An honest look at the facts
Finally, a SmartPlanet column that states the facts. Most of the growth in carbon emissions in the coming years will not be in America, where in fact it is falling to levels not seen since the early 1990s because cheap natural gas from fracking is replacing coal in electricity generation. This was happening even before the EPA got on the bandwagon and essentially outlawed new coal power plants.
The only problem I have with the article is that in the US the "subsidies" oil, gas, and coal receive are largely the same kinds of "subsidies" every business gets in the form of capital depreciation allowances. In renewables, it comes in the form of the government making wild bets on companies such as Solyndra and A123. And the conventional energy industry is many times larger the renewable energy industry. If you look at subsidies per unit of power produced, renewables receive much larger subsidies than conventional energy.
This doesn't mean that America and the world is awash in an infinite supply of oil and natural gas. In fact, the projection is that America will lead Saudi Arabia in oil production for only a short while. What it does mean is that we have time to come up with alternatives that are finally economically justifiable, and time to implement them. In particular, we need to come up with cheap energy storage for renewable technologies that produce power in unpredictable amounts.
