Conservative Principles Now

Apparently now going green means only eating greens. Advice from Lord Nicholas Stern:

Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better. I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating. I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.”

Stern also says that “We have not seen those sort of conditions for 30 million years. These kind of changes will have huge consequences — southern Europe is likely to be a desert; hundreds of millions of people will have to move. There will be severe global conflict.”

Stern is most famous for his 700-page report on addressing global warming where he arbitrarily chose 550 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 as a magical threshold. Anything greater than 550 ppm, there are dire consequences. Below the 550 ppm threshold, we just might make it. Heritage analyst David Kreutzer pokes a big hole in Stern’s logic:

The bigger problem is how the costs are calculated. The Stern analysis purports to see the impact of today’s CO2 emissions 200 years into the future. Further, the impact on the much, much higher expected GDP of the future is presented as having an equal impact today. In other words, getting a dollar in 200 years is just as satisfying as getting a dollar today. Therefore, spending $.99 to get a dollar is a good idea independent of whether you get the dollar today or a thousand years from now. For most people who are not Nicholas Stern, Baron of Brentford, it would make a difference.

Well-known environmental economist Professor William D. Nordhaus of Yale University employed the methodology of the Stern Review and calculated that Stern’s twisted assumptions would recommend cutting the World’s income from its average today of $10,000 to $4,400 in order to prevent an annual drop of income from $130,000 to $129,870 starting in 200 years. Further he points out that half of the environmental costs that Stern says occur “now and forever” don’t actually occur until after 2800. As a reminder, that’s 800 years from now.”

To limit carbon dioxide emissions, population control has been suggested. Trading your dog or cat in for something more sustainable that you can eat like a chicken has been suggested and now trading your steak in for a veggie platter. We’re not talking minor adjustments anymore or merely paying higher prices for goods and losing income – although there’s plenty of that to go around, too. We’re talking about social and cultural changes that affect people in dramatic, non monetary ways.

Almost everything we use and do produces carbon dioxide. Look at the sacrifices made by the Beavan family in the documentary No Impact Man. Reason’s Dan Hayes writes, “Colin Beavan and his two-year-old daughter Isabella are in the bathroom cleaning out mommy’s cosmetics when they decide to wash their laundry by stomping their feet on a tub full of clothes and all-natural Borax detergent. It’s one of the many inconvenient and impractical things Beavan and his family do in the new documentary No Impact Man. The Beavans give up toilet paper, any products with packaging, cars and public transit, elevators, plastic bags, and shopping for anything new. In addition, they won’t use washing machines, disposable diapers, or food grown outside a 250-mile radius of NYC.”

These are sacrifices people do not want to make and do not have to make.

If cap and trade passes, businesses could soon face “The Scarlet Letter” treatment. Businesses may have to include a carbon label on their products that tells consumers how much carbon dioxide used in the production process. Cap and trade would raise production costs for businesses—forcing them to include a carbon label on their products is salt in the wound.

Section 274 of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill calls for an Environmental Protection Agency study “to determine the feasibility of establishing a national program for measuring, reporting, publicly disclosing, and labeling products or materials sold in the United States for their carbon content.” The purpose of the study would be to determine “whether a national product carbon disclosure program and labeling program would be effective in achieving the intended goals of achieving greenhouse gas reductions.”

That’s right. Next to your nutrition label, you could see a carbon footprint telling you how much carbon dioxide businesses emitted to make that product. Sounds harmless. Silly, but harmless. But it may be more harmful than imagined—think of the additional costs this would place on businesses.

This could particularly hit small businesses the hardest and put those businesses at a competitive disadvantage with larger firms within the United States who can absorb the costs more easily. We can look to the food nutritional label and a study by the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University as an example. The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA) went into effect in 1994 and was the beginning of the nutritional facts label. The intent was to provide consumers with the information to make healthier choices and provide producers the incentive to make healthier products. These are certainly commendable goals but according to one study, “considering the relatively small magnitude of diet quality improvements from label use, it appears possible that even when consumers read labels, they do not always understand them.”

And these labels do not come without cost. The Food and Drug Administration estimated that the NLEA would cost industry $1.4 billion to $2.3 billion over a 20-year period. These increased costs led to an increased market share for large food distributors.

Christine Moorman, an author of the study said, “We expected that label information would allow firms to compete more honestly for consumers’ purchases, but instead we find an unintended loss of small firms in food categories.”

A carbon label would likely do the same but instead it affects every industry. Will consumers feel guilty about buying a product with a carbon footprint on it? Will producers feel guilty enough to produce more carbon-friendly products?

The real question is: Does it make sense to increase the costs of products like orange juice when Al Gore lives in a 20-room, eight-bathroom carbon-spitting mansion? (According to a BusinessWeek article, “The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.”)

Bottom line—a carbon labeling program is more government micromanagement that spells higher prices for consumers.

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