Despite this effort, however, none of them passed. Why? Dr. Marlo Lewis, senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, attributes this reluctance to cost.
“Most politicians realize that, in the modern world, given the state of technology that we have, our economy runs on fossil fuels,” Lewis says. “To turn fossil fuels into some kind of villain that we’re going to regulate out of existence is economically very hazardous.”
Alternatives too expensive?
According to the United States Climate Action Partnership, coal fuels more than 50% of the nation’s electricity generation and is one of the cheapest means of doing so. Alternative green fuels include natural gas, wind turbines, and solar panels.
But some experts point out that, while they have their benefits, natural gas at its current price is not feasible, and wind turbines and solar panels prove unreliable as intermittent fuel sources.
“When we initiate this kind of electricity diet, it hurts the nation’s low-income population. It also hurts many retired Americans who are on fixed incomes,” says Lewis. “Whenever you increase the cost of something that is a necessity of life, you are going to take it out of their pockets.”
Legislators on Capitol Hill have echoed this sentiment. During a recent House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on the global warming cure, Rep. Joe Barton expressed his concern that cap-and-trade policies would further raise the already high costs of energy for Americans, export jobs, and do little to improve the environment.
Science does not appear to have reached a consensus on the environment’s condition, only fortifying the reluctance of policy makers to take potential economic risks. Experts have noted evidence that obscures the patterns of global change frequently cited as justification for immediate regulatory policies.
Calm ‘after’ the storm?
The 2005 hurricane season, for instance, proved one of the fiercest on record with a total of 15 hurricanes, according to the National Climatic Data Center. Yet, 2006 turned out to be comparatively calm by many standards, yielding only five hurricanes—none of which made landfall in the United States. Similarly, warming periods are not uncommon, as scientists have identified evidence of warmings in both the Roman and Medieval ages, long before power plants and vehicular emissions.
While proponents of global warming measures concede that a certain amount of warming will occur even if the U.S. cuts its greenhouse gas emissions to zero, the key they say is working to reduce the damage. “There’s going to be damage, but it could either be bad or real bad, and we want to keep it from getting real bad,” Roy says.
Corporate response
Some 42 corporations, including British Petroleum (BP) and DuPont, have partnered with the Pew Center to help further this cause. DuPont and BP, specifically, have committed themselves to voluntary greenhouse gas emissions reductions. “The corporate response among the progressive companies that we work with has been a readiness to deal with the issue,” states Roy.
The question remains, when will Congress? The answer may rest with policies that make the shift to green in the most economical ways possible.