Al Gore Equates Global Warming with World War II and Civil Rights Movement, While Europe Announces Cap-and-Trade Failure

On the same week in which the European Union (EU) admitted that its carbon cap-and-trade system is failing miserably, Al Gore shamelessly equated his latest global warming project with fighting Nazism in World War II, the Civil Rights Movement and the moon landing.

Talk about “inconvenient truths” for the man behind the discredited film “An Inconvenient Truth.”

This week, Gore announced the kickoff of his three-year, $300 million advertising and online lobbying campaign with a group calling itself the Alliance for Climate Protection. Apparently abandoning any remaining sense of shame or restraint, Gore will reportedly equate his latest climate-change pet project with our efforts during World War II, the fight against vicious racial segregation and successfully landing a man on the moon. According to reports, the campaign will in turn demand that the United States join other nations in adopting ineffective, but economically-destructive, emissions cap schemes.

As one might expect, Gore’s proposed solution lies in even more big-government bureaucratic mandates from Washington, D.C. As he told the Washington Post, “the path to recovery runs right through Washington.”

Only one problem: the EU inconveniently acknowledged this week that its own Kyoto-style emission caps are a miserable failure.

According to the EU’s website, its greenhouse gas emissions actually rose some 1.1% last year, despite the fact that it has enacted the very type of economically damaging cap-and-trade mandates advocated by Gore and climate alarmists. Under the EU’s cap-and-trade system, businesses receive a predetermined allotment of emissions credits from government planners, and those businesses that exceed their limits must purchase spare credits from other businesses.

From the start, however, the EU’s cap-and-trade scheme was marred by inherent flaws. Most fundamentally, bureaucratic busybodies were unable to accurately estimate the number of emissions permits to issue. Consequently, they were forced to recalibrate emissions limits and the number of credits, and the program proved a miserable failure. Instead of the intended decline in emissions, they have risen approximately 1% each year since the program’s inception.

Lest Al Gore’s devotees dismiss the EU’s miserable failure as an anomaly, Japan’s climate-change scheme has failed just as badly. The home country of Kyoto was itself supposed to reduce its emissions by 6% below 1990 levels, but its emission levels have actually risen steadily as well.

Although these Kyoto-style programs have utterly failed to achieve their intended goals, they have had an impact, albeit a negative one. Namely, they have inflicted great economic harm upon the nations that have implemented them, with no benefit to the environment.

Across the EU, energy-intensive businesses are relocating their operations and employment overseas, and the European economies trail the United States economy, which has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol during both the Clinton and Bush Administrations. Conditions in the EU have deteriorated so badly that the European Roundtable of Industrialists has written the EU to warn that the EU’s Kyoto mandates are eroding businesses’ ability to compete in the world economy.

Further, European businesses are bracing themselves for additional increases in cap-and-trade costs, as EU bureaucrats respond to the increase in European emissions by tightening limits. In turn, this will increase businesses’ cost of complying with the EU’s cap-and-trade scheme, further eroding EU economic competitiveness.

Ignoring these inconvenient truths, climate change alarmists nevertheless insist that the United States dive into the same self-destructive schemes.

But any such scheme inflicted upon the United States is doomed to failure, just as similar mandates have failed across the world. Cap-and-trade laws will fail to curtail emissions, let alone affect the vast global climatic environment. Instead, they will merely inflict great damage on our economic and employment climate precisely when America faces an increasingly-competitive world economy. The American Council for Capital Formation, as one example, estimates that a cap-and-trade law would cost 3.7 million American jobs, reduce gross national product by 2.6%, increase fuel costs even more and punish the average American household some $1,760 each year.

Hopefully, Americans will prove unwilling to pay this economic price for a scheme that fails to reduce emissions or benefit the environment.