Hot Air and the Greenhouse Effect
It doesn’t take a degree in meteorology to see that the White House is cooling off on global warming. The question is: Why?
If this reflects only President Bush’s customary caution, there is no harm done. Even if it reflects skepticism about being able to come up soon with precise measurements of anything as vast as the planetary atmosphere, there is no real cause to strip Bush of his environmental epaulets.
But if it represents a backing away from concern that man-made carbon dioxides are forming an envelope around the Earth that eventually will raise temperatures in strange places by trapping heat that now escapes into space, then the environmentalists are right to worry.
Few scientists question the validity of the theory that various gases, most of them generated by burning fuels for energy, are creating a monster greenhouse effect. They just want more information before they are ready to join the handful who think they know enough now to say when heat will cause oceans to rise and glaciers to melt.
Bush was right to ask Congress for one thing that is essential to answer questions like those: money. His new budget would increase this country’s Global Change research program by 60%, to more than $1 billion.
Caution on the greenhouse also can cause little trouble as long as Bush does not slow down programs that could retard global warming because they make sense on other grounds, such as making electrical generators and automobiles more efficient and saving tropical rain forests.
But the President was on rather shaky ground when he talked of making absolutely certain that future efforts to deal with the greenhouse effect are consistent with sound principles of economics. Nearly a century ago, a British economist, A. C. Pigou, developed the now widely held theory that industries could not expect to pay hard cash for raw materials, land, labor and the rent of money and then use air and water as if they were free goods. Principles of economics don’t get any more sound or venerable than that.
