Heating up tax spheres

OPINION:

America faces severe housing, financial, energy, food, unemployment and recessionary shocks. But legislators, bureaucrats and presidential candidates seem intent on making them worse, by imposing onerous climate change rules and restricting fossil fuel development and use.

Even the White House now wants “reasonable and responsible” legislation, to avert a “regulatory nightmare” from overlapping state and federal climate rules. It falsely assumes costly federal regulations, emission mandates and hidden cap-and-trade taxes would be preferable.

Earth warmed a degree over the last quarter-century, as it emerged further from the Little Ice Age, and humans may have played a role. However, hundreds of scientists say there is no evidence of a looming climate catastrophe driven primarily 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 rose steadily, temperatures climbed 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 in the last 12 months, satellite measurements show. Ice core data demonstrate that higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels followed rising temperatures, by hundreds of years — the exact opposite of climate chaos hypotheses.

Inconvenient facts like these force alarmists to rely on computer models that generate Frankenclime monsters, to generate fear of climate Armageddon.

Climate models help scientists evaluate possible consequences of changing economic growth, emission, cloud cover and other variables. But they cannot reproduce the actual climate of the last 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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorology professor Richard Lindzen.

They place too much emphasis on carbon dioxide, and 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.

Different models often generate opposite climate scenarios for the same regions, University of Alabama at Huntsville climatologist John Christy points out. One says the Dakotas and Rio Grande Valley would become complete deserts; another says huge swamps.

They’re as reliable as computer predictions of August 2009 vacation weather or 2050 stock markets. They don’t represent reality and must not be used to determine economic and energy policy.

Of the energy Americans use, 85 percent comes from fossil fuels. Less than 0.5 percent is wind power, which is expensive and 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 is 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 CO2 would be subject to strict regulation: bakeries, breweries, soft drink makers, factories, apartment and office buildings, dairy farms and countless others.

Climate alarmists like Al Gore want to slash U.S. carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, even as developing countries continue their economic and emissions boom. The last time the United States emitted such low amounts of CO2 was 1905!

If we head down this path, poor, minority and blue-collar families will get hammered; millions of jobs will head overseas; and millions of people will need energy welfare, as government revenues shrivel. Draconian climate stabilization schemes may benefit a few, but will penalize many more.

In the end, the sacrifices won’t make a difference, because our climate is not driven by carbon dioxide — but by the same natural forces that caused major and minor climate changes since the dawn of time — say numerous experts, including the hundreds who signed the Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change (www.ClimateScienceInternational.org).

Climate change is now primarily about politics and 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 costly, unreliable, insufficient alternative energy. About who gets to decide: how much energy we will have, where that energy 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. You’re about to be put on a wild political roller coaster.

Paul Driessen is senior policy adviser for the Congress of Racial Equality and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, and author of “Eco-Imperialism: Green power — Black death” (www.Eco-Imperialism.com).