If you haven’t had a chance to take part in this week’s Global Warming Tour, you might enjoy watching the following snippet from Joel Schwartz’s Raleigh presentation.
Schwartz is the JLF adjunct scholar and American Enterprise Institute visiting fellow who’s putting the finishing touches on the North Carolina Citizen’s Guide to Global Warming. In his presentation, he offers this assessment (video) of the impact of proposed global warming-inspired carbon dioxide reductions on the U.S. and world economies:
A 60 percent reduction from the world average — that would mean that even a place like China is already twice as high as they could be if we were really going to try to stabilize carbon dioxide. The U.S. is about 10 times higher than where we need to be. Europe is about five times higher than where it would need to be. So we’re talking about moving to energy consumption levels that are typical of very poor countries today or that were typical of the U.S. and Europe 100 years ago.
So one of the things that environmentalists and Al Gore don’t tell you is that this “wrenching transformation” — as Al puts it — involves more than just driving cars that get better fuel economy. It involves more than just screwing in a few compact fluorescent light bulbs. It involves not using … using hardly any energy, much less than we use today. And it means for developing countries — even a place like China would have to reduce its energy consumption, and places like India and Bangladesh and Africa wouldn’t be able to really increase their energy consumption.
We’re talking about destroying the village to save it if we really want to try to reduce CO2 to a level that would be necessary to really affect the climate.
Joel and the JLF touring crew have one more stop: noon tomorrow at Wilmington’s Hilton Riverside. We’ll post a link to the entire presentation once the Global Warming Tour is complete.
