On the backburner

Has a perfect storm of events robbed advocates of a green economy the moral and tactical high ground?

It would seem so, at least temporarily.

The combination of an economy turned south, an unusually frigid winter, evidence of massaged climate data, the Wall Street meltdown, and alarming budget deficits has clearly chilled the plans of climate change activists and emboldened global warming deniers.

It’s fair to say the prospects for a stronger governmental role in shaping market incentives for alternative energy and industry-wide carbon mitigation appear to have significantly cooled.

In fact, the promises of green technology, a green jobs boom, reduced carbon dioxide emissions, and renewable energy for all, a kind of clean power Shangri-la, seem as far away from realization as ever.

Witness the deflation in Congress over cap-and-trade legislation, once thought to be possible economy-wide, is now only talked about in minimalist terms of a phasing-in over many years, with utilities being impacted first.

And then there’s the ideological counteroffensive of climate change naysayers who call the connection between man-caused emissions and potentially catastrophic warming patterns and other environmental impacts “one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated on the American people.”

This blog remains open to contrary views, so, against type, I picked up the latest issue of Newsmax, the cover story devoted to showing the IPCC has it all wrong, that we’re actually in a cooling phase, not a warming one.

The evidence for the contrarians is well-known: cloud science is too complicated to base predictions on, deep ocean currents may do more to counteract warming than is acknowledged, and sun spot activity may be helping plunge us into a new ice age.

Interesting points all, and they should prod us to redouble our efforts to understand and be careful about the science and scientific method undergirding our theories.

But let’s be clear: the reversal of fortune, and the change of public mood, have more to do with the bad economy, an upswing in anti-tax and anti-big government sentiment, and the politics of reaction than anything else.

Stakeholders in the status quo smell blood. And analogous to the health care reform debate, doing nothing about a subject as complex and controversial as climate change (and a scheme as difficult to understand as cap and trade) looks better than doing something.

They were wrong about health care reform, and they are wrong about the necessity of government devising strong market-driven incentives for a low-carbon economy.