The difference will be made up with massive conservation. Smart meters, smart grid, and smart appliances, coupled with conservation pricing (price rationing) will do the trick.
This is ultimately the national energy policy today. How many times have you heard that Americans use too much of the world’s energy?
The conservation policy is easy to implement simply by reducing supply.
And the interesting thing is that with conservation comes even higher prices…as energy companies discover that the price of conservation becomes less profit…[:-,]
coal plants converting to natural gas is much cleaner. prices are cheap now. gasoline prices were cheap too 10 years ago… look for natural gas to go up up up… pickups and semi tractors and busses are being built to run on nat gas…as demand increases so does…
nat. gas cheep now… so was gasoline 10 years ago… as demand increases so does price
When the US is is finally forced, kicking and screaming, to sign a treaty limiting its greenhouse gas emissions (likely in response to the demands for ecotariffs on the US by Europeans that would cost roughly the same) the US will likely be limited to producing 5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, because we are 5% of the world’s population. For two decades the US has been trying to get a treaty in which the starting point is not population, but rat
Gentlemen, you hold out a ridiculous future in which we live with artificial and high-priced scarcity in a world of abundant and cheap energy (cheap, at least, until the politicians get busy with it). Meanwhile putting ourselves at a competitive disadvantage with the developing world, which will never agree to such constraints for itself.
And this doesn’t even begin to explore the exploding cost to Washington (us), which will be forced to subsidize the energy consumption of more and more people along with their chronic unemployment.
Which is not to say none of this insanity will happen. I’m saying, heaven forfend.
To get back “on topic,” I can see a future for the rails hauling sunshine and – the real subject of speculation here – moonbeams.
Fred: Apparently in your view, carbon and GCC is some myth or conspiracy? For everyone’s sake, it would be nice your fantasy were right, just as it’s nice to believe in stuff like the tooth fairy and Old Santa, but reality says differently.
Schlimm: I’m reminded of probably the only useful keepsake from John Connolly’s (sp?) 1980 GOP presidential candidacy. He said, “The worst environment I can think of is to be cold, hungry and out of a job.”
I don’t know if you’re old enough to have signed up for the global-cooling certitude of many scientists in the early 1970s, but if you were around, you probably did.
To get back to trains (Mr. Moderator!): If all coal disappears, there will be something else to haul, if there’s any economy left. That’s the lesson we’ve learned from the disappearance from the rails of passengers, LCL, livestock, produce (largely), and more. Thanks to deregulation, the near 200-year-old railroad model has proven quite resilient.
I think you are in denial. Ever see the show on TLC with the morbidly obese persons who have to be removed from their house on a forklift? That is us, and it cannot continue, the chickens have come home to roost.
The developing world will agree to restrict their emissions of greenhouse gases to a level proportional to their percentage of the world’s population, just as we must… 5% for US (300M people), 50% for China (2B people). Europe has already agreed.
Re: RE:Coal traffic decline
 carnej1 replied on 08-02-2012 12:18 PM |
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People, you’re mad. We may be only 5 percent of the head count, but thanks to the American genius we do a much higher percentage of the world’s work. (Haven’t seen a figure recently, but it used to be around 25 percent.)
In any case: Why should we volunteer for living standards that are a world “average”? Have you ever been to the Third World? Who would volunteer his children and grandchildren for such a thing on the basis of the theory of “man-made” climate change?
(Anyway, if the climate is warming – from whatever cause – who cares? Be scared if we’re cooling, as we do every 10,000 years or so. There would be a game-changer.)
I don’t think you understand that we will not have a choice. Right now 16% of our GDP is derived from exports. What happens if we stomp our feet and say “you can’t make me give up my 4WD pickup as a passenger car”? The rest of the world slaps our exports with ecotariffs severe enough that our exports are uncompetitive. The 2007 collapse wiped out about 14% of GDP, what would 16% look like?
The U.S. emits disproportionately more CO2 than many other lesser-developed countries because it has a lager manufacturing base and a higher standard of living. If you force the world to redistribute the right to emit CO2 on the basis of population, there can only be two results.
One is that the U.S. pays what amounts to a gigantic fine for continuing its standard of living and manufacturing. That other is that the U.S. will not pay the fine, and so the U.S. standard of living and manufacturing base will have to fall to reach parity with the rest of the world’s countries.
[quote user=“Bucyrus”]
DwightBranch:
When the US is is finally forced, kicking and screaming, to sign a treaty limiting its greenhouse gas emissions (likely in response to the demands for ecotariffs on the US by Europeans that would cost roughly the same) the US will likely be limited to producing 5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, because we are 5% of the world’s population.
The U.S. emits disproportionately more CO2 than many other lesser-developed countries because it has a lager manufacturing base and a higher standard of living. If you force the world to redistribute the right to emit CO2 on the basis of population, there can only be two results.
One is that the U.S. pays what amounts to a gigantic fine for continuing its standard of living and manufacturing. That other is that the U.S. will not pay the fine, and so the U.S. standard of living and manufacturing base will have to fall to reach parity with the rest of the world’s countries.
Dwight: 'Fairest" – how?
The U.S. works more, harder and smarter, requiring more inputs. How is it ‘fair’ to punish us by restricting our inputs – so we can work less, less hard and dumber? Whom does this benefit? Certainly not ourselves – nor the rest of the world, either, I would think.
You are a ‘professional’ – but can you give a good argument why you should be paid more than a 17-year-old working at McDonald’s? If so, you might be able to see why the U.S. needs more inputs – and puts them to pretty good use.
So if those countries put an eco tariff on our exports to their country, it would price our goods out of their market. Do you think their citizens would just accept the higher cost goods that would be substituted for ours after the eco tariff makes ours too costly for them?
Can the poor countries really afford to pay more just because they place a tariff on our products?
Most US trade is with developed countries, and the Europeans, especially the Germans, take climate change seriously.
Well aren’t those developed countries going to get kind of a double whammy when they make big sacrifices in their own standard of living, and then have to pay more for their imports because we won’t make sacrifices in ours?
Tariffs have a much more nuanced effect on an economy than you would make them out to be. In the case of agriculture it will actually help the Europeans because they will be able to cut their price supports while maintaining a price at which French, German etc. farmers can compete. Anyone who thinks that tariffs are always a loss for an economy had better not look very closely at Taiwan or South Korea.
On your point about whether European citizens would be willing to pay more for their “stuff” in order to protect the environment, I can’t speak for them but my guess is yes. They are willing to pay much more for food than if they let their own farmers go out of business (so are the Japanese), and as I said they are much more concerned about global warming than Americans, so I can definitely see a willingness to sacrifice lower prices for a social cause…