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Green-on-Green Violence
Steven Milloy
Junk
Science
Friday, Dec 05, 2008
The activist group Environmental Defense got a taste
of what it used to dish out this week when its Washington, D.C.,
offices were invaded by another green group, the Global Justice
Ecology Project.
The Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP) essentially accused
Environmental Defense (ED) of collaborating with the enemy --
big businesses that want cap-and-trade global warming legislation.
Noting that her father was one of ED’s founders, GJEP head
Rachel Smolker said she was now “ashamed” of ED because
it advocated cap-and-trade. Smolker said that the European version
of cap-and-trade, the Kyoto Protocol, had “utterly failed”
to reduce emissions and served “only to provide huge profits
for the world’s most polluting industries.”
“Instead of protecting the environment, ED now seems primarily
concerned with protecting corporate bottom lines. I can hear my
father rolling over in his grave,” Smolker said.
The GJEP activists who took over ED’s offices rearranged
the furniture to illustrate how cap-and-trade is “like rearranging
the deck chairs on the Titanic," and sported signs that read
“Keep the cap, ditch the trade” and “Carbon
trading is an environmental offense.”
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
While this column’s position is that global warming alarmism
is the ultimate in junk science and that the proposed solutions
to this non-problem amount to economic and social suicide, for
those who believe in the need for global warming regulation, the
GJEP activists do indeed have a point -- cap-and-trade is a charade.
If you subscribe to climate alarmism, you can view cap-and-trade
only as too little, too late. Last August, the head of the United
Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, R.K. Pachauri,
told the Voice of America that the clock is running out on the
amount of time left to reverse global warming. “I would
say about six or seven years. We need to think about change rather
quickly because unless we do that, then the impacts of climate
change are going to get more and more serious,” he said.
Assuming for the sake of argument that manmade greenhouse gases
are the climatic culprit that the U.N. and CO2-phobes make them
out to be, how much progress toward Pachauri’s goal of reversing
global warming will cap-and-trade have made in seven years? None.
First, NASA’s CO2-phobe-in-chief, James Hansen, says that
atmospheric carbon dioxide levels need to be stabilized at about
350 parts per million (ppm) to avert harmful climate change. But
atmospheric CO2 levels are already at 380 ppm and growing. So
the CO2 horse has already left the climate barn.
Next, the schedule of emissions reductions in the Lieberman-Warner
climate bill -- the legislation that died in the Senate last June
because it was too onerous -- would only have reduced annual U.S.
greenhouse gas emissions by about 11 percent by the seventh year
of its implementation. Since the Lieberman-Warner scheme covered
only 70 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, in the first
place, the actual reduction in annual emissions after seven years
would have been less than 8 percent from current levels. As the
U.S. would still be emitting more than 6 billion tons of greenhouse
gases to the atmosphere annually, it’s pretty obvious that
a measly 8 percent reduction would not “reverse” global
warming, as Pachauri says needs to happen.
Finally, as former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney
said, it’s called “global warming” not “America
warming.” China is either close to passing, or has already
passed, the U.S. as the world’s leading greenhouse gas emitter.
As it builds a new coal-fired power plant every week, China is
increasing its emissions by as much as 10 percent per year. China,
then, will increase its emissions more in one year than the U.S.
would cut in seven years. Now that’s a carbon offset --
one that renders any U.S. cap-and-trade efforts as futile as King
Canute trying to command the tides.
The Global Justice Ecology Project is entirely correct that cap-and-trade
is a system that will “rake in profits” for Environmental
Defense’s big business buddies. ED’s cohorts in the
U.S. Climate Action Partnership lobbying effort expect that taxpayers
will award them more than $1 trillion in free carbon credits over
the first 10 years of a cap-and-trade scheme. After all, USCAP
members like Alcoa, Dow Chemical, Dupont, and General Electric
are not lobbying for global warming regulation just so they can
operate under an even more onerous regulatory regime. Cap-and-trade
is the latest in corporate rent-seeking -- getting paid for being
regulated.
Hardcore Greens like the GJEP are understandably upset at supposed
allies “sleeping with the enemy.” But large activist
groups like Environmental Defense went mainstream long ago and
are now more like the big businesses they used to scorn rather
than the than grassroots groups they started out as. In contrast
to GJEP’s hand-scrawled 2006 tax return showing revenues
of a mere $103,349, ED’s neatly typed out 2006 tax return
showed revenues of $83,827,034.
Environmentalism has become an industry of sorts. According to
a recent Forbes report, the 11 largest environmental groups have
combined annual revenues of about $1.8 billion and own billions
of dollars of assets. By selling out, Big Green has cashed in.
It will be interesting to see whether the hardscrabble green
groups that seem to really believe in a coming climate apocalypse
will succeed in pressuring the limousine Greens to return to the
fold, or whether the haves will make the have-nots an offer they
can’t refuse.
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