Under The Weather
Climate: A group of scientists recommends to the United Nations a worldwide carbon tax and a ceiling on increases in the Earth’s temperature. The first is bad economics. The second is bad science.
Publication: IBD; Date:2007 Mar 01; Section:Issues & Insights; Page Number: A12
Two years and 166 pages after they began their research, 18 scientists presented their findings Tuesday before the U.N. They offered a host of recommendations, but none was quite so foolish as their plans for creating a worldwide carbon tax regime and establishing a ceiling for global temperature.
The report was, of course, laced with scary scenarios of vicious storms, catastrophic sea-level increases, drought, disease and a flood of environmental refugees. The scientists quite naturally pleaded for billions in research dollars for developing fuels that burn cleaner, because, after all, they need something to do, having just completed their latest U.N.-funded project.
To finance their little war on global warming, the scientists suggest a carbon tax.
But outside of the minds of these scientists and the environmental lobby, has it been clearly shown that a carbon tax is necessary to protect the planet? Not to our satisfaction, nor to the satisfaction of many scientists and policymakers. Al Gore brashly claims the debate is over, but Al Gore isn’t telling the truth.
And what of the economic costs of a carbon tax? Taxes always exact an economic toll, and the effects of a carbon tax would be no different. Raising energy prices so that the lower emissions goals prescribed by the Kyoto protocol can be met could cost as much as 3.5% of the U.S. GDP. The costs are higher in Europe’s developed nations. Job losses in almost inconceivably large numbers would plague economies across the world. Millions of jobs would be lost.
The dizzying effects of tax fever afflicted scientists’ thinking so severely that they actually support a scheme that caps world temperature increases. Their goal is to keep the temperature from rising no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit between now and 2100.
To this crackpot endeavor we say “good luck.” There’s little man can do stop Earth from warming, if that is what it’s going to do in its natural cycle, just as there’s little man can do to stop it from cooling, if that’s where the global climate is headed.
Humans have fought against the elements and tried to shape their world throughout their existence, and have done an admirable job. Look around. It seems arrogant to us, though, to believe that we can actually place a numerical cap on how much the temperature can rise over the next 93 years. The variables outside our control — solar activity, for one glaring example — are too great.
The global warming faithful have little choice but to cling to their insistence on a cap. If they were to admit that humankind couldn’t limit temperature rises, then the whole theory about human activity warming the planet would go out the window.
But don’t think that would put them out of business. They would just come back through the front door in about 10 years blathering hysterically about the grave dangers of an impending ice age. |
