Full of Hot Air

President Bush is going to be making an announcement about curbing emissions, including carbon dioxide. Democrats have been pushing for him to comply with a Supreme Court decision that concluded that carbon dioxide should be treated as a greenhouse gas. It wont make much of a difference since the political class is pretty well convinced of this, so they're all looking to see how to make a few bucks on the global warming thing while avoiding actually having to pay for their own actions.

There is no end to the hypocrisy though. The same folks who want to replace incandescent bulbs with CFLs are busy flying around the planet on private jets that emit far more in a single flight than most people will emit over the course of an entire year.

Therefore, if you want to start with reducing greenhouse gas emissions, here are a couple of real and tangible ways to save the planet - and it starts with the candidates for President from both political parties.

1) No candidate can declare themselves a candidate for President in the 2008 elections until January 1, 2008.

2) All politicians running for President must eliminate all private aircraft flights from their schedules and use commercial flights. The savings from this alone would range into the hundreds of thousands of pounds of emissions per candidate. This provision applies particularly to those candidats claiming that they want to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Since the flights are eliminated, such candidates would therefore not be required to hit up contributors for money to fund such flights and would not need to enter the race sooner in order to get name recognition or the jump on other candidates.

With fewer planes flying in the skies, congestion would be reduced (albeit slightly given the overall number of flights per day - if each candidate flew once on a private jet per day, that would amount to ~1.6% of the total flights per day (based on roughly 1200 flights per day)) and with the reduction in congestion, we'd find that the airlines would save on gas while idling on taxiways awaiting departures or circling airfields waiting to land. Even if the resulting savings are negligible, the fact that these political leaders are willing to cut the flights would be a sign that they are truly committed to being green, instead of simply paying lip service and hoping others do what they themselves are unwilling to do.

These suggestions also have the tangible benefit of moving the political calendar back into its proper place - with 2008 politics discussed in 2008.

Don Surber has additional thoughts on what the candidates ought to be disclosing to the public.

If candidates are not allowed to enter the race until January 1, 2008, this means that all the paper used to make newspapers and weeklies would be put to other, more productive uses. Think of all the trees that could be saved. Think of all the lower costs involved in shipping said lighter papers and magazines.

My proposal has several benefits over other campaign spending and political speech controls in that it not only has the environment covered, but it does not infringe upon the free speech rights. It allows anyone to get involved in the political process and provide funds to candidates, but the limitation is upon the candidates themselves to hold off announcing their run until January 1 of the year of the presidential election. States wouldn't need to race against each other to declare primary days, and the public would have more than ample opportunities to learn about the candidates.