Senate vote on greenhouse gas regulation coming up

[Yangbo Du]

The Senate will be voting on the USEPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow (Wednesday), and debate on carbon cap-and-trade will likely follow on the tail of health-care reform.  When you contact your senators or other legislators regarding energy and climate policy, consider including an adaptation of the following comment (taken verbatim from my most recent correspondence with mine, though I first encountered the idea from a faculty panelist at a recent MIT Energy Club forum on carbon capture and sequestration):

I strongly recommend asking your colleagues this (provocative) question:  Nearly a century ago, did we become worse off because automobiles supplanted horse-drawn carriages?  Now substitute 'clean energy' for 'automobiles' and 'fossil fuels' for 'horse-drawn carriages'.

Thomas Friedman used the same analogy to argue in favor of globalization from the perspective of a 'compassionate flatist' in case you read The World is Flat.  It would be worthwhile to know how those defending 'business-as-usual' respond to such a comparison -- note that auto transport was (and still is) heavily subsidized at the local, state, and federal levels (indirectly through public highways if not directly) should anyone expect renewable energy to scale-up rapidly in the immediate future without strong commitment to R&D, regulatory certainty, or carbon pricing.

Feel free to devise additional means of conveying to the general public, in a quickly comprehensible form, the complex issue of decoupling from fossil fuels.

Yangbo Du