Driessen: Climate-change politics about power
Special to the Star-Telegram
America faces severe housing, financial, energy, food, unemployment and recessionary shocks. But legislators, bureaucrats and presidential candidates are poised to make them worse by imposing onerous climate change taxes and further restricting fossil fuel use.
Now the White House wants "reasonable and responsible" legislation to avert a "regulatory nightmare" from overlapping state and federal rules. It falsely assumes that costly federal regulations, emission mandates and hidden cap-and-trade taxes would be preferable.
Earth warmed a degree during the last quarter century as it emerged further from the Little Ice Age, and humans probably played a role. However, hundreds of scientists say there is no evidence of a looming climate catastrophe driven by human greenhouse gas emissions.
Our planet has experienced numerous climate shifts, they point out, including prolonged ice ages, a 400-year Medieval Warm Period and a 500-year Little Ice Age. Climate scientists still don't understand what caused these events -- or the temperature swings of the last century. As carbon dioxide levels steadily climbed, temperatures rose from 1910 to 1945, fell between 1945 and 1975 and increased again from 1975 to 1998, notes International Arctic Research Center founding director Syun-Ichi Akasofu.
Four of the 10 hottest years in U.S. history were in the 1930s. Average global temperatures stabilized in 1998 and then fell 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit the past 12 months, satellite measurements show. Ice core data demonstrate that higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels followed rising temperatures by hundreds of years -- contrary to climate chaos hypotheses.
Inconvenient facts like these force alarmists to resort to computer models that generate worst-case scenarios -- Frankenclime monsters that instill fear of climate Armageddon.
Climate models help researchers evaluate possible consequences of changing economic growth, emissions, cloud cover and other variables. But they cannot reproduce the actual climates of the past century, or make accurate predictions even one year in the future, much less 50.
Models reflect the assumptions and hypotheses that go into them -- and our still limited understanding of complex, turbulent climate processes that involve the sun, oceans, land masses, water vapor, precipitation, high cirrus clouds and other factors, notes MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen.
They place too much emphasis on carbon dioxide and pay insufficient attention to extraterrestrial factors like changes in the Earth's irregular orbit around the sun, solar energy levels, and solar winds that appear to influence the level of cosmic rays reaching Earth, and thus the formation of cloud cover and penetration of infrared solar radiation. They fail to incorporate the effects that periodic shifts in Pacific Ocean currents have on Arctic temperatures and sea ice.
They're as reliable as models for predicting August 2009 vacation weather or 2050 stock markets. They don't represent reality and must not be used to determine economic and energy policy.
Eighty-five percent of the energy that Americans use comes from fossil fuels. Less than 0.5 percent is wind power, which generates electricity only eight hours a day on average.
Nuclear provides 20 percent of U.S. electricity. More than half is produced by coal, because it's plentiful and affordable, and modern power plants emit few pollutants -- but do generate abundant plant food (the same carbon dioxide we exhale).
Any climate-change regime would impose new restrictions and higher prices for coal and gas-generated electricity, transportation, heating and manufacturing. Any facility that generates significant CO{-2} would be subject to strict regulation: bakeries, breweries, soft drink makers, factories, apartment and office buildings, dairy farms and countless others. Polar bear endangerment rules would add billions more in regressive taxes and regulations.
Climate alarmists like Al Gore want the U.S. to slash carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, even as developing countries continue their economic and emissions boom. The last time that the United States emitted such low amounts of CO{-2} was 1905!
If we head down this path, poor, minority and blue-collar families will get hammered. Millions of jobs will head overseas. And in the end, the sacrifices will make little difference, says a growing chorus of scientists, because our climate is not driven by carbon dioxide but by the same natural forces that caused climate changes since the dawn of time.
Climate-change politics is primarily about power: power to control -- and curtail -- the power we rely on to build, heat and cool our homes; produce raw materials, food and products; transport people and consumer goods; and support modern living standards.
It's about simulations, scenarios and monsters conjured up by computer models that should never be used to determine government policy -- especially on matters that profoundly affect livelihoods, living standards, lifespans, dreams and economic civil rights.
It's about the selection, production, conservation, taxation and prevention of energy; about access to real energy versus mandates to use futuristic, mostly illusory and certainly insufficient alternative energy; and about who decides how much energy we will have, where it will come from, what it will cost and whether there will be enough to lift more families out of poverty.
So hold onto your wallets -- and hope you can hold onto your homes, cars and jobs -- as you ride this wild political roller coaster.
