How About A $700 Billion Bailout for the Climate?
Written on 09/23 at 11:47 PM by Andy Posner
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Filed under: Huffington Post environment
I wrote this article for the Huffington Post. It can be seen in its original context here.
There are a lot of similarities between the current financial crisis and the climate crisis, except for the urgency with which the two are being addressed. On the one hand, the present state of the financial markets hasn’t been seen since the Great Depression of the 1930’s; on the other, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in on pace to reach levels not seen in the last 500,000 years. There is a near consensus among economists that something needs to be done to stabilize financial markets, with the only debate being about how best to do that. Likewise, there is a near consensus among scientists that climate change is happening, is man-made and must be addressed, with the only debate centering around the cost of mitigation and adaptation, as well as the implication of various scenarios (e.g., how much sea level rise at a given CO2 level).
In response to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other storied financial institutions, both Democrats and Republicans have set aside their traditional core “beliefs” (not that it’s hard for them to set those beliefs aside), with Republicans temporarily forgetting about their hatred of government regulation, and the Democrats doing away with their dislike of giving a government official unlimited powers-in this case the Treasury Secretary (I know, they did the same with Bush after 9/11; I’ll get to that in a moment). And despite the fact that there has recently been some opposition from both sides to the current proposal for a $700 billion bailout plan, in all likelihood the plan will pass, albeit with some minor changes.
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