Megan McArdleVarmennettu tili

If you make fun of something like the Green New Deal--as I have, richly and at length--eventually some frustrated person will demand to know what YOUR plan is.

This is a logical fallacy--the existence of a problem does not imply the existence of a feasible solution. Doctors who opposed bleeding tuberculosis patients couldn't provide antibiotics, but at least they could not bleed the patients.

However, in this case, I do have a plan. And it starts with the recognition that what the US does just doesn't matter that much, compared to what China and India and other developing countries do.

We are, as one commenter put it, the "biggest sinner" on a per capita basis. But the rest of the world has so many capitas that even zeroing out our emissions won't offset their output as they develop.

Now, many conservatives treat that as an excuse to do nothing. This is wrong, and fundamentally un-conservative. We have but the one climate system, and any conservative worthy of the name should be deeply uncomfortable with taking unpredictable chances with its equilibrium.

However, this does drive *what* we should be focusing our efforts on. Which is not finding expensive ways to make our homes, power generation, or transportation network marginally more efficient.

Pushing the US economy to zero emissions won't fundamentally alter the problem because--and this is important--if we stop using fossil fuels, they actually get cheaper for everyone else, making developing countries more likely to develop in carbon-intensive ways.

What we need to do instead is make lower-carbon technologies--not just power and cars, but steel, cement, agriculture--price/quality superior to carbon-intensive ones.

That does mean spending a lot of taxpayer money. But the money should be spent on developing greener technology, incentivizing companies to develop greener technology, and possibly, incentivizing developing countries to deploy them.

This is a very different focus from the command-and-control approach of the GND.

We can't fix the problem by skewing markets so that, after heavy mandates and subsidies, green is cheaper, because we can't fix the global market. We can only fix the problem by making them *actually* superior.

And we definitely can't fix the problem by larding up our environmental initiatives with a bunch of unrelated ideological priorities, which will only further polarize what shouldn't even be a partisan issue.

Now let me return to that "biggest sinner" remark that I highlighted earlier, because this is emblematic of the responses I got. The US, the argument goes, consumes more than its fair share of carbon; therefore we have a moral obligation to reduce our consumption.

I don't really disagree with this, except ... Kantian metaethics will not keep the climate from warming. The weather doesn't care whether carbon comes from some fat, rich American burning more than their "fair share", or some Indian farmer who just wants to wash clothes indoors.

In a morally just world, the person with the most unequal share would always be the person in the best solution to any problem. We do not live in a morally just world. Nor can we lobby for a social justice amendment to the laws of thermodynamics.

Let me also respond to the folks who argued, okay, yeah, we obviously need to find some way to keep the bottom billions from heating the climate, but the best way to do that is through "moral leadership". China, they say, will only follow if we "lead".

To these people I put the question: if our moral leadership on major issues is so powerful, how come China still practices mass censorship and imprisons dissidents? I mean, we've spent centuries leading on that issue.

The answer is that the Chinese government is not our child. It is an independent state which follows what it perceives to be its own interests, and the interests of its people.

So while I agree that it is morally urgent to stop global warming, I think the morally urgent thing is to make green technology so awesome, so cheap, that the developing world will adopt it voluntarily. Because there's no mechanism to make them adopt it involuntarily.

Which brings me to the Paris Accords.

A global carbon tax would be the best way to get to a lower carbon world. The problem is, we have no global body that can enforce it on sovereign states. Command and control alternatives fail for the same reason.

Kyoto targets were hit only by happy accidents, like the end of communism and the exploitation of natural gas in the North Sea, or the unhappy accident of the financial crisis tanking everyone ‘s output

US involvement wouldn’t have altered the fundamental problem, which is that governments are more responsive to the immediate desires of the citizenry than to welfare improvement for the unborn

It’s the mother of all collective action problems, and our current multilateral processes are simply incapable of acting with the necessary speed and scale.

So if we can’t find a collective solution to the problem, the US should lead by finding a unilateral solution—one that will entice developing countries to go green because that’s an easier, cheaper way to get rich

This is not a counsel of inaction. I’m all for massive government spending on this project. Just not Green New Deal proposals that won’t fix the big problem and will poison attempts to fix local problems by tacking on unrelated ideological projects