The Orange County Register

The nation avoided global warming-related devastation last week. The Senate killed a grandiose scheme to clamp down on emissions of CO2, a benign, necessary, natural atmospheric gas. However, something similar, if not worse, will be back next year.

The devastation wouldn’t have been the 1- or 2-degree temperature increases that may have occurred over the next century, which may not even be related to CO2. The real devastation would have been gasoline prices increasing $1.40 per gallon by 2050, millions of jobs lost or shipped overseas, an effective $3,700-a-year tax on families, a 33-percent increase in home energy costs by 2020, and, says the Heritage Foundation, the equivalent economic cost of 35 Hurricane Katrinas every year for two decades.
Those would be certain results of the failed Climate Security Act’s vastly expanded government controls to extract trillions of dollars from productive companies and redistribute the money to politically favored interests, say the bill’s opponents.

What’s uncertain is whether the trouble and expense would have bought anything. Even if CO2 emissions are returned to the level of horse-and-buggy days, an increase of 0.013 degree Celsius might be avoided over the next century, says climatologist Patrick Michaels. That’s if CO2 increases temperature, which many scientists doubt. So, why go down this path?

“Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream,” MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen said. “If you control carbon, you control life.” Global warming is the perfect big-government issue. First, it’s predicated entirely on predicted disasters based on arbitrary data fed into computers. What’s fed changes continuously. That’s why a few years ago sea levels were predicted to rise 20 feet, but now only 20 inches or less. Garbage in, garbage out.

Second, global warming is unscientific because it can’t be disproved. When temperatures slightly dropped over the past decade, then were predicted even by alarmists to drop more over the next decade despite ever-rising CO2, rather than admit their theory is wrong, the story line changed. Now we’re told the entirely unpredicted 20-year cooling is only temporary. If temperatures go up, it proves global warming. If they go down, voila! It proves global warming.

Disguised as a “cap-and-trade” plan, it would have made CO2 emitters pay to do what they’ve always done for free. Deceptively passed off as a market-based plan, cap-and-trade is really a hidden tax. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid assured us, “Gas prices will not go up. They will go down.”

In the end, the obvious connection to ever-higher gas prices politically killed the Climate Security Act. Next year another version is certain to return with a president inclined to sign it. We had a preview of the future last week. It’s grim, costly and authoritarian. Read nore here.