Declaring victory on CO2 emissions

Published 8:19 pm Saturday, February 1, 2014

Victory celebrations became unpopular in politics after President George W. Bush’s notorious “Mission Accomplished” photo op in 2003. But President Barack Obama could be forgiven for declaring that the U.S. has achieved its ambitious carbon emissions goals, just days after he reiterated those goals in his State of the Union speech.

He won’t do so, of course, because then he’d have to admit that fossil fuels were the reason we have cut carbon emissions drastically — below the levels the 2005 Kyoto protocol (treaty) called for.

“And when our children’s children look us in the eye,” said Obama in that speech, “and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did.”

The good news is we can.

“U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions have fallen dramatically in recent years, in large part because the country is making more electricity with natural gas instead of coal,” the Wall Street Journal reported last year. “Energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that is widely believed to contribute to global warming, have fallen 12 percent between 2005 and 2012 and are at their lowest level since 1994, according to a recent estimate by the Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the U.S. Energy Department.”

And the reduction came not from Obama’s draconian emissions regulations, but from the free market. “Fracking” and other technologies have made natural gas cheaper and easier to obtain than coal.

“Natural gas emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal when used to make electricity,” the Journal explained. “Last year, 30 percent of power in the U.S. came from burning natural gas, up from 19 percent in 2005, driven by drilling technologies that have unlocked large and inexpensive new supplies of the fuel.”

It’s not just the (alleged) cause — carbon emissions — of a dystopian future that we’ve made great progress on. We’ve also made great strides in making that future better for our children’s children.

Again, Obama probably won’t mention that — because it’s largely because of fossil fuels that their future is brighter.

“Thanks in large part to our increasing use of fossil fuel energy and the technologies they power, life has gotten a lot better across the board for billions of people around the globe,” the Journal noted. “Life expectancy is way up. World life expectancy at birth was just 63 years in 1980. That number has increased to over 70. The US, already far above average with 73 in 1980, today enjoys an average life expectancy of 78. The infant mortality rate of mankind is less than half of what it used to be in 1980 (from 80 to 35 per 1000 live births). Malnutrition and undernourishment have plummeted. Access to electricity, a proxy for development and health, is constantly increasing.”

Obama’s State of the Union address listed a number of goals — most of them much more pressing than his repeated call for more government regulation on emissions. He should declare victory and move on.