Dr. Margo Thorning of the American Council for Capital Formation has an op-ed on keys to getting the economy moving. One piece of advice touches on energy and environment policy:

Don’t: Push unrealistic energy and climate change policies.

We need energy to keep improving the world. U.S. economic growth and energy use go hand in hand; each 1% increase in U.S. GDP is accompanied by a 0.3% increase in energy use. The U.S. Department of Energy projects that the U.S. will need approximately 30% more energy by 2030 to accommodate our growing population, higher levels of employment and economic activity.

Meanwhile, popular opinion has caught up to economics on the issue of drilling. Allowing increased access to both offshore and onshore areas for drilling and exploration would also have a positive impact on U.S. energy supplies.

At the same time, many are rushing to legislate regarding global warming. Climate change is a global problem and meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will require the participation of developing and industrializing countries such as India, China, Brazil, Indonesia and others whose emissions are growing rapidly.

Politicians should avoid imposing tight mandatory emission reduction targets in the U.S., however, because that move could significantly reduce economic and employment growth while sharply raising electricity and other energy prices.

Bjorn Lomborg, known as the skeptical environmentalist, sets out the Copenhagen Consensus findings on just where global warming should fit into our global agenda (hint: we’re worrying ourselves about climate while more serious and more pressing problems are still plaguing us). Thought we’d offer this reminder this holiday season:

The panel concluded that the single best investment, one that could help the planet today, is spending on cheap, simple policies to combat malnutrition and hunger. Getting basic micronutrients to 80% of the 140 million or so undernourished children in the world would require just $60 million annually–and produce economic gains that would surpass $1 billion a year.

The Copenhagen Consensus economists also concluded that passing the Doha Round would be an astonishingly cheap way to reap the benefits of more free trade. From his research on the project, World Bank economist Kym Anderson concluded that, if developing countries cut their tariffs by the same proportion as high-income countries and services and investment were also liberalized, the global annual gains could climb as high as $120 billion by 2015, with $17 billion going to the world’s poorest countries.

Please give the gift of freedom and food this year.

There are certainly reasons to argue against massive new energy taxes in a time of severe economic pain. Even so, many economists will tell you a carbon tax is still superior to the abomination that are cap-and-trade schemes to restrict carbon release. Thought we’d pass along this statement on Capitol Hill today from Sonecon co-founder and former commerce undersecretary Dr. Robert J. Shapiro:

A cap-and-trade system may appear to be sensible climate policy; but in practice, it would be extremely hard to administer, easy to evade, ripe for corruption, and create more volatility in energy prices. It also presents the same opportunities for reckless behavior by Wall Street that ushered in the current financial crisis.

The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin has an excellent recap:

The GAO said that Europe’s cap-and-trade system had created “a functioning market for carbon dioxide allowances, but its effects on emissions, the European economy, and technology investment are less certain.” A separate program that grants offsets to industrialized nations for funding energy projects in the developing world, investigators wrote, has had an “uncertain” effect on carbon emissions, “and its impact on sustainable development has been limited.”

The report, released Tuesday, has implications for the United States, which could launch a program to limit greenhouse gas emissions as early as next year. President-elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are determined to adopt a cap-and-trade system for emissions linked to global warming, and opponents of such a plan seized upon the GAO study as a reason to block it.

See the report’s summary after the jump or view the entire report here.

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Climate activists — along with the good, honest folks at PETA — want to slap significant new taxes on cattle, which generate a lot of methane. Climate activists want to affect the climate. PETA wants to make it more expensive for people to eat cows. But the Diatribe Guy offers some real-world review on this plan:

There is simply no way to overstate how ridiculously stupid such a proposal would be. I grew up on a dairy farm. We milked 60-70 cows at any given time, and had a number of heifers that we were raising both to replace the older cows or to send to market (or butcher for ourselves.) Now, I can guarantee you that 60-70 cows is a small, family operation. My dad was great with his money and so he did well, but he certainly didn’t rake in huge dollars. This was in no way some large-scale operation.

This proposal would have cost my dad another $12,000 per year. That means that one of two things would have to happen: food costs go up in order to cover the additional cost to the farmer, or the farmer goes out of business. There is no way he could have absorbed another 12 grand.

Ahh, just another smelly attempt to make life more expensive in the name of meeting the activists’ agenda. Note to climate activists, though: You may want to avoid aligning yourself with PETA.

We’ve been noting the work of World Growth — why? because we keep finding their stuff interesting — and now the New York Times’ Green Inc blog has picked up on the group’s work, too. In a post, “Climate Change Reduction or ‘Green Global Welfare’?” the blog notes:

Forests and jungles absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, which is stored in trees. Cutting trees down releases CO2 and triggers the emission of additional greenhouse gases from denuded soils. Forest loss and land degradation could be responsible for 20 percent of the planet-warming gases attributable to human activities, some experts suggest.

That has made the question of what to do about forests central to talks underway this week in Poznan, Poland, that aim to shape a new global agreement to fight global warming. Scientists and environmentalists want mechanisms to reward the developing world for saving its forests incorporated into any such treaty.

Even champions of the idea, however — called R.E.D.D., for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation — admit they have reservations.

