Beating the Greenhouse

In his book Suicide of the West, Jonah Goldberg publishes an interesting graph that represents what he calls The Miracle. The graph, he avers, is the most important "hockey stick" graph in all of human history, and he's surely right. It shows that human beings everywhere around the globe lived on the equivalent of $1 to $3 a day throughout all of history until the late 18th century, but that since then human well-being and prosperity have skyrocketed in ways that seem nothing short of miraculous.

The graph looks like this:

This unprecedented boon to those languishing in perpetual poverty around the globe is largely the result of technology developed in the West which is itself, though Goldberg doesn't explicitly make this point, largely the result of the use of petroleum.

A lot of people are calling for the world to curtail its use of petroleum-based fuels, a call which, were it heeded, would be devastating to the poor. If fuel prices were raised substantially it would have a profound effect upon everything from the price of food to the cost of heating homes to the cost of transportation. This would make it very hard for those living on either side of the lower edge of the middle class to stay there and for those living in poverty to emerge from it. It would be an economic death sentence for billions of people.

Now comes news that, whether global warming is real, man-made or neither, it may not really matter. If it's the result of increased CO2 in the atmosphere Western technology may have once again provided a solution.

The Federalist's David Harsanyi provides us with some details. Here are a few excerpts from his column:

A team of scientists at Harvard University and a company called Carbon Engineering announced this week that they’ve figured out a low-cost, industrial-scale method of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Needless to say, it sounds like an exciting technology, which would, as The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer notes, “transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change.”

“This opens up the possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior,” Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told The Atlantic.

It now seems likely that we’re going to be able to reach environmentalists’ carbon-cutting goals at a fraction of the price. The paper claims that companies will be able to remove a metric ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for as little as $94. The cost of averting less than one degree of warming by 2100, according to some, would have cost around $2 trillion every year for a century — which doesn’t include the economic toll it would extract from the world’s economy.

In the near future, in addition to continued gains in efficiency, your community may have a choice between paying for giant, expensive fields of intermittently useful windmills and solar panels or a plant that cleans the air by converting hydrocarbon into liquid fuel. I wonder which one rational people will choose.

This is wonderful news and should be welcomed by everyone, although, as Harsanyi notes, it will probably not be welcomed by the social engineers who want to dictate to everyone how much carbon they can produce and when they can produce it.

Technological innovation flourishes under free markets. The graph above illustrates how the entire world has benefited from that innovation, yet the left still despises capitalism because it makes some people obscenely rich and others not. Better, progressives seem to argue, that everyone be poor than that some be poor and others wealthy.

Nevertheless, as Goldberg observes, "Capitalism isn't just the best anti-poverty program ever conceived, it's the only anti-poverty program ever conceived."

Read Harsanyi's column for more on this hopeful new development in the hunt for a means of cleansing the atmosphere of greenhouse gas.