US Gets Ready to Blow its Economy Away
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 17/08/2008
Visiting America last week to talk to audiences across the country about "global warming", I was struck by television commercials for the two presidential candidates.
Senators McCain and Obama were each shown in front of film of the same giant wind farm, to lay claim to virtually identical "green" credentials. Since America has already built five times as many wind turbines as Britain, covering thousands of square miles, I checked out how much electricity all those 10,000 turbines actually produce. The answer is around 4.5 gigawatts - not much more than a single large coal-fired power station.
After years when America was vilified for not taking "global warming' seriously, it was a shock to find how "environmentalism" is now threatening to transform what is still the largest and richest economy in the world.
Both candidates favour a version of the proposed "cap and trade" scheme to slash US greenhouse gas emissions to 63 per cent below 2005 levels, at an estimated cost by 2030 of more than $600 billion a year - representing a cumulative loss to the US economy, within 22 years, of $4.8 trillion.
Although America is still dependent on coal for around half its electricity, with reserves estimated as likely to last 200 years, state after state is proposing to ban new coal-fired power stations.
Environmental groups, with powerful political support, are now lobbying equally fiercely against natural gas or any new nuclear power plants.
Most dramatic of all are the implications of a Supreme Court judgment in the case of Massachussets v the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which ruled by a single vote that the EPA must treat any greenhouse gases as "pollution", to be regulated under America's Clean Air Act.
The EPA is thus mandated to impose drastic new limits on emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases from pretty well any source, not just industry and transport but schools, hospitals, even lawn mowers.
The implications are so immense for almost every sector of the US economy that government departments -commerce, agriculture, energy and others - have been queuing up to protest, arguing that the effects of such regulation would be so damaging that it should be regarded as unthinkable.
But politicians of both parties, led by the two men vying for the presidency, are so carried away in the rush to appear "green" that it seems there is no longer any national voice powerful enough to question the sanity of such measures.
All the fashionable talk is of how fossil-fuels must be replaced by massively subsidised sources of "renewable" energy, such as vast arrays of solar panels, even though a recent study showed that a kilowatt hour of solar-generated electricity costs between 25 and 30 cents, compared with 6 cents for power generated from coal and 9 cents for that produced by natural gas.
What is terrifying is the extent to which America's leading politicians seem oblivious to the economic realities of what they are proposing. The readiness of Messrs McCain and Obama to posture in front of pictures of virtually useless wind turbines symbolises that attitude perfectly.
Here, in the EU we are only too sadly familiar with politicians floating off into cloudcuckooland over our future energy policy, with the virtual certainty that before many years this may leave us with a colossal shortfall in our electricity supplies.
But "the lights going out all over Europe" is one thing: if they go out in the richest economy in the world - while China cheerfully continues to build one new coal-fired power station a week - we may look back on the US presidential election of 2008 as a time when history really did reach a watershed; the moment when the nations of the West finally signed up to the most bizarre suicide note the world has ever seen.
