Global Warming and Double Dragon

When I was a kid, I loved playing arcade games, especially the 2-D fighters like Bad Dudes and Double Dragon that were prevalent at the time. The structure of the games was pretty simple: You’d walk through a hilariously under-animated two dimensional environment taking out swarms of lowly henchmen, and every so often you’d run into a boss. These bosses would get progressively harder, and at the end of the game, you’d have to fight the biggest boss of them all, the one that controlled all the others.

Right now, that boss is global warming. It’s being blamed for absolutely everything. Too hot, too cold, too windy, too dry, too wet — you name it, if someone doesn’t like the weather, global warming must be at fault. Via Carter Wood at NAM’s ShopFloor blog, here’s Sen. Harry Reid arguing that global warming helped cause the California wildfires. And here’s Sen. Bernie Sanders rambling on about how the overaggressive, expensive, Lieberman-Warner climate bill isn’t tough enough because global warming threatens "catastrophic and irreversible damage."

Yet as Steven Landsburg pointed out in Slate the other day (and again in response to the Center for American Progress’s Joseph Romm) is that none of these people really want to think about costs, about the value of wealth expended now in order to stop something that we’re not even entirely certain of in the future. Just because global warming is happening and we’re responsible for it doesn’t mean that the economic benefits of responding to it outweigh the economic costs.

This is related to a pretty serious problem for the Left: they like to proclaim, on one hand, that global warming is a catastrophic threat, impending doom for all!, and will require a mammoth response. And on the other hand, they also like to minimize the personal cost. But dealing with costs is something that few global-warming policy advocates on the left seem to want to do, despite the fact that it’s the only sensible way to figure out what program, if any, might be necessary to respond to climate change.