We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.

– John W. Gardner

The quote above came to mind when I read ‘Worst Case’ Scenario: New Report Says World Is Warming Faster than Thought:

Two degrees — that value has long been the guideline for international climate policy. Were the increase in average global temperatures held below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), then drastic climate change and long-term irreversible damage — like the melting of Greenland’s glaciers — could still be avoided. Or so it was thought.

…

In 2007, the IPCC assumed that the earth’s average temperature could increase anywhere from 1.8 to 4.0 degrees Celsius by the end of this century — depending on which strategy the international community adopts and by how much greenhouse gas emissions are reduced.

According to the current findings, the world is currently on track for the worst-case scenario — the dynamics of climate change are already larger than feared.

To be on the safe side, people should adjust for a three, four or even five degrees of warming, PIK head Schellnhuber recommended in March at the Copenhagen congress. Should he be right, extreme weather resulting from rising global temperatures could be even more dramatic than assumed up until now.

In the past, the IPCC prepared an entire spectrum of possible emissions scenarios for this century. According to the new report, “some climate indicators are changing near the upper end of the range indicated by the projections or, as in the case of sea level rise, at even greater rates than indicated by IPCC projections.” The report continues, “current estimates indicate that ocean warming is about 50 percent greater than had been previously reported by the IPCC.”

Konrad Steffen, professor for Environmental Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder, explains what that means. “The forecast for the year 2100 probably needs to be revised at least by a meter or more,” he says.

Schellnhuber, who is also a climate consultant for the German government, says he is worried “that we still aren’t seeing a large portion of the unavoidable global warming.” Dirt particles in the atmosphere, especially sulphate aerosols, have created a certain cooling effect and has prevented a stronger temperature increase at the moment. “If we were to ever install sulphur filters all over the world, then we would already be at 2.5 degree warming,” the physicist said.

If this report sounds hauntingly familiar, it is. I mentioned it briefly just five days ago (Document alert: New synthesis report), and provided a direct link to the 39 page, 5.7MB report in PDF format.

What I didn’t do, however, was give this report the attention it deserved. Hopefully this post will help close that gap in my performance.

While I strongly urge you to read the whole document, let me quote at length the portion (page 18) that directly addresses the main issue brought up in the above article:

The goal of constraining warming to an average global temperature increase of no more than 2°C above preindustrial levels plays a central role in current discussions about appropriate climate policies. As described in the previous section, a 2°C warming would, in itself, introduce considerable risk to human society and natural ecosystems. Nevertheless, the facts that global average temperature has already risen by about 0.7°C and that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are still increasing (Box 2) render the achievement of a more ambitious goal very difficult. Due to inertia in the climate system alone, the 2007 IPCC Report argues that a global temperature increase of about 1.4°C above preindustrial levels is inevitable. There is also inertia in human systems but this is harder to quantify and it is not known how quickly or dramatically society can or will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What level of emission reductions is needed to retain climate change on the right side of the 2°C guardrail? The IPCC estimated the level of atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at which the global average temperature rise would be contained within various ranges (Table 1). The concentrations are given both as CO2 and CO2-equivalents. CO2-equivalents include the combined warming effects of CO2 and the non-CO2 greenhouse gases (excluding water vapour) as well as the net cooling effect of aerosols in the atmosphere. CO2-equivalents are expressed as the equivalent amount of CO2 required to give the same net warming as that created by these other gases and aerosols. Aerosols are small particles suspended in the atmosphere that reflect the sun’s incoming radiation and thus have a cooling effect. As air pollution regulations become more stringent and the amount of particles emitted to the atmosphere from human activities decreases, the cooling effect of aerosols in the atmosphere will also be reduced.

According to the IPCC analysis, atmospheric CO2 concentration should not exceed 400 ppm CO2 if the global temperature rise is to be kept within 2.0 – 2.4°C. Today, the CO2 concentration is around 385 ppm, and is rising by 2 ppm per year. The 2007 concentration of all greenhouse gases, both CO2 and non-CO2 gases, was about 463 ppm CO2-equivalents. Adjusting this concentration for the cooling effects of aerosols yields a CO2-equivalent concentration of 396 ppm. A recent study estimates that a concentration of 450 ppm CO2-equivalents (including the cooling effect of aerosols) would give a 50-50 chance of limiting the temperature rise to 2°C or less.

Thus, atmospheric CO2 concentrations are already at levels predicted to lead to global warming of between 2.0 and 2.4°C (Table 1). If society wants to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations at this level, then global emissions should, theoretically, be reduced by 60-80% immediately, the actual amount being dependent upon the amount that will be taken up by oceans and land. Given that such a drastic immediate reduction is impossible, greenhouse gas concentrations will continue to rise over the next few decades. An overshoot of the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations needed to constrain global warming to 2°C is thus inevitable. To limit the extent of the overshoot, emissions should peak in the near future. Recent studies suggest that if peak greenhouse gas emissions are not reached until after 2020, the emission reduction rates required thereafter to retain a reasonable chance of remaining within the 2°C guardrail will have to exceed 5% per annum. This is a daunting challenge when compared to a long-term average annual increase of 2% in emissions (Box 2). The conclusion from both the IPCC and later analyses is simple – immediate and dramatic emission reductions of all greenhouse gases are needed if the 2°C guardrail is to be respected.

Short-term financial concerns, political and institutional constraints and lack of public awareness and concern are the greatest barriers to immediately initiating ambitious emission reduction. There is still disagreement in the economics community as to whether climate change is simply an externality like any other or is fundamentally different from anything humanity has ever faced. There is also disagreement about how to appraise the costs of mitigation as compared to the future costs of inaction, and how to evaluate the risks of climate change. Nevertheless, a growing number of analyses indicate that the costs of both adapting to and mitigating climate change will increase if action is postponed (sessions 32 & 52), (Box eight). Generally, economic analysts agree that the uncertainty about the extent of future climate change is not a rational reason for delaying programs to curb emissions. Existing economic structures and interests, however, can often prevent effective climate policy action.

I have resisted the argument that surely everyone who reads this site has heard, namely that we have to put at least as much resource into adaptation as we do mitigation (i.e. reduction of CO2 emissions). This line of thinking usually falls into one of two categories: Cost efficiency or inevitability.

Cost efficiency, which sounds cold blooded, essentially says that while moving people away from coastlines, building desalination plants and sea barriers, etc. are certainly not cheap, they still deliver more human impact avoidance per dollar than simply reducing CO2. In other words, it’s economics in its purest form: Finding the optimal allocation of scarce resources to achieve the most good. As much fun as it is to bash economists in some corners of the Internet, it’s undeniably true that when you have a choice of preventing X or X + Y human suffering for the same cost, and you’re spending all that you can afford, then only a fool or a sadist would take the first option. Deciding which of many possible combinations of actions to take is a classic exercise in multivariate optimization.

The inevitability argument is much simpler: No matter what we do to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, climate chaos is going to be bad. As in really bad, so it makes no sense to ignore adaptation efforts and focus almost exclusively on mitigation, since that won’t be enough. (These arguments are really the same, as they’re merely claiming that the best way to respond to this quickly evolving situation is not a monolithic approach; they’re often presented as unique views, so I’m preserving that dichotomy.)

Suddenly, I’m no longer sure it makes sense to reject these arguments. If the best, leading edge and peer reviewed research, like the report above, says we’ve already created a world where more than the magic two degrees of warming is locked in, then at the very least we have to start considering some very nasty choices that a lot of people still think are plot elements from a bad science fiction movie and not reality. To pick just two examples: What do we do about all the large population centers on coastlines around the world? And how do we address the looming fresh water crisis that will very likely affect well over a billion human beings in the next few decades?

