The January-February issue of Mother Jones gives the cover to a story which is as delusional as any right-wing denialistic writing. Yes, the left can do it, too.
The author, Kevin Drum, starts with the observation that taking life-style sacrifices to avoid global-warming catastrophe is unpopular. He cites previous ecological collapses among pre-historic cultures and hypothesizes that they saw it coming but couldn’t get their act together to avoid it. He concludes that 21st century earth-wide culture won’t make sufficient sacrifices to avoid the coming collapse.
Never fear, he has a solution; it’s military-level investment in research that will produce technological solutions to allow us to continue our current western lifestyle --- and spread t to the third world – while achieving zero carbon footprint in time.
That means he has a series of assumptions that ALL must come true.
(1) There is such a technological fix.
(2) Research can find it in time
(3) A huge budget for research will produce a huge amount of research.
(4) People unwilling to make other changes will enthusiastically pay these taxes on Mr. Drum’s unsupported assertion that it will solve the Global-Warming problem.
Just how much money he is advocating, he doesn’t specify, but he notes that the USA spent 30% of our economy to fight WWII. and that this is a war against time and physics. (His only acknowledgement of physics.) In WWII. we drafted young men and turned them into infantrymen in a few weeks. Apparently, Mr. Drum envisions drafting young people and turning them into science PhDs. Maybe he thinks that we’ll get enough volunteers if the pay is good enough.
The reality of research is:
1) Wishful thinking has had damnably little effect on technological progress. Needing a break-through doesn’t mean that we get a break-through. Things that looked close at times in the past have not been reached yet, and some achievements which seemed close have taken a century or more. (The first appearance of a chess-playing automaton on stage was a fake, and the 19th century was willing to believe that it was possible then. It was real more than a century later. Mary Shelley thought revivifying the dead was close enough to her time that it made a plausible story. It was a platitude of ‘50s science fiction that the ‘90s would be full of humaniform robots. We see the discoveries that happened as inevitable not because they were, but because we see history as inevitable.)
2) Even if the technology Drum wishes for is possible, nobody who knows the history of technological innovation thinks that it can be accelerated as much as Drum seems to imagine. At any one point, the next step in technology depends on the present stage of technology and also the present stage of science. (The last has only been true for a century or so; technology was independent of science nearly up to the time of Bessemer. It is true today, though.) Willingness to invest more can bring a little acceleration, but not a hell of a lot of acceleration. (At the time of the Manhattan Project, both Plutonium-based and Uranium-based A-bombs looked plausible, and several means of enriching uranium looked like they had potential. Instead of choosing which one to go with, the government threw money at them all. Several worked out. So, if only one path that looked likely had been possible, the full funding of the Manhattan Project would have saved time. We should note, however, [1] that it would have saved years, not decades, and [2] that most of the paths that looked plausible turned out to work.)
3) At the present time, there are a few persons who have adequate training for scientific research who cannot find a job. Slightly larger budgets would produce slightly more research. Drum assumes that vastly greater research budgets would produce vastly more research within a reasonably short time. (Remember that we have designs for wind turbines which could produce nearly enough electricity to supply our needs; we have the designs, but not enough turbines. Research that comes up with a magical source of energy in 2049 would not replace present energy in 2050.) People engaged in scientific research believe that an effective researcher starts with talent. Then he must have a great deal of education and training. The last years of this training must be provided by people doing research in that field themselves. There is a tension between the time for the research that they could do and the time for the education which they could provide for future researchers. Drum, implicitly, denies all of this.
Let’s look again at the problem. We are dumping carbon dioxide into the air. For more than a century, the scientifically educated have known that this increases the retention of heat. Animals (and volcanoes fed by limestone) have been producing carbon dioxide for millions of years, but these are balanced by natural forces which leave the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide within a fairly narrow range. Human-produced deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels is raising carbon dioxide levels. This raises temperature levels and changing weather patterns beyond the range in which we – and most other currently-living species – evolved. This pattern is going to end either by:
1) The climate changing enough to reach an environment which will not sustain industrial society.
2) A conscious set of changes which humanity as a whole takes before we are on an inescapable path to (1).
We all would prefer alternative (2), especially since it’s unlikely that anyone reading this would have descendants alive in alternative (1). By “industrial society,” I mean not merely cell phones but heated houses and transported food.
While deforestation (and other changes in the plant cover) and burning fossil fuels both contribute to the crisis, and both must be ended, they are – otherwise – different problems. In searching for solutions, they should be treated separately. I emphasize that we cannot choose between them; they must be each tackled. Still, they operate differently, and their solutions are virtually certain to be different.
Given any particular global pattern of plant cover, a certain, determined amount of the atmospheric carbon dioxide enters into plants, mostly as carbohydrate, is digested by animals and micro-organisms, and is exhaled by them as carbon dioxide. This maintains a constant – from season to season – amount of carbon in living matter and in the soil. The rest is in the atmosphere.
For fossil fuel, that means that any carbon atom added to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel means one more carbon atom – not necessarily that one – in the atmosphere for centuries to come. Before we have burned a huge amount more, we must stop. (While the present goals are expressed in stopping by year 2050, the real need is to dump only a certain amount into the atmosphere before stopping entirely.) This breaks into several problems.
The first is generating electricity. As far as knowledge goes, we have nearly solved this problem. We have good solar panel, wind-turbine, and battery – for storage in the generating system – designs. We have insufficient production. We could use better designs, and we are on the road to getting them. (The better your technology, the clearer you are how technology can be improved.)
