Huber on Emissions & Fossil Fuel Economics

"We [Americans & Europeans] can't stop the world's 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. . . . If $40 trillion worth of gold were located where most of the oil is, one could only scoff at any suggestion that we might somehow persuade the nasty people to leave the wealth buried. . . .

"So the suggestion that we can lift ourselves out of the economic doldrums by spending lavishly on exceptionally expensive new sources of energy is absurd. 'Green jobs' means Americans paying other Americans to chase carbon while the rest of the world builds new power plants and factories. And the environmental consequences of outsourcing jobs, industries, and carbon to developing countries are beyond dispute. They use energy far less efficiently than we do, and they remain almost completely oblivious to environmental impacts, just as we were in our own first century of industrialization. A massive transfer of carbon, industry, and jobs from us to them will raise carbon emissions, not lower them."

-- Peter Huber, Manhattan Institute City Journal