It's About Politics, Not Climate

By Alan Caruba

If you think global warming is about climate, think again.

It’s all about politics and, if you don’t believe me, maybe you will believe Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund. An April 16 news release from the EDF was titled “President’s Remarks Recognize Political Reality of Coming Action on Climate Change.”

This was a response to President Bush throwing seven years of resistance to the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change overboard and letting it be Congress’s problem. In fact, since 1997 when the Senate, which must approve all treaties, unanimously refused to consider the Kyoto Protocol, any U.S. involvement in limiting “greenhouse gases” has been entirely voluntary.

Ironically, the U.S., according to a recent study by the Pacific Research Institute, is doing a better job than Europe and any of the other signatories to the treaty. Besides, why should the U.S. wreck its economy with emissions caps while China and India have always been exempt from the Protocol?

The Environmental Defense Fund, however, understands what the global warming scare is all about and it isn’t climate! The EDF news release said the White House announcement “marks a significant political shift in the debate over national climate legislation.”

As for legislating the climate, why not get Congress to pass a law against hurricanes like Katrina? Just make it illegal for a hurricane to make landfall anywhere in America. Sound nuts? That’s because legislating anything regarding the climate is nuts.

What EDF wants to know is whether the Bush administration will support “a bill that puts a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions, like the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S. 2191), which is expected to come to a vote in the Senate in early June.”

“The bill would cap and reduce emissions roughly 19 percent below today’s levels by 2020 and 70 percent by 2050, putting the U.S. on the path to reduce emissions far enough and fast enough to help avoid the worst consequences of unchecked global warming.”

This is insane babbling. If you want to return to a level of GHG emissions comparable to just after the Civil War, that’s what this bill proposes.

The Earth is cooling and has been doing so noticeably since around 1998. The Sun’s radiation has been reduced for several years as the result of a lack of sunspot activity. According to NOAA, the oceans are growing cooler, not warmer. The ice caps of the poles have been growing, as have glaciers.

As for greenhouse gases, they are a miniscule part (0.038%) of the Earth’s atmosphere, but the EDF doesn’t want anyone to know that. “The only thing we’re lacking now is political will. The American public wants action, the business community wants action. It’s time for Congress to act,” Krupp said.

Does Fred Krupp speak for you? Is he, in effect, saying that global warming is a political issue, not a climate issue? Make up your own mind about that.