Money is a powerful incentive. When it comes to global warming, governments all over the world have created policies that intend to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but have led to fraud, scams, black markets, and increased emissions. Mark Schapiro of Reuters reports on the unintended consequences of European companies offsetting their carbon dioxide emissions by paying the Chinese to destroy a much more potent contributor to warming: In order to offset their own greenhouse gases, companies and utilities in Europe that are subject to the emission limits of the Kyoto …
Maybe international treaties do send perfectly good jobs overseas after all; it’s just that these treaties do so by regulating commerce at home rather than facilitating it abroad. The Kyoto Protocol is evidence of this fact. Less than a week ago, as the European Environment Agency was celebrating reducing carbon production by close to 17%, the Guardian reported that, based on consumption of carbon rather than production of it, European greenhouse emissions actually increased significantly over the past decade: The original 15 EU member states who signed Kyoto have dropped …
The Heritage Foundation’s Steven Groves and Ben Lieberman are live at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference reporting from a conservative perspective. Follow their reports on The Foundry and at the Copenhagen Consequences Web site. It is hard to do any more wrong by the American people than cap and trade. Whether done by domestic legislation or international treaty, significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions (like the 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050 in the House Waxman Markey bill which the Obama administration had hoped to match at …
The Heritage Foundation’s Steven Groves and Ben Lieberman are live at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference reporting from a conservative perspective. Follow their reports on The Foundry and at the Copenhagen Consequences Web site. There is plenty of anti-U.S. sentiment on display here in Copenhagen as we begin the crucial final week of the United Nations climate change conference. Representatives of developing nations brand Americans as energy hogs – enjoying a high standard of living while contributing disproportionately to the global warming damage that will affect everyone else. Thus, these …
Cap and trade is nowhere near dead but it’s not the only weapon in the arsenal against capping carbon dioxide emissions. Another significant threat to United States energy policy is the possible climate treaty that could supplant the Kyoto Protocol as the new treaty to combat global warming. Just as scary, if not more so, is how an international treaty could affect U.S. sovereignty. In preparation for the December 7-18 summit, The Heritage Foundation will be covering all the details – up to, during, and after the conference. From energy, …
Yesterday, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon hosted a climate summit in New York designed to improve the chances that the December U.N. Copenhagen Climate Conference would produce a substantive treaty that would cap and cut carbon emissions. The Copenhagen agreement would replace the Kyoto Protocol that was rejected by the United States Senate 95 – 0. But as the Washington Post reports, even President Barack Obama’s star power failed to move nations towards meaningful carbon reductions: Initially, many climate activists had hoped this year would yield a pact in …
While an earthquake shifts the ground beneath our feet, the United Nation’s climate change proposal would shift trillions of dollars in wealth transfers and entail “ job losses and gains, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs and subsidies, and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes.” And while earthquakes inflict considerable amounts of economic damage, it pales in comparison to the economic burden a carbon dioxide reduction scheme would do – not only in the United States but also in other developed countries and developing countries. The …
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) is heading to Poznan, Poland, next week to take part in the U.N. climate talks being held there. Kerry will serve as one of several congressional emissaries who have been charged with reporting back to President-elect Barack Obama. But just as Kerry tells Grist magazine that he hopes the talks will lay tracks for the much heralded Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen next December (where the successor to Kyoto is expected to be hammered out), the wheels appear to be coming off of the European …
It will come as no surprise that Barack Obama’s emphatic victory has been warmly greeted in the United Kingdom and across Europe. Newspapers are covered with proclamations of a history-changing moment for the United States. The record turnout, particularly among groups that previously felt they belonged only on the margins of society, is surely something to be impressed by — and a trend all Western parties will hope to learn from. The so-called “Bradley effect” never materialized. And there stands a good chance that race may now be laid to rest …
Possibly the scariest outcome from Super Tuesday is that the top three candidates to become president all support a cap-and-trade approach to global warming. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) are all smart and capable leaders, but they also have been completely engrossed in White House politics for more than a year. Hopefully when they have the time to examine recent evidence they will reject their current proposals, which include costly carbon limits that will harm our economy without positively affecting the climate at all. …
