For the past two years, Congress has been considering legislation to address global warming. The latest version, the Waxman-Markey climate bill, has been approved by the House and seems dangerously close to being enacted into law. For American families struggling to keep their heads above water, the cure will be worse than the disease.
This push to impose what is, in essence, an energy tax is out-of-step with the views of the American people. Congress appears to be convinced that predictions from computer models of high levels of global warming 50 to 100 years in the future are unquestionably accurate. But the latest Gallup poll on global warming finds that 41 percent of Americans now believe that global warming is "generally exaggerated." Thirty 30 percent said they thought that future warming was exaggerated as recently as 2006.
Economists are trained to ask unpopular questions and enjoy a well-deserved reputation as wet blankets as a result. The question to ask about reducing any environmental "pollutant" is, How clean is clean enough?
The answer is: When the cost of reducing pollution just a bit more is the same as the value of the benefit derived from doing so. The answer is simple. but doing the math is complicated.
Fortunately, a back-of-the-envelope" estimate for the costs and benefits of greenhouse gas reductions provides a pretty clear picture. On the cost side, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that any cap-and-trade bill that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 15 percent could cost the average household roughly $1,600 (in 2006 dollars). Further, "The rise in prices would impose a larger burden, relative to income, on low-income households ...." (Households in the lowest income quintile spend 21 percent of their income on energy-intensive items compared with 4 percent for the highest one-fifth of American households.)
A Heritage Foundation analysis finds that Waxman-Markey would, by 2035, raise electricity rates 90 percent, gasoline prices 74 percent, residential natural gas prices 55 percent and an average family's monthly energy bill by more than $100.
How about the corresponding value of reducing greenhouse emissions? Congress has made no attempt to answer this obvious question.
One estimate by Paul Knappenberger, an environmental scientist with 20 years experience as a climate researcher, concludes "by the year 2050, the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill would result in a global temperature 'savings' of about 0.05 degrees Centigrade ... about two years' worth of warming." In short, this legislation creates very high costs for American households and produces NO discernable benefit!
As an elder in a 300-member evangelical church, I am aware of efforts to recruit church leaders to push for climate change legislation. The advocates label their efforts "creation care" and claim Biblical support for their position based mainly on helping the "least among us" and stewardship of God's creation.
But efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions necessarily result in higher energy costs that impact "the least among us" most harshly. The Biblical command to care for the poor and deal with them justly should give us pause as we consider policies with almost no benefit and great cost to the least of these.
http://detnews.com/article/20090630/OPINION01/906300307/1008/Climate-change-cure-plan-hurts-least-among-us
