US Elections

Welcome to the future: Americans gear up to get super-freaky on climate change

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney

20 October 2009

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Of late, Americans visiting Australia might feel like they've stepped into the near future, at least politically. Not only did Kevin Rudd's 2007 election seem like a dress rehearsal of sorts for Barack Obama's extravaganza in the following year, we can now be assured the current debate gripping our government will soon hit the United States Congress. Yes, forget health care; soon enough the number one issue in the States will be climate change, and what to do about it.

Of course, the U.S. is a different nation to Australia, and its climate change debate will not look the same as ours. The USSC's CEO Geoff Garrett, for instance, discussed some of the differences in the policy in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald:

"First, [Democrat Senator John Kerry and Republican Senator Lindsay Graham] advocate carbon tariffs, imposing financial penalties on products from countries that do not accept binding cuts to their emissions - to make them less competitive against local products  ... 

Second, Kerry and Graham emphasised that "nuclear power needs to be a core component of electricity generation if we are to meet our emission reduction targets".

Finally, they said while the US needed to go to Copenhagen with a broad framework to help forge a global consensus, completed American legislation was neither likely nor essential. American bargaining power might in fact be increased by not committing domestically in advance."

As well as pursuing different policies, the U.S. has a different political environment to Australia, and that will affect any bid to pass a bill aimed at curbing American emissions. For a start, the Constitutional requirement that the U.S. Senate ratify any treaties the President negotiates makes any negotiations with other countries a far more precarious prospect, and it is understandable that Kerry and Graham would prefer to send Barack Obama to Copenhagen with a broad framework rather than an inviolable set of rules. America has a lot of clout, but its power is not absolute, and Obama is most likely to get results if he can show world leaders that any agreement they negotiate with him is consistent with the U.S. Senate's desires - and will therefore be ratified by the United States.

And when the actual debate gets going, any coalition in support of a bill will have to be bipartisan, and will be contested by members of both parties. Here in Australia, we have the unusual situation whereby the majority of our Senate would like to pass a bill controlling emissions - Labor is united on the issue, and some Liberal moderates, including the party's leader, Malcolm Turnbull, are convinced climate change is real, man made and must be stopped - but the Opposition is compelled to oppose the legislation to mollify its conservative wing and maintain party unity. In the States, however, the ruling Democrats will not act as one, as Labor has, and many Democrats, especially those representing industry-heavy Midwestern states, will have no interest whatsoever in curbing emissions. As with health care reform, the Democrats must convince some Republicans to join them in support of any legislation, but unlike health care, they'll need more than one or two. The Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein put it like this last week: "This coalition will have to be more like the coalition that passed the Civil Rights Act, when Northern Republicans provided the majority with the votes that the Southern Democrats attempted to withhold."

And over the past few days, we've had a taste of the likely character of the debate over U.S. efforts to reduce emissions. The American blogosphere has recently erupted in a storm of chatter about the new book from journalist Stephen J. Dubner and University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt. Dubner and Levitt write the Freakonomics blog at the New York Times and their new book,Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance goes on sale today. Freakonomics aims to use economics to "expose the hidden side to everything" - their first book had a chapter explaining why the average drug dealer was more like a McDonalds employee than a Scarface-esque high roller for instance - and the new book contains a chapter on climate change.

Klein, the Post blogger, describes Freakonomics as "prefer[ring] an interesting story to an accurate one," and Dubner and Levitt indeed encounter problems when they eschew truth for intrigue in their take on climate change. They say that the real way to combat rising temperatures is not to reduce pollution, as is currently the strategy favoured around the globe, but to instead cool the earth down by pumping sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. Their view has been criticised on a scientific, economic, and journalisticbasis (Dubner and Levitt allegedly misrepresented an expert's views, and, more comically, failed to check what colour are solar panels). Paul Krugman at the Times scolds them on all three counts. Dubner defends the ethics of the book vehemently, though he has had little to say thus far about the purported errors in science and economics.

So what, can we take from this? Malcolm Turnbull may be heartened to see Dubner and Levitt use Australia as an example of a country that would gain no benefit from acting to reduce emissions before other nations do, and all Australians may nod ruefully at the book's acknowledgement Americans would be unlikely to adopt environmentally-friendly kangaroo meat in lieu of methane-emitting cattle, but the real lesson from this is just how virulent the debate over emissions trading legislation will be in the U.S.

Though Dubner and Levitt write far too sceptically about man-made global warming for a pair that says their book supports fighting climate change, they are hardly hardcore deniers of the Stephen Fielding or Wilson Tuckey mould. Instead, for the sake of an attention-grabbing book chapter, they've engaged in some sloppy scholarship. But if mere sloppiness could result in this level of misinformation and prompt this much furore, imagine what it will be like once the debate expands to folks actually opposed to doing anything at all. The tumultuous days of Tea Parties and Town Hall Meetings aren't over yet.

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