The Daily Signal reports the latest beclowning of this nation by Barack Obama:
President Obama’s opening remarks at the Paris climate agreement were effectively an apology for industrial progress. At the kickoff of the talks Obama remarked, “I’ve come here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second-largest emitter to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.”
Obama should not be apologizing for the economic growth that dramatically improved Americans’ and much of the world’s quality of life. Instead, the president should apologize for pushing costly and ineffective climate policies that will make us worse off and trap the world’s poorest citizens in poverty.
The Cost of Climate Policies
The real problem facing American households and businesses is the Obama administration’s climate policies. The administration has finalized a slew of regulations to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions. Known as the Clean Power Plan, the Environmental Protection Agency has required states to meet carbon dioxide emissions reduction goals for existing power plants.
At the same time, the EPA finalized a regulation capping emissions of carbon dioxide from new power plants so low as to effectively prevent any coal power plant from running without carbon capture and sequestration technology (which has yet to be proven feasible). The federal government also implemented climate regulations on vehicles, light and heavy-duty trucks, and fracking.
Heritage analysts modeled the cumulative costs of the Obama administration’s climate agenda by modeling the economic costs of a carbon tax. Taxing carbon dioxide energy incentivizes businesses and consumers to change production processes, technologies, and behavior in a manner comparable to the administration’s regulatory scheme – though neither regulations nor a tax is good policy. By 2030, Heritage economists estimate the damage would be:
- An average annual employment shortfall of nearly 300,000 jobs
- A peak employment shortfall of more than 1 million jobs
- A loss of more than $2.5 trillion (inflation-adjusted) in aggregate gross domestic product (GDP)
- A total income loss of more than $7,000 (inflation-adjusted) per person
The trade-off that Americans receive for higher electricity rates, unemployment, and lower levels of prosperity is not an appealing one. Even though electricity generation accounts for the single-largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, the estimated reduction is minuscule compared to global greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, even if you do believe the earth is heading to catastrophic warming, the warming mitigated by the president’s plan would be barely measurable – unlike the economic consequences.
Is Climate Change a Problem?
This “problem” of climate change is hardly one at all. Natural variations have altered the climate much more than man has. Proponents of global action on climate change will argue that 97 percent of the climatologists agree on climate change. There is significant agreement among climatologists, even those labeled as skeptics, that the earth has warmed moderately over the past 60 years and that some portion of that warming may be attributed to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. However, there is no consensus that temperatures are increasing at an accelerating rate.
In fact, the available climate data simply do not indicate that the earth is heading toward catastrophic warming or more frequent and severe natural disasters. Quite the opposite. The earth has experienced a pause in warming since 1998 and data shows that the climate is less sensitive to increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions than the climate models predicted. …
In his remarks, Obama stressed that “No nation — large or small, wealthy or poor — is immune.” Such a sentiment also holds true for climate policies. Policies that restrict the use of conventional fuels will make everyone poorer. And it’s the poorest that will suffer most.
The Republican Security Council posted this Sunday:
President Obama is a major champion of COP21, and his goal is a landmark global deal on limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
The result will be a grand bargain on emissions limits that future politicians are unlikely to obey.
China and India, the world’s top two carbon-emitting countries, will not be required to do anything until 2030.
Former Vice President Al Gore has been in Paris for the past week, and has recruited over 8000 “Climate Reality Presenters.” They are really cult members who never let facts stop them.
Liberals say nuclear is not the solution, but what they don’t recognize is that there is no solution without nuclear.
They claim to want a carbon-free world, but reject the technology that would make it happen.
Their major claim is to have overwhelming support from the scientific community, but according to the Pew Research Center, 65% of scientists favor building more nuclear power plants.
The applications now pending before Obama’s Department of Energy are for reactors which will cut the cost of nuclear power by 40 percent, making it far more competitive with fossil-fuel power plants.
They would be safer than existing reactors and reduce nuclear waste by 80 percent. Listed below are 10 key facts:
• 1) Nuclear power plants produce no air pollutants or greenhouse gases. Of all energy sources, nuclear has the lowest impact on the environment. It produces none of the air pollution that comes from burning fossil fuels.
• 2) Nuclear already supplies about 20 percent of the electricity produced in the United States, and 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity today.
