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Show THE ZEPHYR] DECEMBER 2008-JANUARY 2009 Reality Closes In| Waiting for progressive capitulation By Doug Meyer “None are more enslaved than those who falsely believeetey are free.” -Goethe and intelligence on a single small niche in our technosphere. Now we need almost the opposite:.a commitment to take what we already know how to do and somehow spread it into every corner of our economies, and indeed our most basic activities. It’s as if NASA’s goal had been to put ALL of us on the moon.” Headlines in Europe today are proclaiming that a “New World Order” is upon us, heralded by unprecedented and coordinated multi-government intervention in financial markets. It seems that socialism has returned from exile, with the taxpayers now owning a bunch of worthless debt. Simple-minded progressives, thinking their long drought is over, relish the thought of paying $69.95 for their next cappuccino if it means they can start planning a “Green” New Deal. Apparently a few facts have slipped by our hopeful friends: governments everywhere operate for the benefit of capitalists; the massive bailouts we've seen this fall have been done entirely on their behalf. Private wealth still owns almost everything, and a money supply whose fundamental concepts are debt and the rate of interest isn’t going away anytime soon. And how’s the green revolution gonna happen with no meaningful price on carbon? Just what do progressives have to show for their continuing submission to the rule of private finance? How about a debt that can never be repaid and a planet that can never be repaired. Regardless, Al Gore’s group WeCanSolvelt is running a national campaign saying America can switch to 100% carbon-free energy in ten years. Let’s look at a cue of points that show why this kind of progressive optimism Just what are those things that we “already know how to do”? Joseph Romm, the author of Hell and High Water, has provided a list of 14 wedges that would reduce global emissions by 14 GtC upon completion of ALL of them, while theoretically maintaining today’s economic growth rate. (“Business as usual” puts us well over 14 GtC annually by the time we hit 450 ppm.) To give you an idea of the scale of these projects, 1 GW is roughly equivalent to a single mid-sized power plant: “One wedge of vehicle efficiency -- all cars getting 60 mpg, with no increase in miles traveled per vehicle. One of wind for power -- one million large (2 MW peak) wind turbines. One of wind for vehicles -- another 2000 GW wind. Most cars must be plug-in hybrids or pure electric vehicles. Three of concentrated solar thermal -- about 5000 GW peak. Three of efficiency -- one each for buildings, industry, ae cogeneration/heat-recovery for a total of 15 to 20 million gwh. One of coal with carbon capture and storage -- 800 GW of coal with is not just wrong-headed, but fundamentally irresponsible: CCS. [Note this] means storing the emissions from 800 large coal plants (4/5 of all coal plants in 2000) -- a flow of CO2 into the ground equal to the current flow of oil out of the ground. That's right -- you have to re-create the 1. Drastic carbon emissions reductions are impossible without “something entirely different”. 2. The UN’s stabilized world population scenario post-2050 is a farce. equivalent of the planet's entire oil delivery infrastructure.” One of nuclear power -- 700 GW plus 10 Yucca mountains for storage. Two of forestry -- End all tropical Why capitalism can’t stabilize GHG concentrations at or below 450 ppm: Writing in the journal Science in 2004, Princeton researchers deforestation. Plant new trees over an area the size of the continental U.S. One of soils -- Apply no-till farming to all existing croplands. Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala made a ‘ name for themselves by breaking up the overwhelming problem of dealing with global warming into nifty, not-so-little slices called stabilization wedges. Since then, progressives have clung desperately to their suggestion that the global economy could keep growing through 2050. and stabilize green-house gas (GHG) emissions at 2004 levels, by a 50-year effort to deploy a truly daunting list of “currently available” technologies. The key word in the last That should do the trick. And yes, the scale is staggering.” To read Romm’s posts, google: vis 450 ppm (or less) politically possible” and take a look at Parts 1 and 2. I can’t resist adding a few more notes from my own research: Two million giant wind turbines would cost over $5 trillion just for hardware and installation and assumes we'd find enough metal alloy for 6 million turbine blades. Not included: 300,000 square miles of land acquisition for the wind farms (areas of Utah, Colorado and Arizona nt sentence is emissions. Think of water running into a bathtub plugged with a leaky stopper. The ever-increasing flow out of the spout is emissions, and the water level in the tub is atmospheric GHG concentration. Socolow and Pacala showed that we would need a Herculean global effort just to let the water run steady while global growth continued thru 2050. Of course, we combined.) were already emitting more GHG’s than the ocean-forest drain could absorb, the excess go out of service in the next 20 years. Three wedges of concentrated solar thermal would cost about $18 trillion. Adding 700 GW of nuclear power compares with today’s 350 GW total global nuclear capacity. This would be on top of the need to replace most of the existing reactors that will filling the atmospheric tub. I'll try to make this as quick and painful as possible. In 2004, Pacala and Socolow concluded that heroically limiting emissions to the then current 7 gigatons carbon (GtC) per year over 50 years might keep the tub level around 500 ppm by 2054. Now just four years after their first paper, the global growth monster is already emitting 8.5 GtC annually. At this rate, the tub could reach 450 ppm as soon as 2030. So, we've got perhaps twenty years to get the global faucet down to a trickle. Note the worried looks settling onto the “we can grow our way out of global warming” crowd. A year ago, in a National Geographic article titled “Carbon’s New Math”, Bill McKibben charactérized the kind of effort needed to keep the tub below 450 ppm while maintaining today’s global population and economic growth status quo: You can look at the list and judge for yourself whether you think it’s environmentally, technically, materially, or financially possible in today’s world. I think it’s pretty clear: honesty now demands that the progressive alliance with capitalism come to an end. We're not going to grow our way to stabilization at 450 ppm. And now, the coup de grace, a quote from this year’s James Hansen, et al bombshell: “Tf humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization devel- _oped and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its.current 385 ppm to at most 350 “As precedents for such collective effort, people sometimes point to the Manhattan Project to build a nuclear weapon or the Apollo Program to put a man on the moon. But * those analogies don’t really work. They demanded the intense concentration of money 12 Again I ask, had enough yet optimists? What more'evidence do you need? Global capitalism is no match for global warming. At least Bill McKibben had the guts to title the first chapter of his new BaOE “After |
