By Patrick J. Michaels, National Review Online
Climate bureaucrats from 180 countries came together in Bonn, Germany, to craft yet another proposal to replace the UN’s failed Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Whatever comes out of the meeting will be up for formal adoption at an even bigger meeting in Copenhagen next December.
Remember Kyoto? It would have required us to reduce our national emissions of carbon dioxide to 7 percent below 1990 levels. Europe, Canada, and pretty much the rest of the developed world had similar “obligations.” Kyoto failed because, simply put, it was too costly, both politically and economically. It would have had no detectable effect on global warming, anyway - “preventing” about seven-hundredths of a degree Celsius by 2050. The Earth’s surface temperature bounces around about twice that amount naturally from year-to-year, so it would have been impossible to determine Kyoto’s “benefit.”
What’s the response of the U.N. and the Obama administration to this failure? The meeting in Bonn proposes even more drastic cuts in emissions. The legislation currently being discussed in the House of Representatives, and supported by the president, would reduce U.S. emissions to 83 percent below 2005 levels. If implemented, this would allow the average American in 2050 to emit only as much carbon dioxide as the average American emitted in 1867. That target is right in the middle of the range being discussed in Bonn.
No one has any idea how this would be accomplished. The president supports the Waxman-Markey “cap and trade” bill - aptly renamed the Obama Energy Tax in this space, since it would amount to the largest tax increase ever instituted by any government in history. Entities that emit carbon dioxide - power plants, GM (Government Motors), you when you drive your car - will be required to reduce emissions by 83 percent over the next 40 years. Those who can’t do this will have to purchase a permit from someone or something that did.
This will make anything using, produced from, or transported via fossil fuels prohibitively expensive. How costly? The last time gas went up to $4 a gallon, the nation’s consumption dropped by about 4 percent. What does the price have to be to cut it by 83 percent? No one really knows, but it will surely be extremely high.
All this will have minimal effect on global warming. Using standard scientific models (such as they are), we can estimate that, if every nation in the world that has obligations under the current Kyoto Protocol begins to reduce emissions soon and reaches the 83 percent target by 2050, the amount of warming prevented by then is a mere 0.08 degrees Celsius by 2050 and 0.22 degrees by 2100, compared with what the United Nations calls “business-as-usual.”
Business not “as usual” won’t be very much business at all, at least in the U.S., where the average per capita emissions would have to drop to where they were after the Civil War. In response, businesses will migrate to where cheap energy is available, such as India and China. Both countries have made it quite clear that they simply will not go along with the emissions reductions being talked about in Bonn and Washington. The political pressure to develop their economies is orders of magnitude stronger than any pressure to hinder that development with artificially expensive energy.
Nor are China and India reluctant to exploit the new administration’s frequently stated desire to “work with the international community” (read: the U.N.) on climate change. So, Beijing and New Delhi are ratcheting up the stakes even farther. China, for example, may agree “in principle” to some vague reductions in emissions at some future time, but only if the developed nations of the world agree to send a check for 1 percent of their GDP annually as payment.
For all its new internationalist intentions, even the many environmental radicals in the Obama administration will recognize the perils of a policy that would lead to another round of de-industrialization in the U.S. while paying competitors to bury our economy. And they have one escape hatch: the U.S. Senate.
Absent some extreme climatic change, there is no way that the Senate is going to go along with the House or with Obama on the issue of drastic cuts in emissions. Consequently, negotiators in Bonn will say that everything that the U.S. does is contingent upon what the Senate will do.
The smartest policy for the new “internationalist” administration would be to support the massive emissions reductions proposed in the House legislation, and to delay consideration by the Senate until after the Copenhagen meeting, where it is sure to die. Obama can burnish his international environmental credentials, please those within his own administration, and avoid further destruction of the economy. See post here.
Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know
By Alan Caruba
Just how crazed is the Environmental Protection Agency? When I say “crazed”, I mean just how far out of touch with reality, with science, with the economy, with common sense, and with the American people is the EPA?
Ever since the Supreme Court made one of the greatest blunders since the Dred Scott case, declaring carbon dioxide (CO2) a “pollutant” that could be regulated by the EPA, that deranged agency has been pushing a tax on CO2 emissions from cows, pigs, and other farm animals on which we depend for milk and meat at the local supermarket.