As for the emissions involved, remember that 1 ppmv of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 7.79 billion metric tons (see Life in the Metricene), so increasing from 385 ppmv now to the 400 ppmv limit mentioned above requires “only” an additional 116.85 billion metric tons. And the world emits about 30 billion metric tons of CO2/year, a good portion of which would effectively be absorbed by the oceans and plant life. That’s assuming we don’t get a sizable boost in CO2 (and/or methane) from the permafrost bomb starting to go off (see Life in the Metricene, CO2 checkpoint, and Methane checkpoint).

Again: Please read the report, and let’s all hope that John Gardner was right and this terrifying situation turns out to be one heck of a great opportunity.

I’ve been struggling for the last few days to make sense of the recent NOAA news regarding atmospheric levels of CO2 and methane, plus a handful of other items, including where I now think we might or might not be headed headed in terms of climate chaos.

The impetus for this effort to piece things together is, of course, the uptick in atmospheric levels of CO2 and methane, which I wrote about on May 19th (Methane checkpoint) and, coincidentally enough, on June 19th (CO2 checkpoint), and what, if anything, we should read into those observations.

First, let me do something I should have in the CO2 post, namely use a little math to try to contextualize the results. That post pointed out that the latest NOAA data shows a pronounced jump in the observed global level of atmospheric CO2. The level increased from 387.71 ppmv (parts per million by volume) in March to 388.47 ppmv in April of this year. That 0.76 ppmv growth is the largest for any March-to-April period going back to 1980, the first year of the publicly available data that I could find on the NOAA site.[1] It’s also 0.35 ppmv above the average March-to-April transition for all years other than 2009.

Just how much CO2 is that? An atmospheric level of 385 ppmv equates to 3,000 billion metric tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. That means every ppmv represents 7.79 billion metric tons of CO2, and 0.35 ppmv is 2.73 billion metric tons. According to the US Dept. of Energy’s Annual Energy Review, the US emits 5.934 billion metric tons of CO2/year.[2] In other words, the amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere in March, above the historical average gain for that month, was 46% of the CO2 the US emitted in all of 2006.[3] Using the oft-quoted world number for CO2 of 30 billion metric tons/year, that increment over the normal rise, for just that one month, was equal to about 9% of humanity’s worldwide, yearly CO2 emissions. (The total increase of 0.71 ppmv is 5.53 billion tons, 93% of the US’s 2006 emissions, or 18.4% of world emissions for a year.) That’s a huge additional pulse of CO2 to show up in the atmosphere in a single month, so it’s no wonder that the trend line in the NOAA graph shown in CO2 checkpoint and reproduced below lurches upward so noticeably.

Given CO2’s long lifetime in the atmosphere, that would be bad enough news, but it comes on the heels of a marked increase in methane atmospheric levels (Methane checkpoint). For many of us, the number one climate fear is that we’ll cross the most critical single tipping point and trigger a massive release of both CO2 and methane from the Arctic region. Most of this would come from defrosting permafrost, with some additional methane coming from methane hydrates, a.k.a. the clathrate gun. If (and that’s an enormous “if”) these additions to the atmosphere’s levels of those two greenhouse gases are the early stage of the permafrost bomb going off, it’s almost unimaginably bad news.

The obvious next question then becomes: When will we know? And indeed, someone did ask it. In the comments for my CO2 post, Sasparilla said (emphasis added):

I wonder how long we’ll have to wait to know for sure? What do you think? 2-3 years?

I remember hearing an author (who wasn’t associated with the geo-engineering field) stating that he thought we’d be forced as a society to seriously entertain geo-engineering strategies (just to keep the temperature brakes on while we get emissions down) in 5-10 years. I thought that sounded far fetched at the time (last year), but here we are a year later and if these trends continue and accelerate as the north continues to warm - we may just end up where he thought we’d be, frightening.

To which I replied:

My gut feeling, based on statistical experience with non-climate time series data (mostly from economics) and my E&E reading, is that we could have a pretty good idea much sooner than 2-3 years. Since 1980, the yearly peak in CO2 level has come in April or May every year. If we peaked this year in June, or saw a statistically significant deviation from the established pattern over the summer, then I think the odds of it being the permafrost bomb would go up considerably. I don’t know if that would mean a 10% or 50% or 90% chance of it being The Bomb, but it would certainly set off alarm bells. If the pattern more or less returns to form, but we start seeing a deviation every year, and it gets larger, then it could take several years to be convincing.

I think the odds that we’ll be able to drop emissions quickly enough to avoid betting the farm (and the city and …) on geoengineering are declining. Right now, my gut feeling is that it’s only about a 60 to 70% chance, but that’s making some (very?) optimistic assumptions about international agreements and compliance.

Upon further thought, I think I wasn’t as clear in my response as I could have been, so I’m going to elaborate a bit.

I see three possibilities in the coming months and years:

• The sharp upticks in both CO2 and methane turn out to be one-time events, and the phenomenon doesn’t reappear in 2010. Whether climate scientists reach consensus on the cause now or a year or decades from now is another matter entirely.
• The upticks subside and the rest of 2009 plays out as one might expect based on historical data, but it happens again in 2010, 2011, and later, establishing a new pattern of Spring greenhouse gas pulses. One could argue whether this constitutes the permafrost bomb going off, even if in stages. With a warming climate I think it would be reasonable, even if too flippant, to refer to these yearly events as permafrost firecrackers going off one at a time, a year apart. The nasty detail, of course, is that each one adds to climate change and brings us slightly closer to the bomb actually going off.
• The upticks don’t subside right away. May’s numbers are even higher, and then so are June’s, making it the first time that the yearly high doesn’t land in either April or May.[4] This would be alarming, and it would result in a huge amount of attention focused on the July numbers. If those came in higher yet, I wouldn’t want to think about the implications or what kind of response it would elicit from various countries and political factions. (I’m ignoring the possibility that we could see a sustained, huge increase in Arctic emissions for just this one year.)

In other words, in the best case scenario (the first one above) it would likely take us a year to gather some hard data (the lack of these pulses in 2010) before we would even consider classifying them as a singular event. But even then, we might be premature in saying they’re a one-time anomaly, as they could show up in perhaps one year out of ever two or three at first and then increase in frequency.

The middle case would also take at least one more year to unfold, as we would have to wait for 2010’s data, at the least, before passing judgment, albeit with the same caveat as above about leaping to a wrong conclusion about the new pattern or lack thereof on such scant evidence.[5]

The last and worst case is the one in which we’d get essentially instant feedback from the climate system. This is what I meant when I said in my reply to Sasparilla that we “could” find out in as little as two or three months. Frankly, I was so focused on this horrific scenario that I didn’t lay out the possibilities, as I see them.

So, Sasparilla might well be right, and it could take 2-3 years to tease the pattern and an explanation out of the raw data. All things considered, this is one of the very few times I hope we don’t solve a scientific mystery right away.

The possibility that the data is showing us the beginning of the permafrost bomb going off is so terrifying that I think it needs to be examined in a broader context.

If you assume, as I do, that James Hansen and Bill McKibben are right, and the “safe” level of CO2 in the atmosphere is 350 ppmv, about 38 ppmv (or 296 billion metric tons, roughly ten years of worldwide CO2 emissions) less than April’s reading, then, like me, you feel on a visceral level how unsettling these CO2 and methane observations are.

In one sense, we’ve almost certainly crossed a critical boundary. As Bill McKibben pointed out in The Most Important Number on Earth:

DIY [do-it-yourself] conservation makes great practical sense, but we won’t save the planet that way. One by one, trying to do the right thing, we add up to… not nearly enough. You cannot make the math work that way—there are too many sockets and too many tailpipes and most of all too much inertia for voluntary action to do the trick. It didn’t work when President Bush made voluntary reduction by corporations his global warming “policy,” and it won’t work fast enough with individuals either.

