Drill and Research

I've just finished this book, and in it Bjorn Lomborg claims that with a 25 billion dollar a year investment worldwide, we could fund enough research and development to replace our need of fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy.

His solution for raising the funds is to tax carbon emissions at 2 dollars a ton. Now, I'm all for funding R&D for renewable energy but I think that we can do that without any new taxes. And we can get the 25 billion from the US alone.

I suggest we take all the money we get from land leases for drilling (on and off-shore), which came to about 9.4 billion last year. That total will be even higher if we open more areas for drilling. And while we're at it get rid of the the new farm subsidies bill at about 30 billion a year. This would give us almost twice the recommended amount needed to fund the research necessary to get us off of oil. Even without the farm subsidy money we would fund almost half of the 25 billion from land leases alone.

Also, new oil drilling sites would allow us to stabilize the price of oil, giving us time to transition to these new forms of energy.

I should probably mention that Lomborg agrees with the findings of the IPCC. Even with this being the case he still thinks it the 14th most important problem to tackle.

Also, with all that uranium coming out of Iraq, we could have the fuel for all those new nuclear power plants McCain wants.

I'll be doing a detailed write up on the entire book in future posts.