Gas-emitting candidates contra carbon emissions

A. Zarkov writes:

Hillary and Obama both back an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. McCain comes in a close second at 65 percent. The U.S. consumes 105 exajoules per year. An exajoule equals 10^18 (1 followed by 18 zeros) joules. About 90 exajoues of that comes from fossil fuels. Therefore if we are going to reduce fossil fuel usage by 80 percent, we have to find 72 exajoules of energy per year. That’s not easy. Currently we get about 20 exajoules from nuclear energy. So we need to more than triple our nuclear energy generating capacity by 2050. Wind, solar, geothermal and biomass give us about 2.4 percent or about 2.5 exajoules. That means we would to expand these energy generators by a factor of about 29 if we didn’t build more nuclear power plants. That’s an increase in alternative energy generation of 8 percent per year every year. And that’s just to stand still in terms of energy consumption.

All candidates support immigration. All candidates support amnesty for illegal aliens. These positions are inconsistent with a concern about carbon emissions as more immigrants mean more energy consumption.

Migrants don’t come to the U.S. for a lower standard of living. They come here to consume more, and that means more fossil fuel combustion. And more consumption of other scarce resources as well. The effect is not trivial as even legal migrants amount to more than 1 million per year. The McCain-Kennedy Senate bill in 2007 also provided a path for the relatives of currently illegal aliens to join them. Both BHO and HRC voted for the bill and both support “family unification.” The effects of both legal and illegal immigration will add more than 100 million people by 2050 over what we would have without immigration and amnesty.

Joule for joule one of the easiest ways to cut back on carbon emissions is to curtail or even eliminate immigration both legal and illegal. Deportation would also cut back carbon emissions. The candidates never seemed to get asked about this basic contradiction in their policy prescriptions.

LA replies:

There is no rational principle at work in liberalism, but rather a wall-to-wall demand for the satisfaction of (liberally correct) desires.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 30, 2008 01:33 PM | Send