How "It's TOOOO EXPENSIVE!!!" Remains The Political Default Even As Climate Breakdown Accelerates
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It was a pivotal moment: Seven months before, during an unusually hot summer, James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, had warned Congress that the signs of global warming were already upon us, making the issue front-page news across the country. By the end of the year, politicians had introduced 32 climate bills in Congress, and the United Nations had established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists and policymakers intended to put global climate policy in motion. In light of these developments, LeVine advised Exxon to temper the public’s growing concern for the planet with “rational responses” — not only arguing that the science wasn’t settled, but also emphasizing the “costs and political realities” of addressing rising emissions. In other words, the main problem wasn’t fossil fuel emissions, but that doing anything about them would cost too much.
This sentiment was echoed by John Sununu, then-President George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, who worked to stop the creation of a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions soon after Hansen’s testimony. Sununu started a feud with the EPA administrator at the time, William K. Reilly, because he thought legislation to take on global warming would hinder economic growth. When Hansen was preparing to give Congress an update on the “greenhouse effect” in 1989, he was surprised by some strange edits on his draft testimony from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, run by an ally of Sununu. They wanted Hansen to say his own science was unreliable and to encourage Congress to pass legislation only if it would immediately help the economy, “independent of concerns about an increasing greenhouse effect.”
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“The costs [of climate policy] would be high,” Montgomery told USA Today in 1992. “Economic benefits are uncertain, distant, and potentially small.” The 30-year-old strategy is still going strong. When former President Donald Trump announced that he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement in 2017, he repeatedly cited industry-funded estimates of its cost, dropping peculiarly specific numbers: “2.7 million lost jobs by 2025,” “$3 trillion in lost GDP,” “households would have $7,000 less income.” These statistics, Stanford’s Franta said, were from some of the same industry-funded economists that had been quoted in newspapers in the 1990s.
In February, the leaders of several organizations working to undermine climate action — the Heartland Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and JunkScience.com — held a press conference to discuss Biden’s “harmful climate agenda” ahead of his State of the Union address. “Overwhelmingly, Americans do not want to pay for the cost of climate action, especially when such actions will hold negative consequences for the economy and America as a whole,” a media advisory describing the event said. (Grist’s requests to attend the event nver received a response.) “We see a rinse-and-repeat pattern with climate legislation,” Franta said. “It’s often the same players, it’s often the same talking points. You know, ‘This is too expensive. It’s not going to work.’” Whenever the federal government was considering taking action — from when the Clinton administration proposed a carbon price in 1993 to when Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman introduced a bipartisan national cap-and-trade program in Congress in 2003 — the industry trotted out economists’ models that conveniently ignored the economic upsides of the policy.
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https://grist.org/economics/climate-legislation-costs-economics-oil-industry/
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