With all the hype this weekend in New York concerning global warming or climate change it might be worth injecting some science into the rhetoric. By the way China, India and Germany have announced they won’t show up to the party.
Matt Ridley, a member of the British House of Lords, recently wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal that I thought was very interesting. The U.N. wrote its first report on this issue in 1990 and it got a lot of attention. Mr. Ridley noted that the U.N. no longer claims that there will be dangerous or rapid climate change in the next two decades. Recently the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change downgraded the warming it expects in the 30 years following 1995.
Mr. Ridley states that even the U.N.’s new carbon estimate may be too high. The climate research establishment is beginning to say that global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began. He suggests that the partyers in New York should, “pack up, go home and concentrate on more pressing global problems like war, terror, disease, poverty, habitat loss and the 1.3 billion people with no electricity.”
It’s interesting to note that for some reason EPA wants a 30% reduction in carbon emissions using 2005 as a baseline year. If that’s the case, it appears, that we are already about 15% below the 2005 levels. So we are already halfway there. What’s EPA’s big hurry to implement these rules? The utility industry is saying that the equipment they need to implement the regulations will not be available within the deadlines that EPA has established and don’t forget some of the requirements such as carbon capture and sequestration are not proven technologies and will not be available for a long time.
The U.S. Chamber thinks the Obama proposed carbon plan will cost $50 billion a year in GDP and prevent the creation of more than 220,000 jobs per year. Household disposable income would be hit for more than $550 billion a year.
The same people that promised Eastern Kentucky green jobs to replace their mining jobs think the regulations will create 250,000 jobs. So far their green economic calculator has consistently missed its mark. EPA’s calculations regarding jobs and health care savings should be dismissed off hand because they refuse to tell us and the Congress where their numbers come from.
So why are we still hyping this idea? Well, it appears it’s all about money. The environmental groups can scare their tribes into giving them money and then there’s the speaking engagements and book proceeds that can be pretty hefty as well. Because of the significant increase in utility bills, low and fixed income families will be particularly hard hit with this idea but for some reason the proponents of this issue haven’t thought about them.