tactics as you criticized your opponents for using, that means you aren’t looking at things objectively.  Very intelligent, very talented people have become convinced of wrong things simply because they were emotionally invested in it — Krugman may in fact be right in this, but no matter how much evidence he lays out, its clear that he’s emotionally attached to the concept of his opponents being traitors to the planet.  If opponents of the PATRIOT Act or Waxman-Markey really are traitors bent on destroying America/Earth then you should lie, cheat and steal (or more accurately, call them traitors, ignore evidence that supports them, and tar their motives with broad strokes) to defeat them.  Even if he’s supporting the right side, Krugman’s obviously not looking over the facts and coming to their logical conclusion.  Why should he?  The other side is a bunch of traitors bent on — in his own words — destroying the world.

For example, I generally opposed the bailout of GM.  But if I describe every politician who voted for it as a bunch of evil, no-good communistic traitors who are leading this country to ruin, rather than simply wrong, you would question my objectivity in dealing with the subject.  You will think, “hmm, if he thinks the other side is evil, how likely is it that he has calmly and rationally assessed the pros and cons of the situation?”  And so it is with Krugman.

Shorter Krugman: “demonizing political opponents as traitors is bad when Bush does it, but good when I do it.  Also they’re traitors against the entire planet, which is totally worse than just America.”  Where’s Captain Planet when you need him?

This stuff is really interesting:

THE SCARIEST THING about geo-engineering, as it happens, is also the thing that makes it such a game-changer in the global-warming debate: it’s incredibly cheap. Many scientists, in fact, prefer not to mention just how cheap it is. Nearly everyone I spoke to agreed that the worst-case scenario would be the rise of what David Victor, a Stanford law professor, calls a “Greenfinger”—a rich madman, as obsessed with the environment as James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger was with gold. There are now 38 people in the world with $10 billion or more in private assets, according to the latest Forbes list; theoretically, one of these people could reverse climate change all alone. “I don’t think we really want to empower the Richard Bransons of the world to try solutions like this,” says Jay Michaelson, an environmental-law expert, who predicted many of these debates 10 years ago.

Apparently proposed anti-climate change responses are estimated to be super-cheap — within the range, as the article notes, of wealthy individuals, and even the smallest countries.  Lots of the solutions are pretty scary in their potential to go horribly, horribly wrong — but if there is some gradualist solution (some presented seemed to fit this bill) that can be slowly enacted to gauge their response, why shouldn’t we try it?

My only quibble with the piece is how it seems to imply that the risks of standard methods of dealing with climate change are not themselves extremely high.  Any plan to cut carbon emissions by enough to severely curtain warming is going to negatively impact the development of many countries — especially India and China.  Their massive uptick in pollution has directly led to much of the economic growth in those countries — pulling billions out of poverty.  What’s the cost of preventing the next billion from achieving the same?

Either way, given the likelihood of any comprehensive climate change plan ever being put in place, eventually we will be forced to consider geo-engineering.  Even if the US adopts a vastly more stringent form of the current Waxman-Markey bill at some point, for any of this to matter, India and China need to be on board.  If the US is barely managing to keep W-M alive today, the governments of India and China certainly aren’t going to do something even more radical.  And in reality, by “we” I am almost certainly referring to the Chinese government.  If it comes to a point where climate change is creating unmanageable problems, they will definitely use some form of geo-engineering to combat it.  Hopefully they won’t call their device the Annihilatrix.