Despite Cost, Global Warming Legislation Won’t Reduce CO2

“Even if we fervently wanted to, nothing that the developed world could do would significantly reduce predictable global warming,” Kenneth Green told attendees at an energy summit held last week at Montana State University-Billings.

“That makes any expenditure to reduce greenhouse gases a waste of resources that will not yield any environmental or human risk-reduction benefits,” said Green, who is a biologist and environmental scientist, serving as a public policy analyst for the American Enterprise Institute.

Both pro-business groups and environmental groups should be “outraged” with what is being proposed in the American Energy and Security Act of 2009, said Green.

According to Green, there are alternatives to the massive, all-intrusive scheme, also known as the Waxman-Markey bill, which has already passed the US House and now awaits action in the US Senate. There are alternatives and time to pursue less disruptive policies. Despite the hysteria, we are not in a crisis mode, and there are options in the future.

What is being proposed is not “carbon cap and trade,” it is “economic cap and trade,” contended Green, who as a biologist, says he “places environmental protection in very high regard.”  “But I strongly believe the environmental protection must complement rather than displace other values such as fiscal conservatism, personal freedom, economic opportunity and prosperity, free enterprise, limited government, and so on.”

Green said that he believes “we have a moral duty to keep energy as abundant and affordable as possible, so as to continue to lift people out of poverty both at home and abroad.”

Rather than supportive of this bill, environmentalists should be unhappy about its “lack of effectiveness, the clauses preventing EPA from regulating CO2 under the Clean Air Act, and the science-censorship of EPA that will prevent them from taking steps to phase out corn-ethanol,” said Green.

Analysts at the Breakthrough Institute have shown that the offset and banking provisions of Waxman-Markey will allow most US emitters – including power plants burning coal – to continue emitting at business –as –usual rates through 2030, while capturing vast wealth in the form of emission permits.”

In fact, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) itself projects coal power will increase under Waxman-Markey by about 1 percent by 2020. And, said Green, EPA projects less renewable energy under Waxman-Markey than there would be without it. Even if fully achieved, EPA “acknowledges” Waxman-Markey would only reduce CO2 levels in the year 2095 by 25 parts per million — “a quantity that will reduce global warming not a whit,” said Green.

While achieving none of the benefits that proponents claim they want, the provisions of the bill will “raise the cost of products, goods, and services in the US, dramatically impairing US competitiveness.” It will “lead to economic contraction or stagnation due to the impact of higher energy rates on ratepayers, which the Heritage Foundation estimates at about $1800 per household by the year 2020,” said Green.

So what should be done?

The “first-best policy option,” according to Green, should be “to increase the resilience of human structures and institutions through an aggressive program of fixing perverse incentives that increase climatic risk-taking.” That means “removing the kind of risk subsidies that lead people to put themselves in climatically sensitive areas, to build on flood plains, in storm tracks and so on.”

Whatever policies are adopted, said Green, “we should pursue only ‘no-regrets’ policies” — policies that “won’t have us looking back in a few decades with no climate benefit in hand, and a legacy of wasted resources and lost opportunities.”

“They should be focused on ending the kind of subsidized infrastructure programs that lead people to build giant cities in deserts dependent on far-away sources of seasonal snow. And, they should put economic repairs first: only the surplus wealth of productive economies allows us to protect our environment, set aside natural resources, and tread more lightly on the Earth.”

He also recommends investing in research and development on means to remove carbon from the air directly through genetic engineering, or pyrolisis of crop stubble.

And, regardless of the impacts of carbon dioxide, we should be researching how to warm or cool the earth, said Green, pointing out that one volcanic eruption puts enough material into the atmosphere to cool the planet for a decade.

Battery technology and how to transmit energy are also areas in which more research would be beneficial.

If some must insist on taxes, then “the best option is a globally harmonized carbon tax,” said Green. “I’d only support a revenue-neutral carbon tax paired with aggressive removal of redundant regulations to enhance our competitiveness,” he said.

A $15 tax on each ton of CO2 emitted would increase the cost of coal by 83 percent, increase the cost of oil by 11 percent, natural gas by 10 percent and add about 14 cents to a gallon of gasoline – and it would generate about $80 billion a year in revenues that could be used to reduce income taxes by 6 percent, corporate taxes by 29 percent and payroll taxes by 10 percent. This shifting of taxes would reduce fuel consumption to a degree that greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by 11 percent, according to Green.

Problems of the Waxman-Markey bill, according to Green, include its call for reducing emissions by a “stupendous” amount — 83 percent below the level of 2005, by the year 2050 – to about 1 billion tons in 2050.

“The last time that US emissions were 1 billion tons was in 1910, when the population was only 92 million (most of whom had no cars).” Per capita income was $6000 (current dollars). In 2050 it is estimated that the US will have over 400 million people. So, in per capita terms, the reduction allows each person 2.4 tons  – less than a quarter of what a person from 1910 put out.

“The last time per-capita emissions were that low was around 1875, barely at the start of the industrial revolution. The only countries with values this low today are economic basket cases like Belize and Grenada. Of the developed countries that come close, France and Switzerland, both are largely powered by nuclear and hydro power, are smaller, and even so, are putting out about seven times more emissions per-capita than we’re allowing ourselves in 2050 under Waxaman-Markey,” said Green.

This all comes following a series of events that are unwinding the prevailing ideas about global warming. “Climate is more unpredictable than anyone imagined,” said Green.

“Europe is coming apart at the seams” as their carbon-trading system has “melted down.” China has become the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter and the climate has stopped warming and started cooling,

Al Gore’s alarming depictions of global warming and the United Nation’s predictions used numerous assumptions to “pump up the estimates of how much a given quantity of greenhouse gas will increase heat retention. Those assumptions have been shown to be spurious on both theoretical and empirical grounds,” explained Green.