CARROLL: Girding for a trade war

By Vincent Carroll, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Friday, March 28, 2008

If you're the sort of person who thinks the Great Depression was an exciting time to be alive, you're going to love the thrills in store for us if Sens. Joe Lieberman and John Warner get their way.

The Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, which mostly concerns a "cap-and-trade" system to curb greenhouse gases, contains alarming fine print outlined in a recent Forbes. In a nutshell, it would ban particular imports from countries such as China, Brazil and India unless they adopted similar emission controls or bought U.S. carbon credits, starting eight years after the law takes effect.

Can you say "tariffs" and "trade war?"

Forbes naturally raises the specter of Smoot-Hawley, the 1930 tariff that deepened that era's economic crisis and helped prevent a business revival. Back then the idea was to save jobs. Today it will be to bludgeon poor countries into adopting the environmental policies of rich countries. But the differing motives hardly will matter if the effect is identical.

A trade war would reduce our standard of living, which is almost certainly not what Lieberman, Warner and most advocates of cap-and-trade systems have in mind. So why include a trade-stifling club? To sweeten the measure for carbon-emitting industries that fear higher regulatory costs will erode their competitive edge.

Astonishingly, not everyone favoring caps on emissions will be upset if our standard of living tanks. In fact, the environmental movement now includes a swelling contingent - still a minority but an ardent one - that argues quite openly for an end to economic growth.

In a column earlier this month on the online Wall Street Journal, for example, Oxford professor Dieter Helm predicts that "halting the relentless rise in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere . . . will probably mean living standards will have to be cut if our consumption is going to be environmentally sustainable. We are simply living beyond our - and the planet's - means."

Bill McKibben, the well-known author of The End of Nature and other books, likewise urges us to forget about economic expansion.

After all, he recently wrote, "when we peer through the climate lens . . . our individual lives look very different through these glasses, too. Less individual, for one thing. The kind of extreme independence that derived from cheap fossil fuel - the fact that we need our neighbors for nothing at all - can't last.

"Either we build real community, of the kind that lets us embrace mass transit and local food and co-housing and you name it, or we will go down clinging to the wreckage of our privatized society."

Now, the reason most people used to live in close quarters, relied on public transit and ate food grown near their towns was not that they valued community so much. It's because they were a lot poorer. Will Americans willingly adopt such cramped lifestyles again? Not very likely. Not unless their living standards begin to slide or, what is no less ominous, they are forced into the bargain.

Environmentalists like to say that the most important debate of our time involves what we do about global warming. With green tariffs and "less individual" lifestyles now in the policy discussion, who could possibly disagree?

Pulling out all the stops

Not all traffic laws are created equal.

Everyone knows a stretch of road where the speed limit is routinely ignored, without any risk to safety, by motorists cruising five to 10 miles per hour faster.

And everyone can point to a stop sign in his or her neighborhood where a rolling halt is as safe as a full one when no other car is in sight.

But almost no one claims that running stop lights at busy intersections is safe. The practice is universally condemned as dangerous - which it is - yet red lights are flouted every day all over metro Denver.

Congratulations to Aurora for doing something about it - for planning to expand its use of cameras to catch those who run red lights at major intersections.

Naturally, the usual tribe of critics has other ideas. "It's basically a violation of due process," complained a spokeswoman for the National Motorists Association, as if there were no right in Aurora to challenge a ticket.

No, it's basically the enforcement of a law that nearly everyone - even those who break it - supports.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.