Possibly the scariest outcome from Super Tuesday is that the top three candidates to become president all support a cap-and-trade approach to global warming. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) are all smart and capable leaders, but they also have been completely engrossed in White House politics for more than a year. Hopefully when they have the time to examine recent evidence they will reject their current proposals, which include costly carbon limits that will harm our economy without positively affecting the climate at all.
The failure of the European Union’s cap-and-trade system is now well established. Due to the inherent difficulty of documenting the carbon reductions necessary for any carbon cap-and-trade plan, the price of carbon never rose to the price needed to reduce emissions. Worse, should the U.S. adopt any cap-and-trade plan, the cost to our economy would be anywhere between 4% and .1% of GDP. Furthermore, even if a U.S. cap-and-trade plan met Kyoto’s ambitious goals, the Earth’s surface temperature would be reduced by an imperceptible 0.14°F per 50 years.
Rather than trying to ratchet down emissions with existing technologies — something that is proving to be both elusive and prohibitively expensive — we should focus on developing the next generation of energy technologies that emit less carbon. Research also shows that investing in measures to mitigate the effect of climate change (rather than attempt to block the change) will both save lives and make it easier for the developing world to achieve sustainable economic growth.
Quick Hits:
- Unlike the authors of the December National Intelligence Estimate, even Russia thinks the launch of an Iranian rocket into space raises suspicion over the true aim of its nuclear program.
- Senate Republicans narrowly defeated Senate Democrat efforts to add some $40 billion in deficit spending to the impending economic stimulus bill.
- U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned that the future of NATO is at risk due to the unwillingness of some member states to risk combat casualties in Afghanistan.
- George Soros is teaming up with anti-free trade crusaders the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to form a new political organization called Fund for America.
- A federal judge in San Francisco, with no military training or expertise and no training or expertise in marine biology, has overruled the National Marine Fisheries Service and ordered the U.S. Navy to establish sonar-free zones around sensitive marine life world wide. The judge’s order applies to areas off the coast of California, offshore from Ecuador, near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and even in the Mediterranean Sea. Magistrate Elizabeth Laporte even ordered the Navy to negotiate details of the restrictions with the environmental groups that filed the lawsuit.