Please go read the whole article. It’s worth your time.

(The phenomenon McKibben points out is why I’ve long advocated that we need both individual action to change our consumption patterns and engagement at the voting booth and through whatever other legal means we can find to tell large concentrations of power–corporations, universities, NGOs, governments at all levels, etc.–that we demand they do their share to bring down our collective greenhouse gas emissions. And if they refuse, then we should withhold the things they absolutely require and give them to their competition: Votes and financial support in the case of politicians, sales from corporations, etc. Nothing will change the behavior of large entities faster than a credible threat to reduce or cut off their oxygen supply and feed it to their competition.)

Once again, timing is everything. We’re just beginning to deal with the fact that humanity poured a lot of long-lived CO2 into the atmosphere before we generally realized the consequences. Now we have no choice but to take much more extreme steps to avoid a climate catastrophe than would have been required had we started 50 years ago. This is why I’ve indicated numerous times, including in my response to Sasparilla, that I’m not optimistic that we’ll be able to avoid resorting to one or more geoengineering schemes. (In fact, I’m less optimistic than I said in that reply. I’m not sure where that 60 to 70% range came from.) If we see strong evidence in the data that the permafrost bomb is indeed going off, then the public support for launching orbital mirrors or seeding oceans with iron or who knows what will rise dramatically.

As uncomfortable as that sounds, I think it signals a more profound change than the one McKibben points out. We’re entering a period when we’re so close to (or have already passed) tipping points that dictate we have no choice but to actively manage the planet’s climate. We’re now in (or will be very soon) what I propose we call the Metricene, a time when virtually everything related to climate, including our own actions, is measured and, by implication, explicitly managed. This is the concept I’ve alluded to in the past by saying we’re all living a “measured life on a managed planet”, and what James Lovelock was no doubt talking about when he said:

This could happen if, at some intolerable population density, man had encroached upon Gaia’s functional power to such an extent that he disabled her. He would wake up one day to find that he had the permanent, lifelong job of planetary maintenance engineer. Gaia would have retreated into the muds, and the ceaseless intricate task of keeping all of the global cycles in balance would be ours. Then at last we should be riding that strange contraption, the “spaceship Earth,” and whatever tamed and domesticated biosphere remained would indeed be our “life-support system.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the growing sentiment for terming our current era as the Anthropocene, the time when human activities have had an effect on the world’s climate. Wikipedia’s entry gives a good overview, and points out that there’s some disagreement about when it should start–in the late 1700’s with the beginning of our love affair with mass use of fossil fuels, or 8,000 years ago when the spread of agriculture increased greenhouse gas emissions. While I think William Ruddiman makes a compelling case for the much earlier date (see his book, Ploughs, Plagues & Petroleum), I think the evidence is quickly growing that even that concept has been surpassed by reality and our perception of it. The shift from a period of unintentional climate influence to one of required and intentional control is an even more compelling reason to coin a new term and view our evolving situation much differently.

I certainly don’t like the prospects of being forced down that path, even if you assume we won’t wind up in the kind of centralized Carbon Dictatorship that Tim Flannery describes in chapter 33 of his must-read book, The Weather Makers. But as is so often the case in life, we’re forced into terrible situations through random chance or our own actions born of simple ignorance.

Right now, as we wait for the next few months or years of data on CO2 and methane levels to trickle in, humanity is playing the role of a medical patient anxiously awaiting test results. We’ve had some disturbing symptoms, and we’re now in the gray zone of ignorance that lies between perceiving ourselves as healthy and either getting good news from the doctor or finding out we have a particularly nasty form of cancer that will require extremely unpleasant treatment in an effort to save our lives. Had we known about this nexus point in our lives years or decades ago, we surely would have changed our lifestyle in almost any way possible to reduce our risk factors–or so we tell ourselves. But for now, all we can do is hope we’re not about to pay an awful price for our past actions.

And maybe all will be well. Maybe the climate scientists will give us the equivalent of a chat in which our doctor says, “Good news–your tests were negative. But you really need to get serious about taking better care of yourself. Stop smoking, cut back on the alcohol, get more exercise, and lose 40 pounds. Next time, you might not dodge the bullet.” And sometimes that scare is enough to force us out of our complacency. We make sweeping changes, give up or greatly restrict some things we’d prefer to indulge in, and in time realize the multiple benefits of our new lifestyle which go far beyond what the actuarial tables suggest.

Those CO2 and methane numbers could very well turn out to be nothing more than humanity’s cancer scare, and one that ultimately is beneficial by providing enough uncertainty and genuine fear to overcome our complacency and willful ignorance. Or they could lead to the discovery of an awful underlying truth about the state of the climate, with terrible, sweeping implications we would do anything to escape. We shouldn’t wait for our global test results. Even without a permafrost bomb in the picture, our situation should be more than sufficiently dire to motivate us. We can and should get to work making those changes throughout society, which will benefit us no matter what the data tells us in months or years. What have we got to lose by acting in our own best interest?

[1] We have CO2 data for Mauna Loa that goes back much further than that, obviously, but I don’t know if there’s global data that predates 1980. I will continue to look for it and contact NOAA.

[2] As I type this on Sunday night, we’re just a couple of days away from the US DOE releasing the latest Annual Energy Review (on Tuesday), which will presumably have emissions data for 2007.

[3] I’m ignoring the fact that some of the CO2 emitted in that month was absorbed by the ocean or plants. I’m assuming that over such a short time frame any such removal of new CO2 would be negligible, although including it would push up the calculated emissions value (2.73 billion metric tons) just slightly.

[4] In the 29 years prior to 2009, the yearly high arrived 16 times in April and 13 times in May. The average change (not absolute value) between those two months was only 0.14 ppmv.

[5] If this sounds like I’m being extremely cautious, I am. The implications of what’s happening to the atmosphere and how we perceive and react to it are impossible to overestimate.

I’m reminded of the story of three scientists walking near their laboratory. One points to a sheep in a nearby field and says, “Gee, didn’t know there were black sheep around here.” The second says, “Don’t jump to conclusions–you’ve only seen one black sheep.” The third says, “Neither of you should jump to conclusions–you’ve only seen one side of one sheep, which happens to be black.”

The US government has released a report that’s sure to be a “must read” item for anyone who cares about the mushrooming issue of climate chaos.

The report is “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States”, and is a product of the US Global Change Research Program. (See the end of this post for links to the report’s web page, which has numerous downloadables.)

I’ve had just a few minutes to give the document a quick skim, but it seems to be exactly the report I would have requested, had I been in such a position, in terms of its focus on regions and sectors. Note that “sectors” is not the typical breakout we see in energy discussions of residential, commercial, industrial, transportation, and electricity. Here, it means Water Resources, Transportation, Ecosystems, Agriculture, Society, Human Health, and Energy Supply and Use.

