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US House May Pass "Cap & Trade" Bill
jamie found this roundup on the status of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, which is about to be voted on by the US House of Representatives. (The article notes that if the majority Democrats can't see the 218 votes needed for passage, they will probably put off the vote.) The AP has put together a FAQ that says, "[The bill, if passed,] fundamentally will change how we use, produce and consume energy, ending the country's love affair with big gas-guzzling cars and its insatiable appetite for cheap electricity. This bill will put smaller, more efficient cars on the road, swap smokestacks for windmills and solar panels, and transform the appliances you can buy for your home." The odds-makers are giving the bill a marginal chance of passing in the House, with tougher going expected in the Senate.
You know, I can't buy the old school hydrochlorofluorocarbon [wikipedia.org] to use as a refrigerant in my new car. The new stuff doesn't work as well (it's close) but it's a lot better for the environment. Small things like this can be important to entities like the EPA.
R-134a is actually not very efficient compared to R-11/R-12, and overall it may be *worse* for the environment. Don't confuse "doing something" with "doing the right thing" -- banning CFCs and HCFCs in cooling systems was not necessarily the best choice. Among other things, cooling systems were not a huge contributer to atmospheric CFCs (particularly modern, low-pressure chillers which cannot leak), and the ozone hole is actually not nearly as bad as we imagined when we started banning things. But now, 25 year later, greenhouse gasses are a much larger concern, and you know what the CFC/HCFC ban did without question -- raise energy usage in cooling systems by lowering efficiency.
You see, in our rush to do something to "save the environment" (i.e. generate political capital) we just rushed out and banned the first thing we could find that had a potential negative environmental impact and didn't have a strong lobby to protect it. We could have done something useful like reducing sulphur levels in diesel (we put that off for another 20 years), but instead we did something that is, at best, a wash for the environment, and quite possibly detrimental. Can we please not make the same mistake twice in a row?