"Climate Change" and Energy Policy

Until recently, those who call "global warming" a hoax or misguided crusade have not bothered to dispute the actual rising of CO2 levels. It is just too well established in multiple ways, including bubbles of actual air from periods going back tens of thousands of years, trapped in the Antarctic ice.

The recent attempt to convince people that there has been no rise in the CO2 level (based on misrepresentation of one climatologist's words -- try googling "wolfgang knorr climate change") is apparently so meritless that neither Rush Limbaugh nor Glenn Beck will touch it, so it has been left to somewhat lower profile blogs like hotair.com, Lucianne.com, and BigGovernment.com.

The increase (by close to 50% in the last 100 years) of CO2 does not prove global warming, and there are various complicated arguments that accept the increase of CO2 but still say there's no global warming problem. For my part, basically I accept that the vast majority of relevant scientists agree it is happenning and is due to fossil fuel burning and deforestation. How rapidly it is happenning is controversial, but there are signs that the consequences, esp. melting of ice sheets could speed up in unexpected ways.

The projections have to be based on some baseline estimates of the amount of gas, oil, and coal that will be extracted and consumed. If there is a revolution in extraction -- whether from offshore drilling, "cracking" technologies for natural gas or simply discovery of vast new oil fields -- resulting in hydrocarbon fuel use greatly exceding current projections then the projections of greenhouse gas increase will also have to be revised upward. We have observed overall temperatures rising decade by decade, and have recently been surprised at how much difference one more degree of average temperature seems to make -- esp in the melting of ice sheets (the melting of ice that currently rests on land, as in Greenland and Antarctica is what would raise sea levels. The melting of floating ice, such as at North Pole will NOT have such an effect). At the very least we are changing something that we cannot reverse, and do not understand very well.

"Global warning" however is far from the only reason to try to burn less fuel, and develop greater fuel efficiency and more renewable energy. The less carbon based fuels are in demand, the less of our real wealth will go to extracting them. Without some downward pressures on demand, with contries like China finally becoming technological powerhouse (their population is comparable to that of the whole industrialized world), we are pretty sure to see $4/gallon gas again, and it could well greatly excede this. The fact that so much of the source of world wealth is in Russia, the middle east, Latin America, etc. has partly reversed a long trend of ill educated and undemocratic nations having no leverage over the educated, democratic and stable nations.

(Partial change of subject to economics in general):
A great deal of the danger and instability of the world today (and at other times in history) is due to such a powerful resource being in corrupt and often irrational hands. The potential for renewable energy will be much more evenly distributed among nations, and will almost certainly be extremely beneficial to one of the poorest parts of the world, and maybe the next great manufactury of terrorists if people are not given better things to pursue -- Africa. It will tend to make these countries self-sufficient, without however, providing a concentrated faucet of wealth prone to be monopolized by a few people in power (this is an idea becoming clear(er) in my mind for the first time. What might be called a "faucet effect" may go a long way to explaining the conditions of the old American South (cotton and slavery), Central America (banannas, and heritage of slavery), South America (among other things, oil, copper and other ores, and the heritage of slavery), the middle east (oil), Southern Africa (gold and diamonds). All of these products -- natural resources and mono-cultures) seem to be managed most efficiently between a powerful few in one country and a powerful few in another country (I wrote about slavery as a "skimmable" river of wealth in paper for History of Ideas class).