Five Reasons to Counter Climate-Change Regulation

By Diana Furchtgott-Roth

There’s a lot more to global warming than it appears.

Speaking at the United Nations on Tuesday,President Obama said: “For all the immediate challenges that we gather to address this week — terrorism, instability, inequality, disease — there’s one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent and growing threat of a changing climate.”

It appears that the defining issue of our time is no longer inequality, as the president said last December, but climate change. Nevertheless, he made no commitments but instead issued a tokenexecutive order that called on government agencies to consider the effects of climate change when funding international projects and constructing federal office buildings.

Back in the 1970s, scientists warned about impending global cooling and nuclear winter. Heating bills would rise because of the cold, policy makers said, and food would become more costly due to shorter growing seasons. Children were lectured on the need to save energy, ride bicycles, close down factories, and have fewer children because this would help economize on energy and food.

Despite the increase in greenhouse gases over the past 15 years, the increase in global temperatures appears to have paused.

Now the problem has changed, and global warming is the bogeyman. But the cure is the same. More than 120 heads of state (excluding those from China and India) gathered at the United Nations in New York to discuss climate change, the biggest such meeting since the 2009 Copenhagen summit. They recommend costly measures to reduce fossil-fuel consumption.

Here are five reasons why America should not go down this path.

Read the rest here.