Now that Albany has been declared The Greenest City in California by at least two evaluating groups, you might think we could rest on our laurels for a spell. But be careful! The City of Berkeley (no doubt chagrined at playing second fiddle to Albany in the "Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the greenest of them all?" competition) is revving up to retake the number one spot. An aggressive Climate Action Plan is up for consideration over yonder, supported in part by a $12.00/year "carbon tax" assessed on the utility bills of residences, higher parking meter rates, and expansion of residential parking permit zones. According to a Chronicle article Berkeley now spends 2.9 million a year on green programs and these new initiatives will cost an additional 4.9 million, for a total of 7.8 million dollars! People! These folks are playing for keeps!
Clearly Albany must respond or be toppled off the center podium. But where will the money come from? With our anemic economic development efforts--which mainly consist of hiring consultants--Albany seems to be making little progress toward becoming the "Green Silicon Valley" of the East Bay --and enjoying the additional tax revenues that all those green laboratories, conventional centers, and hotels would bring. Like Berkeley, we may have to, at long last, turn parking meters for our salvation, and our mayor has been seen to break into board grin at the mere mention of these. Referred to as "Albany Slots" by some who oppose them, we must be quick to point out that parking meters are entirely different from the dreaded slot machines. Parking meters never pay out.
But all that is really not what we came to talk about here. We want to talk about CO2 and the passion this gas evokes. Helen of Troy was said to have had "The face that launched 1000 ships." CO2 is the gas that has launched thousands of green programs--programs that employ growing numbers of people, and attract vast amounts of money. And CO2 forms the basis significant legislation and tax initiatives as government takes up the "fight".
We are told that each of us has a duty to join this "fight against global warming" by reducing CO2, so that our kids and grandkids will have a habitable world to live in. We are told: "Together, we can do it!". Lots of people now make a living researching its attributed effects. "100 Concerned Scientists" take out full-page newspaper ads predicting dire consequences as CO2 increases. And our media does its part to communicate all this in most alarming ways. Anything going up tends to "soar". Anything on the decline "plummets". Graph axes are crafted to create steep trend lines.
So with all this quasi-religious fervor, feverish activity, and money in play, we thought it might be helpful to take a second look at humanity's number one contribution to global warming, that is to say the production of CO2. (We will leave the moosemade, methane based, impact on global warming for another article--and will only point out here that moose have one heckofa methane hoofprint, as research in Norway has demonstrated). The scientific explanation of CO2's contribution to global warming can get devilishly complex, but we won't let that bother us. At the risk of oversimplifying things we'll try to look at this mother of all gasses in understandable ways and let you, our well-informed readers decide for yourselves if and where we've gone wrong.
They always told us in journalism school that newspaper articles need to be mercifully short in order to accommodate busy readers who have a lot of other (better?) things to do. So we'll have to take this matter up again some other time in part two of this article.
!!! Be sure to go back here !!!