Your Teacher Said What?! (27 page)

 

On July 24, 2004, then-Senator Barack Obama gave a speech to the Democratic National Convention and a national television audience. For those who have forgotten 2004—when unemployment was still under 5.5 percent, the annual deficit was still “only” $668 billion, and more than $10 trillion of wealth hadn't yet vanished from America's net worth—the speech in question was the one in which the future president reminded us that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America.”

On November 2, 2010—the day of the midterm elections that “refudiated”
⁴¹
two years of Progressive rule and turned the House of Representatives over to the Republican Party by the biggest margin in more than sixty years—the American voter disagreed. In fact, disagreement on every aspect of the Obama presidency kind of defined the election—including the way it was explained.

One editorial put it this way:

The problem?

According to the
New York Times
, the election

Not exactly. The
Wall Street Journal
pointed out:

There was even disagreement about the president's performance at his news conference the day after what he called the “shellacking” his party had just experienced:

As the Progressive reaction to the midterm elections of 2010 showed, liberal America may still be alive and kicking—for a while, anyway—but it's pretty much blind to reality. An electoral thumping that was unmistakably a referendum on Progressive policies was, to Progressives, a failure of timing. Or communication. Or apathy on the part of other Progressives. Or anything but what it was. And this was true not only to the readers of the
Huffington Post
and
Mother Jones
but to the readers of America's newspaper of record, the
New York Times
.

The
Times
's influence is so wide, in fact, that the only comparable daily newspaper is the bible of American business, the
Wall Street Journal
, which actually shares a lot of its competitor's characteristics. Both win Pulitzer Prizes by the truckload. Both are at the top of the career ladder for every aspiring journalist in the country. Both are based in Manhattan, for gosh sakes.

But when it comes to every public-policy debate, they might as well be in two different galaxies. If the
Times
thinks a particular tax is too low, you
know
that the
Journal
thinks it's too high. If the
Times
hates a Supreme Court decision, the
Journal
loves it. If the
Times
endorses Smith for dogcatcher, you can bet the
Journal
is backing Jones.

And so is the Kernen family. I read both newspapers every day, and you've probably already guessed which one I think understands the way the world works. As regular viewers of
Squawk Box
know, I'm no great fan of the
Times
editorial pages. If I had to imagine a particularly awful way to spend eternity, it would be having to read Frank Rich's column every day, rather than just on Sunday. You can't even explain his presence by the Progressive fondness for highly credentialed elites; the man whom the
Times
pays to write fifteen hundred words on economic policy every week was formerly a theater critic, for heaven's sake.

On the other hand, not only does the
Journal
have a bunch of really smart reporters who understand every aspect of business and the American economy, but its editorials are practically a textbook of free-market philosophy. In fact, I can honestly say that this book owes as much to the last two pages of the
Journal
's first section as it does to anything else.

 

Ask any Progressive, and he'll tell you all about the science of climate change. Men who never took a chemistry class after the tenth grade will bend your ear on convection models, climate forcing, or the medieval warm period. Women who—maybe—took a “science for poets” class in college will go on and on about the kinetic theory of gases, Arctic sea ice, and isotherms. And sooner or later, one of them will mention the Nobel Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and (of course) former vice president Al Gore.

Now, I don't mean to sound like a science snob, but before I joined the investment world I spent a good many years in laboratories working with and for some of the world's best experimental researchers. And I do know that anything as complicated as the world's climate is not the kind of thing that can be understood by watching a one-hundred-minute-long documentary, even if it has Al Gore in it. (I also know one thing for sure about science: It isn't about “truth,” inconvenient or not. There is no such thing as “settled science.” Or “incontrovertible evidence.” If anyone tries to tell you there is, feel free to back away, slowly, with your hand firmly on your wallet.)

Even so, it isn't really the
science
of climate change that generates all the controversy. The thing that matters—that really divides Progressive thinking from, well, common sense—is climate
policy
. More specifically, the economics of climate policy. And this is why the world's climate looks so much different from the
New York Times
offices on Forty-second Street than it does less than five miles south, at the
Wall Street Journal
.