From the Key Findings (page 12):

1. Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced.
Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. (p. 13)

2. Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow.
Climate-related changes are already observed in the United States and its coastal waters. These include increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening growing seasons, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows. These changes are projected to grow. (p. 27)

3. Widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase.
Climate changes are already affecting water, energy, transportation, agriculture, ecosystems, and health. These impacts are different from region to region and will grow under projected climate change. (p. 41-106, 107-152)

4. Climate change will stress water resources.
Water is an issue in every region, but the nature of the potential impacts varies. Drought, related to reduced precipitation, increased evaporation, and increased water loss from plants, is an important issue in many regions, especially in the West. Floods and water quality problems are likely to be amplified by climate change in most regions. Declines in mountain snowpack are important in the West and Alaska where snowpack provides vital natural water storage. (p. 41, 129, 135, 139)

5. Crop and livestock production will be increasingly challenged.
Many crops show positive responses to elevated carbon dioxide and low levels of warming, but higher levels of warming often negatively affect growth and yields. Increased pests, water stress, diseases, and weather extremes will pose adaptation challenges for crop and livestock production. (p. 71)

6. Coastal areas are at increasing risk from sea-level rise and storm surge.
Sea-level rise and storm surge place many U.S. coastal areas at increasing risk of erosion and flooding, especially along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, Pacific Islands, and parts of Alaska. Energy and transportation infrastructure and other property in coastal areas are very likely to be adversely affected. (p. 111, 139, 145, 149)

7. Risks to human health will increase.
Harmful health impacts of climate change are related to increasing heat stress, waterborne diseases, poor air quality, extreme weather events, and diseases transmitted by insects and rodents. Reduced cold stress provides some benefits. Robust public health infrastructure can reduce the potential for negative impacts. (p. 89)

8. Climate change will interact with many social and environmental stresses.
Climate change will combine with pollution, population growth, overuse of resources, urbanization, and other social, economic, and environmental stresses to create larger impacts than from any of these factors alone. (p. 99)

9. Thresholds will be crossed, leading to large changes in climate and ecosystems.
There are a variety of thresholds in the climate system and ecosystems. These thresholds determine, for example, the presence of sea ice and permafrost, and the survival of species, from fish to insect pests, with implications for society. With further climate change, the crossing of additional thresholds is expected. (p. 76, 82, 115, 137, 142)

10. Future climate change and its impacts depend on choices made today.
The amount and rate of future climate change depend primarily on current and future human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases and airborne particles. Responses involve reducing emissions to limit future warming, and adapting to the changes that are unavoidable. (p. 25, 29)

I expect to have more to say about this, post reading.

Links:

• The report’s web page
• the download page on the site<.a>, which has links to the full report, an executive summary, and regional and sector-level breakouts
• the report, in one 196 page, 13MB PDF
• You can follow the goings on today (and possibly in the coming days) about this report on Twitter and facebook.
• an online summary slide show

How do we get people to take personal action to fight climate chaos? I’m not talking about mobilizing every last person in the world or even those in any of the wealthier nations. If we could get 51% to understand the staggering consequences of further delay, and then acting on that new found realization, I’d be deliriously happy. But as we all know, spreading the word, and in the process fighting the well financed and/or ideologically motivated deniers, is a chore that Sisyphus wouldn’t want to take on.

Is it possible that something else will happen besides an outreach/education campaign, some environmentally triggered catastrophe that would so starkly spell out the horrors that await thanks to our cumulative actions over the last century that it would finally make us take action? I hate to use the term, but is it possible that we could have the environmental equivalent of the Pearl Harbor Attack?

I’ve expressed the opinion online that I honestly don’t think it could happen, at least not here in the US. Pick your nightmare scenario–a category 5 hurricane hits Washington DC or NYC or Boston or Houston, causing almost unimaginable human and monetary damage. Or maybe the water supplies of some high population area or areas collapse, creating a desperate need for a massive humanitarian relief effort, larger than anything in human history, and also creating millions of climate refugees. Or perhaps there’s a sudden leap in polar melting, and we see an ice-free Arctic Ocean in just a few years, or the West Antarctic Ice Shelf unexpectedly starts to collapse. In any of those scenarios, I think we’d see wall-to-wall press coverage and a steely resolve to Do Something To Fix It (even as the deniers went into overdrive with a variety of “explanations” for why we should do nothing) that quickly faded into complacency.

Put simply: I see climate chaos as a classic left brain problem. We can’t rely on our evolutionary history to push us into action, but instead have to let the facts and logic dictate our actions. We have to make changes we don’t want to make (an immediate, personal cost) to achieve a much tougher to discern and much longer term benefit.

I honestly don’t know how to solve this problem. The article below is the best short treatment I’ve seen of this situation. Highly recommended.

Yale Environment 360: Beyond Abstraction: Moving The Public on Climate Action:

Humans have been wired by evolution to respond to the most immediate threats, ones they can hear or smell or see — like the lions approaching our ancestral watering holes in the Serengeti. So in searching for answers as to why society has been so slow to react to one of the greatest threats facing the planet today — global warming — this deeply ingrained instinct is a good place to start. Climate change just doesn’t offer those kinds of sensory signals — at least not yet — and humans have not felt the need to react, according to researchers.

“Danger brings emotional reactions, dread, a feeling of alarm. Evolution has equipped us with that,” says Elke Weber, director of the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University. “The threats we face today are not of that type. They are psychologically removed in space and time. So cognitively, we know something needs to be done about climate change, but we don’t have that emotional alarm bell going off.”

Weber is one of a handful of researchers trying to unravel a glaring contradiction: Even though global temperatures are rising, the Arctic ice cap is melting, scientists are offering increasingly urgent warnings about climate change, and polls show Americans acknowledging that the threat of global warming is real, we’re still not doing very much about the problem.

…

Changing behavior, then, becomes a complicated process. Leiserowitz, working with the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, recently released research findings showing how complicated the task may be.

Their analysis from an opinion poll of environmental attitudes of 2,164 adults identifies six groups, which they call the “Six Americas.” Those groups react to different messages, to different messengers, and in different ways to information on climate change. Leiserowitz argues that moving society on this issue will require a tailored approach to each.

…

More worrisome is the politicization of the issue. In another large-scale study on public attitudes, Barry Rabe — a political scientist and professor of environmental policy at University of Michigan who worked with the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia — found that 83 percent of Democrats believe global warming is happening, while only 53 percent of Republicans do so.

“That really did surprise us,” Rabe said. “No matter how you asked the questions, there wasn’t much diversity by state, age, income, gender. The one that jumped out time after time was partisan affiliation.”

We need to use a lot less oil and emit a lot less CO2. I doubt anyone who regularly reads this site would seriously debate those assertions. As we see so often, the truly interesting issues arise only in the follow-up questions: What do we cut? Who has to make which lifestyle changes (and, in some cases, sacrifices)? Who bears which monetary costs? And, most important of all, who gets to answer those first three questions?

All of this came to mind when I read a couple of items that flowed through my news feeds in the last couple of days…

Courant.com: Some Still Swear By Gas Guzzlers, But For How Long?:

Whether I’m launching onto I-84 or passing a truck on Route 44, I want to hear a sound — not a buzz or a whine, but a throaty snarl that speaks of power and survival.

Like many Americans, I need a car with spirit and heft, and if it has some elegance or attitude in the fender lines, so much the better.

Events, however, are conspiring to end this long affair.

Rising fuel prices, the recession, federally mandated fuel economy hikes and smart growth are combining to scrap the vigorous, often chunky vehicles that take our cheeseburger-loving behinds down the road. It won’t be long until we’re all skittering along in identical pods, spurting puffs of mist from our hydrogen-fueled mini motors; or worse, moving under our own puny power.

So I say, let’s enjoy these final years of gas-guzzling joy. Get under the oil tap this Memorial Day weekend and swill.

Speaking as an ex-motor head, a guy who owned sports cars and a 100+ HP motorcycle, someone who lived and breathed 0-to-60 times, 60-to-0 braking distances, lateral G-force ratings, etc., and thought it was my moral duty to exercise all of a speedometer’s range while wallowing in the adrenaline rush of eyeball-flattening acceleration, I have to admit that I went through a list of reactions upon reading this.

My knee jerk reaction: Get over it. The age of mindless, thoughtless consumption is over. Even here in the historically myopic and selfish US we’re (finally!) exiting adolescence and becoming acutely aware of how much our actions affect each other, and therefore ourselves. Poor baby–you have to give up your bloody hobby as part of our joint effort to avoid the twin horrors of peak oil and climate chaos!

