Real Win: Freeing Ourselves of Oil

by Bill Ray, REP member in Washington, published November 30, 2009 in the Herald, Everett, WA

Regarding the Nov. 13 letter, "Alarmists don’t have all the facts":

The letter cites examples of the kind of misinformation that is present on all sides of the climate political debate. Climate changes have to be averaged over at least 30 years to wash out weather cycles like El Nino. The short-term "cooling trend" cited is weather, not climate.

Solar output changes are only one of a couple dozen major factors in the planet’s complex thermal budget — and not a dominant one. To make informed scientific sense of the debate, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Weather Book by Jack Williams provides an excellent foundation on how the weather and climate work, or regionally see the NW Weather book by Cliff Mass.

Over the last 400,000 years the earth has cycled between ice ages and warmer interglacial periods like we are in, and CO2 has also cycled between consistent limits. However, after the industrial revolution, accelerating since the 1950s, as much extra CO2 has gone into the atmosphere as the 400,000-year differences between ice and not. It is high risk and hardly conservative to be adding CO2 to such an "experiment" on a global, multi-generational scale without knowing the consequences.

The real win is that what most of we should do for CO2 also reduces our dependence on buying petroleum from countries who are not our friends. But not all solutions are equal. Coal is deadly dirty while nuclear is not. Ethanol from algae, sawgrass or entire sugar cane plants are winners. Ethanol from food corn is break-even at best.