What should be done about global warming

Global warming has not been proven. Neither, for decades, was the link between cancer and cigarettes, as tobacco companies kept telling us. But there’s even less proof that your house will burn down. Does that mean you shouldn’t buy fire insurance? We don't need absolute scientific proof before we take precautions.

Quite a lot can be done rather cheaply. Here are the directions which look most promising at present.

Revenue-neutral incentives (aka fee-bates)
Hybrid cars
Nuclear power
CO₂ sequestration (pumping it back in the ground)
Wind power

Why are these cheap? First, energy is only about 5% of all costs. Second, everyway of using less fossil fuel, saves about $60/gallon. Third, the market always leaves some low-hanging fruit. People will spend a $1 to save a $1, but they usually wont's spend $1.10. This leave opportunities to spend $1.10 on home-grown conservation and save $1.00 on imported oil. Sure, there's a net cost of 10¢, but we could afford to save a lot of oil at that price, without doing much damage.

Economic Incentives. There's a great new economic technique for getting things done cheaply, and it comes in several flavors. The most popular is often called "cap and trade." If the country is produce X tons of CO₂, and we want to cut back by 10%. Emmissions are capped at the lower level, permits are issued for 90% of X, and everyone is allowed to trader permits. It will turn out that some can save 20% quite cheaply, and they will sell their extra permits, for a fair price, to those who find it too expensive to cut back. The result is that exactly the right parties doe the all the conservation and they get paid for doing more than their share.

Hybrid cars. These still cost more than they save, but not too much, and lots of people like the idea of polluting less. We will eventually switch over almost completely and the sooner the better--there's lots of room for savings here.

Nuclear power. Nuclear power still has problems, but makes no C0₂. A high priority needs to be placed on solving the nuclear-waste problem.

Pumping C0₂ underground. It seems incredible, but they do it all the time to force oil out of oil wells. US DOE has a big project to study this. It may turn out to be too expensive, but it is considered to be one of the best options by those in the know.

Wind Power. ZFacts will be studying this option soon. It is nearly break-even but how much could be installed? Is 5% of total power realistic? Right now that seems very far off.

Should we do something about it?
That depends on how costly the problem is and how much it costs to reduce it. Almost always, and this case is no exception, doing a little is worthwhile but the more you do the more costly it becomes to improve things. This means the question should be "how much should we do?" and not "Should we do something?"

The fact that we are not completely sure that global warming is increasing the destructiveness of hurricanes is no reason to do nothing. We are not completely sure that terrorists will again attack the U.S. but none of those who claim that "not knowing" is a good reason to "do nothing" about global warming would follow that logic with terrorists. Taking some precautions is almost always a good idea.

We do not know that our house will burn down. In fact we are quite sure that it will not. Yet we all buy house insurance. We do not wait until the scientist can give us a better prediction of the chance it will burn down in the next 50 years. The bigger the risk and the more likely it looks the more we should do about it. The idea of doing nothing until we are completely sure is almost always a bad idea, and it is silly when dealing with a problem that will take decades to bring under control. We will probably not be 100% sure until it is 20 years too late to avoid what we just became sure of.

This does not mean we have to bankrupt the country. For the cost of Katrina or the Iraq war, we could do a huge amount. Why not budget 20% of that for global warming and to reduce international tensions over oil.

http://zfacts.com/p/126.html | 01/18/12 07:16 GMT
Modified: Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:17:30 GMT