Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
So, I’ve been thinking about how this new EPA power plant rule will play out.
First of all, after an obligatory EPA 1-year comment period and then
even more time for the states to decide how they might want to achieve
the goals of the rule, it’s going to be after the next presidential
election before we actually see substantial changes in coal-fired
generation resulting from the rule.
How convenient. Old plants are already being shuttered in favor of
gas-fired plants, which are currently cheaper. So what’s the point of
the new regulations?
Well, what might well happen is this. Ten years down the road, “global warming” will turn out to be (surprise!) much weaker than predicted.
Since we know the climate models that predicted much greater warming
can’t be wrong, it must be those new EPA regulations back in 2014 that
solved the problem!
We really can control the climate system! We did something…and it worked…retroactively!
It doesn’t really matter which came first, or what-caused-what. It
didn’t matter for the ice core record of temperature changes coming before CO2 changes, and it won’t matter for this, either."
No comments:
Post a Comment