Greenhouse Gaseous Thinking

Tim Carney, fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and contributing editor to Human Events, must have clicked on the wrong link when he started blogging on Thursday, because he was spewing this stuff over on The Huffington Post. According to Tim, environmentalists, such as Al Gore, are shills for big industry. They are advocating environmental policies that will help big businesses and their Washington lobbyists rake in billions.

I found some of the reasoning tortured. According to Tim, energy companies like carbon taxes because they’ll just pass the costs onto their customers. I thought that was the idea – higher costing electricity from coal could create markets for wind and solar technologies, and promote energy-efficient consumer products. Carbon taxes and carbon trading could turn into an opportunity for some companies to start raking it in – this is why Enron was so enthusiastic about carbon trading. But there are correct ways to use carbon taxes, if policy makers are interested in using them.

Besides, complaining that someone is going to make money because of a market change is so. . . uncapitalistic, and a bit out of character for someone who works for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

According to Tim, Archer-Daniels-Midland is just lovin’ policies promoting ethanol production from corn. However, ethanol as a gas additive won’t do anything for the environment because:

In brief: ethanol evaporates more than gasoline, releasing more smog-causing hydrocarbons; also, the energy intensity of producing ethanol, plus the potential damage to soil from single-crop farms, pose environmental threats in themselves.

I don’t think he’s got that first part right – ethanol won’t do much to reduce ozone formation according to the National Academy of Sciences, but where’s the data showing that ozone would increase with ethanol use? So I have to read the freakin’ book, on the off chance the answer might be in there? (That’s what it’s all about, he’s got a book to sell.) As for the rest of it, where have I heard this before? However, as I’ve mentioned previously the problem isn’t with farming to produce ethanol, it’s with farming in general. Biofuels production is just the symptom.

Of course, teeing off on environmentalists over these problems is misguided:

These three environmental proposals are typical of Washington policy and the exemplify the Ripoff: Politicians push rules that they say are for our own good. But Washington lobbyists raked in $2.28 billion in 2005, with about $2 billion of that coming from business lobbyists--you can bet they don't invest that much for nothing. Because small business and the average American don't have that sort of access, the policies tend to enrich big business while driving up costs for consumers and taxpayers and choking off entrepreneurs.

So what else is new? But if Tim is really interested in getting something done about it, why not get behind campaign finance and voting reforms to help jackhammer the lobbyists and entrenched players out of Congress? Nah, it’s more fun to bash environmentalists using grey propaganda, instead. HuffPo’s spam filter must have been down that day.