Tons of CO2 pollution. We are always hearing about how many tons of CO2 pollution we emit. The average American car emits about seven tons of CO2 in a year; the average American family, about 24 tons; the United States as a whole, over seven billion tons; and worldwide, almost 30 billion tons. The Virgin Earth Challenge (see last week’s post) offers $25 million to whoever can economically remove one billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year.
But what is a ton of CO2?
This post is dedicated to the two great Americans we will honor on Presidents’ Day this Monday.
Everybody knows about Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address; they are a big part of why Lincoln’s birthday is honored. Most people don’t know that Lincoln also established the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
Everybody’s always talking about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. What you don’t hear so often is a suggestion to clean up what’s already there. How would you do that? Good question! And it’s the question that Virgin Earth Challenge is posing to the world. Come up with a commercially viable way to remove a billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year, and win $25 million.
Newsweek is running an article by George Will titled “Inconvenient Kyoto Truths“. Will says, “It is time to call some bluffs … President Bush should give the world something amusing to watch. He should demand that the Senate vote on the [Kyoto] protocol.” He then goes on to say that America is not disproportionately responsible for global warming, that global warming isn’t necessarily such a bad thing, that we don’t know how to stop it anyway, and that any efforts to do so could cost “tens of trillions”. And for all these reasons, he says, the Kyoto protocol was correctly rejected by the U.S.
In my post last Friday, I mentioned “cap-and-trade” as a good strategy to control greenhouse gas emissions. If you’d like to learn more about cap-and-trade, take a look at a post I wrote for the Gristmill Blog. It describes what cap-and-trade is, and why it’s a more effective strategy than a federal “carbon tax”.
There was an interesting Op-Ed in the Washington Post Wednesday titled “Global Warming and Hot Air,” by Robert Samuelson.
Samuelson is a smart guy who gets the science and asks the right questions on economics. And we do agree on the need for new technologies and clean energy options. The question is how to accomplish this.
