Intellectual Property Law

law and global warming

By Obi

    should congress pass laws to make illegal some or all human activity (in the united states) that increases global warming?  what about laws that promote reduction of global warming?  is there a valid class-action lawsuit against oil companies because their products are known to have increased global warming, thereby causing injury to american farmers, hunters, fisherpeople, asthma sufferors, etc?

    these questions come to mind after reading an a.p. article reporting the latest global-warming "be afraid; be very afraid" contribution from james hansen, the NASA scientist who has  been warning about global warming for decades.

    according to the a.p. reporter, hansen believes that today's temperatures are "the warmest in the current interglacial period, which began about 12,000 years ago", during the paleolithic age of human prehistory.  let's stop there for a moment.  "interglacial" does not mean "between ice ages".  thatmeans means we humans are living today in an ice age, but in a bubble of of geological time  in which temperatures are more or less temperate.

    conventional wisdom puts the length of interglacial periods at roughly 12,000 years, which would mean that we're living on borrowed time.  political correctness has given rise to an alternative assessment that this particular interglacial may last 28,000 years.  imagine!  scientists can't forecast the weather 5 days out, but they tell us with a straight face that it will be warm for another 16,000 years.

    it makes a difference for public policy purposes.    lawmakers need to know whether they should enact legislation aimed at cooling the earth or keeping the earth warm.  hansen has the answer.  he tells us that anthropogenic "forcing" of co2 into the atmosphere outweighs the other co2 forcing factors (changes in earth's orbit around the sun, aerosols, vegetation, ice sheets, etc), such that "humans now control global climate, for better or worse."

there you have it, legislators.  if you don't legislate global cooling by reducing co2 forcing, we're in for 16,000 years of no ice caps, due to temperatures so hot that the earth hasn't experienced  them "since the middle pliocene".  pliocene: 5-18 million years ago, when natural co2 forcing helped overheat the climate.  california proposes to lead they way by backing greenhouse emissions  from state sources to 1990 levels by 2020.

    i wonder if that the people who made that commitment  are aware of the census bureau's prediction that the state's population will grow by almost 40% by 2030.  that's over 12 million people.    if that growth were to be linear, by 2020 the population of california would increase by 7 million, or about 19%.  given that there are approximately 1.5 motor vehicles for every two people in california, population growth would lead to the addition of 5 million vehicles to the roads of that state.  the "average vehicle" emits 10,000 pounds of carbon monoxide per year.   the increase in carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles alone would be 50 billion pounds, or 25 million tons per year by 2020 -- without the greenhouse gas law, of course.    that law says that the state will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2020.    the law doesn't specify how that will be done, but in order to cut today's emissions of co2 by motor vehicles alone by 25% of the 2006 level by 2020, the state would have to enact and enforce legislation that would cut the 2020 levels by 38%. 

    There are only three policy positions with respect to global warming.  act to reduce it, do nothing, or act to increase it.  all public policy adopted by legislatures and signed by the executive of a nation or state is subject to the techlawyer's first law of legislation:  every statute leads to unintended consequences.   

    for example,  some folks believe that the interglacial warm spell is ending and by 2012 the earth will begin to cool again, and over the course of this century the average temperature on the earth's surface will be lower than it is today by one degree celsius, or a little less than 2 degrees fahrenheit.   one such person is dr. khabibullo abdusamatov, an eminent russian scientist.  (that you can't pronounce his name doesn't mean you should ignore what he has to say.)    abdusamatov gives more weight to solar cycles as a factor affecting our climate than the scientists who blame climate change on human behavior.   is he right, or are they right?     no one knows, and i dare say that there is no way of knowing.     if abdusamatov is right, should we combat the coming extended cold spellby ramping up production of anthropogenic carbon dioxide?

the takeaway here is that passing a law to make temperatures cooler is about as sensible as passing a law to mandate the use of sterilizing soap in all households to prevent bacterial infection.    we can do it, but there's no telling how mother nature will react.    there are plenty of good reasons to use less fossil fuel, indeed less fuel of any kind.  doing it because we think we can make the earth's temperature stay the same as it is now is the height of unreasoning hubris, as it forces arithmetic onto a non-arithmetic set of terrestrial systems that we understand only poorly.    this brings us to the techlawyer's second law of legislation: the bigger the problem that legislation is intended to solve, the more severe the unintended consequences.

Full post as published by TechLawyer on October 05, 2006 (boomark / email).