And don't forget the master of Senate procedure, Bob Byrd of coal-dependent W. Virginia, remains in the Senate as well. Below is an excerpt from my next book in which I summarize that proposal and expand on it a bit. The quality of the gaseous bubble that surrounds the earth is hugely important to the quality of life on earth. Our use of fossil fuels has put that domain at risk. For example, we Americans blow about 1.5 billion tons of carbon into the air each year.
Oil is no longer in short supply.
Yet because the atmosphere has no owner, it's treated like a common sewer. That helps keep energy prices low because, when you buy gas at the pump, there's nothing factored into the cost for the use of the atmosphere. Our demand for skyborne carbon storage is the flip side of our demand for fossil fuels. We pay for oil used because we assign property rights to its use. We don't pay for air to hold its combusted residues, but that's because only recently has it become clear that atmospheric capacity is scarce.