After a few moments of contemplation, I realized I was making the same idiotic and infuriating mistake that so many others make: I’m imposing my own values (as they exist today) on others, dismissing the viewpoint of the people I’m passing judgment on, and confusing strategy and tactics.

I’ll come back to these points below, but let me flesh out the pattern a bit with the other article I read, Cultural Trends Examiner: Indy 500 continues to waste fuel: Another car race with no awareness of recession or peak oil:

The Indy 500 happens at this time ever year regardless of the price or scarcity of gasoline. It’s pushing $3 per gallon, and it was near $5 per gallon last year. Still, these folks continue to blow off valuable energy as if there is an endless supply. They no longer use gasoline but have replaced it with ethanol, the plant-based fuel that is now causing us to grow corn and sugar for fuel rather than feeding the 25,000 who will die of starvation today. Experts say that the energy required to fill one SUV tank could feed a single person for an entire year.

And we still haven’t even included the waste from the fuel used by people who spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to attend and watch cars drive fast around and around and around. I thought that we were deep into a recession, and that people were having trouble with the basics of life. We’ve been asked to limit our use of oil and combine out trips to save fuel, but these racers just keep driving nowhere. And people come out to watch and cheer as long as they make lots of noise and crash every so often. How about a real technology race of electric, sustainable energy vehicles?

That does not seem to be the interest of such big sports events. People are still attending and making a big deal about this type of “competition,” which is really nothing more than lots of fat cat corporate types getting “we the people” to get excited about overpaid “athletes” creating a spectacle. It’s just big money using more big money to attract money from unconscious people (mostly guys).

The majority of people who have the great seats are corporate executives whose tickets are bought by the company, many of which are being supported by U.S. government funds. That big corporation may be receiving bail out money from us (”we the people” American taxpayers), but they still “invest” in taking themselves and their clients to these big sporting events.

Since I try very hard to stick to the numbers in such discussions, let me point out that the amount of fuel used every year in the US during these races plus everything burned to get the drivers, their huge support teams, the cars and other equipment, and all those spectators to a race is certainly an impressive number, in absolute terms, but a truly insignificant one in terms of the overall US liquids fuels consumption. I won’t bother doing the research needed to ballpark the number; consider it an exercise left for the reader. Nor will I address the issue of who is buying those expensive tickets, which borders on class warfare and is therefore irrelevant.

The problem with this view of Indy and car racing in general is that it views the whole operation via a specific set of values and imposes a moral judgment on those who see the world differently.[1]

But wait, I can hear people typing into their angry e-mail already, isn’t it absolutely true that if we gave up a lot of completely unnecessary activities, like holding and attending many professional sporting events, that we would forgo a lot of CO2 emissions and effectively leave a lot of oil in the ground? Wouldn’t that benefit us all? Of course it would, and I’ll sign up for that view just as soon as someone gives me a list we can all agree on of which things are truly “unnecessary”. You might think the first writer’s obsession with all things automotive, or my obsession with lacrosse, are inexcusable luxuries. But taking those “unnecessary” things away from people like us (and your favorite things away from you, I dare say) would have a huge impact on our lives, even if they don’t provide food, clothing, shelter, or medical care.

So, we’re at a stalemate, and we should do nothing, and race right off the edge of that quickly approaching cliff, right? Of course not. What we should do is take the approach that I keep preaching governments should adopt: Set the strategy (reduce CO2 emissions, reduce petroleum dependency), but don’t pick winners and losers. In the case of government subsidies, that usually means not selecting one technology over another for support. In the case of our individual lives and how we view the actions of others, that means leaving moral judgments for more appropriate circumstances, like how we view issues of prisoner torture or war in general, aside and focusing on the big goals.

That’s a nice sentiment (I hear you typing), but in the real world the government has to favor some solutions over others, even before our quaint panorama is warped almost beyond recognition by the absurdities of politics. Witness the recent changes in funding for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, Yucca Mountain, the ongoing PTC (production tax credit) for renewables, the endless support for corn-based ethanol, and the subsidies for nuclear power, including insurance, which would be all but impossible to acquire without government help. Until we have a reasonable price on CO2 emissions, then I think we have little choice but to employ technology-specific government support, especially where it’s critical to providing the stable, investment-friendly environment that’s critical in building a large enough industry for building and maintaining wind turbines and solar power in its various forms, for example.

I’m more convinced than ever that the solution on the climate portion of our shared nightmare is a well run (note the emphasis) cap and trade system for CO2 emissions and most other forms of environmental impact. Set the overall limit and let the market and individuals decide how they want to divide it up, with no subsidies for anyone aside from R&D funding. If some entity wants to horde its CO2 emissions allotment, in effect, and then blow it all on attending a couple of races or lacrosse games or NFL games or science fiction conventions or yacht races or whatever “unnecessary”, legal pursuit you can name, then that’s fine, and it matters not the least whether the entity is an individual, a university, a government office, an NGO, or a corporation. The grand goal–get CO2 emissions down to X tons/year–is still met, and that’s all that matters. Moral judgments should be as irrelevant to us as they are to the atmosphere, which draws no distinction between CO2 emitted for a “good reason” vs. that emitted for something “unnecessary”.

Peak oil is a far more problematic issue, as trying to get people focused on a hard and fast limit–the US has to reduce its oil consumption to Y million barrels/day next year–simply because the education process is so much further behind that for climate chaos. I know and have spoken with quite a few mainstream consumers and voters who have more or less accepted the conclusion that climate chaos is very real problem, one we have to address as soon as possible and much more vigorously than we have to date. And yet a large portion of these people (80%?) don’t realize we’re facing a second ticking time bomb in our world oil supply. Almost any attempt to talk to them about it futile, regardless of the approach (and I’ve tried everything short of puppet shows). Part of this is, I think, crisis exhaustion. Between all the aspects of the economic mess we’re living through plus all the enviros hammering at them over CO2 emissions, they simply don’t have the mental and emotional bandwidth to deal with yet another Big, Scary Thing. As a result, they think that “there’s plenty of oil” to be had, and there is no deadline approaching. Of course there is a deadline–the amount of oil in the ground and the amount of CO2 we can pump into the atmosphere without triggering a climate catastrophe are both reality-imposed limits, whether or not we choose to see them as such.

Put another way, this is a plea for us to stop and take the time to evaluate which issues do and don’t matter as the twin terrors of peak oil and climate chaos rush ever closer. We should focus all our resources on addressing the truly important ones as quickly and efficiently as possible, and then simply ignore the rest.

And as soon as I have a good definition of what’s “truly important”, I’ll let you know…

[1] I would say something here about the anti-suburbs fetish that’s so rampant in some corners of the blogosphere, but that would side track the entire discussion, so I’ll leave it for another day.

If there’s one thing people take away from this blog, I would hope it’s an appreciation for the perverse level of interaction between natural and man-made events, and therefore how easy it is to let simplistic assumptions lead us to horribly incorrect conclusions. I was in this frame of mind last night when I saw the report that NBC did on their nightly news broadcast about the new CAFE standards.

They talked about what the new requirements are, and then said that this will add $1,300 to the cost of every car by 2016 (without revealing the source of that estimate, as best I can remember). They said that the Administration says that the average driver will save about $2,800 on reduced fuel cost over the life of the vehicle, based on a price of $3.50/gallon.

I have no idea exactly what other assumptions went into that calculation, and I won’t waste my time and yours dissecting it. But $3.50/gallon for gasoline? In 2016? Seriously?

