Former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s famous axiom is that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. It’s an even a worse thing to manufacture.
Creating an unwarranted sense of drama and urgency around climate change is central to Biden’s approach to catalyze action unsupported by the facts or common sense. In announcing his climate agenda, Biden called it a crisis requiring a “unified national response,” an “existential threat of our time.” But to believe that increasing global temperatures, if true, are a threat to human existence itself is laughable. Mankind is an adaptable species that has survived far worse than a few degrees increase in the earth’s temperature.
Biden, however, doesn’t want or need us to think rationally about the downside of costly measures to cripple the US economy in the name of saving the planet. He needs a crisis atmosphere – facts and science be damned.
Let’s pretend for a moment that Biden and future presidents could manage to reduce emissions annually. What will we have achieved other than bankrupting the country? Using the highly suspect UN climate model, Biden’s promises will have only reduced warming by the end of the century by a small 0.07 degrees. Biden claims this will make us more prosperous; a claim that is highly improbable.
A study in Nature found that a 95% reduction in US carbon emissions by 2050 will annually cost 11.9% of GDP. To put that into perspective – total expenditure on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid came to 11.6% of GDP in 2019. The annual cost of trying to hit Biden’s target will grow to $4.4 trillion by 2050. That’s more than everything the federal government is projected to receive in tax revenue this year. It breaks down to $11,300 per person per year, or $45,200 for a family of four.
The weekly median earnings for full-time wage or salary workers in the United States in the second quarter of 2021 amounted to $990, translating to a yearly income of approximately $51,480. According to a report by the US Census Bureau, in 2017 the median income was $62,626; in 2018 it was $64,324; in 2019 it was $68,703; and in 2020 it dropped to $51,168 per year.
While Biden is working hard to destroy fossil fuels, coal remains at the heart of China’s flourishing economy. In 2019, 58% of the country’s total energy consumption came from coal, which helps explain why China accounts for 28% of all global CO2 emissions. And despite their promise to cut emissions to zero by 2060, they continue to build coal-fired power plants at a rate that outpaces the rest of the world combined.
India is expected to become the most-populous country in the world by 2027. It is also a nation that intends to make major leaps in its development in the coming decades. Achieving such leaps will require considerably more energy than India currently consumes. India is now the planet’s third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, yet the country is still building coal-fired plants.
I get it! So far, no country has managed to lift itself out of poverty without the use of fossil fuels. And yet, Biden is demanding that US taxpayers bear the burden of reducing US emissions to compensate for the increased emissions of nations like China and India for a mere 0.07 degree decrease in global temperature.
It is possible that rising temperatures could become a problem for future generations but, instead of Biden’s economy destroying solutions, shouldn’t we focus on policies that encourage rapid economic growth to endow future generations with wealth and technologies that will enable them to handle whatever nature throws at them?
Or is it possible that Biden’s economy destroying policies have nothing to do with a climate crisis?
Source: There’s a better way than Biden’s unrealistic, expensive climate pledge by Bjorn Lomborg, New York Post; Joe Biden’s climate agenda is all about creating a crisis — not actually fixing one by Richard Lowry, The New York Post; Despite Pledges to Cut Emissions, China Goes on a Coal Spree by Michael Standaert, Yale Environment 360
