Perspectives

Skeptics face the green screen

Scientists have incentive to exaggerate global warming

By Rohit Joy
From the February 2007 Print Edition

            During the 2006 election campaign, a cool $100 million was raised by both supporters and opponents of just one ballot initiative: Proposition 87. Proponents of the initiative claimed to have the best interests of the nation on their side and that the opposing campaign largely comprised a consortium of big oil companies selfishly seeking to protect their profit margins. Yet, many of the major backers of the ‘Yes’ campaign also stood to benefit financially had the measure passed.

Vinod Khosla is a venture capitalist who holds significant investments in alternative-energy companies. These companies would have been eligible to receive proceeds from the new tax on oil according to the San Jose Mercury News. While Khosla certainly had the right to contribute all he wanted to support Proposition 87, his claims about its environmental benefits were no less tainted by self-interest than claims by oil producers about higher gas prices and heightened dependence on foreign sources of energy.

            The conflict of interest facing promoters of stricter environmental policy is not limited to this example. Many note that scientists skeptical of human-caused global warming sometimes receive funding from the oil industry, which has a vested interest in opposing any new regulations on greenhouse-gas emissions. It must also be noted, however, that scientists whose research shows that humans are largely responsible for the current episode of global warming often receive government funding. Since funds for scientific research are limited, recipients have an incentive to emphasize findings pointing to global warming being a serious problem to encourage allocating more money for their field. Conversely, finding that climate change is not a serious problem is likely to result in less government support for climate science and more for research addressing other pressing issues. 

Richard Lindzen, professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT and climate-change skeptic, attests to the inherent government bias in an April 2006 Wall Street Journal op-ed, asking, “After all, who puts money into science — whether for AIDS, space, or climate — where there is nothing really alarming? … Scientists who dissent from the [climate] alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks, or worse.” He provides specific examples of the partiality to views favoring catastrophic climate change, explaining how Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza lost funding for raising questions about the prevailing climate-change orthodoxy and “Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming.”

This does not automatically imply that findings indicating that humans are causing global warming are false, simply that possible biases of climatologists arguing in favor of global warming must be investigated with similar scrutiny to those of scientists with contrary findings. Just as financial backing from Exxon Mobil may lead a scientist to suppress evidence of climate change, support from the National Academy of Sciences may have the opposite effect.

An additional weakness of the government’s role in making environmental policy is that politicians, upon learning of a particular environmental problem, craft “solutions” that ignore economic principles. To use global warming as an example, the primary “solution” policymakers have crafted is the Kyoto Protocol. Ratifying Kyoto would not only cede our sovereignty to the United Nations, but also ignore the substitution effect since the treaty does not impose uniform emissions restrictions on nations in the Third World. Companies would simply move their operations overseas to avoid complying with the mandates. The end result would be to exacerbate the erosion of American manufacturing while doing little to actually reduce worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions.

There is a better way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The U.S. government could levy an excise tax on carbon dioxide emissions and use the revenue to finance across-the-board reductions in income taxes. The excise tax would give U.S. companies an incentive to develop less-polluting manufacturing processes while reduced income taxes would compensate for a reduction in economic growth the carbon tax would inevitably cause.

To account for other nations such as China and India not taking similar actions, the United States could impose tariffs on goods manufactured in these countries equal to the costs U.S. manufacturers incur in reducing carbon emissions. The revenue from the tariffs could then be used for additional individual and corporate income tax cuts, again mitigating the negative effects on economic growth. The same general approach could be used to abate other forms of pollution: excise taxes on the pollution itself, tariffs on relevant foreign products, and compensating income-tax reductions.

            For the first 125 years or so of our nation’s history, tariffs and excise taxes were the primary source of revenue for the federal government. Income taxes were not widespread until the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913. A tariff and excise-tax approach to reducing pollution would be most protective of American sovereignty, jobs, and industry, and be most in harmony with the designs of our Founding Fathers.

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