Well, I guess the short answer is yes. But it depends on how it is done. I think cap and trade is good as long as the cap is real and firm and not a "floating" cap that allows certain companies to basically opt out of it. That does no one any good. Cap and trade has been proven already in the limits placed on sulfur dioxides (the main culprit behind acid rain). We still have acid rain but nowhere near the levels we had before. The reason that system worked is because they finally realized the way to do it is to leave it up to the companies to figure out how they do it. Rather than saying, OK, you all have to install this specific scrubber system, etc., etc., they said, here's the deal, your levels have to be below X. How you do it is your problem. It caused a lot of innovation and 3rd party development, research, etc. And in the end the cost was much, much lower than ever anticipated. They need to do the same sort of thing with carbon.
Saying that reducing carbon emissions will accomplish nil is silly and can only come from sources directly related to the fossil fuel industries. First, let's say that it's too late. It is. The cycle is in place and climate change (global warming is an unfortunate moniker and should never have been used, but what are you going to do?) is inevitable and already occurring. But that doesn't mean you don't try and make the effects less devastating. A substantial reduction in carbon won't prevent most of the outcomes that are predicted, but it can put them off for a time. That's worth something. The challenges include the inability to definitively predict what those outcomes are and what degree they will manifest themselves. Current predictions are not pretty. And many of these things will occur in our lifetime and will certainly change our children's future dramatically. The world of our own childhood is already gone. Our kids live in a very different world, even if we think it's subtle, it really isn't.
A huge obstacle is the "why should I if they don't?" syndrome. The U.S. has been adamant about not following worldwide greenhouse gas emissions limits because they don't want to limit themselves if other countries (who are trying to play "catch up" in an industrial sense) aren't required to make the same limitations--even though at their most consumptive levels they use a mere fraction of energy per person that we do. Somewhere along the line (our generation, basically) the U.S. decided to stop being a leader and to be a spoiled brat instead. Look where it has gotten us. "We shouldn't have to make economical cars! Whaaa! We shouldn't have to make quality vehicles! We should impose import tariffs on foreign cars instead!" That has been our mindset. We have known for some 50 years that petroleum was reaching its peak and would become less abundant and more expensive. But we don't think we should have to do anything about it because that would be like sacrificing something and we deserve anything and everything we can have no matter what the rest of the world is like. Thirty plus years ago the warnings about climate change and greenhouse gas emissions were being sounded. Scientists have gone before Congress many times over that period and always we refuse to do anything substantive about it because we are entitled.
Even under this administration, which many of us had hopes for but see them diminishing daily, any legislation will get watered down to cater to the fossil fuel lobbies until they do very little good. They'll continue to cave in to the pressures of the coal lobby (there are no redeaming values to coal usage other than the fact that it is relatively abundant and--thanks to HUGE government subsidies--cheap, cheap, cheap. Take away the billions upon billions of dollars in subsidies to fossil fuel companies and direct even a fraction of that money to alternative sources and it would take no time at all for those alternatives to be more than competitive costwise.
And don't get me started on Big Agriculture and corn subsidies and the way Monsanto is striving to destroy our entire food chain. Biodiesel and ethanol are fine and dandy, but not if they are produced with an utterly inefficient crop like corn. It takes as much energy to make it as you get out of it--and that's with the subsidies! There are far better sources for that which won't require turning our entire nation into a toxic waste corn and soybean field.
Water. Where do we even begin with water?
No nation on earth wastes water like we do. We take it for granted on a scale otherwise unimagineable. Something like 2% of the world's population has running water. Seems crazy, right?
In the future, our wars will only be tangentally based on religion (er, I mean, politics, yeah, politics, that's it). As climate change continues the most sought after commodity on the world market will be clean, fresh drinking water. A large majority of the world already has to struggle to obtain it. What happens when ocean levels rise, millions and millions of people are displaced from now-coastal regions into already impoverished inland regions (already experiencing unprecidented desertification)? No food. No water. A shitload of anger--a lot of which will be directed at those who use these resources frivolously and consider it their devine right to be able to waste, waste, waste.
In the not-too-distant future, it is estimated that the Colorado River (and, coincidentally, Lake Michigan) will see an approximate 30% decrease in water levels. As damaging as dams are (no matter how much care is put into their design and construction there are always negative environmental impacts), there will be no choice but to build more dams in order to create more resevoirs in order to supply water to areas that simply don't have any. We are seeing this in Arizona, Nevada, California, etc., right now. There are too many people living here and we all expect to have all the water we want whenever we want it. And, by god, we want a big lush lawn while we're at it! And fountains! Big fountains. I just saw a satellite image presentation looking at Las Vegas--it showed images over the space of 25 years and clearly showed an amazing growth in land usage and an equally amazing decrease in available water sources. If it wasn't for water from the Colorado River and the Central Arizona Project canals, Phoenix and Tucson would not be able to exist as they currently do. [Yes, I am fully away that I am very much a part of all of these problems.]
I hadn't heard about the farmers in California, but it would not surprise me if water rationing from the Colorado River will become a huge point of contention in the future. Before the Hoover Dam was built (well, and at times after) there were big battles over who gets the water. There was actually an "almost" war between Arizona and Nevada once upon a time. The Hoover Dam was built to control flooding and subsequent water distribution to farmers, not to generate power.
In the end, everything will cost money. No way around it. But we have to get our heads around the fact that what we spend now--if we spend it wisely and actually do something substantive--will be far less than what the cost will be if we wait and don't do anything at all. Most of our economic problems, if you ask me, can be directly attributed to the viewpoint that profit now is what matters, the future consequences be damned. We are not a farsighted nation. Maybe it's because we are a very young nation, who knows. But we have a nasty habit of putting our immediate gains ahead of our future well-being. We need to get over that and we need to get over it soon. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like that's happening.
