Oh, just as now he wants "Lower Fuel Prices" - hahahahaha
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11/06/2000
High Cost of Gore’s Enviro Proposals
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By Aimee Welch
welch@insightmag.com
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Al Gore’s proposal to force the nation to comply with the radical Kyoto Protocol could increase the price of gasoline another 66 cents a gallon and disrupt the U.S. economy.
As winter sets in and Americans struggle to budget for extraordinarily high fuel costs at the gas pump and for home-heating oil, Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee, tells voters he is looking for a solution to the crisis. “I think that we need to get serious about this energy crisis, both in the Congress and in the White House, and if you entrust me with the presidency I will tackle this problem and focus on new technologies that will make us less dependent on big oil or foreign oil,” he told a national TV audience during his first debate against GOP presidential nominee George W. Bush. But “Presidential-Promises” Gore and “Environmental-Guru” Gore have a hard time meshing their messages.
Gore claims he will fight for the people to bring down their energy costs, conveniently omitting references to the environmentalist argument that he’s been making for decades: namely, that high energy costs could be just what the Earth-doctor ordered to save an ailing planet from the scourge of human energy consumption.
Just this past April he rereleased his controversial 1992 environmental treatise, Earth in the Balance, saying he stood by every word of it. This is the book in which the vice president says a government-induced hike in fuel prices would be “one of the logical first steps in changing our policies in a manner consistent with the more responsible approach to the environment.” Ultimately, saving the Earth will require “a bold effort to change the very foundation of our civilization,” he says.
Why? Because, as he explains in his book, he is convinced that humanity’s activities on planet Earth are causing global climate changes that will usher in doomsday for the world. Of special concern to Gore are carbon emissions released in the burning of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal). He claims the emissions are causing a global temperature increase that could have all manner of devastating results — from melting the polar ice caps and causing massive flooding to increased incidence of cancer from too much exposure to the sun to destruction of delicate species of all sorts. No cost is too high to stop this warming trend, he argues. Protecting the environment, Gore writes, should be “the central organizing principle” of U.S. government.
In December 1997, Gore led the U.S. delegation at a meeting of representatives from 160 countries in Kyoto, Japan, where an agreement that has come to be known as the Kyoto Protocol set emissions reduction targets for developed nations to be reached between 2008 and 2012. The protocol signed by Gore called for emissions 8 percent below 1990 levels for the European Union, 7 percent for the United States and 6 percent for Japan. Further negotiations on the agreement are set for The Hague the week after the U.S. presidential elections.
How much of this can be achieved by executive order is anybody’s guess, but ratification by the U.S. Senate is unlikely. On July 25, 1997, the Senate passed the Byrd-Hagel resolution (S.Res.98) 95-0, formally expressing opposition to U.S. involvement in any treaty that posed economic hardship to the United States or failed to include developing nations.
How much it would cost the United States to comply with the Kyoto Protocol has been the subject of much speculation. Costs probably would be highest were the United States actually to reduce its emissions by the designated amount (estimated to be 30 percent lower than they otherwise would be in 2010) but somewhat lower if the United States were to purchase emission rights from developing nations that didn’t need their full ration of emission permits.
Americans at the gas pumps take note: The Energy Information Administration, an independent governmental agency, estimates that U.S. compliance could cost as much as $348 per ton of carbon emissions, raising gasoline prices 66 cents per gallon and shrinking production by 4.2 percent. A study by Yale University economist William Nordhaus pegged the costs of compliance with this Gore enthusiasm at $2,000 per household per year. A more optimistic July 1998 study by the Council of Economic Advisers said that in the right scenario costs of compliance could be as low as $14 per ton of carbon emissions, raising gasoline prices just 5 cents per gallon and shrinking the gross domestic product by only 0.1 percent.
