Posted by
theoilpatchplug on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 8:27:48 PM
Campaign '08: After the coldest April in 11 years, John McCain offers a "market friendly" approach to global warming — saying we "have a genius for adapting, solving problems." But shouldn't the problems be real?
McCain is the last politician we'd accuse of pandering. His honesty, steadfastness and independence have earned him the right to call his campaign the Straight Talk Express.
So we were disappointed when, at an Oregon wind turbine manufacturer on Monday, he seemed to embrace the shaky environmentalist position on global warming.
Saying the costs of our reliance on fossil fuels "have added up now in the atmosphere, in the oceans and all across the natural world," he proposed that by 2050, the U.S. should reduce CO2 emissions to a level 60% below that emitted in 1990. The question is, why?
Cold water was thrown on the climate-change disaster hypothesis by the National Climate Data Center's recent announcement that last month was the coldest April in more than a decade and the 29th coolest since record keeping began 114 years ago.
The average temperature was 1 degree cooler than the average April temperature of the entire 20th century.
A few weeks ago, as North America was emerging from one of its coldest and snowiest winters in decades, the climate center issued a statement saying that snow cover on the Eurasian land mass had been the most extensive ever recorded, and that this March had been only the 63rd warmest since 1895.
On April 24, the World Wildlife Fund published a study, based on last September's data, showing that Arctic ice had shrunk from 13 million square kilometers to just 3 million. What the WWF omitted was that by March the Arctic ice had recovered to 14 million square kilometers and that the ice cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska was at the highest level ever recorded.
In fact, the United States already leads the world in both energy efficiency per unit of GDP and control of CO2 emissions. We recently pointed out that, according to the 2008 Index of Leading Economic Indicators, U.S. emissions grew by 6.6% from 1997 to 2004, vs. 18% for the world as a whole and 21.1% for those nations that signed the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases.
The U.S. reduced carbon emissions from natural gas and petroleum by 1.7% and 1.5% from 2005 to 2006 and coal emissions by 0.9%. Energy intensity (energy consumed per dollar of real GDP) fell more than 4% as total energy declined 0.9% and the U.S. economy expanded 3.3%.
We were pleased that McCain endorsed nuclear power as a pollution-free source of energy that can help us toward energy independence while reducing emissions. But the fact is that we will need more energy, not less, by 2050, from all sources. Both economic and technological growth will demand more.
The nation that first split the atom should first stop splitting hairs and revive nuclear power. We should also be taking more American oil out of our soil. We are the Saudi Arabia of coal. McCain is right about our ability to solve problems. The nation that put men on the moon can find a way to burn coal cleanly.
We definitely should not subsidize burning food in our gas tanks. McCain heroically opposed ethanol subsidies in 2000, running third in the Iowa caucuses, and he rightly opposes them today. And we have nothing against wind and solar, if they are economically competitive.
Our needs for more energy and less reliance on foreign sources are both real and solvable. Global warming is debatable, both as to its causes and its effects. By taking the lead on domestic energy, McCain could help solve a real problem and make a clear distinction between himself and his head-in-the-tundra opponents.
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, May 13, 2008 4:20 PM PT