Every serious effort to slow global warming needs to start with a geographic reality. Carbon dioxide (CO 2) is the main human cause for warming. Climate change is also caused by other gases, albeit small players compared to CO 2. Through global warming, it is necessary to make a great tooth of CO 2. The most significant economic and polyethic problems presented by slowing global warming derive from the fact that CO2 lingers for one hundred or more years in the atmosphere, which is why climate policy analysts classify it as a “stock pollutant.” Global warming is continuing with the rise of stock.
Since CO2 extraction processes operate very slowly from the atmosphere, major stock changes require large emission transformations. For example, the only way to stop the accumulation of CO 2, the global emissions must be cut by around half. Reducing the stock required eventually to reverse global warming would require even more drastic reductions. It is difficult to pin out just how much a cut is required because the natural processes that remove CO 2 are not fully understood. It is likely that the stock of CO2, which would require even deeper cuts, will be much less efficient.
As CO2 is an inventory pollutant, the heating problem is global. Emissions waft around the world in about a year, much quicker than hundreds of years, to eliminate most of that pollution, in natural processes. Politically speaking, this means that every country will evaluate the decision to reduce emissions with an eye on what others will do because no country, acting alone, can have a great impact on the planetary problem. The pollution from other countries wafted globally, even the biggest polluters, like China and the United States, is mostly damaged.
Because CO2 is our main pollutant, our focus is on energy policy, and we know that serious regulation. CO2 is a by-product of the society’s current consumption of fossil fuels, and the vast majority of useful energy from fossil fuels that power modern economies. It won’t make much difference to tinker at the range of the energy system. Probably a major reengineering of current energy systems is needed for deep CO2 cuts. This will change, among many other consequences, the electricity generated by utilities and the fuels used for transport. It is not impossible to make such a transformation; in fact, several times it happened in history.
