TESTIMONY TO THE COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC WORKS OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE
Hearing on the Super Pollutants Act of 2014 (S. 2911)
Washington DC, 2 December 2014
Dr Benny Peiser
The Global Warming Policy Foundation
10 Upper Bank Street, London E14 5NP, United Kingdom
benny.peiser@thegwpf.org
I would like to thank the Chairman and the Committee for the opportunity to testify before your committee on the high risks and costs of unilateral climate policies.
I am the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a non-partisan think tank and a registered educational charity based in London. The GWPF, while open-minded on the contested science of global warming, is deeply concerned about the costs and other implications of climate policies currently being advanced in Britain and by other governments around the world.
Since the GWPF was launched in the House of Lords in 2009, it has been scrutinising the economic, social and industrial implications of unilateral climate policies of the UK and the EU.
Europe’s climate strategy was founded on two key assumptions: first, that global warming was an urgent threat that needed to be prevented without delay and at all costs; and second, that the world was running out of fossil fuels, which meant oil and gas would become ever more expensive and renewable energy competitive.
Both conjectures, however, turned out to be wrong, and as a consequence there is growing realisation within the EU that our unilateral climate policy is misguided and economically harmful.
The growing damage of this go-it-alone approach to the economic stability of Europe and the gradual abandonment of unilateralism is the subject of my testimony.