Feds Employ Lucky Rabbit's Feet To Fight Global Warming

As I took my seat in the classroom at the beginning of an exceptionally warm June school day, my best friend took a bright purple rabbit’s foot out of his pocket and began stroking it with intensity and single-minded focus. “Please let the teacher have lost the test,” he kept repeating, fearful of doing poorly on his impending fifth-grade final exam. Rather than studying for the exam, he had spent the past few days after school playing outdoors in the inviting and newly arrived summer-like air.

Rubbing his lucky rabbit’s foot may have made him feel better at the moment, but it didn’t prevent our teacher from giving us our final exam that day, nor did it change the reality that my best friend was unprepared for the test that was about to be dropped onto his desk. When on the last day of school he brought home a D rather than a B or better on his report card, he spent the following two weeks cooped up in his bedroom, grounded during the best two weeks of the Kid Year.

As we look forward to a 21st century of potentially warmer temperatures, our federal government is choosing the same failed rabbit’s foot strategy employed by my fifth-grade best friend. Rather than preparing for the potentially warmer temperatures, as my best friend should have prepared for the fifth-grade final exam, our federal government is foolishly thinking that throwing billions of taxpayer dollars into endless and redundant academic studies and ineffective renewable power subsidies will make the projected warming go away.

The U.S. alone has spent close to $100 billion on global warming programs during the past two decades. With each passing year, federal agencies are requesting more and more taxpayer dollars to fund studies whose results can be easily ascertained in advance by merely looking at the name of the agency or the names of the people conducting the study. Yet what has all this wasted money delivered for us?

With each passing year more and more taxpayer dollars are being handed over to the renewable power industry, yet renewable power still generates a measly two percent of our nation’s electricity, and does so at a substantially greater cost than conventional power generation. Again, what has all this wasted money delivered for us?

All these studies, and all these renewable power subsidies, have done nothing to alleviate the impacts of warming temperatures that the oracles of climatic doom and gloom say are on the way.

Gillard‟s tax on “carbon pollution‟: the facts @ Association for ...

If the Australian Government’s proposal to oblige 500 big “polluters” to engage in what the City of London calls “trading hot air” were to achieve its stated aim of cutting 5% of Australia’s CO2 emissions by 2020, and assuming HM Treasury’s 3.5% pure-rate-of-time-preference commercial discount rate for inter-temporal investment appraisals – Conclusion: Mitigation policies cheap enough to be affordable will be ineffective: policies costly enough to be effective will be unaffordable. It is unlikely that any policy to forestall global warming by regulating, reducing replacing, taxing or trading greenhouse-gas emissions will prove cost-effective solely on grounds of the welfare benefit foreseeable from global-warming mitigation. No such benefit is discernible. High abatement costs, and the negligible returns in warming forestalled, imply that focused adaptation to the consequences of such future warming as may occur will prove more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation. The opportunity cost of diverting trillions of dollars to mitigation is heavy. Therefore, the question arises whether mitigation should be attempted at all.

Background information On the same assumption, the global abatement cost of a policy is the cost (expressed as a percentage of global GDP taken as increasing yearly at 3% real, and discounted at some inter-temporal discount rate) of forestalling all warming from CO2 and other manmade climate influences up to the target year (in this case, 2020).

3.4 C°: cent.est. of 21st-century manmade warming: (IPCC, 2007, p.13, table SPM.3).

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