May 05, 2017
In the era of Donald Trump, the New York Times apparently felt it was important to get a climate denier among its columnists. For this reason, they hired Bret Stephens away from the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, they could not find a climate denier who also understood arithmetic, since Mr. Stephens clearly falls short in this category.
Stephens uses his most recent column to tout mistakes made by those pushing for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. He rightly seizes on biofuels, which are in fact a net loser from a global warming perspective.
While he is right that the effort to promote biofuels was a major mistake, it’s not clear what the importance of this is. There were major mistakes in the development of every major technology in history. It would be hard to imagine that the effort to develop clean or cleaner energy sources would not take some wrong turns.
Anyhow, Stephens goes badly astray when he tries to tell readers that we have seen nothing but wrong turns. He tells us:
“There’s also been some acknowledgment that Germany’s Energiewende — the uber-ambitious “energy turn” embarked upon by Angela Merkel in 2010 — has been less than a model for others. The country is producing record levels of energy from wind and solar power, but emissions are almost exactly what they were in 2009. Meanwhile, German households pay nearly the highest electricity bills in Europe, all for what amounts to an illusion of ecological virtue.”
I managed to track down Mr. Arithmetic (he’s been on a long vacation) to ask about this one. Mr. Arithmetic points out that Germany’s economy has grown by more than 16 percent since 2009. This means if Stephens is right, that its emissions are lower today than they were in 2009, then Germany has managed a remarkable 16 percent reduction in emissions per unit of GDP in just eight years.
Contrary to what Stephens implies in his column, this would be an incredible success story, especially since Germany’s emissions per unit of GDP were already relatively low. (It is harder to achieve a larger percentage reduction from a low level than a high level.) If Stephens is right about Germany, then it should be easy for the United States to achieve and beat the emissions reductions set in the Paris agreement.
It is also worth noting that everyone understood that the first-movers were going to pay a higher price than followers. In other words, Germans understood that by taking the lead in reducing emissions it would pay a higher cost for reductions than laggards. They would be the cutting edge in developing and putting in place new technology, meaning that they would be stuck with paying the bill for some losers. The laggards would only pay for the winners.
This was a very socially minded position, where the whole world stood to gain from the fact that Germany was taking the lead in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This wasn’t a case of stupidity, as Stephens seems to think. It was a case of caring about the future of humanity and being willing to make some sacrifice to protect it.
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