Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Global Warming Silliness

Buried in the text of Tuesday's joint declaration between the President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao was a significant climate announcement: The Obama administration will offer concrete emission reduction targets as part of next month's negotiations, as long as the Chinese offer a climate proposal of their own.

This is such nonsense. The agreement is not enforceable, so each side will do nothing and say it is waiting for the other side to go first. Then each can claim the other side is the problem.

Everyone knows that any policy toward global warming that has any chance of adoption will in fact have no effect. Everyone also knows that any policy that would actually reduce emissions to a signifcant degree would be incredibly costly.

So what's the answer? Repeal existing policies - like energy subsidies - that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and that do not make sense in the first place. This makes sense no matter what one belives about global warming science.