Kerry-Lieberman is a cruel joke

Junior scientists in the Senate. "Hey. We are scared by global warming. So let's try something. It just might work. It will cost billions and cost a lot of people their jobs. And other countries will continue their emissions. But we will feel good. And no one will measure our results." That's John Kerry (did you know he fought in Viet Nam?) and Joe Lieberman ("watch me backtrack on everything I have stood for for years in the next three weeks, because AlGore chose me!") Wash Examiner

Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., have managed to write a cap-and-trade energy bill that should be greeted with guffaws from both believers and skeptics of man-made global warming. At a cost of billions of dollars and millions of jobs across America, the proposal would produce virtually no reduction in global temperatures even after being in force for decades. Using the MAGICC/SCENGEN climate model originally developed for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and assuming no other nation adopts the same measure, climate researcher Paul Knappenberger found that Kerry-Lieberman would reduce the average global temperature 0.077 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, compared with what it would be if the bill were not adopted. That is one-fifth of one degree, which, as Knappenberger notes on the MasterResource blog, is a "scientifically meaningless reduction." One problem for Kerry-Lieberman is that China, India and the rest of the developing world show no inclination to join the United States to achieve carbon emissions reductions of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, 42 percent below by 2030, and 83 percent below by 2050. If anything, China is headed rapidly in the opposite direction, building hundreds of new coal-fired power plants in recent years and generating two-thirds of its electricity from the most emissions-intense fuel. China gives lip service to carbon reduction, to be sure, but it keeps building new power plants. China is also moving aggressively to increase its access to oil and natural gas, striking deals recently with Venezuela and Cuba, with the latter for exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico. The other problem for Kerry-Lieberman is that its minuscule temperature reduction comes at immense cost. The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis found in an econometric model analysis that between 2012 and 2035, 1.1 million more jobs would be lost than would be the case without the measure's adoption. Just in the first decade, unemployment would increase by .5 percent, according to the Brookings Institution. Even after accounting for the creation of "green jobs," a study for the National Black Chamber of Commerce projected a loss of as many as 2.7 million jobs by 2030. In addition, gas prices at the pump and monthly utility bills for electricity would, in President Obama's own words, "necessarily skyrocket," while the cost of all manufactured and agricultural products would also rise sharply. Such costs with essentially no return is a bad joke, but neither global warming proponents nor skeptics are laughing. ...