"ya pays me now, or ya pays me later"

[originally published 27-Jun-09 13:51 on refiamerica.org]
Hearing the voices against a climate control bill rant how "cap and trade will destroy the economy" and "cap and tax will be the biggest job killer ever voted on by congress", makes me just want to puke. A great quote in a recent renesys blog post sums up where America is right now in the global warming fight, "don't wait until the tanks are in the streets to figure this out, because by that point, you may have already lost the war". Of course reducing carbon is going to increase energy costs to consumers, but hey, "ya pays me now, or ya pays me later"... We can pay the up-front costs now, and the continued higher cost for energy that is so cheap to us now, or we can pay enormous sums of money and watch thousands die when droughts hit and the rising seas shrink coastlines. How secure will America be when unfriendly governments, seeing that their land is being destroyed and their economies are being ruined, decide to lash out at whomever has more resources or whom they think got them into this mess to start with. Yeah, not so secure. You think times are bad now...

Ok, I digress. Bottom line is that we are already way past stopping CO2 from screwing things up, and can only reduce what we can now and in the future and then adapt to the changes that will continue to plague the world for decades to come. NASA GISS recently released a study oh projections of peak oil's effect on the future climate. To quote that article:

"Previously published research shows that a dangerous level of global warming will occur if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeds a concentration of about 450 parts per million. That's equivalent to about a 61 percent increase from the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million, but only 17 percent more than the current level of 385 parts per million. The carbon dioxide cap is related to a global temperature rise of about 1.8°F above the 2000 global temperature, at or beyond which point the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet and Arctic sea ice could set in motion feedbacks and lead to accelerated melting."

Other NASA studies show that the number at which we start seeing bad effects (the level past which life as evolved on earth starts being affected) is with a CO2 concentration of 350 ppm. Guess what? We have already past that number and are rising at a rate of 2 ppm/year. Not good. So not good that big Large Scale Integrators (LSI) like GE and other multinationals are now shifting resources and money from Carbon reduction research and planning to "Adaptation technologies" to allow regions to deal with rising seas and other climate related changes to their environments. So, the big 20+ year projecting producers in the world are already admitting that it is too late for parts of the world and are developing tech to help countries deal with rising seas. not good. --egrep