***Here's something else that the government in DC is going to screw
up. --Al
Global Warming: Playing It Cool
Rich Tucker
Friday, May 16, 2008
Sorry, but is this a bad time to discuss global warming?
Here in the mid-Atlantic, the month of May has been a washout. Record
rainfall has made last year's drought seem like a distant memory. And the
temperature just can't seem to warm up. It feels more like March than May.
But maybe one month isn't a fair sample. "When you look at climate change,
you should not look at any particular year," cautions Michel Jarraud, the
World Meteorological Organization's secretary-general and a global-warming
proponent.
Well, then. Is 10 years long enough? As BBC news put it last month,
"temperatures have not risen globally since 1998 when El Nino warmed the
world."
Oh, but Jarraud has an answer to that, too. "La Nina is part of what we
call
'variability.' There has always been and there will always be cooler and
warmer years," he explained, "but what is important for climate change is
that the trend is up; the climate on average is warming, even if there is
a
temporary cooling because of La Nina."
Well, few people are meteorologists. But almost anybody can identify the
key
word in Jarraud's explanation: "variability." The weather in New York is
different from the weather in L.A., which is different from the weather in
Chicago. And tomorrow, the weather will be different in all three places.
Weather "varies."
But scientists aren't celebrating our decade of cooling. Since the planet
hasn't been getting any hotter, they now talk about how the problem is
"global climate change." But that shouldn't be a concern. The climate is
always changing, and there's simply no way for humans to alter that.
Oh, but we're going to try.
Next month, lawmakers in Washington (which might have warmed up to summer
temperatures by then) will take up a bill called "America's Climate
Security
Act." It aims to control global warming by reducing the amount of carbon
dioxide (you're exhaling some right now) our country emits.
The bill's complicated, of course. But it would do what government does
best: Attempt to address a problem by creating a bureaucracy to manage it.
That approach has failed completely with, say, education policy. But maybe
it'll work to cool the planet.
Tellingly, the proposed climate change bill relies heavily on a technology
known as "carbon capture and sequestration," where carbon from fossil
fuels
is, instead of being released into the air, collected and buried. But the
technology to do this doesn't exist yet, and may never exist.
Ironically, the entire bill is unnecessary.
Americans are increasingly interested in protecting the environment. We
don't
want to lose our jobs to do so (one study predicts that this bill would
cost
hundreds of thousands of jobs, especially manufacturing jobs). But
everyone
wants to live in a clean world.
If CO2 is a problem, American inventers will solve it. The market's demand
for a cleaner planet will force us to find ways to remove CO2. Meanwhile,
we'll
move past the internal combustion engine and find a fuel that burns
cleaner.
It's worth noting that our country could reduce its energy use right away
--
but the government stands in the way.
In the May edition of The Atlantic, Lisa Margonelli noted that "A 2005
report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that U.S.
industry
could profitably recycle enough waste energy -- including steam, furnace
gases, heat, and pressure -- to reduce the country's fossil-fuel use (and
greenhouse-gas emissions) by nearly a fifth."
Why don't we? Overregulation is a big reason. "The Clean Air Act has
succeeded spectacularly in reducing some forms of air pollution,"
Margonelli
writes, "but perversely, it has chilled efforts to reuse energy: because
many of these efforts involve tinkering with industrial exhaust systems,
they can trigger a federal or local review of the plant, opening a can of
worms some plant managers would rather keep closed."
Of course, the scope of the Clean Air Act pales in comparison to that of
the
Climate Security Act. Imagine the government attempting to manage the
output
from every manufacturing and power plant, under the guise of reducing
global
warming. It's a disaster in the making.
Around 1900, many forward thinkers worried about the future. How, they
wondered, would the United States deal with all the horses its urbanizing
culture would require in the 20th century? They couldn't foresee that the
automobile would completely replace the horse and solve that problem.
Today, in a country with more cars than drivers, we can't imagine an
economy
that doesn't depend on oil. But we'll develop one.
Washington should encourage that, perhaps by setting up some sort of prize
for the person who invents an effective hydrogen engine. But mostly by
staying out of the way and letting the market work.
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