March 01, 2010
The problem with solving global warming
Lately I have been spending more time studying the issue of climate change.
The good news about climate change is that solutions exist. We can make our machines, vehicles, and devices vastly more energy-efficient. Instead of coal and oil, we can use hydroelectric, wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, even municipal waste to generate electricity. Clean coal has not yet been tried on a large scale, but on a small scale, it has been proven to work. Electric vehicles can easily replace oil-burning cars within the next decade or two.
So we're on course. All it takes is political will.
The flip side is that carbon-friendly sources of energy are, without exception, more expensive than fossil fuels. Dirty coal is the easiest, cheapest fuel in the history of the world. There is a reason it is cheap - the true cost is paid by future generations through global warming.
But that does not change the fact that our entire civilization is based on energy being cheap. And emerging civilizations - China, India, and the rest - are relying on cheap coal to fuel their rapid economic growth.
If we do what must be done - stop emitting greenhouse gases - we must accept, for decades, more expensive energy as a basic fact of life. That means everything that takes energy - everything not made with pure manual or animal labor - in short, almost any product or service of an industrial economy - becomes more expensive. Living standards stagnate or drop. Growth slows down, maybe permanently.
Most tragic is the rise in inequality heralded by decarbonization. The rich countries got rich in no small part by running what could be called an "environmental deficit"'; they borrowed against the biosphere, using artificially cheap energy. Now the biosphere is tapped out. That means the poor countries won't be able to industrialize as easily and cheaply as the West did. With a slower growth rate all around, it will be all that much harder to catch up to the West - maybe not possible at all.
Even within Western countries, the general rise in prices will hit the poor and middle class much harder than the rich. The oil price spikes of the 1970s (and 2008) were followed by major recessions that devastated the lives of millions. (There was of course a financial bubble in 2008, but think of peak oil as the needle that burst that bubble.) A coal price spike would be much, much worse. And we've never had a major coal price spike before.
Now it becomes clear why there is so little political will to stop global warming. Nobody wants to accept the inevitably lower standard of living this entails. That's why climate change denialists take refuge in a fantasy world where global warming doesn't exist. With the recession to remind people just what a lower living standard is really like, denialism has soared. Fewer and fewer people believe global warming exists and is man-made, even as the science has solidified in the past few years. Fake pseudo-scandals that would have been ignored in 2007 become front-page news in 2010.
Is there a way out? Maybe, one day, we will figure out ways to make renewables as cheap as coal is today. But that "one day" is not likely be within the cruelly short interval within which it is possible to act. We have 20-30 years before feedback effects kick in and global warming becomes irreversible. We cannot wait until we've found a cheap replacement for coal.
And that means a lower standard of living, lowest of all for those who already have least.
Posted by Tyrone at March 1, 2010 08:32 PM