Environmental Priorities

Call me a denier if you like. I don't believe man made carbon dioxide emissions represent a serious threat to the planet. On the contrary, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a net benefit because of its effect on plant growth. I do believe the earth is a warmer place than it was a hundred years ago, though not warmer than eighteen years ago, or than in the days when Rome was in its ascendency. Whether the world will be warmer or cooler a hundred years from now is a matter of some conjecture but we should be prepared for it either way. Here is my problem. If we pursue draconian measures to discontinue the use of fossil fuels, measures that even their advocates concede will have minuscule effects on climate change, mankind will certainly be less prosperous in the future and less able to deal with changes in the climate that will surely occur. We will have passed on an opportunity never before seen, a chance to eliminate extreme poverty. If we need to build dikes to ward off rising sea levels we will not have the where-with-all to do it It is the poverty issue that bothers me most. In the U.S. the EPA is implementing regulations designed to drive up the cost of energy, increase the number of citizens classed as poor, and further reduce disposable incomes for those least able to afford higher fuel bills. For those of us who live in Texas a return to the days of summers without air conditioning is not a happy thought It gets worse. President Obama has disapproved the Keystone XL pipeline to transport Canadian oil to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, oil that will be shipped instead by rail, or by sea to Asia. It is a purely symbolic gesture to prepare him for a coming international conference in Paris where he will urge the rest of the world to follow suit. He will commit to a level of funding for the third world he and the world know the congress will not approve. If we spent a fraction of the political and economic capital he will propose, we could rebuild the electric grid in India and supply power to advance that country's move into the realm of the middle class. In the process millions of lives would be spared death from respiratory ailments caused by indoor cooking fires fueled with dung I am not a scientist but I know what the scientific method is and the climate models predicting catastrophic global warming aren't it. When a hypothesis proves wrong, a scientist changes his hypothesis. He does not fall back on the half truths, wild exaggerations, and outright fabrications that drive climate change alarm. That alone is enough to produce the healthy skepticism so many people have toward the argument. I would also argue, though Pope Francis would disagree, that a more prosperous planet would be a cleaner one. England is certainly a cleaner place than during the early days of the industrial revolution. The United States is cleaner than it was in my youth when many people heated their homes with coal. We can thank natural gas pipelines for much of that. And we are seeing the Chinese pay a lot more attention to their own smog problems, an issue much closer to them than carbon dioxide is likely to be any time in the near future. I would like to see us focused on projects with measurable benefits, projects we can actually do. We have made enormous progress in recent decades in reducing extreme global poverty. Why is that? How can we expedite the process? We are moving backward in the United States. How can we turn that around? And why don't we clean up the dead zone at the mouth of the Mis