No doubt the story of the day will be the release in Paris of the report on global warming:
PARIS – Scientists from 113 countries issued a landmark report Friday saying they have little doubt global warming is caused by man, and predicting that hotter temperatures and rises in sea level will “continue for centuries” no matter how much humans control their pollution.
A top U.S. government scientist, Susan Solomon, said “there can be no question that the increase in greenhouse gases are dominated by human activities.”
Environmental campaigners urged the United States and other industrial nations to significantly cut their emissions of greenhouse gases in response to the long-awaited report by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“It is critical that we look at this report … as a moment where the focus of attention will shift from whether climate change is linked to human activity, whether the science is sufficient, to what on earth are we going to do about it,” said Achim Steiner, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Program.
The report itself can be found here.
I rarely write on environmental issues—they’re too far outside my area of expertise. I do have some opinions, of course.
For example, I think that the idea that human activity contributes to global warming is obvious and incontrovertible. Determinative? I have no idea.
I also think that it would be prudent for us here in the United States to take the issue more seriously than we have. What to do?
I think that emphasis on approaches like CAFE standards are misguided. More organic solutions should be considered the most important of which is that the federal government should stop subsidizing highway construction. I believe that people have the right to live where they care to and can afford to but I also believe that they should bear the full costs of their decision. If you want the federal government to subsidize something it should be mass transit.
I think that subsidies for the production of ethanol are misguided, too, or at least premature. Such subsidies should be limited to sources that don’t consume more gasoline in their production than they replace. That’s not the case now.
I also think that we’re trending in the wrong direction in the construction of new electric power utilities: coal-fired and petroleum-fired stations are on the increase.
It’s vitally important that we adopt a sane policy with respect to China. With its enormous size China is terribly hard to move and, if there is a determination that the Chinese have a right to pollute on a per capita basis just as much as Americans do, there is absolutely nothing sane that the rest of the world can do to slow human-caused global warming let alone roll it back.
While I sincerely believe that America should be much “greenerâ€, I think that we were right in rejecting the Kyoto protocols and should continue to reject international agreements as paternalistic as Kyoto is.
All of this having been said I have no real hope that much will actually be done until things get much, much worse. The benefits of the present system are already being felt and those who receive them will fight to retain them tooth and nail; the benefits of change are much harder to see in anticipation.
Without question, the price of fossil fuels needs to go up dramatically to bring it in line with the cost of burning such fuels. One of the biggest reasons that we drive oversized vehicles ridiculous distances just to get to/from work, that we heat and cool oversized houses, and that we spend billions subsidizing one of the most inefficient travel modes available (air) instead of investing in efficient modes (rail, or just plain walking), is that it is too damn cheap to not do it that way. A $1 per gallon gas tax with all of the money going to research and investment in green transportation would be a good start.
One way to talk about these issues seriously is not to look at them solely through the lens of global warming. Inefficiencies in the combustion engine create pollution, which cause health problems and expense. The number of cars on the road increase the time to get anywhere. And there are obvious relationships between our energy needs and national security.
I agree with Gollum about a gas tax. I would offset the tax with some income tax relief for lower incomes and families. I would subsidize nuclear energy, which I think is a central part of the McCain/Lieberman/Obama global warming bill. Blair seems to think he can get China and India into a post-Kyoto framework . . . we’ll have to see.
Oops, just read that Blair is in trobule. Strike that last sentence.
You say, ” I believe that people have the right to live where they care to and can afford to but I also believe that they should bear the full costs of their decision.”
What about “I believe that people have the right to breed if they can afford to, but I also believe that they should bear the full costs of their decision”?
In other words, the costs of combating climate change that doesn’t immediately threaten the living should be borne by the breeders alone. It is they who have invested in the future and who are continuing the pollution as well as the threat to wildlife and exhaustion of energy and fresh water supplies.