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July 6, 2009
The politics of climate change is one in which the coal, mining and farming industries, a large part of the Liberal Party, all of the National Party, the free market think tanks and national newspaper, the Australian , are in favour of business as usual. This do nothing alliance has historically justified its stance in terms of denying that climate change is a man made problem.
As this justification increasingly lacks persuasive power in public debates, the denialists have turned to neoclassical economics for a justification for them doing nothing. This social science discipline has a stranglehold over public policy, and the acceptance of its utilitarian framework requires that policy is evaluated in terms of a cost-benefit analysis and discounting to justify the expenditure of scarce economic resources.
Neoclassical economics, which presents itself economics, presents itself as a self-sufficient mode of analysis, is primarily concerned with economic growth of GDP and it values the natural world only in terms of how much profit can be generated by its exploitation. It fails to grasp the ecological underpinnings of the economy, sees the economy as independent of the environment, and holds that there are no environmental constraints on economic growth. Environmental problems either do not really exist, or they can be solved by the free market plus technological fixes.
Even though climate change is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen, conventional neo-classical economists argue that saving the planet for its inhabitants may be all very well and good … but it is simply too expensive for the capitalist economy to afford. Stabilizing our future climate is too expensive. Conventional economic analysis typically recommends doing much less, and more slowly, in order to avoid dampening the prospects for economic growth. The inference is that it is better for society to bear the long-term costs of climate change than the short-run costs of climate stabilization.
Julian Simon in his book The Ultimate Resource published at the beginning of the 1980s, he insisted that there were no serious environmental problems, that there were no environmental constraints on economic or population growth, and that there would never be long-term resource shortages. Simon's mantle of firring salvos aimed at environmentalism was picked up by Bjørn Lomborg, now an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School). In The Skeptical Environmentalist, (200) Lomborg argued that attempting to prevent climate change would cost more and cause more harm than letting it happen. His Copenhagen Consensus” (2003), which ranked the world’s leading problems, placed climate change at or near the bottom of the world’s agenda.
His 2007 book Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (2007) was primarily an extended attack on the Kyoto Protocol and all attempts to carry out substantial cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Lomborg's essential point was that “all major peer-reviewed economic models agree that little emissions reduction is justified.” He relied particularly on the work of Yale economist William Nordhaus, a leading economic contributor to the economic discussion of global warming, who has opposed any drastic reductions in greenhouse gases, arguing instead for a slow process of emissions reduction, on the grounds that it would be more economically justifiable.
So the slow ‘policy ramp’, with meagre emission reductions over the next quarter of a century, is implicit in the arguments of Nordhaus and other neo-classical economists. The Stern Review stands in marked contrast to these arguments and so the issue was joined.
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So dealing with climate change is on the back-burner? Legislation too slow and politically tricky?
Here's an idea! Why not repackage it and sell it as a "war".
The talk-radio jocks and pollies will got nuts for it.
WAR on terror, WAR on drugs, WAR on bikie gangs. "Better safe than sorry". you know. They just LOVE that sort of stuff! Hugely popular around these here parts.