Can't See The Planet For The Straws

800 demonstrators packed into Congressional offices and lined hallways demanding that Congress take action on climate change this week.

Most were students, some of which were in middle school.

128 were arrested by Capitol Hill police when they refused to disperse.

The focus of their efforts is to force House Democrat leaders to support a far-left plan for a "Green New Deal".

You should remember that term. I predict you will be hearing a lot about it over the next several years. It appears to be what Socialist Democrats intend to use to package most of their long sought policy goals--guaranteed income, Medicare for all, free college, spending on green technology and jobs, elimination of fossil fuels and the like. This is evident by looking at the platform of the Green Party that clearly spells all of this out under that umbrella.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a leading advocate of The Green New Deal. This is how she described it during her campaign for Congress.

“The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan,”. “It will require the investment of trillions of dollars and the creation of millions of high-wage jobs. We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy but this time green energy.”

The leftists claim that this huge effort is necessary because of "the science in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report shows the world needs to slash emissions 45 percent by 2030 and get to net zero by mid-century or risk warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. If that happens, small islands will be swallowed by the sea and millions will be conscripted to a life of poverty amid worsening weather".

Let's take a step back and look at this issue in context. That is something we like to do at BeeLine.

These activists want to take action to slash carbon emissions by 45% over the next 12 years.

How do you do that?

Let's not just look at the United States. If this is a problem, it is a global problem.

This is a chart showing the latest estimate on global carbon emissions.

Total global carbon emissions are estimated to be 37.1 billion tons. As you can see from the chart, the contribution of the United States is about 12% of the total and its emissions have been trending down since 2000.

The same is true for the European Union. Together, the EU and the United States are responsible for less than 1/4 of all carbon emissions in the world today.

In other words, the United States could eliminate all carbon emissions over the next 12 years and it would be less than 25% of what the climate alarmists state is necessary to avoid "catastrophe". Even if Europe also eliminated all carbon emissions, less than half the goal would be met. This is also not taking account of additional carbon emission increases going forward from other countries.

It is also important to note that the United States was the only major country in the world to actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 2017.

Greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 2.7% in the U.S.  Emissions from large power plants declined by 4.5%.

For additional context, consider that on a per-capita basis, U.S. carbon emissions in 2017 were the lowest they have been in 67 years!

France carbon emissions were up 3.6%. Yes, the country which is famous for the Paris Accord on Climate. That is also the country where people have recently taken to the streets and are burning cars and looting stores because of a fuel tax increase that was designed to help France reduce carbon emissions.

The EU as a whole was up 1.5% last year.

China was up 1.7%.

India was up 4.6%.

Of course, as you can see from the chart, the real problem for increased carbon emissions is in the rest of the world. South America. Africa. The Middle East, Southeast Asia.

193 countries have signed the Paris Accord (the United States now excluded) indicating that they are committed to reducing carbon emissions. That is almost every country in the world. However, carbon emissions keep climbing.

127 countries also signed the Kyoto Protocol on reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in 1997. This is also an agreement that the United States never formally ratified (although Bill Clinton and Al Gore did sign on). This agreement obligated the signatories to a 5.2% reduction in carbon emissions by 2012.

Ironically, although the United States was never formally part of the Protocol, it was the first major industrialized nation to meet the 5.2% target , although a portion of that result was due to the stagnant economy in 2009-2012.

The point of all of this is that talk is cheap when it comes to politics (and carbon emission reductions).

It is easy to talk a big game.

It is easy to participate in symbolic demonstrations.

It is easy to talk about how much you "believe" in man-made climate change and the "urgent" need to do something about it.

It is much harder to really do something about it.

The United States has actually been doing something about it without signing on to any high-minded and symbolic demonstrations of "commitment".

Looking at the data, why aren't these protestors storming the Chinese, Indian, Indonesian and Turkish embassies instead of the halls of Congress?

Why are they not supporting President Trump's tariffs on China? After all, those Chinese factories and the massive transportation costs to get those products to the United States are producing a lot of carbon emissions.

Why are they not opposed to illegal immigration? Don't they realize the additional energy, infrastructure and sustainability costs that will have to be borne with those additional people in the United States compared to what it is in their home countries?

These actions would all have much more meaningful impacts on what the leftists suggest is the real problem (global carbon emissions)  than demonstrating for a Green New Deal in the United States.

All of this reminds me of the story I saw about the Legoland amusement parks recently announcing a ban of plastic straws and lids in its parks.

Bear in mind that Legoland is an attraction that revolves around plastic bricks and toys. In fact, its newest park has 15 million of them. Almost all of them are made of non-biodegradable petroleum-based plastics.

Lego sells a reported 75 billion plastic bricks globally each year.

And they are concerned with the environmental impact of plastic straws at Legoland?

It used to be said that people often could not see the forest for the trees.

I guess we are now to the point that people can't see the planet for the straws.