Word: carbonations
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...pendulum is shifting back. The sudden spike in both food and fuel prices is raising concerns that we may not be able to grow forever, that even with the best technological innovation, the planet may have limits. It's becoming increasingly clear that if we can't curb carbon emissions in a world of 6.8 billion, it may be impossible to do when there are 9 billion of us. And while population growth has slowed drastically in many countries in Western Europe and in Japan, where women are having fewer and fewer babies, it's still rising in much...
...would not "shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears" - was most remarkable for what it said about the changing politics of global warming. It is difficult to imagine a Republican candidate for President calling for a mandatory cap-and-trade system that would reduce U.S. carbon emissions to 60% below 1990 levels by 2025, as McCain does, or insisting on engagement with rising developing countries like China and India. It's sign that global warming has reached the mainstream, that it will be increasingly difficult to find politicians who claim it's simply a hoax, as Republican...
Like Obama and Clinton, McCain is calling for a mandatory cap-and-trade program that would gradually tighten limits on national carbon emissions, with the goal of reducing emissions to 60% below 1990 levels by 2050. (A number of similar bills have already been introduced to Congress, including one by McCain himself and another, by Senator Joseph Lieberman and John Warner, that has made it past the Senate's environment committee.) Like Obama and Clinton, and increasingly most mainstream environmentalists, McCain wants to let the private market do the work of cutting emissions, by effectively putting a price on carbon...
...bill, which is seen by many environmentalists as a compromise unequal to the scale of the cuts needed to avert dangerous warming. Though he didn't make this explicit in his speech, under his cap-and-trade plan McCain would initially give away most of the permits to emit carbon to industries, rather than auctioning them off, as Obama and Clinton would. (This means that under McCain's plan, carbon prices are likely to be lower than under the Democrats - and he'll miss out on the revenue created by an auction system, though McCain says that he'll gradually...
Most hopefully, McCain was realistic about the need for the U.S. to take the lead internationally on cutting carbon emissions, even without other major industrializing nations. "If the efforts to negotiate an international solution that includes China and India do not succeed, we still have an obligation to act," he said. That was a remarkably un-Bush thing to say - the President has long refused to engage seriously on an international climate change regime unless China and India take on emission-reduction goals too - and indeed, it was McCain's implicit criticism of Bush that most stood out in this...