Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Second Thought of the Day
The point is, unlike conventional air pollution, which was reduced without any constraint on fuel use, the CO2 in the atmosphere can be reduced only by the use of massively less coal, oil, and natural gas. But even if the case for catastrophic global warming weren’t in free fall, the energy ambitions of the climate campaign remain so extreme as to make King Canute blush. The target the climate campaigners have set for the United States—an 80 percent reduction in CO2 emissions by the year 2050—would require replacing virtually our entire fossil fuel energy infrastructure. Substituting natural gas for coal would deliver only about a 15 percent reduction in CO2 emissions, and even if we replaced every coal plant with a carbon-free nuclear plant, we’d still be less than halfway to the policy target. For the United States, the 80 percent reduction target means reducing our fossil fuel use to a level the nation last experienced in 1910. But since our population in 2050 will be nearly five times larger than the population of 1910, on a per capita basis we’re talking about going back to the fossil fuel use of about 1875. This is patently absurd.
Stephen Hayward
Stephen Hayward
Labels: Stephen Hayward quote
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 7:46 AM 
