And let’s please not forget that every barrel of oil we buy from you-know-where is that many more dollars sent to you-know-who (rhymes with Obama).
The bad news is America uses lots of oil. The good news is there are plenty of easy things we can do to save oil.
Here’s one:
Every shopping mall and supermarket and movie theater and convenience store and highway rest stop— turn the thermostat down two degrees fahrenheit in the winter, and up two degrees in the summer.
Two degrees: summer up, winter down. Simple. Effective. And dare I say it, a helluva lot more patriotic than sending our dollars you-know-where.
Here is an update on the can-we-solve-it and it-costs-too-much global climate crisis conversation, from Reuters November 12:
“Limiting warming to no more than 2 degrees would be especially expensive because it would involve scrapping and replacing dirty power plants at a cost of about $3.6 trillion from 2010-2030, the IEA report said.
That compares with global efforts in recent weeks to shore up the world economy at a cost of about $4 trillion.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4AB2L220081112
Hello??
Banks fail and governments rush money to them, more than the highest price tag for mitigating global warming, a price tag, let’s remember, which will launch a new industry, new jobs, with great benefits to the planet and people, and which will result in greatly reduced healthcare costs. And let’s not forget that the reduced healthcare costs means many millions fewer people will be made ill by our pollution, not a small thing, and immeasurable in monetary terms.
Why aren’t these benefits being internalized in the cost analysis? Just as carbon-burning industries fail to internalize their true costs, now analysis of the costs of solving the climate crisis is failing to internalize the benefits of those solutions— benefits which outweigh the cost.
And any sound discussion of the cost of solving global warming must include the costs of NOT solving the problem, which from all estimates, far exceed the cost of solving it. The benefits of solving the problem, and the costs of not solving the problem positively dwarf the costs of solving the problem.
So can we just stop externalizing costs and benefits? The urge to externalize is part of our tendency to blame and shift responsibility, and this human characteristic is NOT serving our best interests. It never does, in fact. But maybe that’s beside the point:
Let’s just spend the the money to fix this. How much of a no-brainer is this? Big one.