According to Encarta, in 2005 there were an estimated 95,848,000 cows in the United States. Presumably, there are comparable numbers of pigs, goats, and other critters that emit belches and farts sufficient to destroy the Earth with the CO2 they emit. Nor should we overlook the six pounds of CO2 that the 307 million Americans exhale daily.
Since there is NO global warming and the Earth has been cooling for the past decade, the proposal that these farm animals be taxed constitutes a criminal act, devoid of any justification.
Since CO2 plays virtually no role whatever in so-called “climate change”, taxing farm animals is a violation of the known science and an assault on the economy in the name of the greatest hoax of the modern age.
It is not, however, a matter of “saving the Earth” so far as the EPA and the rest of the Obama administration is concerned. It is MONEY. And money is POWER.
The proposal, floated in late 2008, would impose a per-cow tax on any farm or ranch with more than 25 dairy cows, 50 beef cattle or 200 hogs that would require a payment of about $175 for each dairy cow, $87.50 per head of beef cattle, and $20 for each hog.
Suffice it to say that dairy farmers across the U.S. are being forced to send many of their herd to the slaughter house because the price of milk has fallen to the point where it is unprofitable to maintain them. Owners of even a modest-sized cattle ranch would face additional costs of $30,000 to $40,000 a year. Add a tax on cows and you end up with a nation that has to import more milk than oil.
Taxing farm animals is a great way to bankrupt dairy farmers and cattle ranchers, along with all those who raise hogs. After that, it is only a matter of time before Americans would all have to become vegetarians because the cost of meat would put an end to that part of our diet.
As bizarre as the EPA proposal is, the effort by the Democrat-controlled Congress to impose a Cap-and-Trade bill on the nation in the name of reducing CO2 emissions dwarfs the farm and ranch proposal.
The Heritage Foundation has crunched the numbers on Cap-and-Trade concluding that job losses would exceed 800,000 annually for several years. Durable-manufacturing employment would decrease by 28 percent. Machinery-manufacturing job losses would exceed 57 percent. The same would hold true for textile-mills, electrical equipment and appliance manufacturers, paper and paper product jobs, and jobs involving plastic and rubber products.
Cap-and-Trade isn’t just a job-killer, American Solutions estimates that it would increase gasoline prices by 74 percent, electricity rates by 90 percent, natural gas prices by 55 percent, and add $1,600 a year to the cost of living of a typical household. The result would be to make the Great Depression look like a day at the park, but minus the hot dogs and ice cream.
This is what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have planned and they want the bill passed before Congress goes home for its summer recess. At that point, the destruction of the U.S. economy would be complete and there would be no reason for Congress to return. Does this seem an extreme conclusion to you? No, it is the reality the nation faces. See more here.
Christian News Analysis
‘At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers’ - ‘’Shouldn’t we start punishing them now?’ By Marc Morano
The appeal appeared on Talking Points Memo, an often cited website that helps set the agenda for the political Left in the U.S. The Talking Points Memo appeal to execute skeptics is not unique. As the science behind man-made global warming fears utterly collapses, many of the biggest promoters of the theory and environmental activists are growing increasingly desperate. Read entire article.
Threats, innuendo’s, name calling? The signs of those afraid of open discourse.
Let’s say that global warming is not the mass delusion or the scam I suspect it is. Let’s say for the sake of argument that human beings are destroying the planet and we are all doomed unless we turn over our lives to our “Green Masters,” along with our national sovereignty, freedoms, economy, and car keys. Then what?
Will China, India, and Russia - the other world’s main polluters - decide to play along and go “green?” Not likely! They will continue to blow soot out of their factories and keep their economies going. We are chumps if we fall for this scam.
Tiananmen Square in the smog
So do we do nothing? Of course not. But we don’t overreact either. Cutting back on pollution and waste is always a good idea. Destroying what’s left of our economy by implementing over-the-top laws and regulations based on flawed science will be a disaster for America.
Ever notice how the ringleaders of this group always seem to leave the biggest carbon footprint and rake in the most coin? Maybe they should lead by example before telling the rest of us what to do.
See blog here.