Warming is real & there are two other reasons to act....

Today's post: Wednesday, 10-7-2009

We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.

1. I’ve seen first hand that global warming is real. And the likely costs of global warming are huge and a bit frightening.

For most of the last 25 years my parents had a cabin the Sierra of California just low enough in elevation that they didn’t get a lot of snow (& closer than the Lake Tahoe area to where they and most of the rest of our family lived in the San Francisco Bay Area.)

Because cold winter weather becomes colder, and in this location snowier, at higher elevations, if the climate warms up snow will fall at in increasingly higher elevations and plants that don’t grow where it gets too cold will be found at increasingly higher elevations.

That’s exactly what happened at my parents’ cabin. They saw the snow line go to higher elevations. And, poison oak, that doesn’t grow where it gets to cold, went from none at all in the community near my parents’ cabin to having some to having a lot over the last 25 years. They saw other similar changes in what plants grew there also.

The ample pictures of huge decreases in glaciers suggest strongly that this effect is world-wide and NOT just found in California.

So, since global warming looks quite real, what problems will it cause?

Since warming, as it continues, will flood coastal cities that contain much of the world’s population and economy now, that’s a very big deal indeed. The costs that look to be needed for flood protection, as the Netherlands has done, or relocations will be enormous.

We’ve seen initial evidence that global warming may increase the number of droughts and floods and storms such as tornados & hurricanes or make the ones that occur worse. The costs that look to be needed to combat these effects will be enormous. And the economic productivity lost that would not have been won’t help either. Worse, our food supply will potentially be reduced as these effects harm agriculture.

2. Mining and burning coal as it is now practiced has been expanding as our economy grows. But in addition to the huge amount of CO2 this has generated & will continue to do even under the best and most optimistic scenarios, this causes land and water pollution during mining and when the coal is burned, it kills trees with acid rain that we need to remove the CO2 from the air & poisons the fish and seafood we eat with the mercury it throws into the air. And, there is evidence this mercury is poisoning US. That harms our brains and can cause both decreases in reasoning ability & memory -- & it can lead to mental decline as well. That slows our economy and creates more medical costs.

Burning coal without adequate filtering of the smoke also creates enough haze to harm agriculture and cause lung and heart disease – as it has already begun to do in China and the countries downwind from China. That effect too creates more medical costs and harms the economic productivity of the people it harms.

So, even if global warming were not the concern it is, it’s become clear that until or unless we clean up the process of mining and burning coal AND burn far less, we will have increasing environmental problems and harm both to people AND to our economy.

That will make coal more expensive to burn even without any regulations on CO2 released that tax or limit the CO2 that is released. So it will pay us to have alternatives in place soon that cost less.

3. At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both.

And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.

That means we have a number one priority to act to save our economy from these effects even if global warming weren’t real.

As gasoline prices went from $2.00 a gallon to over $4.50 a gallon in our part of California recently it slowed our economy noticeably here. And the similar increases in the cost of gasoline elsewhere in the United States helped trigger the recession since it both increased the cost of doing business and reduced the amount of other purchases consumers were able to make. It certainly did for my wife and me.

Imagine the effects of gasoline rapidly going to $10 a gallon or more in today’s dollars and having gas lines and rationing on top of that -- with worse to come.

Unless we very rapidly increase the energy efficiency of our economy and add huge amounts of renewable energy sources soon we may well see exactly that.

So, that means that opposing the switch from coal and oil to increasing the energy efficiency of our economy and adding huge amounts of renewable energy in part by increased regulation of fossil fuels and braking their use in some way -- will harm our economy and the people and businesses in it.

That means opposition to global warming and acting to switch our economy to these new sources is very BAD for business -- and will be so much sooner than many now think.

And, all three of these concerns make the recent opposition of exactly that kind by the US Chamber of Commerce an extremely ill advised policy indeed!

The companies with leaders who understand this likely complained to the leadership of US Chamber of Commerce apparently with no effect.

So, those companies recently have been leaving the US Chamber of Commerce and declining to any longer be members or associated with it.

I’m pleased to say that this includes PG&E and Apple Computer that are headquartered here in the Silicon Valley area.

There IS a point that makes sense to increase energy efficiency and renewable energy supplies more at first than making use fossil fuel energy more expensive to avoid shocking our reeling economy.

But not understanding that the need to make this switch is real and pandering to people as if they are not informed or quite bright to oppose it as the US Chamber of Commerce has been doing are simply not OK.

I think Tom Freidman’s idea of the United States racing the Chinese to do the most to develop and add huge amounts of renewable energy is dramatically better policy.