Vincent Carroll of the Denver Post recently penned a well thought out opinion piece called Carbon cutting pipe dreams. In it he does some quick back-of-the-napkin calculations that show how unrealistic the proposed cap-and-trade legislation is. Some interesting comments follow the piece as well.
He points out that the average Coloradan’s carbon dioxide footprint is about 20 metric tons. To reach to proposed 80% reduction in carbon dixode emissions by 2050, we’d have to cut our individual output to less than 3 metric tons.
And we’re going to do this with wind and solar? I don’t think so. Barring some significant technology break throughs, this is very unlikely to happen.
Then again, we can make ourselves feel good by wrecking the environment with 400 foot tall wind towers, massive solar arrays, plus the transmission lines to go with them, while still needing other sources of energy for our base power (coal, natural gas, etc.).
Cap-and-trade will follow in the footsteps of the dot-com bust, the real estate bust, credit default swaps, and the like. And surely some will get rich along the way.
For Colorado to do anything the leasst bit dramatic to cut down on CO2 would be crazy. First off, Colorado currently produces only 1.3% of the CO2 produced annually in America. And, in the future, China, India and a handful of other developing countries will produce 90% of all new CO2. Even if America did reduce CO2 production by 42% by 2030, the net impact on world wide atmospheric CO2 will be less than 2 ppm. Anyone who can build a spread sheet can download the data necessary to prove that from the U.S. DOE-EIA web site which provides both historic and future CO2 production numbers. So if America could at best reduce CO2 in the atmoshphere by 2.5 ppm (this 2.5 ppm assumes that the industries we close don’t go to China, Mexico or India, which of course they will) – the absurdity of Coloradans attempting to seriously reduce our carbon footprint, which would contribute at most 42% of 1.5% of 2.5 ppm (.016 PPM) whilst wrecking the Colorado economy would perhaps be the dumbest thing ever done by all of mankind. Colorado should do no more than perhaps build a few power plants which run on Natural Gas, but even that makes little sense because Colorado is located near the cheapest coal in the world from Wy and Mnt. Reality somtimes bites, but in the end this is a math thingee!
T. Luxer,
Thanks for the comment. You hit the nail on the head.
See my recent post for another article by Carroll and a sober assessment of the situation in Colorado by Roger Pielke Jr. here:
http://co2realist.com/2010/03/08/pielke-jr-on-decarbonization-of-the-colorado-economy/