The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [98]
Americans spew about twenty tons of CO2 per person per year. By the EPA’s calculations, the United States is imposing an annual burden on the environment of up to $1,224 per American. And that may be low. Other estimates reviewed by the agency put the social cost today of one ton of CO2 at $159. If we were presented with the bill, perhaps as a tax on energy use, we would in all likelihood use energy more sparingly.
Europeans do better, mostly thanks to hefty taxes that increase their price of energy. In 2009, German households paid almost €0.23 per kilowatt/hour of electricity, roughly three times the rate in the United States. They also pay about three times as much for their gas. And they are thriftier about their energy use. Germany consumes energy at a rate of somewhat above four tons of oil per person per year, roughly half the rate in the United States. German emissions of CO2—about ten metric tons per capita—also amount to about half of what Americans disgorge.
Americans too could be made to emit less carbon. But to do that, they would have to be made to pay for their emissions. The United States is a nation of drivers. In 2000, nine out of ten Americans drove to work, up from two thirds in 1960. There are 820 motor vehicles tooling along the nation’s roads and highways for every 1,000 Americans, compared with 623 for every 1,000 people in Germany, 557 in Canada, and 76 in Indonesia. The transport sector in the United States consumes almost twice the amount of gasoline per person as in Australia, nearly four times as much as in Britain, and thirty times as much as in China.
But though we love our cars, we can be persuaded to drive more efficient ones. A study of auto sales from 1999 to 2008 concluded that a one-dollar increase in gas prices boosted the market share of compact cars like the Toyota Corolla by 24 percent and reduced the share of pickups like the Ford F-150 by about 11 percent. That won’t transform the United States into Britain. There, gasoline costs up to three times as much and the bestselling car in 2009 was the tiny Ford Fiesta, which emits only 158 grams of CO2 per mile driven, compared with about 660 grams per mile emitted by Americans’ beloved Ford F-150 pickup truck. But tripling the price of gas might persuade Americans to lead somewhat more energetically frugal lives.
PRECISELY BECAUSE ENERGY is not sufficiently taxed, humanity consumes it with abandon, spewing around 39 billion tons of CO2 from energy use, 60 percent more than in 1980. Other dynamics, like deforestation, add another 20 billion tons. Because of this, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by more than half since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. And global temperatures have risen by about half a degree Celsius since then.
We have a lot more warming coming. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists studying warming around the world, on present trends greenhouse gas emissions will grow between 25 and 90 percent from 2000 to 2030. Along this path, the planet would warm at least 1.8 degrees Celsius and perhaps up to 6.4°C over the course of the current century.
For comparison, we are only 5°C warmer than we were during the last Ice Age.
It doesn’t require a lot of warming to cause environmental havoc. Even if temperatures rose less than 2°C, warming would disrupt patterns of rainfall, causing both floods and drought in India,