Don's Tuesday column

              THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   9/04/2012

Lost jobs, economic decline over CO2 targets

Tonight’s Tea Party Patriots meeting will have a timely presentation by Elizabeth Woodward, who will explain how the Election Integrity Project works. This project has made tremendous strides to ensure fair elections. Mission statement: “The Election Integrity Project is a group of citizen volunteers seeking to fulfill our responsibility to actively participate in our Republic and ensure the integrity of the process that protects our freedoms and our way of life.” Find out more at http:\\electionintegrityproject.com.

Getting back to the costs of global-warming-hysteria-driven California public policy, the headline summed up what should be glaringly obvious: “Study: Families and state’s economy to pay dearly for global warming policies.” The sub headline further stated: “In 2020, families will pay annual hidden tax of $2,500; state and local annual lost revenue to hit $7.4 billion.” (Stephen Frank’s blog http://capoliticalnews.com/2012/07/27/) “These policies will create a large but hidden tax on families and will add new burdens to a fragile state economy,” said Jack Stewart, president of the California Manufacturers and Technology Association (CMTA).

Assembly Bill (AB) 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act, will, in addition to costing families annually between $1,300 (the “low case”) and $4,500 (the “high case”), also result in annual lost earnings of $900 by 2020. “The costs to families will start to mount immediately in 2013. Losses to employers and the state’s economy will be counted in the billions.” Passed in 2006, AB 32 puts a statewide cap on emissions that the warming alarmists believe are responsible for climate change.

I’ve stated that there has been no net warming in over 10 years. One chart shows none since 1979, according to the graph “LOWER TROPOSPHERE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE: 1979-2008” from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, with subsequent readings continuing a downward trend through October 2011. The subtitle of the graph further explains, “Since 2005, global temperatures have given back most of the warming that had occurred since 1980.” Roy Spencer, PhD, has a graph showing a 33-year net 0.25 degree Celsius increase. Graphs of extreme weather events such as tornados and hurricanes also show no increasing trend; what has increased, however, is media and news coverage due to technological advances.

“The study also shows that by 2020, California will have 262,000 fewer jobs and 5.6 percent less gross state product …” Those projections, as well as the $7.4 billion decline in tax revenue, are “based on an ‘optimistic’ scenario, where costs for each policy are assumed to be at the low end of a range of expected costs and the environmental goals are achieved.” That assumes there will be plenty of low-carbon fuels, limited demand outside of California for those same fuels, 2.5 percent energy efficiency improvements and “a significant reduction in vehicle miles traveled. Unfortunately, in the less-optimistic-but-probably-more-realistic scenario, per family costs rise to the aforementioned $4,500, while state and local revenues decline by $38.8 billion.

Bear in mind that no other states will follow us over the “cap and tax” cliff, and Republicans in Washington will never subject America to a national version of California’s lunacy. Not to worry, however, because if anyone starts to have second thoughts about legislative mandates, caps, costs and the impossible and unreliable goal of getting one-third of our electricity from “renewables,” Gov. Jerry Brown has launched a state-sponsored and funded website to refute climate change skeptics.

Meanwhile, scientists Richard Lindzen of MIT, Will Happer of Princeton and Roger Cohen of the American Physical Society penned an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, disputing fellow scientist Fred Krupp’s admonishment to conservatives and Republicans to get on the global warming bandwagon because, you see, only those on the political right resist the climate alarmist movement.

They wrote, “Some of the most formidable opponents of climate hysteria include the politically liberal physics Nobel laureate, Ivar Giaever; famously independent physicist and author, Freeman Dyson; environmentalist futurist, and father of the Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock; left-center chemist, Fritz Vahrenholt, one of the fathers of the German environmental movement, and many others who would bristle at being lumped into the conservative camp …

“It is increasingly clear that doubling CO2 is unlikely to increase global temperature more than about one degree Celsius, not the much larger values touted by the global warming establishment. In fact, CO2 levels are below the optimum levels for most plants, and there are persuasive arguments that the mild warming and increased agricultural yields from doubling CO2 will be an overall benefit for humanity. Let us debate and deal with serious, real problems facing our society, not elaborately orchestrated, phony ones, like the trumped-up need to drastically curtail CO2 emissions.”

Ask yourself how much sense it makes to impose monumental costs and economic dislocations and hardships in the futile pursuit of some magical number of parts-per-million (ppm) of CO2 molecules. Do you realize that the difference between 300 and 400 ppm over the course of 100 years would be like having a $10,003 investment grow to $10,004 over a century?

I challenge any of our enviro-liberalists to admit that they would favor global warming carbon capping policies no matter the disastrous impacts to California, America and our citizens, while weakening America’s economic standing and power in the world.