The Nation has devoted its current issue to "surviving the climate crisis," and it's chock full o' good stuff.
First up is Jim Hansen, the World's Least Censored Censored Scientist, who recommends the following five steps:
- "First, there should be a moratorium on building any more coal-fired power plants until we have the technology to capture and sequester the CO2."
- A gradually increasing price on CO2 emissions.
- Energy-efficiency standards.
- A National Academy of Sciences panel to study ice-sheet stability and nonlinear ice-sheet collapse.
- Reform of government communication practices.
Next up is Christian Parenti, who gets a lot of things forcefully and eloquently right in this piece, but muddies the water with a title and a lead conceit that doesn't particularly fit the rest of the article. Small-scale hydro, solar thermal, and vehicle-to-grid all get mentioned, but because there will still be large-scale wind farms, support for decentralized generation is a bit of quaint nostalgia? That seems strained.
Then there's Doug Henwood, noting that global political and economic elites have gotten on board re: climate change, but still favor solutions (e.g., cap and trade) that are not equal to the task. Naturally, Henwood, like everyone not a politician or a potential taxee, prefers a carbon tax.
Then Mark Hertsgaard (again) offers a piece on adaptation, noting that rich countries caused the problem and thus far are doing virtually nothing to help the developing world adapt to the nasty results.
Then the delightfully named Elizabeth Economy notes that China's development threatens to tip the climate over into chaos, Matthew Gilbert notes that climate change is going to screw the Gwich'in tribe, A. C. Thompson & Duane Moles raise all the usual doubts about carbon offsets, Lawrence Weschler surveys artistic responses to climate change, and George Monbiot says (again) that flying's not gonna fly in a warming world.
And finally, saving the best for last: Jeff Goodell on clean coal. It's a must read, though unfortunately available only to subscribers. Here's my favorite bit:
Big Coal has good reason to fear a crackdown on CO2. Coal's ace in the hole has always been that it's cheap. Of course, coal is cheap in the same way that fast food is cheap -- because all the health and environmental costs are offloaded onto the public and not included in the bottom line. But when a price tag is attached to CO2 emissions, that calculation will change. A new study from MIT estimates that deploying carbon capture and storage will raise the wholesale price of electricity from new coal plants by 50 percent (this may be a conservative estimate -- other studies have put the price nearly twice as high). If the price of coal-fired power increases 50 percent, a log of people will as, Why bother?
Indeed. And:
By all means, let's praise innovative companies that take risks with new technology, and let's boost federal funding for carbon capture and storage research--the more we know about the costs and risks of burying CO2 the better. But let's not lose sight of the big picture here. Coal is the fuel of the past, not the future. The sooner we muster up the courage to admit that, the sooner the revolution can begin.
Word.
("Coal is the fuel of the past, not the future" has a certain ring to it, but it's no "coal is the enemy of the human race.")
Ask Umbra on ditching dirty things
Comments
View as Flat
Delay And Deny Posted 10:15 am
24 Apr 2007
The Nation is full of Princeton grads who are the children of wealthy (as in stuffed) parents.
Most of them go to Princeton and whine and cry about being poor little rich boys and girls and then wind up making $18,000 a year at the The Nation continuing to whine.
Meanwhile their parents run some of the biggest CO2 production facilities in the world.
Message to the nation: Curtail your parents, and save the world.
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services. http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com
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Bart Anderson Posted 10:51 am
24 Apr 2007
Bart
Energy Bulletin
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Delay And Deny Posted 11:15 am
24 Apr 2007
Bart Anderson:
http://globalpublicmedia.com/the_reality_report_bart_ande ...
The Face Of Green Youth or 70s style ecologist?
All that's missing is the pukka shells...
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services. http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com
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Zarkov Posted 12:10 pm
24 Apr 2007
this would be a FATAL, irreversible mistake......
I am pro-future of LIFE... I advocate completely clean energy
BUT NOT NOW !!!!!!
You know not what your wishes will bring...
