Word: carbonization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...year - and that is a good thing, because the Waxman-Markey energy bill passed by the House is an excellent candidate for euthanasia. It is a demonstration of all that's wrong with the legislative process in latter-day America. There is a simple solution to this problem: a carbon tax to discourage people from using fossil fuels. That tax could be immediately refunded in the form of lower payroll taxes. But the House Democrats, still playing by Reagan-era ground rules, were too frightened to go there: they proposed instead a weak, inelegant cap-and-trade system...
...paper published in the July 6 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by a team of researchers at Princeton University offers a possible way out of the diplomatic dead end. Instead of simply considering carbon emissions on a national or per capita level, the Princeton team proposes a more granular system of climate accounting that would examine the range of individual emissions within countries. Thanks to economic growth, there are well-off people in almost every nation in the world - and the global middle class and wealthy, in India or Indiana, are responsible for most of the carbon...
Chakravarty and his colleagues crunched total carbon emissions and income distribution from each country to estimate the emissions of individuals in each nation. For example, Australia and France have similar income levels - but because Australia uses more carbon-heavy fuels like coal, there are more Australians than French producing high levels of carbon emissions (above 10 metric tons of CO2 a year). The researchers then compiled those numbers to get a global estimate of how carbon emissions are distributed individually; unsurprisingly, about half of the world's emissions in 2008 came from the planet's 700 million richest people...
...global population in 2030 - would exceed. Emissions-reduction efforts would focus on the well-off people above the cap, whatever country they live in. That lets the global poor continue to use cheap fossil fuels to help lift themselves out of poverty - countering the argument that cutting carbon emissions will disproportionately hurt the poor. "The result is you decouple poverty reduction from averting global climate change," says Chakravarty...
Ultimately, the Princeton plan would still require rich, developed nations like the U.S. to make the sharpest emissions cuts, largely because they have the most well-off people and the biggest individual carbon emitters. And the study doesn't take into account the carbon that is embedded in imports and exports in global trade. But big developing nations like China - with its rising middle class - won't be let off the hook either. "We think this represents a nice path for distributing the share of the work of cutting emissions between countries," says Chakravarty. The Copenhagen negotiations will be hard...