Heartland Update: Climate Engineering and the Fallacies in the EPA’s ANPR
Nicolas Loris /
Dr. Patrick Michaels, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute discussed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR). The EPA bureaucracy is trying to circumvent Congressional legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and regulate carbon dioxide and other GHGs under the Clean Air Act.
Heritage Foundations economists have covered the economic costs of the EPA’s ANPR:
• Cumulative gross domestic product (GDP) losses are nearly $7 trillion by 2029 (in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars), according to The Heritage Foundation/Global Insight model (described in Appendix A).
• Single-year GDP losses exceed $600 billion (in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars).
• Annual job losses exceed 800,000 for several years.
• Some industries will see job losses that exceed 50 percent.
Dr. Michaels talked about the science in the actual ANPR document and refuted a number of misleading statements. For instance, the technical support document to the ANPR says that complete disintegration of the Greeland Ice Sheet would take “many hundreds of years” to complete. In reality, it takes thousands of years of unrealistically high assumptions for carbon dioxide to do such a thing.