Max Gladwell

You’ll seldom sway a global warming skeptic. Never fear. There’s another way to get there from here.

We introduced this series with a post about debating etiquette and tactics. It’s not about winning the debate or proving your opponent wrong. With global warming, it’s about persuasive arguments that can rally them to the cause. First, let’s get a feel for the challenge.

Global warming’s biggest asset also happens to be its greatest liability: Al Gore. The former Vice President and presidential candidate triggers an irrational response from Republicans, who happen to occupy the White House, nearly half of Congress, and a slim majority in the Supreme Court. Whatever Gore is for (such as becoming president), they’re against. And nothing polarizes them more than when Vice President Gore is proven right, especially when he earns an Oscar and Nobel Prize for his rightness. It’s a breed of “kill the messenger”, where it’s not the message itself but the one who’s delivering it. As such, a recent poll found that 74 percent of Congressional Republicans are global warming deniers. Note the nature of their anonymous responses:

The poll asked 39 Democrats and 39 Republicans if they thought that “it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made pollution”. The answers are anonymous, except for party affiliation. Only 26 percent of Republicans answered yes, with the rest answering no. Among Democrats, 95 percent answered yes.

The survey’s results include some choice anonymous quotes from the deniers:

“Reasonable people have doubts. For every Al Gore, there is an intelligent scientist armed with legitimate facts to debunk him.”

“If there’s one thing poll after poll indicates, it’s that the science is not settled on this issue.”

“What has been proven is that a well-targeted pop-culture campaign can trump even the best of science. The bad news is, a very few will get very rich, and the rest of us will foot the bill with mythical creations like cap and trade. The impact of such programs on the environment: Zero. The cost to the American public: Huge. The grin on Al Gore’s very wealthy face: Priceless!”

This isn’t to say that Republicans are the only skeptics. A recent post on the left-leaning The Huffington Post triggered a flurry of denier responses. The catalyst was a study by the Pew Global Attitudes Project that found “the percentage of Americans who think global warming is a ‘very serious problem’ dropped 5% over the last year, from 47% in 2007 to 42% today.”

Then again, it’s also not a right or left issue. Newt Gingrich supports the WE campaign. And the more reasonable libertarians (Ron Paul types) feel it amounts to an issue of property rights:

If property rights lie at the heart of free market environmentalism (FME), then FME advocates should think seriously about the normative implications of human-enhanced climate changes that could disproportionately harm those portions of the world that have (at least thus far) contributed least to the problem.

Unfortunately, no matter what tact you take with skeptics, especially those driven by politics and their hatred of Al Gore, they’ll never be persuaded. Even if the polar ice caps melt and Miami is under five feet of water, it won’t have been the fault of mankind, and nothing could have been done to stop it. Some will blame solar flares. Others will say it was a natural climate fluctuation. No matter how much data you provide or how well you craft your argument, it is just impossible for them to agree with Al Gore on anything. So don’t try. Instead, take a different route.

Global warming is directly tied to the burning of fossil fuels. Coal, oil, and natural gas account for at least 60 percent of greenhouse gases i.e. CO2 emissions. The skeptics have a tough time with this, especially the simpler ones. We exhale CO2. It’s in our beer and soda. How can it be bad? So goes the reasoning. Let’s suppose, for a moment, that they’re right. In the absence of global warming, is the urgency to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels any less? No. Because when it comes to our immediate health and wellbeing, CO2 is the least of our worries.

In his aptly titled Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction, Terry Tamminen lays out a specific case against oil. Very little of it has to do with climate change. Tamminen is Governor Schwartzenegger’s longtime environmental advisor.

Among the “six most dangerous pollutants” in petroleum emissions, according to Tamminen, CO2 isn’t among them. Instead, they are terms with which few are familiar. Particulate matter (PM) leads to “respiratory ailments, cardiopulmonary disease, premature death, low birthweight babies, and infant deaths.” Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are “known carcinogens and reproductive toxins that cause leukemia, lymphatic tissue cancers, birth defects, bronchitis, and emphysema.” Ozone “acts like an acid on the lungs, causing and aggravating asthma.” A recent study found that asthma rates are 50% higher near freeways, and while the national average has skyrocketed to one in 10 children, those of Fresno, California, have asthma at a rate of one in six. No coincidence that Fresno also has the highest levels of ozone. Nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide (CO), and lead round out these top-six pollutants.

