Anyone who thinks that climate change is purely a partisan issue isn’t paying attention. Increasingly, the national debate on global warming is breaking down between carbon states - those that produce coal, oil and automobiles - and those that see a future beyond fossil fuels. Republicans and Democrats are all over the map.
This carbon-state split flared up in Washington last week when Rep. Rick Boucher, a Democrat from the coal state of Virginia, unveiled draft energy legislation that would prevent California and other states from enacting their own greenhouse gas laws. The legislation would also restrict the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions - a reaction to a Supreme Court ruling in April that said the EPA must treat these gases as a pollutant, regulate them or explain why it won’t.
U.S. Rep. John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan, is also mulling energy legislation that could block California from implementing its “clean-car” law - enacted in 2002 and opposed by auto manufacturers in his state. See full story here
By Ross McKitrick, Canadian Financial Post
Why not tie carbon taxes to actual levels of warming? Both skeptics and alarmists should expect their wishes to be answered.
After much effort, G8 leaders last week agreed to “stabilize greenhouse-gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” This is the same wording as in Article Two of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed in 1992. In other words, after months of negotiations, world leaders agreed on a text they had already ratified 15 years earlier.
Global-warming policy is stuck in a permanent stalemate for very basic reasons. Important divisions of opinion still exist on the extent of humanity’s influence on climate, whether or not the situation is a crisis, whether and how much greenhouse-gas emissions should be cut, if so how to do it, and what is the most we should be prepared to pay in the process.
With this stalemate in mind, I would like to propose a thought experiment about a climate policy that could, in principle, get equal support from all sides. Read more about a tax tied to global warming.
Counterpunch editor Alexander Cockburn, in a scathing indictment of global warming hysteria, shines a light on how climate science is being manipulated by climate modelers and the media. His commentary includes the conclusions of many top climatologists, geologists, geophysicists, astrophysicists and meteorologists.
Counterpunch describes itself as offering “muckraking with a radical attitude” and Cockburn is no fan of industry. But he does understand what’s going on in the global warming debate:
Back in the 1970s, as the oil companies engineered a leap in prices, the left correctly identified and stigmatized the the conspiracy. Some thirty five years, here’s the entire progressive sector swallowing, with religious fervor, a far more potent concoction of nonsense to buttress a program which will savagely penalize the poor, the third world and the environment.
Read more of this left-wing columnist’s article here.