Just a few months ago, Steve Forbes, editor of Forbes and an economic adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain, was assuring the base that McCain would abandon his call for a cap-and-trade system to regulate carbon emissions once he assumed office. Today, he pens a piece in his own publication rife with debunked climate myths that concludes cap-and-trade is “the wrong solution for a problem that we don’t fully understand.” Here’s the column:
Frozen credit has occupied our minds of late, but our economy is also vulnerable to dangerous ideas. One is the notion that we should slow down the U.S. economy to save the planet from global warming.
There is growing consensus that temperatures on earth correlate to sunspot activity. What we’re seeing from the sun implies not global warming but a global cooling that we haven’t seen since the “Little Ice Age” three centuries ago.
There is no proven correlation between temperatures on earth and carbon dioxide. The earth’s axis, the salinity of the Arctic Ocean and volcanoes all dramatically affect temperatures. But carbon dioxide? No way.
Yet we still flirt with imposing a harmful “cap-and-trade” system to limit carbon emissions. It will constrain our economy, raise prices for consumers, and encourage fraud among those forced to trade emission credits. It’s the wrong solution for a problem that we don’t fully understand.
For complete debunking of all the above, see our How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic Series: “No evidence,” “it’s the sun,” “we’re seeing cooling,” “volcanoes are causing it,” and “mitigating carbon dioxide emissions would cause an economic disaster.”
