President Bush proposed an alternative to the Kyoto Treaty yesterday that employs “voluntary” means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions but nevertheless leads the nation “down a dark path,” according to some critics of global warming theory.
“Spending any money at all to curb CO2 emissions is a complete waste of time,” Dr. Arthur Robinson, professor of chemistry at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, told WorldNetDaily. “There is absolutely not a shred of evidence that humans are causing any change in the climate by generating CO2.”
Bush said his proposal would cut the growth rate in greenhouse gases by offering companies incentives to cut emissions. His plan also aims to encourage development of alternative energy forms, improve conservation and develop technology to reduce pollution.
Democrats and environmental groups, however, immediately charged that the plan would do little to reduce greenhouse gases.
Robinson noted that the Clinton administration’s support of the Kyoto Treaty has backed Bush into a political corner.
“Bush did the right thing, keeping us out of Kyoto, which was a total disaster – mandatory controls all over the world that would have caused a horrible amount of suffering and trouble,” Robinson said. “If he has to go along with some kind of minor thing to kind of cover his tail and preserve capital, I won’t hold it against him.”
Robinson sponsored a petition that has garnered the signatures of more than 17,000 scientists who oppose ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. About 7,000 have doctorates in science, he said.
In response to Bush’s plan, Myron Ebell, director of global warming and international environmental policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said that while “the president’s commitment to sound science is a welcome change from the Clinton-Gore administration, the substance of the proposal is a misguided concession to environmental alarmism.”
CEI, a nonprofit, non-partisan public policy group in Washington, D.C., said, “The introduction of limits on carbon dioxide emissions, even in the technically ‘voluntary’ form envisioned by the administration, starts the nation down a dark path.
“While the effect on carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will be miniscule and undetectable, the White House will create the framework for energy rationing, which will lead to greater pressure to expand the program and make its emissions goals mandatory,” CEI said. “Even a small concession to those who favor energy suppression will make pursuing the right policies in the future more difficult.”
Robinson agreed that the president’s proposal “gives credence to the myth” of global warming.
“So in that way it’s damaging,” he said. “I was kind of hoping that Bush, having done the substantial thing, would pay lip service to the rest – study it to death. That would have been better.”
Proponents of global warming theory often refer to a list of some “2,500 scientists” who purportedly found evidence of a “discernible human influence” on global climate.
“There is absolutely no long list of scientists that endorses the Kyoto idea,” Robinson contended. “It doesn’t exist.”
Of the 2,500 or so people asked to participate in a 1996 meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, only 1,100 were scientists, “and they were never asked to approve a report of the meeting,” Robinson said.
“Some thought it was a problem,” he acknowledged. “But most of them were there just as part of the goings-on. When the whole thing was over, a committee of a few guys wrote a report, pointed to the warm bodies, and said they all endorse it. They didn’t.”
The “voluminous” report included opposing views, Robinson said, but the committee issued an executive summary backing global warming theory, “and that’s what the media reads.”
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