The second problem assumes that the first can be solved. It is to use electrical power to replace fossil fuels in certain uses. For trains, cooking, and heating, the technology is there. For automobiles, we have a good start, and that technology can be applied to trucks, buses, and tractors. Here, again, any improvement in battery design would help.
That leaves a good section of energy use to which electricity does not seem applicable, air travel, sea travel, ore refining. (Cement and iron production involve emitting of carbon dioxide beyond the burning of fuel for heat. Sequestration has promise in those areas, where it does not when applied to carbon dioxide already free in the atmosphere.)
To repeat, given any particular global pattern of plant cover, a certain, determined amount of the atmospheric carbon dioxide enters into plants, mostly as carbohydrate, is digested by animals and micro-organisms, and is exhaled by them as carbon dioxide. This maintains a constant – from season to season – amount of carbon in living matter and in the soil. The rest is in the atmosphere.
That means for deforestation, a maximal forest absorbs a great deal of carbon dioxide during the summer when the trees grow, and an equal amount is released over the course of the year as leaves and fallen trees rot. Cutting down the forest releases a good deal of carbon dioxide immediately --- and burning it down releases more --- but even more is released over the course of the next decades. If we stopped pumping oil and digging up coal, the global warming effect of those extractions would end within a year. If we stop cutting down forests, the carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation will persist for decades.
On the other hand, while we can’t put fossil fuels back in the ground on a time horizon that humans can appreciate, reforestation is perfectly possible. (For that matter, replacing the coal deposits over the next millions of years would also require reforestation.) Reforestation has already begun in Africa, and it is expected to bring other ground cover which will absorb some atmospheric carbon dioxide over the next several centuries.
But, while the time frame for the benefits of reforestation are more nearly human, the process is far from instantaneous. From seedlings to adult trees is a matter of decades, and – even when the trees are adult -- the process of burying carbon in the ground is only well begun. That it is well begun is the good news. One acre of seedlings will ultimately replace an acre of clear cutting, but it will not do so within the time frame that climate scientists are saying is critical.
A previous post on this issue was misinterpreted by some people with poor reding skills as an argument by me against efforts of reforestation. Don’t take this that way. Deforestation dooms us – burning fossil fuels dooms us – choosing between them dooms us; we must deal with them both. Reforestation is our hope for the future. It takes a while to have much effect, but it takes a given time after it is begun. That is hardly a rational reason to delay beginning it.
Deforestation and reforestation are the most radical change in ground cover, but they are not the only ones. Restoration of wetlands increases carbon burial in the ground, and so do some changes in agriculture. These might have more rapid effects, and they should be encouraged.
Getting back to the article, at the end of a long article of little but assertion that vague activities will have vague effects, he makes specific proposals. Several of them, despite the preceding emphasis on research are activities. Reforestation is one of them. I support that, and his statement that we need more research in how to do it is inexplicable. If we start planting acres of trees, we’ll find out how to do it more efficiently; can you think of another way to find out? Another suggestion is adaptation. Oceans are going to rise, so how do we deal with this? Again, I don’t consider this research.
Several are non-fossil fuel ways of generating electricity. As I pointed out, we already have some methods; building enough generating stations fast enough is the problem. It is difficult to see how developing an entirely new method of producing electricity through fusion would speed up the production of generating plants in the next 30 years.
(Long ago, I read a science-fact article on fusion power. I’m paraphrasing from memory, so the quotation is inexact. “Researchers tell me that commercially delivered power is coming in 20 years. Coincidentally, the first article I wrote forAstounding was 20 years ago. The prediction then was that commercially delivered power was coming in 20 years.” It is closer to 40 than to 20 years since I read that article. They still don’t have a fusion reactor which produces more electricity than it takes to run it.)
Other suggestions he makes involve the storage of energy at the generating station to continue delivery of electricity when the sun is down, or the wind isn’t blowing.
As I’ve said, these problems have present design solutions. They can be improved; they are being improved; they will be improved. The problem isn’t research to get better designs.
The problem is production of sufficient material before we run out of time. The other problem is the energy uses for which electricity cannot be substituted. A huge research effort into more methods of generating electricity bypasses the real needs.
He does deal with that in suggesting massive research into algae-based biofuels. That is almost the only one of his suggestions where increased research shows promise. If we take care of the electrical-generating problem, then electrically drying algae would melt out their lipids into something which could possibly be refined into a fuel that could possibly replace gasoline in airplanes.
I might point out that Drum’s vision of sweeping technological change that will enable us to maintain our life-style without change is a dream of something which has almost never happened before. When history records a technological change which works on the consumer level, it usually records a change in life-style along with it. Certainly, our auto-centered culture resulted in a huge change in our way of living.
So:
1) While a little more research will probably lead to a little more progress (and continuing the ongoing research is necessary), a tripling of research spending is not going to bring a tripling of progress.
2) A method of generating electricity which we do not currently use will – at best – only marginally improve our collective carbon footprint before the predicted crisis point.
3) Reforestation is a long-term necessity, but it will only be a minor contribution to avoiding – if we do avoid – the crisis which some climate scientists foresee in 2050.
4) In particular, combining an acre of reforestation with an acre of deforestation increases the carbon footprint for something like a century.
5) We don’t yet have the techniques for lowering our combined carbon footprint to 0, but the sooner we use the techniques we have, the longer we have to find the other techniques.
6) Achieving zero carbon footprint will require life-style changes in the first world (and a shift in the direction of life-style changes in the third world).