Enviroscam: Pew Emits Global Warming Hype

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change recently released its agenda to combat so-called global warming in a report entitled “Agenda for Climate Action.”  Like most left-wing environmentalists’ call to arms, it is a mish mash of bad science and economics, although for once there is some honesty:  “Addressing climate change is not a cost-free proposal.”

Beyond that, there are the usual scare tactics: “The well-established link between increasing temperatures and human activities such as fossil fuel combustion and deforestation makes it necessary to act now to curb our influence on the earth’s climate.”  Yet doubts about the link persist.  A recent article in Geophysical Research Letters notes that, “Natural climatic excursions may be much larger than we imagine. So large, perhaps, that they render insignificant the changes, human-induced or otherwise, observed during the past century.” Another article in Quarternary Science Reviews written by various paleoclimatologists stated that natural factors may play a much larger role in affecting temperature than previously thought, thereby “devaluing the impact of anthropogenic emissions and affecting future predicted scenarios.” The authors also throw some cold water on the Kyoto Protocol: “If that turns out to be the case, agreements such as the Kyoto protocol that intend to reduce emissions of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, would be less effective than thought.” 

Pew calls for a Kyoto-type solution to global warming.  One such solution is an “economy-wide cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases.”  According to the report, “A cap on emissions would send an economy-wide signal favoring reductions, and emissions trading would ensure that reductions are achieved at the lowest possible costs.”  The second such solution in the report is to convert the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards into a “tradable corporate average CO2” emissions program.  Under such a system a car manufacturer “whose emissions are below the average” in a given year “would earn allowances…that could be banked [or] sold to other manufacturers.” 

The belief in the plausibility of a cap-and-trade system is based on the relatively successful cap-and-trade system that was instituted in the U.S. to deal with sulfur dioxide.  Yet when the U.S. adopted this policy in the late 1980s, technologies to deal with sulfur dioxide, like low-sulfur coal and smokestack scrubbers, were already in existence.  There is no such comparable technology for carbon dioxide. 

It is also worthwhile to note that most countries involved in the Kyoto Protocol will fall far short of their carbon-dioxide reduction target.  According to the BBC, “The European Environment Agency says that the 15 longest-standing members of the EU are likely to cut emissions to just 2.5% below 1990 levels.”

Finally, Pew calls for a significant “ramp up” of government tax credits and subsidies for renewable energy.  These include “a longer-term extension of the federal production tax credit (PTC) currently available to some GHG [greenhouse gas]-emission-free generation,” and “extend the same credit to other zero-GHG electricity sources,” presumable wind and solar.  The report also states that, “Federal policies and R&D funding should support the use of ethanol and biodiesel today, and drive toward more advanced uses of biomass in the future.”  Such policies amount to throwing more money down the sinkhole.  The federal and state governments have been providing tax credits and subsidies for renewable energy for over two decades.  However, biomass, solar and wind still only provide barely 3% of our energy needs.

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change continues to promote hype on global warming and ineffective, if not harmful, policies to combat it.  Hopefully, its most recent report will be largely ignored.