In today’s W$J, Brian Carney reports (link for subscribers) from a Venice conference on the difference between American and European perspectives on the challenge of climate change policy.
The story according to which politically connected industries block economic developments that would be beneficial overall but redound to the detriment of the big players is one expounded mostly by cranks in the U.S., but is commonly accepted in Europe. This results from the fact that in Europe, this kind of thing happens. Market signals on employment, wages and production are all attenuated by government’s heavy hand to a much greater extent than they are in the U.S. Stagnation in Europe has many faces, but one of the most important is the stasis of the corporate constellation: Most European economies are dominated by the same large companies that ruled the roost decades ago, while in the U.S., many of our largest and most successful companies didn’t exist a generation ago.
This comparison is not new. But its relevance to the global warming debate is not well-understood. As a former Carter administration official at the conference put it, “America is, psychologically, an open-frontier society. Europe’s frontier closed a millennium ago.” In other words, the characteristic American response to, say, climate change, is to believe that technologies