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TechnoratiToward a Defensible Climate Realism
It's a tough time to be an American climate realist. After all, which realism will you choose? The Beltway realism that limits U.S. commitments, and even U.S. initiatives, to those that are immediately sustainable by veto-proof congressional majorities? The internationalist realism that begins instead with the recognition that - as the recent multilateral climate talks in Bali clearly indicated - a viable global accord will necessarily require substantial rich-world financial commitments? How about a straightforward scientific realism that proceeds differently, ignoring the politics of the moment and stressing instead the physical demands of the climate system?
Ideally, there would be at least one realism to satisfy everyone. But this is not an ideal world. It's certainly not an ideal country. If it were, the United States wouldn't have repudiated the Kyoto Protocol, which way back in 1997 asked us to reduce our emissions to 7% below 1990 levels by 2012. Had we done so, today's projections wouldn't show our 2012 emissions being a full 20% higher than they were in 1990. Had we done so, we wouldn't now find ourselves facing some extremely unappealing choices.
So, what are we to do? First, we should be clear that the climate system is not particularly responsive to political calculation. Its realism is a physical one, and we know it, if we know it at all, only though science. Which is why it's important to remember that the Bali call to reduce emissions 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020 hails from Box 13.7 in the Working Group III volume of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report.
Second, we should be honest about the drift of the science, which is very bad. In fact, the 25-40% 2020 Annex 1 reduction target that was in such high-profile contention in Bali comes from the IPCC's most stringent scenarios - the top line in the table above - which was the closest it could get, in the Fourth Assessment Report, to the emergency trajectory we actually need. This is a long story , but its bottom line is that we should be thinking in terms of the high end of Bali's 25-40% reduction range, not the low end, at least if we want a decent chance of holding the total warming to 2ºC above pre-industrial levels (today's usual, dangerously high, benchmark for the maximum manageable warming).
Third, we should be brave enough to draw some anything-but-reassuring conclusions about the current crop of national climate legislation. Even the Sanders-Boxer-Waxman trajectory - as defined in the best of the legislation now in play in the United States - calls only for a return, by 2020, to 1990 emissions levels. This is far, far less than the call for a 25-40% reduction that focused so many minds in Bali, and its adoption as official U.S. policy would seriously undermine, if not actually poison, the international negotiations. Even worse, such a low U.S. target is entirely inconsistent with the global emergency stabilization program that, frankly, we need as soon as humanly possible.
U.S. Obligations
Weak targets are just the first part of the problem. The second is obligations. It's now abundantly clear that carbon markets, whatever else they may or may not be able to do, are definitely not, in themselves, capable of meeting the financial challenges of an internationally viable climate regime. Moreover, this is obvious no matter your strategic preferences. If you're most concerned about the fate of the poor and the vulnerable, then you want to know where hundreds of billions of dollars in adaptation funding is going to come from. If mitigation is your key issue, you want to know how the best available technology is going to be rapidly dispersed around the world, and you suspect that, however it's finally done, it's not going to be cheap. If forest protection is your priority, then the question is how you're going to support the initiatives necessary to forestall massive deforestation. And if you're already panicked, and ready to start pumping streams of money into carbon sequestration, then it's not unlikely that you've also begun to wonder just who's proposing to pay the bill.
I am not claiming that we can't afford to save the world. Rather, I'm simply arguing that it's long past time to start thinking strategically about money. More particularly, it's past time to admit, and this despite all the techno-optimism in the world, that stabilizing the climate is not going to be cheap, and then to draw some obvious - and realistic - conclusions.
One obvious conclusion is that we can't afford to give away gobs of money to corporations. Yet we're very much in danger of doing just this, and soon. The authors of the Lieberman-Warner bill propose to launch the age of U.S. federal climate legislation with a giveaway of almost 80% of total permits - a massive, perhaps unprecedented corporate giveaway. They further propose to reduce that giveaway so slowly that decades upon precious decades would pass before the windfall fades and the auction revenue stream widens enough so that low-income transition assistance, renewables and energy efficiency subsidies, adaptation funding, "cap-and-dividend" style citizen rebates, forest protection, technology transfer support, and all the rest of the necessary transition programs have some hope of adequate funding.
