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When it comes to energy, cost isn’t everything – but it’s a lot. Everybody wants cheap power.
In the world of energy politics, the sudden vanishing of the word ‘coal’ is a remarkable and unprecedented event.
Bloomberg is famously impatient with beltway politics and believes that to get anything done you need to work from the ground up.
The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call ‘external costs,’ like the health effects of air and water pollution.
In any crass political calculation, drilling for oil will always win more votes than putting a price on carbon. But if I recall what I was taught in fifth-grade American government class, we elect presidents to do more than crass political calculations.
Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution – warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain – are even more deadly here.
With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production.
Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change.
Have we failed to slow global warming pollution in part because climate and environmental activists have been too polite and well behaved?
Americans don’t pay much attention to environmental issues, because they aren’t sexy. I mean, cleaning up coal plants and reining in outlaw frackers is hugely important work, but it doesn’t get anybody’s pulse racing.