The G-8 Economic Suicide Pact
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Climate Change: Channeling King Canute, G-8 leaders agree to wreck the world's economy, and ours, by pledging to prevent temperatures from rising more than 4 degrees by 2050. What if the Earth has other plans?
Canute was the legendary king whose sycophantic followers praised his power and wisdom. He was The One of his time. He once stood on the shore and commanded the waves to halt. As the story goes, he was exercising his ego when in fact he was giving his followers a dose of reality — the power of man over nature is finite and inconsequential.
We were reminded of this as members of the G-8 met in Italy on Wednesday to agree in principle to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050. The aim is to hammer out a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012. In December, the U.N. is convening a meeting in Copenhagen to forge a binding consensus on reduction targets.
The announced goal, which President Obama has signed on to, is to keep the earth's average temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). That should not be a problem. While the warm-mongers tout 1998 as a record warm year, no year since has been as warm as the earth has, in fact, cooled during an unusually quiet solar cycle.
Last August was the first month in nearly a century in which the sun was completely devoid of sunspots, an indicator of solar activity. While the earth's temperature charts nicely with the solar cycles over time, it correlates not at all with rising CO2 levels. In fact, the earth has been cooling even as these levels rise, and the earth is no warmer than it was in 1979.
Since Al Gore released his feature-length cartoon "An Inconvenient Truth" in October 2006, the Earth has cooled about 0.74 F, almost the same amount that the U.N.'s climate panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claims was gained in the entire 20th century.
Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute has actually sat down and crunched the numbers to find out what an 80% reduction actually means. An 80% reduction from 1990 levels means that in 2050 we cannot emit more than 1 billion tons of CO2. The last time U.S. emissions were that low, Hayward estimates from historical energy data, was in 1910.
We have pointed out that Kyoto-like accords are recipes for global poverty and that capping emissions is capping economic growth. An analysis of the more modest Waxman-Markey bill by the Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million.
According to an analysis by Chip Knappenberger, administrator of the World Climate Report, the reduction of U.S. CO2 emissions to 80% below 2005 levels by 2050 — the goal of Waxman-Markey — would reduce global temperature in 2050 by an insignificant 0.05 C.
EPA climate analyst Alan Carlin, who will not be invited to Copenhagen, recently had his study exposing warming as an over-hyped fraud ignoring actual data suppressed. He was told his conclusions would have "a very negative impact on our office." The truth hurts.
China and India quite sensibly are refusing to participate in this nonsense. "Without participation from China and India, anything we do here at home would impose burdensome costs on consumers in the form of higher electricity, gas and food prices, all for no climate gain," says Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe.
It is wise for these guys to meet in Copenhagen in December. That way they won't be embarrassed as was the British House of Commons when it debated a climate change bill last fall that pledged the U.K. to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050 amidst the first October snow since 1922 hit London.
King Canute, call your office.