He wants Biden to open up more drilling and predicts that engineering will eventually solve climate change. He blamed the high gasoline prices on President Joe Biden’s policies. The towing still takes place because he doesn’t want to give up family vacations, Gowan said. To save money, he has subbed a small Jeep Renegade SUV, which gets substantially better fuel economy than the 24 miles per gallon he gets with the pickup, which he bought to tow a travel trailer. “That one doesn’t come out of the driveway near as much as it used to,” he said while pumping gas near work. But with gas close to $5 per gallon, he’s cut one-quarter of the truck trips. Richard Gowan, 56, of Brighton, Michigan, used to commute 26 miles to his Ann Arbor workplace twice per week in a 2021 Ford F-150 pickup. Now people are paying more when they hit the gas station and some are changing their habits. Carbon emissions are causing harm, especially to future generations, but for decades cheap gas has meant “no one is paying for that harm,” he said. High gas prices are “unequivocally” good for fighting climate change because people use less fossil fuel and emissions go down, but the poorest people, who don’t have other options also “suffer the most,” said climate economist Solomon Hsiang, director of the Climate Impact Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. “So prices that are high and expected to stay that way have more of a longer term ability to cut demand and my guess is the administration wouldn’t mind seeing that, but the problem is that people hate it.” “High fuel prices are a really difficult thing because they’re a double-edged sword,” said Samantha Gross, director of the energy security and climate initiative at the centrist Brookings Institution. climate goal is to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. Yet, a 6% drop in driving roughly translates to only a 1% drop in overall U.S.
That 6% drop is tiny compared to the 40% plunge in driving miles in April 2020 as the pandemic kicked in. Energy Information Administration.Īmericans in April, the last month data was available, drove 6% fewer miles than the same month in 2019, according to transportation analyst Michael Sivak, a former University of Michigan professor who is a long-time tracker of driving and car-buying habits. June gas sales are about 5% below pre-pandemic 2019 levels and 2.6% below a year ago, according to the U.S. Gas prices in much of the United States shot past the $5 a gallon mark last month before a slight drop, and Americans have responded by driving a bit less, two sets of data show. As Congress and now the Supreme Court stymie the Biden administration’s efforts to curb climate change, one thing the president doesn’t want - sky high gas prices - actually is nibbling away at emissions of heat-trapping gas.
0 kommentar(er)
