It must be frustrating for all of you who care about the environment to watch the current debate over ACES (the Waxman-Markey bill). It's maddening to sit there and watch Joe Barton deny that climate change is occurring, and it's even more maddening to watch Democrats from the midwest cave on a high permit-auctioning bill.
But there is an easier way to sell it, and I hope the Democrats can bring it when it counts:
We're running out of energy.
Does that make sense?
So here goes:
The entire world have an approximately 30-40 year oil and gas supply. That’s taking current consumption into account ONLY. In other words, without the further growth of China and India. So in less than 30 years, no more oil and gas. Period.
Thankfully (so to speak) the US has about a 100 year coal supply. Coal supplies about 40%-50% of our total energy use as a nation. That, too, is based on current consumption. If the population of the U.S. increases, which it is currently projected to by around 50% in the next 30 years, that means we really have about 50-75 years of coal, total.. "Clean coal" technology is much less efficient than our current coal plants, which means more coal for the same amount of electricity. Bummer, dudes.
I’m not as up on nuclear, but I know that the US is dependent on foreign supplies of uranium, which I’ve heard are about 30-40 years total.
So we’re running out of energy and time. What are we going to replace it with?
The purpose of cap and trade is to cap carbon (and therefore fossil energy use) and give people a price signal to use renewables. Currently, the real cost of fossil fuel usage, which doesn’t take into account the cost of wars to procure it, the health problems that pollution creates, etc.), is not included in the cost of oil, natural gas, and coal.
I don’t mean to be anti-coal, anti-gas or anti-oil, we’re just running out of them. And we have nothing to replace them with but renewables.
Forget global warming. I believe it’s happening, but you don’t have to believe it to know for a fact that we are all running out of energy. That’s a fact. And when it happens, prices will go up, and it will cost thousands per family.
Of course, it’s also a fact that current renewable technology can’t fill the gap created by an absence of fossil fuels. So we better get on that.
So I want to start a discussion about this here at dKos. I'm not much of a diary writer, but it drives me nuts that it's only the "environment" that is used as a selling point for cap and trade.
The energy squeeze will be something we can grasp intuitively, and I think it should be the key selling point.