An Inconvenient Truth

[kandrathe]

Van: My point was that political will is needed to make the needed environmental changes without driving the world economy into the toilet. I've been watching this train wreck my entire life, while people run around defocused on crisis followed by crisis. I studied the impending end of the hydrocarbon economy while in high school in the late 1970's, and wrote a thesis on energy alternatives while at the university in the 1980's. Yet, auto manufacturers are still delivering only the minimal restrictions while we consumers are still demanding 6 mpg muscle cars and Hummers.

I would just like to see a little political leadership on this, and in fact something as simple as

• We have a big problem, <>
  
• We need to do these things now <>
  
• Your children might survive.<>
  [st]
  

  During the 1960's, smog in America was increasing at a worrisome rate; predictions were that smog controls would render cars exorbitantly expensive. Congress imposed smog regulations, and an outpouring of technical advances followed. Smog emissions in the United States have declined by almost half since 1970, and the technology that accomplishes this costs perhaps $100 per car.
  
  Similarly, two decades ago a "new Silent Spring" was said to loom from acid rain. In 1991, Congress created a profit incentive to reduce acid rain: a system of tradable credits that rewards companies that make the fastest reductions. Since 1991 acid rain emissions have declined 36 percent, and the cost has been only 10 percent of what industry originally forecast. Gregg Easterbrook, Visiting Fellow, Governance Studies -- The Brookings Institute Full Article

  
  And to Jester from a different thread: If the world economy hits the crapper, starving parents will not be thinking about conservation. So it's not the "poor American" who is forced to pay 1$ per KwH I'm concerned about. It's the cronically unemployed Central or South American parent who has joined a paramilitary group bent on destruction.