But even when both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have announced their support for 100% auctioning, many of the big Washington environmental groups are still supporting such corporate giveaways. And they're doing so even though, to quote a congressional staffer who requested anonymity, Lieberman-Warner is increasingly looking like "the best deal that American business will ever get." Why? Because they're pursuing their own, preferred version of realism. Environmental Defense, for example, argues on its website that Lieberman-Warner is necessary because it's possible now: "if we wait just two years to enact the bill or something similar, we'll need to double the pace of emissions cuts to get where we need to be in 2020." This is an exceedingly odd claim. Whatever numerical analysis lies behind ED's "if we wait just two years" claim, it's designed to justify Lieberman Warner's fatal political compromises, and thus its disastrous financial architecture, by means of bold claims for a 2020 target that is patently inadequate.
And things get worse. Even if we step beyond today's Beltway realism and adopt domestic emissions reduction targets commensurate with Bali's 25-40% range, or, better, even if we focus on the top end of that range - 40% by 2020, which is about right for wealthy countries like the United States - and even if we achieve those targets, this would hardly be the end of our national obligations. The United States must also shoulder international obligations commensurate with our carbon debt (historical responsibility) and our capacity to pay. Looking toward the future, we have to consider our share of the wealthy world's obligation to provide the funds and technology necessary for the developing countries to achieve what the IPCC (look under 2020 in the above table) called "substantial deviation from baseline" emissions. And that's not to mention our share of the adaptation burden.
Looking Ahead
There is a way forward. We have the technology. And we have the money. After all, the United States is spending at least $2 billion dollars a day on the military. But if we're going to engage the climate crisis in an environmentally adequate and politically viable manner, we need to find a path forward that satisfies all the "realisms" noted above. And the undeniable fact that this would be one of the hardest things we've ever done is no excuse for pretending that it's not necessary.
Fortunately, we're getting closer. But the hour is late, and we can't take anything for granted. The time now, inevitably, has to be one of preparing as well as one of acting. Because the scientific ground for the necessary emergency mobilization has been prepared, but not the political ground. And the problem? That the only way the Non-Annex 1 countries are going to make a "substantial deviation from baseline" emissions paths, in time, is if the wealthy countries provide them with the technology and development assistance necessary to do so without compromising their development prospects. Politically this can only happen in a progressive manner (not in the sense of "progressive politics" but in the sense of "progressive tax") as part of a package that mobilizes the longing for economic justice as well as the drive for climate stabilization. In other words, we need a new deal that's not limited to climate protection, but also reforms "development" and drives poverty alleviation in the wealthy world as well as the poor.
Green collar jobs are part of the answer. So is the solar revolution. So is "cap and auction" (as against "cap and grandfather"). So is the new flexibility that was visible in Bali (though not from the United States). But they're not enough. We also need a new realism, one that doesn't ask either science or the poor to step aside in the interests of short-term calculation.
It won't be easy, but it's the only real chance we have.
Tom Athanasiou is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus and the executive director of EcoEquity.
Copyright © 2008, Institute for Policy Studies
22 Comments so far
Show AllLovely post, PaulK.
I thought "technically credentialed people" view fusion as more or less of a pipe dream. The claim that they agree that solar and wind can't help much is far from my experience. I see a raging argument about this, and am not technically literate enough myself to know who's right.
But I think the argument that renewables can't help much because of intermittency is largely bogus. Wind and sun tend to complement each other; solar puts most power into the grid during peak loads in the afternoon; there are ways to store the power as heat for concentrated solar thermal plants (mainly in the southwest.) Much of the country could feasibly replace a great deal of the current power supply with one or the other. We also need to get to work, hard and fast, on efficency and conservation. The reality is that fossil fuels are running out, and burning even what we've got left will cause unacceptable damage to the climate. So we HAVE to find ways to replace some of the power we currently use with renewably-sourced power, and to use less power. Nuclear is too problematic and expensive, and biofuels are really not a solution at all. If someone could demonstrate a way to produce fusion power, even if it were expensive and inefficent, it would be worth investing public money into research for breakthroughs on cost and efficiency--but until that happens we need to focus on what seems doable.