The NYT then goes on to highlight this from World Growth’s recent report on the topic:

If the leading mitigation strategy for forestry is deforestaion and, as is proposed in the R.E.D.D. strategy, developing countries are paid to cease deforestation, they will be paid to cease conversion of land to produce food and sustain society. This is an anti-development strategy. And where this activity reduced commercial forestry in plantations and natural forest, this would remove an activity which created jobs, generated taxes and earned export income. Productive economic activity is halted and in return money is paid. This is a form of Green global welfare.

As is often the case, IBD has a great editorial on energy and environment and the cost-benefit ratio at play. Today they take up the issue of whether the president-elect can “create” jobs through government spending on “green” energy. Here’s the important bits:

Spending money on projects where costs exceed benefits simply to “create jobs” is a bad idea. Taking capital from productive uses and redeploying it to politically popular but nonproductive uses lowers productivity by paying those with “green jobs” more than their output is worth. It’s not welfare, it’s “greenfare.”

This, by the way, was the make-work model followed during the Great Depression. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.

These ideas aren’t new — they were thoroughly debunked 158 years ago by pioneering French economist Frederic Bastiat, who wrote about the “broken window fallacy.”

It goes like this: Most people agree that when someone breaks a store window, it’s a tragedy for the shopkeeper. But many also believe the overall economy actually benefits, because the shopkeeper now must buy a new window, a kind of “stimulus.”

This logic, of course, makes no sense. Yet it’s the basic idea behind all government stimulus plans. The money for the window comes out of the shopkeeper’s pocket. Instead of carrying more stock in his store, or hiring a clerk, he must spend his money instead on a window. So the “stimulus” is really zero — or negative.

“The ‘broken windows’ in this case,” notes American Enterprise Institute analyst Kenneth Green, “would be lost jobs and lost capital in the coal, oil, gas, nuclear and automobile industries.” They together employ more than 1 million people. But millions of other jobs would also be at risk because, as with the shopkeeper, money spent on green projects can’t be spent elsewhere.

Maybe it’s time for a refresher course on econ 101 …

in the Wall Street Journal by Reuvain Borchardt of New York:

Even if one is a full-fledged believer in global warming, he or she must understand that even if we were to drastically reduce greenhouse gases emitted by our country through a gasoline tax or any other method, it would have no effect on global warming unless other countries that emit large amounts of greenhouse gases — including China and India — joined us in an agreement. America “going it alone” with government mandates purporting to reduce emissions would do nothing but harm our economy, without the supposed positive results for our environment anyway.

The overarching issue is the question of global warming, which has led to much harmful legislation affecting so many aspects of American industry and life, well beyond the auto companies. The solution is for America, and the rest of the world, to finally have an open and honest debate on climate change, instead of being alarmed and bullied by a few scientists and politicians into drastically changing our lives and businesses over their “believe or you’re a heretic” religion of global warming.

… and he got room for his drivel in the Wall Street Journal. What does he want? A global carbon tax! When does he want it? Now!

If President Barack Obama wants to stop the descent toward dangerous global climate change, and avoid the trade anarchy that current approaches to this problem will invite, he should take Al Gore’s proposal for a carbon tax and make it global. A tax on CO2 emissions — not a cap-and-trade system — offers the best prospect of meaningfully engaging China and the U.S., while avoiding the prospect of unhinged environmental protectionism.

Here’s an interesting note, though, with Nader pointing out a key flaw in the notion of American politicians enacting a unilateral cap-and-trade plan:

Cap-and-traders assume, without much justification, that one country can put a price on carbon emissions while another doesn’t without affecting trade or investment decisions. This is a bad assumption, given false comfort by the Montreal Protocol treaty, which took this approach to successfully rein in ozone-depleting gases. Chlorofluorocarbons are not pervasive like greenhouse gases (GHGs); nor was the economy of 1987 hyperglobalized like ours today.

Take-away lesson: Even Ralph Nader thinks cap-and-trade is bad policy! When will our politicians get the memo?

The World Growth Institute, mentioned on this blog recently, sent out a newsletter to its supporters and it hit on a note that we watch closely: the negative economic impact of unreasonable activists. Here’s the group’s take on enviros and forestry policy:

To date, the biggest hindrance to sustainable forestry has been opposition from environmental activists, particularly Greenpeace and WWF. These radical groups opposed proper recognition of forestry’s role in offsetting carbon when the Kyoto Protocol was originally negotiated. Their motive wasn’t environmental. Rather, they were concerned that if offsets were readily available, the pressure on fossil-fuel based energy industries to reduce emissions would be eased.

Greenpeace and WWF have campaigned aggressively for ending deforestation in tropical regions. Many of those areas are home to some of the poorest communities on the globe. And those people depend on deforestation to acquire wood for fuel, create living space and enable agricultural and commercial crop production. In addition to feeding, shelter and keeping them warm, these activities also raise their living standard.

But anti-forestry programs would work against that beneficial growth, effectively induce greater poverty in these already poor nations.

Simply put: Stopping all deforestation reduces economic activity. But now more than ever, post Kyoto strategy must be pro-development as well as pro-environment. Global strategy must give developing countries the ability to raise living standards, otherwise their leaders will not support it. And until that happens, no agreement will be reached.