Obama and Kyoto II: A Wealth Redistributionist's Dream, America's Nightmare

This is part one of a ten part series on 10 Dangerous U.N. Schemes Obama Could Buy Into. The rest of the series will be written by guest authors. Tomorrow’s installment will be on the Law of the Sea Treaty and written by Sonlit Knight of A Newt One.

 

2008 will be the coldest year of the decade.

For the record, carbon dioxide emissions have not decreased worldwide.  In fact, a 2006 article says they are accelerating.  The atmospheric density of carbon dioxide stands at 384 parts per million, a level Dr. James Hansen says is terrifying.

The sun, however, has done something different this year.  There was a glaring absence of sunspots:

“August 2008 has made solar history. As of 00 UTC September 1st 2008 (5PM PST) we just witnessed the first spotless calendar month since June 1913.This was determined according to sunspot data from NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center, which goes back to 1749. In the 95 years since 1913, we’ve had quite an active sun, but activity has been declining in the last few years.

Despite the fact that it has actually cooled a third of a degree since “An Inconvenient Truth” was released, and despite the belief that we will experience cooling until 2015, there are currently bureaucrats from over 200 countries meeting in Poland to discuss how to curb the emission of carbon dioxide, the only possible cause of the warming of the Earth.  (By the way, the meeting to discuss curbing carbon dioxide contributed another 13,000 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere.)

Our new president has said that climate change is going to be a top priority to his administration, opening the door to the United States possibly joining the rest of the world in the next Kyoto Protocol.

Carbon Dioxide is a Dangerous Pollutant

On October 16, Barack Obama said he would order the Environmental Protection Agency to “use the 1990 Clean Air Act to set emissions limits on power plants and manufacturers.”

Bloomberg.com wrote:

Placing heat-trapping pollutants in the same category as ozone may lead to caps on power-plant emissions and force utilities to use the most expensive systems to curb pollution. The move may halt construction plans on as many as half of the 130 proposed new U.S. coal plants.

Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that his policy would bankrupt anyone trying to start a new coal burning power plant and would cause electrical prices to “necessarily skyrocket.”

This is because of the aggressive cap and trade system he plans on creating, which means, “every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter.”  The Atlantic reports Obama promised to “use the proceeds the government earns from auctioning off the pollution credits to invest in green jobs.” 

The current Kyoto Protocol uses a cap and trade system also, and it isn’t much of a stretch to see Obama committing the country to the sequel.  Two questions come to mind:  how did the first treaty work out and what would this cost the United States?

The “Success” of Kyoto

President Bush has been castigated by the environmental lobby for his refusal to participate in the Kyoto Protocol.  But what isn’t brought up is that from 2000-2006, the United States “net greenhouse gas emissions fell 3%.”  From 1997-2004, our emissions rose 6%.  The nations participating in Kyoto?  Not so good:

…during the last decade the United States has had the best record among industrialized nations in restraining GHG emissions. Between 1997 and 2004, the last year for which comparative data are available: —global GHG emissions increased 18 percent; —emissions from Kyoto Protocol participants increased 21.1 percent; —emissions from non-Kyoto nations increased 10 percent; —emissions from the United States increased 6.6 percent.  (h/t Q and O)

There is massive fraud, waste and abuse in the Kyoto system also.  For example, the countries committed to Kyoto “have paid more than €4.7 billion to eliminate an obscure greenhouse gas called HFC-23.”   However, the cost of the necessary incinerators is less than €100 million. Where did the rest go?  “Most of the difference in such schemes goes to the foreign government, such as China’s communist regime.”

David Victor and Michael Wara of Stanford University researched the cap and trade system used by the United Nations and found billions of dollars of waste:

A working paper from two senior Stanford University academics examined more than 3,000 projects applying for or already granted up to $10bn of credits from the UN’s CDM funds over the next four years, and concluded that the majority should not be considered for assistance. “They would be built anyway,” says David Victor, law professor at the Californian university. “It looks like between one and two thirds of all the total CDM offsets do not represent actual emission cuts.”

The paper also found “that nearly every new hydro, wind and natural gas-fired plant expected to be built in China in the next four years is applying for CDM credits, even though it is Chinese policy to encourage these industries.”

“Traders are finding ways of gaining credits that they would never have had before. You will never know accurately, but rich countries are clearly overpaying by a massive amount,” said Victor.

