Al Gore Challenges U.S. to Change to Carbon-Free Energy in Ten Years
By Wesley Joseph • Jul 17th, 2008 • Category: Climate Change, Energy, Politics, Recent Posts, Uncategorized
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Today, Al Gore had his moment. Perhaps bigger than his Nobel Peace Prize, Gore gave a speech today that may be his crowning achievement: leading the country he was denied the chance to lead. Whether you think he deserved to lead or not, he was denied the chance.
Today, Gore enthusiastically endorsed the idea that the United States can and should change our economy over to completely renewable sources of carbon-free sources of energy within ten years. Can’t be done? Try landing on the moon in ten years’ time!
Gore compared the challenge to the one John F. Kennedy announced thirty-nine years ago to land on the moon. To summarize the main point of this speech:
He said the United States and the rest of the world were facing unprecedented problems, including growing demand for electricity, dangerous changes in the climate driven largely by emissions of carbon dioxide and political instability in regions that produce much of the world’s oil.
He continued:
“When we look at all three of these seemingly intractable challenges at the same time, we can see the common thread running through them, deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges — the economic, environmental and national security crises,” Mr. Gore said. “We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.”
I love to see Mr. Gore using both his political and environmental credibility to shift the debate from short-term half-measures to, “let’s fix this problem in the next decade,” kind of thinking. That is important for the next President to be able to tackle this problem head on–that is to say that having the debate moved toward fixing the problem soon rather than allowing the energy industry to drag its feet.
One last point: Gore matched up the idea of taxing carbon use with the idea that one would cut payroll taxes. That sounds like a plan many can believe in, because it would tax people’s income less while keeping government revenue (needed to pay the bills!) from decreasing. Gore said we need to be taxing what we burn rather than what we earn.
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Wesley Joseph is the primary editor for EHI. He comes from a strong political science background and is interested in the effect humans' actions have on the environment, how in turn the environment affects humans, and how environmental policy at large and personal actions can both change into positive envirohuman impacts.
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I’m even more optimistic than Mr. Gore, I think we could do it in five years or even less! If the government actually encouraged and invested in alternative clean energies, we’d already be there and this discussion wouldn’t be taking place. Honestly, I see little to no reason we can’t build massive solar and wind plants and ween ourselves off oil. The first step is to get the oil industry out of the government and to focus the government on helping everyone, not just themselves.
One issue with the carbon tax, how do you keep track of how much carbon is used? Also, it’s focusing too much on only one pollutant instead of aiming to tax bad pollution period.
Yeah, I can say that I would like to see it faster than five years — though many are saying Mr. Gore is being too optimistic with his ten-year goal. He’s saying a few trillion dollars are needed through public and private investment, and obviously, the sooner the better, and I can’t fault optimism :).
Great question regarding how carbon dioxide is measured; I had to do some reading to check that my assumptions were pretty close on this one. A carbon tax could be levied on carbon emissions by measuring emissions, which is done, I believe, by amount of coal or oil-based fuel burned (or other fuel).
So, for instance, scientists who understand the chemistry behind combustion, it’s inputs and outputs can give a quantitative amount of carbon dioxide released from burning, let’s say, a gallon of gasoline. A tax could be levied per pound of carbon dioxide emitted on this basis, or for units of coal in the case of a coal-burning power plant, and the amount of tax would be determined at the legislative level.
I’m not such a scientist, but quick Google searching can reveal several ways that scientists might work through such formulas to reach an amount of carbon dioxide emitted. I know this may not be the most helpful and I am sorry to leave this vague here, but this is likely a topic for a full post here on EHI once I have found the best methods for measurements. Thanks, as always, for contributing, Adam!
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