...any politician, of any country, who would vote for radical environmentalist legislation that would cripple their own economy, while literally doing absolutely nothing to reduce "global warming" should be kept away from sharp objects for their own self-protection. In NZ and Australia similar legislation to the US Waxman-Markey Bill is being looked at askance. Analysis of Waxman-Markey concludes ...in the year 2050 with an 83% emissions reduction the temperature reduction is (estimated) nine hundredths of one degree Fahrenheit, or two years of avoided warming...all together a scientifically meaningless, and economically ruinous project. It has to be asked if the Senators supporting such snake-oil lunacy are doing so with their eyes and ears open or shut, and whether they have any concern for the people they pretend to represent...more, here... and, while the warmists get more desperate, they talk of "treason". Bjorn Lomborg replies...reasonable people can differ over their interpretation of the Waxman-Markey bill. Even if we set aside its masses of pork-barrel spending and analyses that show it may allow more emissions in the US for the first decades, there are more fundamental problems with this legislation.At a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars annually, it will have virtually no impact on climate change. If all of the bill’s many provisions were entirely fulfilled, economic models show it would reduce the temperature by the end of the century by 0.11 degrees centigrade – reducing warming by less than 4 percent.
Even if every Kyoto-obligated country passed its own, duplicate Waxman-Markey bills – which is implausible and would incur significantly higher costs – the global reduction would amount to just 0.22 degrees centigrade by the end of this century. The reduction in global temperature would not be measurable in a hundred years, yet the cost would be significant and payable now.
Is it really treason against the planet to express some skepticism about whether this is the right way forward? Is it treason to question throwing huge sums of money at a policy that will do virtually no good in a hundred years? Is it unreasonable to point out that the inevitable creation of trade barriers that will ensue from Waxman-Markey could eventually cost the world 10 times more than the damage climate change could ever have wrought?
Today’s focus on ineffective and costly climate policies shows poor judgment. But I would never want to shut down discussion about these issues – whether it is with Gore, Hansen, or Krugman. Everybody involved in this discussion should spend more time building and acknowledging good arguments, and less time telling others what they cannot say. Wanting to shut down the discussion is simply treason against reason...more here...
