I caught AEI fellow Joel Schwartz’ Greensboro stop on his global warming tour with the John Locke Foundation. You want an Al Gore-type apocalyptic vision? Schwartz has it. It’s called environmentalism.
For starters, the argument that greenhouse gas emissions are greatly contributing to global warming just doesn’t hold water, Schwartz says. The Earth has warmed when there were no greenhouse gas emissions — polar bears survived the Medieval Warm Period, by the way — and cooled when there were greenhuse gas emissions. If anything, Schwartz argues, climate trends “are moving in the opposite direction from what models of greenhouse warming predict.”
Even if there are future changes to the Earth’s climate, human beings are usually able to adapt with increasing wealth and technolgical advances. A great example, especially on a day like today, is air conditioning. One of environmentalists’ dire predictions is that climate change will greatly increase deaths from heat waves. But the risk of dying from heat waves in the U.S. has dropped 75 percent from the 1960s to the 1990s, with the hottest areas having the lowest risk of heat-related deaths. Temperatures in the American Southwest were hotter than they were in Europe during the 2003 heat wave that killed 35,000 people. Europe may have free healthcare all right, but the hospitals don’t have air conditioning. Yeah, that’s a societal model the U.S. should follow.
So what’s the bottom line? Radical policies that will keep carbon dioxide emissions at 2004 levels “would require that the people of the world would be restricted to a level of energy use typical of countries where average real incomes are about one-third to one-tenth that of the average American’s income,” Schwartz says. Significantly reducing those emissions will do much to help “impoverish the current wealthy and deny the benfits of wealth to the currently impoverished.”
Think about it for a minute. Environmentalists are worried about the coming heat wave, and what do they want to do? Raise the cost air conditioning. Doesn’t make sense.
