When thinking about the problems that our culture will be facing in the upcoming years, one cannot help but contemplate how we will deal with our energy problems. In a recent article by The Christian Science Monitor, Kurt Cobb argues that our current political strategies are doing little to alleviate our problems, and are in fact "designed for specific constituencies with no coherent goal." He asserts that we need more than subsidies for well to do companies. Many parties believe in a different end goal in the battle of the carbon footprint. Some of the measures discussed include a complete transition to nuclear energy, switching to renewable resources, and to seek the cheapest prices for energy with no regard for the environmental price. Prior to the nuclear incident in Japan, the nuclear strategy was gaining quite a bit of steam. What Cobb describes as the "de facto policy of the United States," the Obama administration endorses an "all of the above" strategy.
Cobb goes on to argue that our supply of fossil fuels are becoming harder and harder to obtain. Either they are becoming harder to extract geologically, they are more sparsely distributed, or because they are in areas that are difficult to access in the first place (deep under the seabed.) Also, climate change is proceeding faster than we previously thought. While many previous studies suggested that the arctic ice would be gone by mid century, some studies are now showing that it could be gone as soon as 2020. On top of green house admissions, the prices that fossil fuel companies are putting forth are much lower than what they may be in reality. Our idea of risk is also a bit skewed. "It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear." This speaks to the idea that our long term forecasts of risk management are not exceedingly accurate. Because we know that our fossil fuels will last for at least another few decades, we choose to ignore the environmental factors that are being produced by them. If we don't have to worry about them for another few decades, then what is the point? It is Cobb's opinion that the only way to fix our carbon addiction would be to place an ever rising tax on carbon. This would not favor any of the energy ideas proposed, but would keep carbon use on everyones' minds. If we do not put some sort of measures into place, then this surmounting problem will only get worse with every passing year.
