Week before last saw the death of "cap and trade" carbon suppression legislation in the United States. While some deplore the action (as Thomas Friedman does in an article in the NY Times), I applaud it.
Courtesy diesel-smoke.org
Cap and trade policies merely put into place and build a new political bureaucrat empire to shuffle carbon emission "permissions" from one favored industry to another - yet one more game of stroking your biggest contributors. It essentially set a political minimum (not maximum) on the amount of carbon allowed to be expelled into the atmosphere, providing a "market based" permit system that gave away permits (for free) to favored industrial corporations that could be sold to others by those with political pull. In many cases, those who get the permits emit would have no significant CO2 emissions at all. It was a boondoggle of typical Federal proportions that was finally killed off, accompanied by great weeping and gnashing of teeth by those who saw more freebies and piles of money in the pipeline for themselves.
The scientific view of "cap and trade" has always been a rude raspberry. It's an unworkable system of favors and profit that would not actually reduce carbon emissions at all - just spread them around at some arbitrary level determined not by science but by political "in" groups.
Courtesty MIT
My take: Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Now, the news magazines are bleating that we should never bother limiting carbon emissions and just learn to "muddle through" (NY Times). The man in the street, bless his nearsighted, head in the sand, uneducated heart still thinks anthropomorphically caused atmospheric and ocean warming is not important and a recent survey found 48% of "moderate" Americans believe that the whole thing is blown out of proportion and isn't worth bothering about. (The Economist). How wrong they are.
How terribly wrong they are. Mean average global temperatures have risen one full degree fahrenheit since yours truly was in highschool - some fifty years ago. The moderate latitudes (35-50 degrees North and South) are going to suffer the most from this continued warming and the Northern Arctic will be ice free in the summer within the next fifteen years if not before. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which holds a significant portion of the fresh water in the world is slowly being undermined by ever warmer water, causing large chunks to calve off every Southern Summer.
If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet should totally break away, dissolve or melt, the sea levels, world wide, will rise 20-30 meters (up to 100 feet). Long before that happens (short of an unanticipated catastrophe) we will loose, gradually, all the coastal cities which house 2/3 of the world's population and 80% of it productive capacity.
I don't know how one "muddles through" something like that.
The problem lies in time, as does most of humanities troubles. Population growth over time, global warming over time, agricultural productivity over time, available of fuel sources over time; all of them are someone else's problem down the river of time - until it isn't. Then the Four Horses of the Apocolypse: War, Pestilence, Famine and Death will ride and the population of the world will shrink by over two thirds and civilization as we know it will cease to exist except perhaps in small heavily defended enclaves and pockets. Even then it will be a "scavenger civilization" as the capability to produce goods and services over more than a very limited area will be destroyed.
The fact that the "Cap and Trade" legislation for carbon emissions is a dead horse is not the final word, however. The EPA now has power to regulate to some extent, carbon emissions through The Clean Air Act. How they will administrate this is anyone's guess except for the likely doubling of the number of employees of the EPA so the VOP (velocity of paper) increases to show "they are doing something". Garbage! Barf! Also, it will be a political "regulation" so those with a firm grip on Congress's ass will benefit the most and be legislated the least. That includes big oil and big coal. (Bet on it!)
We, as human beings simply cannot walk away from global warming, greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. To do so insures our Great Grandchildren's children will live in a sewer of literally garbage, extreme heat, cold, wild weather as climate shifts forth and back with new and different steering currents and warmer oceans. We simply cannot do that.
courtesy photos-on-line with attribution
What's the solution? A very simple tax on carbon emissions in the developed world and technical assistance to the developing world to allow them to make a leap technologically from burning wood to cook and coal for industrial uses to a cleaner and less damaging fuel. Listen! If we start RIGHT NOW to clean this up, we have already married ourselves to a 3 degree Celsius temperature rise on average before 2100. That is a rise of worldwide average temperatures from 61 degrees F (today) to 67 degrees F within 90 years. This is a conservative figure and is based upon the assumption that we stop blowing CO2 into the atmosphere TODAY! Which ain't gonna happen.
The changes in weather along will guarantee crop failures, floods and droughts in places that never see them. The shit will indeed hit the fan.
So put a tax on carbon. It's an engineering problem. Every car, every natural gas power station, every coal power station, every computer, every dozen eggs, every pair of glasses - all have a carbon footprint that can be calculated very accurately and when it is, add the carbon tax to the product, whether energy or ice cream and the proceeds go to one place: clean energy production, clean transportation, clean food production, clean industry and a huge program to research and prove out a way to bury the damn carbon out of sight and out of reach so we can start cleaning up our already fouled nest.
With a simple tax on carbon emitted from construction of a train or truck through the fuel it burns and the cost of salvaging it when it wears out would probably double the cost of most everything - with the accompanying weeping and gnashing of teeth. Not doing it will be the death of us. Natural gas engines for rail and trucks is a very temporary stop-gap that will help but not be an end all to all problems.
The true solution is solar power. For everything. Which means huge breakthroughs in technology in both generation and storage of power and our ability to survive and flourish by using much, much less power at the same time. The Sun is the only energy source we have that will never run out. When it does, we, the human race will be long extinct from our own stupidity or spread throughout the Universe as a super race of unimaginable form. I repeat, the Sun is our only source of inexhaustible energy. Just think for a minute if all the engineers and technicians now designing and building weapons of war were to be put to work on ways and means to harness, store and efficiently use solar energy in its many forms. Just think about it. It would change the world in a generation.
Weapons of war are not productive in any way. They are built to be destroyed, be outdated and be used in the destruction of real and supposed enemies. I do not say stop all defense development and deployment - just shrink it and direct, say 40% of it into constructive R&D and manufacture of new, enhanced and never invented ways of cleaning up our energy sources so we reduce our CO2 footprint, become non-reliant on foreign sources of dirty energy and probably generate as much employment as we want in the process. The retrofit of homes to be energy efficient and independently powered is mind boggling in its magnitude and would be of infinite benefit to the citizens of this country (and all who desire to work!).
If there is a time to reinvent our priorities, including military and social, it is now. Little time remains.
But what to do with countries who ignore the effort? After all, the future of the world has no borders and if a hundred countries make the effort (fat chance) and another 100 keep right on blowing CO2 into the atmosphere, how can we succeed?
Simple answer: Morally, we can't. If we are going to do it, we are going to do it as a species, not an American, a Chinese, a Brazilian an Aussie a Russian or a South African. We're going to have to do it as human beings, all pulling in one direction or we face species extinction just as surely as if an astroid a mile or two in diameter smacked us in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The astroid will do a fast job of it. Our suicide by global climate change, waste and corruption is the drip-drip-drip of gradual deterioration until we reach the tipping point which may engulf us in flames or a new ice age - the scientific vote is still out on that. I find the possibility of a tipping point into a new ice age humorous and it would be just like Gaia to pull a fast one on us that way! Too bad that either way, we are, by the billions, dead, dead, dead.
We clean up our act starting yesterday or suffer the consequences a few years down the line.
My take? I fear for my Great Grandchildren's wellbeing and have no hope for their children at all.
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