The Business of Going Green

Bjorn Lomborg wrote a scathing editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal entitled "The Climate-Industrial Complex." The occasion is this weekend's World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen.

His use of the hyphenated term is a direct and explicit reference to outgoing president Dwight Eisenhower's use of the term "military-industrial complex."

Rather than worry about the unholy alliance of large defense contractors, the Pentagon and members of the House Armed Services and Appropriations Committees, as in olden times, Lomborg spotlights today's new unholy alliance.

That would be people like Al Gore, on whom Lomborg focuses, climate-change-friendly legislators and government administrators, and their collaborating corporate partners, such as Duke Energy. I'm a little surprised he omitted GE. Maybe they aren't attending the summit, although it's almost impossible to believe they would miss such an obvious public trough at which to feed, isn't it?

Lomborg writes in his editorial,

"Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is "rent-seeking."

American electricity utility Duke Energy, a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, has long promoted a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme. Yet the company bitterly opposed the Warner-Lieberman bill in the U.S. Senate that would have created such a scheme because it did not include European-style handouts to coal companies. The Waxman-Markey bill in the House of Representatives promises to bring back the free lunch.

U.S. companies and interest groups involved with climate change hired 2,430 lobbyists just last year, up 300% from five years ago. Fifty of the biggest U.S. electric utilities -- including Duke -- spent $51 million on lobbyists in just six months.

The massive transfer of wealth that many businesses seek is not necessarily good for the rest of the economy. Spain has been proclaimed a global example in providing financial aid to renewable energy companies to create green jobs. But research shows that each new job cost Spain 571,138 euros, with subsidies of more than one million euros required to create each new job in the uncompetitive wind industry. Moreover, the programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs for every job created."

That Spanish statistic is pretty chilling, and provides context for all those green energy ads you see touting the job creating power of wind or solar energy. Something you certainly don't hear about, eh?

Lomborg concludes his piece with these observations,

"The World Business Summit will hear from "science and public policy leaders" seemingly selected for their scary views of global warming. They include James Lovelock, who believes that much of Europe will be Saharan and London will be underwater within 30 years; Sir Crispin Tickell, who believes that the United Kingdom's population needs to be cut by two-thirds so the country can cope with global warming; and Timothy Flannery, who warns of sea level rises as high as "an eight-story building."

Free speech is important. But these visions of catastrophe are a long way outside of mainstream scientific opinion, and they go much further than the careful findings of the United Nations panel of climate change scientists. When it comes to sea-level rise, for example, the United Nations expects a rise of between seven and 23 inches by 2100 -- considerably less than a one-story building.

There would be an outcry -- and rightfully so -- if big oil organized a climate change conference and invited only climate-change deniers.

The partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners truly is an unholy alliance. The climate-industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everybody. We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act. Spending a fortune on global carbon regulations will benefit a few, but dearly cost everybody else."

Lomborg's casual comment on the one-sided nature of the summit belies his concern. As many have suspected, the climate change crowd is no longer interested in either debate about the sources of any change, nor the sort of cost-benefit work regarding how it could even be affordably affected, as Lomborg has long and successfully demonstrated to be virtually impossible.

Instead, this 'unholy alliance' is moving full steam ahead to wring profits out of the climate scare for the early, chosen few businesses.