Global wierding, green jobs, and the need for a carbon tax
….There is only one effective, sustainable way to produce ”green jobs”, and that is with a fixed, durable, long-term price signal that raises the price of dirty fuels and thereby creates sustained consumer demand for, and sustained private sector investment in, renewables.
Without a carbon tax or fuel tax or cap-and-trade system that makes renewable energies competitive with dirty fuels, while they achieve scale and move down the cost curve, green jobs will remain a hobby.
It’s time to get real about green policy, Thomas Friedman, The Age, September 15, 2011, EVERY time I listen to Texas Governor Rick Perry and Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann describe climate change as some fraud perpetrated by scientists trying to gin up money for research, I’m reminded of the line that actor Jack Nicholson delivers to the needy neighbour who knocks on his door in the film As Good As It Gets. ”Where do they teach you to talk like this?” asks Nicholson. ”Sell crazy someplace else. We’re all stocked up here.”
Thanks, Perry and Bachmann, but we really are all stocked up on crazy right now. I mean, the Texas Governor rejects the science of climate change while his own state burns after the worst droughts on record propelled wildfires to devour an area the size of Connecticut. As a statement by the Texas Forest Service said last week: ”No one on the face of this earth has ever fought fires in these extreme conditions.”
Remember the first rule of global warming. The way it unfolds is really ”global weirding”. The hots get hotter; the wets wetter; and the dries get drier. This is not a hoax. This is high school physics, as Katharine Hayhoe, a climatologist in Texas, explained on the Climateprogress.org blog: ”As our atmosphere becomes warmer, it can hold more water vapour. Atmospheric circulation patterns shift, bringing more rain to some places and less to others … When a storm comes, in many cases there is more water available in the atmosphere and rainfall is heavier. When a drought comes, often temperatures are already higher than they would have been 50 years ago, and so the effects of the drought are magnified by higher evaporation rates.”
CNN reported recently that ”Texas had the distinction of experiencing the warmest summer on record of any state in America, with an average of 86.8 degrees [Fahrenheit, 30.4 degrees Celsius]. Dallas residents sweltered for 40 consecutive days of gruelling 100-plus degree [37.8 degrees celsius] temperatures … Temperature-related energy demands soared more than 22 per cent above the norm this summer.”
There is still much we don’t know about how climate change will unfold, but it is no hoax. We need to start taking steps, as our scientists urge, ”to manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable”. If you want a quick primer on the latest climate science, tune in to ”24 Hours of Reality”. It is a worldwide live, online update that can be found atclimaterealityproject.org today with contributors from 24 time zones.
……..There is only one effective, sustainable way to produce ”green jobs”, and that is with a fixed, durable, long-term price signal that raises the price of dirty fuels and thereby creates sustained consumer demand for, and sustained private sector investment in, renewables.
Without a carbon tax or fuel tax or cap-and-trade system that makes renewable energies competitive with dirty fuels, while they achieve scale and move down the cost curve, green jobs will remain a hobby.
No comments yet.
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 
Leave a comment