The inconvenient truth about climate policy

It won't make a lick of difference when it comes to global temperatures

By Benjamin Zycher of AEI.

"Climate change is a manmade crisis, and so the need to implement sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is paramount. That summarizes the constant drumbeat of conventional wisdom, which raises an interesting question: If the Obama administration’s Climate Action Plan – a 17 percent reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 – were to be implemented immediately, what temperature reduction would that yield by the year 2100?

The answer: 15 one-thousandths of a degree. Yes, you read that correctly. The effect would be too small even to be measured, let alone to affect sea levels and cyclones and all the rest. That number, by the way, is not some screwy calculation from the back of an envelope. It comes from the Environmental Protection Agency’s own climate model, not that the EPA has ever admitted this publicly, obviously because it is embarrassing. That is why the EPA’s benefit/cost “analysis” of its Clean Power Plan and the other components of its climate policy assumes a deeply dubious array of “co-benefits” in the form of particulate reductions and other impacts that are simply invented out of whole cloth or that already are counted as justifications for other regulatory policies. Without such machinations, the Climate Action Plan would collapse as a regulatory framework, because it is all cost and no benefit. Literally."