If there’s one thing every environmentally minded American can agree on, it’s the complete failure of the Bush administration to recognize the severity of the climate crisis. (Greenhouse-gas emissions stablilization by 2025? You’ve got to be kidding.) But sometimes it seems that’s all we can agree on. Take the ongoing squabbling between Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress (with some help from Dave Roberts at Grist) and the Breakthrough gang (Ted Nordhaus, Michael Schellenberger and Roger Pielke Jr.) Their mutual sniping and name-calling was amusing for all of five minutes. Now it’s time they shook hands and got back to what matters: convincing the powers to get off their butts and do something.
The sniping took off the with the publication in Nature of a commentary co-authored by Pielke that argued the climate crisis is so bad that we have to spend oodles of money developing new technologies to replace the fossil-fuel engine that currently drives the global economy. Romm took issue with the notion that existing technology isn’t up to the task and pointed out all sorts of errors in the piece, casting aspersions on Nature‘s editors for publishing the piece in the first place.
The central issue, which got lost among semantic debates over the definition of “decarbonization” and what exactly the IPCC means by “spontaneous,” revolved around the notion that we can either implement policies and mandates that call for widespread introduction of existing technologies, such as concentrated solar, wind, mini-hydro, grand-scale photovoltaics and so forth, or we can spend that money now developing even better, and cheaper, technologies. It’s a false dichotomy.
It seems to me that it’s important to restate the one point on which their is little doubt: Things are bad. You don’t have to embrace James Hansen’s predictions of several meters of sea level rise this century to recognize that the planet is warming too fast. As Joe likes to remind us (and appropriately so), IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri (the guy Bush installed to replace a guy who was being too alarmist for Republican sensibilities), says that
“If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”
To me, it doesn’t logically follow that we have to chose between existing technology and future “breakthroughs.” What it does mean is we have so little time that we have to do both. We must, as Hansen advocates, phase in a moratorium on coal-fired power plants until such a time as the breakthroughs on carbon capture arrive. We must, as Romm advocates, start building large concentrated solar power plants, which store energy as heat and can therefore supplies continuous power. And we must, as Pielke, Schellenberger and Nordhaus propose, spend hundreds of billions of dollars on finding cheaper and more efficient ways to move people, heat homes and power industry with clean sources of electricity.
Implementing both strategies will cost money. The grand solar PV plan outlined recently in Scientific American would cost $400 billion and involve stringing new high-voltage DC power lines across the country, for example. But that’s over 40 years. And we have that kind of money. (Well, OK, it’s China’s money. But if we can spend a trillion dollars fighting a losing battle to defend access to oil, I think we can spend comparable amounts on clean energy. At least we know the investment will eventually pay off.) Let’s build what we know does work now, but keep looking for better alternatives.
Both Romm and the Breakthrough boys make some good points and both exaggerate the problems with the other’s position. Concentrated solar power, for example, probably will be more expensive that Romm claims. But probably not by as much as the B-Boys suggest.
I suppose if I had to choose a perspective that better reflects the urgency of the matter as described by the climatology community, I’d have to go with Romm’s insistence that we can’t wait for hypothetical (or worse, unlikely-to-be-realized) breakthroughs. There really is no justification for waiting, which to me invokes Bjorn Lomborg’s discount voodoo economics.
I know for a fact, because I pay our family’s utility bills, that there’s great deal that can be done with off-the-shelf technology and modest changes in habits. Our 3,000-square-foot, 100-year-old, rambling home consumes half the energy (in terms of CO2 emissions) of the average American house. And we use less than a third the average water. And that’s without any help from renewables.
Furthermore, I’m taking a conservative guess that a solar water heater would cut another 20 percent off our electricity bill. If our electrical utility, Duke Energy, was to provide solar water heaters to all its customers, that would probably cost less that the $2.4 billion it’s spending on a new coal-fired plant iunder construction 50 miles to the east of here, and eliminate the need for the plant along the way.
Will this kind of thinking get us all the way to a near-zero-emissions strategy within 42 years? (Some would argue we need to get there a lot sooner, but let’s leave that for the time being and go with the 80-90 percent reduction by 2050 as both Clinton and Obama promise they’ll support.) Maybe not. There’s plenty of political inertia to overcome, for one thing. I have no doubt that some handy dandy breakthroughs would make it more likely. But I don’t see as how anyone can rationally argue against a plan that calls for both immediate implementation of existing technology and radically increased spending on research and development of new technology.
There. Now can’t we all just be friends?