Somehow I missed CNN’s fisking of Sen. Inhofe back in September. It’s great. Here’s a friendly tip: if you think that global warming doesn’t exist, you are an enormous idiot with the IQ of a sea sponge who, in the name of consistency, should also insist that we live in a geocentric universe and that the earth is flat.
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I’ve got a few minutes this morning, so let’s get together and solve this global warming business. I’ll stipulate, for purposes of this exercise, that global warming is a fact and that it is caused by humans – principally through carbon emissions.
OK, what to do?
The first international attempt to deal with global warming was the much-ballyhoed Kyoto Treaty. My understanding of Kyoto is that:
1. It doesn’t do anything to reduce emissions in China, India, and other burgeoning polluters.
2. NONE of the European countries that have ratified the treaty are going to meet its carbon-reduction goals.
3. When there was a vote taken in the US Senate during Clinton’s presidency, it was like 98-0 against bringing the treaty up for ratification.
4. Even if it were ratified by all countries and honestly implemented, it would only reduce global temperature gains by about .6 C in the next 50 years – not enough (at least based on the dubious computer models now in use).
I could go on, but I think that’s enough. Not a very auspicious start to solving “the greatest crisis in human history.”
And what’s more is that all of this looks like a thinly-disguised attempt to handcuff the economy of the American Colossus by the usual suspects. So even if Sen. Inhofe is wrong, I can forgive him for not wanting international bodies run by thugs, tyrants, and corrupt bureaucrats hamstringing the US economy.
Kyoto is DOA – I think even Tony Blair has admitted as much.
It would seem to me that only through unleashing the market-driven power of invention in the G-7 and a handful of other countries to find economically viable alternatives to carbon-based fuels can a sloution be found. (This would have the ancillary benefit of crashing world oil prices, so folks like Hugo Chavez and our friends the Saudis would no longer have much influence in the world. But I digress.)
As a stopgap measure, we could start building nuclear power plants and retiring coal and oil plants as they came on line, but I can already hear the howls coming from the environmentalists at that idea.