The Carbon Debate: A dose of cynicism

There are also still a few scientists on the fringe who will tell you global warming is not a threat, but the consensus among people who know more than any of us is that global warming can and will cause tremendous environmental AND economic damage if something is not done.

While I don't subscribe to Huber's smoke 'em if you got 'em approach, I do find myself somewhat cynical that things can truly be reversed at this point -- at least not within any of our lifetimes.

I think the biggest mistake the green movement has made has been to center its appeal on saving the environment. As noble a goal as it may be, there's a certain percentage of the population that just doesn't care, or at least doesn't care enough to alter their lifestyle in a meaningful way. If you ask me, though, a case can be made for clean energy, painful as it may be, on purely pragmatic grounds.

One thing that I think we tend to forget is how the rise in oil prices last year was one of the things that helped spark the recession. The graph on the right tracks the rise in energy prices since the last recession; clearly, gasoline prices rose much more significantly than the pace of inflation. Gas prices have definitely plummeted down from $4/gal. last summer, but that is in large part due to the nearly worldwide recession. When the economy turns around, don't we have every reason to believe that increased demand will cause gas to shoot right back through the roof? I have a feeling that we're going to be reading a lot of stories about our Energy Crisis in the summer of 2010.

Part of human nature, it seems, is to avoid making painful changes until it is absolutely necessary, and/or we are forced to. Energy use is no different. Over the past decade (and more), instead of taking a sensible approach to energy, we followed a course of action that was not entirely unlike Huber's suggestion. Instead of recognizing that there is a limit to the amount of coal and oil we can extract from the ground and investing in clean energy, high speed rail, etc., we exploded the nation's housing inventories and furthered urban sprawl out into suburbia, which require an even greater dependency on cars to get us to and from work. The only way this approach makes sense is if gasoline is and will continue to be cheap. We have structured our economy (and way of life, really) on the faulty premise that the atmosphere will continue absorb more and more carbon dioxide without reprecussion,and that we will be able to continue getting cheap oil from from the ground.

So to say "if we don't change, then the worst will happen," rings a bit hollow for me. I don't see how we can possibly change enough, in time, to make any kind of significant difference. But while Mr. Huber looks at that and says its party time! with coal-burning, I try to make whatever difference I can, however small it may be, in the hope that if enough of us make changes to our lifestyle, eventually, we can repair some of the damage we've done to the world.

Update: Stephen Chu seems to share my cynicism. Not exactly the most optimistic metaphor possible in Newsweek:

Q: Aren't we in pretty bad trouble no matter what we do?
We're not going to be able to stop burning fossil fuels for quite a while.

A: We're in the great ship Titanic, the Earth is, and it's going to take a half century to really turn the ship. But that doesn't mean we can't start doing it today, and we must. It's possible that the United States can greatly reduce its use of energy in our buildings, which consume 40 percent of our energy, and our personal vehicles.