A lot of people are ripping it to shreds on either side of the CAGW fence-line.
From Tony Dokoupil writing at MSNBC:
Obama’s climate policy is ‘practically worthless,’ says expert
President Barack Obama’s by turns tearful and triumphant unveiling of the Clean Power Plan Monday seemed like a turning point in the fight against global warming.
If it survives legal challenges, it could remake the way America generates electricity, accelerate a shift away from coal-fired power plants – the chief source of the greenhouse gas emissions that scientists blame for global warming—and cement Obama’s legacy as the greatest environmental president.
“I don’t want my grand-kids to not be able to swim in Hawaii or not be able to climb a mountain and see a glacier because we didn’t do something about it,” Obama said in the emotional conclusion to his speech. “That’d be shameful of us.”
But for some who study climate change the only shame is this: Obama’s plan does not go nearly far enough. It’s meek and dangerously self-congratulatory, sapping the movement of urgency while doing almost nothing to maintain the future habitability of the earth.
“The actions are practically worthless,” said James Hansen, a climate researcher who headed NASA’s Goddard’s Institute for Space Studies for over 30 years and first warned congress of global warming in 1988. “They do nothing to attack the fundamental problem.”
Hansen and the GISS are a pathetic joke - the Goddard Institute is a small office in New York City allied with Columbia University. The place is crawling with partisan hacks. For them, Anthropogenic Global Warming is a religion and not science. To link them with NASA is to tarnish the great work that the other 99.999% of NASA has done.
On the other side, we have this from Jillian Kay Melchior writing at National Review:
Obama’s Latest Executive Action: Spend Hundreds of Billions to Not Help the Environment
The Obama administration today announced its Clean Power Plan rules, which set limits on carbon emissions from power plants nationwide. At a White House event, President Obama trumpeted the rule as “the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change.”
Unfortunately, the Clean Power Plan packs neither the environmental nor diplomatic punch the Obama administration has claimed. Moreover, contrary to the White House’s assertion, it offers states little flexibility and comes at enormous economic expense.
Begin with the impact on climate change. The United States is responsible for only 5 percent of the world’s total carbon emissions. In other words, “even if the United States stopped emitting all CO2 now and going forward, it would only reduce emissions by 0.15 degrees Celsius — that’s all we have to work with,” says the Cato Institute’s assistant director of the Center for the Study of Science, Chip Knappenberger.
Using the EPA’s own climate-model emulator, Knappenberger and his colleague Patrick J. Michaels determined that the Clean Power Plan rules will affect climate by less than two-hundredths of a degree Celsius by 2100, an amount so minuscule that it’s nearly impossible to measure.
It will have an effect though - it will make our energy costs skyrocket. All for nothing. And, this with a cooling trend beginning in 3... 2... 1...
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