Global warming is one of the greatest challenges of our generation. Addressing this challenge also represents enormous opportunities for economic recovery and long term prosperity.
But sometimes the big picture is lost when just a part of the story is told.
That's just what happened when Douglas Elmendorf, the head of the Congressional Budget Office, testified recently before the Senate Energy Committee about the economic impact of clean energy legislation recently passed by the House of Representatives.
Afterward, a few headlines gave a misleading impression about the implications of addressing the challenge of global warming.
But those reports largely missed what CBO left out of its analysis.
The CBO Director said it himself: "These measures of potential costs do not include any benefits from averting climate change."
Global warming is happening now. Ignoring the long-term costs of doing nothing to avert the most dangerous impacts of a changing climate results in a profoundly incomplete and distorted economic picture.
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that more frequent and intense storms, wildfires in the West, heat waves across the nation, increased droughts and flooding, global instability and conflict, food shortages and more are all among the likely impacts of continued global warming.
Whether or not it was caused or worsened by climate change, the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina provide a window into the kind of world we can expect if global warming continues unabated.
Earlier this month, President Obama visited New Orleans. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina took an estimated 1,700 lives and displaced 1 million people. The total cost of the storm is estimated at well over $100 billion, with some estimates much higher. Four years later, the people of the region are still suffering, and it will take billions more to rebuild the Gulf Coast and protect coastal communities from future storms.
And that's just what one storm cost us. How many of these disasters can we withstand? We must take action to address these real and costly threats.
A closer look at CBO's testimony, and analyses by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Energy Information Administration (EIA), shows that the cost of action is dwarfed by steady growth in the economy.
CBO estimated an average monthly cost of about $13.00 per family in 2020. An EPA analysis estimated a price tag even smaller -- less than a postage stamp per day.
The CBO has also estimated U.S. gross domestic product may be just slightly lower in 2050 (one to three percent) than it would be without comprehensive clean energy legislation, but they didn't put that in context.
Let's think about what that really means. Over the next four decades, our economy is projected more than double in size. According to CBO's estimate, if we act now to address global warming and invest in clean energy, the economy 40 years from now may be about 249 percent bigger, instead of 250 percent bigger. And we'll still get to 250 percent - in May instead of January 2050.
And a recent study from the University of California at Berkeley reports that comprehensive clean energy legislation, coupled with gains in energy efficiency, could produce nearly 2 million new American jobs by 2020.
The CBO director noted, "The uncertainties around the damage of climate change are also great ... many economists believe that the right response to that kind of uncertainty is to take out some insurance ... against some of the worst outcomes."
We are at a crossroads. We can choose a future in which we face the ravages -- and the costs -- of unchecked global warming, while other nations gain the jobs and the economic benefits of investing in clean energy technologies. Or we can act now to transform our economy, create millions of new American jobs, and lead the world in developing and exporting in clean energy technologies while protecting our children from dangerous pollution.
Comprehensive clean energy legislation like the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act that Senator Kerry and I have introduced in the Senate is not only the right choice to transform our economy, create jobs, and make America more secure. It is also our most effective insurance policy against a dangerous future.
Follow Sen. Barbara Boxer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Barbara_Boxer
http://www.capanddividend.org/?q=readfirst
this would be good news:
The Sun's Sneaky Variability~
Measurements by a variety of spacecraft indicate a 12-year lessening of the sun's "irradiance" by about 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at EUV wavelengths.
http://www.physorg.com/news175970429.html
Published: 7:00AM GMT 25 Oct 2009
"Then, in 2007, the story suddenly entered its third stage. In a way that had been wholly unpredicted by those IPCC computer models, global temperatures started to drop. Although CO2 levels continued to rise, after 25 years when temperatures had risen, the world’s climate was visibly starting to cool again. "
This cap and tax scheme is another corporate present.CO2 isn't the root cause of anything.It hasn't been proven because it isn't true.China has demonstrated that they are causing artificial climate change.Certainly HAARP disturbs the atmosphere.Rockets.Planes.Wars.None of these are good.Industrial farms?Disaster.They just took trillions from the American people.Enough scams.
