worst nightmare of the left is about to come true: The United States is about to achieve the carbon emissions goals set under the 1997 Kyoto Accords.
The United States is halfway toward meeting the stringent Kyoto goals — once seemingly beyond reach — to reduce carbon emissions without a cap-and-trade law or a carbon tax or declaring carbon dioxide a pollutant.
Environmental nightmare? Yes. The goals of the climate-change crowd are not reduction in global warming but the enactment of a worldwide system of regulation that puts business under government control and transfers wealth from rich nations to poor ones under the guise of fighting climate change.
Should the emissions come down on their own, as they are doing, the excuse for draconian legislation goes, well, up in smoke.
The facts are startling. In 1990, the year chosen as the global benchmark for carbon emissions, the United States emitted 5,007 millions of metric tons of carbon (mmts). Kyoto specified that emissions must be reduced to a level 6% lower than in 1990. For the United States, that means 4,700 million metric tons.
American carbon emissions rose year after year until they peaked in 2007 at 5,967 mmts. But in 2008, they dropped to 5,801 and in 2009, the best estimate is for a reduction to 5,476. So, in two years, U.S. carbon emissions will have gone down by more than 500 mmts — a cut of more than 8 percent. President Obama has pledged to bring the U.S. carbon emissions down by 17 percent. The country is halfway there.
A combination of the recession and an increased emphasis on cutting emissions is working and may make onerous regulation unnecessary and even redundant.
How can we achieve the other half of the hoped-for reduction?
If 60 percent of American cars were electric, the net savings in carbon would be 450 mmts (even counting the coal burned for the higher levels of electricity required). And if one-third of the truck fleet ran on natural gas, the carbon savings would add another 150-200 mmts.
The point is that public education and increased environmental consciousness — the normal ways we Americans respond to challenges — may suffice without the need for government regulation. And what persuasion fails to achieve, higher gasoline prices will do for us: Move people to buy electric cars.
Good news, huh?
Not if you are a socialist banking on climate change as the banner to regulate all utilities and industries in the world. The socialists' game plan is to use the financial crisis to regulate white-collar businesses such as banking, insurance, and finance, while using fears of climate change to extend government regulation to the blue-collar trades.
John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, calls cap and trade a "massive redistribution of wealth from the north to the south" (i.e. from the developed northern hemisphere to the less developed southern half of the globe). What the globalists and the one-world crowd had hoped to achieve by foreign aid, they now seek to bring about by cap and trade, forcing businesses and utilities to pay rural societies for the right to pollute with carbon.
But market forces are accomplishing what they hope only regulation can achieve. And the rationale for the global system of regulation being negotiated at Copenhagen is being rendered unnecessary even as the agreement is being devised.
There is a great deal of justified skepticism about the entire question of whether climate change is going on and, even more, how much human activity is contributing to it.
But as the world divides into those who demand global regulation to fight climate change and those who say it isn't happening, there is now an inconvenient truth: The market is taking care of the problem on its own.