Pro-Growth Environmentalism

In the Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Adler takes on Break Through, a book by two liberals that offers plan for a new environmentalism–a supposedly "pro-growth" environmentalism–and knocks it down it fairly nicely.

Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger want “an explicitly pro-growth agenda,” on the theory that investment, innovation and imagination may ultimately do more to improve the environment than punitive regulation and finger-wagging rhetoric. To stabilize atmospheric carbon levels will take more–much more–than regulation; it will require “unleashing human power, creating a new economy.”

…Such a shift in focus would be welcome, of course, but it is hard to see why their centralized subsidy plan would produce commercially profitable–that is, “pro-growth”–technologies better than the multiple efforts of private investors. In short: Why would an “Apollo” plan succeed where the Synthetic Fuels Corp. failed? Having accepted the platitude that “human governance is what makes markets possible,” the authors embrace the fatal conceit that markets can somehow be planned or manipulated to achieve a grand and worthy purpose.

This is exactly right.  I haven’t read the book, but a condensed version of its primary argument appeared in The New Republic not long ago, and I had the same reaction.  The authors do wonders for the liberal environmental movement by going on and on about the failures of restrictive regulations and energy regimes whose main focus is telling individuals how much and what kind of energy they can and can’t use.  And it’s wonderful, for a bit, until it falls apart when you find out that what the authors really want is a slate of policies that would roughly match Al Gore’s with a slightly stronger emphasis on investment in new technology.  For all their love of the market and growth and innovation, they still want to weigh down the economy with slow-moving government directing our energy policy.

Still, Adler is right to conclude thusly:

Still, “Break Through” does bust up big parts of the old paradigm, not least by challenging environmentalists to rethink their “politics of limits.” In an odd way, the doomsaying of the global warmists has had a tonic effect, revealing, nearly 40 years since the first Earth Day, that environmentalism is stuck in a midlife crisis.

It would be nice if the book’s underlying ideas, if not exactly its policies, became more common, because, in the end, they are far more likely to produce sensible, cautious energy policy than the quasi-religious hokum that often passes for political thought amongst liberals these days.