Going off half-cocked over carbon

OPINION:

Crisis, by definition, requires immediate action. Immediate action in search of a crisis, though, necessitates common sense intervention. President Biden’s climate agenda betrays precipitous tendencies, heaping painful impacts upon Americans without the requisite authority or demonstration of need. With Mr. Biden’s “green” executive orders set to go off half-cocked over carbon, sounder judgment, fortunately, has prevailed. 

A federal judge on Friday halted the president’s attempt to adopt an expensive social cost of carbon as a means of mitigating global warming, commonly described in opaque terms as “climate change.” U.S. District Court Judge James D. Cain Jr. of the Western District of Louisiana granted a preliminary stay on the regulation, which had been sought by attorneys general in 10 Republican-led states.

By quintupling the social cost of emissions from the Trump-era level of $10 per metric ton to $51, Mr. Biden would “significantly drive up costs while simultaneously significantly decrease states’ revenues,” wrote Judge Cain in his ruling. Not disputing the president’s higher social cost calculations, which obligate greater taxpayer investments in mitigation, the judge sided with the plaintiffs’ argument that he may have overstepped his authority in doing so.

Mr. Biden might have exceeded the limits of logic as well. Climate change as an existential threat is premised on the idea that human activity powered by modern technology is raising the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is trapping heat and raising global temperatures. Changes in the Earth’s climate, though, demonstrate anomalies that indicate the effects of maddingly complex influences.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought human enterprise to a standstill long enough to cause a 2.8% decline in the global gross domestic product. With the lockdown of cities, the shuttering of factories and the stoppage of air, land and sea transportation, the engines of commerce went silent, temporarily.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration should have fallen in tandem. It did not. Rather, emissions continued their upward trajectory, recording an increase of 2.31 parts per million — nearly identical to the 2.49 ppm logged in 2019, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A similar divergence from the expected norm was observed when the CO2 concentration climbed from 2.22 ppm in 2014 to 2.90 ppm in 2015 despite an international trade slowdown that triggered a 5.4% drop in global GDP.

Judging from his executive actions, Mr. Biden assumes human beings control the global climate. Also at work, though, are forces of nature, which have taken the planet’s climate on a madcap roller-coaster ride throughout the eons of Earth’s existence. Instead of steering, we might be just tagging along. 

Enacting climate policies that promise to suppress the rise in global temperatures by only a few thousandths of a degree is a “green” form of virtue signaling. Placing a price tag on the social cost of carbon that would cost Americans trillions is above Mr. Biden’s paygrade.