“As a first priority, the Trump Administration must review, revise, reject or even rescind the SCC, and reduce its values well below what Obama used – perhaps even to zero or negative numbers. Doing so will destroy the justification for many expensive, intrusive, punitive, useless, counterproductive regulations.”
“The benefit estimates … will remain orders of magnitude larger than any reasonable SCC estimates, which means the B-C ratios will also remain very high.”
The Obama Administration aggressively used a Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) scheme to justify federal regulations pertaining to carbon-based fuels, carbon dioxide and methane emissions, coal mine and pipeline permit denials, energy development foreign aid, and many other actions.
While “SCC” may sound esoteric or academic, it is a critical concept. Without the artificial and inflated SCC estimates, many recent energy and environmental regulations could not have been justified or promulgated.…
“The proposals offered thus far for adoption at the UN Paris conference to drastically reduce world GHGs and hydrocarbon use by 2050 are fatally flawed, unrealistic and impossible to achieve without destroying the world economy.”
[Editor note: The first part of this post ran yesterday at MasterResource.]
Policy prescriptions for drastically reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, to keep global temperatures from increasing by 2° or 3° Celsius (3.5 to 5.5° Fahrenheit), are based on unverified computer model projections, which are themselves based on the much-contested assumption that carbon dioxide now controls Earth’s climate.
Even if that assumption is correct, however, eliminating fossil fuels over the next 35 years would reduce world per capita GDP to only about 4% of what it is otherwise forecast to be, under a “business as usual” scenario.…
“The UN’s ‘Deep Decarbonization Pathways’ … will require a radical transformation of economic and energy systems by 2050, through massive declines in carbon intensity in all sectors. It is not about modest or incremental change [but] … major changes in every country’s energy and production systems, over both the mid-term and long-term.”
Radical Islamist terrorists just maimed and murdered hundreds of people in Paris, dozens more in Mali, still more in other nations. They promise more atrocities in the United States and around the globe.
Meanwhile some 40,000 bureaucrats, politicians, scientists, lobbyists, activists and journalists plan to enjoy five-star Parisian hotels and restaurants, while attending COP21, the twenty-first UN Climate Change Conference, from November 30 through December 11. Like President Obama, they insist that humanity faces no greater threat than climate change.…