We have the IEA howling, yet again, about the coming oil crunch (”Downturn Sets Up Surge in Oil Prices“), and all those nasty predictions about peak oil being here or imminent, from the rank and file of the math and logic enabled (that’s us, dear readers) to Raymond James to Jeff Rubin. Assume for the moment that we haven’t yet peaked, and that Chris Skrebowski’s prediction of a 2011 peak will still prove to be accurate, investment-triggered crunch notwithstanding, then what do you think the price of oil, and therefore the price of gasoline, will do five years post-peak? It’s possible that we’ll be using oil at a low enough level that we’ll still be trundling along on the undulating plateau of world oil production, meaning we won’t yet have encountered true supply constraints because we’ll still be eating into excess capacity.

Right now, it doesn’t look like that will happen; even a moderate worldwide economic recovery in 2010 is likely to re-start the growth in oil demand in China and India, which should swamp out any conservation in other countries. Add to that dynamic the fallout from the current plummeting investment in oil field development, and the scene is set for supply constraints, significantly higher prices, and any talk of $3.50/gallon gasoline in the US in 2016 sounding terribly quaint.

Which begs the question: Are the new CAFE rules a major advancement in the greening of America, or will they prove to be much ado about nothing? I’ve been pondering this since the news broke, and I think I’ve finally come down on the side of much ado about nothing. I think they represent a very hollow victory; yes, sanity has prevailed, and the US government is finally acting like the adults are in charge, which is always a good thing. But what real effect will they have? Right now, it seems none at all, as the price of gasoline will provide more than enough incentive to move consumers to more efficient vehicles well before 2016.

One can make the argument that before consumers can buy those cars the car companies have to design and build them. Higher CAFE standards for 2016 put into place now will indeed provide the regulatory certainty that people are talking about (a non-trivial detail), but I’m not at all convinced that they will accelerate the development and availability of more fuel efficient cars. With the steady drumbeat of announcements from various car companies about PHEVs, EVs, diesels, etc., it seems that even the most reluctant companies have finally Received The Message.

I think the bottom line is that events are largely locked into place for the next few years on the oil front, barring any unforeseen above ground event, like an inconveniently placed/timed hurricane or war, and we’re headed for gratuitously interesting times.

At least that’s how I assume things will work out…

Some days you have to wonder if everyone who’s been sounding the alarm about oil issues for years have been right all along, and the rest of the world, including the US power structure, is just now playing catch-up. At least that’s the thought I had when I read BusinessWeek’s U.S. Reliance on Oil an ‘Urgent Threat’:

A group of retired senior U.S. military officers has concluded that the country’s reliance on fossil fuels undermines its capacity to defend itself. Citing a “serious and urgent threat to national security,” the group has urged the Pentagon to take the lead in shifting to a new age in energy.

The dependence on oil-based fuels left the U.S. military seriously over-extended in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the officers’ report, issued on May 18 by CNA, a military think tank based in Alexandria, Va. The 62-page report asserts that the true cost of fuel, including logistics and the military protection of sea lanes, can run to hundreds of dollars a gallon.

“Our energy posture is not sustainable. It can be exploited by those who want to do us harm,” retired Air Force Lieutenant General Larry Farrell, a co-author of the report, said in an interview. Finding a suitable alternative fuel and scaling it up to the size of the U.S. economy “is a 30-year project,” Farrell said. “We’ve got to get started now.”

The report, called “Powering America’s Defense: Energy and the Risks to National Security,” was written by CNA’s military advisory board, comprised of 12 retired generals and admirals. It’s a follow-up to a 2007 report by the advisory board called “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.”

From the report’s executive summary:

This report identifies a series of current risks created by America’s energy policies and practices that constitute a serious and urgent threat to national security—militarily, diplomatically, and economically:

• U.S. dependence on oil weakens international leverage, undermines foreign policy objectives, and entangles America with unstable or hostile regimes.

• Inefficient use and overreliance on oil burdens the military, undermines combat effectiveness, and exacts a huge price tag—in dollars and lives.

• U.S. dependence on fossil fuels undermines economic stability, which is critical to national security.

• A fragile domestic electricity grid makes our domestic military installations, and their critical infrastructure, unnecessarily vulnerable to incident, whether deliberate or accidental.

Looking forward, the report warns that continuing business as usual is perilous because of the converging national security risks of energy demand and climate change:

• The market for fossil fuels will be shaped by finite supplies and increasing demand. Continuing our heavy reliance on these fuels is a security risk.

• Regulatory frameworks driven by climate change concerns will increase the costs—both economic and geopolitical—of using carbon based fuels.

• Destabilization driven by ongoing climate change has the potential to add significantly to the mission burden of the U.S. military in fragile regions of the world.

The home page for the report is here.

You can directly down the report here [74 page, 750KB PDF].

Bill McKibben has an interesting piece in today’s LA Times, Can 350.org save the world? (emphasis added):

In Washington, meanwhile, the Obama administration is valiantly helping to push a bill through Congress that would finally set a cap on U.S. carbon emissions. Introduced by Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), it has the support of most environmental groups and represents the culmination of years of hard lobbying work. And if the leaks coming out of the committee are correct, it’s watered down with lots of loopholes and compromises. These concessions are clearly necessary to win passage, but they may also limit the speed and breadth of the legislation’s impact.

The trouble is, physics and chemistry aren’t adjusting their schedule to fit our political and economic convenience. Each week brings new accounts of crashing ice sheets and spreading droughts. The scientific journal Nature said in its April 29 cover story that “a growing number of scientists agree that the CO2 challenge is even greater than had been previously thought.”

As politics gets slower, global warming speeds up. The problem isn’t feckless officials. Obama has a dream team of climate specialists: Clinton administration EPA veteran Carol Browner as energy czar, Harvard physicist John Holdren as top science advisor, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu as Energy secretary and Oakland activist Van Jones as White House green jobs coordinator.

And the problem isn’t that environmental groups aren’t working hard enough. I’ve never seen them work more tirelessly, with lobbying efforts in capitals around the world.

In fact, the problem is pretty simple: The environmental movement isn’t big enough. It’s one of the most selfless of advocacy efforts. But the movement has been sized to save whales and build national parks and force carmakers to stick catalytic converters on exhaust systems. It’s nowhere near big enough to take on the fossil fuel industry, the biggest player in our global economy. It’s like sending the Food and Drug Administration to fight the war in Afghanistan.

In reading this, I immediately thought of that scene in Apollo 13 where one of the Earthbound astronauts is arguing with an engineer about how to concoct a power-up sequence for the Command Module. In frustration, the engineer says, “You’re telling me what you need, I’m telling you what you have.” That’s exactly where I think we are in dealing with peak oil and climate chaos: We’re fighting a war with a dedicated, passionate and compassionate, but grotesquely over matched force.

It’s not true, as so many like to claim, that humanity is too short sighted or greedy to do what’s in its own best interest. The crux of the matter is the power wielded (with a helping, not-so-invisible hand from their ideologically driven friends in the press and the blogosphere) by those tiny portions of humanity that are indeed greedy and myopic greatly slows down or blocks meaningful progress in responding to highly diffuse problems. Preparing and implementing a response plan for an outbreak of avian flu, for example, is comparatively simple. There’s no financial incentive among the fossil fuel companies or anyone else to see thousands or millions die, and the response can be highly centralized. The average citizen doesn’t need to know any of the details or take any action until the time when the plan is put to the test. Peak oil and climate chaos are fundamentally different, in that the cause of those problem is the behavior of basically everyone in certain countries.

I don’t have any answer about how to fix this situation. If I did, I would write a book or get funding from Ted Turner or the Clinton Global Initiative or Bill Gate or Warren Buffet to make it happen. Hell, who am I kidding–I’d just tell the world about it right here.

Are we as good as cooked? Should we give up the fight, let the fossil fuel companies make all the money they want while we buy and drive absurdly oversized vehicles too many miles, and use all the cheap coal-fired electricity we want?

Yes.

It’s over, and the bad guys have won.

