Immediate moves on climate change not a priority for many
Arecent Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey interviewed 1,200 people and found, in the words of the subsequent Journal report, that divisions in America “reach far beyond Washington into the nation’s culture, economy and social fabric …”
Yet one of the questions highlighted an area of broad agreement — one that bodes well for Republicans, but not Democrats.
The poll asked respondents if they considered themselves “a supporter of taking immediate action to address climate change.” Just 4 percent of Republicans and 31 percent of Democrats did.
Put another way, the poll showed large majorities in both parties are not unquestioning supporters of climate change policies. If 31 percent of Democrats support immediate climate action, then 69 percent of Democrats do not.
Yet many major Obama administration policies were zealously focused on global warming.
The so-called Clean Power Plan sought to effectively reduce national power production emissions to 1985 levels by 2030 even as the U.S. population was expected to increase 53 percent. The plan would have effectively forced closure of many existing power plants that use coal, and its mandates (now on hold as court challenges proceed) would mostly have taken effect before sufficient transmission line could be installed to new power plants. As a result, the plan was expected to increase electric rates nationwide. In Oklahoma, experts predicted rates could surge as much as 40 percent by 2020.
This was to be endured in the name of fighting climate change, but there was little expectation the plan would actually reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.
Similarly, the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency advanced “regional haze” regulations that were designed to improve air visibility to a degree that cannot be discerned with the naked eye. Once again, the climate benefits were confined largely to hypothetical situations, not reality.
When the plan was challenged in court, Justice Paul Kelly of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver noted as much in a dissent. In order to reject an Oklahoma state-based plan for compliance, Kelly noted the EPA “assumed OG&E would burn coal they are not burning and have no plans to burn” and assumed power plants could use “scrubbers that do not fit and are not technically feasible.”
The Obama administration committed the United States to the Paris agreement, which was supposedly designed to reduce climate change. In 2016 Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, noted the agreement would cost “between $1 trillion and $2 trillion annually” and “slow the world’s economic growth to force a shift to inefficient green energy sources.” In exchange, Lomborg, said the U.S. would receive “almost nothing.” Even if every nation lived up to its associated promises by 2030 and stayed true to those commitments throughout the century, Lomborg noted peer-reviewed research indicated that “global temperature rise would be reduced by a tiny 0.3 degrees F (0.17 degrees C).”
For eight years, Democrats devoted much of their energy and focus to promoting policies that were economically destructive and environmentally pointless. That they did this without majority support even among their own party members helps explain Democrats’ subsequent loss of political power.