According to “The Skeptical Environmentalist” author, statistics professor and Copenhagen Consensus Center founder/director Bjorg Lomborg, emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) in the U.S. are at their lowest level in 20 years. And, it’s not because of the government-subsidized “green” fetish for alternative energy sources like wind or solar power.
Lomborg, a respected moderate voice on climate issues, has researched the significant reduction in CO2 air pollution emissions in the U.S. He finds that while in the E.U. where heavily subsidized solar and wind energy costs more than $20 billion annually, CO2 emissions have fallen less than in the U.S.
The cause of U.S. CO2 reduction is the growing economical conversion from coal to natural gas for U.S. energy production. Natural gas emits 45% less CO2 than coal in energy production. Three decades of America’s petroleum industry development of underground hydraulic fracturing technology (fracking) has resulted in massive reductions of U.S. CO2 emissions -- about twice the total reduction compared to the Kyoto Protocol regulations for CO2 reductions in the E.U., and much of the developed economies. Fracking to replace coal with natural gas in energy production has succeeded where Kyoto regulations and carbon cap-and-trade taxes have failed.
Consistent with the myopic militancy of global green eco-groups, more than 100 worldwide protests by environmentalists are planned in an effort to stop fracking. The GlobalFrackdown website and campaign by the Washington, D.C. nonprofit Food & Water Watch claims that fracking “…has already damaged communities and ruined lives. It pollutes water and makes people sick. The message is, we need to ban fracking. We think fracking is just another way to produce dirty fossil fuels.”
Recent U.S. EPA investigations of such reckless eco-hysterics have found no significant water pollution or sick people caused by fracking in the U.S.
Green-obsessed bureaucrats and militant eco-groups have become an “axis of antagonism” that we can no longer afford.
Subscribe free to this Column by clicking the blue-highlighted +Subscribe line below author's title.
Comments