California Commits Eco-Suicide

By Alan Caruba

In late August, Democrats in the California legislature and Governor agreed to a deal that would impose a limit on all greenhouse gas emissions. As reported by the Associated Press, “The bill would require the state’s major industries—such as utility plants, oil and gas refineries, and cement kilns—to reduce their emissions of the pollutants widely believed to contribute to global warming.”

Among the many problems involved with this deal is the fact that there is no global warming as defined by environmentalists, i.e., a sharp, scientifically predictable increase in the Earth’s overall temperature in the years, decades, and centuries ahead. After touting a coming Ice Age in the 1970s, the Greens reversed course and began to conjure up global warming. Basing public policy on a hoax has become the political choice of Democrats.

Worse, the California deal would allow businesses “to buy, sell and trade emission credits with other companies.” A completely bogus market will be created where real money will buy meaningless “credits” while the emissions involved will continue.

You want electricity? Other than nuclear and hydroelectric power, you will have to tolerate some emissions. Slightly more than half of the electricity generated in America today comes from the burning of a resource we have in abundance, coal. California, which has consistently failed to provide for sufficient generation, now wants to make the provision of electricity even more costly.

If there was ever a better way to drive business and industry out of the State, it has yet to have been invented.

The Democrat Party, intellectually and morally bankrupt as this point in its history, has decided to embrace environmentalism’s biggest lies because they will provide a new basis to attack the industrial heart of the nation’s economy.

Ignoring the real threat, the worldwide Islamic Jihad, Democrats will attempt to distract Americans with scary stories about the future climate of the Earth.

Addressing the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in late August, Sen. Dianne Feinstein offered the Democrat plan to attack global warming in the next session of Congress. She unveiled a legislative package she intends to introduce that would require the auto industry to improve mileage and “coax” power producers to meet emissions standards. This is an extension of the deal California lawmakers have reached with the Governor to the entire nation.

“There is now a scientific consensus that global warming is happening and we can’t stop it,” said Feinstein during an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. This is a lie. A very big lie.

Far from any consensus, there is a growing body of scientific evidence that utterly disputes and debunks that claims made for global warming.

In a recent policy analysis report issued by the Cato Institute, Patrick J. Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies, a professor of natural resources at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and the past president of the Association of State Climatologists, concluded that “It is apparent that many recent stories on melting of high-latitude ice, hurricanes, and extinctions are riddled with self-inconsistencies, are inconsistent with other findings, and are reported—as much by scientists themselves as by reporters—in extreme or misleading fashions that do not accurately portray the actual research.”

The Cato analysis was buttressed by 77 footnotes documenting the misuse of science to advance the global warming hoax. Ironically, the early Green warnings of a coming, new Ice Age were far closer to the truth, given the fact that the Earth is nearing the end of an interglacial period, thus putting us closer to a colder, not warmer, future.

There is no need for the control of greenhouse gas emissions. Even with such controls, the climate of the Earth will be determined by known cycles of solar activity, by known cycles of oceanic activity, by known cycles of hurricane activity, by forces far beyond the control or influence of human activity.

The Democrat program of emissions controls is a cruel hoax tied the even greater hoax of global warming. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Sen. Feinstein’s “goal would be to keep global temperature increases to a manageable 1 or 2 degrees by the end of the century. To do so by 2050, she said, the United States would have to cut carbon dioxide emissions to levels 70 percent below those of 1990.”

What Sen. Feinstein and the Democrats are proposing is nothing less than a criminal conspiracy to undermine the American economy while nations such as China, India, and even Europe would continue to ignore such senseless limitations on the use of energy to expand their economies.

Sen. Feinstein told her audience at the Commonwealth Club that, “without such measures, the global temperature could rise by maybe 9 degrees. In that scenario, three of every five species would die, the sea would rise by two feet, massive floods would hit every 10 years and the state’s drinking water supply would be in jeopardy.”

This is lying and scaremongering on a grand scale and it is about to make its way from California to the halls of the U.S. Congress.

She will be joined by Sen. Kerry who is calling for “energy independence” by advocating mandates to reduce U.S. consumption of oil by 2.5 million barrels a day by 2015.

Among the steps that would achieve true energy independence would be to open a small section of ANWR to oil drilling and that alone would take ten years before its effect would be felt. Another step would be to require states to permit offshore drilling for oil and natural gas. Meanwhile, China, in cooperation with Cuba will be drilling for oil just ninety miles off the shores of Florida, while that State continues to refuse to permit any drilling.

California is about to commit eco-suicide and wants the rest of the nation to join it. The business and industry that will flee the Golden State is incalculable. The danger of these anti-energy policies to the future of the nation is beyond comprehension.

Alan Caruba’s new book, “Right Answers: Separating Fact from Fantasy”, has been published by Merril Press. His weekly commentaries are posted on the website of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com.