Matt Yglesias asks “How much will Americans pay to save the world”. The answer is not much.
He reports that
A recent Washington Post poll asked Americans how they would feel about cap and trade under some different cost scenarios. Turns out that if the monthly cost is $10, 56 percent support cap-and-trade and 42 percent opposed it. But when the cost is $25 per month, sentiment shifts to 44 percent in favor and 54 percent opposed. That’s pretty stingy of the American people.
Stingy indeed. It calls to mind David Hume’s remark that “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”
Happily, at least the first step in climate change legislation, the Waxman-Markey bill,won’t cost that much. Here is a handy chart from Think Progress that compares GDP with and without cap and trade.
But I’m not sure the public is as stingy as Matt Yglesias thinks. Many people remember The Population Bomb, Silent Spring, and other books that predicted environmental disaster, and their predictions didn’t pan out.
That is not because these books didn’t point to a real threat, but because we were able to respond to the threat in ways that enabled us to avoid the worst consequences.
So the public has developed the habit of treating predictions such as the catastrophic effects of climate change with some skepticism.
That is not entirely irrational as long as the skepticism does not become denial, and as long as we start to develop responses to the dire predictions, such as Waxman-Markey.
