It is all too easy to forget what is at stake in the attempts by the Obama Administration and climate alarmists to implement climate alarmist policies in the US. One of the primary issues is whether the US would be wise to greatly increase the cost of energy used in the US by making it both much more expensive and much less reliable. A number of developed countries have already done so with very adverse results. China, India, and most less developed countries are doing little, if anything, along these lines on the reasonable argument that this would damage their economies, which they realize is where they need to make the most progress. But no one seems to consider that these policies would also cause immense damage to the US economy.
One of the primary reasons for the high US living standards has been very high energy use per person–one of the highest in the world. This high level of energy use minimizes human effort to provide goods and services by assisting humans by substituting mechanical energy and even automation. Making this use much more expensive, as the climate alarmists advocate, threatens to greatly damage our high living standard. This, in turn, endangers the environment by reducing the resources available for environmental preservation. It has been shown that the environment is best looked after in high income countries and worst looked after in lower income countries. Humans naturally place a higher priority on necessities rather than less immediate needs such as environmental protection.
Climate Alarmist Policies Have Already Had Very Adeverse Economic Effects on Other Developed Countries
We have already seen the economic effects that climate alarmist policies have had in other developed countries. The effects have been horrendous everywhere that they have been seriously implemented. And the same thing will happen here in the US if they should be adopted widely here.
Climate alarmists always claim that environmental protection measures have not had serious economic consequences and that climate alarmist policies will be no different. But this is nonsense since it depends on the magnitude of the resources used and the actual benefits that the measures have. What is being proposed now would have much more serious economic effects than any previous environmental measures.
The chief beneficiary of effective such US climate alarmist policies would be China. President Trump appears to even suspect that the economic impact of climate alarmist policies is the chief purpose behind China’s support of climate alarmist policies. Thus they may hope to surpass the US economically by getting the US and other developed economies to self-distruct their economies.
The effects of greatly increasing the costs of energy in other developed countries have been spectacular, as illustrated in two charts (here and here) used a couple of weeks ago. European electricity prices have doubled and even tripled. Citizens of particularly alarmist-oriented US states are paying much more than people living in other states. The state of South Australia has become the poster child of the resulting reduction in electric grid reliability with their continuing grid failures caused by using unreliable sources of electricity such as wind and solar.
What Have These Alarmist Policies Actually Achieved?
And what have these high cost and low energy reliability states and countries achieved? Much less than nothing. Humans and the environment would be much better off with both higher temperatures and atmospheric levels of CO2, not lower. So in the unlikely circumstance that these measures were actually successful in lowering both, these results would be bad, not good.
Fortunately, President Trump has taken some of the actions needed to reduce the effects in the US, but he needs to do much more if the US is to avoid most of the adverse effects of climate alarmist policies. The most important is to withdraw the USEPA GHG Endangerment Finding so that the expensive, counter-productive climate alarmist policies required by this Finding cannot be brought back at the next change in Administrations.
via Carlin Economics and Science
December 15, 2017 at 03:53PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 