Cooling Down?

Rich Lowry, today:

As an indirect tax on carbon, cap-and-trade would increase energy prices when people are already straining under $4-a-gallon gas. Even a political naif — which McConnell assuredly is not — would realize the benefit of hanging the proposal around its supporters’ necks. Lately, we’ve seen the tech and housing bubbles burst, and now — at least as an urgent political issue — the global-warming bubble is getting pricked.

Is the tide turning in the global warming debate?  Jim Manzi points out a series of Andrew Sullivan posts and suggests that maybe it is.  Here’s the takeaway:

Given current projections, the costs of restricting emissions just can’t be justified based on the benefits that it is projected to provide.

As far as I can see, proponents of emissions reductions will respond with four arguments: (1) inflate the analyzed costs of global warming by claiming the science actually now says things will be even worse than we previously thought, (2) inflate the analyzed costs of global warming by embedding indefensible discount rate assumptions in the black box of econometric calculations used by economists to conduct the cost-benefit analysis, (3) deflate the analyzed costs of emissions mitigation by claiming a free lunch – that there is a cost-free or low-cost way to radically reduce emissions, and/or (4) turn this into a moral crusade asserting that we have a moral duty to the poor of the world because of our past sins of emission. I have laid out responses to each of these objections: 1, 2, 3 and 4. When considered carefully, emissions mitigation proponents have no persuasive arguments.

I’m not entirely convinced that the debate is shifting outside of an influential but still small subset of the blogosphere.  But the potential for a shift is clearly there, and the politics of the recent debate over Lieberman-Warner do suggest a future in which cap-and-trade just isn’t on the table.