Robert J. Chassell wrote:
> Fortunately, the graphs I have seen for carbon dioxide in the air and > the like, and reports from people whom I respect, have all suggested > that the problem is human-caused and that therefore the solution is > not hugely expensive.
Doug Pensinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> responded:
But what if it's both and we are exacerbating a natural cycle?
Could be.
Could it be like rolling a boulder over hillside prone to an avalanche? And even if any of the above scenario's are only slightly true, what is the most _conservative_ approach? ....
The most conservative approach is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sharply.
We know that greenhouse gases do have some effect. The question is how much? If the effect is small, as it must be if the changes we see are natural, then we need to make bigger reductions.
Reductions mean, for example, increasing the funding and subsidy of public transportation, and encouraging people to use it. Empty buses are not good. To get people to shift over, the action has to be dramatic. One way is to make and buses gratis to use and, at the same time, sharply increasing the tax on carbon in gasoline -- not by the US$0.10 per gallon (US$0.379 per liter) that environmentalists have advocated (and lost) but by a much higher amount.
How about simply having bus routes that actually go where people want to go at the time they want to go there? Many people these days live in one suburb and work in another suburb, and therefore in most areas where I have lived and checked into the bus system if they wish to ride the bus to work they have to catch a bus in the suburb where they live -- assuming there is a route which goes there at all -- and ride it all the way downtown, where they have to wait for anything from a few minutes to the better part of an hour to catch another bus that goes from downtown out to the suburb where they work -- again assuming any such route exists. That means that a person who has to be at work at 8 am has to get up at 4 am to be at the bus stop by about 5 am or so to ride downtown, wait, then ride to the vicinity of work, and then to do the same thing all over in reverse in the evening, not getting home until maybe 7:30 or 8 pm, while if they use their own car, the trip each way is about 30 minutes or so, even with traffic. Then there are the people who do not work 8 to 5 and so either have to get to work before the first bus of the morning runs or leave after the last buses of the evening have run, or in the case of evening or graveyard shift workers, both. And while cell phones and laptops indeed allow some people to make productive use of commute time, most people don't have jobs where they can do work away from their work site and/or during other than "normal business hours", nor is there much they can do in the way of home chores or family duties while riding on a bus or sitting on a bench in the pre-dawn cold.
I don't know what the plans would be for gases such as methane.
Outlaw beans.
On the one hand, `natural gas', i.e., fossil methane, has less carbon per unit of energy produced when it burns, so it is better than coal. On the other hand, when it leaks, it goes into the atmosphere where it absorbs more infrared than carbon dioxide. It is a more dangerous `greenhouse' gas. In the early 1990s, leaks from the former Soviet natural gas pipeline system were a serious issues. Cows and termites release a great deal of methane into the atmosphere; more research would have to be undertaken to deal with this, too, not to mention less expensive voltaic cells, seaweed and other biological stuff to alcohol, and the like. In other words, the government would have to sharply increase funding for a very wide variety of university research projects.
Also, the conservatives would insist that all cities provide no-fee `white' bicycles for people to pick up, ride, and then drop off.
The conservative approach means taxing home heating oil and gas and encouraging people to wear sweaters.
Some people already do. In fact, some people wear two or three sweaters, pants, heavy socks, and a wool watch cap to bed because they cannot afford _today's_ prices for heating oil and gas. And what do we do about the emission from power plants generating electricity to run air conditioners in the summer? There is only a certain amount of clothing one can _remove_ to stay cool, and that is even more limited if one is not in the privacy of one's own home with the drapes drawn. And if things are already to the point where the climate is only going to get hotter, there is going to be more demand for air conditioning, not less.
It means encouraging yet more insulation. It means changing light fixtures so they do not send light into the sky, where it is wasted.
In addition to conservation, the US government would have to spend tax payers' money on many different research projects for hydrogen or hydrogen-boron fusion -- not a billion dollars a year, or 10 billion dollars a year, but a billion or 10 billion dollars a month.
Unfortunately, those who work in fusion research have a saying, "Fusion power is thirty years away, and probably always will be." It certainly has been "thirty years away" since at least the early Seventies, and we don't seem to be any closer to achieving long-term sustainable fusion reactions which produce enough more energy than it takes to keep the reaction equipment running to be a commercially useful power source than we did thirty years ago. And most of them don't think it is a funding problem, but a fundamental problem needing some breakthroughs in physics.
The expenditures would have to rival US taxpayer spending on Iraq.
Because of the `free rider' problem, the money will have to come from taxes. Although there will be some people who act to reduce or change the source of their energy use even though others do not, few are like that. As a practical matter, few people are saints. It is like the convention that everyone drives on a particular side of the road, on the left in Great Britain, and on the right in the US: everyone needs to follow the convention.
In a James Bond movie, you might enjoy a scene in which our hero drives in the on-coming lane; but outside a movie, life in the on-coming lane is short and nasty.
Although the US is more energy efficient than it was 30 years ago, the US is built around the use of fossil fuels and a transition is difficult and expensive.
In my experience, people who advocate doing little or nothing are people who do not have children and who do not care for the future of their neighbors' children.
While many people who oppose new taxes are people who have children and can barely make ends meet now.
(They say that they expect someones' children to invent solutions, but no one has any confidence that unknown inventions will be made, or if made, will be less expensive that acting now.)
All I can say is that I hope that the environmentalists are right and that those who say the changes are natural or from `exacerbating a natural cycle' are wrong. If the current changes are even partly natural -- which they might be -- the cost and suffering is higher.
And if the current natural variation is greater than the anthropogenic component of the variation -- and natural variations in the past have certainly exceeded anything humans can do -- then we or our descendents will have to adapt to warmer climates anyway, probably technologically, or die out. Some say that instead of restricting the technology which may allow us to adapt and survive we ought to go ahead and use our intelligence and technology which allows us to adapt our local environment to our needs rather than to be at the mercy of natural variations in the environment.
-- Ronn! :)
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