Our Changing Globe

Archive for the ‘cap and trade’ Category

The Price Of Flights Will Soar If Co2 Reductions Come Into Force

If the U.S. fulfills its pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then the ensuing CO2 reductions will cause a host of little mentioned, but very severe and punishing effects to the travel and tourism industries.

The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) released what it refers to as its "endangerment findings" last Monday, and they outline the public health risks associated with carbon emissions.

The Obama administration has pledged to work closely with Congress as its looks to pass clean energy reform legislation, that would entail cutting carbon gas emissions by more than eighty percent, but such a bill would badly damage the U.S. economy and would cause a major reduction in the number of flights, cause big prices increases, and have a majorly negative effect on the travel and tourism industries.

Ken Green, who is an environmental scientist with the American Enterprise Institute, said, "The European diplomats who all who flew over to Copenhagen are the excepted class, as is Al Gore, but the rest of us are not supposed to fly, and so they’ll be raising your ticket prices and putting restrictions on flying that make it more difficult".

"The impact on passengers is going to be higher ticket prices. If you try to cap carbon, and the airlines have to buy emission permits from other sources that could reduce their emissions, they’re going to pass that cost along to consumers. It may mean less availability of flights".

Each gallon of jet fuel creates 23.88 pounds of carbon dioxide, and domestic flights alone produce an estimated 11.1 million tons of carbon dioxide every month, and an estimated 133 million tons of the gas annually.

Domestic airlines consumed an enormous 929,849,433 gallons of jet fuel in October and President Obama’s proposed a cap-and-trade bill would require cutting the gallons of fuel burned by a staggering amount.

Airlines be left with just two choices:

1) Reduce the number of flights
2) Buy purchase emission permits from companies or countries that create little CO2.

New advanced technologies are not even on the drawing boards yet, and experts say the shorter the timeline to develop carbon-efficient systems, the higher the prices will be, or the less flights there will be, or both.

The GOP And Climate-Gate

A group of twenty eight Republican senators recently called on the United Nations to appoint an independent investigator to probe leaked e-mails that they claim raise serious questions about the science behind global warming and Rajendra Pachauri who is chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, announced last week that, "The U.N. would conduct an investigation, that the controversy over the e-mails was serious, and that he didn’t want to brush anything under the carpet".

The GOP senators then wrote to Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon saying that, "While such an inquiry is a positive step, they want an investigation that is truly independent of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the U.N. in the style of the independent investigation led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in the wake of the Oil for Food scandal".