Brown Elected, What Does It Mean For Cap And Trade?
They're playing hockey in Hades. Massachusetts has elected a Republican Senator.
The conventional wisdom seems to be Scott Brown's election means cap and trade is all but dead. Maybe so. But, Scott Brown and the Republicans are not the reason cap and trade is in extremis. Cap and trade proponents must admit data quality, or more accurately the lack thereof, is the root of the problem.
In a Politico blog posting (Politico is a first rate source for DC news) Walter Russell Mead, a respected fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, makes the point well:
While everyone's attention was fixed on Massachusetts, the climate change agenda was busily unraveling....The problem is that the IPCC's prediction that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 turns out to have no factual or scientific basis at all. Zip. The IPCC is withdrawing the prediction...after ignoring attempts by specialists to delete the ridiculous prediction and then vilifying public critics as anti-scientific numbskulls.
Mead's point, which should be well taken, is poor data quality will "heighten skepticism about IPCC recommendations -- and about both the will and the capacity of the climate change establishment to translate raw scientific data into serious policy". As a result, he predicts "2010 will not be the year that either the US or the world in general come to terms on a serious climate agenda." Absent a credible data fix, the US may not "come to terms on a serious climate agenda" for 2010 and beyond.
