Nobel laureate Paul Krugman writes today in the New York Times that the opposition of much of Congress to the Waxman-Markey bill is treason and betrayal.
If it passes, this bill will be our nation’s first legislative response to global warming. The House narrowly passed Waxman-Markey last Friday, and it now goes to the Senate, where it faces more opposition, led by the states most dependent on oil and coal.
Doesn’t ‘treason and betrayal’ sound too extreme and reactive of Mr. Krugman, as if he has an axe to grind? How could people elected to Congress in an educated, democratic country be committing treason and betrayal?
The answer lies in the fact that the climate and the natural world don’t care about our economy, our political system or our human desire to conduct business as usual. The climate is warming much faster than even the pessimistic scenarios of a few years ago. We’re looking at New Hampshire having the climate of North Carolina by the end of this century, and Illinois having the climate of East Texas.
As Mr. Krugman points out, the politicians who oppose Waxman-Markey don’t like the policy implications of all this, so they’ve decided not to believe in climate change. I would add this is similar to earlier in U.S. history, when the country’s economy was so dependent on slavery that most people decided not to believe slavery was immoral. It was easier to pursue business as usual than a paradigm shift. But their denial did not prevent the end of slavery and the accompanying paradigm shift from happening.
Here at the Diamond-Cut Life I tend to focus on changing our lifestyles so that we’re living more sustainably. But political change is equally essential. Mr. Krugman is right that Congresspeople who refuse to take action on climate change by voting for the Waxman-Markey bill are commiting treason and betrayal. Instead of practicing leadership, they are following the leadership of ExxonMobil, which today happens to have a quarter-page advertisement directly under Mr. Krugman’s editorial. Their ad claims with a straight face that it is simultaneously addressing “the challenge of sustainability” as it also continues to “deliver superior stockholder returns”.
That is like cotton plantation owners in the South claiming in the mid-1800’s that they are addressing the challenge of slavery as they also continue to deliver cotton at the cheapest possible price.
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I agree that we need to live more sustainably. I still hate the idea of the Cap & Trade bill.
To use your slavery metaphor, Cap & Trade would be like passing a bill that made it still OK to have slavery, but now the slave owners now have to pay a tax to rich northerners who then provide no goods or services – they merely dip their hands into the slave owners pockets, and they use government force to do so.
In that scenario, both parties would be wrong. Slavery is wrong and using the government to steal is wrong.
Heavy polluting may be wrong, but stealing from the heavy polluters is also wrong.
And you should consider China. If we kill those industries here, manufacturing and others will merely move overseas, where they (the industry) will have less regulation than they did here. China has already said that they will not comply with cap & trade type standards. So by passing the bill here, we may actually have a worse net effect on the environment – and as a bonus we will injure our own economy and have increased poverty here.
That does not sound like a good idea to me.
Besides, why should any elected official pass any bill they have not read? The bill is over 1,000 pages long, and all the details have still not been worked out.
Cap & Trade is not about climate change, many of its authors have already admitted that it will have little or no impact on the environment – it’s about government control.