ECONOMIC CATASTROPHES BASED ON JUNK SCIENCE
EPA Lawyers: Cap-And-Trade ‘Fatally Flawed’
Posted 11/11/2009 07:28 PM ET
Warming: After stifling a report questioning the science behind climate change, the EPA is censoring two of its lawyers for saying the proposed solutions are also problematical. The debate isn’t over. It’s being suppressed.
In the proud tradition of EPA whistle-blower Alan Carlin, whose leaked study blew the lid off the EPA’s hyped and flawed science behind climate change, two EPA lawyers, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, have produced a Web video titled “A Huge Mistake.” In it they say cap-and-trade in general and the Waxman-Markey bill in particular are the wrong answers anyway.
Williams and Zabel do not deny climate change or its alleged dangers. They are fans of alternative energy and support carbon fees, rebated to energy consumers, to curb emissions. But in two segments of the video they say cap-and-trade is a “big lie” and carbon offsets are a “big rip-off.”
Williams states: “Cap-and-trade for climate change has been tried in Europe. It produced harmful volatility in energy prices and few greenhouse gas reductions. It raised energy prices for consumers and raised billions in windfall profits for utilities.”
Zabel, who has helped oversee California’s cap-and-trade and offset programs for more than two decades, says “carbon offsets won’t work because they can’t be certified or verified as real additional reductions.” Williams says carbon offsets are like “subprime mortgages and other clever financial instruments” and similarly “lack integrity.”
They compare the mammoth Waxman-Markey bill that includes cap-and-trade provisions to the Challenger disaster, where administrators “refused to listen” to experts who knew better. They say it and other proposals like it create “perverse incentives” to continue polluting while others trade offsets for fun and huge profits.
In a Washington Post op-ed echoing their video, they cite an example of a landowner paid not to cut a forest he wasn’t planning to cut anyway. Even if he was planning to cut it, this means only that another forest will be cut.
“Purchasing this offset allows owners of a coal-fired power plant to burn extra coal, above the cap,” they write. The demand for wood remains. The burning of coal remains. Money changes hands with no reduction in greenhouse gases.
They also cite the refrigerant HCFC-22, the manufacture of which creates a dangerous byproduct.
Rather than requiring its quick and easy destruction, governments allow that destruction as a carbon offset, “making it twice as profitable to sell byproduct destruction as it was to sell the refrigerant.”
It also encourages the production of extra refrigerant to profit even more.
We do not share the belief that global warming is a man-induced and imminently dangerous form of climate change. We do share the belief that cap-and-trade and carbon offsets are a scam that wreaks economic havoc to reduce global temperatures by an immeasurable amount, if at all. We believe that recent events, such as a decade-long cooling trend, are what we used to call weather and part of a natural and cyclical pattern.
We have noted that all this will do more to green some bank accounts than green the environment.
We have noted how Al Gore has seen his net worth grow from a reported few million dollars to more than an estimated $100 million in less than a decade, profiting from his climate alarmism and investments in “green” technology.
We have also noted how the EPA has engaged in a cover-up of its own analyses of climate change, and discouraged public dissent. At EPA’s insistence, Zabel and Williams took down the video from their Web site, but not before it was copied and widely circulated.
Carlin, senior research analyst at the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, dared to say, in essence, that emperor Al Gore and his environmental sycophants at the EPA were wearing no clothes.
Carlin, who holds a doctorate in economics with an undergraduate degree in physics, said after examining numerous global warming studies that his research showed that “available observable data . .. invalidate the hypothesis” that humans cause dangerous global warming.
What humans cause are economic catastrophes based on junk science.
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