Hot and cold

Coal dork that I am, even as temperatures hover below zero here in Gillette, two articles on climate change (you know, global warming? That would be OK this week...) caught my eye:

The Economist reports that Norway's government has unveiled a plan to become "carbon neutral" by 2030, with the ambitious goal of cutting carbon dioxide equivalent output by up to 31 percent over the next 12 years. That's a 15-to-17 million ton cut. For those keeping score at home, based on data from the Energy Information Administration, the United States would have to cut 1,854 million tons to achieve the same percentage of cuts. To be fair, Norway is much smaller in size (324,000 square kilometers) and population (4.6 million folks) than the U.S. (9.8 million square kilometers and just over 300 million people) but the policy implications are pretty staggering as Congress gets ready to debate the Warner/Lieberman bill. And we did produce about 110 times more carbon dioxide in 2005.

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is calling for the World Bank to become "a bank of the environment" and Robert Redford (of All the President's Men fame) has produced a movie dealing a movie dealing with fights against coal plants in Texas.

Now if these people could just get the snow out of our driveway...