Commentary

California’s aggressive climate policies increase our cost of living. Taxes, regulations, and the cost of acquiring emission permits under cap-and-trade have resulted in gasoline and electricity costs far above national averages.

Many Californians believe that high energy prices are worth it to prevent climate catastrophe. But the truth is that California climate action will not save us.

Our state is responsible for only about 0.7 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, so state policies cannot move the needle very much. Further, while emissions have been falling in California, they have fallen as fast or even faster in other states that have not implemented costly climate policies. For example, greenhouse gas emissions declined by 22 percent in Ohio since 1990 compared with a 12 percent drop in California.

And much of the decline in California greenhouse gas emissions is the result of us transferring them elsewhere. While we drill and refine far less oil than previously, most of those savings are offset by increased imports of crude oil and gasoline on tankers that generate substantial emissions not included in the state’s climate inventory.

A reasonable counterargument to all this is that California needs to do even more to reduce its fossil fuel dependence and to bring other states and countries along in the process. But that implicitly assumes that a failure to sharply reduce carbon emissions will set us up for a climate catastrophe, and this assumption deserves deeper examination.

Now that the changing climate has been a concern for several decades, we can review predictions made by climate scientists and activists to see if the global failure to tackle greenhouse gas emissions has had the predicted effects. This failure on the global scale is evidenced by the fact that worldwide greenhouse gas emissions have risen by 45 percent since 1990.

But the results of this failure have not been as catastrophic as expected. In 1989, a U.N. Environment Programme official said that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000,” according to the Associated Press. But 36 years later, even the world’s lowest-lying nation, the Maldives, has remained above sea level.

In 2009, Al Gore said that there was a 75 percent chance that “the entire polar ice cap will melt in summer” by 2016. In fact, the September minimum ice cap has yet to fall below 1.3 million square miles, and it increased to 1.8 million square miles this year. This may explain the failure of another climate change prediction: The global polar bear population has been stable or rising, with little prospect of extinction in the coming decades.

Closer to home, climate activists were quick to link the Palisades fire in Los Angeles in January to climate change, but the relationship is indirect at best. We now know that the inferno resulted from incomplete extinguishment of an earlier arsonist-set blaze, and that the city had insufficient water and personnel in place to contain it. While the extremely dry and windy weather that intensified the fire may have a relationship to changes in climate, Southern California has experienced similar weather conditions long before this became a concern.

Regardless of whether climate change fueled the fire, the only feasible solution is better preparation. While increased carbon concentrations are likely contributing to a modest increase in average temperatures, California state policies alone cannot alter this trend. Improvements in technology and global population decline later this century will likely halt atmospheric carbon increases before the worst catastrophes occur and without state leaders taxing Californians into poverty.