How Irrelevant the Bill in Congress Is to Global Warming

A bill is floating in Congress to reduce US emissions of carbon dioxide by 83% in the next 40 years.  Good idea?  Two recent analyses show that It will be completely inconsequential to reducing global warming.  The bill itself would only reduce warming by a mere one-three-thousandth a degree.  Not even measurable.  And the huge increase in cost of cheap fuels would have the perverse consequence of accelerating the use of oil and coal in the developing world, overwhelming all the reduction by the US.  This analysis is so even if we get the whole developed world (US, Europe, Japan, Australia) to go along with it.  The problem lies not with the West, but the Rest (of the world).  Read on, below the fold.

The first analysis is from Peter Huber, entitled Bound to Burn.  It is well worth reading in its entirety.  Peter Huber is well known for his thinking on the geodesic network and how the telecom infrastructure would evolve during the Information Superhighway era of the '90s.  He tackles other issues, especially energy policy. Here is his thesis:

We rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions—because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still.

His main point is that the developing world (China, India, Brazil etc.) with 80% of the world's population has already exceeded the developed world in carbon emissions.  Hence if the developed world truly tries to reduce emissions by 80%, it will be more than made up by the developing world continuing to grow. Worse, any such attempt will require huge taxes on cheap energy (oil, coal), reducing demand, which perversely will lower the cost of cheap energy to the developing world, accelerating their use of it. Put simply, if we use less oil and oil prices drop, the demand for oil will increase in 80% of the world. Again, increased carbon emissions is the consequence of our reductions.

And of course as the West commits economic suicide, the Rest will be happy to pick up the slack. 

The second analysis comes the World Climate Report and their back-of-the-envelope calculation of how emissions impact temperature, using the IPCC data. With that data, they estimate your impact on global temperatures:

• We have had a 100 ppm increase in CO2 the past 150 years, and world temperatures increased 0.8 degrees C. Hence an increase of 125 ppm = 1 more degree C.
• To get 125 ppm increase requires 1.8M million metric tons of CO2. That is million million metric tons - we are in the trillions here.
• A typical household emits a mere 24 metric tons a year, so going completely non carbon lowers temperature by about one hundred billionth a degree.
• Lowering the whole US by 83%, which is the goal of a law winding its way through Congress, would reduce warming by about 0.0028 degree, or less than one three thousandth.

Not very meaningful! Especially if we destroy our global competitiveness in the process.