By Nicholas Beaudrot At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen produces a list of states with the largest carbon footprints. At the top are Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, which leads Cowen to note that this may cause political pain for any cap-and-trade system. Considering these are five of the top 6 most populous states in America, I think we can also predict with high confidence that they will lead such important lists as:
- Total Solid Waste
- Number of Xbox 360s purchased in the last three years
- Gross State Product (essentially, GDP at a state level)
- Subscriptions to USA Today
But as with the CO2 list, these lists wouldn't tell you anything, other than that lots of people live in those states. The relevant metric, of course, is CO2 emissions per capita. California has 50% more people than Texas but produces 50% less greenhouse gas; my back-of-the-envelope arithmetic says that means California is about three times as efficient than Texas. And keep in mind that San Francisco has fewer than a million people living there; most of California looks like the prototypical American landscape with lots of large highways filled with cars, and there are in fact a sizeable number of manufacturing jobs in the state. Yes, Texas's oil production is part of the story, but there are still plenty of milkshakes to drink in California as well. What scares me is I have a hard time believing Tyler Cowen would accept this line of reasoning from a student in his hypothetical giant undergraduate course. Call it "Numerical Thinking in Public Policy Decision-Making". In the extreme this argument reduces to "China produces lots of CO2; regulating China is hard; we shouldn't try. QED!" Isn't that, you know, the point of negotiating these sorts of issues? What are we paying all those foreign service officers for, if not for times like this? We can debate the merits and tradeoffs of reducing the chances of total ecological collapse, but it's rather difficult when one side deploys specious arguments about political feasibility like this one.
