Economic growth can solve climate change?
Cameron English writes at Policymic:
The remaining GOP presidential contenders are a mixed group in a lot of ways. On climate change, however, their views converge just as you might expect: they don’t buy it.
All four candidates have voiced skepticism during the primary race and said they will reduce environmental regulations. Naturally, a number of high-profile environmental groups are crying foul this week in response. But the Republicans’ skepticism is justified for one reason: The primary solution to climate change isn’t federal or international regulations, but economic growth. And economic growth is undeniably the result of capitalism…
We’re still emitting a lot of carbon dioxide today, and many economists don’t believe that the EKC ultimately explains how we will reduce our CO2 emissions. So if a Republican president guts the EPA next year, can we avoid the disastrous effects of climate change? Yes. As climatologist Roy Spencer points out, if the market is allowed to work, the price of oil will continue to rise as it becomes scarcer, and that will create an incentive to develop alternative energy sources.
Environmentalists may complain that Roy Spencer is a conservative climate change “denier,” and his work should be doubted as a result. But former Vice President Al Gore said essentially the same thing several years ago: “Free market capitalist economics is arguably the most powerful tool ever used by civilization. As the world’s leading exemplar of free market economics, the U.S. has a special obligation to discover effective ways of using the power of market forces to help save the environment.”
Not only is there ample evidence to support this alternative approach to climate change, but legislating the problem out of existence has so far failed. Seventeen attempts later, we’ve yet to enact a viable international climate treaty, and the billions of dollars so far spent on green energy have done little to get us away from fossil fuels.
A few points:
- Nothing can stop climate change.
- There is no reason to believe that climate change is bad. What is the perfect climate and how to you make and keep it, anyway?
- In the future, we will be using more fossil fuels than ever before.
- As we are all environmentalists, those poseurs who use environmentalism as a shield behind which they advance their Marxist agenda have every reason to fear a GOP President.