Word: coal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There are millions of reasons to think Congress won't do much about global warming, all stockpiled in the lobbying budgets of the U.S.'s mightiest interest groups--automakers and other manufacturers, environmentalists, labor unions, farmers, oil companies, coal companies, utilities, the military, antitaxers and so on. A Washington axiom holds that it's always easier to do nothing than to do something. By that standard, tackling climate change, which would affect every industry and every private life, looks almost impossible...
Easy to say but fiendishly difficult to execute in a world where carbon emitters range from coal-fired power plants to the backyard grill. "How many sources of carbon dioxide are we talking about?" mused Fitzgibbons. "How do you allocate the amounts? t's a geometrically complex arrangement...
Even tougher is the one perplexing area in which the fight against global warming conflicts with the U.S.'s goal of greater energy independence: coal. "The U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal," Dingell recently declared. We have seemingly endless tons of the stuff, which can be converted into liquid fuel for cars. Coal boosters are pushing legislation through Congress to subsidize the use of coal instead of oil. The only problem: coal is the dirtiest source of greenhouse gases. Representative Rick Boucher, from Virginia's mining country, chairs the subcommittee on energy, but coal's influence goes further than...
...away with the existing CAFE system for measuring fuel efficiency and replace it with a system that measures tailpipe emissions. After all, a car that runs 25 miles on a gallon of clean biodiesel might be preferable environmentally to a car that runs 35 miles on gasoline or liquid coal...
...meet reduction targets in part by trading pollution credits. Critics often dismiss carbon offsets as the green equivalent of religious indulgences, but in fact they stimulate the market-moving entrepreneurs to find dirty plants, clean them up and sell the CO2 reductions. Gore also wants a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants that don't capture and store their carbon emissions and much higher fuel-economy standards for cars. After Gore presented these views on Capitol Hill, critics assailed them as costly, unworkable economy cripplers. His reply: in a few years, when the crisis worsens, these proposals "will seem...