Summary of talk by Angela Johnson Meszaros

I attended a talk a few days ago given by Angela Johnson Meszaros. A lot of information was related to environmental justice on which she had been working for 15 years.

The current biofuels made by corn is not good. She said that the cellulosic technology will help but it is not ready for industrial use yet.

She said that carbon trading does not work because:

• the caps are too high
• the cost per ton is way too low, about $3 per ton (vs $300,000 per lb for particulate matter)
• industries will buy their way to continue their current business of burning fossil fuels
• they can do the same thing as well by buying carbon offsets
• the acid rain cap and trade program is not a comparison for carbon because it followed regulations (the Clean Air Act), also there were technologies readily available for industries to immediately employ to reduce SO2 emissions. For CO2, there are no regulations or emission limit to follow and no good current technologies to switch to.
• the price per ton does not include external (environmental and social) cost
• the current programs in EU, the one in the East Coast, and the RECLAIM program in SoCal all are not working.

The best way is to have carbon tax. But politicians are always afraid that the proposal of adding tax will be rejected in congress.

One audience asked a question about the EJ community. She said that they are the people who practise the most "sustainability". They are the ones who always find ways to reduce the cost and reuse resources. The infrastructure is not available for extensive use, so people cannot just trade 3 hours of public transit to driving their car to pick up the kids.

She also said that carbon capture/sequestration is not recommended because it is just another way to "encourage" the use of fossil fuels (I think short-term "coverup"). It is just putting CO2 somewhere else, and there is no guarantee that the "storage" will be safe in the long-term.

My sidenotes and thoughts:

There is a new article today saying that ethanol production requires much more water predicted before. So a lot of water is used for corn production and then another lot of water for ethanol production.
http://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2009/04/14/1/

Carbon trading won't stop climate change
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227046.200-carbon-trading-wont-stop-climate-change.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=climate-change