CNN host Chris Cuomo’s Friday attempt to cast Florida Sen. [crscore]Marco Rubio[/crscore] as a global warming denier didn’t go well.
Rubio responded to the charges and said that reducing American carbon dioxide emissions won’t prevent global warming or slow sea level rise. Rubio argued reducing carbon dioxide emissions could do significant damage to America’s economy.
“I asked the environmentalists and others who are supporting those laws, well, how many inches of feet of sea level rise will that law prevent? And there answer is, it won’t prevent any,” Rubio told Cuomo “And then I ask the economists and they say it will have a real impact on our economy. So they are asking me to support public policies that will do nothing to affect the environment but will have a direct and immediate impact on our economy. I think that’s a terrible tradeoff.”
President Barack Obama’s current attempt to slow global warming is based around the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan (CPP), which would replace cheap coal and natural gas power with expensive solar and wind energy.
The coal industry estimates the CPP will cost a staggering $41 billion annually, and the plan likely won’t have any impact on global warming. According to analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute, using models created by the EPA, the CPP would only prevent 0.019 degrees Celsius of warming by the year 2100 — an amount so small it can’t even be detected.
The amount of warming prevented by the CPP is so small the EPA actually omitted it from the rule’s regulatory analysis. EPA admits it assesses the CPP’s benefits “qualitatively because we do not have sufficient confidence in available data or methods.”
Rubio has a long record of arguing unilateral policies intended to slow global warming likely won’t have much of an impact.
Rubio supports the Keystone XL pipeline and offshore energy drilling. He strongly opposes the CPP and has pledged to not support a carbon tax.
Chris Cuomo is the brother of the current Democratic Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo.
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