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Global Warming: A New 'Revolution'?
Investor's Business Daily
Climate Change: For Congress, it's become a matter of near-religious faith that we should spend whatever is needed to curb global warming. A new study suggests that the amounts needed will be staggering. Democrats in Congress are touting a new National Intelligence Assessment — created by the CIA and other agencies solely at the behest of Congress — that suggests global warming is a grave national security threat.
Pardon us if we laugh, but these new intelligence reports deserve little, if any, credence. They are politically motivated documents, put out by the spy agencies just to get Congress off their backs. The fact that the intelligence agencies themselves admit to having only "low to medium" confidence in their forecasts suggests they recognize this is a political document of virtually no value.
Yet even as the CIA's politically cooked global warming forecast gets all the press, a more important report is virtually ignored. This one, by the well-respected McKinsey Global Institute, suggests the economic costs of meeting global warming targets will be enormous. In sum, the world will have to boost its energy productivity — or efficiency — by a factor of 10 by 2050 in order to pay for global warming and maintain our standard of living.
Let's put that into perspective. Today, McKinsey notes, we produce about $740 of GDP for each ton of CO2 we emit. To cut global warming emissions 72% by 2050, as some want, we'll have to produce $7,300 of GDP per ton of C02 emitted. Such an extraordinary leap of productivity would be like compressing the entire Industrial Revolution — which lasted from roughly 1830 to 1955 — into just 42 years. While GDP is expected to grow 3.1% annually over that time, our energy productivity will have to increase 5.6% a year. That would require major technological advances nowhere on the horizon. It ain't going to happen.
The price tag? Roughly 0.6% to 1.4% a year of GDP by 2030. World GDP is now about $64 trillion. So every year we'd have to fork out about $896 billion in current dollars to meet the goal. Make no mistake: The United States, as the world's richest nation, will get stuck with the bulk of the tab. As if we didn't have enough on our plates with the $51 trillion Social Security and Medicare crisis.
All told, we'll have to spend upwards of $65 trillion in the U.S. to pay for both global warming and entitlements. As candidates in this election year promise to address warming, Americans should keep in mind that "doing something" comes down to a tax hike of almost $40 trillion on world output over 40 years — a lot of money that could be spent on far better things.
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 30 June 2008