Bad Science from Cato
I was listening to NPR recently. Either 'To The Point' or 'Which Way L.A.' One of the guests was from The Cato Institute. He stated that it was a mistake for California to require lower emissions from cars and trucks because scientific projections showed that even if every state in America adopted California's limits, global temperatures would only be a fraction of a degree Celsius lower by 2050. I then saw a similar statement accepted as fact in an editorial in The LA Times. I'm not sure which is more disappointing, the uncritical repeating of this position by the LA Times, or the fact that the other guest on NPR, who was a scientist, failed to point out the fundamental flaw in this argument. The flaw is that we are not currently primarily concerned with lowering global temperatures, we are concerned about reducing the increase in temperatures. If reducing auto emissions results in temperatures being slightly lower in forty years, that's not a small shift relevant to the baseline today, that's a large shift relative to where temperatures will be if we do nothing.
But the Cato institute isn't done with their bad science on this issue just yet. They have an opinion piece up on their website which further compounds their errors. In particular they suggest that an unintended consequence of this law could be that people will drive more if their vehicles get better gas mileage. They argue that better fuel efficiency decreases the marginal cost of driving a car, and that people will respond to this by driving more. Were this the case, wouldn't people who own gas guzzlers drive less already? Yet clearly most people believe that the overwhelming bulk of the driving that they do is necessary. Finally, while this would be anathema to the libertarians at Cato, if people responded by driving more this could easily be addressed by increasing fuel taxes.
The curious contradiction in all of this is that the Cato Institute is advocating a reckless and irresponsible approach to a growing environmental crisis that is badly out of step with the current state of scientific research and knowledge. Bizarre, really, that an organization that is based on the principle of personal responsibility believes that adherence to their ideological creed is more important that responsible behavior. If they perhaps had some compelling argument as to how people can be made to see the consequences of their bad choices before global warming is affecting daily life in places like Los Angeles, they should offer up those arguments. If not, they should shut up and get out of the way. By the time they start to see signs of global warming in Washington D.C. it will be far too late to do anything about it.