Take the villainous substance that is at the heart of all climate change debates: carbon dioxide, or CO
₂
.
⁴²

Carbon dioxide is not exactly an exotic substance. Almost every organism on the planet either produces it or consumes it; the cycle of life itself depends on plants turning CO
₂
into carbohydrates and animals turning carbohydrates back into CO
₂
. It's not much of a stretch to say that without carbon dioxide, life as we know it wouldn't exist.

 

“Blake?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“What do you know about carbon dioxide—CO
₂
?”

“Like in the song?”

“Song?”

“The song we learned at summer school: ‘Unlike me and you /

Plants need CO
₂
/ That lets off oxygen / That keeps us from turning blue / Every plant can do this fundamental process / And we can call this photosynthesis.' ”

“Yes, Blake. Just like that.”

 

Life depends on CO
₂
—oops, I meant to write carbon—for more than just photosynthesis. Every instant, the sun radiates a huge amount of energy, some of which hits earth. That energy comes in different flavors: the kind we can see—visible light—passes through CO
₂
, but a large amount of energy that we
feel
, mostly in the form of heat, is absorbed. The result, due to this “greenhouse effect,” is that earth is warm enough to support life. For living things, carbon dioxide is, by any measure, a good thing.

Now, it is certainly possible to have too much of a good thing, and the entire climate-change controversy is built around the contention that CO
₂
is a really good thing when its percentage of earth's atmosphere is 0.03 percent but a disaster when it is 0.04 percent. Accept this, and you have joined the “consensus.”

Here's how you get there:

 

Step 1: Carbon dioxide is a “greenhouse” gas. No argument.

Step 2: Industrial civilization has produced more atmospheric carbon dioxide than would have been present if, for example, humanity were still dependent on muscle and waterpower. Since CO
₂
and water are the result of the chemical reaction that occurs whenever a fuel that contains carbon is burned, also no argument.

Step 3: Globally, temperatures are rising. Plenty of argument here, mostly about the magnitude of the rise. It turns out to be very hard to measure worldwide temperature, since it can, for example, be hotter in one place this year than it was last year, while cooler elsewhere. However, for the sake of argument, let's accept that it is rising.

Step 4: It's rising a lot. This is where the argument starts to show some tatters; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the body usually used to “prove” the dangers of global climate change, estimates that if current trends continue, the worldwide temperature will rise somewhere between three and five degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100. This matters—but how much? In the long history of the planet, this is barely noticeable (and even in the northeastern United States, where the Kernen family lives, a December day that is 45 degrees rather than 42 degrees isn't going to make headlines).

Also, while such a worldwide increase in temperature does have some serious costs attached to it, mostly in the form of rising sea levels, it also has some benefits. Places way too cold for agriculture today would be available, and those doomsayers worried about feeding a few billion people in the face of a “climate disaster” should also know that crop yields are expected to
increase
by more than 10 percent because of increased amounts of carbon dioxide—which plants “breathe”—in the atmosphere.

Step 5: We need to stop the temperature rise, no matter what the cost. This is where the argument really unravels. That predicted temperature increase—from the IPCC, remember—has been estimated to cost a bit more than $20 trillion, which is a huge sum of money. But it's a huge sum of money
a hundred years from now
. While the cost of avoiding that temperature rise is the equivalent of $14 trillion
right now
.

 

Think about it. Pick door number one, and you get to spend $14 today. Or select door number two, and spend $20 a century from now, when you (or rather, Blake's great-grandchildren) will be ten times richer than you are today.

Behind door number one is the
New York Times
.

Take, for example, the small matter of whether CO
₂
is a dangerous substance. Back in 2007, a federal judge ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency was required to decide whether carbon dioxide was something that “threatens public health and welfare.” The “endangerment finding” that resulted was tabled by the Bush administration but greeted by the
New York Times
with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for the discovery of a winning lottery ticket in your sock drawer.

Here's what the
Times
editorial page had to say about the endangerment finding:

This has to be read twice to fully appreciate it: The United States House of Representatives—which was, in 2009, still firmly in the hands of the Democratic Party—having already voted to restrict the EPA's authority, is told by the
Times
that the best way to keep the EPA from requiring massive cuts in CO
₂
emissions is for
Congress
to require them first.

 

“Blake?”