The United States needs to set a concrete goal to cut CO2 emissions

Thank you llamallama for developing such a controversial, and important debate for us to have. I have taken the con in this case for a couple reasons which I hope to explain in depth below. Before this, however, I have some questions in regards to what you support. Firstly, how will the "concrete goal" be measured? In terms of total carbon dioxide, percentage of the worlds carbon dioxide? Is this to be domestic purely, or do you advocate joining international action like the Kyoto Protocol? Lastly, what exactly do you believe the concrete goal should be? Until these questions have been clarified it will be difficult for me to provide direct argumentation, so for this post I shall simply make general statements in opposition to your argument. Lets start off at the top, shall we? "First of all, global warming is real and the evidence is everywhere. The summer arctic sea ice on the arctic ocean has been melted away to the lowest extent on record. The top eleven warmest years on record have all been in the last 13 years" The world has been warming recently, you are right. But you have no evidence in your post that the US, or even humanity in general is the root cause of this. We'll discuss the evidence later i'm sure, but right now you have provided none that global warming is occuring due to human intervention. You also have no evidence that CO2 is the leading cause of this warming. Right now we agree that warming is occurring, the debate will center, at least partially, over WHY the warming is occurring. You continue by describing the horrible effects of climate change, but this has long been observed. Newsweek from 1975: "There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now.... The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually." Obviously we can agree about the impact of global warming, it has been observed since the 1970s.... wait. I forgot the next paragraph: "To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth's climate seems to be cooling down" Yes, in the 1970s global COOLING was all the rage because of the cataclysmic nature of what it could do to the planet. So at best warming has been occuring for the last 30 years, when it had been cooling for at LEAST the 50 years before that. But one more nice fact about the global cooling phenomona--what did scientists believe the leading culprit was? Carbon Dioxide gasses in the atmosphere. Sound familiar? By the way--ACUF.org "The official thermometers at the U.S. National Climate Data Center show a slight global cooling trend over the last seven years, from 1998 to 2005." Maybe we need to start worrying about our food supplies again. Listen, global warming has been occurring, but it occurs naturally at many different intervals. One of humanity's greatest flaws is our egocentricism. Believe it or not, global warming occurred before the massive human exploits of the 20th century, such as in the medieval and roman warming periods. (950-1300 and 200 BC-600 AD respectively) One constant "fact" thrown around is that temperatures are at there highest points in a 1000 years, but this isn't true, as it was actually HIGHER during the period of medieval warming. Part of the reason why today's temperatures are seem so extreme in light of the past 400 years is that up until the late 1880s we were in the middle of "The Little Ice Age!" Now lets talk about humanity's role in greenhouse gasses. Current statistics show that humanity makes up approximately 3% carbon dioxide gasses. You claim that the US is the largest emitter of CO2, but this isn't true, that title belongs to China. (http://www.guardian.co.uk...) Even assuming that the US makes up 23% of the worlds total man-made emissions (which it did prior to the rise of China), the US only made up .69% of the worlds total emissions. Less than 1%. Even if humanity did have a role to play, I ask what significant impact this would have when merely focused to a US initiative. Furthermore, Carbon Dioxide is only part of the problem. A very small part. Carbon Dioxide makes up, total, 3% of greenhouse gasses. Which means that the US's CO2 output in terms of overall greenhouse gasses is a whopping .02%. I'm sorry, but nothing significant will occur from this. Given that there is NO conclusive evidence that humanity has caused global warming, OR that we have the ability to stop it (and yes, you need both) there has yet to be a proven reason why the US must create a goal to do so—especially when you give us no idea of what this goal could be. The fact of the matter is that there is an inherent balance between the economy and the environment, and while I am far from anti-green (I actually often support environmental policies), it makes no sense to risk massive destabilization of an already fragile economy to change overall temperatures by less than a fiftieth of one percent.