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Gar Lipow Posted 12:28 pm
24 Apr 2007
I've made thesame argument and even used the same title on occasion, so feel obliged to defend his choice. The vast majority of our energy under a renewable scenario will come from electricity. Unless there are breakthroughs in PV that drastically lower its cost, the vast majority of renewable electricity will come from wind and solar thermal in the desert - both highly centralized technologies. Every form of renewable electricity we are seriously contemplating at the moment is variable - requiring electrical storage. Every type of electrical storage that is anywhere near commercial benefits from economies of scale - flow batteries, pumped storage, compressed air. Even hydrogen, which I criticize a lot, can be made more cheaply by large electrolyzers than small ones. Sunflower makes good arguments even solar space and water heating is better done via district heating--which of course means centralization compared to how we do it now.
Even if we get breakthroughs, cheap small batteries, cheap solar cells, cheap fuel cells and electrolyzers and so on require large scale plants to make them tapping the economies of mass production. So at best we will have decentralized deployment. Our economy will remain centralized.
I have never understood the scale/decentralization fetish a lot of environmentalists have. Our transportation system is extremely decentralized. Most households have their own car; those cars are small compared to buses or trains. They are driven over widely dispersed infrastructure. Yet I know of few environmentalists who are fans of them over public transit--for good reason.
I don't think becoming narrower, more localized more atomized is a good or particularly democratic thing.
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GreyFlcn Posted 1:46 pm
24 Apr 2007
this would be a FATAL, irreversible mistake......
I am pro-future of LIFE... I advocate completely clean energy
BUT NOT NOW !!!!!!
You know not what your wishes will bring...
Well there is an option C for coal fired power plants.
Switch to burning bio-charcoal.
Would mean almost certainly that other renewable technologies would be able to outcompete it on a raw cost basis ;D
And it's far more realistic than carbon sequestration.
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Bart Anderson Posted 8:39 pm
24 Apr 2007
It may because you are especially interested in high tech and efficiency, which usually works better with centralization at a large scale. Politically, we're talking about a centralized bureaucracy and a technocratic elite. It may or may not be democratically controlled.
Conservation-oriented solutions are more suited to local, de-centralized settings. The low tech solutions enable widespread participation, and encourage community. Individuals have more control over their own fate and are less dependent on remote authorities.
One thing that particularly interests me is resiliency in the face of disruptions. Large systems are particularly vulnerable - terrorist attack on an nuclear power plant, for example - or blackouts over the grid.
As a personal example, I re-discovered bicycles after becoming disgusted with the local bus system. Bikes - they're under your control, you can fix them.
Bart
Energy Bulletin
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caniscandida Posted 9:02 pm
24 Apr 2007
<<
Well there is an option C for coal fired power plants.
Switch to burning bio-charcoal.
Would mean almost certainly that other renewable technologies would be able to outcompete it on a raw cost basis ;D
>>
Look, Grey Falcon, you have seriously contributed some good, thoughtful, well-thought-out stuff.
Clearly, you are a very intelligent scientist and engineer, and you have a great deal to offer.
Hopefully, you will learn before long to accommodate the rest of us, Ms. Raptor, into the way your mind soars.
Meanwhile, FYI, you lose me. My loss, I know. : (
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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caniscandida Posted 10:00 pm
24 Apr 2007
<<
"It is cynical to declare that the war is lost because you believe it gives you political advantage," Cheney said.
Reid, D-Nev., dismissed Cheney's comments. "I'm not going to get into a name-calling match with the administration's chief attack dog," he told reporters.
>>
"Cynical," of course, means, "I am as a dog [kyon, genitive kynos)and no better than a dog, and I believe that no one else is any better than any groveling, miserable, hungry, opportunistic dog."
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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spaceshaper Posted 10:33 pm
24 Apr 2007
<emAll</em> charcoal is bio-charcoal
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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spaceshaper Posted 10:34 pm
24 Apr 2007
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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Tom Athanasiou Posted 1:55 am
25 Apr 2007
First up, great job. I hope it's the beginning of a new engagement, by The Nation, with the "climate issue."
I only have one criticism, and it's mostly by way of noting an omission. It would have been good to have one more article, focused on the battles raging within and around the international climate negotiations themselves, as we gear up for the expiration of the Kyoto Protocol (2012) and the shaping of the "post Kyoto" regime. This battle, rarely foregrounded by the US movement, has to be understood if climate politics as a whole is to be intelligible, or to understand the significance and limits of our own national responses. This is, moreover, true for that very interesting reason that the international climate policy impasse is, fundamentally, an impasse between the rich and the poor worlds.
