Global warming research has become a very big business throughout the world. Each year billions of dollars are spent studying climate change. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), now has an annual budget that has reached more than 6 million. The Bush Administration has spent more than thirty billion dollars on federal programs involved in global warming in the last six years. In total, global warming proponents are estimated to have been funded by more than fifty billion dollars during the last decade.

In the frenzied search for solutions to the global warming crisis, climatologists, policy makers and other concerned environmentalists have overlooked one of the leading causes of rising temperatures around the globe—soot—the black residue that coats fireplaces and darkens vehicle exhaust.  Black carbon soot may in fact be the second largest contributor to global warming next to the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

According to Stanford environmental engineering Professor Mark Z. Jacobson, “Soot, or black carbon, may be responsible for 15 to 30 percent of global warming, yet it is not even considered in any of the discussions about controlling climate change.” (“Nature”, ScienceDaily, Feb. 9, 2001).  Jacobson also observed that human beings produce most of the soot particles that pollute the atmosphere.  He maintains that soot consists primarily of elemental carbon and that 90 percent of it comes from the consumption of fossil fuels (particularly coal, diesel fuel, jet fuel, natural gas, kerosene) and the burning of wood and other biomass.  Jacobson also claims that a worldwide reduction in soot emissions and controlling biomass burning could quell the alarming pace of global warming and also reduce our reliance on soot-producing fuels. ( http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/02/010208075206.htm.)

It cost me to fill up my car today—EIGHTY-FIVE DOLLARS! It’s been heading that way for some time. Listening to the news you’ll hear oil company executives deny that there is any corollary with their record profits and you will hear some politicians even deny that the war in Iraq and the greater instability in the Middle East have anything to do with it, none of which passes the smell test.

It has always amazed me that the most vigorously touted technologies for going green are the least viable for all practical purposes. It is as if there was someone leading us on a wild goose chase pursuing a “perfect” plug-in electric car or a cheap bio-fuel to surplant gasoline. It is as if there is a concerted effort to only promote the technologies that are ill-equipped to truly supplant fossil-fuels for combustion.

As we’ve already begun to see, ethanol would strangle agriculture. Even now there is a well rehearsed line from the right denouncing “burning food for fuel.” Other biofuels have similar problems or would produce pollution as bad as burning gasoline.