Report: carbon emissions lowest in 20 years!

Aug. 17, 2012

Katy Grimes: Apparently the big news that the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in the United States has fallen to the lowest level in 20 years, hasn’t yet reached the desk of Mary Nichols, the director of the California Air Resources Board.

Nichols is frantically moving ahead with cap-and-trade auctions at breakneck speed, despite that this will create needless, excessive costs for the state’s employers, and seriously prevent businesses from grow. The uncertainty the CARB is causing among employers in the state has dramatically impacted the state’s economy.

“What most people don’t know is that CARB is asking employers to pay for far more emission credits than are needed to reach our goals,” Gino DiCaro with the California Manufacturers Association wrote. “California will reach it’s 1990-level greenhouse gas emissions without the economy-debilitating cap-and-trade auction, but CARB continues to move forward.”

Scientists blindsided

“Many of the world’s leading climate scientists didn’t see the drop coming, in large part because it happened as a result of market forces rather than direct government action against carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere,” Kevin Begos with the Associated Press wrote this week.

The U.S. Energy Information Agency reported August 1 that energy related U.S. CO2 emissions fell to 1992 levels.

According to Begos, the reason is cheap and plentiful natural gas has led many power plant operators to switch away from using coal. The low price of the plentiful natural gas is a result of shale gas drilling in Texas, Arkansas and Lousiana.

But the most compelling piece of information is that climate scientists didn’t see this drop coming. While they were so busy manipulating data to keep the focus on climate change and global warming alarmists, it was free market forces and not government mandates that led to the lower carbon emissions.

Take that, Mary Nichols. 

The free market still trumps anything the government can do.