"Fusion was going to create electric power 50 years ago, and still hasn't generated anything consistently positive, much less worthwhile."
Once again, it is due to lack of funding! And 50 years ago, no one was talking about fusion.
Building a demonstration Tokamak - type reactor of sufficient size to maintain a sustained 500 MW reaction is underway - in Europe - with little US participation. The next step, a full sized demonstration generator plant is also in preliminary planning - but the US will be on the sidelines watching.
http://www.iter.org/
http://ec.europa.eu/research/energy/fu/fu_rt/fu_rt_pp/article_1236_en.htm
Even if were willing to destroy all our wild mountain areas building all the dams, There would still not near enough suitable pumped storage hydro sites to make much a dent in the capacity needed to balance intermittent sources.
I am absolutely for climate realism.
Scientific realism
First, the ocean isn't going to flood tomorrow. President Obama, after 8 years, probably won't see the White House or the Washington Metro flooded unless a 175 mph hurricane hits just right. New Orleans or Miami might get washed down.
Millions of species won't disappear before our eyes in 8 years, first because we can't catalogue them fast enough, second because remnants of widely populated species hang on for a while.
Political realism
So, there's only limited political pressure from a fringe called "scientists". Notice how every candidate changes the subject when constituents bring up global warming?
My United States Senators both have gum on their shoe. Oh, look, they can't get off the dime. They also take money from the nuclear subsidy racket, cash from big coal, perks from the biggest company on earth, Exxon/Mobil. And they're the good guys!
Many, many countries have put global warming way down on their to do lists.
It's only a few million individuals that are mobilizing to do the Earth's work.
Technological realism
"Peak oil" has in the short term caused a massive worldwide run on coal, on charcoal from forest land and on ethanol from prairies. We're accelerating the process!
Countries like Denmark, fearing for their own ultimate disappearance beneath the waves, invested in wind power like crazy. They were considered fools by many people 10 years ago. They're pretty wealthy now. Wind is golden, abundant, and fears nothing but a further breakthrough in solar or other alternatives.
Completely bogus critics (i.e. the industry-paid shills and whisperers who last year said there was no such thing as global warming) regularly imply that wind and solar power can't be stored (stored by pumped hydroelectric plants, for example).
After alternative electricity, we need to look at alternative building heat and hot water (not too hard after the lightbulb goes off above the architect's head).
Then we need to approach 100% electric-fueled transit. I'll give you a hint: don't listen to any car company that says it couldn't be done yesterday. There's a retrofitting garage near you now. Think 80 cents per gallon equivalent.
We don't like to think about making industry more energy-efficient because we think of industry as polluters and as soulless. However, stupid industrial processes are one major component of global warming,
Dreaming and realism
So, we need one team to work on the "soulless" part, and the other team needs to work on the "polluters" part.
Your turn. Your project team is waiting for you to start to awaken to your personal destiny, then you'll look around and find the other team members. And you thought flipping burgers was your destiny? Or accounting? Cmon. For real?
I guess I never was a complete realist. I just want more honest and workable answers. I want to win.
"Wind and solar are mature technologies, which are only awaiting the economics of scale to help them out, so they don't need R and D spending."
Wind and solar are not the least bit mature technologies. I forecast a 50% drop in price per effective unit of power (mostly kilowatt-hours, but possibly in BTUs too) in five years, and another 50% drop in another ten years after that. The field is really trucking. Anyone in the wind and solar business looks over her or his shoulder just a bit.
Fusion was going to create electric power 50 years ago, and still hasn't generated anything consistently positive, much less worthwhile. Anyone in the nuclear fusion business is forced to stick his head in the ground and pray simultaneously for stable solar/wind energy prices in the next 15 years, and for a nuclear research miracle.
I am referring to R and D spending. Wind and solar are mature technologies, which are only awaiting the economics of scale to help them out, so they don't need R and D spending.
