George Rebane
Bjorn Lomborg (q.v.) enlightens us again about the realities of the much-ballyhooed policies to fight what is sold as preventable manmade global warming. (here) The bottom line is that the agreed on policies of the recent Paris accords, and those to be adopted next month in Glasgow, are both enormously expensive and will not make a hill of beans difference in the future anticipated as calculated by the UN and reported in Nature. We should also note that no one is even on track to meeting their Paris commitments signed under Obama.
If the whole country went carbon-neutral tomorrow, the standard United Nations climate model shows the difference by the end of the century would be a barely noticeable reduction in temperature of 0.3 degree Fahrenheit. This is because the U.S. will make up an ever-smaller share of emissions as the populations of China, India and Africa grow and get richer.
America’s goal, according to the Biden administration, is a 95% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, which will come in at a cost of 11.9% of GDP annually. The Left claims that polls show Americans are all for reducing carbon emissions, and even willing to pay up to $200 annually to achieve that. But the actual cost per person breaks down to $11,300 per person per year. That means that the annual bill to an average American household of 2.53 people is over $28,500, and no one is willing to pay even close to that by almost an order of magnitude.
Polls are mostly worthless pieces of legerdemain because their questionnaires are ideologically wordsmithed, represent dynamic attitudes, and their results are misunderstood by their innumerate audiences. Few would answer ‘No’ to ‘Do you favor policies to reduce future crop scorching temperatures and rising sea levels?’ or ‘Should CO2 levels be reduced to what we had in 2005 to stop global warming?’ With one-sided questions like these, no one knows either the effect or the cost of achieving the stated goals. And yet the policy promoters in government and the media state with grave authority that ‘85% of Americans favor policies to significantly reduce future carbon levels’. This then is supposed to be the public’s support for draconian increases in our taxes, economy stifling regulations, and added restrictions on our freedoms. Sleazebag politics at its finest – “A nation ignorant and free …”.
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