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Even California Can't Meet Climate Change Goals
The author is whining about not doing enough. I present it as an example of how much it's going to cost, notwithstanding the need.For climate change optimists, California is indeed the golden state when it comes to aggressive policies designed to avoid Give us more power and control! We will save you! That's the number scientists believe must be met to keep climate change in check. "This is quite a stringent requirement, and even if we aggressively expand our policies and implement fledgling technologies that are not even on the marketplace now, our analysis shows that California will still not be able to get emissions to 85 metric tons of CO2-equivalent by 2050," said Jeff Greenblatt, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who wrote the report. Greenblatt assumes that Californians will drive 30% fewer miles in 2050, and if they're still driving gasoline-powered cars, their vehicles will get about 78 miles per gallon. About 17 million cars would need to be zero-emission vehicles--powered by batteries or fuel cells. The state had better hope that fracking works out; 45% of all heavy-duty trucks would be powered by natural gas under the most optimistic scenario. They'd prefer that truck would run off unicorn natural gas, none of that nasty fracking, please! Coming soon, with additional funding grants - The study does identify policies that were not considered under the third scenario because of a lack of data on their impact. Those included making all buses electric or powered by fuel cells, converting trains to run on natural gas, self-driving cars, and the mass deployment of solar panels and energy storage in every home to radically cut power plant emissions. Nor were their any cost estimates associated with the proposed changes. Posted by: Bobby 2013-11-07 |
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