China isn’t the only nation receiving money via the cap and trade system of the Kyoto Protocol.  Russia is as well.  Under the system, New Zealand has to pay Russia “4.1 billion dollars by 2012 to purchase carbon credits to offset the increase in CO2 emissions beyond mandated Kyoto targets.”  There is some concern that the money could be used to fund a war against Georgia.  Australia is in the same boat.  We might be as well, if we were following Al Gore’s advice.

In June of 2008, Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish author and professor at the Copenhagen Business School, estimated the global cost of Kyoto to be $180 billion dollars.  Money going from the rich industrialized countries, to the poorer countries, like China and Russia.

Somewhere, Maurice Strong is laughing.

What Would It Cost Americans

Arthur Laffer studied the cost of a cap and trade system in America.  His conclusions were troubling.  A 4.2% reduction in the economy, rise in unemployment, decline in the stock market value are listed among the consequences, consequences we are already suffering from another Democratic social experiment.

Remember the promise Obama made above to use money to fund green technology.  That’s just big corporations are counting on it:

“Cap-and-trade is a simply dreadful policy option that is being pushed by Alcoa, BP, Caterpillar, Conoco Phillips, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Dupont, General Electric, PepsiCo and the other big business interests that belong to the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP),” said the FEEI’s Tom Borelli. “Global warming pork-barrel spending and corporate welfare are what they’re after,” Borelli added.

 

“USCAP members hope that, through a cap-and-trade scheme, Congress will simply give them and other special interests what amounts to essentially ‘free money’ — as much as $1.3 trillion dollars over the next 10 years under legislation recently introduced by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) — as well as other competitive business advantages,” explained Milloy. “Not only is cap-and-trade likely to misdirect taxpayer monies and rob hard-working Americans of income, it’s not at all clear that it will produce any environmental benefits whatsoever,” he added.

The worst of the possible losses Americans could suffer like in personal freedom.  It wasn’t too long ago that California proposed installation of thermostats that could be controlled remotely, allowing a bureaucrats somewhere to decide when you had air conditioning and heat:

“You realize there are times — very rarely, once every few years — when you would be subject to a rotating outage and everything would crash including your computer and traffic lights, and you don’t want to do that,” said Arthur H. Rosenfeld, a member
of the energy commission.

Reducing individual customers’ electrical use — if necessary, involuntarily — could avoid that, Dr. Rosenfeld said. “If you can control rotating outages by letting everyone in the state share the pain,” he said, “there’s a lot less pain to go around.”

Obama said before that we can’t expect to ask the rest of the world to change and have them accept that we are living comfortably in our air conditioning.  After all, the 2003 heat wave in Europe killed more than 52,000 people.  Why?  In France, where almost 15,000 people died, we are offered this explanation:

The bulk of the victims — many of them elderly — died during the height of the heat wave, which brought suffocating temperatures of up to 104 degrees in a country where air conditioning is rare.

What?  This isn’t some third world country.  This is France.  Why is air conditioning rare in France?  Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels explained it this way:

…a major reason is the impact of environmentalism on government energy policy. To address the alleged threat of global warming, France, along with the rest of the European Union, has imposed steep energy taxes in order to reduce energy consumption. As a result, Michaels explained, energy costs to consumers in France are about 25 percent higher than to consumers in the United States. At the same time, average incomes in France are considerably lower than those in America, which, in relative terms, makes electricity there all the more expensive.

It’s as the article’s title says:  Death by Environmentalism, or just a broader example of “letting everyone…share the pain.”  Combine that with the belief that America will experience rolling brown out and black outs and you can see the idea of centralized control of your living conditions isn’t out of bounds for the eco-marxists.

The addition of Obama’s cap and trade system will be bad enough.  If he and the Democrat controlled Congress decide to include the United States in Kyoto II, it will be worse.  And for what?  One polar bear a year.  That’s it.

 

Photo credits: 

• UN Poster – zieak
• Sunset – Kevin Dooley

Ten Dangerous U.N. Schemes Obama Could Buy Into

Part One: Obama and Kyoto II: A Wealth Redistributionist’s Dream, America’s Nightmare by Duane Lester of All American Blogger

Part Two: L.O.S.T. get LOST! by Sonlit Knight of A Newt One

Part Three: What Will a President Obama Likely Do With the U.N. Responsibility to Protect Doctrine? by Gray Rinehart of The GrayMan Writes.

Part Four: Why We Should Not Join the United Nations’ Alliance of Civilizations by Mr. Websmith of Mr. Websmith.