The Greenhouse warming is "worse than the worst that was expected three years ago" said the IPCC scientific intermediate conference co-chair a few days ago. The USA is the number one perpetrator. Obama has also proposed green energy, without paying enough efficient attention towards the fact that the market has been manipulated towards burning carbon. Instead the market should be manipulated to make burning carbon what it really is, namely expensive.
So far, Obama has proposed a Carbon Cap and Trade circus, as the European union has tried to make work, for years. But Carbon Cap and Trade should be considered only a second order measure, as it is in Europe. It is slow, difficult to implement, with extremely complicated regulations, and price fixing, that have baffled even the Parisians, and, although the French wanted to avoid this, Carbon Cap and Trade turned for years into a subsidy for polluters. The first order measure to make the market price carbon accurately ought to be, as it is in Europe, a tax on bad energy.
TAX AND THRIVE.
ENERGY TAX NOW. CARBON CAP TRADING LATER.
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WHAT GLOBAL WARMING DENIERS FAIL TO LOGICALLY PROCESS; THE CH4 ERUPTION POINT:
The USA produces more than a third of the world CO2 emissions (25% inside the USA plus a considerable amount of U.S. industrial production relocalized to China, where coal provides the energy of the beast). In the USA, more than half of electricity production comes from coal (whereas the carbon contribution in France, although still disgusting, is negligible).
What the greenhouse deniers do not understand is that warming causes THEMSELVES are non linear, and NOT CONTROLLED BY MAN, BEYOND A POINT. We basically went from 270 ppm of CO2 before the industrial (aka carbon burning) revolution, to 385 ppm now. Some will say, there is no reason to sweat, because 4,000 ppm were present during the carboniferous era. True. But the jump from 400 ppm to ten times that does not have to be linear, and it's not. The way it may work is this: beyond some threshold, methane erupts. where does the methane come from? From frozen, hydrated deposits deep in the ocean, or in the tundra. If they get warmed up enough, they evaporate, and make methane. Methane, a Green House Gas (GHG) that is much more warming than carbon dioxide by a factor of more than twenty times over a century. It is not as stable as CO2 in the atmosphere, because, basically, it burns, or oxidizes (whereas CO2 does not). This means that its capacity to heat up the atmosphere is even higher.
Thus, at some point all the methane will erupt, and put a warm blanket over the planet, all of a sudden. That, in turn, will release immense quantities of CO2 presently in the ocean (half of the humanly created CO2 has been going there, deep in the oceans, but now it is shaken out of the Antarctic ocean, due to acceleration of wind speeds, and lowering of the main wind circulation belt).
This why putting a limit of 550 ppm would be stupid. In the official scenario, it would double the CO2 levels, and, from crude computations rise the planet's biosphere by just three degrees Celsius. But this inconveniently forgets that most of the warming would be in the Arctic, and would erupt the methane hydrates there. The total amounts of methane in the oceans and in the ground in the polar regions is not known, BUT OF THE ORDER OF ALL RESERVES OF HYDROCARBONS COMBINED. It may be half, it may be more. Only Satan, a resident of Venus, knows. In any case, the amounts of methane are gigantic, and are known to be capable of giant tsunamis and bringing the planet swiftly into its HOT MODE (because it happened 35 million years ago).
The warming of the arctic has become so catastrophic, it is self amplifying. That is known. It is to be feared that methane will keep on erupting in massive quantities, as it did last summer. So the number to look at is not just the carbon dioxide density (around 385 parts per millions), but the density of CO2 EQUIVALENT Greenhouse Gases. At some point the effect of warming through CH4 eruption will be RUNAWAY (no human intervention would stop it, not even if one stopped the anthropogenic emissions of CO2).
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WHY ENERGY TAXES BRING JOY AND JOBS:
The three largest car companies automotive groups in the world are not American anymore. They are all from countries with high gasoline and road use taxes (Japan, France, Germany). There is a direct cause and effect relationship, but one needs, as usual, a threshold of mental capability and knowledge to understand this. [See addendum for details.]
The old cliche' that rising taxes in a recession is wrong is itself wrong. What is needed now is more USEFUL economic activity, so as to get more USEFUL jobs. Taxes which decrease jobs are bad, taxes that encourage jobs are good. Energy taxes are doubly good: they give more fire power to the government spending (but enough money to the plutocrats already, please!), and they create the necessary condition for a new green energy job market.
The plans of job augmentation of the Obama administration have been, so far, laughable: the Summers-Geithner crowd is apparently spending all its brain power (liberally admitting it has any) on sending money to their ultra rich friends, who are past and future employers, mesmerizing mentors, and their everyday obsession. They plan to "create or preserve" three million to four jobs within a year. It's pathetic: the population augments by roughly as much, so basically their aim is to create no jobs at all, relatively speaking. Besides the economy is losing 700,000 jobs a month. That's about nine million jobs in a year. And five millions have already been lost.