In contrast, wind and solar power provide only 2 percent of our electricity and only 6 percent of our carbon-free electricity.
• 3) The rest of the world recognizes nuclear’s importance and its capacity is due to grow by 80 percent by 2030.
France already gets 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear and has among the lowest electricity rates and carbon emissions in Europe. France also exports power to the rest of Europe.
Russia is using nuclear to replace natural gas, which it is selling to Europe at six times the price.
Besides saving money, why is this needed? According to the International Energy Agency, the world demand for energy will grow 65 percent in the next five years.
• 4) The anti-nuclear movement was put together by Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda in the 1970s as a means of keeping the Vietnam-protest infrastructure alive.
After the accident at Three Mile Island and the 1979 release of the Hollywood horror movie “The China Syndrome,” about a hundred proposed reactors were canceled.
• 5) Liberals were successful in shutting down nuclear power for over 30 years and the technology was frozen in time. It was a very expensive choice for America.
If we had kept building our power grid could have been carbon-free years ago.
• 6) The major argument against nuclear power today is related to the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
16,000 people were killed by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, but nobody in Japan died from radiation.
In 2013 the United Nations said “no discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects are expected.”
• 7) Another major argument against nuclear power is the 1986 Chernobyl accident in the Soviet Union.
It was a direct result of both a faulty design and the operators’ incompetence.
Fewer than 50 people died at Chernobyl; by contrast, the American Lung Association estimates that smoke from coal-fired power plants kills about 13,000 people every year.
There have been several coal mine tragedies, devastating oil spills, and deadly explosions on natural-gas pipeline, but there has never been a death from a nuclear accident at an American commercial reactor.
There has never been a nuclear-related death aboard an American nuclear Navy vessel, either.
• 8) The good news is that even President Obama is offering rhetorical support for nuclear power, but he really doesn’t mean it. His Energy Department will not approve the new reactor designs which would dramatically lower costs and significantly expand the use of nuclear power.
Obama needs to support the nuclear industry with more than words, and this is similar to the battle against the Islamic State. In both instances, the President’s rhetoric is admirable, but he has no winning strategy.
• 9) Solutions for the problems posed by nuclear waste have made great progress, and might soon be solved.
Technologies such as hybridize fission and fusion may run on depleted uranium.
In 2008, the Department of Energy originally applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to construct and operate a deep geologic repository at Yucca Mountain.
It is located in the Nevada desert about 100 miles from Las Vegas, and it has been under consideration since the early 1980s. Seven miles of tunnels have already been constructed through the mountain.
In addition, over $15 billion has been spent to determine if it would be a safe repository for our nation’s nuclear waste.
The NRC issued a five volume study and says the repository can safely isolate used fuel for 1 million years.
Today the Yucca Mountain site has been abandoned and there will be no progress during the Obama administration.
• 10) The GOP House has already passed legislation to help new reactor technology and out nuclear national laboratories, but it has been stopped by a Senate filibuster.The Republican Party advocates the construction of 100 new nuclear power plants in the next two decades because it will help the environment and provide low-cost, predictable power at stable prices.
If you think being opposed to “low-cost, predictable power at stable prices” that “will help the environment” seems strange, wait until you read this from Investors Business Daily:
We’re talking, of course, about the annual confab at Davos, Switzerland, 5,120 feet up in the Swiss Alps, presumably high enough to give the 40 heads of state and 2,500 billionaires, businessmen, CEOs, rock stars, assorted royals and politicians at least a metaphorical view of the whole world.
Davos was once a semi-serious event dedicated to business executives gathering to talk about common problems and how to solve them.
But it’s turned into a preachy, weeklong exercise in excess, during which the same people who flew 1,700 private jets to attend — yes, someone counted them — lecture the rest of us about the importance of cutting back on our carbon footprints and other things.
“Decision makers meeting in Davos must focus on ways to reduce climate risk while building more efficient, cleaner and lower-carbon economies,” Mexico’s former President Felipe Calderon told USA Today.
“The purpose,” said former vice president and climate-change entrepreneur Al Gore, standing with hip-hop star Pharrell Williams, “is to have a billion voices with one message, to demand climate action now.”
OK, so how about you flying commercial, for a start?
This year’s ration of ridiculousness and hypocrisy is so prominent, even the media have noticed.
