e an ideal atmosphere for plant life, accelerating plant growth and multiplying yields, thereby sustaining far more animal and human life than is currently possible. Whatever standard the EPA selects will be arbitrary.
"Forget about the plants," say the greens. "What we're trying to control is how warm Earth's atmosphere gets." To which I reply, "With all due respect, are you kidding me?"
As with a "right" concentration of CO2, what is the "right" average global temperature? For 7,000 of the past 10,000 years, Earth was cooler than it is now; mankind prospers more in warm climates than cold climates; and the Antarctic icecap was significantly larger during the warmer mid-Holocene period than it is today. Are you sure warmer is bad or wrong?
And how do you propose to regulate Earth's temperature when as much as three-quarters of the variability is due to variations in solar activity, with the remaining one-quarter due to changes in Earth's orbit, axis, and albedo (reflectivity)? This truly is "mission impossible." Mankind can no more regulate Earth's temperature than it can the tides.
Even if the "greenhouse effect" were greater than it actually is, the EPA and Congress would be powerless to alter it for several reasons:
1. Human activity accounts for less than 4 percent of global CO2 emissions.
2. CO2 itself accounts for only 10 or 20 percent of the greenhouse effect. This discloses the capricious nature of the EPA's decision to classify CO2 as a pollutant, for if CO2 is a pollutant because it is a greenhouse gas, then the most common greenhouse gas of all – water vapor, which accounts for more than three-quarters of the atmosphere's greenhouse effect – should be regulated, too. The EPA isn't going after water vapor, of course, because then everyone would realize how absurd climate-control regulation really is.
3. Even if Americans were to eliminate their CO2 emissions completely, total human emissions of CO2 would still increase as billions of people around the world continue to develop economically.
Clearly, it