Payne: CO2 reductions good for nothing

Posted by hpayne on July 18, 2012

“What the government has not mandated, the economy is doing on its own: emissions of global warming gases in the United States are down,” thrills New York Times’ reporter Matthew Wald. “In part, the Great Recession has been good for something.”

Good for what?

The Green Church and has long advised the importance of economic sacrifice to heal the planet ” and yet despite seven years of declining U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, its media disciples are still complaining this summer of hot temperatures. “Experts say it’s difficult to prove a causal relationship between climate change and last week’s wild weather in Michigan, but record temperatures and violent storms appear to fit the widely-accepted scientific model,” worried MLive’s liberal Jonathan Oosting this July.

Clearly the draconian six percent decrease in U.S. CO2 emissions since 2005 has been good for nothing. Despite the most wrenching economic downturn since the Great Depression – costing millions of jobs and destroying thousands of businesses – emissions reductions have had zero effect on the climate.

The dirty (pun intended) secret of the green agenda is that even harsher economic measures will make no difference either.

You thought the economy has been bad since 2005? President Obama and his media allies want 80 percent more in CO2 reductions by 2050. That’s an economy-strangling 20 percent per decade – over three times the retraction from the Great Recession. For four more decades. Yet, scientists concede, the millions more in unemployed people and the billions more in subsidies for boondoggles like Solyndras and Beacon Powers will do NOTHING to reduce global temperatures (even if one believes in climate science after the devastating Climategate scandal).

Why? Because the CO2 emissions of the rest of the world ” up 3 percent in 2011 and 9 and 8 percent respectively in the rapidly-growing behemoths of China and India – will continue to rise. Veteran climatologist Patrick Michaels points out that – according to the U.N.’s own climate models – cutting GLOBAL carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 would only reduce predicted temps by 7 percent.

Global economic devastation for a mere 7 percent. Clearly, the solution is worse than the disease.

In assessing The New York Times “good news” of the Great Recession, U.S. Energy Information Administration official Howard Gruenspecht found some “bad news.” That is, that U.S. CO2 emissions have increased since the recession ended. “The 3.9 percent increase in emissions in 2010 was primarily driven by the rebound from the economic downturn experienced in 2008 and 2009,” he lamented.

Bad news? Better that a richer world endure inevitable temperatures with First World air conditioning than a poorer world that suffers inevitable temperatures in Third World shanties.

 

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