by Steve Milloy, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow and Junkscience.com Founder
As appearing in the Wall Street Journal

Climate alarmism isn’t popular with the public, so Republicans don’t need an alternative.

The Senate rejected the Green New Deal on a 57-0 procedural vote last month. Not a single senator voted to bring the proposal to the floor, including its chief sponsor, Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey. Climate alarmists demanded that Republicans come up with a plan of their own. But the best plan may be no plan at all, for at least four reasons.

First, cutting U.S. emissions won’t have much of an effect on the climate. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, total man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were an estimated 53.5 billion metric tons in 2017. If the U.S. went dark and magically stopped emitting CO2 today, the rest of the world would continue to emit on the order of 45 billion tons of CO2 annually, an amount far in excess of the Kyoto Protocol’s goal of reducing annual emissions below the 1990 level of 35 billion tons. Supposing the U.S. could go carbonless, the difference in atmospheric CO2 levels by 2100 would be only about 29 parts per million. Based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change modeling, this would make no discernible difference in mean global temperature.

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