Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., left, gestures toward Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., right, as he shakes hands with Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. upon his arrival for a Capitol Hill news conference Monday on the environment and global warming. The three senators are among those who back the Climate Security Act. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Carbon cuts: how costly?
Economic harm is top concern in Senate debate over bill.
By Peter Grier | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor/ June 3, 2008 edition
Reporter Peter Grier discusses the emerging debate over the cost of carbon emission-capping legislation.
Reporter Peter Grier
Washington
Reducing US greenhouse-gas emissions would cost the economy money. As the Senate debates a bill this week to do just that, one key question is: How much will it cost?
Predictions of the price of future cuts in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions vary as widely as predictions of future climate change itself. They range from a negligible reduction in economic growth to the loss in 20 years of millions of US jobs and $6,000 in annual income for every household in the country.
Much of the variation in cost assumptions may be due to different predictions about the speed with which new, greener industries and technologies will arise and the extent to which US consumers will embrace their products.
Many supporters of legislative action also argue that the worst-case cost scenarios ignore the price of inaction. Global warming could result in expensive increases in hurricane damage and other climate-related costs, they say.
“Climate change is on a collision course with the US economy, long before the end of the century, unless we act now,” said Frank Ackerman, a Tufts University economist and coauthor of a recent study on the economic effects of global warming, on May 22.
That’s not the way the White House sees things. On June 2, President Bush called the bill now under Senate consideration “a huge spending bill fueled by tax increases” and said it would impose roughly $6 trillion in new costs on the US economy.
The bill would add 53 cents to the price of a gallon of gas by 2030, according to a new administration analysis. The cuts in carbon emissions called for under the legislation “have no chance of being realized and have every chance of hurting our economy,” said the analysis.
The 500-page climate change bill the Senate is debating this week is unlikely to pass the chamber. If it did, it would surely face a White House veto.
But it could be a harbinger of action in the next administration. All three major presidential candidates support its basic structure of capping emissions of America’s major greenhouse gases, then establishing a trading mechanism to facilitate the buying and selling of permits to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
All also say they favor some changes in the current legislation. Presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain wants it to include more support for nuclear power. Leading Democratic contender Sen. Barack Obama wants to ban construction of new coal-fired power plants that use older designs.
Specifically, the Senate measure aims to cut US greenhouse-gas emissions by 18 percent by 2020, and two-thirds by 2050. Its pollution-allowance trading system is projected to produce billions of dollars in revenue for the US government, providing money to help old industries adjust, new greener industries arise, and individuals adapt to higher energy costs.
Carbon-intensive industries such as oil and power generation and many US business groups have long complained that the economic disruptions of such a bill would be hugely expensive.
According to a study released by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) on March 13, the Senate bill if enacted would produce gross domestic product (GDP) losses of $151 billion to $210 billion in 2020 and up to $669 billion per year in 2030.
The bill would cause the economy to lose 1.8 million jobs by 2020, according to NAM. The price of electricity would increase by a third over the same period.
According to Heritage Foundation policy analyst Ben Lieberman, the Senate bill would work like a massive energy tax. By capping carbon dioxide emissions, it would force down the supply of energy and thus boost its price.
“As energy is the economy’s lifeblood, and 85 percent of it comes from these fossil fuels, the impact will be substantial,” Mr. Lieberman wrote in a study released June 2. Cumulative GDP losses could reach $4.8 trillion by 2030, he estimated.
In response, environmental groups say that many industry-backed studies fudge the fact that they are talking about reductions in the future growth of GDP and income, not absolute cuts from today’s levels.
Studies that predict high costs also generally assume that alternative-energy technologies will not advance and ignore jobs that might be created in new low-carbon industries, says the Natural Resources Defense Council in a new forecast of the economic effects of climate change legislation.
Furthermore, almost all studies that predict direct economic consequences ignore the costs of inaction, according to the NRDC. Over the next century, average temperatures in most of the US could rise 13 degrees, producing hurricane damage, real estate losses, and increased energy and water costs of almost $1.9 trillion annually, claims a report from Tufts University commissioned by the NRDC.
“The 80 percent reduction in US emissions needed to stop climate change may not come cheaply, but the cost of failing to act will be much greater,” concludes the report.
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Comments
2. Mike Higgins | 06.04.08
The Senate bill is simply a new transfer program from the poor and middle class to the intellectual and financial elite. Higher energy prices through taxation passed down to the people to fund questionable research and subsidize corporations lining up to get their fair share at Congress. We need to open our eyes to the reality. All programs like this reduce the standard of living of Americans who are less well off. The intellectual and financial elite will always have enough money to pay for their disproportionate use of energy. They are not harmed by this new taxation.
3. Mike Higgins | 06.04.08
In the end, the minimal reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere will not make any difference to the temperature, mainly because no causal link has been demonstrated to exist between CO2 and temperature. Based on the ice core records over the last 10,000 years, the earth’s temperature has see-sawed within a narrow range of 2 degrees C. After all the warming that has occurred in the industrial era, the earth’s temperature is currently in the middle of its range of temperature for the last 10,000 years. The current warming is NOT unusual and clearly unrelated to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. There are NO disastrous effects that require us to enrich the intellectual and financial elite.