But how often are we going to have to explain that no technically-credentialed person believes that wind and solar can provide 100 percent (or anything close) of the worlds power needs.
I know most people here have a beef with light-water fission. But, what exactly is their beef with fusion? It's intrinsically, absolutely safe, uses and produces very little (D-T fusion), or no (D-D or D He3 fusion), radioactive fuel or waste.
Luddism will not save us from possible global catastrophe. Technology will.
Nuclear get many times the funding clean, renuable energy recieves.
Two things that no one talks about - representing an apalling lack of imagination.
1. The elimination of the personal car for 90% of the population - and immensely improved quality of life, through smart urban development and public transit.
www.carfree.com
2. Fusion electric power - which remains in the quazi sci-fi category only because of very poor funding.
http://www.iter.org/
Why are we all acknowledging that a livable future depends upon drastic action now, and yet there's almost no chance of anything remotely close to adequate being done "because business as usual is just too profitable"? Is humanity insane?
Well--yes. But how did that happen? I believe the key is corporate media. They have enormous power to shape public opinion, on the one hand, and on the other they are enormous corporations, tied in turn to other corporations including weapons manufacturers and oil companies. What many fail to understand is that corporations are not managed by their CEO's--they are machines, and the CEO's are among the components. They either work, using their human brains, to maximise profits at all times and at all costs--or they are tossed aside like any other defective component and replaced. Managers know this, and it must be about as hard to make it to the top of a major corporation hindered by scruples as it is to pull a camel through the eye of a needle. In other words, we have sociopaths at the tops of our corporations and at the upper levels of government. That's how our system works. The only way we can get the violently rapid reversal in policy we need to combat climate change is with enormous public pressure, especially in the US--and people actually ARE waking up--but nowhere near fast enough.
However, I think it's not quite as bad as USAn said--many proposed coal plants HAVE been cancelled because of global warming, and I can tell you that the coal industry here in WV is whiney and embattled. They are beginning a major, defensive PR push. I think there actually is some hope of defeating them--if we can somehow get ten times as many people involved, especially young people, and if we can somehow steer policy so that we don't spend our last fossil fuel subsidies (before the end of cheap oil closes down options) on false solutions like biofuels and nuclear power and carbon sequestration.
Why are these false solutions? Briefly:
Biofuels may be useful on a small scale in a few locations, but corn takes nearly as much fossil fuel as it yields and major diversion of our corn crop to ethanol is driving up food prices. Other crops are more efficent--like sugarcane and soybeans, which are being cultivated largely for the EU's biofuels demands at the expense of rainforests in Indonesia and Brazil. This "solution" is worsening global warming and extinctions.
Nukes: Uranium will run out in a couple of decades, we have made zero progress in figuring out how to deal with waste that remains dangerous for millennia, and each plant and supply line is an invitation to terrorism. They're also extremely expensive. Dead end.
As for sequestration, it ought to be researched but is not likely to work on a scale massive enough to allow us to keep using the coal we have left in this country. The danger I see is that TALK about sequestration will be used to push through plants that won't end up using it.
Can renewables fill the gap? It would require major infractructure investment to build new power lines from the sunny southwest where a lot of concetrating solar thermal plants could be built, and from the whole middle of the country and the coasts, where windmills could go up. Also we need to convert our vehicle fleet to electric as they are several times as efficient as gasoline engines. We would also have to invest in efficency of various sorts. It would require a huge investment--something on the order of what Bush has wasted on the Iraq war already, and what will be wasted there in the future if--sigh, sob--either a Republican or a Democrat gets in in November. This huge investment would, of course, provide a huge number of jobs. But in several ways it would reduce the profits and the control of the tiny elite now running things, so it can't happen, no matter how desperately the whole world needs it, unless we find a way to bring democracy to the US. Any ideas?
Hi BBR. I don't know if it's the nuke plants in Tennessee or a combiation of several things. One old guy who worked at Oak Ridge from it's inception, quietly told us that they used to take that shit, (referring to depleted uraniun and plutonium), put it in boxcars and rail it over to a deserted side line. The people there don't talk about it much, especially to strangers. Actually, I believe they are afraid of it, lots of cancers and other horrible diseases in children there. __ And adults.
