THE TRUTH ABOUT DEALING WITH GLOBAL WARMING

Recently, former Vice President Al Gore has made something of a media splash by the release of a documentary film called "An Inconvenient Truth". In it, Gore asserts that the inconvenient truth is that human-caused global warming is real, despite the efforts of some in government to pretend otherwise. He may be right. But Robert Samuelson has it right when he points out "The Real Inconvenient Truth".

From 2003 to 2050, world population is projected to grow from 6.4 billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use per person and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in 2050. But that's too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. Unless we condemn the world's poor to their present poverty -- and freeze everyone else's living standards -- we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.

Read the whole thing. As I have also argued many times, it is simply not possible for political leaders to deliberately slow the growth of their economies. As long as our world economy is based on petroleum, as it is, then we will not see any deliberate effort to limit its growth. We may see, as in the Kyoto Accords, lip service paid to the idea of limiting greenhouse gas emissions, but even the signatories will, in the end, ignore their promises if those promises lead to a slowdown in their local economies. The only way out is to find a way to shift the basis of our economy away from the use of greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels. Unfortunately, even if we manage to come up with the technological breakthroughs to make that happen, it will not happen in time to reverse, or even slow, the effects of global warming as expected through the rest of this century. If I am right, then we need to make a concerted effort to adapt to the new climate as best we can.