It’s pretty obvious that people who can pay $40,000 to attend Davos and fork over $43 for a hot dog, $47 for a burger or $55 for a Caesar salad — all actual prices at this year’s World Economic Forum — would seem to be in a poor position to lecture the rest of us.
Even so, Bloomberg highlights remarks by subprime mortgage billionaire Jeffrey Greene that “America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence. We need to reinvent our whole system of life.”
Greene, according to Bloomberg, “flew his wife, children and two nannies on a private jet plane to Davos for the week.” How’s that for “less things”? His remarks are more than a little ironic, given one of the main themes of Davos this year: “Income inequality,” or getting the rich to pay their “fair share.”
Then there’s that pesky gender gap, another major topic — at a conference where women make up just 17% of all attendees.
Increasingly, it seems, some think their wealth entitles them to run our lives instead of their businesses.
Matt Ridley adds:
The climate change debate has been polarized into a simple dichotomy. Either global warming is “real, man-made and dangerous,” as Pres. Barack Obama thinks, or it’s a “hoax,” as Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe thinks. But there is a third possibility: that it is real, man-made and not dangerous, at least not for a long time.
This “lukewarm” option has been boosted by recent climate research, and if it is right, current policies may do more harm than good. For example, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and other bodies agree that the rush to grow biofuels, justified as a decarbonization measure, has raised food prices and contributed to rainforest destruction. Since 2013 aid agencies such as the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank have restricted funding for building fossil-fuel plants in Asia and Africa; that has slowed progress in bringing electricity to the one billion people who live without it and the four million who die each year from the effects of cooking over wood fires.
In 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was predicting that if emissions rose in a “business as usual” way, which they have done, then global average temperature would rise at the rate of about 0.3 degree Celsius per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 to 0.5 degree C per decade). In the 25 years since, temperature has risen at about 0.1 to 0.2 degree C per decade, depending on whether surface or satellite data is used. The IPCC, in its most recent assessment report, lowered its near-term forecast for the global mean surface temperature over the period 2016 to 2035 to just 0.3 to 0.7 degree C above the 1986–2005 level. That is a warming of 0.1 to 0.2 degree C per decade, in all scenarios, including the high-emissions ones.
At the same time, new studies of climate sensitivity—the amount of warming expected for a doubling of carbon dioxide levels from 0.03 to 0.06 percent in the atmosphere—have suggested that most models are too sensitive. The average sensitivity of the 108 model runs considered by the IPCC is 3.2 degrees C. As Pat Michaels, a climatologist and self-described global warming skeptic at the Cato Institute testified to Congress in July, certain studies of sensitivity published since 2011 find an average sensitivity of 2 degrees C.
Such lower sensitivity does not contradict greenhouse-effect physics. The theory of dangerous climate change is based not just on carbon dioxide warming but on positive and negative feedback effects from water vapor and phenomena such as clouds and airborne aerosols from coal burning. Doubling carbon dioxide levels, alone, should produce just over 1 degree C of warming. These feedback effects have been poorly estimated, and almost certainly overestimated, in the models.
The last IPCC report also included a table debunking many worries about “tipping points” to abrupt climate change. For example, it says a sudden methane release from the ocean, or a slowdown of the Gulf Stream, are “very unlikely” and that a collapse of the West Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets during this century is “exceptionally unlikely.”
If sensitivity is low and climate change continues at the same rate as it has over the past 50 years, then dangerous warming—usually defined as starting at 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels—is about a century away. So we do not need to rush into subsidizing inefficient and land-hungry technologies, such as wind and solar or risk depriving poor people access to the beneficial effects of cheap electricity via fossil fuels.
As the upcoming Paris climate conference shows, the world is awash with plans, promises and policies to tackle climate change. But they are having little effect. Ten years ago the world derived 87 percent of its primary energy from fossil fuels; today, according the widely respected BP statistical review of world energy, the figure is still 87 percent. The decline in nuclear power has been matched by the rise in renewables but the proportion coming from wind and solar is still only 1 percent.
Getting the price of low-carbon energy much lower will do the trick. So we should spend the coming decades stepping up research and development of new energy technologies. Many people may reply that we don’t have time to wait for that to bear fruit, but given the latest lukewarm science of climate change, I think we probably do.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
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