WASHINGTON – Americans' day-to-day lives won't change noticeably if President Barack Obama achieves his newly announced goal of slashing carbon dioxide pollution by one-sixth in the next decade, experts say.
Except for rising energy bills. And how much they'll go up depends on who's doing the calculating.
The White House will commit the U.S. to a goal of cutting carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 to about 17 percent below 2005 levels at a U.N.-sponsored climate change summit in Copenhagen early next month. That's about 12.5 percent below 2008 levels, according to theDepartment of Energy. He also set a goal of cutting emissions by 83 percent by 2050, which is what European nations want.
So the question is how big a burden would those double-digit cuts be for the average American.
Experts say it will mean higher energy bills, fewer deaths from air pollution, and maybe even a dividend check at the end of the
Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away
Climate sceptics have lied, obscured and cheated for years. That's why we climate rationalists must uphold the highest standards of science.I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can't possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.
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