Comments Sharon Astyk has made

No question, but...

For me, I don't think there's even a remote doubt that we will have a more prosperous future if we deal with climate change.  

At the same time, however, what I think there is a doubt about is whether we have the base capital in both resources and wealth to do it.  That is, at a certain point, it becomes impossible to make capital improvements simply because you don't have enough to borrow against the future, or to bear the costs of the infrastructure development.

I've written about this here: http://sharonastyk.com/2009/02/16/910/

I am not certain we are at this point, but I think we may be awfully close to it in some ways.  That is, it becomes impossible to economize, because you are so busy remediating your present situation.

I certainly agree "get rich and fix climate change" is a good sell - and maybe it is even necessary.  But I think that for the forseeable future, getting rich is not going to happen - and that the backlash and anger against those who told people they could have a new and better economy may end up costing us more than finding ways to sell the much harder case.

Sharon Astyk

Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.

The race to the finish

Note that this entire post was written without referring to "wood" or "forests."  Some years ago I wrote a paper on the ethics of biofuel use, and one of my points was about the language we use - I argued that we would someday see entire forests transformed into "heating biomass" or "generating biomass."  I admit, I never thought it would happen so quickly, nor that it would come from environmental activists.

The reality is that this paper does not discuss the scalability issues at all, clearly because they aren't nearly as cheerful as the idea that we can convert our coal plants to generating electricity with wood.  At this point, we have no large dedicated plantations of wood that are harvestable for this - and we are already using just about all the "excess" wood that can come off our existing forests, so this is a recipe for deforestation, erosion, the loss of soil and forest humus.

It ends in a race between the reduction in emissions and the reduction in the ability of soils to hold carbon.

Sharon Astyk

Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.

Banging Up Against Many Resource Limits

I'd second Bart's mention of Heinberg's new book on coal - I know that he's been able to get advance materials - you might contact him for more discussion of this issue.

To me, one of the major issues is that any "shift to another finite resource" strategy is precisely the strategy offered by the baby boomer generation to Gen Xers like me - that is, push the problem of on one's posterity.  In 1979, Carter identified Global Warming as a major issue and there was a solid body of research suggesting that we'd hit resource limits within a few decades - and despite the hard work of many boomers to avoid it, the solution we got was "stick the problem with another generation."

Personally, I decline to enact that solution again - to deliver to our children a warmer, poorer world based on the assumption that resource limits shouldn't be considered until we bang hard against them.  The idea that one's posterity should endure the hardships the parents are unwilling to endure is one that has to go - simply because it is morally evil.

Sharon

Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.

The key word here is "net."

The difficulty with all of this, however, is the word "net" - ie, relying on later paybacks for current investment.  This is, broadly speaking, heartening, but there are real questions about what "net" paybacks will turn out to be.  For example, retrofitting industrial buildings with a five year payback is great...unless the industry goes under in 2 years.  An investment in home insulation with a net payback that assumes that I'll have an ongoing practice of heating whole house to fairly warm temperatures comes out rather differently when the utility company shuts off my deliveries of heating oil anyway and I'm heating my house with a single stove.  

I don't disagree that there's value here, but I would be more impressed by analysis that took seriously the question of what the real impact of an extended and profound economic crisis will be.

Sharon Astyk

Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.

Yes, she took hits because she's female

On the other hand, her utterly undignified use of race makes the whole thing seem pretty silly.

The idea that being a rich white woman and the wife of a former president is more victimized position than being a black man in this country is ridiculous.

She's my senator.  I had some respect for her - not fondness, but some marginal degree of respect - but no longer.

Sharon

Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.

Sometimes the language is for effect...

LOL, believe it or not, I do know that we aren't running out of oil, and that beer can be made without it ;-).

Sharon

Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.

Time to tell the unfortunate truth

Jon, I think your essays are admirable, and maybe within the realm of very broad technical capacities in the time required.

But here is the major difficulty - no program involving a massive build out thus far, that I am aware of, fully includes the energy and climate implications of that build out, while maintaining the larger economy in stable enough condition to meet urgently necessary short term climate requirements.  I've written more about this, in response to one particular plan, and using only very rough back of the envelope calculations, but the larger principle applies.

http://sharonastyk.com/2008/01/29/the-cure-is-worse-than- ...

If Hansen is correct and we need to get back to 350 ppm (and there seem to be compelling reasons to believe this is true), then we have only a very, very short time indeed to make whatever alterations we can to industrial society.  The kind of massive relocation of population, buildout and reinsulation of housing, etc... may simply be too carbon intensive.  I'd need to see specific numbers.  Some of what you imagine could be electrified, particularly mining, seems unlikely without a massive nuclear program.

There's also the difficulty that all of these resources have lifespans - we're talking not just about doing a single build out that then gets us to a perfectly sustainable society, but about needing to maintain and replace and repair all of these things - and at the moment we don't make wind turbines or rigid foam insulation without oil and other fossil fuels.

The truth is, I think we may have waited too long to have the choice of a benign form of industrial society - that's not to say that all industrialization must go, but I tend to think that the mythos that we can have an essentially familiar society is not only untrue, but a mistake - perhaps it will turn out to be possible, but isn't it more urgent to start preparing the populace for a harsher reality, just in case?

Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.

The problems of intermittency and dispatchability

...have simply not been overcome with either wind or solar.  A quick skim of the reports you cite suggest that both underestimate capacity factors in their estimates.  And recent example of wind shutdowns during the Grangemouth refinery shutdowns points up just how dependent renewables are on fossil fueled back up plants - up to 60% of capacity in some estimates

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3919#more.  

Then there's the DOE commissioned Hirsch Report that suggests that a major build out of renewables would take about 20 years at WWII levels - which means that we won't be seeing that much capacity before 2018 anyway.

Little as any of us like it, it may well be the case that most of what we have is negawatts - and if we're to get to 350ppm, that means a LOT of negawatts, a life much less like Californians, and much more like Keralans, Sri Lankans, Venezuelans, Cubans.  

IMHO, we're not going to get there if we keep selling the idea that all we have to do is be Californians.

Sharon Astyk

Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.