Posted on 03/20/2008 9:38:23 AM PDT by rightinthemiddle
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Here's what leading presidential candidates have said about climate change and energy policies, and what they want to do.
REPUBLICAN ARIZONA SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: "I know that climate change is real ... we've got to address it, we can do it with technology, with cap and trade, with capitalist and free enterprise motivation." Co-authored bill to cut emissions by 65 percent by 2050, favors unspecified fuel efficiency increase and overall energy efficiency.
DEMOCRATIC NEW YORK SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: "We need to start on a path to slow, stop and reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions." Supports an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, 40 mile-per-gallon fuel efficiency standard by 2017 and 10 percent cut in energy consumption by 2020.
DEMOCRATIC ILLINOIS SEN. BARACK OBAMA: "For the sake of our security, our economy, our jobs and our planet, the age of oil must end in our time." Supports 80 percent cut in carbon emissions by 2050, 50 mile-per-gallon fuel efficiency standard in 18 years and 50 percent cut in energy intensity -- the amount of power used as it relates to economic growth product -- by 2030.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
I just can’t take anyone seriously who believes in man made global warming.
Of course climate change is real.
This morning it was 42 degrees and right now its 78 degrees and I expect tomorrow it to be about 68 degrees.
You aren't going to hear anything from McCain, or the other two for that matter, that isn't straight out of Soros' agenda to bring this country to it's knees.
McCain wasn’t a very good student at USNA. At the time he went it was a solid engineering only school. He must have been sleeping in thermo classes(steam as we called it).
We need to make sure that we elect many solid conservatives to override McCain on the issues of energy and immigration..so we must go to the polls..elect him and elect a conservative congress to make up for his weakiness’s.
Plus we need to have a VP who is conservative to replace him after his first term.
I agree. I find it very hard to vote for a candidate who campaigns on “fighting climate change.”
Even if I vote for him, I won’t send him a dollar.
Pandering whores.
so debate them and let’s see who wins
www.realclimate.org
John, it's called "weather." Look into it.
The Sun Contributes to Climate Change!
Video @ 10:00
I think that climate change is real too. When has it ever NOT changed? Where I live we sometimes get 40 degree swings in temperature over the course of a single day. We even experience (gasp!) significant changes in average temperature that last for months - these are called “seasons”.
The question is not that the climate changes it is whether or not the change is for the worse and whether or not we can do anything about it. The other day there was a segment on a newscast about greenhouse gases and the climate change loons admitted that even if every vehicle in the US was banned tomorrow the resulting change in temperature would be less than 1 degree over a period of years.
The only thing I am sure of is that if we give complete control of energy production and usage to politicians we will have surrendered virtually all freedom for virtually nothing.
ping
The question of whether we can do anything about global warming should be left to the economists.
The question of whether there is global warming should be left to the climate scientists.
They forgot a candidate:
Hot debate: Global warming
Alan Keyes
September 23, 2000
This week, I am going to consider some of the economic and related human costs of a serious attempt to restrict carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. These are costs that the Kyoto protocol would impose whether or not the warnings about global warming — and its catastrophic effects — are reality or fantasy, a topic I will explore next week.
The material basis for human flourishing is crudely measured by our statistics of wealth and income. It is no doubt true that many in the developed world cast their money after baubles of mere momentary interest, distractions rather than helps on the road to happiness. But this does not significantly alter the large picture, which is that economic flourishing makes possible — indeed, largely consists in — an increasingly effective human providence over the daunting and dangerous circumstances of our material existence. Nourishing and plentiful food, protection from the elements and disease, opportunity for leisure and rest in circumstances that rejuvenate tired soul and body — all these things are possessed by the people of the world, by and large, in proportion to their annual income.
Perhaps even more important, these blessings are not best understood as war prizes won by autonomous individuals in the combat of economic life. Human beings work, save and spend, for the most part, so that they can care for the people in their lives, children and spouses above all. Whatever theories may be in the heads of leftist intellectuals, the fact of real human life is that our economic striving is ordered to the fulfillment of our moral duties and hopes. This is the moral meaning of property rights, and of economic liberty, and it is the real reason that grandiose governmental schemes to redistribute wealth or accomplish other noble sounding goals are so dangerous — governmental intervention in the fabric of wealth creation is almost by definition a tyrannical disruption of our efforts to care for ourselves and each other.
The poor of the world are particularly vulnerable to such disruption for two reasons. First, wealth is the resource base for freedom and a wealthy people tends to be more able to establish and preserve its liberty against government ambition than a people entirely distracted by the daily effort to keep body and soul together. Second, government interference in economic activity is most damaging to people who are still striving for material essentials and for whom economic disruption means the delay or indefinite loss of those essentials. Recession in America means fewer SUVs — in Bangladesh it means famine and death.
These facts may seem obvious to many but it is important to remember that it is only in the past several decades that the intellectual battle over their truth was won — and that the political victory is still in doubt. The proposition that economic liberty and growth were the most important paths to the material well-being of the world’s people was ferociously disputed for most of the 20th century by socialists. It is a mistake to believe that today’s liberals have abandoned that dispute.
Today, the Clintons and Gores of the world seem content to crow about the abundance that economic liberty has produced and to make use of it to advance their own political power. But the crucial fact to remember is that, while they may be willing to milk this cow, they don’t love it, don’t know what keeps it alive, and may very well kill it without a second thought if their calculus of political advantage and ideology shifts and the path of political power diverges from the path of economic liberty. At that point, those who are building a global economy of solutions to the perennial material needs and pains of human existence will find that their political leaders have derailed a prosperity that, at the beginning of the 21st century, was on track to bring incalculable benefit to billions of people around the world.