After all, we don’t have history to point to, like the US mobilizing the entire country and transforming its industrial base with breathtaking speed to defeat a genocidal regime and then help rebuild large parts of a continent.

International treaties to reduce a dangerous pollutant? Oh, please. If we had done something like that to, oh, I don’t know, save the ozone layer from CFC emissions, I’d have some hope.

And we’ve never seen anything like massive numbers of American voters reject the backward looking, anti-science wing of our political spectrum and electing not just a progressive, pro-science pragmatist but the first US President of African American descent. What an absurd, utopian notion! Never happened, never…

Oh, wait…

Lester Brown, one of the people I consider a must read, has an interesting take on one of the grand questions in the energy and environmental area, how we perceive our world, how it works, and how we fit into it, in Needed: A Copernican Shift.[1]

Some excerpts from the essay (which I urge you to read in its entirety, emphasis added below):

Economic theory and economic indicators do not explain how the economy is disrupting and destroying the earth’s natural systems. Economic theory does not explain why Arctic sea ice is melting. It does not explain why grasslands are turning into desert in northwestern China, why coral reefs are dying in the South Pacific, or why the Newfoundland cod fishery collapsed. Nor does it explain why we are in the early stages of the greatest extinction of plants and animals since the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. Yet economics is essential to measuring the cost to society of these excesses.

Evidence that the economy is in conflict with the earth’s natural systems can be seen in the daily news reports of collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, eroding soils, deteriorating rangelands, expanding deserts, rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, falling water tables, rising temperatures, more destructive storms, melting glaciers, rising sea level, dying coral reefs, and disappearing species. These trends, which mark an increasingly stressed relationship between the economy and the earth’s ecosystem, are taking a growing economic toll. At some point, this could overwhelm the worldwide forces of progress, leading to economic decline.

These increasingly visible trends indicate that if the operation of the subsystem, the economy, is not compatible with the behavior of the larger system—the earth’s ecosystem—both will eventually suffer. Recent events in the economic and financial systems cause one to wonder if we’re beginning to see the effects of an economy outgrowing its natural base. The larger the economy becomes relative to the ecosystem, and the more it presses against the earth’s natural limits, the more destructive this incompatibility will be. The challenge for our generation is to reverse these trends before environmental deterioration leads to long-term economic decline, as it did for so many earlier civilizations.

An environmentally sustainable economy—an eco-economy—requires that the principles of ecology establish the framework for the formulation of economic policy and that economists and ecologists work together to fashion the new economy. Ecologists understand that all economic activity, indeed all life, depends on the earth’s ecosystem—the complex of individual species living together, interacting with each other and their physical habitat. These millions of species exist in an intricate balance, woven together by food chains, nutrient cycles, the hydrological cycle, and the climate system. Economists know how to translate goals into policy. Economists and ecologists working together can design and build an eco-economy, one that can sustain progress.

…

The gap between economists and ecologists in their perception of the world as the 21st century began could not have been wider. Economists looked at the unprecedented growth of the global economy and of international trade and investment and forecast a promising future with more of the same. They noted with justifiable pride the sevenfold expansion of the economy since 1950, which raised output from $6 trillion of goods and services to $43 trillion in 2000 and boosted living standards to levels not dreamed of before. Ecologists looked at this same growth and realized that it was the product of burning vast quantities of artificially cheap fossil fuels, a process that destabilizes the climate. They looked ahead to see more intense heat waves, more destructive storms, melting ice caps, and rising sea levels that would shrink the land area even as population continued to grow. While economists saw booming economic indicators, ecologists saw an economy that is altering the climate with unthinkable consequences.

Economists rely on the market to guide their decisionmaking. They respect the market because it can allocate resources with an efficiency that a central planner can never match (as the Soviets learned at great expense). Ecologists view the market with less reverence because they see a market that is not telling the truth. For example, when buying a gallon of gasoline, customers in effect pay to get the oil out of the ground, refine it into gasoline, and deliver it to the local service station. But they do not pay the health care costs of treating respiratory illness from air pollution or the costs of climate disruption.

…

The good news is that economists are becoming more ecologically aware, recognizing the inherent dependence of the economy on the earth’s ecosystem. For example, some 2,500 economists—including eight Nobel laureates—have endorsed the introduction of a carbon tax to stabilize climate. More and more economists are looking for ways to get the market to tell the ecological truth.

The existing industrial economic model cannot sustain economic progress. In our shortsighted efforts to sustain the global economy, as currently structured, we are depleting the earth’s natural capital. We spend a lot of time worrying about our economic deficits, but it is the ecological deficits that threaten our long-term economic future. Economic deficits are what we borrow from each other; ecological deficits are what we take from future generations.

I agree that this shift in our perceptions is desperately needed. It reminds me other comments I’ve heard, such as Robert F. Kennedy’s observation that “there’s no money to be made on a dead planet”, and Bill McKibbon (in the documentary Everything’s Cool) saying that we’re about to test the theory that we can have an economy without an environment.

My one quibble here is that, like so many others, Brown seems to think that economists (including yours truly) are a monolithic block that thinks and acts as one. Hardly. There are plenty of us out here who don’t think the environment is infinite, that the market isn’t a deity to be worshiped, etc. (He seems to change his tune a bit by the end of this piece, as quoted above, but it would still be more accurate if people who write about entire professions used qualifiers to avoid such broad brushing.)

As I pointed out the other day (When inaction is the riskiest action of all), I reject this notion that the market is “failing” or that it isn’t “telling the truth” because it doesn’t automatically account for things like health and environmental impacts that don’t have an explicit price. Expecting the market or economics to deal with things that don’t have a price is like asking an engineer about the conditions that existed before the Big Bang–there’s no relevant mechanism or frame of reference. If we want our economies to take those things into account (and I would argue very strenuously that we do), then it’s up to society in general to put a price on them and thereby inject them into the economic system.

Perhaps the answer is not “simply” a merging of economics and ecology, but the addition of politics, sociology, psychology, and probably other fields to those two, forming a Grand Unified Theory of Managing A Planet (GUTMAP).

This is a very tall order, by any means. We can’t even escape the climate chaos deniers and Cornucopians online and in most of our public policy, and here I am asking for a far larger, more comprehensive, holistic view to guide our actions. To be blunt, I think we’ve created such a mess for ourselves that we’re forced to make this drastic a course correction. Our long history of ignorance (both natural and willful), and the sheer number of human beings alive and the kind of lives so many of us do (or aspire to) lead, have all combined to paint us into a very tight and nasty corner. Cutting a hole in the wall at our backs may be the only escape.

Will it happen, and more to the point, will it happen in time (however one chooses to define “in time” in this context)? I don’t know. But the only thing worse than trying and failing would be not trying at all.

[1] Brown’s essay is “adapted from Chapter 1, “The Economy and the Earth,” in Lester R. Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), available for free downloading and purchase at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/Eco/index.htm.

Are we finally seeing hydrogen fuel cell vehicles heading off into the general direction of the sunset? Possibly, although I wouldn’t bet my keyboard on it.

WSJ: Running on Empty: Obama Budget Cuts Funding for Hydrogen Car:

President Obama’s proposed 2010 budget calls for cutting funding for a program at the Department of Energy that carries out research on hydrogen technology for vehicles by roughly 60%, or $100 million, as part of an effort to shift to technologies “with more immediate promise.”

The administration’s proposal illustrates how much has changed in Washington and the wider world of vehicle research in recent years. Six years ago, President Bush called for new federal funding for research into how to produce and distribute hydrogen and then store it in tanks so it can be used in fuel-cell-powered cars.

…

Because hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and using it to power cars would be so clean, proponents have often described it as the Holy Grail of alternative fuels.

