“No matter how much you pay with a carbon levy, virtually nothing is received climatically…. No matter the level of domestic action that we take, it will pale in comparison to the rapid expansion of carbon dioxide emissions in other parts of the world.”
How much global warming will result from U.S. emissions over the course of this century, and how much of that could be prevented by a carbon tax? These two questions have the same simple answer—virtually none. One or two tenths of a degree a century out with–and without–a carbon tax makes the whole climate debate a peculiar exercise.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the earth’s average temperature will increase somewhere between 1.1°C and 6.4°C over the 21st century, depending on the assumed pathway of anthropogenic emissions (both greenhouse gases and aerosols) and the actual (but unknown) climate sensitivity.…
Continue ReadingBill McKibben, who has been called “the nation’s leading environmentalist,” is leading a movement to destroy the fossil fuel industry, which he calls “Public Enemy Number One.” This is the signature issue of his mega-popular organization 350.org under the names “Do the Math“ and “Fossil Free.”
As an energy researcher who knows the indispensability of the fossil fuel industry to my own life and billions of lives around the world, I am doing whatever I can to stop this movement.
My Debate with Bill McKibben
Earlier this month I publicly debated Bill McKibben in order to make the case that his quest “to cut our fossil fuel use by a factor of 20 over the next few decades” is pseudoscientific and suicidal.
Throughout the debate I stressed four points:
[Editor Comment: Previous posts at MasterResource (see here and here) have critically reviewed Moore’s Law applied to energy systems. Mr. Lightfoot revisits the issue below based on his article in Engineering Dimensions (May/June 2013). His views about the need for government direction to achieve energy transformation are the author’s alone.]
In a 2009 speech before the United Nations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke about hope for the future:
“It took us centuries to get from the printing press to the telephone, decades to get from the telephone to the personal computer, and only a few years to get from the personal computer to the internet. What seemed impossible a few years ago is already outdated, and we can scarcely fathom the changes that are yet to come.…
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