My focus here is on the United States as being the worst offender. The logic is that if the USA turns the corner, the rest of the world will either follow suit, or suffer trade embargoes.
Nuclear power can be done is a safe way, as long as regulations are strictly adhered to. I’m not sure which regulations referenced above could be dropped to make the building process quicker, or cheaper. How do we insure the operations? Accidents happen and there will need to be money available to clean up the mess. We don’t even know how to clean up the messes we have already (anybody up to speed on the situation at Oakridge?). Look at how poorly we handle fossil fuel accidents and spills.
We can break the automobile culture. Don’t roll your eyes yet, this new generation of young adults are not casting their ego on to their cars as much as the previous generation. The Prius has replaced the Chevelle SS as “the car to have”. Breaking the trucking industry will be difficult. Railroads can provide the same service, but it’s much more inconvenient. I can truck my product straight to your loading docks, alternatively you’re on your own to get my product from the railroad head to your business.
I’m personally 100% behind carbon taxes and cap-and-trade programs, as my home and business is strictly wind generated electricity. However, for the nation as a whole, these programs will be inflationary. I’d add these extra costs to the price of my product, which means less people can buy them, so I have to curtail production and lay-off workers. It’s not out of the question that any realistic program would keep the economic in a long term recession.
Campaign Finance Reform, as long as Exxon gets a ten-fold return on their campaign contributions, they will never be subject to environmental laws. It’s a matter of public record that Prince William Sound fishermen had to wait 20 years to get $30,000 compensation for the loss of their businesses, homes, jobs. Unfortunately, the very people who are allowed to initiate campaign finance reform are the people who benefit the most from the current system. Meaning it’s never going to happen.
If I understand things correctly, none of this can be put in place soon enough. Whatever man-kind’s contribution to global warming is already set in stone. That means we have to continue to adapt to these changing conditions. We have 100 years to add another 3 feet to our seawalls, people who build homes on sandbars in the ocean will still have to rebuild periodically, farmers will still have to select and save the seeds of their best performing food-plants.
… barring a breakthrough in solar technology … the sun bathes the Earth in energy.
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I think we should focus on today’s problems today. The next generation will be able to solve the climate change problems if they’re not saddled with having to solve all our problems as well. It’s not illegal to talk to terrorist groups about what they think we should do, and it’s not illegal to make sure Big Oil knows we’re talking to terrorist groups about what they think can be done. I’m sorry, it was really important to the peoples of the West to save our remaining forests … just how important is climate change to you?
You must be joking. One out of every three truck you see is hauling food. Food which was grown using fossil fuels to make the fertilizer and ship it, haul it by train, deliver it by truck. It was planted, sprayed, watered and harvested and moved to your location by fossil fuels. There isn’t even a weeks food supply with out trucks delivering it. Every day.
With out fossil fuels, and trucks, and refrigerators, and trains and ships and tractors and fertilizers, you will start starving to death in a week. Along with 3 billion other people. The Amish and other natural people will be fine, until the starving millions show up there.
That’s the reality of fossil fuels.
Until you understand reality, you can’t fix the problems of reality.
The U.S. is not the worst offender by a long shot. China emits almost twice as much CO2 per year, which amounts to about 30% of global CO2 emissions. The U.S. emits about 16%. Furthermore, China’s CO2 emissions are rising rapidly, while the U.S.'s are actually falling.
Think hard about those numbers. The U.S. only emits about 16% of global CO2. If you could cut U.S. CO2 emissions in half, you’d reduce global CO2 emissions by 8%, assuming that such a cut wouldn’t affect consumption elsewhere.
But here’s the thing: You think that if the U.S. cut emissions unilaterally, the rest of the world would follow suit. This is completely backwards. In fact, if the U.S. reduced its use of fossil fuels, it would create an added incentive to consume it in the rest of the world, for three reasons:
The comparative advantage of burning fossil fuels would go up. As the U.S. energy costs go up, other countries gain relative advantage by burning lower cost fuels.
The social cost of CO2 is lower for everyone else. If the U.S. takes unilateral action to mitigate global warming, it takes pressure off of other countries to do the same.
The price of oil declines. Less demand = lower price. The result is higher consumption elsewhere, since fossil fuels are a fungible commodity. Couple that with the new comparative advantage other countries get from the U.S.s higher energy costs, and you really ramp up the incentive to build industries in countries like China and India.
The notion that all we need to do is set an example and everyone else will join us is a fundamental misreading of how international diplomacy works. If you really want to understand it, start with this principle: All countries negotiate only when it is in their own interest. In democracies, you can amend that to say that they will only negotiate when it is in the best interest of the special interests that drive their politics. No one signs a treaty to be nice, or in a spirit of companionship or an outburst of love for mankind. It’s always, always a case of “what’s in it for me?”
The U.S. is simply not the problem here. The scary problem is in China and India, which are emitting huge amounts of CO2 despite having very low GDP per capita. As their economies develop, the amount of CO2 produced by them will dwarf anything the U.S. generates.
Lord save me from people who want to ‘break industries’ to save the world. Do you have any idea what ‘breaking the trucking industry’ would do to the economy? As for breaking the automobile culture, let me guess: You live in a big city? With access to good public transportation? You don’t work in a job that requires you to carry a lot of stuff to and from work? You don’t have children that need to be driven around? You don’t have any hobbies that require you to drive?
