I am going to mostly parrot what Scientific America laid out as the outline of a plan last year with my own mental notes: This is all from memory, so have some mercy on me.
*Please note all my statements should be read with the disclaimer of according to the currently most accepted theories: *
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Can we halt the worst effects? Yes, we can, the increase is still occurring and we have not yet hit the critical concentration of Green House gases in the atmosphere.
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We need to think of the attempt as a 50-year plan and a 100-year plan.
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Remember that the plan we come up with today is not the plan we will finish with. There will be some missteps and some happy surprises.
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There is no one single solution for every country and geographic area. We need to work with flexible plans in different areas.
**Some of the many contributing solutions: **
a) Increase efficiency in energy use is the easiest to attain goal.
____I) Lighting: We need a big push toward Compact Fluorescent bulbs, LED lighting, Fiber optic lighting, motion sensitive switches. Give some incentives to get LED holiday lights to market in the next few years. Speed up the process.
____II) Heating and Cooling: We need to better insulation in homes, improved windows insulation, improve building to the local climate, incentive to install high efficiency furnaces, boilers, water heaters and air conditioners.
____III) Appliances: Put some teeth and incentives into Energy Star. Push the requirement up and give either rebates for the highly efficient or tax penalties to the inefficient. Provide some tax relief for appliance upgrades to highly efficient models.
____IV) Electronics: Believe it or not, all of our little idiot lights, clocks etc add up to a lot of energy consumption when considering an entire household. Improve the energy efficiency on these products. Give some tax incentives for LCD HDTV over the competing models that use up to twice as much energy as the same size LCD. Keep pushing better standards for printer and computer energy use and especially their sleep modes. A printer not in use but left on can draw anywhere from less than .1 amps to over 2 amps while idling.
b) Automotive: We do not know the right solution, so we need to try several and bet on a few.
____I) A safe bet is continued incentives for low emission Hybrids. Increased gas efficiency and decreased greenhouse gases.
____II) Start a sliding tax on vehicles to encourage the purchase of more efficient vehicles. This can be fairly simple: If a private vehicle gets under 20 mpg, charge and extra 50 cent per gallon if it gets over 40 mpg, give a 50 cent per gallon break. Play with the numbers until it works and adjusts as needs every few years.
____ III) Give incentives to car companies to develop plug-in hybrids that burn gas or E85.
____ IV) Investigate E85 from sources more efficient than corn, hell even Bush talked about this one.
____ V) Continue looking into Hydrogen cars and buses and the required infrastructure starting with large cities.
**c)**Energy production: We need to improve efficiency in transmission, production and clean up production.
____ I) Start shutting down or retrofitting the dirty coal plants and replace with the cleanest possible coal plants as we will continue to use this cheapest form of energy that we have currently. Una could write a staff report on what can be done to improve this part of the energy equation.
____ II) Sorry fellow greens, it is time to build more and better nuclear power plants. I know, it is a tough pill to shallow, but they need to be part of the solution, they produce no greenhouse gas.
____ III) Build much more Solar farms, house, and building with Solar panels. Increase the tax breaks and rebates for adding solar panels to houses. I have a 6700-watt system. NJ paid 70% of the cost for it. We need more programs like this.
____ IV) Build more wind farms, build a lot of wind farms. Educate people that wind farms can be very scenic. Again, fellow Greens, I am sorry, but some birds are going to die. Not as many as will die if we allow Global Warming to continue the way it is projected to at present.
____ V) We are now experimenting with very low resistance transmission lines to reduce the rather large loss of energy in the grid. We need to push ahead in this area and poor more money into it and similar research.
____ VI) Increase the money into fusion research.
____ VII) Put some money into the more fringe concepts like Geo-thermal vents 6 miles deep to generate energy, Solar Sails in orbit, Giant Solar Towers like Australia is looking into.
____VIII) Look into more Tidal generation and more Hydropower.
**d)**Look into planting a lot more trees and ensure the trees become furniture and houses or go into landfills and so the carbon gets stored.
e) Look into methods to get the Oceans to store more carbon. We have an ongoing thread on what looks like an unlikely solution, but there might be other methods of doing this.
I apologize; I have run out of steam. There is more and I am forgetting it.
Jim