There is also a remakable pact coming together between all of the anti-freedom special interests: the animal rights folks say meat is causing it, the safety nuts want cigarettes banned and speed limits lowered, the socialists want cars eliminated and replaced with mass transit, and the big-government tax and spenders are the biggest winners of all.
It's as if there was a perfect storm of everyone who wanted to end freedom as we know it and they have all gathered together in this Global Warming Doomsday Cult.
The facts of life are that "all men are created equal" is not biologically tenable, and history shows that it is not a societlal certainty, either. It is a credo that a society has to work on. And the end result is taxes that redistribute wealth, create institutions that benefit all, and sometimes attempts to influence bad behavior (i.e., behavior that adds unwarranted costs to society and should be avoided). The problem with taxation in the AGW "arena" is that we see no definition of how that money is to be applied to "problem". It is just a stick that punishes, not the corporations that are involved in the "arena", but the people who use the goods and services provided. Wouldn't it be more honest to directly burden each memeber of society, each end user, a tax, and ensure that those revenues are directly applied to remedying "the problem"?
The only way to get Congress to do the Right Thing on ANY issue is to change the way elections are financed in order to prevent corporate bribery. But the government of, by, and for the greediest crooks on Earth has no plans to change its methods any time soon. It seems that the "philosophy" of the thieving corporatists and their fawning servants in Congress amounts to making sure that they own or control the most material wealth when the planet becomes uninhabitable in the next few years. "He who owns the most stuff when he dies wins." That's what capitalism is all about.
Al Gore may be making tons of money off this scam, but let's wake up and ignore this fraud on our wallets and minds
Just a few decades ago, scientists believed that all ordered matter consists of self-repeating building blocks -- atoms, ions or molecules.
Scientists challenged this once-believed universal law of nature when they discovered an “impossible” material whose existence could not be explained by periodic arrangement of atoms.http://www.physorg.com/news176214864.html
fortunately.. there's no way science can be wrong about a trace gas being in total control of the climate..
BTW, Is your nose growing a little bit?
1) how hot would it be equatorially w/o CO2?
2) and since when and where is water vapor not self-forcing?
The interconnectivity of all things, including concepts of time is something I learned as a young North American Indian boy.
While I support the fur industry, eat meat, avoid as best I can the chicken little notions that the sky is falling pummelled into us here in Europe by the environmentalists, and yes, the corporations now on the rich green bandwagon, I find little that shocks me. I was shocked today however reading in our dominical press, a report by our premier technical university that global warming is melting our glaciers here In Switzerland at a phenominal pace.
We here will now pay for the fundamental sins of our parents. The price is overwhelming and frightening
The melting of the glaciers is releasing, in alarming quantities, poisons trapped in the ice during the laissez faire years of industrial excess from the hippy generation. Mass quantities of carcinogens, filth and residue from every sort of plant is leeching from the melting ice and compromising our lakes and streams. Not only must we battle the direct issues associated with warming ltself but we must also gird ourselves for the sins of our fathers. I am filled with hopelessness,
You have stated that Global Warming is happening now. The state of California's draft climate adaptation report has a chart showing data for the average California temperature. The peak temperature on the chart, on Page 17 of the report, is from 1998. From the last century. If the state of California has not warmed since 1998, how can you state that Global Warming is happening now?
The skeptics harping on cooling for the last couple of years were relying on the abnormally warm temperatures in 1998. The AGW proponents now arguing warming (with their statistician friends) have realized that 1998 is now no longer in the last decade. They are relying on a somewhat cooler period from 1999-2000... Should we redo the statistical exercise in 2011 to show a cooling trend? Or perhaps redo it over the last 13 years (that is a nice round number!)
Look at the data! (sorry about the JS link, if anyone has a more politically correct T summary page I will use it...)
http://junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/All_Comp.png
Our ice caps are rapidly melting, sucking up that extra heat. Only when they are done melting will you notice a more dramatic raise in the total global temperatures.
is somehow overwhelming polar ice?