How to Grapple With Greenhouse Gases

President Obama has routinely put greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction is at the top of his agenda. At the same time there is strong support for such action in the Congress, while all concerned international authorities are committed to the GHG emission reduction agenda. Given the souring economy, leaders domestic and abroad have paid plenty of lip service preserving and promoting economic growth while implementing GHG reduction. This, however, is far from guaranteed.

The international policy train has “left the station” and it will be important for those who understand economics and understand the importance of minimizing poverty to participate in fashioning the inevitable policies to achieve whatever GHG emission reduction goals are finally adopted.

Some GHG emission strategies are worse than others. The most destructive could reduce our freedom, interfere substantially with lifestyles, curb economic growth, increase unemployment and increase poverty. Other strategies would rely principally on technological advances, permitting people to live as they prefer, without serious economic consequences. The irony is that the first approach, which relies heavily on regulating human behavior (quite a challenge), is by far the least promising approach. The ingenuity of humankind holds the key to the future, just as it has cleared the way from the past.

Setting International Objectives:

The problem begins with an over-arching problem. The United States could see itself materially disadvantaged depending upon the nature of future international treaties to which we are likely to be party. Last summer, the G8 adopted an objective for each developed country to reduce GHG emissions 50 percent by 2050. As fair as that may sound, it is inherently unfair, because such across-the-board objectives take no account of differences in population growth rates. People in fast growing nations like the United States, Canada and Australia would need to reduce their GHG emissions far more than in Europe or Japan. In the United States, for example, a 50 percent GHG emissions reduction by 2050 agreement would require a 61 percent per capita reduction because of our strong population growth. Europe would need only a 48 percent reduction, because it is growing slowly and will soon be into modest decline. Japan’s per capita reduction would be only 38 percent because it is already losing population and will lose as many people as live in Florida and New Jersey by 2050. International treaties need to be on a per capita rather than an “across the board” basis.

Living Like Indonesians?

The challenges, however, could be even greater, because President Obama has proposed an even more rigorous 80 percent reduction in GHG emissions by 2050. This would reduce US GHG emissions per capita almost to Indonesian levels. If that means living like Indonesians, the American people will have none of it, and they will quickly dispatch in to retirement politicians who lead (to misuse the word) in such a direction. If, on the other hand, if means living like Americans, while relying on human ingenuity to emit no more GHGs per capita than Indonesians, then opposition will quickly fade away. But there is an important point to understand here. There is no constituency for returning to the lifestyles of the 1980s, much less the 1950s or the 1800s. Nor is there in Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan, China nor Indonesia. As my colleague at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris, Professor Jean-Claude Ziv likes to say, “sustainability must be acceptable.”

Looking Backward:

Yet some of the proposals being put forward would seriously retard the standard of living. Most especially, the proposals of the urban elite would have us giving up our cars and being forced increasingly to live in far more dense urban areas. Such simplistic notions ignore the fact that more crowded urban areas have more traffic congestion, not less. They miss the fact that more traffic congestion means more intense air pollution and that more intense air pollution means greater health problems.

They also ignore economics. The international research is clear on the economic contribution of personal mobility to affluence. Where people can travel farther in an urban area there is greater economic output. Traveling faster in urban areas generally means having cars, since transit is so much slower than cars except for the few largest downtown markets where rapid transit service can compete. The problem is that 90 percent of metropolitan employment is not downtown and there is no reasonable prospect of ever providing transit service that is competitive with cars for this majority of trips. Further, where lower income households have access to cars, as Brookings Institution, Progressive Policy Institute and University of California research tells us, there is less low income unemployment.

The Bankruptcy of Regulating People:

The tragedy about all of this is that even with the lifestyle and economic sacrifices the urban elite would have us make, their solutions could not be more ineffective. Even the most aggressive anti-automobile and anti-suburban proposals would not reduce the first gram from the GHG emission levels of today. Yet, such hopeless, disconnected strategies have become public policy in California, through the enactment of counter-productive legislation such as Senate Bill 375 and a sue-happy Attorney General, Jerry Brown, whose grasp of the bigger picture is like the blindfolded man seeking to describe an elephant by feeling its toes.

Driving Greener:

That regulating behavior is not the answer does not mean that there are not benign strategies for reducing GHG emissions. In fact, technological solutions are on the horizon. If, for example, all automobiles were to become as fuel efficient as the latest hybrid cars or the soon to be marketed “plug-in” vehicles (like the Chevrolet “Volt”), GHG emissions from cars could be reduced by 50 percent by 2030. Moreover, they would nearly be on a glide path to meet an 80 percent reduction target by 2050. The vehicle emissions standard recently adopted by the European Parliament would do even better. Further, advances in alternative fuel technology, while not on the doorstep today, could even further reduce GHG emissions after 2030. All of this could be accomplished while driving continues to increase with population growth and people continue to prosper as is only possible if they have access to the personal mobility that minimizes travel times in urban areas.

Greener Suburbs:

Moreover, the suburban house is not the GHG emissions outlaw that the urban elites would have us believe. The Japanese have already developed a 2,100 square foot carbon neutral house. This means that there is no reason to stop the suburban development that has made it possible for home ownership rates to near 70 percent. This is most promising, because the American Dream of home ownership needs to be expanded, not contracted. Today, fewer than 50 percent of Latino and African-American households own their own homes, compared to 75 percent of White-non-Hispanics. The anti-suburban and anti-automobile GHG reduction policies would unfairly bar the door to further advancement. It is no time to shut the door on equal opportunity.

Living Like Americans:

The bottom line is that there is no reason why Americans cannot continue to live like Americans. Indeed, we should all look forward to the day that that Indonesians achieve their hope of living as well as Americans.

The new administration and Congress should focus on the policy objective, which is regulating GHG emissions. They should, however, reject any idea of regulating people or their behavior. An ancient prescription would be appropriate: “First do no harm.”

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Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia in St. Louis and is a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission and one term on the Amtrak Reform Council.