Indeed, Tennessee is a very beautiful state, wonderful people and the best highways in America. Careful where you get your drinking water, like almost everyplace else now, and don't eat any fish caught there. The geese and ducks are adult in a year and I have no idea of how long they live there, but they're full of radiation and probably not very long till they quack up.
Really USAn? ___ Thank you for the lesson. How about all of the piping etc, that supply cooling waters for a water cooled reactor. You ever seen what a class four or five tornado can do to anythng man made? Amazing when you see a 40 ton locomotive twisted to junk, lying two miles fron the station.
Have you ever seen huge tanks and or, huge ponds of highly radio-active liquid waste located near nuclear power plants? There is nothing protecting them except a high fence. Do you hear about the spill of radioactive fluids at a Japanese nuclear power plant a few weeks ago after they had an earthquake?
Tell ya what. Google atomic power plant accidents and then nuclear accidents. It is not a question of IF we will have another three mile island type of accident, or a much worse one, It WILL happpen. There is nothing man has ever made, that didn't eventually fail. I'd much rather have a failre of a solar or wind powered plant than a nuclear plant, where the damage could wipe out an area the size of Pennsylvania and New York combined and steralize it for centuries.
Kem,
The containment buildings an other critical component of a nuclear power plant are designed for tornado-force winds - and the maximum physically possible earthquake shaking too. It's called "engineering".
bbr-001,
Good points. There is a stunning disconnect between the high minded talk from politicians and the reality of economic activity on, and especially under, the ground.
One needs to tune out the hopeful, ambitious talk of the politicians or "policymakers", and instead, read a few corporate annual reports. If you do, you will find that global warming is being given absolutely ZERO, I repeat, ZERO consideration in the long-term expansion plans of every oil, coal, electric power, transportation, or real estate development corporation. Governments, from OPEC, to Alberta, to Venezuela, down to every local zoning board (which alone could be the source of enormous cuts in car and fuel usage) are likewise not changing their plans a bit in consideration of global warming.
Then there is the USA's 1.1 trillion dollar military-industrial complex.
So, it isn't a matter of technology - of course it is technologically possible to fix the global warming mess. But, under capitalism and it's so-called free markets, it is economically impossible - there's simply too much profitability in humanities suicidal trajectory.
Only some kind of new, powerful, neo-authoritarianist system that can arrest and imprison the corporatists and other resisters and enforce very tough, draconian measures could save us now. I don't see that happening.
But waht about personal initiatives? Well, I've made great progress in keeping my carbon emissions way down compared to the average US suburbanite. But I've seen absolutely no one follow suit. No one. Just the same bellyaching about high gasoline prices, even though it is still far too cheap in the USA. Oh, and the derisive mocking and laughter from the teenagers and young adults - our future - at my electric motor scooter as I ride by.
Tom has a long list of things that 'we' need to do. I would like to add that we need to excercise more, lose some weight, eat more fresh vegetables etc. etc. We won't. Yes, this is a negative attitude. It is also a realistic one.
KEM P
You have me very curious. Is the waste from mining, WWII or cold war activities or from TVA nuclear electric plants?
Its a shame for the people of such a beautiful state.
We have relatives who work at Oak Ridge. If any dangerous nuclear waste is present in the plant, alarms go off. They go off pretty often. It seems that if one of the employees happens to step in any goose or duck shit, and there is plenty of that around there. The alarms will go off when they enter a building. That's how much nuclear waste there is in the enviroment in Tennessee, and how sensitive the alarm systems are. You don't eat the geese or ducks and you and don't dare eat the fish there either.
Well I totally disagree with you on that finger in the dike comment ~BBR-001~.
Clean and safe energy is viable and we could have it instead of nuclear if we initiated a massive effort to do it.
