Climate change offers us an opportunity

Jim Geraghty

is a contributing editor at National Review magazine and regularly appears on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News

Our current blazingly hot summer is spurring another go-round of exhausted arguments about climate change, whether it is "real" and "is it man-made?"

Ideally, the national discussion would move past those questions. Whether the phenomenon is exaggerated or whatever the cause, the uncomfortable fact is that very few climate scientists believe that the process is significantly reversible, and certainly not by unilateral U.S. action. As the Heartland Institute's James Taylor noted in Forbes, data released by the Environmental Protection Agency earlier this year indicate that even if the United States and the entire Western Hemisphere immediately and completely eliminated all carbon dioxide emissions, the growth in Chinese emissions alone would likely render this action moot within a decade.

Anyone who suggests that the climate will go back to "normal" - whatever that is - if Congress passes a certain bill or if you drive a different car is trying to sell you something. The current debate is mostly an excuse for those who make certain consumer choices (Priuses, reusable shopping bags, buying "carbon offsets") to talk about how much more responsible and sensitive they are than others, and for those who choose differently to urge them to put a sock in it.

As President Obama and his aspiring replacements grapple with how to handle this emotional issue, they have left one avenue largely unexplored: the often-ignored fact that climate change will help the U.S. economy in several ways and enhance, not diminish, the United States' geopolitical power.

The notion of climate change as an opportunity goes beyond the administration's tiresome refrain of "green jobs," an approach that has largely failed in Spain. (Researchers at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos concluded in 2009 that for every four "green jobs" created by government spending in "green energy," the government could have created 11 through traditional infrastructure investments. They argued that every "green job" created by these programs costs 2.2 jobs elsewhere.)

Despite the doomsday talk, global warming will be a net economic benefit to the United States, in at least the short term and probably for several decades. Really.