An Internet friend posted an amusing link this morning, broadcast with the scary headline Researcher: The US Owes the World $4 Trillion For Trashing the Climate. It’s a me, me, look at me! bit of self-puffery that latches onto one of the sillier aspects of global warming politicization. The big global warming conferences almost invariably include very serious discussions about compensation to be paid by wealthy, high-carbon-emitting countries to the poorer nations that haven’t been pumping out as much carbon over the decades. The justification expressed for this compensation is that the wealthy countries got wealthy by polluting the planet. Presumably, this makes the planet a less valuable place for the poor and developing nations.
Take note of “less valuable.” Not “less hospitable,” or “less desirable,” but “less valuable.” This is the only way to rationalize the wealth transfer, because it must be predicated upon loss of value or financially resolvable damage, not upon intangibles that don’t have a quantifiable monetary equivalent. At first, casual blush, one might be tempted to accept this line of reasoning. It’s a macroscopic manifestation of the tragedy of the commons, the socioeconomic phenomenon wherein collectively owned property engenders maximum individual incentive to use and minimum individual incentive to maintain. In the case of environmental matters, polluting is a classic example and a persistent problem of the tragedy of the commons, and different nations have devised various means for addressing matters of pollution, both internally and internationally via treaties and international law.
Global warming is a different animal, though. Lets presume, for the sake of this discussion, that anthropogenic carbon emissions are, in fact, having a significant effect on global climate, that this effect is not only significant (i.e. observable outside natural variations) but substantial, and that this effect is a net negative (i.e. more bad things than good things will result). Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a fundamental by-product of human civilization as well as a vital component of the life cycle that exists on the planet. To declare it a pollutant is to declare human civilization itself an invasive externality vis-a-vis Mother Earth. The problem with this idea (quite popular among the self-hating, the hard-core environmentalists, and Agent Smith of The Matrix) is that, were it not for human beings, no one would care and it wouldn’t matter. The Earth doesn’t care about the happenings on its surface, animals don’t care, plants don’t care, and there aren’t any alien overlords around who care. In short, the Earth isn’t some entity apart from humanity that has the desire or the right to exist unmolested by the humans on its surface. We are the ones who care, because it is we who live on this planet, each pursuing happiness in whatever form we consider most desirable. Therefore, concerns about the happenings on the Earth are necessarily about the well-being of humans and the advancement of humanity.
The US has led the way on industrialization, going back a century and a half or so. Accordingly, the enviro-scolds believe that the US should now pay everyone else for the by-product of that industrialization, because other nations haven’t had the chance to emit the way the US has and, more importantly, won’t, due to the increased atmospheric CO2 concentration and the need to do something about it. That need isn’t actually going to stop any of them, because no nation with any shred of respect for its people will curtail CO2 emissions to the degree the environmental scientists who are warning us about global warming say is necessary. That’s simply not going to happen. That doesn’t meant those nations won’t demand reparations for America’s past emissions. After all, free money is free money, and they’ll rationalize their demands by claiming that this money will help them build up power production capabilities that emit less.
Those power-production and other industrial infrastructures have benefited and will continue to benefit from the knowledge gained during America’s industrial revolution. None of those nations will have to reinvent anything that’s been invented here, nor will they have to endure any of the failures that happened during America’s buildup. The massive body of knowledge, the enormous American infrastructure, the trade with companies that developed their products here and grew thanks to American consumers, all tally up to a truly enormous benefit bestowed upon developing nations by America’s past and current industrial buildup. I don’t hear much in the way of calls for those nations to offer up compensation or reparations to the US for all this. I also don’t see, in the demands for compensation/reparations, any consideration for the opportunity cost. Taking money out of an efficient enterprise and putting it into a less efficient one may make those involved with the less efficient enterprise happy, but they impose an overall net cost. Since the whole point of this global focus on carbon emissions is, well, global, how does it benefit the globe to use resources less efficiently? What of all the lost innovation lost in America thanks to the taxation necessary to fund those massive reparations?
That unanswered counterbalance to the assertion that America’s emissions means America owes the world undermines the entire carbon emissions compensation idea, but that idea falls apart entirely when we consider its foundational premise. For carbon emissions compensation to be legitimate, there must be an underlying premise that the planet itself is owned collectively and proportionally. This conflicts directly with the notion of individual property rights or the independence of nations. I’m sure there are many collectivists out there who will happily declare “YES!” to the idea of a globally owned planet, of course, but it’s just a silly idea. If the planet is owned collectively, how can there be any property rights at any lower level? How can there be any idea that nations are independent of each other? Where is the representation of the individual owners – who’s tallying votes on what to do with this collective property? And, if the collectivists’ answer is one-world-government, if they want nations to answer to a global authority, that would make it up to an elite few to manage the property. But, if it’s up to that elite few, how can it then be considered collectively owned? To own something is to have control over how it is used, not to simply put its stewardship in the hands of some unaccountable and disconnected overlords. There are no other owners to consider, no Gaia that obligates us. As I noted above, humanity’s concern is and should be for humanity, for the well-being of humans and the advancement of the human race.
And, to extend the analogy, if this sort of claim is valid, if a “collective ownership entitles some nations to recover from others when those others disproportionately used or depleted some element of that which is owned collectively, then any resource drawn out of the earth must also be collectively owned. Do the Saudis and other oil-producing nations owe the rest of the world compensation for their disproportionate extraction of petroleum? Does Russia owe Europe for all the natural gas it has been extracting and selling? How about all the carbon emitted by the burning of that petroleum and natural gas? Shouldn’t we actually shift the burden of compensation onto those who “liberated” the carbon from its sequestration underground in the first place? That idea will land with the thud of a wet sack of rice at the next climate change conference, I’m sure.
The actual harmed parties from global warming (again, presuming it’s real, significant, substantial and a net negative) aren’t even alive today. Despite lots of handwaving about actual, current, today problems caused by global warming, the reality is that there hasn’t been any warming for nearly two decades, the sea level rise isn’t going to be big enough to matter for decades, the ice caps haven’t melted off, and big weather hasn’t been more frequent or more extreme. The aggrieved will be born in the coming decades, and those alive today won’t experience the predicted negative effects of continued human carbon emissions.
This raises the question – if the aggrieved are in fact the future generations, and if all this talk of financial compensation is actually for their benefit, why is the world not looking out for those future generations’ financial benefit in other aspects of collective life? Why are nations continuing to accumulate debt and build unsustainable social welfare programs? Is all this concern for the harm that global warming will do to future generations genuine, or is it a smokescreen for baser, more selfish motives? I think we can answer that for ourselves.
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