The Kansas Legislature has wisely written a proposed tax on
carbon dioxide emissions out of this year’s energy legislation.
That’s the good news: As originally written by the Committee on
Utilities, the Sunflower Energy bill’s CO2 tax would have been a
first, and a very bad precedent. The bad news is that the original
bill will be copied and wind up before other legislatures that are
more likely to pass it, like those of California and Oregon.
A CO2 tax will largely be levied on utilities that exceed modest
limits on their carbon dioxide effluent, so consumers won’t “see”
it — except in their electric bills. They’ll send in their monthly
checks, quite unaware that the new tax revenues are likely to be
shoved into a slush fund for solar energy, windmills, biodiesel,
ethanol and other green gadgetry boondoggles.
Never mind that even the New York Times now
acknowledges that biofuels add more carbon dioxide to the
atmosphere than the equivalent amount of conventional fuels, or
that the diversion of a third of the U.S. corn crop to ethanol
production has driven world food prices up so much that we are now
witnessing riots, including a major one in Jakarta last month.
Let’s just consider the merits of this legislation vis-a-vis
some pretty well-known (if poorly publicized) global warming
science.
Further, we’ll cheat a bit and stipulate that the bill results
in a 10% net reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, and that global
warming fever sweeps the nation, resulting in similar legislation
passing in every other state.
Based upon a widely accepted formula originated at the U.S.
National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, if
the entire United States adopted the original Kansas legislation,
it would prevent a total of 0.11 degrees F of global warming
per century. Read that again, because it’s not a typo:
Eleven one-hundredths of a degree in 100 years.
Instead, let’s apply the original Kansas legislation to every
nation on the planet that agreed to limit its emissions under the
infamous 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an amendment to a 1992 United Nations
global climate treaty that would require the U.S. to reduce
emissions far beyond what was written out of the Kansas bill. The
new law would prevent 0.27 degrees F of warming per century. That’s
an amount too small to measure, because global temperatures vary by
more than that from year-to-year — global warming or not.
Since 1979, satellites have been measuring lower atmospheric
temperatures around the globe. In the last 12 months, they show
that the earth’s mean temperature has dropped by
1.13ºF. Thus, in one year, that natural variability is
four times greater than the amount of warming that would be
prevented if the entire industrialized world adopted the original
Kansas statute.
The satellite temperature surveys also show there has been no
net global warming since 2000. It’s a little unfair to go back much
further in this discussion, because 1998 was an extremely hot year
— the high point in both satellite and land-based temperature
histories — because of a huge El Nino (which, incidentally, proved
to be a great boon to Kansas’s wheat farmers).
All of which is to say that global warming isn’t exactly
proceeding apace. Rather, the rate of planetary warming is falling
in line with the low end of 21st century projections made by the
UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with the smart
money now riding on a bit more than 3 degrees F of warming this
century. It’s worth noting that the 20th century saw about half of
that warming, along with a doubling of life expectancy in the
industrialized world, and an approximately ten-fold increase in
real personal wealth.
But we hear over and over that if we don’t “do” something
serious about carbon dioxide emissions in the next eight years (a
conveniently presidential number), we are condemning ourselves to
an unmitigated climate disaster, as much of Greenland’s ice crashes
into the sea, raising sea level as much as 20 feet.
That’s about as likely as a bill limiting CO2 emissions in
Kansas putting a detectable dent in global warming. Congratulations
to the legislature for its wisdom in writing out the carbon tax.
But beware, electronic copies of the original are flying around the
country, looking for places to land.
