A Suicidal Collapse Of Western Civilization?

American Thinker

By S. Fred Singer

My background is basically European — and more specifically, Western European.  I have lived and worked in many of those countries, and I know most of the major cities intimately — from Stockholm in the north, Newcastle, London, Paris, The Hague, Munich, Vienna, to Rome and Erice, Sicily in the south.  I have also spent several months in Moscow and in Jerusalem as a guest of academic institutions.

Economic Suicide

The ongoing economic suicide of Europe is based on a faulty understanding of the climate issue by most Western politicians and on their extreme policy response, based on emotion rather than logic and science.  The major European economies have reacted irrationally to contrived, unjustified fear of imagined global-warming disasters

Perhaps I should explain that the climate has not been warming for the past 18 years — and even if it had been warming, it would be no disaster.  The EU wants to cut emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, a natural plant-fertilizer, by 40% within 15 years — by 2030.  This insane drive to replace energy sources from fossil fuels that release plant-friendly CO2 into the atmosphere has led to greatly increased costs of energy.  As is well understood, such actions not only hurt economic growth, but they increase poverty levels and therefore threaten the social fabric of these nations. 

There are some exceptions. of course: France and Belgium rely heavily on nuclear energy; Austria and Norway rely heavily on hydro.  Poland has actively resisted the general trend to demonize CO2, but the UK and Germany, which has been the power-house of European economic growth, are severely threatened by their insistence on installing wind and solar energy.  The latter is especially inappropriate to the Continent and to Great Britain.

The pity of it all is that these economic sacrifices in Western Europe will hardly affect the level of atmospheric CO2 — which is controlled globally by huge emissions from China — and soon also from India.

Unfortunately, during the past few years, and even during the White House administration of George W. Bush, the United States has tended to move in the same direction — and energy costs have gone up markedly.

The regulatory burdens created by the EPA’s “War on Coal,” by holding up permits for pipelines and for exploration-production of fuels on Federal lands, etc, are imposing real costs on US households, which are the equivalent of a large energy tax — except that none of these increased costs flow into the US Treasury.

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