President Obama flew down to Florida this Earth Day to give his umpteenth speech on climate change. That means he’ll have added something like 94 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere on his round-trip 747 flight to decry CO2 emissions.
In any case, as with every Earth Day, the public gets an annual dose of fear and loathing about the environmental dangers facing our planet. Well, here are some inconvenient facts environmentalists aren’t likely to tell anyone. (Keep in mind that all the data come from official government sources.)
1) The air is dramatically cleaner. IBD called this “the EPA’s dirty secret about the environment” — namely, that every type of harmful air pollution it measures is dramatically reduced over the past several decades, to the point where most are at or below the government’s current standards. This decline came amid gains in GDP and increases in population, making them all the more remarkable. And they will continue to fall, even without any new rules, as the economy continues to improve its efficiency.
2) CO2 levels in the U.S. are down sharply. They’ve fallen so much in the past decade, in fact, that emissions are down to where they were around 1993. Again, that’s despite two decades of population and economic growth.
3) Green energy has no future. Despite billions spent on green energy sources like wind and solar, they are expected to make up just 4% of the nation’s domestic energy supply by 2040, according to the Energy Department.
4) Global temperatures haven’t increased in more than a decade. Contrary to what climate models predicted, global temperatures have largely flat-lined for years. As a result, climate scientists have been scrambling to explain away this “pause.”
5)If climate scientists are right, its already too late to stop catastrophic warming. For many years, climate experts have warned that the planet is close to a “tipping point” where catastrophic global warming becomes inevitable. The reason is that CO2 pumped into the atmosphere remains there for decades. The Global Carbon Project figures that even if the entire planet immediately froze CO2 emissions at today’s levels — something no one is advocating — it would push back the date the planet exhausts its “carbon budget” by just eight years.
But as IBD noted, “a review of recent research indicates that, no matter how many costly regulations the U.S. imposes or how dire the warnings, the battle appears to be already lost.” At the very least, none of the solutions bandied about would come close to preventing climate change.
The good news is that since climate models have been overestimating warming, these dire predictions about a coming catastrophe may be way off base, too.
