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Environment
Air is a scarce resource too
One solution to CO2 emissions is to sell air at market prices
By Kevin Potvin |
The two major global problems facing all governments—CO2 emissions causing global warming, and resource depletion causing economic disruption—are treated so separately that Peak Oil, for example, the most serious example of resource depletion, is not even mentioned in any documents going into the world’s biggest and most important environmental conference getting under way this week in Bali.
The world community is meeting in Bali in a follow-up to the Kyoto meetings that produced the infamous Kyoto Protocol. The point of the meeting is to assess how the world has met the challenge so far of heading off mankind-produced climate change, and to find the way forward to bring the world around to lower CO2 emissions.
With the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on their laps, world leaders don’t have a lot to be proud of. The report says that the planet’s average temperature is rising dangerously fast, and that man has undoubtedly caused the rise, mostly through production of CO2, and that CO2 is mostly released by the burning of fossil fuels, especially oil. The report says that rather than reducing its burning of oil since the Kyoto agreement, the world has only increased it. Governments and businesses have responded by saying any serious decline in the world’s burning of oil could bring on severe economic hardship.
Part of the problem leading to this impasse arises from the general failure among policy makers and commentators alike to see that CO2 emissions and Peak Oil are one and the same problem. Both are a case of resource depletion.
There are plenty of industrial processes that require a commodity for production of a manufactured good that doesn’t, in the end, contain any of that commodity. The production of oil itself is a prime example. Most production of oil today, especially in Alberta’s tar sands, requires a great deal of fresh water, yet fresh water is not a part of the finished gasoline product. Water is nonetheless an important, and increasingly scarce and expensive, commodity in the oil production business, and oil producers must account for the market costs of water in pursuing their industrial activities.
Tailpipe exhaust is part of the whole fossil fuel cycle, and without it, there would be no oil being burned. Exhaust is only possible provided there is a key resource available to dissipate it, that resource being air. Just as water resources are essential to the production of oil, air resources are essential to the burning of oil. And just like water, there is only so much air available for the complete industrial process before other uses for the commodity are too far infringed upon. Too much CO2 in the air deployed to dissipate the gas ruins the resource, just like too much contamination of fresh water deployed to produce the oil ruins that resource.
Oil resources themselves are being depleted just as other industrial resources associated with the production of oil, like water and air, are also being depleted. We already know how to deal with resource depletions: either governments mandate rationing, or market forces are employed to price remaining resources high enough to reduce consumption.
If air’s capacity to dissipate CO2 were considered an industrial resource like any other, and if we’re all agreed that that resource is being serious depleted, then there should no longer be any more head-scratching about what to do. Either governments mandate rationing of the remaining stocks of the resource, or market forces are employed to price the resource out of enough hands to achieve a reduction in its consumption.
Just as the depletion of the oil resource itself has caused prices to rise to more than $90 per barrel, with no one suggesting their governments do anything to cushion the economic blows such high prices will bring, so too should the depletion of the air resource be allowed to cost industrial and consumer users whatever it might come to cost without governments doing anything to cushion the economic blows.
Until now, most commentators and political and business leaders have cautioned governments not to do anything about CO2 emissions that might cost their economies to suffer blows. But this is a completely backward approach. By appearing to do nothing, governments are dangerously subsidizing at great cost the further depletion of an already badly depleted resource.
The real act of staying out of the way of market forces would see governments letting the real cost of the increasingly scarce resource of air enter into industrial processes. Only when the total costs of all resources employed in the complete oil cycle, from production to burning, are included in the prices paid by consumers of oil will we actually have the dreamed-of market system working properly and free from state interference.
As air is a public commodity like fresh water, forests, and airwaves, the solution is now simple: charge private industrial users of the resource a price that reflects the scarcity and usefulness of that resource.
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The Republic of East Vancouver masthead
The Republic of East Vancouver supports no party, advocates
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