"Meeting the Climate Challenge": Left-of-Center Groups Warn of Impending Doom
by Amy Ridenour
Whether you love
them or would just love to leave them out in the cold, enthusiastic
advocates of the global warming theory are not known for an exquisite
sense of timing.
A year ago, former
Vice President Al Gore picked a sub-zero, wind-whipped day in
Manhattan to take over the stage of the storied Beacon Theater
and accuse President Bush with ignoring the perils of global
warming. Gore's rant was delivered on the coldest day in a decade
in New York City, while a stagnant cold front sent wind-chill
readings plunging to 100 degrees below zero in parts of New England.
This January, as
an Arctic clipper sailed across the northern United States and
blanketed New England with several feet of snow, global warming
alarmists topped Gore's act - and then some.
A new report called
"Meeting the Climate Challenge" by three liberal think-tanks
in the U.S., Britain and Australia generated dozens of headlines
around the globe similar to this one in Britain's London-based
Independent: "Global Warming Approaching Point of No Return."
In creating a collaborative
product by the Center for American Progress, the U.K.'s Institute
for Public Policy Research and the Australia Institute, the authors
went far further in terms of predicting a climate change disaster
than any other global warming advocates to-date.
While the U.N. Panel
on Climate Change and many environmental groups project severe
climate change occurring by the end of this century, the latest
report warns the point of no return is only 10 years away.
To ward off the
coming apocalypse, the report warns, the U.S. and other wealthy
countries must immediately commit themselves to drastic cuts
in oil and gas consumption and agree to tap a quarter of their
electricity from renewable resources such as solar and wind power.
It also calls for them to double their research spending on low-carbon
energy by 2010.
This latest over-the-top
warning of impending doom appears to be a last-ditch assault
by the international global warming lobby to pressure the U.S.
to impose draconian cuts in energy consumption equivalent to
those demanded by the 1997 Kyoto Treaty on climate change.
The treaty, which
would curtail current U.S. energy use by some 30 percent, becomes
binding on its signatories in mid-February, but many of the world's
largest emitters of carbon dioxide - including China, India,
Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico - are exempt from its provisions.
The U.S. Senate
voted 95-0 in 1997 to urge the Clinton Administration not to
send the treaty to Capitol Hill for ratification. President Bush
formally rejected Kyoto in his first term.
While Russia recently
ratified it, many observers believe Putin was pressured into
it by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other European Union
officials who threatened to deny membership in the World Trade
Organization - a denial that would have cost Russia tens of billions
of dollars annually.
Andrei Illarionov,
Putin's chief economic adviser, repeatedly has cast doubts on
whether Putin will uphold his commit to Kyoto, noting that none
of the treaty's assertions about climate change have been documented
by scientific data.
"There is no
evidence confirming a positive linking between the level of carbon
dioxide and temperature change," Ilarionov says. "The
U.N. panel's so-called scientific data are considerably distorted
and in many cases falsified."
Ilarionov further
contends that global warming crusaders are spurred by an ideology
that compares with "the human-hating totalitarian ideologies
like Nazism and Marxism, which we had the bad fortune to deal
with during the 20th Century."
Ilarionov and others
contend the sole objective of climate change advocates is to
disrupt the advanced economies of the U.S., Europe and Japan
by convincing multi-national companies to move plants and jobs
to developing countries that don't have to comply with emissions
restrictions.
"The wealth
of the United States is, and has been the prime target,"
says Tom DeWeese, president of the American Policy Center in
Warrenton, Virginia. Moving American factories to Third World
nations doesn't make sense, he contends, "because that means
the same emissions will be coming out of the jungles of South
America instead of Chicago. So where is the protection of the
environment?"
He's right. The
latest spurge of dire warnings about global warming deserve instant
burial in the snow drifts currently laying siege to the United
Nations complex along Manhattan's East River.
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Amy Ridenour is
president of The National Center for Public Policy Research.
Comments may be sent to [email protected].
