Collapse!

By Chattanooga Times Free Press
EDITORIAL: Global Warming House of Cards

Apr. 4--The view that man has to take radical steps to prevent disastrous "global warming" rests on lots of shaky assumptions.

One of the shakiest, acknowledged even by those who fret the most about global warming, is that the various weather control measures require almost universal agreement to work. In other words, the activists say, we cannot hold down temperature increases around the world unless all the major players -- the United States, the European Union, India, Russia, Communist China and others -- go along.

That alone makes the anti-global-warming house of cards collapse. Many nations that signed onto the Kyoto environmental treaty to cut down on "greenhouse gas" emissions failed by a wide margin to meet its obligations, as they discovered the harm it did to their economies. New proposals to cap emissions are even harsher than Kyoto's. How will those nations meet stricter rules when they can't meet easier ones?

And here is another huge obstacle: Communist China. It has been growing its economy with energy produced by its rapid construction of coal-fired power plants. Those plants lack the technology that reduces emissions from plants in the United States, and Communist China is now the world's biggest polluter.

Yet it has no interest in limiting its growth to fight extremely iffy predictions of an environmental catastrophe decades away. In fact, it says nations that buy goods made in China should have to slash their emissions even more to make up for greenhouse gases released in the production of Chinese goods. All that would do is hurt economic growth in other countries while letting Communist China go on polluting as much as it wants and undermining other countries' efforts on global warming.

The United States should look very skeptically at any treaty on climate change -- especially treaties that tie the hands of our economy while exempting big foreign polluters.