Back with a fresh DJ tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s a 2006 piece on energy policy that is timely at the moment.

RALEIGH – Here’s a brief but telling example of how public policymaking goes awry when anecdotes and show business supplant careful examination of actual data.

Let’s say that the United States should take immediate action to forestall projected, human-induced global warming. (Actually, let’s not say that, really, but bear with me today for the sake of this argument.) There are many different policies and energy alternatives that politicians and international negotiators might pursue. These options would have very different effects per dollar of cost.

According to research from the consulting firm SFA Pacific and the Joint Economic Committee, the cost per ton of mitigating carbon-dioxide emissions are as follows:

• Using natural gas, nuclear, and clean-coal technologies (that would sequester the carbon rather than releasing it) to replace today’s coal-fired power plants would all cost far less than $50 per ton of CO2 reduction. Wind power is in the same ballpark in terms of cost per reduced emission, but less reliable and more situational.

• Using cellulose-based ethanol, such as that made from switchgrass or agricultural wastes, to reduce the gasoline content of motor fuels would cost approximately $120 per ton of CO2 reduction.

• Using conventional ethanol, such as that made from corn, would cost nearly $200 per ton.

• Inducing consumers to switch to hybrid automobiles would cost about $250 per ton.

Obviously, we’d get by far the biggest bang for the buck by focusing on modernizing electric-power generation, particularly given that fuel for both nuclear and clean-coal plants is available domestically (as is wind power, if you add up every city hall, county seat, and state capitol in the country). Both ethanol options involve substantial changes in the use of agricultural land, and particularly in the case of conventional ethanol present a major challenge to food affordability in the developing world. As for hybrids, folks ought to drive them if they like them, or are willing to hang onto them long enough for the savings at the pump to offset their higher price at the dealership. But they ought not to drive hybrids to save the planet. The numbers don’t work, not unless you deny the existence of an opportunity cost for every option – which, if you are a CJ reader, you’re just not allowed to do.

Unfortunately, the relative costs and benefits of these alternative responses are not reflected in the relative amount of attention given to them by politicians, the news media, and stubble-chinned Hollywood trendinistas in-between their private jet flights to movie sets and vacationlands. Thus the problem. Or one of them, anyway.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.