BROOKS: A founding father charts a path on climate change

I’ve been confused about this Paris climate conference and how the world should move forward to ameliorate climate change, so I seanced up my hero Alexander Hamilton to see what he thought. I was sad to be reminded that he doesn’t actually talk in hip-hop, but he still had some interesting things to say.

First, he was struck by the fact that on this issue the GOP has come to resemble a Soviet dictatorship—a vast majority of Republican politicians can’t publicly say what they know about the truth of climate change because they’re afraid the thought police will knock on their door and drag them off to an AM radio interrogation.

The Paris conference, I told him, seemed like a giant Weight Watchers meeting. A bunch of national leaders get together and make some resolutions to cut their carbon emissions over the next few decades. You hope some sort of peer pressure will kick in and they will actually follow through.

Hamilton snorted.

The co-author of the Federalist papers is the opposite of naive about human nature. Unlike weight loss, the pain in reducing carbon emissions is individual but the good is achieved only collectively.

You’re asking people to impose costs on themselves today for some future benefit they will never see. You’re asking developing countries to forswear growth now to compensate for a legacy of pollution from richer countries they didn’t benefit from. You’re asking richer countries that are facing severe economic strain to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in “reparations” to India and such places that can go on and burn mountains of coal and take away U.S. jobs. And you’re asking for all this top-down coercion to last a century, without any enforcement mechanism. Are the Chinese really going to police a local coal plant efficiently?

I pointed out that policymakers have come up with some clever ways to make carbon reductions more efficient, like cap and trade, permit trading and carbon taxing.

The former Treasury secretary pointed out that these ideas are good in theory but haven’t worked in reality. Cap and trade has not worked out so well in Europe. Overall, the Europeans have spent $280 billion on climate change with very little measurable impact on global temperatures. And as for carbon taxes, even if the U.S. imposed one on itself, it would have virtually no effect on the global climate.

Well, Mr. Founding Father, what would you do?

Look at what you’re already doing, he countered. The United States has the fastest rate of reduction of CO2 emissions of any major nation on earth, back to pre-1996 levels.

That’s in part because of fracking. Natural gas is replacing coal, and natural gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide.

The larger lesson is that innovation is the key. Green energy will beat dirty energy only when it makes technical and economic sense.

Hamilton reminded me that he often used government money to stoke innovation. He pointed out that when America was just a bunch of scraggly colonies, he was already envisioning it as a great world power. He used government to incite, arouse, energize and stir up great enterprise. The global warming problem can be addressed, ineffectively, by global communiques. Or, with the right government boost, it presents an opportunity to foment a new technological revolution.

Sometimes—like your country—you’ve got to be young, scrappy and hungry and not throw away your shot.•

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Brooks is a New York Times columnist. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.