The Real Cost of Global Warming Fixes

Global Warming: A co-sponsor of cap-and-trade legislation has tried to convince the public that the regime would cost families only "about a postage stamp a day." The real cost might be closer to next-day delivery rates.

Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf, testifying before Congress last week, said the House global warming bill will slow economic growth in the next few decades and cause "significant" job losses in the fossil fuel industry.

During last Wednesday's session of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Elmendorf said the carbon cap-and-trade provisions of the comically named American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 would cut GDP below what it would otherwise have been by 0.25% to 0.75% by 2020. The impact in 2050 would be 1% to 3.5%.

Elmendorf's office issued the same warning in a report last month.

The cap-and-trade legislation, sponsored by Democratic Reps. Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Henry Waxman of California and passed in the House in June, is intended to cut domestic carbon dioxide emissions by 17% by 2020 and 83% by 2050. This would drive U.S. per capita CO2 emission levels "below those of George Washington's first term as president," economist Garrett Vaughn wrote in IBD in August.

Such low emission levels can't be reached without economic pain, and the cost will surely be more than Markey's "postage stamp a day." Any sharp reduction will require the country to move almost entirely away from fossil fuels - not a cheap transition.

Neither would it be meaningful. The churning shift simply would not make a real difference in global CO2 levels. The Environmental Protection Agency itself said drastic CO2 emission cutbacks made in the U.S. are virtually worthless if developing nations China and India don't cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

Both have made it clear that they have no intention of joining developed nations in committing economic suicide by placing limits on their carbon emissions.

Elmendorf, who seems to have bought into the global warming scare, said during testimony that projected cost estimates "do not include any benefits from averting climate change."

While the statement is a ready-made Democratic talking point, the reality is that no benefits will be coming. There is nothing to avert. The global warming predicted by the computer models just hasn't materialized. Nor will it.

No one should wonder about that, given the tainted data that were fed into the models and those same models' poor record. It's a classic case of garbage in, garbage out.

Two years ago, the International Journal of Climatology published a study finding that 22 models used by researchers were so flawed that they predicted warming when cooling was the case. Nearly three years earlier, the famous Mann hockey stick temperature chart that alarmists cite as evidence that man is causing the Earth to warm was discredited by an article in Geophysical Research Letters.

Meanwhile, scientists at the University of East Anglia seem to have lost or destroyed the raw data they have used to make the case for man-made global warming. This loss - or cover-up of data the scientists want to conceal - makes it impossible for other researchers to confirm or refute their claim.

Despite his proximity to the university, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, like all true believers and political operators who have a stake in perpetuating the global warming fraud, is unaffected by this case of scientific malpractice. Brown, who is facing a difficult election, claimed Monday that the world has 50 days to save itself from climate "catastrophe."

Should the Senate follow the House and heed Brown's hysteria by passing a cap-and-trade bill that the president signs, the country will be forced into an uncomfortable place. As is often the case in Washington, doing nothing would be the far better choice.