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Strategy 14: Reversing Global Warming

Current scientific consensus is that the release of carbon, methane and CFC gases into the atmosphere is creating a "greenhouse" effect that will raise the average base temperature of the Earth 2° to 5° over the next 50 years. Such a temperature rise will have profound impact on nearly all aspects of daily commerce -- from food supply to coastal settlements that will flood as the seas rise to health concerns. The World Health Organization predicts that in the next century malaria cases could increase by 50 to 80 million each year.[117]

The world currently gets 90% of its energy from carbon-based sources such as coal, oil and natural gas because these sources are "cheap." One reason they are cheap is that they are heavily subsidized. For example, Russia and Germany subsidize coal mining, and the US subsidizes oil by spending billions on keeping the Mid-East, not "safe for democracy" as anyone familiar with the autocratic regimes of the region can attest, but "safe for oil companies and consumers." Other subsidies, such as tax credits, cheap oil and gas leases on federal lands, government-run energy corporations, and price subsidies permeate the global energy system. Removing these subsidies, especially to carbon-based energy sources would be a money-saving measure that would lower carbon emissions and slow the onslaught of global warming. Through a combination of programs -- international accords, taxes on carbon release, increased energy efficiency in industry, transportation and households, decrease in fossil fuel use, increases in renewable energy use, and reforestation -- global warming can be slowed and eventually stopped.

Costs/Benefits

Such programs, not covered by other strategies listed above, would cost about $8 billion per year for thirty years. This is about 6% of what developing countries are spending on subsidizing their electricity prices, or less than 17% of what the insurance industry paid out in the 1990s for weather-related damage (three times what they paid out in the 1980s).[118] It is also about 1% of the world's total annual military expenditures, or 0.8% of the world's illegal drug trade.

Benefits would include a more stable environment, more secure food sources and food production regimes, more coastal lands, less flooding, less insurance payouts for weather damages, fewer weather caused natural disasters, fewer extinctions caused by shifting ecosystems, more stable national and international economies and fewer environmentally caused diseases such as malaria.

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