The Tribune editorial on July 26 claims that there “is a growing acceptance that global warming is, indeed, a problem.” Unfortunately, that “growing acceptance” is wrong and therefore a poor basis on which to establish a public policy.
While the greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have grown in the last 50 years, the correlation with a warming of the world’s climate is weak and far from being generally accepted by the scientific community.
The projections of future warming are based on models that do not predict the current temperatures very well. The only place where a rising temperature can be substantiated is in the high northern latitudes in the dead of winter and that amount is on the order of just a couple of degrees.
It has been estimated by a climatologist generally sympathetic to the cause that a 30 percent reduction in 2010 emissions would reduce the temperature about one-tenth of a degree. However, the cost to society of an equivalent reduction in energy consumption would be a worldwide recession.
Many supporters of the Kyoto Protocol look to emissions trading to make the cost acceptably low.
Past experiments with emission trading, however, are not encouraging. The sulfur dioxide trading among electric utilities under the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 is so complicated that only one-quarter of the trades are between utilities.
The other three-quarters are essentially self-trading, which amounts to nothing more than averaging emissions for each utility.
When the state government in California took over the electricity supply earlier this year, it suspended the trading of oxides of nitrogen emissions because the prices were too high.
All the sources that over-reduced their emissions in hopes of selling the excess were taught a lesson. No environmental good deed goes unpunished by the government.
Contrary to the Tribune editorial, the best policy is to develop the science of warming to a higher degree of confidence. In the meantime we should do no harm.
