Paul Krugman had a couple of columns, today and Friday, with some complementary posts at his blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal,” on the economics of cap-and-trade as well as the dire situation in which we find ourselves relative to warming and its impacts. To refute some of the nonsensical – and false – claims relative to job loss, Krugman offered this column on Friday: It’s Easy Being Green. “It’s important, then, to understand that claims of immense economic damage from climate legislation are as bogus, in their own way, as climate-change denial. Saving the planet won’t come free (although the early stages of conservation actually might).But it won’t cost all that much either.”
Krugman further explores the faulty economics and the politics that drive it at his blog: Pigou, Glenn Beck, and the false case against cap-and-trade. Following up, he writes on The textbook economics of cap-and-trade. In the lucid manner that many of us have come to so greatly respect from this Nobel economist – and on which we so often rely to cut through lies and confusion – Krugman lays out the case for why cap-and-trade will benefit not only the planet and its climate system, but the businesses who engage in optimizing their operations to meet the cap, as well as the businesses that will profit from capturing the value of the offset system.
Today he writes in his column on the Cassandras of Climate. You must remember that although a “Cassandra” usually has a negative connotation, she was right when she predicted the fall of Troy. And, like Cassandra, climate scientists are “…gifted with the ability to prophesy future disasters, but cursed with the inability to get anyone to believe them.” It’s a characteristically hard-hitting column. He points out what’s too painfully obvious: “Responding to climate change with the vigor that the threat deserves would not, contrary to legend, be devastating for the economy as a whole. But it would shuffle the economic deck, hurting some powerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don’t.”
Let’s hope that Washington can overcome its propensity for catering to special interests and gets the public policy work done that must be done in order to move us out of the climate red zone. Barbara Boxer and John Kerry will introduce their climate and energy package in the Senate this week. Let’s see how it fares.
