links for a late Monday afternoon
Ahead of legislative and executive discussion of global warming, the Washington Times notes the following:
Brian Kennedy, spokesman for the Institute for Energy Research, said Mr. Bush should realize that the U.S. is already ahead of the Europeans.
“U.S. taxpayers are already spending more than $40 billion a year to address climate change, and to date we’re achieving better results than the Europeans are under a bureaucratic regulatory framework,” he said. “That should be kept in mind before any rash — or political — decisions are made inside the White House. Excessive regulations would come with significant economic consequences and additional costs for consumers.”
Christopher C. Horner, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming,” said the Bush administration should have seen the regulatory problems long ago and that the president is trying to solve them the wrong way.
“There’s a way to responsibly do this, but calling for a bill isn’t it. Democrats — and all presidential candidates — desperately want Bush to take ownership of the issue before he goes, leaving them free of the burdens of responsibility for their rhetoric,” Mr. Horner said.
He said Mr. Bush should have been spending the past two years pointing out that even as the U.S. reduces the rate of growth of carbon emissions, it is taking manufacturing jobs from Europe. Nations that adopted strict carbon emissions are facing economic consequences while finding the goals impossible to meet, he said.
“The U.S. is the world leader in reducing the rate of growth of CO2 emissions while also growing its economy — faster on both counts, as with population as well, than its principal antagonist, Europe, which is suffering for reasons of political ‘face’ under a failed scheme that the Democrats and McCain amazingly want to burden us with,” he said.
To me, there are far too many uncertainties in global warming policy to justify the much more certain risk of economic catastrophe that would accompany the restrictions Al Gore and friends want. Is global warming really happening? Sure temperatures have increased over the past century or so, but what about the decrease over the past decade? Assuming global warming is happening, are we absolutely certain that humans have caused it? Predicting the weather 24 hours in advance is difficult enough, so how we can be sure given the multitude of climatic factors that global warming would not occurred absent industrialization? If we do decide to go forward with drastic cuts in emissions and other significant regulation, are things going to change for the better? The underlying assumptions of global warming bureaucrats appear to be that will be far less flooding and other natural disasters, that much fewer people will live hungry and in poverty, and that somehow that the dying off of animal species that has been occuring since the beginning of mankind will stop — in short, solving global warming will also solve the major macroeconomic issues that have perplexed policymakers for years. I’m just a bit skeptical.
A “Compassion Forum“?!?!?! Now that’s high comedy.
John McCain: Just another proponent of National Greatness Conservatism – individualism is not welcome.
Looking back at affirmative action and the use of statistics.
April 14, 2008 at 10:12 pm
According to a research the poorest people in the world’s poorest countries will suffer the earliest and the most from climate change, according to this year’s edition of the Environmental Review. The report says that, due to their geographical location, low incomes, and low institutional capacity, as well as their greater reliance on climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, the poorest countries and people are suffering earliest and are poised to suffer most.
April 15, 2008 at 9:16 am
That begs the question — should we spending our time asking why these countries are so poor (institutional capacity, lack of respect for property rights, barriers to trade), or should we endorse a policy that will make energy production much more expensive, especially for poorer countries, and trust that the problems these countries have endured absent climate change fear will somehow go away?
It’s interesting to note that the move towards ethanol and agricultural energy products — an artificial move due to government subsidies — appears to be having the perverse effect of decreasing the supply of food, thereby increasing costs. Guess who is worse off because of that . . .
I also get a kick out of the recent and subtle change in vocabulary in this debate. It is more appropriate now to speak of “climate change,” as opposed to “global warming.” This comes after scientists have noted that we haven’t really been warming that much over the past decade, and in any event how the temperature fluctuations over the past two centuries relate to the fluctuations throughout earth’s history is anyone’s guess.
April 15, 2008 at 11:26 am
This is what I’m talking about.