We'd rather bake. The first analysis of the global warming treaty's impact on the 50 states is in. It's worse than ugly. From soaring energy costs to massive job losses, the treaty will fall like a hammer on the American economy.
Jimmy Carter's sweater-clad call for energy sacrifices doesn't hold a candle to the prescription of pain and austerity the White House wants to foist on us.
According to the study by the economic consulting firm WEFA Inc., each person would have to cut his personal energy use in half in order for the U.S. to meet the treaty's terms.
You can imagine the barking: "Set the water heater at 80 degrees," "Two-minute showers, kids," and "Turn that thermostat down."
The deal Al Gore "negotiated" in Kyoto, Japan, will boost energy costs significantly. Home heating oil would climb some 70%.
New England politicians will rail about senior citizens freezing to death in their homes. Yet they would have the wise men in Kyoto to thank for protecting them from the heat.
The price at the gas pump will roll up 65 cents a gallon - and the travel industry will besiege Washington.
Nationally, WEFA sees the U.S. jobless rate in 2010 at about 5.4% absent Kyoto. It's what economists label the "base case." With the treaty, look for a nationwide jobless rate of just under 7%, says WEFA. The study says 2.7 million jobs would be lost.
Under the treaty, Americans would face higher food, medical and housing costs, says WEFA - for food, 11%, medicine, 14%, and housing, 7%. At the same time the average household of four would see its real income drop by $2,700 in 2010. And these losses would be felt for years.
The analysis is even more devastating than earlier studies. Those, including one put out by the White House, said gross domestic product would be about 2% lower than expected by 2010. WEFA puts the figure at 3.2%.
Prior studies assumed the U.S. would not agree to any course that cut emissions below 1990 levels. President Clinton, himself, pledged just that. The Clinton team also promised a nervous Congress it would sign no deal without developing countries as part of the mix. Neither happened. Still, the White House promises it won't send anything to the Senate for approval without these elements.
But nothing is happening to improve the U.S. position. News out of Bonn, Germany, last week is that developing countries insist on staying out of the treaty. As for the developed world, it continues to resist any sort of emissions trading scheme with the U.S.
Green groups say that business-sponsored studies tend to inflate the harm of certain policy paths. No doubt at times there's something to that complaint.
But even if the estimates WEFA ran through its quite mainstream economic models were off by say, 50%, that's still a huge drag on the economy.
Inflicting this pain makes the least sense economically. Free from even a fig-leaf commitment, developing countries would walk through the door to our markets.
Not only would the flood of textile and apparel imports increase, but WEFA also warns of suffering for "the computer and electronic products industries, particularly from imports."
Mary Novak, the WEFA study's lead author, says the treaty will hit so hard because of the rapid timetable governments set to put the treaty in place.
Complying in a little more than a decade is far less time than the capital cycle prevailing in the U.S. economy. Novak estimates that to last some 30 to 40 years. That means investments in power plants, transportation and other energy-intensive fields would be lost.
What should make these costs all the more scary to Americans is that the science behind the push for the Kyoto treaty is far from conclusive. Indeed, only the activists, the White House and to some extent the media have accepted the global warming theory without question.
What happened to the Clintonites' '92 mantra, "It's the economy, stupid"? By pushing for the Kyoto deal, their new mantra seems to be, "It's the fate of the earth, peon."
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