Why We Can’t Go Green
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September 29, 2009 • Alex Baker
Filed under Opinions and Views
“Going green” has gained a lot of popularity within the past few years. People are doing things to help the environment like riding bikes and recycling. These are little steps to fight global warming, but to actually make significant strides in helping the environment people are going to have to take the leap and put large scale plans into effect.
Small steps like carpooling are a good start, but, compared to other ideas, carpooling only saves a fraction of energy. Yes, carpooling does help; it saves about 850 million gallons of gas a year. However, what if four trillion gallons of gas could be saved?
United States Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, projects that we could save that much energy. This goal could be accomplished by painting roofs white and lightening all roads from black to a concrete color. The energy saved by changes such as these would be equivalent to taking every car in the United States off of the road for eleven years. If we can save all that energy, then what is keeping us from putting these plans into effect? The answer is money.
It would take a lot of taxpayers’ money to paint all roads and roofs and people are not willing to pay for these huge projects. People in the United States are not dedicated to helping the environment and aren’t willing to turn global warming around unless they can see profit for themselves and for their posterity.
Another example that shows people are unwilling to sacrifice their money to reduce carbon emissions is The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, a major part of which is the cap-and-trade system.
Cap-and-trade systems have quickly surfaced as the focus of climate policy discussions across the country and are relatively easy to understand, even for the layperson. In short, a “cap” is a legal limit on the quantity of greenhouse gases that a region can emit each year and “trade” means that companies may swap among themselves the permission – or permits – to emit greenhouse gases.
There are only a certain amount of permits that can be purchased and there are fewer permits available to companies each year the program survives. The goal is to commit the United States to responsible limits on global warming emissions to gradually step down those limits over time.
President Obama is a big fan of these systems and he has made it clear that establishing bold cap-and-trade programs is a priority for the United States of America.
The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 caps carbon emissions at seventeen percent below 2005 levels by 2020, gradually lowering the cap to eighty-three percent below 2005 levels by 2050. Obviously, the latter will not affect our generation, but, perhaps even more important, it will profoundly affect our children’s lives. If this bill does what it plans to do, carbon emissions will not be completely eradicated, but they will be significantly less than what they are now.
There are many plenty ways to fight global warming, but people are going to have to put their ideas into effect. The real problem of global warming isn’t the lack of being able to solve it but rather people’s unwillingness to solve it.
I feel that many people may not even understand how little they are doing to help the environment. People need to realize that there are going to be many necessary sacrifices in order to completely stop the progress of global warming. So are we really ready to stop it? Do we truly care about the environment? Or do we like our ways and our “green” too much to go green?
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