I wrote this over the summer when climate change legislation was in the news.  But given the recent “scandal” over the hacked climate scientists’ emails, it seems that the main points are newly relevant.

A background assumption of what follows is that government legislation is needed because people are not sufficiently motivated on their own to put the necessary changes into effect.

The things that I really understand are few and far between, so I would love feedback on the following line of thought:It seems to me that the two most frequent objections to climate change legislation are:

1) The economic consequences, e.g., loss of jobs and higher taxes and higher prices on everything, are not worth the questionable impact/success of the climate change legislation.

2) Man-made climate change (i.e., global warming) is a myth—either our actions don’t have an impact (or if they do, it is negligible) and the climate is changing due to natural causes, or there is simply no significant climate change going on.

In response (and this isn’t so much a response as a plea for humility in one’s rhetoric) to 1): The tricky part with the issues from 1) is trying to asses actual possible outcomes of our actions and the probability of each. For example, what is the probability of economic hardship given Policy A and what is the probability of the planet and its life being destroyed if Policy A is not enacted? Moreover, what about Policy B versus Policy A versus doing nothing?

Are economic outcomes easier to reliably predict than environmental policy outcomes?  The predictive reliability of economics is discussed here on Leiter’s Blog.

Regarding objection 2) there seems to be a good response available:

Ignore the question of climate change (global warming)—what are the implications of our current energy policy and practices?

Three of them seem to me to be:

A) Dependence on foreign oil, etc.

B) Dependence on a finite energy supply.

C) Pollution and damage to the natural world.

Regarding those:

A) causes all kinds of political problems and leads to much suffering.

B) is a disaster waiting to happen.

C) is morally wrong (I would argue).

Those who are pushing for environmental legislation seek to promote:

D) Clean energy

E) Renewable energy

F) Local energy sources

D-F help to remedy A-C

Therefore, even if we are wrong about climate change, D-F make sense to legislate. Pragmatically speaking, climate change legislation is the right thing to do even if global warming is a hoax.   It frightens me to think that the reaction to the idea that climate change is a hoax is that we needn’t do anything about A-C above.

Help me out here. What are some things that I’m failing to consider or have wrong?