Mark Hertsgaard got closest to this territory with his talk about "climate change reparations" and his discussion of the all important matter of responsibility. But he only began to follow the thread. Yes, it's true that climate change will be a humanitarian catastrophe, and that the rich world will be largely responsible for the poor world's adaptation, to the extent that such adaptation is even possible. But the rich world will, by any reasonable calculus, also be responsible for most of the necessary mitigation, and not just within its own territories. This for the bone-crushingly obvious reason that the global carbon budget is just about exhausted, and that the "development" it purchased is, by and large, ours to enjoy.
Within the negotiations, with their unenviable mandate to contrive a "global burden sharing" scheme that might actually work, the logic of international obligation is so well known as to be axiomatic. The pragmatists, of course, do their best to ignore it, but it's really not possible. When we signed and ratified the United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change, we accepted an obligation to prevent "dangerous climate change," one in which the United States, like all nations, would act "on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities." That last word, "capabilities," is of course code for wealth, and everyone knows it.
There's lots of talk in climate circles about how post-Bush America will bring "US leadership" back onto the international stage. In fact, such leadership will only be accepted when the US begins to meet its true obligations. When it stands to advocate a global climate regime that is actually fair, or at least fair enough. And it's past time for us to talk about just what such a regime would entail.
Tom Athanasiou
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caniscandida Posted 4:27 am
25 Apr 2007
This is a very good letter, Tom. If the editors do not print it, it is their loss.
What I do not understand is this: Once the 2008 election takes place, is the US slate rubbed clean? Can the new president summon a summit meeting in, say, February, 2009, in which the US sits back and behaves like just another partner? And everybody automatically trusts us? Or rather does not distrust us, any more than anybody distrusts Paraguay, or Madagascar?
Or will it always (until our decline declines a bit further) be the case that the US must show leadership? Is the rest of the world still waiting for the US to establish the agenda?
And if so, how easy will it be, really, to put Bush/Cheney behind us? In many superficial ways, all sorts of changes are likely to take place, we may suppose. But more to the core, do not the elections of 2002 and 2004 impress the world more with who Americans really are, than does the reactive, non-positive election of 2006, and than will the presumably similar (!a ver!) election of 2008?
Is it not the mere truth, that US authority will count for little or nothing, in most of the world, for the next few decades?
I feel very sorry for David Roberts, and other Americans of his generation, who are raising children at this time.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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GonzoDon Posted 2:22 pm
25 Apr 2007
Therefore I was pleased to receive The Nation issue this week on living green. My only complaint: pages and pages of discussion, but not a single mention of the underlying cancer of exponential population growth on our planet. Not once, as far as I can tell!
I guess that topic is too politically-incorrect for a leftist magazine to highlight.
Too bad. Until we look that problem in the eye and begin to address it, all of our other actions on this little planet of ours are simply acts of re-arranging deck chairs on a ship that is sinking under the weight of 6.5 billion people, going on 9. When peak oil arrives it's gonna be one ugly scramble for the table scraps ...
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:30 pm
25 Apr 2007
How about BioCoal then?
The "Bio" tends to give a more direct conitation to those who may or may not know where charcoal comes from.
_
Unless we go off the deep end with nuclear.
BioCoal offers a flexible, reliable, and effecient way to bridge the gap between intermitant renewables.
Especially given the existing dominant infrastructure of coal fired power plants.
And the tightening restrictions on Sulfur and Mercury emmisions are unneccisary if there is non to begin with (Both of which Coal power plants would need to spend lots of money to deal with anyways)
_
Not to mention, there's plenty of room for improvement.
Algae biomass for instance grows just great off of coal fired power plant emmisions. (Eats up about 85% of the Nitrogen, and 30% of the carbon)
In daylight, it can double in size in about 3 hours.
The power plants are also a great source of cogenerated heat for drying/charring biomass.
(Runs at about 1600°C)
Direct Carbon Fuel Cells that are availible can utilize charcoal at 80% effeciency.
(Also good for heat cogeneration, runs at about 750°C)
_
Getting off of Oil is going to be easy.
Just need to switch to diesel/hybrids/electric.
But getting off of Coal is going to be much harder. And without a fuel subsitute, it will be multiple decades before our coal plants cycle out of production.
Cars by comparison are replaced relatively often.
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:33 pm
25 Apr 2007
Who needs oil when you got electricity?
Atleast two electric sedans out next year will have more horsepower than Hummers.
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