Iraq War Costs Exceed Costs to Reduce Global Warming (among other things)

[IChing]

Cass Sunstein, a mainstay of the “law and economics” movement, offers this boggling analysis of the cumulative cost of the Iraq invasion in barely 4 years, compared to the costs projected by the Bush administration for adhering to the Kyoto protocol over its entire lifetime - costs they insisted were so high they made that policy impossible to implement.

For the United States, the cost of the Iraq war will soon exceed the anticipated cost of the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement designed to control greenhouse gases. For both, the cost is somewhere in excess of $300 billion. . . .

he same numbers raise questions about the Bush administration’s claim that the cost of the Kyoto Protocol would be prohibitive, causing (in President Bush’s own words) “serious harm to the U.S. economy.”

With respect to the Iraq war, careful estimates come from Scott Wallsten, a former member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers who is now at the American Enterprise Institute. Writing at the end of 2005, Wallsten estimated the aggregate American cost at about $300 billion. With the costs incurred since then, and an anticipated appropriation soon, the total will exceed $350 billion.

With respect to the Kyoto Protocol, the most systematic estimates come from William Nordhaus and Joseph Boyer of Yale University. Writing in 2000, they offered a figure of $325 billion for the United States, designed to capture the full costs of compliance over many decades. This staggeringly large figure helped support Kyoto skeptics in the Bush administration and elsewhere, who argued that the benefits of the agreement did not justify its costs.

For the world as a whole, the comparison between the Iraq war and the Kyoto Protocol is even more dramatic. The worldwide cost of the war is already much higher than the anticipated worldwide cost of the Kyoto Protocol — possibly at least $100 billion higher.

The worldwide cost of the war now exceeds $500 billion, a figure that includes the cost to Iraq (more than $160 billion) and to non-American coalition countries (more than $40 billion). For the Kyoto Protocol, full compliance is projected to cost less than $400 billion, because the United States would bear most of the aggregate costs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/09/AR2006050901502.html


He also points out that the Kyoto estimates ignore technological advances that could reduce its financial impact, and are a product of the Bush administration - which cooked them up precisely to justify scuttling the treaty - and are widely believed to be inflated.>>>>.snip


What are we to say about this? Bush is so reckless he was willing to start a war for no reason that cost so much he himself believed it would destroy our economy? Bush is so feckless he knowingly cited as unaffordable costs for a useful program that he was perfectly willing to squander on a pointless one? Bush is so hostile to any human interests beyond his own and his cronies’ that he was willing both to bankrupt the country and sell the entire global environment down the river just to have his war? Bush is so stupid he simply didn’t notice he was violating his own stated standards of fiscal responsibility? Bush is so mendacious that he deliberately inflated, then lied about, costs for vital environmental protections that he had already committed to a war of choice? Bush is so incompetent that he drew a line for unacceptable economic impact, started a war that almost immediately crossed that line, and then kept going?

We have a situation philosophers call “underdetermination” - the evidence (Bush’s war costs more than saving the global environment; Bush opposed saving the environment because of costs; Bush supports the war in spite of costs) is too meager to distinguish between several competing explanatory theories. Reckless, feckless, vicious, stupid, or just plain useless? - Bush could be any of these! He’s at least one, though on logical grounds alone he’s probably not all of them. (This is why he has been defending his bogus “WMD” claims for two years now as something he believed at the time was true, despite the many people, including the Secretary of State, the CIA director, and Sadam Hussein’s own foreign minister acting as a US agent, who told him otherwise. Incompetence is now the prefered public stance for the Bush administration, because it precludes the other obvious explanations whereby Bush screwed everything up knowingly.)

But whichever explanation for this fiasco turns out to be true, the outcome is heartbreaking. Bush personally torpedoed the first and only worldwide attempt to do something systematic about global warming before it’s too late. The Kyoto treaty has been ratified by 163 nations, accounting for 62% of all worldwide carbon dioxide emissions (as of 1990), but it’s useless without implementation by the United States, which singlehandedly accounted for 36% of those emissions. His stated reason was the economic burden - spread over the entire foreseeable future - of not committing global suicide (homicide, it should be said, since everyone in the world except him wants to go the other way). Yet he willingly imposed a vastly greater burden on the US in just a few years’ time for a pointless, destructive, and murderous war of personal choice. (“They tried to kill my D-a-a-a-a-d . . .!” - yeah, and you killed 2,428 American moms, dads, daughters, and sons - and tens of thousands of Iraqi moms and dads - in response? Nice work, asshole.) And merely being wrong is irrelevant - it has no policy implications for him. This would all be psychotic - on the level of the most crazed and uncivilized savages of history - if the right wing had not moved the boundaries of normality so far that “crazy” no longer has any meaning. The planet itself - the entire livable environment - left teetering in the balance, for reasons that have no more substance than the WMDs and other fantasies of the non-reality-based community that inhabits the White House.
>>>>>snip http://www.leanleft.com/archives/2006/05/10/5507/


This and other rational programs have been sacrificed to the Military Industrial Complex

[MH1]

1. Excellent & important post. K&R.

[IChing]

2. Thanks I think it is an important talking point for our side

The number of jobs, new industries and research programs that could and will be created to do our part in global warming would be enormous for they would encompass alternative energy sources, cleaner power plants, hybrid automotive technologies etc. etc.

But this wouldn't have helped haliburton, or big oil.