That might be the agenda after presenting the views of professional global warming trivializer Bjorn Lomborg on today's oped page. Lomborg warns readers not only about the cost of curtailing global warming, relying on an outlier among economists in his estimates of the cost of curtailing emissions and the benefits from doing so, he also warns that the world may suffer from ............ protectionism! Lomborg tells readers that the world stands to lose $50 trillion (is that in one year, over a decade, a century, a millennium? This is the Post, who cares?) from protectionism related to global warming. The point is that not only will curtailing warming pose its direct costs, but it will also pose additional costs through protectionism. Apart from the loon tune numbers this is the granddaddy of all double-counting. Let's think about this for a second. The idea is that we will tax carbon in the U.S./Europe/Japan, raising the price of goods with high carbon content. For example, suppose that our carbon taxes raise the price of steel produced in these countries by $10 a ton. In order to accomplish our goal of actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions and not just shifting production to countries without carbon taxes, suppose we tax steel imports from countries without a carbon tax by $10 a ton. This will raise the price of imported steel by $10 (ignore questions of incidence for a moment), but our calculations of the cost of curtailing global warming already assumed that the price of steel would rise by $10 a ton. So, we already got this one in our calculation, but Lomborg and the Post just think it sounds more scary if we can say that the cost is coming from hoary old-fashioned protectionism, rather than green taxes. Are you scared yet? We should get Joe Wilson to tell these false free traders what they are. I can hardly wait to see the Post's oped on the origin of species and the shape of the earth.
--Dean Baker
