Rural climate skeptics are costing us time and money. Do we keep indulging them?
It’s been one week since the Trump administration issued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator’s first ever climate report, and what you see is the kind of progress conservatives have long decried from Obama and, more specifically, former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy.
On the surface, the report is a modest, even incremental step in the right direction. But a closer look reveals a much deeper story, far less rosy.
This report isn’t about the administration’s overall goal of cutting carbon dioxide emissions to 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 — or even to keep carbon pollution at 2005 levels. Rather, one of the report’s major conclusions, which it doesn’t offer much detail about, is that the existing EPA proposal would result in the planet becoming hotter.
The current EPA plan would keep warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) for most of the 21st century, but then ramp up to 1.5 to 1.7 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.
This is much farther from the administration’s goal of an average global temperature increase of 2 to 2.7 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit). And this is exactly the trajectory that climate skeptics have criticized for decades — and which, ironically, has the opposite effect: it puts the temperature on course to stay below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
This approach would make global warming much more severe than the administration would like. And it would cost us more, too.
Roughly $16 billion would have to be spent on the Clean Power Plan by 2025 in order to be carbon-neutral. The economic cost of this “carbon bubble” is almost $1 trillion per year. That’s money we’ll have to spend on things we don’t need to spend, such as school lunches and infrastructure.
And that
