USA Today:
The worldwide economic slowdown is having an unexpected positive impact in the fight against global warming: Emissions of carbon dioxide are falling, records collected by governments show.
From the United States to Europe to China, the global economic crisis has forced offices to close and factories to cut back. That means less use of fossil fuels such as coal to make energy. Fossil-fuel burning, which creates carbon dioxide, is the primary human contributor to global warming.
A recession-driven drop in emissions "is good for the environment," says Emilie Mazzacurati of Point Carbon, an energy research company. "In the long term, that's not how we want to reduce emissions."
Yeah, probably not. I'm not even sure how we'd manage to keep things this bad. There's a lot of economic thought on how to get an economy out of a recession, but not a lot about how to maintain one -- although, the Republican party seems breaking new ground in that research. Give them another shot at an alternative budget and I'm pretty confident they'll come up with a way to keep us permanently screwed. They've got a real talent for that kind of work. Too much talent, actually. They'd probably find a way to keep us in the poorhouse while increasing carbon emissions... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
