John A. Charles, Jr.
This week the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) is holding its final public hearing on a plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 90% from fossil fuels used in Oregon.
Since there is a rough proportionality between fossil fuel combustion and CO2 emissions, that means the DEQ rule is a mandate to reduce the actual use of carbon-based fuels by 90%. This would essentially shut down the Oregon economy.
DEQ’s program goes by the Orwellian name of “Climate Protection Program,” but it will have no effects on global climate. Any carbon dioxide reductions occurring in Oregon will be immediately offset by growing emissions elsewhere, which will be true for decades.
The primary result of DEQ’s rationing scheme will be rising energy prices, and the rapid exodus of people and businesses to other states.
DEQ’s Climate Protection Program was ordered by former Gov. Kate Brown after she failed to get the program enacted by the state Legislature. It should be repealed by legislators as soon as they convene again in February.
John A. Charles, Jr. is President and CEO of Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization.
jimwPDX
Mass hypnosis? It’s happened before.
It’s estimated that 30% of the increase in agricultural production since 1950 is due to increased CO2, which has the effect of accelerating plant growth, providing protection against drought, and forming shells for crustaceans. In view of the lack of historical causal link with temperature changes (CO2 changes follow temperature changes, not the reverse), in view of the near-complete saturation of CO2 for IR absorption at the lower levels, in view of the logarithmic decline in CO2 effect on temperature, in view of the fact that our current atmospheric CO2 is close to the lowest it’s been for the last 600 million years… why then are we thinking of crippling our economy for some putative future benefit that seems entirely speculative and unwarranted??
We don’t even know what the optimum temperature for the world is. Global temperature has been declining for the last 8,000 years since the Holocene Optimum (so called because it was – yes – warmer). Brief interruptions for the Minoan warming, the Roman warming (when Hannibal took Elephants over the Alps) and the Medieval Warm and the Modern Warm… Now the temp decline seems to have reversed.
Remember, 20,000 years ago, London and New York were both covered by mile-thick ice sheets, and CO2 was around 210ppm.
130,000 years ago, the Eemian, the world was 2C warmer, oceans were 6m higher, and corals and polar bears were doing fine. As were humans. CO2 280 ppm.
Currently, since our emergence from the Little Ice Age, 40 years before the human industrial CO2 contribution began to be measurable, CO2 trend up has been languidly uninterrupted during WW1, the depression (30% decrease in industrial output), WWII, post war reconstruction, the Covid 10% decline,.. No, not any evidence whatsoever that human production drives atmospheric CO2.
Nor is there any evidence that CO2 controls climate change. For 550 million years, there has never been a temperature reversal preceded by a CO2 change. The end-Ordovician (Hirnantian) Ice Age, 440 million years ago, began when CO2 was around 4,000 ppm and temp around 22C, and lasted a couple of million years with glaciers reaching across the continents. At the end of that time, with 85% of marine life extinct, when the frigid oceans had gobbled up atmospheric CO2 to around 3,000 ppm, the globe suddenly began to warm up, getting back to the previous 22°C with astonishing speed. We haven’t the faintest idea why it cooled so fast and so far, or especially why it warmed so fast and so far. After all, that was the time of the cool young sun. It’s not just The Pause that doesn’t fit the model(s).
Do we not teach Scientific Method in schools anymore?