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Wednesday, May 19, 2010

CHUCK ROGÉR: JUNK SCIENCE, DECEIT, AND DESTRUCTION

Time again for me to ask a question that I've asked before: "How are your horse and buggy skills?"

Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman have come up with an utterly dishonest and lethal piece of legislation called the "American Power Act." The APA is the subject of an exposé by Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels, who writes that...

…[the APA] mandates the impossible, will not produce any meaningful reduction of planetary warming, and it will subsidize just about every form of power that is too inefficient to compete today.

Just how sublimely unrealistic is the bill?

…APA will allow the average American the carbon dioxide emissions of the average citizen back in 1867, a mere 39 years from today.  Just like Waxman-Markey, the sponsors have absolutely no idea how to accomplish this.  Instead they wave magic wands for noncompetitive technologies like “Carbon Capture and Sequestration” (“CCS”, aka “clean coal”), solar energy and windmills, and ethanol (“renewable energy”), among many others.

To get a feeling for how silly it would be to rely on wind and solar energy to drive us to an absurd goal of 83% reduction in CO2 emissions (the APA target), please refer to my May 14 blog post on the extreme cost disadvantage of the two technologies. The bottom line is that Kerry and Lieberman--and other global warming zealots interested in wealth redistribution--are simply assuming that if government taxes carbon-based energy enough, then the people will reduce usage by the 83% in 39 years demanded by the legislation. Envision $20-a-gallon gasoline and you'll have a picture of the level of pain that the Kerry-Lieberman strategy invites.

Michaels has another way of painting a portrait for us.

Getting to that 83% requires getting rid of carbon emissions from power production.  Period.  In 39 years. Got a replacement handy?

Adding details:

Anyway, just for fun, I plugged the APA emissions reduction schedule into the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change (MAGICC — I am not making this up), which is what the United Nations uses to estimate the climatic effects of various greenhouse-gas scenarios.

The two graphs below show the results of Michaels's calculations.





The graphs show the anticipated rise in average global temperatures by 2050 and 2100 for three different scenarios.

 

1st bar-BLUE: Business as usual. In other words, the planet will experience the temperature increases shown from climatic change that's been going on for 12,000 years since the end of the last major ice age. Humans didn't cause the ice to form in the first place, didn't cause it to melt, and haven't done a thing to cause the speed-up in melting that started about 160 years ago.

2nd bar-PURPLE: Kerry/Lieberman's APA gets implemented but only the U.S. follows the mandates called for in the bill.

3rd bar-YELLOW: APA with all Kyoto Protocol countries, including the U.S., following the bill's mandates.


What do the graphs tell us?

If we implement the APA, send civilization back to 1867 energy profiles, decimate the world's economies, and make life generally miserable, we'll affect the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere enough to reduce the average global temperature by about eight one-hundredths of a Celsius degrees by 2050 and about a fifth of a degree by 2100. In other words, crippling the world economy buys nothing, zilch, nada, rien--not a darned thing in the way of "stopping global warming."

So what is the APA all about? The same thing that global warming religionists are always about: wealth redistribution. Warmists want money to be taken from carbon-intensive energy producers so that the confiscated funds can be given to "green" producers, in which the religionists of course are heavily invested. If the massive fraud gets implemented into law, we will also see a huge outflow of American wealth to other countries who, according to the warmists, need our money to "catch up" with us, technologically speaking.

Never again will any form of "cap-and-trade" be justified on an America-only, economically sound basis. Such justification is impossible.

Curious that the Kerry-Lieberman legislation is labeled the "American Power Act," isn't it? Wonder why the Senators don't call their bill "Cap-and-Trade" or the "Global Warming Reduction Act."

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© 2010 Chuck Rogér

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