Proverbial

In an online chat with 321 people (.br), this thursday, Folha de S. Paulo’s science editor Claudio Angelo said the Earth will “certainly survive” global warming, but it won’t be such a good place for people - especially the poor - to live in. Pretty much par for the course, these days. But then, he went on about how we might prevent such a dire future:

There’s a very simple practical measure: cut global CO2 emissions by 50% to limit the gas levels to 550 ppm (about double pre-industrial times) and limit the warming in 2100 to 2°C. The problem is that that’s not gonna happen, because the global economy is based on oil.

Well, if the global economy is based on oil, perhaps cutting emissions by half is not such a “very simple” thing to do, after all? According to mr. Angelo, it’s only a matter of will:

(…) [Americans] don’t change their attitude for a very simple reason: life there is VERY GOOD. Now, throughout the country, companies, cities and states (such as California, that has a Republican governor) are adopting emission restriction measures. Why won’t the US federal government commit itself? I don’t know, but I suspect that one of the answers lies in Exxon’s
US$ 39,5 billions profit announced in 2005.

In all fairness, he did mention that China is the second largest oil buyer in the world, with about 70% of its energy matrix on coal, and that it too needed to clean its act. But as one would expect, apart from saying that the world should magically decide to cut CO2 emissions by half, he has no proposal on how to achieve it, other than the usual mantra of “switching to nuclear energy until we conduct more research on renewable energies”, blah, blah, blah.

And that’s the science editor of one of the country’s most renowned newspaper. I don’t know about anyone else, but to me it says a lot about the state of science journalism in Brazil, and about the sort of thing we should expect to see in Folha de S. Paulo’s pages.

UPDATE: anyone remotely interested in really discussing the economic implications of currently proposed solutions to fossil fuels and carbon emissions could do a lot worse than this post on the Volokh Conspiracy about the “dirty secret” of climate policy, or this article on The New Atlantis about the myth of hidrogen as fuel.