South Dakota Politics: Climate Policy Fails the Reality Test. Again.

An environmental policy can aim to achieve one or both of two things. One aim is green marketing. It can sell us things that make us feel virtuous and chic. The other is that it can at protecting the environment both for our sake and for the sake of the world itself. Just right now, the two aims are diametrically at odds with one another.

My friend and esteemed Keloland colleague Cory Heidelberger has a typically interesting piece of South Dakota's share of the nation's carbon emissions. Oddly, South Dakota comes out rather well while North Dakota is among the highest emitters per capita. Cory rightly points out that we get a lot of our power from "squeaky clean" hydroelectric generators. I note that such power requires dams, which had done a lot of damage to local environments. He also points out that we get a lot of power from out of state.

Cory is also a big fan of green technologies like wind power. But it is quite clear that wind power is, at present, rather bad for the environment. Studies of nations that have heavily invested in wind power show that leads to increased carbon emissions overall. It is also rather bad for the various economies. Maybe wind power will be viable at some point in the future, but right now it is a bust. That matters if, as Al Gore keeps saying, we have to do something right now. Well, at least it's sexy.

So called green technologies are often gangrene technologies when it comes to the environment and job growth. We invest in them because we prefer ideas to environmental and economic realities. Another reality that is frequently ignored in environmental policy is political reality.

Next month world leaders are meeting at Copenhagen for a "global climate conference." But they have decided in advance that there will be no "politically binding agreement" at that conference. What then are they meeting for? A lot of pious speeches, I am supposing.

At a hastily arranged breakfast on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting on Sunday morning, the leaders, including Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark and the chairman of the climate conference, agreed that in order to salvage Copenhagen they would have to push a fully binding legal agreement down the road, possibly to a second summit meeting in Mexico City later on.

No wonder the world likes Obama. A conference to decide when to decide sounds like our man! But one wonders whether this process really has anything to do with protecting the environment, as opposed to pretending to care about the environment.

The best example of backward thinking I have seen is this: a bunch of models stripping as global warming heats up.