The evidence that global warming hysteria is . . . well, hysterical, continues to accumulate. The latest correction to the data used to justify that hysteria concerns the benefits of using biofuels to cut carbon emissions.
The study, published this week in Science, says that biofuels, marketed as a low-carbon alternative, will actually emit more carbon dioxide than burning gasoline over the coming decades. . . .
The problem stems from a basic error in the Kyoto Protocol – and subsequently copied into European and US environmental legislation – which calculates emissions without taking the source of the fuel into account. . . .
“It literally means you can chip up the world’s forests and burn them for fuel without noting the effect on the world’s greenhouse gases,” adds Timothy Searchinger, a research fellow at Princeton University.
Will this news do anything to dampen the current obsession with enacting new, sweeping regulations based on the old data? Silly question. It’s full steam ahead for the political class.
Like doomsayers throughout history, Gordon Brown says the upcoming Copenhagen summit is our last chance.
“We can’t afford to fail. If we fail, we pay a heavy price,” he warned. “For the planet, there is no plan B.”
Al Gore sees hope in Brown’s hysteria, and says it is swinging public opinion and business leaders his way.
They’re seeing the writing on every wall they look at. They’re seeing the complete disappearance of the polar ice caps right before their eyes in just a few years.
(Is anything melting faster than Gordon Brown’s political career?)
Pew Research reports that Gore is wrong, finding that the gap in public opinion between Americans who support cap and trade and those who don’t has narrowed from 60% in 2006 to 24%.
That shift still leaves a decided majority in favor of environmental policies that can only be justified by spurious data like the Kyoto snafu on carbon emissions. A significant chunk of the population believes the debate is over.
So a lot of people still consider it logical to burn the world’s food stores in our gas tanks while leaving the oil underground.
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