4. Mike Higgins | 06.04.08
Evidence that CO2 does NOT Cause Dangerous Global Warming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fCP_nHRjP8
5. Mike Higgins | 06.04.08
31,000+ American Scientists Reject Human-Based Global Warming
http://www.petitionproject.org/
6. Dr. Francis T. Manns | 06.05.08
In Canada, we’ve got a rising healthy polar bear population that has just gone on a Protected Species list; what is that about? This is clear proof the NGOs and EPA do not have a clue about science. Two population on Baffin are smaller in number, but this is a region that is cooling not warming. Polar bears are a variety of brown bear and probably do very well when it warms, but not in competition with Brownies.
However, it’s certainly not about the bears. This is about abstract computer modeling being falsely elevated to the level of science and then being presented as if it were science. Modeling produces objective computer generated conclusions based upon input assumptions and processing. In order for models to be approximately predictive, the assumptions must be realistic and work backward as well as forward.
Government decisions, however, in democracies are not based upon science or first principles when a politically correct model gives the politicians an advantage to manipulate politically correct voters. It is extremely dangerous when politics operates on secondary causation instead of first principles. Bear protection is all about a global mass movement that intends to destroy global prosperity by brave new world crowd control. NIMBY is the foremost philosophy of the enemies of our prosperity but by putting Polar bears on an endangered list when they are not endangered is ‘new speak’, mind-control, and secondary reasoning all wrapped up in one, and it intrusive into someone else’s (Nunavut’s) back yard to boot. Science should not be secondary to modeling under any serious circumstances because there is too great a likelihood of missed assumptions and empty logic rendering the conclusion dead wrong.
Where is Al Gore’s consensus going with this? There is not a scrap of objective science in the CO2 global warming hypothesis either.
Francis Manns, Ph.D., P.Geo. (Ontario)
323 Blantyre Avenue
Toronto, ON
M1N 2S6 Canada
7. Ben | 06.08.08
I looked at the petitionproject.org mentioned above and if you google some of the names of the supposed dissenting scientists they are either dead, non-existant, or not in a field that has anything to with climate change. So I am very skeptical that petitionproject.org is a legitimate website.
8. Jerry McIntire | 06.11.08
Yes, the petitionproject.org site has been forced to take back some of its claims, but most of them remain, though spurious.
And who is Francis Manns? “There is not a scrap of objective science in the CO2 global warming hypothesis…” ignores that fact that over 90% of the peer-reviewed, published articles by scientists in the fields related to climate all agree that global warming is occurring, and people are contributing to it. Let’s be part of the solution, not continue to blithely and greedily use energy in a way that contributes to the problem.
9. Mike Higgins | 06.12.08
Ben, would you kindly provide a link to the list of scientists who support CO2-caused global warming? … It would also be helpful if you could provide a link to some experimental evidence that concludes that increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is causing global warming.
10. Mike Higgins | 06.12.08
Jerry, would you please provide a link to back up your claims about the petitionproject.org… Also, I have no disagreement regarding the assertion that the Earth has been in a warming trend for the past few hundred years. But this is very normal when you look at the historical data.
The argument is over whether human emissions of CO2 cause disastrous global warming. The evidence I’ve provided in the links above demonstrates that it does not.
11. Gene Nordell, retired engineer | 01.18.09
Carbon dioxide & Methane gas have now been analyzed and proven via measurement to be relatively ineffectual as greenhouse gasses.
The 800 pound gorilla of greenhouse gases is water vapor e.g. (cumulus and cirrus clouds)each of which performs a very beneficial service in controlling earth’s climate; serving much like a thermostat controlling temperature of the earth within a tolerable range for life as we know it.
Carbon dioxide has also been shown to be very beneficial to plant life such as trees, food plants, etc. It might be considered to be a form of ‘Fertilizer’ that is airborne! Do you remember basic high school science that covered the photosynthesis process of plants which take in CO2 and utilize the Carbon content in creation of the plant fibre such as wood while it releases Oxygen back into the atmosphere!?
There is a petition signed by over 31,000 scientific personnel working in the field that support the above concept and disagree with the Kyoto Protocol. Over 9,000 of the signators have PhD’s while all signators have a four year degree and either work in the field or are capable of understanding the output reports.
Agreement with the Kyoto Protocol is tatamount to industrial suicide and is one of the worst things that could happen to the USA as it will limit or ration the amount of energy allowed. All industry is based on having adequate and inexpensive energy which is generated either from burning of carbon type fuels or nuclear energy. If you’re worried about inflation, you ain’t seen nothing that would approach the impact of the Kyoto Protocol!
If you don’t believe what I’ve said here, don’t argue with me, just go to; http.//www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm or http://www.petitionproject.org
and take the time to digest what is presented there by reputable scientists!
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1. Mike Higgins | 06.04.08
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