Estimates reveal that the federal government will spend more money on fighting global warming than it will on tightening border security. Global-warming spending is estimated to cost approximately $22.2 billion this year, twice as much as the $12 billion estimated for customs and border enforcement.
According to the White House, there are currently 18 federal agencies engaged in activities related to global warming. Those agencies fund programs that include scientific research, international climate assistance, renewable energy technology, and subsidies for renewable energy producers.
Republicans have criticized the administration for its global-warming efforts and have demanded more transparency. The online Daily Caller reported, “Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee have been calling on the heads of major federal agencies to testify on global warming activities.”
The efforts to acquire testimony have been mostly unsuccessful, however, with just the heads of the Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency agreeing to testify in front of the House of Representatives.
“With billions of dollars currently being spent annually on climate change activities, Congress and the public should understand the scope of what the federal government is doing, how the billions of dollars are being spent, and what it will accomplish,” said Kentucky Republican Rep. Ed Whitfield. “Anyone who believes the committee ought to be focusing its attention on climate change related issues should be standing with us to get these answers.”
In the Senate, a hearing was held to discuss the immediate impacts of global warming, but Senate Republicans released a report rejecting many of the claims advanced by scientists and lawmakers about global warming. “Over nearly four decades, numerous predictions have had adequate time to come to fruition, providing an opportunity to analyze and compare them to today’s statistics,” reads the report from Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
In particular, Republicans have criticized efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. Still, the EPA is working toward imposing emissions caps on power plants across the country, standards that would negatively impact the coal industry.
But that may not be an unintended consequence. It has been revealed that the agenda behind environmental global-warming efforts, such as cap and trade, has more nefarious ends, which include wealth redistribution and virtually stunting economic growth.
Have you noticed that the term “global warming” has morphed into “climate change” in recent years? The simple explanation is that in the 1970s, the Progressives first attempted to convince the country that “global cooling” was the immediate threat. But by the 1980s, scientists refuted that theory, prompting the Progressives to turn their attention to “global warming.” Now that “green” scientists are in the uncomfortable position of trying to reconcile increased ice formations at the southern polar cap, long periods of cooler temperatures, etc., with global-warming theories, they have changed the environmental issue to “climate change.”
And assertions made by climate-change skeptics that there are ulterior motives behind climate-change legislation were confirmed by a leading member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
During an interview with Germany’s NZZ Online, UN official Ottmar Edenhofer declared, “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”
Edenhofer confirmed what many Americans have asserted all along: Cap and trade will penalize Americans and American industry. The American Chronicle article entitled “Cap-and-Trade Energy Tax will Cause Redistribution of Wealth Among States and Working Families” cites the Congressional Budget Office as stating that cap and trade would cost the average American household an extra $1,600 per year. It would increase the price for a gallon of gasoline between $0.61 to $2.53, and would increase electricity costs anywhere from 44 percent to 129 percent.
In 2009, the online site Our Changing Globe commented about cap and trade: “The intention is that the industrial world would pay the underdeveloped world huge sums of money for doing nothing at all, and you can easily imagine the bureaucracy and corruption that would occur if this nonsense were ever to come into being.”
It added, “The flawed idea behind Cap and Trade is that companies that were penalized would work hard to reduce their pollution, and even though the technology is presently not available and won’t be in the foreseeable future, Obama is promising that the U.S. will reduce its pollution by 80 percent, which would take it back to levels that existed before the industrial revolution.”
And assertions related to the threat posed by manmade global warming continue to collapse. According to the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), the human effect on climate is “likely to be small relative to natural variability, and whatever small warming is likely to occur will produce benefits as well as costs.”
Addressing reports produced by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the NIPCC indicates:
Global climate models produce meaningful results only if we assume we already know perfectly how the global climate works, and most climate scientists say we do not (Bray and von Storch, 2010). Moreover, it is widely recognized that climate models are not designed to produce predictions of future climate but rather what-if projections of many alternative possible futures (Trenberth, 2009). Postulates, commonly defined as “something suggested or assumed as true as the basis for reasoning, discussion, or belief,” can stimulate relevant observations or experiments but more often are merely assertions that are difficult or impossible to test (Kahneman, 2011). Observations in science are useful primarily to falsify hypotheses and cannot prove one is correct (Popper, 1965, p. vii).
But the Obama administration contends that there is no longer a need for a debate on whether manmade global warming poses a real threat. “We have turned a corner on that issue,” said Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. “We are — including in our Congress — really past the issue of whether we need to respond.”
Senate Republicans continue to push for further evidence on the threat of global warming before throwing more money at the “problem.” “The American public should be deeply troubled to learn that EPA is actively working to increase energy prices based on predicted global temperature increases without first undertaking efforts to determine if temperatures are actually increasing to the extent predicted by the climate models they are using,” reads the Senate Republicans’ report.
Meanwhile, as the federal government continues to spend taxpayer money on global-warming initiatives, American border security continues to suffer. And while increased spending does not indicate quality service, the administration’s decision to assign twice as much spending toward global-warming efforts than security seems to reveal where the administration’s priorities are.
