U.S. EPA Will Regulate Carbon Dioxide under the Clean Air Act

Let me slip this tidbit in first, before I discuss CO2 (it's good to be back after a bit of a hiatus from this blog!). U.S. gasoline prices have quietly leapt higher, from lows of $1.69 per gallon not too long ago to $2.15 per gallon (using the gas station down the street from me in Massachusetts as a gauge).

Quietly, because no one is really talking about "soaring gas prices" at the moment of a really bad economic downturn. Yet the current price represents a 27 percent increase in just a few months.

Much of the energy talk now revolves around which low-carbon strategies to implement in light of making an attempt to stem global warming.

However, oil is currently at $57 per barrel; any further increases will make it much more difficult for the world to recover from recession.

Speaking of global warming, the U.S. EPA in mid-April declared that it would regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) and four other pollutants under the Clean Air Act. This declaration precedes a formal proposal to regulate the greenhouse gases, which include methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride. The declaration will be accompanied by the usual quips about human exhalation of CO2 and how it can be controlled!

Here's the detailed EPA description of their decision.

It's a several-months long bureaucratic public process (I used to write about these regulatory issues in a newsletter) before CO2 emissions end up falling under a new final regulation.

However, the Obama administration has now made a complete about-face compared with the Bush presidency in an effort to regulate CO2 emissions and move to a low-carbon economy.

The next stage in this contentious legal arm-wrestling is a proposed "cap-and-trade" system for limiting overall greenhouse gas emissions.

Have I really conserved?

By displaying how much gasoline I used on the year in the left column of this page, I'm helping myself reduce gas use by measuring my consumption, whereas also crowing about my accomplishment. I'd say I've reduced my gasoline consumption by about 175 or more gallons per year, compared with previous years.

But is 225 gallons of consumed gasoline in a year really a lofty goal? Not really. Let's do the math.

A lot of people in China want to realize the American dream and drive like Americans.

According to Lester Brown's book Plan B 3.0, if China reached the car-ownership rate of Americans (three cars for every four people) by 2030 China will have more cars than exist on earth right now (heading for 2009).

And to provide the space on which to drive them, they would have to pave over a lot of the acreage that they require to grow rice and feed their teeming throngs.

Now to my supposed reduced consumption. 1.1 billion cars is the projected number of cars owned in China given an average eight-percent economic growth rate from now until 2030. What if all of these cars driven by people in China used as much gas as I did in 2008?

1.1 billion X 225 divided by 365 equals 678,082,191 gallons of gas used per day. Since one barrel of oil produces about 20 gallons of gas (plus other products like heating oil), then China's 2030 consumption equates to about 33,904,109 barrels of oil per day.

This number exceeds present U.S. consumption by more than 10 million barrels per day, and would probably represent more than one-third of all the daily available oil in the world.

Therefore, not even my reduced consumption is impressive or sustainable, and I haven't even mentioned the associated carbon emissions, which is probably the most important aspect of reducing gasoline consumption.