Assisted Economic Suicide

Assisted Economic Suicide

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, March 12, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Climate Change: Sen. John Kerry warns that deferring cap-and-trade in a recession is a "mutual suicide pact." In an effort to keep the glaciers from melting, he proposes putting the American economy in the deep freeze.

"You don't enter a mutual suicide pact because the economy is having a hard time right now," the failed presidential hopeful and noted climatologist said Wednesday. "Climate change is not governed by a recession."

But trying to prevent a bogus apocalypse can drive one into a depression.

Kerry ignores the growing body of evidence presented by reputable scientists and including satellite observations, not computer models, that the earth has been cooling demonstrably since 1998 due to declining solar activity and other natural factors.

He also ignores the warnings of cap-and-trade's economic consequences.

The winter of 2008-09 has seen record cold temperatures and snowfalls around the globe, with snow reported in such unlikely places as Las Vegas and Malibu, Calif.

As Al Gore might say (with apologies to Groucho Marx), who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?

"The sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer sun spots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline," notes Weather Channel founder and meteorologist John Coleman. "Earth has cooled for almost 10 straight years. So, I ask Al Gore: Where's the global warming?"

More and more Americans are asking the same question (see "In Hot Pursuit Of CO2" on previous page).

The skepticism of global warming and its dangers shown in the Gallup poll comes on the heels of a conference held by the Heartland Institute in New York earlier this week.

It was attended by some 700 scientists, economists and policy makers confronting the issue "Global Warming: Was it ever really a crisis?"

The consensus (sorry, Al) was a resounding no.

Willie Soon, a Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist with scores of peer-reviewed papers and books to his credit, said he's "embarrassed and puzzled" by the shallow science in papers that undergird the proposition that the Earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.

He called for a "fairness doctrine" to be "applied to the funding of research and to the journal-review and publishing of papers."

One target of the attendees' scorn was NASA's Dr. James Hansen, himself recently caught fudging the numbers in declaring last October the warmest on record. Hansen helped organize a recent global warming march in Washington, D.C., during a snowstorm.

John Theon, retired senior atmospheric scientist at NASA, and Hansen's former boss, accused Hansen, Gore's favorite scientist and Kerry's too, of "embarrassing NASA."

Hansen, a NASA astronomer, once received a six-figure grant from the Heinz Foundation, run by Theresa Heinz Kerry, the wealthy wife of Sen. Kerry, and afterwards endorsed Kerry for president. Yet Hansen was never accused of having his opinions bought and paid for — unlike the many skeptics of global warming's claims.

It's not the glaciers of the Antarctic that face a meltdown, but the American economy.

An analysis by the George C. Marshall Institute estimates GDP losses of as much as 3% in 2015 and 10% in 2050 as a result of this cap-and-trade measure.

This enormous cost will make the mortgage and market meltdowns a fond memory and undo any good the stimulus package may have produced.

Cap-and-trade, the most popular way to address climate change, is a regressive tax that would hit the poor hardest.

The Congressional Budget Office calculates that higher prices caused by a forced 15% cut in CO2 emissions would cost those in the bottom quintile $680 a year, or about 3.3% of their income. They're the poorest of the poor.

The three middle quintiles would be socked between $880 and $1,500, or 2.7% to 2.9% of income. The rich would lose a mere 1.7%.

Clearly Joe Sixpack in his modest Midwest bungalow would be hit harder than the Al Gores of the world.

We call that spreading the poverty around. Cap-and-trade would be an economic tsunami.

Rising prices, not rising sea levels, are what threaten us. Scrap the cap.