‘Green default’ is pure biomass

Cass Sunstein obviously takes pride in having been called “The most dangerous man in America” by U.S. conservative commentator Glenn Beck. Mr. Beck tossed that sobriquet at Mr. Sunstein when the Harvard law professor was appointed head of President Barack Obama’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in 2009.

What made Mr. Sunstein dangerous was that — along with his collaborator and co-author, Chicago economist Richard Thaler — he is the leading peddler of the “nudge” doctrine, which aims at bigger, smarter, more subtle government. You can see Mr. Beck’s point. The Orwellian rationale for this Brave New Government (if I may mix dystopian references) lies in the psychological quirks of human nature, which are accumulated in the field of behavioural economics. Nudgery says that governments should use these foibles in a clever form of policy ju-jitsu, utilizing individuals’ own stupidity to guide them toward falling on the “right” choices.

However, the twin elephants in the room, from which Messrs. Sunstein and Thaler resolutely avert their eyes, are surely the complex of psychological quirks that determine their own immovable, history-free, leftliberal interventionist mentality, not to mention the fact that politicians invariably use public ignorance not for the public good, but to gain power.

The clear and present danger represented by Mr. Sunstein is on display in his new book, Simpler: The Future of Government, and in an article he penned for The Globe and Mail on Saturday, titled Green by default.

In the article, Mr. Sunstein glides deftly over the roiling global battle over climate policy, but suggests that there are lots of smaller initiatives that could make a difference to “the environment.”

In their book Nudge, Messrs. Thaler and Sunstein cite the reduction in spillage achieved by etching flies into urinals (surely the last place where you’d want to be nudged). Mr. Sunstein has a new suggestion: Institutions should set their printer defaults to “print on front and back.” Apparently, Rutgers University adopted this procedure, and “saved” the equivalent of 620 trees in one semester.

But how much inconvenience did this involve? Printing on both sides makes documents unwieldy, particularly if you are editing them and want to spread out the results. And from what, exactly, were those 620 trees

The answer to using more green energy is to make it the default choice.

“saved?” Providing forestry jobs? Trees are renewable. Paper gets recycled. North American forests are under no “threat.” So Mr. Sunstein’s bright idea actually involves inconveniencing oneself in order to destroy jobs.

How would we know which defaults to set? Simple: You impose “what most people would choose if they were adequately informed.” That is, if they were Mr. Sunstein. Why doesn’t he just make all our decisions for us?

It gets worse. According to Mr. Sunstein, the answer to using more green energy is to make it, too, the default “choice.” He cites two towns in Germany that use lots more wind and solar as a result of being automatically signed up.

Did Mr. Sunstein check the Ontario Green Energy Act before he wrote this? Does he not know that the entire province has been “defaulted” into expensive wind and solar power? Perhaps he should check how happy Ontarians are about this situation, plus maybe also how much thoughtful cost-benefit analysis went into cancelling/moving those natural gas plants.

Ontario’s experience also shows that Mr. Sunstein’s suggestion that “green default” would “save money” is pure biomass.

You can almost see Mr. Sunstein’s high brow knitting as he worries about the “hard choices” required to “balance” economic and environmental values. The problem is that economic and environmental values tend to be incommensurable because the former are about money and the latter steeped in moralism. Nothing indicates that better than the climate policy issues over which Mr. Sunstein skates both in the article and his book.

The most influential promoters of climate catastrophism — such as Al Gore, Lord Nicholas Stern and James Hansen — are given to wild exaggerations and ad hominems (as in Mr. Hansen’s recently dubbing the Canadian government “Neanderthals”). Doesn’t seem like a very suitable environment for deft nudging. Mr. Sunstein’s book is much, much more of the same, featuring a celebration of all the great things OIRA did under his czar-ship, such as making washing machines more energy efficient (something that would apparently never have occurred to the manufacturers) and saving consumers money by forcing them into cars they don’t want.

Prof. Thaler has used Homer Simpson as a proxy for the average person’s alleged irretrievable stupidity. Professor Sunstein uses Michael Lewis’s baseball book Moneyball as a shining example of how governments might manage the national economic team by dispassionate use of statistics, what he calls “Regulatory Moneyball.” Maybe he should have read Michael Lewis’s work on government stupidity-to-the-point-of-insanity in Iceland, Germany, Ireland and Greece. Then again, given that believing is seeing (the most fundamental of psychological quirks), he wouldn’t get the message. After all, he spent three years operating in the fiscally-feckless, climate-obsessed, Solyndra-backing White House without losing the faith.

One other common behavioural quirk that no doubt helped him through was demonization of a Republican opposition, which apparently resists Obama’s policies out of sheer perversity. These (unnamed) boneheads want to turn back the clock to the days of Herbert Hoover (I think Mr. Sunstein actually means Calvin Coolidge).

How irrational can you get?