Earth Equity News

Gore's Climate Remedy Must Match Remedy. By Charles Komanoff, HuffPost, March 1, 2010. "Al Gore's eminence in the global climate movement is on impressive display in his full-throated defense of climate science in Sunday's New York Times. His essay, We Can't Wish Away Climate Change, is triple the paper's standard length for op-eds. Only Gore could command such a bully pulpit, and probably no one else could so powerfully restore the sense of urgency that has seeped out of climate policy over the past year... Mr. Gore demonstrates his mastery of both science and metaphor that animated the documentary An Inconvenient Truth and invigorated the citizens' climate movement during the long darkness of the Bush administration. The former vice-president also presents a reasonable, if backhanded, explanation of the demise of cap-and-trade legislation, the approach long anointed by the Big Green groups (though not by Gore himself, a carbon taxer since the early 1990s), which Lindsey Graham, a rare G.O.P. Senator who 'gets climate,' reportedly just pronounced 'dead.'

"Which makes it both perplexing and frustrating that Mr. Gore's response to cap-and-trade's manifest failure is to repeat not only his endorsement of cap-and-trade before Congress last year, but his latter-day criticism of a carbon tax: '[T]here is no readily apparent alternative [to cap-and-trade] that would be any easier politically. It is difficult to imagine a globally harmonized carbon tax.' This is dreadfully wrong, both substantively and politically... Mr. Gore's substantive error lies in presuming that a cap-based approach could be harmonized globally. Perhaps this is a legacy of his having championed cap-and-trade in the 1997 negotiations that produced the Kyoto Protocol. Yet now, as then, there are no clear grounds for translating a possible U.S. cap on carbon emissions into limits for other countries. Per capita, Americans generate 4 times as much greenhouse gases as Chinese and 14 times as much as Indians. Why, then, should a U.S. commitment to reduce emissions by, say, 2% a year, carry any moral authority in China or India? Indeed, India's per capita emissions could increase by 2% a year for more than 60 years and still not match U.S. emissions declining at the same rate. A carbon tax, in contrast, is wholly fungible across borders." Charles Komanoff, an economist, is co-director of the Carbon Tax Center.