Promised Greenhouse Gas Emissions Cuts: A Useless Gesture
11/11/2015 06:15 PM ET
Environment: What would happen if every country taking part in the United Nations climate summit in Paris later this month cut its greenhouse gas emissions as they have pledged? The short — and long — answer is: nothing.
The goal of the Paris talks is "to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, with the aim of keeping global warming below" 2 degrees Celsius, or 36 Fahrenheit.
To reach this, countries have submitted their "intended nationally determined contributions," which outline how much they pledge to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.
The U.S., for example, promises that by 2025 it will have cut its greenhouse emissions 26% to 28% below 2005 levels.
If every country follows the U.S. lead that President Obama believes we should take, that should do it, right?
Global warming threat extinguished.
Climate crisis averted.
Don't believe it.
Those promised cuts will be useless in stopping Earth from warming as predicted by the models — profoundly flawed models, we should add, which have predicted heating over the past two decades that simply has not developed.
Those error-ridden models aside, the proposed cuts in emissions that many hope will be binding after the Paris conference is over will do nothing.
"Paris is being sold as the summit where we can help 'heal the planet' and 'save the world,'" Danish researcher Bjorn Lomborg says. "It is no such thing. If all nations keep all their promises, temperatures will be cut by just 0.05" degree Celsius."
That's not enough to even talk about, much less try to attain.
What if the cuts go even deeper?
Lomborg, president and founder of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, has figured that in, too: "Even if every government on the planet not only keeps every Paris promise, reduces all emissions by 2030 and shifts no emissions to other countries, but also keeps these emission reductions throughout the rest of the century, temperatures will be reduced by just 0.17 (degree Celsius) by the year 2100."
Actually, the emissions cuts would have a lasting effect, just not on the environment.
The big impact would be on the economy — where the disruptive nature of the lower-carbon regime would hurt a lot of families.
According to Energy Ventures Analysis, the Obama Clean Power Plan regulatory scheme — think of it as the U.S. contribution to the U.N. effort to lower global CO2 emissions — that seeks to slash emissions by 32% would increase household gas and electricity bills by nearly $700 a year over the next five years.
Meanwhile, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce report says the Clean Power Plan rules "threaten to suppress average annual U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by $51 billion."
Overall, they will "cause U.S. consumers to pay nearly $290 billion more for electricity between 2014 and 2030, or an average of $17 billion more per year."
At the same time, "the typical household could lose a total of $3,400 in real disposable income" because it is forced to pay higher energy costs.
Meanwhile, the stringent new rules will also kill American jobs, says the Chamber.
"On average," the report reads, "from 2014 to 2030, the U.S. economy will have 224,000 fewer jobs, with a peak decline in employment of 442,000 jobs in 2022.
"These job losses represent lost opportunities and income for hundreds of thousands of people that can never be recovered."
Those are some unreasonably steep prices to pay for a policy that does nothing to achieve its stated goals of cooling the planet.
But the attendees who jetted to the Paris climate summit will nevertheless insist on a worldwide agreement to cut emissions — after which they will demand even deeper cuts, because the ones they will just have agreed to will be found inadequate.
Then they will warn us, after jetting out of Paris and spewing CO2 emissions freely into the French skies, that it's our last chance to save ourselves — a hysterical story that activists have been spreading almost yearly since at least 2001.
The best way to save ourselves is to keep the activists who are pushing these emissions cuts from achieving their goals.
After all, they're far more dangerous than human CO2 output.
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