Thus instead of going to Europe trying to stimulate European laughter by suggesting that Mexico joins the United States of America, and that he is not fighting Islam in the Middle East, Obama should go back to Job One, namely stimulate the job market of the USA. For that he needs battle field courage, and use its enormous popularity to teach America that it needs a reallocation of its priorities. It is better to have teachers, and schools, and health care, and welfare than trucks and potholes and waste and smog and hot, rising, acidic seas.
Because energy prices have collapsed, due to the Great Repression out there, so did green investments, which were cut by more than half since 2008. In Europe green energy grows by leaps and bounds because the price of energy is stable, and very high (gasoline taxes are typically of the order of five dollars, or much more, up to eight dollars per gallon!)
With high energy prices, alternative project managers and engineers and politicians can then make precise plans. A 200 meters high windmill, or a giant solar installation cannot be planned when the price of energy can be halved in 6 months. Another interest is that the price of energy, ultimately, will get enormous. To raise the price now forces anticipation while there is still time. The only available mass energy right now which is available as an alternative to coal is nuclear. But nuclear plants could not possibly be built in large numbers fast enough. Moreover, to be really as ultra safe and ultra efficient as it can be, nuclear needs generation IV and higher plants, which have not been researched yet.
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COAL IS TOXIC AND HOPELESS:
Some people crow that coal could do it all. They used to crow that the USA had 250 years of coal. China also was crowing similarly. Never mind the soot and the CO2. But then something happened, and the American and Chinese reserves were cut down enormously. It turned out that the numbers had been computed way too optimistically. In three years, the USA was cut down to 100 years of coal. Anyway, coal has to be cut down: the sea is rising too fast, faster than the worse predictions of three years ago. These days, three years is like eons.
Retooling the entire transportation industry of the USA to make it more efficient is a good start to create new jobs. For that the government has to make more efficient industries profitable, and cut the hidden subsidies to carbon (among the later, the cost of its pollution, all the people it kills, the gigantic military deployments overseas it necessitates, and all the corruption attached to oil and gas procurements). Bringing up the price of energy is the way to do it.
That old partisan of fetching oil in Iraq, manu militari, Thomas Friedman, has turned ecological. In a pretty good editorial he cuts through the fog of the administration: "A cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse-gas is actually a carbon tax. So let’s stop hiding the ball and have a strategy, message and messenger that tell it like it is." [Show Us The Ball, April 7, 2009, NYT.]
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WANT REAL CHANGE? TAX GAS, BIG TIME, AND SHUT DOWN COAL:
A gasoline tax is not subtle, and would support a rejuvenated Detroit. Indeed people would be forced, and could be further incited with cash payments to buy new cars (that could be done right away, as I advocated, and as the Obama administration has enjoined Chrysler to do with Fiat; an alliance between GM and Renault, and Ford with Peugeot and/or Volkswagen could do the same; inciting car purchases with cash payments is a French method, many times used, and that now Germany has imitated). The USA, overall, would save energy, thus money, and quickly, an effective national defense function (and that would advance the technological level of the USA and its industrial base, two other defense functions).
A national gasoline (and more generally energy) tax would also decrease the enormous deficits that are piling up as the USA tries to spend a huge amount of energy (hence money) trying to get out of its desperately erroneous trajectory. That is another national defense function.
But, unfortunately, the Bush, sorry, Obama, economic advisers are deeply entranced in Market Mystique, as Paul Krugman puts it cogently. So they are delighted to set up another market, the Carbon Cap Trade. It took years for the French and other Europeans to make it work, sort of (the carbon exchange is based in Paris). So Carbon Cap and Trade will allow to delay treatment of the national carbon disease by years. It was also highly profitable to a chemical company such as the French Rhodia, and other giant corporations. One of the problem is that the carbon pollution prices had been mispriced (and given to companies too generously).
Of course it would be unimaginable that Carbon Cap Trade would allow some of the friends of the administration, the hedge fundists, to make more money, and it would be unimaginable that the reason that some in the administration want to set it up is that, precisely, it will take years to do so, while making it looks as if they were busy doing something.
If the executive could execute, rising energy taxes could be done by executive order. Compensatory payments could be made to the poor as in Europe.
Coal produces more than half of U.S. electricity. That has to be reduced, not forgotten. Coal should not be the object of fantasy, such as that even greater pie in the sky, "Carbon Capture", also pushed by the administration. Capture is practiced in a few places, true. But mostly for local economic reasons (typically reinjecting CO2 to push natural gas out). Otherwise it would turn out so expensive that it would make coal too expensive. Figuring that one out with absolute certainty, would take many years, furthering implementing real change that would make a difference.
Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/ (For an even longer version!)