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The House voted on the CLEAN Energy Act today - legislation that eliminates billions of taxpayer dollars worth of energy industry subsidies and sets that money aside for investing in clean and renewable energy.
The legislation passed with broad bipartisan support, 264-163, with all of New Jersey's Democrats and 4 of 6 Republicans supporting the legislation. Only Rodney Frelinghuysen and Scott Garrett voted to continue subsidizing the energy industry. All New Jersey Democrats were co-sponsors of the legislation.
| FOR | | AGAINST | Rob Andrews (D)
Rush Holt (D)
Frank Pallone (D)
Bill Pascrell (D)
Donald Payne (D)
Steve Rothman (D) | Albio Sires (D)
Mike Ferguson (R)
Frank LoBiondo (R)
Jim Saxton (R)
Chris Smith (R) | | Rodney Frelinghuysen (R)
Scott Garrett (R) |
This is absolutely the right move, though it's possible even this action may come too late. The debate over global warming in the scientific community ended many years ago. It's no longer a question of if we are causing climate change, but whether it's possible to turn it around. We might not know the answer to that for several years or decades so the prudent thing to do is to at least stop making the problem worse than it is.
But we shouldn't be under the impression that energy efficiency and renewable energy are the solution to the problem. Our energy demands are so immense that CO2 output - the biggest human factor on climate change - will continue to increase unless we attack the problem from multiple directions. The figure below shows that the projected CO2 output over the next 50 years will roughly double to 14 billion tons of CO2 per year if the current trend continues.
Just to hold output steady, we need to save 7 billion tons of CO2 by 2050. This paper outlines a possible solution, known as the stabilization triangle. The bad news is that no single approach can achieve that level of savings. The good news is that the technology already exists to solve the problem. The idea is to tackle the triangle one "wedge" at a time, with each wedge saving 1 billion tons of CO2.
Each of the following strategies could tackle one wedge, and possibly a little more: efficient vehicles, reduced use of vehicles, efficient buildings, efficient baseload coal plants, gas baseload for coal baseload power, capturing CO2 at baseload power plants, hydrogen plants or coal-to-synfuels plants, replacing coal power with nuclear power, wind power or photovoltaic power, using wind power to generate H2 for car fuel cells, replacing fossil fuel with biomass fuel, reducing deforestation + reforestation + afforestation + new plantations.
The authors propose 15 wedge possibilities, of which we would need to implement 7 to stabilize our CO2 output. Some will be easier than others. One of the easiest could come from nuclear power, which unfortunately is opposed by many in the environmental movement (NJ gets about 50% of its power from nuclear - our air is bad enough as is...do we want to replace all that with fossil fuel-burning plants?). Hopefully in 50 years when we've managed to hold the line on CO2 output, the first commercial fusion plants will come online and help us actually reduce CO2 emissions.
To have a chance at succeeding, this needs to be a national priority. Our government took a first small step in the right direction today. Let's keep the pressure on to continue that progress.
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