Global Warming’s Impact-A Pro Con Article
California’s economy threatened
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says California will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050. The question for today is whether this defense against global warming will “terminate” California’s economy.
We’ve already seen the answer, and so has California.
Five years ago, power shortages were forcing rolling blackouts across the Golden State. Traffic lights were going dead, schools were dark and hospitals relied on diesel generators to keep their operating rooms lit. Not surprisingly, California companies were announcing plans to move out.
Everybody knew that unless California generated more power, the Golden State’s famous high-tech economy was headed into a tailspin.
California resolved the immediate crisis by authorizing new electrical generating plants and importing billions of dollars worth of high-cost peak power from outside the region.
Today, California has forgotten the rolling blackouts—or convinced itself they were just a plot by the evil utility companies. We shouldn’t be surprised. Many people still believed in the merits of communism even after the revelations of bloody crimes against humanity committed by communist dictators from Moscow and Beijing to Ethiopia and Cambodia.
Where will California’s jobs go? They could go anywhere the infrastructure will support them: Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, for example. My Rust Belt home city of Lansing, Mich., has land, infrastructure and Michigan State graduates to spare.
Some of California’s jobs might even wind up in China. The Chinese are fueling their economic growth with their abundant coal. They have also commissioned dozens of nuclear power plants that will generate lots of electricity without producing any greenhouse gases.
Schwarzenegger, of course, cannot win many votes by promising to build nuclear power plants. California’s Greens say global warming is the biggest threat in history, but not serious enough to permit safety-proven nuclear power plant designs.
So far, the governor’s only specific promise has been that he will dramatically increase the number of solar panels on the roofs of California homes.
Unfortunately, demanding that California rely on solar panels for its electricity is like asking Los Angeles to feed itself from urban gardens. The productive density just isn’t there. Free people get tired of struggling in overly repressive systems, and they move. Economic growth departs with them.
Michael Hanemann of the California Climate Change Center at Berkeley says global warming itself threatens the state’s economy. He notes that much of the state’s water comes from mountain snowpacks, which are dwindling.
But what if California shuts down its power plants, bans driving four days a week—and the snowpack continues to disappear?
History tells us this is Earth’s third global warming in the past 2,000 years. There was the Roman Warming during the 1st century and the Medieval Warming during the 12th century—all before the modern warming began around 1850.
England was warm enough to grow wine grapes in Roman times and in the 12th century. The Brits can’t yet grow wine grapes in the 21st century, but that may well happen even without human carbon-dioxide emissions. The ice cores brought up in Greenland and the Antarctic during the 1980s show 300 instances of global warming over the past half-million years. The isotopes of oxygen, carbon and beryllium in the ice tell us our 1,500-year climate cycles are produced by a tiny cycle in the sun’s irradiance.
Schwarzenegger’s solar panels won’t stop the sun’s variations. Should California put its dollars into desalinization plants to ensure drinking water instead of into solar panels? Such decisions may determine whether the Golden State remains golden.
Global Warming’s Impact
Better Environmental Policies
By: Wayne Madsen
The Bush administration constantly drags out the bloated red herring of negative economic effects as a rationale for unilaterally rejecting international environmental protection treaties and eroding domestic environmental laws.
The recent Executive Order issued by President Bush’s fellow Republican, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, to make drastic cuts in his state’s greenhouse gas emissions while creating new technologies and jobs to reduce global warming, proves the Bush environmental doctrine is dead wrong.
While Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol, now ratified by 141 nations, California, has, in effect, thumbed its nose at Washington by committing itself to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2010, 1990 levels by 2020, and 80% below current levels by 2050. That would exceed the British goals of reducing their emissions by 60% by 2050.
In 2003, Maine passed similar legislation, which aims to reduce its emissions from 75% to 80% in the years after 2020.
California and Maine have upped the Kyoto ratification numbers to 143—minus the rest of the United States. Washington State, Oregon, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York and Vermont designed to approach or match California’s standards are a further indication that “Blue America” is also “Green America,” with a wholly different environmental policy and global outlook than “Red America.”
In essence, California, the sixth-largest global economy, has bypassed Bush and joined the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Russia, Japan and other industrial nations in committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
California’s independent environmental policy is a strong indication that the Bush administration and Republican Congress are becoming largely irrelevant when it comes to protecting the global environment. The Union of Concerned Scientists echoed this view in stating California’s decision demonstrated “California’s leadership role in a vacuum left by federal inaction to avert dangerous levels of climate change.”
Schwarzenegger rolled out his new Executive Order as San Francisco, where the United Nations was founded, hosted the organization’s World Environment Day 2005 conference. As the Bush administration pushed John Bolton, a miserable and nasty unilateralist, to be its ambassador to the U.N., California diplomatically played host to environmentally conscious mayors from cities as diverse as Shanghai, Jakarta, Istanbul, Buenos Aires and Calcutta.
As for the effect of California’s decision on its economy and jobs—look for the state to both increase revenue and employment. California understands that its pioneering work on renewable energy resources like wind, solar, geothermal, smaller hydroelectric facilities and biomass, as well as new automobile tailpipe standards, diverse fuels, hybrid vehicles, cogeneration, energy efficiency will make it the first American state to adopt a sustainable economy. As it becomes a global center for environmental science, technology and consulting, it also will become an exporter of goods and services and a magnet for employment.
Compare California’s forward-thinking policies with those of the Bush administration, which is rejecting environmental protection, strangling federal environmental standards, running a record trade deficit and hemorrhaging jobs overseas.
While California leads Blue America into the 21st century, Red America’s oil-refining states like Texas and Louisiana join fellow world polluters Iran, North Korea and Algeria in rejecting greenhouse gas emission controls and continuing to pump ozone-depleting pollutants into the atmosphere at a devil-may-care pace. They may regret it when California shows that green policies can, indeed, produce green revenues.
Wayne Madsen is a contributing write for Online Journal, www.onlinejournal.com
