EPA Carbon Regulations: Science or Religion

    The EPA enacted, and President Obama enthusiastically touted, new regulations on carbon emissions targeting coal burning power generation. The regulations phase in between now and 2030. This post contains the numbers – which you are not likely to read anywhere else – behind the regulations. Note: The US Supreme Court recently stayed the regulations until after the matter is adjudicated in the appellate court.

    The US uses 18% of the world’s energy of which 36% is coal generated. Thus the US uses 6.5% (18% times 36%) of global coal power. However, absent new regulation, America’s reliance on coal is falling rapidly; over the next 15 years (the length of the EPA regulation phase in) it will be less that 5% of global coal power generation.

    The EPA mandates a 32% decrease in carbon emissions by 2030. A cut of 32% of 5% is equal to a reduction of 1.6% – or one-tenth of one percent per year between now and 2030. The regulation reduces temperature by less than two-hundredths of one degree Celsius by the year 2100. During the phase-in period of the regulation, China alone will add far more coal burning capacity than the US takes out of service. Despite virtually non-existent benefits, the costs to achieve them are astronomical.

    The American coal industry is savaged, big swaths of our country economically devastated, 300,000 jobs destroyed and economic growth stifled. The initial compliance costs are $50 billion and then $10 billion of ongoing costs per year and increasing every year thereafter ad infinitum. Every American household and business will pay much, much more for energy with working people and the poor, i.e. those who Obama claims to be looking out for, the most severely impacted.

    For any American president to invoke such an extreme measure by executive fiat, one would have to believe the horrendous sacrifices being demanded of the American people are justified by the results attained, i.e. the costs bear at least some relationship to the putative benefits. Yet as shown herein, the costs are real, onerous and immediate while the benefits are  microscopic, uncertain and remote. Reductions of carbon of .1% (one part per thousand) per year and in temperature of .02 degrees by 2100 (2.35 ten-thousandths of one degree) per year are so small as to defy measurement.

    Obama is demanding extraordinary sacrifices without benefits; yet that is not the most absurd part of this American tragedy. The pinnacle of absurdity is that these sacrifices are being imposed, not in the name of science, but in the name of climate religion. There is no evidence warming is significantly anthropogenic or even harmful, while there is much evidence (see March 6th MLLG posting) to the contrary.

    This is another instance of liberal elitists impoverishing millions of working Americans solely in obeisance to their unscientific, politically climate religion.