In the summer of 2006 my hometowns of El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico saw something they had not seen before: torrential rains that lasted for about a week.
As a desert environment, the region tends to have long periods of drought with a short-lived periods of intense precipitation in the summer months. For example, in an average year, it will not rain for a few (or many) months and then one day there will be a torrential downpour of biblical proportions. But these will usually last for no more than a few hours, sometimes even minutes.
That week, the rain did not stop.
As a place not used to dealing with precipitation, El Paso is ill-adapted to rain (i.e. it has terrible drainage systems). As a result, there was widespread flooding that caused a lot of infrastructural damage. The interstate highway that connects the city was completely submerged, leaving people stranded far from home.
El Paso’s neighbor to the south, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, saw even worse damage to infrastructure, livelihood, and human lives. Many roads were undrivable afterwords, people’s homes were destroyed, and lives were lost.
Having experienced such drastic changes in climate has made me worry about the future unanticipated effects of global warming on communities across the globe. As Luers et al. of the Union of Concerned Scientists point out in their report “How to Avoid Dangerous Climate Change: A Target for U.S. Emissions Reductions,” no matter which road we take, GHG (Green House Gas)emissions must be “reduced between 40 and 50 percent from 2000 levels by 2050,” in order to avoid catastrophic climate change. The more realistic and gradual of the plans would have the U.S. peak in its GHG emissions in 2010; next year!
In light of this, we need to make vast and sweeping changes in our consumption of fossil fuel energy pretty rapidly. The more generous time frame would have us peaking at 2020 but we would have to reduce our consumption after that very rapidly. Such drastic changes would be unsettling and for the most part, unpleasant.
So how do we achieve such drastic reductions in emissions in less than ten years? In order to achieve long term and meaningful reductions, we need to change the basic energy infrastructure and build new systems of renewable energy to make them readily accessible for everyone when the time comes. But until those systems are in place, what can be done to encourage conservation?
A number of economic incentives are discussed in Jane A. Leggett’s “Climate Change: Current Issues and Policy Tools” 2009 CRS Report for Congress. The two main ones are GHG fees/carbon taxes and cap-and-trade. I believe a tax for consumers and a cap-and-trade system for producers could, if well thought-out and implemented, take us a long way in reducing our total emission of GHGs.
Ideally there would be a system in place where individuals could track their own emissions and make adjustments accordingly, in order to save money. Energy efficiency could be maximized by people trying to reduce the amount they pay. Such an immediate and personal way of making people think about their own emissions would benefit us in the long run, even if people would be initially upset about the tax.
The tax revenue could then go into building infrastructure for locally adequate renewable resources. For example, El Paso has over 310 (intensely) sunny days a year. Why not take advantage of that with extensive installation of solar panels?
It is necessary to keep in mind the cost of our actions to the environment (our only home), and internalize those costs to ensure a good quality of life for future generations.
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Here is a video of some of the damage the 2006 flood caused:
The following is a video on a more radical way of cooling down the earth through geoengineering. Of course there are some consequences of using such techniques, such as drastic climate change (cooling/warming) which could cause many problems, as well as the problem of acidification of oceans. However, it is interesting to see the possibilities and tools that are available.
Tags: carbon tax, climate change, floods, Mexico, solar energy, Texas
