Ok, I have been thinking about this for a while and here's what's bothering me.
Almost all the major policy proposals to curb greenhouse gas emission, involves reduction in demand: increasing the MPG of the cars, the cap and trade systems and so on. They all focus on reduction of the demand, while ignoring to reduce the supply.
In fact most of the "energy" bills, including the ones adopted by the European countries, stress looking for fossil fuel resources in untraditional places.
This is quite blatant in the new offshore drilling proposals floated recently by Bush and McCain.
But the reality is that the current approach is not going to help the climate change. The reason: there is already enough Carbon dioxide in the air. As long as we burn hydrocarbons, the carbon in them is going to end up in the atmosphere and guess what, it will exacerbate the Climate Change.
According to Jan-Peter Onstwedder the former head of risk management at BP
the potential carbon emissions from proven oil, gas and coal reserves are estimated at around 700 billion tonnes, but if temperature increases are to be restricted in accordance with the conclusions of the IPCC's 4th Assessment Reports (2007), then only about 500 billion tonnes of these fossil fuels can be emitted this century. This prompts the question of why the oil industry was spending so much on oil exploration, at a cost of about US$50 billion a year.
If we are making our cars more efficient, that's great: we are decreasing the demand. but other pieces of policy increase the supply by harvesting every last resource of combustible fuel, which will in turn drive the up the consumption: the good-old law of Supply and Demand.
The moment oil comes out of the ground, it will be used one way or another.
So my solution: keep the darned stuff in the Earth.