United Mine Workers want their engagement ring back

Professor Freeman Dyson

Climate change is a highly charged emotional issue. It should not be. Anything as deadly serious, with such huge potential human peril and economic impacts, must be analyzed only with the sharp, cutting edge of cold reason. Religious fervor has no role. But we, and our children, are being proselytized that carbon is an evil pollutant, and that human-caused carbon emissions are wrecking the climate. This is a hypothesis, not settled fact. There are very smart people who believe otherwise, but they are dismissed as crackpots. Or worse.

Freeman Dyson is a brilliant physicist who taught for decades at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies after Albert Einstein’s death created an opening. Dyson was considered the only physicist capable of filling Einstein’s enormous shadow. There is just one problem – Dyson is an anthropomorphic climate-change skeptic, and climate warriors have demanded his head – literally. Professor Richard Parcutt of Australia seriously proposes the death of heretics such as Dyson, provided they do not repent (much like Galileo). This is no way to conduct a scientific debate.

Dyson thinks that the computer models used by climatologists are faulty and do not account for the climate cooling effect of clouds. His hypothesis may be credible in that there has been no significant warming in the past sixteen years. Even the august New York Times has said “The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that” (“What to Make of a Warming Plateau”, June 10, 2013).

As Dyson puts it, "there’s more solid evidence for the beneficial effects of CO2 than the negative effects." In spite of that, your president is pursuing policies to impoverish you.

In a recent major policy speech on climate change, President Obama drew a keen bead on the nation’s coal miners. In so many words, he said, if you are a coal miner, it’s time to find another line of work (or sign up for food stamps).

This was not a complete surprise to them. In 2008, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) voiced whole-hearted support and proposed marriage to then-candidate Obama. But by 2012 they had seen the handwriting on the wall and chose to withhold support from either candidate, a shocking turn of events for a staunchly Democratic union. But they had overheard the whispers of the president’s environmental base and were worried.

In April 2013, fulfilling the UMWA’s fears, the president’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reclassified carbon dioxide as a hazard to human life. Shortly thereafter, they revealed a major policy shift buried in the fine print of a regulation on electrical efficiency. The agency raised the “social cost of carbon” from $22 to $36 per ton. The administration was saying that the costs of global warming would be greater than previously thought and that these costs were exacerbated by the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 

By executive fiat, the president initiated a major, wrenching change in the nation’s energy infrastructure with no legislative deliberation by your elected legislators. While generating electrical energy with wind mills or solar panels is a lovely idea, these are nascent technologies. Energy costs, if sharply increased, will cut though the economy like an inflationary great white shark. How would grandma like to buy $15 corn flakes?

Taking the next logical step, what's to prevent the EPA from assessing a fine to parents of each newborn child? Using the administration's current projections, an American child will cause $52,000 of "climate damage" during his or her lifetime, both from simple exhalation and from consuming the fruits of the economy. Instead of a dependent tax deduction, parents would owe the IRS a huge penalty on their next tax return. 
  

Here’s another viewpoint. While our children are being brainwashed that carbon is an evil pollutant, perhaps they should also be taught that they are, themselves, carbon based life forms, and that carbon dioxide is crucially necessary for the growth of plant life on earth. In other words, we would not exist without carbon, and plants could not grow without carbon dioxide. There are demonstrably two sides to a very one-sided story.

What we need is a reasoned debate, with scientists properly playing the role of skeptics and the media, objective investigative journalists. The time for mindless religious cheerleading and witch hunts is past. There is too much at stake.