For most people in North America, doing without a car is next to impossible. And frankly, most people don’t want to live in the urban planner’s utopia of mass transit and tightly packed humanity. It isn’t going to happen.
And anyway, transportation only amounts to about 28% of U.S. energy consumption. That includes trains, aircraft, mass transit, commercial and private vehicles. If you cut that in half, you wouldn’t make a dent in the global warming problem, but you would damage the U.S. economy and put severe hardship on a lot of people.
How nice for you. It’s always easy to get behind a movement when it doesn’t cost you anything. I wonder how you’d feel about it if you were a small farmer and energy costs were a big part of your outlay? Or if you lived in the suburbs and were already struggling to pay your energy bills? Or you were a manufacturer facing already shrinking margins and increased competition from places that won’t have your energy tax?
Yes. Now imagine how the poor people in China would feel about it. And imagine just how much support a politician will get in the U.S. if he comes out and admits that if elected he will enact policies that keep the country in permanent recession so that people 100 years from now have a better time of it.
And… Campaign finance reform? As a solution to global warming? I think this just shows that people tend to see issues through the lens of their own pet causes.
Now here’s an area where we can get agreement. There are some policy changes that can be made which will lower the mitigation costs of global warming while actually making the economy more efficient. For example, stop subsidizing the construction of housing on bloody floodplains and beaches through federal disaster insurance. Stop subsidizing water usage in California.
While we’re at it, end the stupid ethanol subsidies that are driving up food prices and damaging good agricultural practices. There’s a good example of what happens when government rushes into a ‘solution’ before they know what the true effects are.
There are numerous lines of research that could result in a dramatic reduction in the cost of solar energy. We may, in the relatively near future, get to a ‘tipping point’ where solar becomes cost-effective and more convenient for many applications, at which point we will see a rapid transition away from fossil fuels.
There are a number of converging technologies on the horizon that should give us hope that this is a temporary problem. Better batteries, more efficient power sources, more efficient conversion of power into useful work. Produce a car with batteries that have three times the storage of the current ones at half the cost, make the cars themselves 20% more efficient, and no one will want to buy a gas vehicle anymore. When we have flexible solar sheeting that can easily be applied to many surfaces and generate power at competitive prices, we’ll see a major shift away from the traditional power grid in many areas.
We just need to have a little patience and stop trying to use the heavy hand of government to force a solution before its time. That never works. Instead, you get to deal with the unintended consequences such as the mess that subsidized ethanol is causing, or the collapse of the solar industry in Spain.
Do you have any idea what the current laws are doing to the trucking industry? Or what would happen if the US government required just one third of light trucks to be diesel engines?
It would eliminate the need to import any oil to the US.
The fuel saving would be that big. Make them hybrids and you destroy the oil economy.
That’s the kind of the thing that is actually possible.
Did you miss the part about trade agreements being contingent on conformance with emissions protocols? US consumption is a major factor in China’s economy, never mind the consumption of the entire industrialized western world. Hell, sometimes it looks like Walmart alone is a major factor in China’s economy!
Suppose that western politicians – in the US in particular – got their heads out of their rear ends and decided to implement serious domestic carbon mitigation measures, and seriously pursue international agreements, making it clear that non-signatories would face huge punishing tariffs or outright trade embargoes. Who would China trade with then? The problem is the lack of will, a condition that industrial and fossil fuel interests are happy to promulgate in every way possible. If there was broad recognition of the magnitude of the problem and a critical mass of international cooperation, rogue countries would quickly find themselves economically isolated.
Everyone – individually, corporately, and nationally – is always going to follow the path of least resistance to securing their own best interests. The policy challenge is to make the fossil fuel energy path sufficiently reflective of its true costs that less damaging options become more attractive.
Indeed, and when I look at what many economists are telling us, the point that the stopping blocks are mostly political are becoming clear to them also.
As the last investigation by Frontline showed, it is clear who is the political party that has decided to ignore what the scientists and even economists recommend.
What I have seen is that even the economists that approach this issue conservatively do not agree with the “that never works” idea that governments should not intervene when what be have here is a tragedy of the commons.
Participatory democracy is a means to an end, not an end in itself. When it’s only serving to accelerate the pace of our own destruction, it’s time to make some changes. Those of us in the reality-based community have no obligation to let those who want to kill us participate in our collective decision-making processes.
No need to get medieval, what I think will happen in the end is that we will see the ones that financed the denials and the politicians that followed that denial only facing some economical inconveniences to their business. Just like the tobacco executives ended doing, and their corporations still going on.
I would had agreed that jail time for some executives should had come for perjury at least as they indeed got away with the deaths of many of their customers; but what has happened with the tobacco industry is a good reason for me to say that many fears from the fossil fuel industry are silly, as mentioned in the examples, no one is proposing that we should double the price of the fossil fuels.
That’s just it–it wouldn’t, because the structure for a wholesale transition to other forms isn’t in place.
We can put it in place, and there’s nothing stopping us except for the fact that those with something to gain from maintaining the status quo are doing their damndest to prevent us from mobilizing resources on the scale necessary to get it done, because they’re quite happy to kill us all for their own short-term gain.
I don’t think anyone will voluntarily do anything significant about it. For me, the story of the Rapa Nui civilization is the epitome of what the entire mankind is doomed to go through sooner or later.
