I read the problem detailed in today’s Wall Street Journal by the insightful Shikha Dalmia as evidence that Bryan Caplan (following Geoff Brennan and Loren Lomasky) is correct that collective political action inspires irrationality.
Here are relevant passages:
If their opposition to the Klamath
hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest is any indication, the
greens, it appears, are just as unwilling to sacrifice their pet causes
as a Texas rancher is to sacrifice his pickup truck. If anything, the
radicalization of the environmental movement is the bigger obstacle to
addressing global warming than the allegedly gluttonous American way of
life.
Once regarded as the symbol of national greatness,
hydroelectric dams have now fallen into disrepute for many legitimate
reasons. They are enormously expensive undertakings that would never
have taken off but for hefty government subsidies. Worse, they
typically involve changing the natural course of rivers, causing
painful disruptions for towns and tribes.
But tearing down the Klamath dams, the last of which
was completed in 1962, will do more harm than good at this stage. These
dams provide cheap, renewable energy to 70,000 homes in Oregon and
California. Replacing this energy with natural gas — the cleanest
fossil-fuel source — would still pump 473,000 tons of additional
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. This is roughly equal to
the annual emissions of 102,000 cars.
Given this alternative, one would think that
environmentalists would form a human shield around the dams to protect
them. Instead, they have been fighting tooth-and-nail to tear them down
because the dams stand in the way of migrating salmon.
Environmentalists don’t even let many states, including California,
count hydro as renewable.
….
Bruce Hamilton, Sierra Club’s deputy executive
director and a longtime proponent of such a mandate, refuses to even
acknowledge that there is any conflict in closing hydro dams while
fighting global warming. All California needs to do to square these
twin objectives, he maintains, is become more energy efficient while
embracing alternative fuels. "We don’t need to accept a Faustian
bargain with hydropower to cut emissions," he says.
This is easier done in the fantasy world of greens
than in the real world. If cost-effective technologies to boost energy
efficiency actually existed, industry would adopt them automatically,
global warming or not.
When the personal material cost, at the time of individual action, of expressing one’s fantasies is near-zero, very little exists to check the expression of those fantasies. No matter how bizarre, inconsistent, or dangerous they might be if real-world attempts are made to act upon them, if a holder of such fantasies suffers no personal cost from advocating his or her crazy idea, lots of crazy ideas will be advocated. This fact is especially true for those crazy ideas that, when held and advocated publicly by certain people, fill those certain people with a personal sense of distinction, heroism, or self-satisfaction.
And for further evidence of the hand-in-glove relationship between irrationality and politics, see today’s Washington Post column by Robert Samuelson, which begins:
It’s one of those delicious moments when Washington’s hypocrisy is
on full and unembarrassed display. On the one hand, some of America’s
leading politicians condemn high gasoline prices and contend that they
stem from "gouging" by oil companies. On the other, many of the same
politicians warn against global warming and implore us to curb our use
of fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.
Guess
what: These crowd-pleasing proclamations are contradictory. Anyone
fearful of global warming should cheer higher gasoline prices, because
much higher prices represent precisely the sort of powerful incentive
needed to push consumers toward more fuel-efficient vehicles and to
persuade the auto industry to produce them in large numbers.
Of course, politicians at the moment are self-righteously condemning the rise in gasoline prices as the result of evil corporate greed and monopoly power. More Samuelson:
It’s always fun to blame unpopular occurrences on corporate greed.
Schumer’s notion, for example, is that the wave of giant oil mergers
(among others: BP/Arco, Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco) has so
concentrated U.S. refinery capacity that companies can constrict supply
and create artificial scarcities by refusing to build new refineries.
It’s a plausible-sounding theory whose major defect is the absence of
supporting evidence.….
Americans want to stop global warming. They want to cut oil imports.
They want cheaper energy. Who will tell them that they can’t have it
all? Not our "leaders."
You show me endless examples of market failure; I’ll show you endless examples — and worse ones — of government failure.
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