But it’s not just the cost of the Kyoto requirements that is in dispute. First, many estimates of global-warming reductions to be achieved by these costs are negligible. The computer model from the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research reportedly finds that if the entire world reduced its greenhouse-gas emissions by about 5 percent, as the Kyoto Protocol proposes, the Earth’s mean temperature would be only .07 degrees Celsius lower in 2050 than it would be without the proposed cutbacks. Furthermore, despite Gore’s claims to the contrary, even a cursory review of scientific literature reveals that much uncertainty remains in the scientific community as to whether there is global warming and (if so) whether human activity is its cause. Some reputable climatologists even suggest that moderate global warming could have a host of positive results, such as increased crop yield to keep food supplies in stride with human population growth.
“In order to justify the enormous expenses associated with the Kyoto Protocol, we would need to determine — with absolute certainty — that a) the earth is warming, b) humans are causing it, c) there is a way to stop it and d) the effects would be overwhelmingly negative,” said Myron Ebell, the director of global-warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, last July. “There are uncertainties for each of those steps.”
Gore is not troubled by uncertainty, and his book has been the source of much amusement among his political opponents. The Republican National Committee issued a press release on Sept. 28, declaring: “Gore wants higher fuel costs.” According to the release, the federal government’s Producer Price Index showed that fuel prices at the pump had skyrocketed 12.9 percent in August and September while home-heating oil was up 30.6 percent. “Think that’s high?” asks the release. “Gas prices will jump another 65 cents a gallon if Al Gore is elected president, according to the nonpartisan Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, all thanks to Gore’s risky Kyoto treaty. Plus, the United Mine Workers Union calculates the treaty will throw 1.7 million Americans out of work and into unemployment lines.”
Also attacking from the right with the rerelease of Earth in the Balance was Jack Kemp, who published a column last spring proclaiming “today’s energy-price crunch foreshadows life under a Gore presidency.” Kemp said he had no doubt that, left to market forces, the price of oil would fall — but that “the real danger in today’s oil spike is that if Gore is elected president, it will provide the cover for a new Gore administration to replace OPEC [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] production controls with federal government taxes and regulation to keep the price of oil up.” Kemp prophesied, “Believe me, when OPEC’s cohesion finally dissolves and the price of oil is set to decline again, if Gore is in the White House he will be first in line to propose new taxes and regulations to keep the price of oil from falling. Read Al’s book.”
From the left, Green Party presidential nominee Ralph Nader also has attacked Gore’s environmental record, describing it as “atrocious.”
“Everywhere you follow the tracks of Al Gore, there is betrayal,” Nader told a crowd of thousands at a campaign stop in Boston on Oct. 9. On a Sept. 27 stop in Liverpool, Ohio, he called Gore’s earlier environmentalist expressions “phony populist rhetoric that Mr. Gore has tried to sell the American public in this election year.” He continued, “Al Gore knows how to talk the talk on environmentalism and public health, but when it comes time to stand up to corporate power and get results, he won’t even attempt to walk the walk.”
In an August appearance on Meet the Press Nader elaborated, “What has [sic] Gore and Clinton done on solar energy? They’ve supported subsidies to fossil fuels and nuclear [energy]. They haven’t really pushed the transformation of our country into energy independence. We’re importing more oil than ever before. … Above all, they’ve given the auto companies a free ride. Eight years without any increased fuel-efficiency standards. Reagan-Bush couldn’t have done worse than that.”
Despite Nader’s green rhetoric, environmental groups including the Sierra Club gave Gore their endorsement, praising Nader’s record but deeming him unelectable. Jerry Taylor of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington agrees and says that Gore’s actual policies have not come close to matching his environmental rhetoric. To do so, Taylor says, “would be political suicide.”
Nonetheless, if Gore were elected president and he tried to keep his campaign promises, Taylor says there is no way of knowing how much the proposals Gore has endorsed would cost to implement. But, says Taylor, “I’m not one of those who thinks a Gore presidency would mean this crazy leap into the enviro-socialist unknown. Look how the public is reacting with a market-induced spike in energy prices — think how they would react if the spike were government induced.” As Bush put it during the second presidential debate, “Now that energy prices are high, I guess he’s not advocating those big energy taxes. …”
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