President Joe Biden and his climate envoy John Kerry just hosted the Leaders Summit on Climate to work on limiting carbon dioxide. One has to admire their ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. Over the last 30 years, there have been many carbon dioxide-limit summits with no success.
Our latest inadvertent experiment in carbon dioxide reduction, the COVID-19 lockdown, while dropping the world’s carbon dioxide output by 17%, made no difference. Carbon dioxide continued its relentless climb in our atmosphere.
Some say we need to continue COVID-19-style lockdowns to keep the world to warming levels in the range of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit to below 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit, which was the ambition of the Paris Agreement. And if we do not, life as we know it will come to an end “someday” in the future.
Drastically limiting carbon dioxide in the United States will be economically painful, cost trillions, and cause energy costs to double or even triple, hurting minorities the most. It will also result in millions of lost jobs, shifting work and production to nations with low energy costs, such as China.
China burns more than half of the world’s 8 billion tons of coal used each year. China’s energy investments are heaviest in fossil fuels, not renewable sources, as the media say.
Regardless, carbon dioxide may not be the “control knob” of the climate it is said to be. Water is the most important and abundant greenhouse gas, according to NASA. At 4% of the atmosphere, water is 100 times more abundant than carbon dioxide, at 0.04%.
Clouds, which at any time cover two-thirds of the Earth, both warm and cool the Earth, which make accurate weather and climate predictions nearly impossible, NASA said.
The Earth’s climate has always been changing. We do know that the Earth began warming in the 1800s after the well-documented Little Ice Age, even before the increases in carbon dioxide caused by fossil fuels after World War II. There is no way to know how much of the present warming is natural or human-made.
When it was colder during the Little Ice Age, life was harder for people because plants didn’t grow as well as they do now. Twenty times more people die from cold than from heat.
Try as hard as we like, we cannot control the weather or the climate. Why waste trillions on an impossibility? Is it for political purposes, profits, hubris, or dangerous overconfidence? Judging the results of the many past failed attempts at carbon dioxide reductions, it certainly isn’t success or real-world results that matter.
People have been led to believe that deaths from natural disasters are on the rise when, in fact, they are not. We were told the Arctic would have no ice in the summer by 2020, yet it had 1.44 million square miles last year. Polar bears are more numerous than they’ve been for the last 50 years. Crop harvests are setting records. Worldwide, wildfires are down, not up. Hurricanes and tornadoes are down, not up. In short, there is plenty of good news from nature that benefits people.
We should be celebrating the recent progress we have made. More people are eating better, living longer, and leaving poverty than ever in history. The energy that fossil fuels provide made this possible. China gets this, even though the West does not.
According to the Institute for Energy Research, “China’s strategy of decarbonizing the rest of the world through the Paris Accord makes China’s economy even stronger by reducing the cost of the fossil fuels that it purchases and weakens its rivals’ economies. Clearly, China is using global warming to advance its economic, national security and geopolitical interests.”
Our president is doing just the opposite for the United States.
There is still time for us to wake up and change directions. China is our biggest rival, doesn’t keep promises, and is seeking world domination. We need to get back to being the leader of the free world.
China’s actions mean that it doesn’t matter what the West does to de-coal and decarbonize — worldwide emissions are going up, regardless of how we feel about it. We may as well accept the inevitable and prepare for it.
Frank Lasee is a former Wisconsin state senator and former member of Gov. Scott Walker’s administration. The district he represented had two nuclear power plants, a biomass plant, and numerous wind towers. He has experience dealing with energy, the environment, and the climate.
