Challenge candidates on global warming
by Fresh EnergyFor those who like to connect the dots in news and politics, yesterday’s news has three compelling reasons to press all candidates for public office on whether they intend to lead or obstruct progress to cut global warming pollution.
The BBC reports on a huge economic study on the cost of global warming, commissioned by the British government, showing that failure to act will mean staggering disruptions of global economies, hitting poor countries hardest. The former chief economist of the World Bank writes, “our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th Century.” He estimates that unchecked global warming will reduce incomes by about one-fifth. On the brighter side, he argues that spending large sums of money now on measures to reduce global warming pollutants will bring dividends on a colossal scale. According to Stern, wouldn’t spending 1 percent of global GDP to increase our wealth by 20 percent be a no-brainer?
Despite the daunting nature of the challenge of making a new energy economy that does not dump its fossil emissions into the atmosphere, and despite the emergence of many great new technologies that are ready to contribute to (but not fully solve) the problem, budgets are falling in the race to fight global warming, especially in the United States. According to the New York Times rockstar global warming reporter Andrew Revkin, federal investment into research in energy technologies (adjusted for inflation) has fallen by more than half since 1979 under Jimmy Carter and is now at $3 billion. This figure is all energy research, not just research into climate-friendly technology. By comparison, medical research has quadrupled in that same time to $28 billion, and military research has increased 260 percent to $75 billion.
Yet another story reports that global warming pollution by 40 nations was the highest in 2004, including backers of caps under the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol and outsiders led by the United States. In these 40 countries, emissions rose to 17.9 billion metric tons in 2004 from 17.8 billion in 2003 and 17.5 billion in 2000. On the brighter side of that story, the data also showed the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per dollar of economic output in industrialized nations had fallen by 28 percent from 1990-2004—meaning growth was not so dependent on burning more energy.