The statistical correlation between economic prosperity and the use of energy — and of electricity in particular — is nearly perfect. Countries that are wealthy use lots of energy, countries that are poor use very little. Countries that are on the move out of poverty, and toward prosperity, experience dramatic increases in their use of energy.
And this is not surprising. Energy, as the late Julian Simon pointed out, is the “master” resource — the resource that enables mankind to transform raw materials into useful commodities. America is often criticized by environmentalists for using so much energy but this is absurd. We use so much energy because we feed the world, just to name one of the many good works of the American economy. Criticizing the use of energy in economic activity is no different, in principle, from a parent criticizing a child who spends much energy in helping around the house. Free economies use energy in ways that human ingenuity and experience judge to be the most efficient deployments in particular times and places to solve the problems and seize the opportunities of human life. Living things use energy to accomplish their good and important goals — and so do free economies.
This is the plainest common sense and we are far-gone down the road of ideology, indeed, when we have become propagandized into thinking that the very use of energy is suspect. Such suspicion is, along with abortion, perhaps the clearest manifestation of the socialist death wish. The left seems often to think that the perfect state of human existence would be to successfully prevent the introduction of new life and any sign of metabolism in those who have the questionable good fortune to exist.
For the most part, and increasingly, the energy used by the world economy takes the form of electricity. The obvious and true conclusion to be drawn is that the provision of increasing quantities of energy in the form of cheap electricity is a fundamentally important task if we are to remain on the course of economic prosperity. And, as Dr. Mark Mills points out, “the cheapest source of both existing and new kilowatt-hours is fossil fuel — coal in particular. Two-thirds of global power is fossil-fueled; that figure will rise to 70 percent by 2015 since fossil fuels account for nearly 80 percent of all planned and projected growth in world electric supply.” The production of cheap electricity from fossil-fuels produces carbon dioxide.
Which brings us to Kyoto. The core proposal of the Kyoto movement is that the governments of the world should agree to enforce a dramatic reduction in the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But it is overwhelmingly true now, and for the foreseeable future, that the increases in energy use which will be required for continued material improvement of the human condition will come in the form of fossil-fuel based electricity. Therefore, over the relevant historical period we can consider, it will remain true that the imposition of a reduction in the rate of growth of our use of fossil fuels will reduce economic prosperity by a corresponding amount.
The electricity produced from renewable sources will be both more expensive and dramatically insufficient in quantity. Despite billions of dollars in taxpayer and ratepayer subsidies over two decades, wind farms and solar panels (the renewable energies most favored by the Kyoto partisans) supply less than two percent of America’s electricity needs. Other than in niche-market applications, they are simply not competitive with other fuel sources. Were we to attempt seriously to substitute renewable sources for fossil fuels in the production of electricity, these limitations would translate directly into fundamental economic costs of the kind that wealthy westerners can hardly imagine.
The cuts in global usage of electricity that are the goal of Kyoto would prevent the spread of electrification in the developing world, denying the people in those countries the basic benefits of such devices as air-conditioners, refrigeration, and the whole range of labor-saving devices that we take for granted in the West. Denied also would be the cheap power that has been the foundation for economic growth in every country in the world throughout the industrial age. Denied as well would be the benefits of the age of intelligent devices, exploding communications capacity and barely contemplated other new uses of the electrons that lie at the heart of the new economy.
For while it is true that the communications and computer revolutions make the use of energy greatly more efficient, and that efficiency in the use of electricity has and will continue to grow rapidly even in its older applications, still the growth of population, the spread of electricity to new areas, and the development of new kinds of applications of electricity vastly outpace the increases in efficiency. Despite its more efficient use, absolute use of electricity will grow dramatically in the service of human economic activity in the years ahead and there is no source of that electricity capable of meeting the demand but fossil fuels.
The Kyoto reductions of carbon dioxide emissions would require the fundamental disruption of the global project of improving the material conditions of human existence. The cost of the Kyoto experiment will be abandoning the growth path of an economy that has the capacity to end famine and other basic deprivations, extend access to learning, and lift the whole globe to levels of material prosperity that were, until recently, the prized accomplishment of the few developed nations of the world. Why would any sane person consider paying this cost in the absence of absolutely compelling evidence that the alternative is global calamity on a huge scale?
One reason is suggested by the fact, previously mentioned, that we have a class of politicians who have for a long time been evidently motivated by something other than the ambition to leave the world’s people in freedom to accomplish their own material and moral success. An article in The Electricity Journal by David Wojick suggests another reason. Dr. Wojick points out that the requirements of compliance with the Kyoto goals do not fall evenly on all developed nations. While the United States would have to decapitate the growth curve of its own use of electricity in order to meet its target under Kyoto, Britain and Germany would have to do very little. The reason is that the American economy is growing and its use of electricity, and the associated consumption of fossil fuels, is growing correspondingly. The tired nations of Europe, on the other hand, are not growing and seem content to remain economically stagnant even as they cease to replenish their human populations. Is it not possible that the leaders of these stagnant countries see in the Kyoto agenda an opportunity to prevent the boisterous life of the developing world, including the still young and vigorous American economy, from disrupting a Europe that seems content to grow old rocking on its porch?
The use of energy is a sign of youth, of hope and of life. These things are hated by the old, the despairing and the dead of soul. The siren of Kyoto is an invitation to join these latter forces in the abortion of the global effort to make life better for ourselves and our brothers and sisters. Rejecting it will be an important part of the duty of the West to choose life.
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/keyes/000923
anyone can make a site called junk science. That doesn’t mean they are actually scientists.
Yes, climate change is real....happens here in December, March, June, September.....
LOL LOL
Worst winter for the Midwest in decades...major snow storms and blizzards.....
I would believe we are in a global cooling cycle....
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.