"Climate plan sends air of unease across Rust Belt," the Oct. 12 Associated Press headline read. Only the day before, an op-ed co-written by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., appeared in the New York Times boasting the ridiculously sappy title "Yes We Can (Pass Climate Change Legislation)."
The bill in question, S.1733 The Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act of 2009, sponsored by Kerry and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., had AP reporter H. Josef Hebert asking, "Will it increase energy costs and drive businesses and jobs overseas to countries such as China that may not commit to similar controls on fossil energy?"
Maybe, but how would that be different from yesterday? They call it the "Rust Belt" for a reason.
American manufacturing has been dying a slow and painful death for the past 30 years as companies took advantage of lower labor costs, poor safety standards, no pollution controls, poverty and desperation, and the lack of human rights in many east Asian countries to shift operations there.
However, if there is anything the migration of jobs to less-developed nations has taught us, it is that with economic interdependence comes influence. As industrialized nations became aware of conditions in countries our economies have been exploiting for cheap goods, we began the long march to change those conditions. And as the standard of living within their own countries improved, citizens began their own pushes for safer working conditions, better pay and a cleaner environment – just as workers did in this country a hundred years ago during the labor movement.
Climate change is a global problem in need of a global solution. If we have any hope of influencing China and India to help mitigate what is ultimately going to impact us all, we need to look to our own house first. The Senate bill does that, but it also does a lot more. It invests in the one kind of job we will never be able to export, the kind that has the capability of replacing our failing manufacturing sector and revitalizing the blue-collar workforce – infrastructure.
China may now dominate in the manufacturing of photovoltaic panels, but we still need "good ol' red-blooded Amer'kins" to install them on roofs all over the country. And it's here in the United States where the high-tech research is being done to create the next generation of solar electricity panels, increasing energy conversion factors from the teens into the 40 percent range and inventing PV that can be woven into fabrics, embedded into glass and otherwise made invisible, durable and highly efficient.
The Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act of 2009 invests in these kinds of projects. It also hopes to break our dependence on foreign oil by expanding offshore drilling, looking to nuclear power, investing in clean energy technologies directly and putting a price on carbon, which will spur independent venture capital and market-based investment.
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As the science now stands, the global warming alarmist scientists say the climate is sensitive to a “radiative forcing” effect from atmospheric carbon dioxide which greatly magnifies its greenhouse effect on atmospheric warming. The only proof they can provide of this complex hypothesis is by running it in climate computer models. By starting the models in about 1980 they showed how the continuing increase in CO2 was step with a steady increase in average global temperatures in the 1980s and 1990’s and claim cause and effect. But, in fact, those last two decades of the 20th century were at the peak of a strong 24 year solar cycle, and the temperature increases actually may have been a result of the solar cycle together with related warm cycle ocean current patterns during that period.That warming ended in 1998 and global temperatures (as measured by satellites) leveled off. Starting in 2002, computer models and reality have dramatically parted company. The models predicted temperatures and carbon dioxide would continue to rise in lock step, but in fact while the CO2 continues to rise, temperatures are in decline. Now global temperatures are in such a nose dive there is wide spread talk from climatologists about an impending ice age. In any case, the UN’s computer model “proof” has gone up in a poof.Nonetheless, today we have the continued claim that carbon dioxide is the culprit of an uncontrollable, runaway man-made global warming. We are told that when we burn fossil fuels we are leaving a dastardly carbon footprint. And, we are told we must pay Al Gore or the environmentalists for this sinful footprint. Our governments on all levels are considering taxing the use of fossil fuels. The Federal Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of naming CO2 as a pollutant and strictly regulating its use to protect our climate. The new President and the US Congress are on board. Many state governments are moving on the same course.We are already suffering from this CO2 silliness in many ways. Our energy policy has been strictly hobbled by the prohibiting of new refineries and of drilling for decades. We pay for the shortage this has created every time we buy gas. On top of that, the whole issue of corn based ethanol costs us millions of tax dollars in subsidies, which also has driven up food prices. All of this is a long way from over.Yet I am totally convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it.Global Warming: It is a hoax. It is bad science. It is high-jacking public policy. It is the greatest scam in history.
To support this problem that doesn't exist, deal with the cause that isn't the cause, and to support the solution that isn't a solution are the "findings" of a group of "scientists" who have prostituted themselves out to make identical pseudo scientific studies in support of this problem that doesn't exist for lucrative government grants.
These findings unsupportable as they are, are eagerly embraced by those who have adopted this fraudulent notion as some sort of religion. Those heretics who express doubt about this "religion are cursed as "global warming deniers" . Some have suggested that such people need to be punished. Those in academia who deny this hoax are faced with being ostracized or removed.
Why? You might ask.