Leaders of eight industrialized nations met last week in Italy to discuss a number of critical issues, including climate change, and in what British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called a “historic agreement,” the G8 agreed that “average global temperatures shouldn’t increase by more than 2 degrees Celsius[,] in a significant new acknowledgment in the fight against global warming.”
So, the G8 reached an agreement on global temperatures. A certain amount of pretentiousness lingers from this statement. As if it’s something they can really control – limiting global temperatures increases to only a two degrees C is well within their scope of power.
To reach this limit, global leaders want to cap carbon dioxide emissions, which would have devastating effects on economies reliant on fossil fuels, such as our own. Since 85 percent of America’s energy needs come from fossil fuels, cap and trade would be a massive tax on energy consumption if enacted.
The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis found that by 2035, gasoline prices would increase 58 percent, natural gas prices would increase 55 percent, home heating oil would increase 56 percent, and worst of all, electricity prices would jump 90 percent.
But the direct tax on household energy use is just the beginning. The energy tax also hits producers. As the higher production costs ripple through the economy, the household pocketbooks get hit again and again. When all the tax impacts have been added up, the average per-family-of-four costs rise by $2,979 per year. In the year 2035 alone, the cost is $4,609. And the costs per family for the whole energy tax aggregated from 2012 to 2035 are $71,493.
Of course, even if the G8 decides to reduce carbon dioxide, convincing some of the world’s biggest carbon emitters (such as developing nations India and China) will be no easy task. Understanding the trade-off between economic growth and reduced carbon emissions, they will be unwilling to curb carbon emissions, especially when they have more pressing environmental issues.
Who knows? The temperature cap could happen regardless of a carbon capping program. June, “saw another — albeit small — drop in the global average temperature anomaly, from +0.04 deg. C in May to 0.00 deg. C in June, with the coolest anomaly (-0.03 deg. C) in the Tropics. The decadal temperature trend for the period December 1978 through June 2009 remains at +0.13 deg. C per decade”
For more, visit Heritage’s Rapid Response page.