Spreading the wealth around

Why do global warming deniers complain about the redistribution of wealth? Opponents of responsible climate change policy often complain, as Rick Santorum did recently, about the supposed desire to redistribute wealth from developed countries to poor countries that supposedly underlies proposals designed to fight global warming.

To be intellectually honest, they should say that they are worried about arresting the redistribution of wealth from poor countries to rich countries. The international economy is well-designed to allow American and other Western corporations to exploit the cheap labor and natural resources of non-Western countries. That's the baseline we have to start from when we have this conversation.

What's more, Santorum and his school clearly don't understand climate policy the way I do. Strict limits on carbon emissions will impede the economic growth of poor countries and stanch the flow of trillions of dollars of wealth from rich oil importers to oil-producing countries. I don' t see that as some great scheme to tax advanced countries and hand money out to the global poor.

This debate is couched in Santorum's whining about evil dogmatic scientists suppressing all the evidence that contradicts evolution. This is as baseless as it always is. According to Santorum:

'[T]he scientific "community" claims there is no controversy, and that debate should be banned.'

That's a blatant straw man. Scientists will tell you there is no legitimate scientific dispute over the theory of evolution. There are controversies about details, and those details are debated frequently. But when scientists saw that it should not be legal to teach anti-scientific nonsense in sciences classes, this is not the same as trying to ban debate. Rick Santorum can have a debate about evolution any day of the year. What he would not be able to do, were he still a sitting legislator, is force science teachers to put his religious ideas into their curricula.

Turning to climate change, Santorum appeals to the ersatz 'climate-gate' scandal, which he says revealed 'gross misconduct' by climate scientists. Says Santorum:

'Yet we all know that the world has been both much hotter and much colder than it is today, and that temperatures have changed dramatically over the millennia for a multitude of reasons.'

But how does Santorum know that? Why is it that when climate scientists say there was an Ice Age 40,000 years ago, he never doubts them, but when they say with no less evidence that human activity is drastically changing the Earth's climate, they're part of a conspiracy? Furthermore, I'm surprised that Santorum even knows that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old. When geologists say that the Earth is billions of years old, Santorum takes their claim at face value. When they say that the fossil record displays an obvious development of complex organisms from less complex ancestors, they must be lying. Okay.

It's too late at night for me to address the slew of scientific howlers at the end of Santorum's column. Maybe I'll hit them in the morning.