A Quote by Van Jones
There would be a cost for dumping carbon into our atmosphere and a cap on total emissions. The government must make a clear and firm decision - terminating the idea in our society it is free to pump infinite amounts of carbon into the air. Once that happens, private capital will flow even more aggressively into developing and deploying the alternative, less-polluting technologies.
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The power the fossil fuel industry exerts over Congress is polluting American democracy, the propaganda it emits through its front groups is polluting our public discourse, and, of course, its carbon emissions are polluting our atmosphere and oceans - it's a triple whammy and a disgrace.
If you have a carbon cap and trade system, there'd be an agreed-to limit the amount of carbon we emit. That changes the economic picture for fossil technologies and for the renewable technologies. It makes the renewable technologies more attractive and the fossils less attractive.
It seems like every week we are considering bills that would make it harder to limit the amount of carbon we are dumping into our atmosphere, and prevent implementation of clean technologies. The voters who sent us here deserve better.
Today, about 40 percent of America's carbon pollution comes from our power plants. There are no federal limits to the amount those plants can pump into the air. None. We limit the amount of toxic chemicals like mercury, and sulfur, and arsenic in our air and water, but power plants can dump as much carbon pollution into our atmosphere as they want. It's not smart, it's not right, it's not safe, and I determined it needs to stop.
Over the long term, we should develop and implement new technologies to capture and store coal's carbon emissions. We also must make our electric grid more resilient.
In developing countries the situation could be even worse because developing countries do not have to count their emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. Private companies from industrialized nations will seek cheap carbon credits for their country in the developing world.
Some time ago we discovered the carbon cycle - a long-term set of chemical reactions that govern climates based on how much carbon is free in the atmosphere. At that point, it became clear that humans were affecting our environments far more profoundly than we realized. By releasing so much carbon and greenhouse gas into the environment, we're making long-term changes to every aspect of the natural world.
'Goals' and 'caps' on carbon emissions are practically worthless, if coal emissions continue, because of the exceedingly long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the air.
A cap on carbon is important because it sets a specific goal for reducing carbon emissions 80% by 2050.
I get to be the mayor of the capital city of the most polluting state of the most polluting country on the planet. ... I see truly a non-carbon economy. It's cleaner. It's healthier. We're about out of alternatives, so it's going to be easier and more cost effective to start to do the right thing.
If every country committed to spending 0.05 per cent of GDP on researching non-carbon-emitting energy technologies, that would cost $25 billion a year, and it would do a lot more than massive carbon cuts to fight warming and save lives.
My first goal would be to reduce the perturbation in the carbon cycle. That would mean using carbon neutral sources of energy, and changing our agricultural practices to be less disruptive and polluting. I'm not talking about a policy here so much as changing the way our infrastructure works. That's why I'm so fascinated with changing the way we build cities, because they are the most developed forms of physical infrastructure for human habitation.
Even if every major government were to slap huge taxes on carbon fuels - which is not going to happen - it wouldn't do much to halt climate change any time soon. What it would do is cost us hundreds of billions - if not trillions - of dollars, because alternative energy technologies are not yet ready to take up the slack.
I am troubled by the lack of common sense regarding carbon dioxide emissions. Our greatest greenhouse gas is water. Atmospheric spectroscopy reveals why water has a 95 percent and CO2 a 3.6 percent contribution to the 'greenhouse effect.' Carbon dioxide emissions worldwide each year total 3.2 billion tons. That equals about 0.0168 percent of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration of about 19 trillion tons. This results in a 0.00064 percent increase in the absorption of the sun's radiation. This is an insignificantly small number.
You should be attacking the carbon emissions, period, and whether it's cap-and-trade or carbon tax or whatever, that's the realm in which we should be playing.
We need to use economic instruments such as carbon taxes, cap and trade, tax and dividend and whatever else to help incentivize behavior that will move us to a post-carbon, post-animal agriculture world, and make our societies more resilient to the shocks that are already baked into the system. But that doesn't make climate change an "economic issue."
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