OPINION:
Speaking to environmentalist supporters in 2008 regarding “climate change,” candidate Barack Obama candidly revealed, “Under my plan, electricity costs will necessarily skyrocket.” President Obama’s White House Science Adviser John Holdren has since elaborate: “We need to de-develop the United States to bring our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation.”
The so-called Clean Power Plan proposed by Mr. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is well designed to do precisely that — “de-develop” the United States. The National Black Chamber of Commerce estimates the regulation will cause job losses reaching 7 million for blacks and 12 million for Hispanics, with the poverty rate increasing by more than 23 percent for blacks and 26 percent for Hispanics.
That is because the plan will ultimately more than double the cost of natural gas and electricity, adding more than $1 trillion to family and business energy bills. This will drain funds that could be used for new jobs and pay increases, and end up destroying millions of jobs in companies and businesses that can no longer compete due to the higher costs. The costly EPA rules will reduce U.S. economic growth every year, causing $2.3 trillion in losses in the coming years.
The skyrocketing costs for energy and electricity will have a “disparate impact” on the poor, and low-income blacks and Hispanics, as those increased costs will constitute a higher percentage of their lower incomes. Blacks and Hispanics would consequently be threatened with a new energy poverty. Under the civil rights theories of Mr. Obama’s own Justice Department, this means his EPA Clean Power Plan constitutes illegal discrimination.
African-American author and news analyst Dineen Borelli comments that the EPA’s new overregulation is “the green movement’s new Jim Crow.” National Black Chamber of Commerce President Harry Alford calls the EPA’s regulatory overkill “a slap in the face to poor and minority families.” Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia summarizes it starkly: “A lot of people on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum are going to die.”
But Mr. Obama’s regulatory overkill is quietly supported by billionaires heavily invested in high-cost, government-subsidized “alternative” energy, such as California Democrat Tom Steyer. Mr. Steyer’s funding for the fiance of Oregon Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber, guided by his staffers, forced the wild-eyed, pro-regulation governor to resign earlier this year. Nearly half of the board of directors of the Sierra Club are owners, founders and CEOs of “renewable energy” companies that profit from the club’s anti-coal “climate change” campaign.
Mr. Obama repeatedly tells us that the EPA’s sharp restrictions of power plant emissions of carbon dioxide will “cut carbon pollution.” But carbon dioxide is a naturally present trace gas (0.04 percent of the atmosphere) essential to the survival of all life on the planet. It promotes photosynthesis in plants, which is the foundation of the food chain for all plant and animal life. Without carbon dioxide, plants would die, and consequently so would all animal life, including human beings. Carbon dioxide cannot in any sense be called “pollution.”
President Obama says, “Scientists have known since the 1800s that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide trap heat, and that burning fossil fuels releases those gases.” Since the 1950s, the National Weather Service has “found, year after year, that carbon pollution in our atmosphere has increased dramatically,” he adds.
But the president does not say that U.S. government satellites circling the Earth measuring global temperatures 24/7 definitively report no increase in global atmospheric temperatures for almost 19 years now — even though human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions have been the highest in history during that entire time.
Soon that period without global warming will be longer than the period of actual global warming, resulting from cyclical natural causes, which lasted only 20 years, from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. Before that was 30 years of global cooling. While increased carbon dioxide does have some warming effect, experience shows it is not anywhere near as powerful in raising global temperatures as alarmists have claimed.
The Heartland Institute has recently published three 1,000-page volumes titled “Climate Change Reconsidered II,” containing dispassionate, peer-reviewed, scientific literature documenting that global temperature trends predominantly result from natural causes, with no realistic risk of man-caused influences producing catastrophic results. That is the comprehensive, top-shelf source to counter all the official, scare tactic lies we are being told on this issue.
Indeed, the latest science indicates based on patterns of solar activity that the Earth is approaching a period of sustained global cooling comparable to the Little Ice Age that prevailed for hundreds of years between roughly 1350 to 1850 A.D.
• Peter J. Ferrara is a senior fellow for the Heartland Institute, and a senior policy adviser for the National Tax Limitation Foundation.
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