Know How Much Warming Ocasio-Cortez's Multi-Billion Dollar Green Tax Would Stop? 0.14 Degrees.
All great politicians need a signature piece of legislation. Even if they’ve been in office for, oh, less than a week as of this writing.
For Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that piece of legislation is the Green New Deal. She’s already drafted legislation that would get the ball rolling in the battle against “climate change.”
In language that sounds straight out of an Ayn Rand novel, it states that it would create a “select committee (that) shall have authority to develop a detailed national, industrial, economic mobilization plan … for the transition of the United States economy to become greenhouse gas emissions neutral and to significantly draw down greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and oceans and to promote economic and environmental justice and equality.”
What it aims to accomplish is nothing less than the United States becoming 100 percent independent of carbon-based fuels within 12 years, according to the New York Post. That’s wildly optimistic and bound to be expensive. So, how much would it lower the earth’s temperature?
A whole 0.14 degrees Celsius by 2100, if one temperature calculator is correct. And even then, that’s being generous.
According to The Daily Caller News Foundation, that number comes from the Cato Institute’s Carbon Tax Temperature-Savings Calculator.
Now, granted, the Cato Institute is a market-friendly, libertarian-leaning institution. However, the data it used for the calculator comes from the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s MAGICC model, produced with funding from the Environmental Protection Agency.
“The year-to-year variation is very close to the total amount of warming that would be ‘saved’ by 2100, according to EPA’s own model,” Patrick Michaels, a Cato Institute climatologist, told The Daily Caller.
“I seriously think the effect would — at best — be barely detectable in the climate record,” he said.
This, by the way, is based on an estimation of 3 degrees Celsius of climate sensitivity — the amount of warming that would be predicted if you doubled greenhouse gas emissions.
As of right now, the U.N.’s models predict something between 1.5 and 4.5 Celsius. While the 3 degrees nicely splits that number, recent studies seem to indicate it could be on the low end, according to The Daily Caller.
If climate sensitivity were at 1.5 Celsius, the amount of cooling from eliminating 100 percent of carbon emissions in the United States would be 0.083 degrees Celsius, The Daily Caller reporter; if it’s the worst-case scenario of 4.5 Celsius, we’d cool the earth a whole 0.173 degrees Celsius.
That doesn’t sound like much, but that hasn’t stopped the left from signing on wholesale to the Green New Deal — even if liberals are a bit iffy on what it means.
“Dozens of Democratic lawmakers have endorsed the proposal, and the environmental group pushing it on Capitol Hill, the Sunrise Movement, calls the Green New Deal ‘the best chance we have to fight climate change,'” The Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
“Neither the Sunrise Movement nor a spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez responded to TheDCNF’s inquiry. TheDCNF asked if either had, or knew of, estimates into how much future warming the Green New Deal could avert.”
But it sounds great! Renewable energy! (That will cost more.) Green jobs! (That won’t replace the untold number of other jobs that are lost.) Climate cooling! (Of the most minimal sort possible.)
“This is going to be the New Deal, the Great Society, the moon shot, the civil rights movement of our generation,” Ocasio-Cortez said recently of the Green New Deal.
For that to be true, Herbert Hoover would have had to have beaten FDR in 1932, LBJ would have had to have lost vote after vote for the Great Society programs, the Soviets would have had to have beaten us to the moon and George Wallace would have had to have won the stand in the schoolhouse door.
The Green New Deal may sound great, but it’s an incredibly damaging proposal that’s meaningless to boot.
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