Today the UN COP 21 in Paris reached agreement on a new international climate agreement after many years of meetings and oceans of propaganda. Although the agreement includes a number of aspirational statements, it is essentially toothless and non-binding. It is actually weaker than the Kyoto Protocol that it is intended to replace. The result is that any nation would be free to do anything or nothing, including rapid increases in CO2 emissions. This was apparently necessary in order to receive the support of China and the less developed countries that would like to improve the economic well-being of their people by substituting fossil fuel energy for their labor.
EPA Powerplant Regulations Useless and Counterproductive
This shows how useless and counterproductive the new EPA climate regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing electric power generating plants are. The reductions will have no measurable effects on atmospheric CO2 levels or global temperatures and will impose very large costs on the US economy and electric bills.
EPA defended them basically by arguing that they were necessary to encourage other countries to reduce their emissions, presumably through the upcoming climate COP 21. Obviously it has had no such effect. The result of the new EPA regulations will thus be to greatly increase US costs of electricity while other nations (such as China, a major US competitor) are free to maintain existing rates by continuing or more likely expanding fossil fuel use. Nations that voluntarily handicap their economies and populations with such counterproductive regulations are only hurting themselves and doing nothing for the environment. CO2 is not even a pollutant and limited and gradual increases in global temperatures are beneficial (as discussed in my new book).
In this rare instance I strongly agree with James Hansen, who has characterized the Paris talks as “a fraud.”