Not counting
the non-enforced southern border and the hordes of new and lawless Democrat
citizens who demand their fair share of the American dream now turned into a
welfare nightmare, the national debt is most likely to sink the economy sooner
than any other variable and that includes climate change that has been changing
for millennia.
Rubin
asserts that, since the “scientific community is all but unanimous in its
agreement that climate change is a serious threat,” we have to include climate
change risks in economic policy, fiscal and business decisions, even though we
cannot define climate change risks with precision.
He cites a
Gallup poll (we know how accurate opinion polls are) that nearly “60 percent of
Americans believe that global warming is caused by human activity.” We’ve had
17 years of record cold temperatures and an unusually cold and late spring and
summer. Every time progressives have met somewhere to hold a global warming
protest or conference, Mother Nature rewarded them with blizzards and snow
storms. Since the coastal areas are not underwater as Al Gore has predicted due
to the melting of the polar ice caps, progressives have modified their talking
points from global warming to climate change.
“The buildup
of greenhouse gases is cumulative and irreversible.” Even though we’ve had
record ice this year, Secretary Rubin repeats the environmentalists’ fallacious
statement that “the melting polar ice sheets will cause sea levels to rise.”
Did he learn in school why melting ice cubes in a glass does not cause the
water to spill over?
The
discussion, he said, has been incorrectly concentrated on the trade-off between
environmental protection and economic prosperity. Instead, the discussion
should be focused on the “cost of inaction.” Inaction is an exaggeration since
every agency of the federal government has been ordered to adopt a climate change
platform and the EPA has been busy forcing many coal powered plants to close
due to their inability to comply with the draconian new rules imposed by the
EPA.
Rubin
believes that the long term cost of inaction is much greater than the cost of
action. We are spending a lot of money on a healthy patient on the assumption
that, at some point, this patient might get the plague.
A bipartisan
effort (It must be good since it’s bipartisan) is measuring the economic risks
of unchecked climate change in the U.S. Are we now so powerful that we can keep
the climate in check? The report named “Risky Business,” was released in June
2014 under the co-chairmanship of the former Mayor of New York, Michael
Bloomberg.
Apparently agriculture,
energy, coastal property sectors, public health, and labor productivity will be
significantly harmed by climate change by 2050.
We cannot accurately
predict the weather a week in advance, or where the tornado will decide to
touch down, but we can now predict and manipulate climate change? Maybe we can
with cloud seeding.
How about Mark
Armitage, the professor who found in 2012 soft tissue on a triceratops horn at
Hell Creek Formation in Montana? His discovery sure turned on its head the “consensus”
science that dinosaurs roamed the earth 60 million years ago. The soft tissue found under a powerful
microscope proves that the fossil is “only 4,000 years old at most.” If triceratops
roamed the earth at the same time as humans, then what theory are scientists
going to advance now about climate change, its causes, and how dinosaurs
disappeared? (Acta Histochemica, July 2013, Vol. 115(6): 603-608,
doi:10.1016/j.acthis.2013.01.001)
Properties
in Florida and Louisiana will be below sea level and thus flooded to the tune
of $48-68 billion, said Rubin. I could
be wrong but a lot of Louisiana and Florida are already below sea level and
subject to floods. Al Gore told us in his award-winning documentary that sea
levels would rise by 20 feet and many coastal nations would be under water “in
the near future.” http://scienceline.org/2008/12/ask-rettner-sea-level-rise-al-gore-an-inconvenient-truth/
Damage from
super storms that are yet to occur, like Katrina and Sandy (combined $193
billion in economic losses), will drain the economy, he says. He states that
“we can’t attribute all the damage caused by Katrina and Sandy to global
warming,” but rising sea levels caused higher surges and these “super storms
will increase if global warming persists.” He is sure that the damage will not
be on a straight line, it will be on an “upward sloping curve.”
How do we
mitigate the damage from a potential super storm or an erupting volcano? Why mitigate
just potential super storm costs? Because environmentalists blame CO2 (carbon
emissions) on human activity and they want to tax it. They certainly cannot tax
a volcano spewing ash into the atmosphere or under sea volcanos that release
lava and gases constantly, possibly accounting for the acidification of sea
water.
“Carbon” is the
chemical element with the symbol C and the atomic number 6. A second definition
pops up, obviously driven by the global warming agenda, “carbon dioxide or
other gaseous compounds released into the atmosphere, associated with climate
change.”
Rubin’s Malthusian
prognosis is that “dramatically rising temperatures in much of the country will
make it far too hot for people to work outside during parts of the day for
several months each year – reducing employment and economic output, and causing
as many as 65,200 additional heat-related deaths every year.”
The actual
deaths associated with exposure to excessive natural heat in the U.S. in the period
of 1999-2010 when several super storms and hurricanes hit was 7,415, an average
of 618 per year, the highest in 1999 (1,050) and the lowest in 2004 (295). http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6136a6.htm
Incidentally, 2004 was the year that registered three
super storms, Hurricane Charley that hit southwest Florida, Hurricane Ivan that
hit the Caribbean and the Mid-Atlantic states, and Hurricane Frances that hit the
Bahamas, Florida, the Carolinas, Ohio, and Canada. http://www.neontommy.com/news/2013/11/top-10-super-storms-2000
Perhaps we
should recall that unemployment is already at a very steep 18 percent, not the
rosy and inaccurate MSM reporting of a constantly dropping unemployment rate (due
to a larger and larger contingent of discouraged workers who gave up looking
for work and are thus no longer counted, but receive unemployment or welfare),
GDP has been negative in the last quarter, and measured temperatures around the
globe have been cooler in the last 17 years.
Rubin
identified three risks associated with “unmitigated climate change:
1. “Future federal spending to deal with
climate change is likely to be enormous and should be included in fiscal
projections” (the spending is already enormous, to the tune of trillions of
dollars during this regime); costs must be covered either by increasing the
deficit, raising taxes (Democrats’ favorite playbook), cutting spending on
defense (they’re going that), cutting our social safety net (the safety net no
longer exists due to government out of control spending and welfare largesse to
evil dictatorships around the world), and cutting public investment in
infrastructure, education, and basic research. Where did the stimulus billions
go that were supposed to build and fix roads and bridges?
2. Investors should demand that
companies “disclose their exposure to climate risks, assets that could be
stranded by climate change, and the costs they may someday incur to address
their carbon emissions.” (There is the real reason for this entire article,
more taxes, taxing the carbon footprint.)
Former SEC chairwoman Mary Shapiro wants to encourage businesses to make
such reporting mandatory in their quarterly disclosures. If not, SEC, the Wall
Street regulator, should mandate such disclosures.
If climate-related risks are exposed, companies would be forced to change
their polluting behavior.
3. GDP is not a good measure of our economy
because it does not include negative externalities resulting from climate
change. Rubin proposes a parallel GDP that reflects the impact of greenhouse
gas emissions.
Tax the companies for the damage resulting from their emissions involved
in producing goods and services and then pass the cost onto hapless consumers
who need the goods and services to survive.
Suddenly we are
faced with the never-before proposed scenario “to protect our economy by
protecting the environment” or “allowing environmental havoc to create economic
havoc.” The economy is “risky business” but it is even riskier when environmentalists
are driving the debate of an economy to reflect the world as the globalists
plan it to be.