Realism on Emissions: Everybody Expects Everybody Else to Cheat

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Nothing brings out the warmonger in me like an antiwar protest: Put those dirty hippies on one side of a barricade and I instinctively want to be on the other side. If I smell patchouli, I’m ready to invade Canada. Media reports about corporate scandals have a similar effect on me: When the New York Times reports that Company X or Executive Y did something awful, nefarious, and indefensible, my natural tendency is to assume that the story is exaggerated, that events have been distorted and taken out of context, etc.

With that in mind: Volkwagen’s behavior in the emissions-rigging matter is awful, nefarious, and indefensible.

If you’ve missed the story, Volkswagen installed software in U.S.-bound diesel-powered cars designed to detect when an emissions test was being conducted and to temporarily alter engine-performance characteristics to reduce emissions for the duration of the test. This isn’t one of those oopsie things; Volkswagen didn’t accidentally discover that its software could, under certain conditions, game emissions tests, and then cover up the embarrassing fact — it was designed that way, with malice aforethought. Volkswagen’s CEO, who goes by the wonderfully Hobbity name Martin Winterkorn, has resigned in richly deserved disgrace.

But if we can pry ourselves away from the ritual denunciations of corporate greed and the wickedness of capitalism — original sin is not exorcized by organizing a corporation, as it turns out — we might ask: If the gentlemen in Wolfsburg are willing to game emissions tests over the margin on a few million diesel engines with a few measly billions of dollars at stake, what might the gentlemen in Beijing do when it comes to emissions, when there are potentially trillions of dollars at stake, not to mention the always-present possibility that they will end up with their heads on spikes in a public square?

Humans cheat and, hence, human institutions cheat. In the matter of genuine corporate scandals (which are not rare but which are rarer than media-invention corporate scandals) you often will find that this is a matter of cold calculation. When cutting a certain corner provides savings in excess of what is likely to be extracted in fines or litigation should the scheme be discovered, then the temptation to cheat is strong. This is particularly true when it comes to phony moral imperatives, notable examples of which are American automotive emissions standards and their big brother, the worldwide global-warming crusade.

Maybe you don’t think that these should be considered phony moral imperatives, but they are. Everybody talks in sober, even apocalyptic terms about carbon-dioxide emissions and climate change, and then they do — nothing. The celebrities go back to their private jets and their 50,000-square-foot homes, and the politicians . . . go back to their private jets and their 50,000-square-foot homes.

In Beijing and New Delhi and other capitals considering similarly situated national economies, the argument is explicit: Reducing emissions means forgoing economic growth and related gains in real standards of living, which may look like a noble exercise in self-mortification to you comfortable Westerners in your BarcaLoungers and fuzzy slippers and your snifter of cognac and no living national memory of famine, to you people from places where the only goat-bothering subsistence farmers resigned to a primitive life on the land are hipsters from Oberlin College, but we’re too poor to choose to make ourselves poorer. On the American Right there are skeptics of global warming per se, and skeptics with a much stronger case for doubting that proffered reform models would accomplish anything other than giving Barack Obama another occasion for moral preening.

Both the developing-world attitude and the American conservative attitude assume a sort of prisoners’ dilemma — everybody expects everybody else to cheat, for good reason. Assuming that they have any powers of introspection, the Chinese expect the Chinese to cheat, too. If you think that the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist party of China is less likely to countenance the gaming of emissions inspections than is the compliance team at Volkswagen, you are in error.

So we end up with what is in fact a reasonable approach despite the doomsday promises of Al Gore Inc.: Wait and see, consider programs of mitigation and their costs, expect tradeoffs. The solid prices of waterfront properties in Malibu and the Hamptons argue that there are a great many pharisaical rich liberals who do not take the threat of rising seas as seriously as their ostentatious displays of piety would suggest.

The Obama administration is in the process of forcing substantial emissions controls on American power plants, partly as a raised middle finger to coal-powered Republicans such as Mitch McConnell, partly because he believes it will fortify his international stature — the thing he values most of all — as he prepares to twist global arms in pursuit of a broad climate-change agreement. Such agreements have one purpose: to be signed. The bit where we go about making sure that nations and institutions actually live up to their obligations? Consider the ferocity with which the U. S. government defended its illegal cotton subsidies — going so far as to pay Brazilian litigants hundreds of millions of dollars to drop their World Trade Organization complaints — and consider that Chinese political incentives are expressed with tanks and rifles rather than votes and nasty YouTube videos, and you should have a pretty good idea of what enforcement will look like.

Executives cheat. Politicians cheat.

Ayatollahs, too, for that matter, if you’re concerned about emissions a few orders of magnitude more worrisome than the stuff that comes out of your nose.