Sorry Beto, CO2 Is Good For The Environment — And The Economy

Announcing his presidential candidacy on Thursday, Beto O’Rourke said carbon is harming the planet. “We must plant things that absorb greenhouse gasses and carbon and invest in the technology to allow us to claim some that are in the air now,” O’Rourke said.

Beto and the other tree-huggers, hippies, and dope-smokers who run the Democratic Party are actually calling for abandoning the modern world, going back to 1750. Modern prosperity, which includes your job, depends on fossil fuels.

Data doesn’t support Beto’s concern. America has satellites measuring global temperatures every day of the year, and they show that global warming has not accelerated over the last two decades.

Global temperatures throughout the 20th have followed natural cycles and causes — not carbon dioxide emissions.

Satellite images have in fact shown the planet is greening. That’s in part because more carbon [CO2] in the atmosphere — not less — actually promotes plant photosynthesis and growth, a fact established by literally thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies.

Without carbon in the atmosphere, plants would die, and so would animals, including humans, who are dependent on plants at the bottom of the food pyramid.

The seas are not rising any faster than they have since the end of the last Ice Age, 20,000 years ago. Polar ice caps wax and wane.

Weather is not getting more extreme. The chance of catastrophe occurring as a result of fossil fuels is literally less than zero.

Fossil fuels were the foundation of the Industrial Revolution starting 250 years ago. That Industrial Revolution increased world GDP by 16 times, creating the modern world.

High school physics explains why wind and solar cannot replace fossil fuels and nuclear energy to power modern economies.

The energy in fossil fuels and nuclear is highly concentrated, unlike the energy that can be found blowing in the wind or dancing on sunbeams.

That is why despite hundreds of billions in subsidies for wind and solar, their production today still only accounts for less than 10 percent of the energy produced in America.

As Stephen Moore and Kathleen Hartnett White point out:

For many centuries mankind relied on what is now called “renewable energy” — windmills, wood, water, and the sun. The notion that green energy is “in its infancy” is laughable.

These sources of energy go back thousands of years. And the data recently gathered by economic historians … show that wind and water wheels never provided much power. It wasn’t until man harnessed fossil fuels — primarily oil, gas and coal — that industrialization achieved unprecedented productivity.

Now that the U.S. is the world-leading producer of oil and gas in the world, and could be in coal — not to mention our vast experience with nuclear energy — Democratic leaders are proposing we abandon these incredible American riches, and the resulting energy independence, actually energy dominance as President Trump calls it.

Energy independence has been a longstanding bipartisan goal. But today’s Democrats would just toss it away.

What today’s Democrats are actually proposing is the opposite of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Not an attempted solution to the Great Depression.

But a new Great Depression, losing incalculable millions of jobs, not just in the fossil fuel industry, but in manufacturing, dependent on low cost, reliable energy, and all other modern business and industry dependent on low-cost reliable energy.

Goodbye Silicon Valley. When you folks wake up, give us a call, because there are no computers, laptops, tablets, or even cellphones, without electricity.

Electricity in the modern world is fueled by fossil fuels (and nuclear energy, which is also a cuss word for the fruits and nuts of today’s Democrat Party).

Abundant, low-cost energy leading the world is exactly what traditional liberal Franklin Roosevelt would have chosen for working Americans and their families. His New Deal was far from “green.”

Lew Uhler is founder and chairman of the National Tax Limitation Committee and National Tax Limitation Foundation (NTLF). He was a contemporary and collaborator with both Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman in California and across the country. 

Peter Ferrara, a senior fellow with NTLF, teaches economics at Kings College in New York. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as associate deputy attorney general of the United States under President George H.W. Bush.

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