Carbon Hyperbole

We had an early frost in North Texas this year, about three weeks before usual. The reason was pretty simple, a combination of low humidity and no cloud cover. When the sun went down the temperature started dropping like a rock, a classic reaction to low greenhouse atmospheric conditions. Thin dry air is the reason temperatures tend to fall so quickly at night in the mountains. Without water vapor the earth would be a much colder place and most life as we know it would be impossible. It is far and away the most important of the green house gasses and I suspect most of us don’t even realize that is one. Most of us might list carbon dioxide and maybe methane or nitrous oxides, but almost certainly not water vapor. In fairness an increase in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, those generated by human activity, is usually cited as the primary cause of global warming. Water vapor is rarely mentioned. But I think the example illustrates that most of us don’t really know very much about the issue. We’ve been conditioned to think of greenhouse gasses as pollutants and of course that isn’t necessarily so.

That all tends to get lost in the noise over global warming. An extremist environmental lobby, a few well intentioned celebrities, and a compliant media have so wildly exaggerated the harmful effects of CO2 that we may be about to inflict really serious long term damage to our economy in order to reduce emissions. We are told that last summer’s $4 gasoline was a good thing. Some think $5 or even $7 would be better. Our president elect wants a carbon cap and trade auction that would bankrupt anybody building a new coal fired power plant. If we don’t act now, humanity will soon be reduced to a few thousand souls living at either pole, the only habitable places left on the planet. Society will collapse into medieval poverty. To avoid that fate we must impose economic penalties on ourselves that would take us to, um, medieval poverty.

It’s a shame because there are so many opportunities we could be pursuing to make the planet a better place, and are distracted by all this hype. We could be drilling in ANWAR at virtually no environmental cost and using the oil royalties to clean up the Chesapeake, Lake Pontchartrain, the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi, San Francisco Bay, and who knows how many other polluted waters. At a fraction of the cost of cap and trade taxes we could build enough nuclear power plants to supply all our electricity needs with no pollution emissions of any kind. We could divert coal to clean technology that would eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, bring enormous economic benefits, and knock the props from under some of the world’s worst tyrants. We could build desalinization plants to supply fresh water for our cities in the southwest, divert water they use now to irrigation, and feed a lot of hungry people.

There are a lot of things we could and should be doing to make the world better and more livable but aren’t because of misplaced priorities. Instead we want to incur enormous costs for negligible benefit. Even the most alarmist scientists say current proposals to restrict carbon emissions will have little effect on global warming. Some say the whole thing is a giant hoax. Most say the warming is a fact and is caused by human activity but the dangers are grossly over stated.

I was encouraged last week to see several carbon related state ballot initiatives defeated as too onerous and too costly. Maybe we will now begin to have some reasoned public discourse. It has been too long absent.