An Earth Day, birthday “he said; she said”

Bob Inglis

I was briefly a conservative hero in a sea of liberals last week.  The occasion was an assembly convened by the Rochester People’s Climate Coalition and sponsored by both the Sierra Club and the Rochester Chamber of Commerce.  The guest speaker was Bob Inglis, a former South Carolina Republican Congressman whose awakening to the dangers of climate change got him primaried out of his seat after serving 12 years.

Inglis is evangelizing for a bipartisan bill called the Energy Innovation Carbon Dividends Act (EICDA). It’s a carbon tax that’s positioned as nota tax increase because all the proceeds will be rebated to taxpayers in a monthly check. Acting kind of like a universal basic dividend, it would also be redistributive.  If you’re a rich person who owns a limo, a Ferrari and a Gulfstream, you’ll pay a lot in carbon taxes but get the same amount as a minimum wage worker who takes the bus to work. 

Inglis started by polling the audience and I found myself as only one of three people holding up my hand. We three were right-leaning and believe we should do something about climate change.  And, so I was briefly a hero to the radical lefties in the room. I was thanked and congratulated and should have felt good about it.  But, instead, I found myself, in my pin-striped suit and tie, feeling like a prize pig at the county fair – emphasis on pig.

I was invited to the event by Abigail McHugh-Grifa, the interim director of the coalition.  She and I co-authored a piece in Sunday’s Democrat & Chronicle (D&C), using “he said; she said” style to portray a casual conversation between friends about climate change, the EICDA and the Inglis event. It was intended to be cute and I think it was.  Here’s an excerpt:

He: I’m sorry, Abby. But I’ve never had a good answer to this question: How are you going to pay for that? 

She: Although people won’t like the idea of rising costs, that’s the point of a carbon price, so we shouldn’t tiptoe around that. However, we should also consider that the cost of burning fossil fuels does not reflect their true cost to society in terms of public health and climate impacts. Polluters continue to pollute while taxpayers pick up the bill for disaster relief and increased healthcare costs.

It was not an in-depth debate. The D&C’s 475-word limit leaves scant space to explore one point of view much less two.  But it’s worth noting that there’s some Milton Freidman philosophy embedded in Abby’s response.  In the web series Freidman Fundamentals, he explains libertarian philosophy (1-minute video) and defines the point at which government must intervene as when “a company is imposing a cost on me for which I am not being compensated.”  And, indeed, to the extent that burning fossil fuels emits pollutants that affect my health or to the extent my taxes contribute to the healthcare system, I am not only not being compensated but also paying the socialized cost of damage created by others. 

Still, there are reasons to be skeptical.  A website called ‘New Scientist’ claims there is no link between CO2 increases and global warming.  Another ‘The Conversation’ questions the logic of the standards set by the Paris climate agreement.  But every scientist you talk with will qualify their comments by saying climatology is not their expertise.  Meanwhile, the climatologists on the International Panel on Climate Change say we have reached the “gold standard” of certainty that climate change is man-made, and we must do something about it. 

My background is not science; it’s economics.  So, my concern is focused on what we do, how we do it and what it will do to our economy. Disruption is expensive and the cost must be borne by someone.  In Germany, the push toward alternative energy coupled with a ban on nuclear has led to a 50% increase in energy costs to consumers.  That would be politically infeasible in the U.S. and would undermine the effort before its goals were achieved.

Many people support conversion to nuclear energy as France has done.  The most concise economic argument I’ve seen was made by the Wall Street Journal in a piece titled ‘The Nuclear Option is the Real Green Deal.’  But I worry what happens at scale.  How would we handle the amount of waste water created at 100% nuclear?

Many are concerned about solar at full scale too.  So, I asked a local solar installer how much land would be required to be 100% solar. “One eighteenth of North Dakota,” came the reply without hesitation.  That’s about one half of 1% of the U.S. land mass or slightly more than half what the federal government leases to the oil and gas industry.  He sent me a study to back it up.  

In the end, I come down in favor of the EICDA not because it offers a perfect solution but rather because it doesn’t create a government mandated plan.  It simply disincentivizes burning fossil fuels by raising the cost of doing so, leaving free enterprise to innovate solutions.  

As for Inglis’ presentation… Well, he exhorted our left leaning audience to approach those on the right with language more likely to lead to constructive dialog.  “Innovation not regulation” was his catch-phrase.  That’s a good place to start, in my view.  As for the event itself, it failed to move the needle primarily because Inglis was preaching to the choir.  The better audience would have been made up of politically moderate business leaders, perhaps convened by the Chamber of Commerce rather than the climate coalition.

WHO WILL LEAD?

PS my twins were born on Earth Day in 1973, hence the title of this post.  Happy Birthday, Peter and Dan!