The Trial Lawyer Summer 2022 | Page 76

Then there ’ s the issue of the way fossil fuels are financed . They ’ re not treated as a depleting public good , but as a source of profit — with investors either easily enticed to plunge into a passing mania or spooked to flee the market . Just in the past decade , investors have gone from underwriting a rapid expansion of fracking ( thereby incurring massive financial losses ), to insisting on fiscal responsibility , while companies are now milking profits from high prices and buying back stocks to increase their wealth . Long-term energy security be damned .
Meanwhile , the climate monster stirs fitfully . With every passing year , we have seen worsening floods , fires and droughts ; glaciers that supply water to billions of people melting ; and trickles of climate refugees threatening to turn into rivers . As we continue to postpone reducing the amounts of fossil fuels we burn , the cuts that would be required in order to avert irreversible climate doom become almost impossibly severe . Our “ carbon budget ” — the amount of carbon we can burn without risking catastrophic global warming — will be “ exhausted ” in about eight years at current emission rates , but only a few serious analysts believe that it would be possible to fully replace fossil fuels with energy alternatives that soon .
We need coherent , bold federal policy — which must somehow survive the political minefield that is Washington , D . C ., these days . Available policies could be mapped on a coordinate plane , with the horizontal x-axis representing actions that would be most transformative and the vertical y-axis showing what actions would be most politically feasible .
High on the y-axis are actions like those that the Biden administration just took , to release 1 million barrels a day of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve and to invoke the Defense Production Act to ramp up the production of minerals needed for the electric vehicle market . While politically feasible and likely popular , these efforts won ’ t be transformative .
An announcement by President Joe Biden of an ambitious energy-climate vision , with the goal of eliminating our dependence on foreign fuel sources and drastically reducing carbon emissions by the end of the decade , would probably fall somewhere in the middle , where the x- and y-axes meet . Such a vision would encompass a four-pronged effort being proposed by the government :
• Incentivizing massive conservation efforts , including “ Heat Pumps for Peace and Freedom ” and providing inducements for businesses to implement telework broadly .
• Directing domestic production of fossil fuels increasingly toward energy transition purposes ( for example , making fossil fuel subsidies contingent on how businesses are growing the percentage of these fuels being used to build lowcarbon infrastructure ).
• Mandating massive investments in domestic production of renewables and other energy transition technologies ( including incentives to recycle materials ).
• Providing an “ Energy Transition Tax Credit ” to households or checks to offset energy inflation , with most of the benefits going to low-income households .
Ultimately , some form of fuel rationing may be inevitable , and it is time to start discussing that and planning for it ( Germany has just taken the first steps toward gas rationing ) — even though this would be firmly in the x-axis territory . Rationing just means directing scarce resources toward what ’ s vital versus what ’ s discretionary . We need energy for food , critical supply chains and hospitals ; not so much for vacation travel and product packaging . When people first hear the word “ rationing ,” many of them recoil ; but , as author Stan Cox details in his history of the subject , Any Way You Slice It , rationing has been used successfully for centuries as a way to manage scarcity and alleviate poverty . The U . S . SNAP ( food stamp ) program is essentially a rationing system , and all sorts of materials , including gasoline , were successfully rationed during both world wars . More than two decades ago , the late British economist David Fleming proposed a system for rationing fossil fuel consumption at the national level called Tradable Energy Quotas , or TEQs , which has been discussed and researched by the British government . The system could be used to cap and reduce fossil fuel usage , distribute energy fairly and incentivize energy conservation during our transition to alternative sources .
Also , we need to transform the ways we use energy — for example , in
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