RALEIGH – Now this is a spectacularly bad idea.
According to a slavishly credulous report from the Associated Press, a “coalition of environmentally oriented shareholders” issued a demand Wednesday that many American power utilities, including Progress Energy/CP&L here in North Carolina, produce reports that quantify the cost of complying with potential regulations to combat global warming.
At first glance, it might seem reasonable, even prudent, for major companies to provide such information to their shareholders. After all, there is a risk that politicians will react to pressure and propaganda and enact some pointless “carbon tax” or emissions caps similar to those specified in the Kyoto Protocol. Given this risk – which is political rather than environmental, by the way, more akin to the risk of tax increases than the risk of flooding – don’t shareholders deserve some sense of how much the damage might be?
The problem is that this “coalition of environmentally oriented shareholders” isn’t at all interested in assisting shareholders in this manner. Since the compliance costs are likely to be quite high, it would be strongly in most investors’ interest to insist that companies whose shares or bonds they own put adequate resources into lobbying against global-warming regulations or even electing sensible lawmakers to state and national office who will let science rather than left-wing ideology guide their decisions.
But the activists seeking “full accounting” from utilities would have none of that. Ceres, the group in question, is quite specific on the point:
Only Massachusetts and New Hampshire have so far formally adopted carbon dioxide reduction pollution requirements. “It’s only a matter of time before limits are imposed in more states, and indeed nationwide,” said Mindy Lubber, Ceres’ president.
Clearly their publicity stunt about informing investors of global-warming risks is designed to advance the regulations. They are under the impression that there is a consensus among climate scientists in favor of the notion of disastrous human-induced warming, which is false. I suspect many of them are also under the impression that such regulations would advance their anti-capitalism, anti-growth agenda, which is true.
The best way to inform investors on this issue would be to provide them with a balanced perspective on global warming: what the climate trends at various altitudes actually show, what fossils and geological records suggest, and how effectively the current climate models predict past weather (that is to say, not very, so why assume they can predict the future?) I’m all for doing that. I suspect Ceres and other like-minded groups are not.
As the AP dutifully reported, they claim that “a large majority of scientists” agree with the need for immediate, costly action to head off human-induced warming. That’s misleading and irrelevant. It’s misleading because such surveys include lots of scientists with little expertise in the field. And it’s irrelevant because the worth of a scientific theory is not determined by the results of an unscientific survey of practitioners. It is determined by explanatory power – which this theory does not have.
There are real economic and environmental issues for both the private sector and public officials to address. If rational priorities were being set, folks wouldn’t be talking about the inevitability of state-imposed caps on emissions of carbon dioxide (which is not a pollutant).
But they aren’t, so they are.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.