(Installment 11 of the autobiographical series, "Liters to the Black Bone.")
I am concerned about the environment, but what’s the alternative? Are you going to tell the people in Sub-Saharan Africa that they have to live off two dollars a day for the rest of their life and have an infant mortality rate that’s fifty times what it is here and a much lower life expectancy? We have the tools to grow in an environmentally responsible way. In the U.S. emissions actually fell last year. Why? It’s not because our economy shrunk. It grew. It’s not because industrial production declined. It grew. It’s not because we had some very sophisticated carbon-pricing Kyoto accord, we don’t have that. It happened because natural gas is displacing coal to a very large degree in electricity generation and because the typical car sold today is 15% more fuel efficient than the typical car sold 5 years ago, and people have been focusing on efficiency. Our economy grew, we added several hundred billion new dollars in economic activity while emissions declined. And it happened without some major, successful policy. So it’s doable.
Read more:
2. The Tuk Tuk
No comments:
Post a Comment