By Michelle D. Bernard, The Examiner
A certain moral vanity infuses the environmental movement. It demands drastic action to prevent possible warming a century away, but offers little or no hope to those starving or dying of AIDS today. Protecting the planet is important. However, we must never forget that humankind is at the center of God’s creation. Climate change is horribly complicated. There has been warming over the last century, but not the last decade. New studies suggest that temperatures may actually cool through 2015. Knowledgeable scientists disagree over how much warming is due to human action and how much is due to natural factors.
Most important, we really don’t know how much warming is likely to occur in the future. Imagine trying in 1900 to predict the world of 2000. We can do no better today looking ahead to 2100. Even small changes in assumptions could invalidate predictions of warming in coming years, let alone decades. If it were easy to do, then we could dramatically cut CO2 emissions just to be sure. But carbon-based fuels - coal, natural gas, and oil - make up 85 percent of America’s energy supplies.
Never mind years of research and billions spent on alternative fuels. Renewable sources of energy accounted for just 7 percent of America’s total energy consumption last year. The share due to wind, solar and geothermal power barely registers. That’s not going to change anytime soon. Energy is what makes our economy run. It’s how we fuel our cars and planes, heat and cool our homes, run our factories and produce the goods and services that turned a life of misery into one of plenty. Slashing CO2 emissions means slashing energy use, and slashing energy use means slashing economic growth.
One of the so-called “cap and trade” measures recently advanced in the Senate called for a 70 percent cut in emissions by 2050. The result of this sort of legislation would be dramatically higher energy prices. Forget $4 per gallon gasoline. Think twice that and more. Looking at it another way, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that this approach could raise an average household’s annual energy costs by $1,300. That’s the same as the government imposing a $1 trillion tax on the economy. The economic consequences of such a price shock would be huge. Manufacturing would be hurt the most. Analysts predict job losses in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.
Today’s gross domestic product runs about $14 trillion, but the Environmental Protection Agency figures the legislation debated by the Senate could cut our economy’s output up to $1 trillion in 2030 and $2.8 trillion in 2050. The accumulated losses would be staggering. Incurring this kind of cost could be justified if it was the only means to save the Earth from disaster. But estimates suggest these economy-wrecking efforts would ultimately only prevent 0.013 degrees (Celsius) in warming. In other words, it would have no meaningful effect on our climate.
The poor would suffer the most. If we drain trillions of dollars out of the economy, it is the poor who find it hard, if not impossible, to buy a home, educate their kids, buy gas, put food on the table, get needed health care and more. Any money spent to try to prevent temperatures from rising generates an “opportunity cost,” that is, we are missing out on putting that money to another use. Think of America’s great needs. Poverty still exists, even amid plenty. Our educational system is abysmal, failing to educate many children morally to be good citizens and economically to participate in the global economy. There is infrastructure to be built and investment to be made. Every dollar spent to preclude a temperature increase that might never occur is a dollar not available to help a needy person today. And opportunity costs run global.
Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg organized the Copenhagen Consensus, which brought together experts to debate how best to spend $75 billion to help the world’s poor. Top of the list were vitamin supplements for children. Second was freer trade. Third were mineral supplements for kids. Fourth was expanded immunization for the young. And so it went -food and education aid, women’s programs and health care. The first global warming initiative checked in at only number 14: Research and development spending on low-carbon energy technologies. Mitigation, that is, cutting energy use to reduce temperatures, came in at 29 (when supplemented with R&D) and 30 (when considered alone). That is, there are 13 better ways to save lives and improve people’ standard of living than to do anything about global warming. The latter might be a problem, but it isn’t the most important problem facing us. It isn’t even among the top dozen. Of course, if temperatures rise significantly, there will be consequences, but the most cost-effective way of dealing with them will be to adapt. That’s what we did in past centuries as the Earth warmed and cooled. It’s what we should do in the future in similar circumstances.
The Nobel laureate Milton Friedman told us there is no such thing as a free lunch; he was right. Politics is about trade-offs, and spending ourselves poor in an attempt to deal with uncertain climate problems in the future will cost our society, and particularly its most vulnerable members, far too much today. Protecting the environment requires that we first protect the people in it. Read full report here.
By Matt Nauman, Mercury News
Al Gore said in San Jose Saturday that the climate crisis deserves the same type of attention and money from Washington that the financial meltdown is getting. “Instead of a focus only on a bailout, we need to bail in renewable energy,” Gore said during a 50-minute speech at the Civic Auditorium.
Gore, who turned 60 this year, was a three-term U.S. Senator from Tennessee, vice president for eight years and narrowly lost the 2000 presidential election to George Bush. But it was his move toward environmentalism, symbolized by his starring role in the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and his subsequent Nobel Peace Prize that turned him into an international crusader against global warming.
That’s what brought him to San Jose Saturday, as the keynote speaker for the three-day West Coast Green conference. It included presentations on a variety of green-living topics, plus an exhibit hall of green-building products.
He traced the current crisis with the financial markets to the subprime mortgage mess. There’s also a “subprime carbon” mess that’s shaking the world’s economy, he said, one that puts 70 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air each day. And companies that deny it’s harmful are engaging in “a form of stock fraud,” he said.
He plans to seek oil from Canadian oil shale and tar sands are “utter and complete madness, complete insanity,” he said. And new coal plants should be banned in the United States, he said.
Icecap note: Read more of Gore’s trying to save his GIM fund boondoggle and the movement that has falling to the bottom of the list of 20 key issues America worries about as the earth cools and his prophecies fail here. See also comments by UK Professor Emeritus of Biogeography Philip Stott of the University of London “Gore appears to be twisting the truth on what exactly is ‘subprime.’ See: ‘Global warming is sub-prime science, sub-prime economics, and sub-prime politics’ Excerpt: “‘Global warming’ is sub-prime science, sub-prime economics, and sub-prime politics, and it could well go down with the sub-prime mortgage.”
U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, today released an updated comprehensive investigation into the financial and political activities employed by charitable and environmental organizations claiming to be non-partisan. “Campaigns to ‘save the cuddly animals’ or ‘protect the ancient forests’ are really disguised efforts to raise money for Democratic political campaigns,” Senator Inhofe said during a floor speech today presenting the new report. “Environmental organizations have become experts at duplicitous activity, skirting laws up to the edge of illegality, and burying their political activities under the guise of non-profit environmental improvement.
Take this ad for example, displayed on the League of Conservation Voters, or LCV, website. This is LCV’s standard text used to raise money for the nonprofit organization. In turn, LCV takes these donations, given to ‘save the environment’ and uses them to fund ads for Democratic Candidates such as Ben Lujan from New Mexico. LCV, similar to other groups I’ll highlight later, disguises itself as an environmental group dedicated to saving the environment, yet, as shown by this political ad, it is simply an extension of the Democratic political party.
“What we find now is the fleecing of the American public’s pocketbooks by the environmental movement for their political gain. We also find exhausting litigation, instigation of false claims, misleading science, and scare tactics to fool Americans into believing disastrous environmental scenarios that are untrue. Especially in this election year, the American voter should see these groups and their many affiliate organizations as they are: the newest insidious conspiracy of political action committees and perhaps the newest multi-million dollar manipulation of federal election laws.
As an American citizen concerned about our environment and our country, I’m dismayed and saddened by this deception. If these groups actually used the hundreds of millions of dollars they raise for actual environmental improvement, just think how many whales and forests we could save. These wolves should be seen for what they really are: massive democratic political machines, disguised as environmental causes.” See the full report here.