Global Warming

Yesterday I finished reading "The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth" by Tim Flannery and attended a Book Club meeting of the National Capital Region Chapter of the World Future Society where it was discussed. The book was very readable but not in the same league as "Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore. It did point out many more facts in much greater depth. Two were of special interest to me. That the oceans were once about 300 feet higher; so I quickly Googled my home's elevation, 345', and now can plan to sell future "beach front" property. And that during the 1970s global warming was masked by aerosols. But we were actively cutting back on aerosol emissions subsequently making global warming more pronounced. Now some mitigation proposals include purposefully adding aerosols to reflect away sunlight.

From an article in today’s Washington Post: “Reuel Shinnar and Francesco Citro, two chemical engineers at the Clean Fuels Institute at the City College of New York, published a paper in the current issue of the journal Science…” They estimated for a cost of $200 billion a year the US could reduce the use of fossil fuels by 70% within the next 30 years. The problem is getting the government to start paying for it.

With the will, there is a way. What about using an escalating “neutral” tax to jump start the commitment? If there were political will, we could establish a schedule of increasing carbon taxes that businesses could plan on and the marketplace optimize for. And the revenues collected could be redistributed on a per-capita basis to strongly offset their impacts on the lower economic rungs.