alternative hippopotamus

There’s an interesting pair of articles by Arianna Huffington at the Huffington Post, and Robert Samuelson at the Washington Post that function as two dovetail arguments in the Global Warming argument. By this I don’t mean merely pro and con. No, I mean the reality-based discussion vs. that of the faith-based: the former gives an example of what happens when government takes an active stance towards solving Global Warming, while the latter argues that government can’t do anything about Global Warming and therefore shouldn’t. It’s really the story of our time: how ideology triumphs over science and engineering. How big business triumphs over good stewardship.

Arianna Huffington:

In 1996, GM introduced the EV1, which you could juice up by plugging it into a wall socket. The cars quickly developed a small but passionate following (small because GM produced less than a thousand of them; passionate because they were terrific — and terrifically efficient — cars).

But behind the scenes, numerous forces were hard at work fighting to undermine the California zero-emission mandate — and the success of the EV1.

At this point, the film shifts gears from electric-car primer to a compelling murder mystery, as the filmmakers roll out the prime suspects (and, yes, many of them are of the “usual” variety) in an effort to determine who, indeed, killed the electric car. It’s like a cinematic game of Clue. But instead of “Professor Plum, in the library, with a candlestick,” we get: “GM, in the boardroom, with a blunt profit motive,” “Big Oil Companies (aided and abetted by the Bush administration), in the courtroom, with lawsuits forcing the rollback of California’s rules,” and “American Consumers, in the showroom, with a poisonous mix of an ad-fueled desire for gas-guzzling SUVs, tax incentives, and zero financing.”

Robert Samuelson:

No government will adopt the draconian restrictions on economic growth and personal freedom (limits on electricity usage, driving and travel) that might curb global warming. Still, politicians want to show they’re “doing something.” The result is grandstanding. Consider the Kyoto Protocol. It allowed countries that joined to castigate those that didn’t. But it hasn’t reduced carbon dioxide emissions (up about 25 percent since 1990), and many signatories didn’t adopt tough enough policies to hit their 2008-2012 targets. By some estimates, Europe may overshoot by 15 percent and Japan by 25 percent.

Here we have an example where government, in this case the State of California was attempting to solve the problem, and GM had done the engineering work to produce a working electric car. But the forces of industry managed to trump engineering and science:

In the end, the lobbying and lawsuits by oil companies and the Bush administration caused California to soften its rules and allowed GM, which was making money hand over fist on SUVs, to pull the plug on the EV1 — which was never really given a fighting chance.

When I say that I find Samuelson’s argument on Global Warming to be faith-based, I of course don’t mean that in a religious sense, but in an ideological sense. Samuelson’s notion of progress is really one of consumption and consumerism: if Exxon-Mobil sells more gas and GM sells more SUVs, that increased consumption of goods is progress. Likewise, government can’t solve the problem- this is the other refrain that those of Samuelson’s ilk are fond of. As a corollary, since government can’t solve anything, the only thing it can do is get in the way of industry- which again, is contrary to his notion of progress.

How can Samuelson ignore the government-mandated increased fuel efficiency in Europe, the UK, China, etc? Surely he sees that voluntary measures, such as we’ve had in the US for the last 10 years, yield nothing. Moreover, by ignoring fuel efficiency, American car companies have lost out on the emerging hybrid market to Japan.

In the reality-based community we call ignoring a scientific problem while simultaneously losing out in the marketplace a lose-lose proposition.