Clarity from Chaos

By: Dave Campbell

Climate Change Debate is Immoral

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Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Gina McCarthy wrote that we have a “moral obligation to prevent climate impacts that threaten God’s creation, especially for those most vulnerable.” (“Obama officials: Power plant rule part of a ‘moral obligation,’” July 13.) But we also have a moral obligation to use our God-given brains to think rationally about the issue.

It is clearly irrational for McCarthy to focus most of her agency’s climate-related programs on vainly trying to stop climate change, something that has been happening since the origin of the atmosphere, billions of years ago.

It is clearly irrational, indeed immoral, for the EPA administrator to encourage a situation in which, of the $1 billion spent globally every day on climate finance, only 6 percent of it is dedicated to helping vulnerable people adapt to climate change today. The rest is wasted trying to stop phenomena that McCarthy wants us to believe will someday happen if we don’t follow the steps she proposes.

It is both irrational and immoral that, because of the climate scare, 6.5 percent of the world’s grain now goes to fuel instead of food, causing food price spikes in the developing world.

It is stupid and unethical that 1.2 billion people still lack access to electricity even though their nations have plentiful fossil fuel resources. People like McCarthy make it far more difficult for poor countries to get the money they need to develop these sources.

It is a tragedy that millions of birds and bats die each year in collisions with industrial wind turbines, massive machines built to supposedly stop climate change. Even more serious are the ruined lives of hundreds of thousands of people who are subjected to 60-story turbines erected close to their homes.

Or how about the hard-working Americans who will lose their jobs as coal, the most important source of electricity in the U.S., is rapidly phased out, electricity rates soar and companies close down or relocate overseas?

Finally, it is clearly irrational — indeed inexcusable — for McCarthy to refer to carbon dioxide emissions as “carbon pollution.” Besides the fact that CO2 is no more “carbon” than are any other of the thousands of compounds that contain carbon, CO2 is a benign, colorless, odorless gas on which all plant life depends, the very opposite of pollution.

Yes, Ms. Administrator, climate change is a moral issue. But you and your allies are the cause of many of these ethical tragedies.

From Tom Harris, executive director, International Climate Science Coalition, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

www.climatescienceinternational.org

Crap Science and Climate Change

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June 18 was the official release date of the Pope’s encyclical on climate change. Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI’s) Mr. Myron Ebell provides this assessment of Pope Francis’s statements, lamenting the neglect of how energy policies that count on bad climate facts can actually end up hurting the poor and perpetuating energy poverty.

“Pope Francis argues in his encyclical that the developed nations have a moral responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because climate change threatens poor people in poor countries the most. However, poor people in poor countries lack access to the modern energy and technologies that allow people to deal with environmental challenges. The Vatican seems to have forgotten to consider the effects that energy-rationing policies to reduce emissions will also have on poor people in poor countries. Putting the world on an energy-starvation diet will consign billions of people to perpetual energy poverty.

Global warming is a moral issue, but a proper moral evaluation must include comparing the impacts of global warming, which may be bad, with the impacts of global warming policies, which will almost certainly be catastrophic. The Pope’s encyclical misses that significant matter.

The Vatican appears to have been very ill advised in preparing the encyclical. It has been announced that two of the experts consulted were Hans Joachim “John” Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute and Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University. Mr. Schellnhuber has advocated for the rapid de-industrialization of the West and for a world government to achieve environmental salvation and enforce population control. Mr. Sachs has promoted misguided developmental policies in the Third World that have helped to stymie development and perpetuate poverty.”

Myron Ebell is director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, which comprises over two dozen non-profit groups in this country and abroad that question global warming alarmism and oppose energy rationing policies.

Ebell has appeared as a guest on numerous television shows, including the ABC Evening News, NBC Nightly News, PBS News Hour, BBC Newsnight, BBC World, CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, MSNBC, ITN, Voice of America, Televisa, Sky TV, Al Jazeera, PBS’s NOW, Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier, O’Reilly Factor, and Hannity and Colmes. He has spoken frequently on a variety of BBC radio news shows and on hundreds of radio talk shows.

Ebell’s writings have appeared in a variety of publications, including the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Forbes, London’s Guardian, Standpoint Magazine, Riverside Press Enterprise, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Environmental Law Forum.

Competitive Enterprise Institute