Petroleum emissions and cigarette smoke share no fewer than eight of the same toxins. And yet somehow we only feel compelled to limit our exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke. Meanwhile, “a child riding in a diesel school bus may be exposed to as much as four times the level of toxic diesel exhaust as someone riding in a car ahead of it. These exposures pose up to forty-six times the cancer risk considered significant under federal law.”

And it’s not just the children of California. “A study by doctors at Indiana University School of Medicine…found that lead levels in the blood of NASCAR crew members was 40 percent higher than the level considered safe by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. After years of criticism by public health activists, NASCAR finally agreed to eliminate leaded fuel from their race cars in 2008.”

Just last week, California passed the nation’s first, serious climate change legislation, aiming to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by about 30 percent by 2020. According to estimates, “cutting down emissions could save over 300 lives and up to $2.4 billion dollars, ARB staffer Edie Chang said. The savings would come mostly from decreasing asthma and lost-work days.” It’s obviously not the CO2 that’s killing us all. But when you reduce one emission, you reduce them all.

The health effects of our fossil-fuel dependence is one of those “externalized costs” associated with their production, distribution, and consumption that energy companies don’t pay. This is where the libertarians among us get pissed, because it is anathema to liberty and a true free market.

Economists have historically labeled impacts–good or bad–that do not feed back into economic decision-making as “externalities.” If you bought a car battery and paid nothing to sequester its toxic materials upon disposal, the costs to society of dealing with it—whether counted as health care for people getting heavy metal poisoning or their harder-to-measure suffering—were deemed externalities because neither the customer nor the battery maker paid this cost.

Now, in many states, that externality has been internalized. The customer purchases a $25 certificate licensing her to dispose of the battery, and she is buying with knowledge of the full cost of the product. Likewise, the impact on the atmosphere of shooting carbon through a smokestack was an externality; carbon taxes and cap and trade systems are proposed mechanisms for internalizing the costs.

As we’ve seen with tobacco, though, companies can also end up paying these external costs through litigation. According to Tamminen:

One of the most significant benefits of the tobacco litigation was the restitution to states of the costs they incur for health-care programs related to cigarette smoking. Relief in oil and auto cases could be similarly focused. One study suggests that 4.5 percent of all health-care costs are for air pollution-related illness. Another study estimated that air pollution-related health-care costs in the United States each year are at least $55 billion.

This is just the costs of petroleum emissions. There is also untold water pollution due to spills from refineries, tankers, and pipelines. And though most of us don’t live near coal-fired power plants, those who do suffer worse health effects than living next to a freeway. Natural gas is certainly much cleaner, both in terms of toxins and greenhouse gases, but it has its own set of issues that we’ll visit in Part 3.

What does this have to do with global warming? It’s simple. We need a mechanism that prices or internalizes health costs into fossil fuels, and it should be fair. In other words, the price should be relative to the costs. The problem is finding a common denominator among fossil fuels that is proportional to the health effects so we can price them accordingly. Energy content is inconsistent, since BTUs bear no correlation to pollutants. Fortunately, CO2 does.

Coal has the highest CO2 content and pollutes the most; petroleum is a close second, and natural gas comes out pretty clean overall. If a health tax were placed on fossil fuels based on CO2 emissions, it would function to fairly internalize those costs while creating a better market for natural gas and an even greater market for clean forms of energy that don’t cause cancer, asthma, premature death, etc., etc.

Whether or not you like Al Gore or not should have no bearing on whether your children and grandchildren lead healthy, productive lives. Ultimately, we all want the same thing. It’s six to one, half-dozen to the other. Whether you internalize the full costs of fossil fuels in the name of global warming or health, it has to be done. Using CO2 as a common denominator just makes sense.

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