Anti-CO2 activists may have to find something else to give their lives meaning. The AP reports that “the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in the U.S. has fallen dramatically to its lowest level in 20 years, and government officials say the biggest reason is that cheap and plentiful natural gas has led many power plant operators to switch from dirtier-burning coal.”
So if you’ve been championing government action as the last best hope to save humankind from the big broil, you too should find a hobby: “Many of the world’s leading climate scientists didn’t see the drop coming, in large part because it happened as a result of market forces rather than direct government action against carbon dioxide.”
Finally, if you think the problem has been America’s uncooperative attitude regarding international treaties, you’re wrong: “the shift from coal to gas has helped bring the U.S. closer to meeting some of the greenhouse gas targets in the 1997 Kyoto treaty on global warming, which the United States never ratified.”
It’s an amazing story, really. How did it happen? Shale gas and fracking: “A frenzy of shale gas drilling in the Northeast’s Marcellus Shale and in Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana has caused the wholesale price of natural gas to plummet from $7 or $8 per unit to about $3 over the past four years, making it cheaper to burn than coal for a given amount of energy produced.”
Whether or not you think anthropogenic global warming is a real problem, it’s hard to overstate the significance of this. For years, the Inconvenient Truthers have been telling us the sky will fall unless Big Government comes in to regulate emissions on a global scale. Federally backed “green-energy” companies like Solyndra have gone bust on the taxpayer’s dime trying to combat CO2. The free market is now under perpetual attack, as a human-killing, planet-destroying profit monster that can only be fought back by a new regulatory regime. Hydraulic fracturing (the practice of freeing underground natural gas by using a mix of pressurized fluid containing water, sand, and chemicals) has come under fire from environmentalists as the energy-evil du jour. And, of course, in the supposedly “post-American” world, we are told the United States can no longer afford to look down on international agreements that would hold the behavior of Americans to the standard of some mediating body like the UN. All of it, nonsense.
No government or bureaucracy can centrally plan to accomplish what the self-interested nodes of a free-market system can. The U.S. brought down CO2 emissions without help from Washington or the United Nations. We can always raise them again by killing free-market innovation on the advice of environmentalists.
The always thoughtful and entertaining Abe Greenwald! n nAbe's last comment is priceless: "We can always raise them again by killing free-market innovation on the advice of environmentalists." That is, if the environmentalists want to destroy us, simply over-regulate the economy and remove the free market. Presto! Innovation is lost, our world will be poorer and dirtier. n nThe problem is not that the free market doesn't work, because it does work. It's getting those who fundamentally despise it to see that they are misguided in their views. We have to push and prod our friends to see the benefits of a free society and a free market place on the quality of life that we have.
Let's not lose site of the fact that the "environmentalists" are much less concerned about the environment than they are about obtaining political power (for proper liberal thinking people only) than they are about the environment. They will either risibly dispute the facts listed in articles such as this one or simply pretend these facts don't exist so they can press on with their *political* agenda. nPolicies ostensibly on behalf of the environment are merely a tool for the Left. A cleaner environment is not the goal, despite what the Left posits. To be continued… n
nThe best example of this is when the Climategate emails were made public. The "environmentalists" recoiled in horror at the mortal blow they had been delivered. They disputed the undisputable findings or simply pretended that the emails never happened. One would think that if these people were truly concerned about the environment, they would have been jumping for joy to learn that the "top" "environmental scientists" were cooking the books to show global warming when the was no global warming ("hide the decline"). The earth actually *wasn't* going to cook and fry us all. Instead of joy, they were all utterly morose. The best you could get from the Left on this topic was the occasional intellectually honest Lefty who unhappily conceded that these emails were damning to the cause. Not one of them was actually happy. And that, folks, is all you need to know to determine the true goals of the "environmentalists."
So far so good, but how has the price of coal been impacted by draconian — essentially predatory — government regulations in the past four years?