In a confused op/ed in the Washington Post today, Cass Sunstein asks “If We Can Fund the War in Iraq, Why Can’t We Fund the Kyoto Protocol?“:

For the United States, the economic burden of the Iraq war is on the verge of exceeding the total anticipated burden of the Kyoto Protocol. Because the price of the war increases every day, its total cost, for America as well as the world, will soon dwarf the expected cost of a remarkably ambitious effort to control the problem of climate change.

There are a few problems here. First, as Sunstein acknowledges, the effect of Kyoto, ambitious as it is, would – on its supporters own admission and accepting all their contentions – be to reduce additional warming by a measly 0.07 deg C by 2050. Is it worth replicating the disruption and harm to the economy caused by the Iraq War to aceive that? To ask the question is to answer it.

More seriously, though, the comparison isn’t accurate. Sunstein is comparing a cost to taxpayers with a cost to GDP. They’re two different things. The cost of the Iraq War to GDP, if any, is likely to be a lot, lot less than $300 billion – GDP is continuing to grow despite the war.

The inconvenient truth is that Kyoto would be more disruptive to the US economy than this war. That should be a sobering thought.