Aren't we all pleased that of the 40 some tornadoes that hit Tennessee Wednesday, one or more didn't strike one of the nuclear power plants, or one of the several nuclear waste storage dumps. That's just ONE example of why nuclear power is a bad idea. I will agree that coal fired power plants are just as bad an idea or much worse, when it comes to pollution of the atmosphere.
As far as I can tell, we don't even have a moratorium on new fossil fuel use! New coal fired plants have been licensed. New stations to import liquified natural gas are planned. I don't know about oil refinery expansion plans, if any, but everything seems still in growth mode. The NEA future coal fired electric power graph is a hockey stick itself. Go Go Go. Grow Grow Grow. We conquered and occupied an entire nation to grab its oil!
This isn't waterboarding, invading Iraq, free speech, capital punishment, bombing Iran, or any other debate we have ever had. The scientific reality trumps the political ones. Do or die. We can't even freeze what we have now. Looks like we die.
We need to take every oil and electric bill and every odometer reading times gallons per mile... and inform every business, building owner, household, airline... how much less they will be using next year and thereafter. It will be a ration, and it just gets turned off when expired. No exceptions. (Well, maybe for the guys who already drive a Prius.) New building permits cannot increase regional power consumption. Something else has to be reduced first.
Then we need to start replacing coal fired with the best nuclear technology available. Commission at least 5 new plants every year for the next 20 years, and decommission dozens of coal fired plants. Then go after home heating oil and gasoline. Build them in 3 years, not 10 or 12. Use the military if necessary. I know nuclear power is a big "No-No" around CD, but its available now, and its getting better.
Just my techie fantasy. Won't happen.
BTW: Renewables are eqivalent to a finger in the dike with a 100 ft tsunami overhead.
~~Huck~~ In thirty to forty years, It is more likely there won't be ANY children here to converse with. We can and should vote for green or progressive candidates at the local level, but for the present it won't help at the presidential level.
If you Google Arctic methane gas and then scroll down to the article titled, "Arctic Methane Gas __ A Ticking Time Bomb". We can readily see, we may have fifty years or a bit more, or by the studied opinions of some world renouned scientists, we easily may have far less than twenty years to clean up our mess.
Lieberman-Warner bill is the industry bill paid for by corporate money: PERIOD!
Al Gore's position hit the mark and remains the standard for authentic change: hit the abusers where it hurts. Start taxing the hell out of them until they modernize and introduce carbon sequestation technology. Any thing else is nothing more than window dressing.
Amazing is that the corporate paymasters have gotten just what they want: they will run two corporate owned candidates against each other. One from the Democratic Party and the other from the Republican Party. Either way THEY WIN AND YOU AND I LOSE!
Wake up people and stop voting against your interest. Vote for a real progressive candidate in the Green Party or as an Independant. Otherwise, what ever is left of the human population in 30-40 years will be telling their children stories that begin with the phrase, "Once upon a time" there was majestic glaciers and polar ice caps...
I'm not quite sure what the difference is between cap and auction and cap and grandfather.
I do know that we in the US produce 25% of the carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere, so we are the ones that must make the biggest change. This pointing fingers at India and China because someday they may catch up to us, is childish and obscene.
The US government, on every level, supports oil based living arrangements, from the Federal support of war, road building and airplane subsidies, to the local support of infrastructure paid by the taxpayers to subsidize private developers producing urban sprawl.
Stop it all now. Tax dollars should only go to support green energy sources (and it should go without saying, but doesn't, that doesn't include nuclear), walkable communities with public sustainable transportation and green building codes.
Won't you stay with us in the fight, Stilba? We need you. We don't have the luxury of despair. I know I've said this in other posts, but a terrific book to read that lays out all of the technical, scientific, and financial solutions to climate change is "Plan B 3.0" by Lester Brown. It arms us with the knowledge we need to go out into the political/social realm and fight to save our precious environment. Besides, whether we ultimately win or lose, I think you'll probably have a much more interesting life if you stay in the fight than if you retreat into despair. But then, perhaps you are still fighting and simply expressing your all too understandable feelings of discouragement in your post.
Hope dies last, but I think it's died in me as far as climate change goes. We overreached.