But lately, enthusiasm among auto makers and politicians has been shifting away from hydrogen toward electric vehicles. One reason: the enormous projected cost of developing an infrastructure of hydrogen filling stations. The National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, said last year that the total cost of deploying a national hydrogen network could be as high as $200 billion, including $55 billion in government aid through 2023. And that amount, the council said, would be enough to put only two million hydrogen cars on the road - a small fraction of the total U.S. vehicle population of about 300 million cars and trucks.

Here we go again. First we have the “hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe” idiocy, which just might be the the all-time best example of a true but totally irrelevant energy factoid. Then we have the “cost of the infrastructure” canard. Ouch.

On the abundance of hydrogen: Of course it’s abundant. It’s also in places and forms that make it very inconvenient (read: expensive) to use as a motor vehicle fuel. This is why you so often hear people say that hydrogen is not an energy source, but an energy carrier. You have to consume a lot of electricity (and possibly natural gas, if you go that route instead of electrolysis) just to make the hydrogen, and then you have to consume quite a bit more electricity to compress it for storage in a fueling station and on board the vehicle. You put a lot of energy in to get energy out, about three times the amount of energy per mile driven that you would need to charge a battery in an EV. Think of the hydrogen fueling infrastructure as an inefficient and very complex way to recharge a battery in the vehicle.

Without belaboring the point for the Nth time, let me point out that hydrogen as a transportation fuel has several very high hurdles to get over, and the refueling infrastructure is not high on the list.

“But wait!”, I can imagine people saying, “wouldn’t it cost A Lot Of Money to build even a minimal hydrogen refueling system from coast to coast in the US???” Of course it would, but that’s not what any rational person would consider doing, at least initially. You could build out a refueling infrastructure at a much lower ratio of stations to population, compared to gasoline stations, simply because there would be so many fewer HFC vehicles on the road for years. As the vehicles sold, companies like our friends who provide us with gasoline would leap at the chance to add hydrogen dispensing facilities to some of their existing stations so they could sell us another form of fuel.

The immediate economic hurdle for HFC vehicles is the cost of the vehicles themselves, assuming you can come up with a design that provides enough range per tank, has no performance issues at high and low temperatures, has an acceptable longevity for the fuel cell, etc. Yes, with more R&D and the proper invocation of the ghost of Adam Smith to endow your project with the proper economies of scale savings, you just might be able to get the price below, say, $100,000 for a Civic-size car in the next 10 years. Maybe.

Beyond that gigantic hurdle there’s the climate chaos factor I’ve mentioned countless times. If we’re really struggling to make an 80% reduction in our CO2 emissions by 2050 (and make no mistake, it will be a struggle), then we won’t have the luxury of consuming three times as much clean electricity per mile in an HFC vehicle as we would an EV. As we electrify transportation, imagine having to build three times as many nuclear power plant, wind turbines, concentrating solar power plants, etc. to support that sector of the economy. We’ll be hard pressed to find an affordable combination of conservation and clean electricity generation to make our CO2 reduction goals as it is, without this huge burden being added to our to-do list.

Is this really the end of the HFC vehicle nonsense? I doubt it. Even though the current administration is moving in the right direction, they won’t be in power forever. Before we know it, whether it’s in 2012 or 2016 or whenever, the US will elect a president much more like George W. Bush than Barack Obama, and we’ll see enough policy reversals to give any observer whiplash.[1] I only hope that PHEV/EV technology is advanced enough and has demonstrated enough market success that even a profoundly disappointing, stupefyingly weird selection by the voters at large would not resurrect HFC vehicles.

[1] If you think I’m being overly cynical or skeptical, consider recent US elections history, particularly the dual nightmares of 2000 and 2004, from which we’re still trying to awake, and convince me I’m wrong.

New “Green Cities” Report Assesses How Key Cities in America are Combating Climate Change:

A new report released today called Green Cities is one of the first assessments of exactly how 40 of the country’s largest cities are trying to limit their carbon footprints and take the steps needed to raise these efforts to the next level. The report was initiated and conducted by Living Cities, a long-standing collaboration of 21 of the world’s largest foundations and financial institutions.

Based on conversations with the leading thinkers and practitioners in the field, the report is an effort to showcase and support the innovative ways in which cities are creating an equitable green economy - one that connects low-income people and under-invested urban communities to the economic mainstream. According to the featured survey included, it is here where cities have generally fallen short.

Don Chen, Program Officer at the Ford Foundation, addressing the latter point, notes that, “This report shows that cities are leaders in using green strategies to advance economic recovery efforts and create better jobs. But it also signals the urgent need for these efforts reach more people - including low-income and working families - to build stronger communities for the long term.

Living Cities’ is also serving as a resource to inform the usage of federal dollars available through stimulus funds and the workforce dollars associated with investments in the energy efficiency sector. The Green Cities report is focused on building energy retrofits, green workforce development and transit-oriented development, three areas also identified as priorities by local leaders and to which the recently passed stimulus bill brings extraordinary new resources.

Ben Hecht, Living Cities CEO, notes that, “The emerging green economy can and must deliver opportunities to low-income people and communities, from lower energy and transportation costs, to good jobs and career paths. We are working with city governments, nonprofits and businesses who share that vision.”

The report can be downloaded from the above page or here [23 page, 1.1MB PDF].

BusinessWeek: Car-Scrapping Plans: Germany’s Lessons:

The global auto industry may be facing its worst crisis ever, but you’d never know it at Ford Motor’s factory in Cologne. There, workers are putting in extra shifts on weekends to cope with demand for the compact Fiesta. In fact, Ford (F) sales have been booming in Germany. Customers have placed orders for 68,500 Fiestas, Ka subcompacts, and midsize Fusions in the four months to April, more than triple the year-earlier figure.

Thanks for this gravity-defying performance go—at least in part—to the German government’s so-called environment bonus, which Germans prefer to call the Abwrackprämie, or “wreck rebate.”

The program, launched in January and renewed in March, is Chancellor Angela Merkel’s most visible economic stimulus measure. It pays $3,320 to people who scrap a car that’s at least nine years old and buy a new car instead. The scheme has more than offset the effects of the global downturn on domestic auto sales, preserved factory jobs, and encouraged people to replace gas-guzzling, exhaust-spewing clunkers with the latest engine technology.

…

But the rebate also has some major downsides. Retailers, for example, have complained bitterly that the program sucks spending from other categories. German retail sales fell 1.5% in March—the third monthly decline in a row—a decline that retail industry groups blame partly on incentives to buy cars rather than other goods.

The rebate also is expensive. Nominally it will cost $6.6 billion if Germans take full advantage of the program. The real cost is harder to figure. Increased sales will boost sales tax revenues, and the state will avoid the cost of unemployment benefits for workers who might have lost their jobs. On the negative side of the balance sheet, the program will kill jobs in other parts of the economy, for example auto repair shops or used-car dealers. A study by the Halle Economic Institute, a major think tank, estimates that the net burden on the German government budget will be $3.5 billion.

And you thought public policy involving the economy and energy would be simple… why, exactly?

Monbiot.com: How Much Should We Leave in the Ground?:

The two papers on carbon emissions published in Nature last week were ground-breaking: they show us how much carbon dioxide we can produce if we’re to have a reasonable chance of preventing two degrees of global warming. It’s a completely different approach from the UN’s and national governments’. They set targets for reductions by a certain date but have nothing to say about the total amount of carbon we can release.

One of the papers, by Myles Allen and others(1), suggests that we can burn, at most, another 400-500 billion tonnes of carbon at any time between now and the extinction of humanity if we want to avoid two degrees of warming. The other, by Malte Meinshausen and others(2), suggests that producing 1000 billion tonnes of CO2 between 2000-2050 would give us a 25% chance of exceeding two degrees. That’s a lot less than Allen’s estimate, as one tonne of carbon produces 3.667 tonnes of CO2 when it’s burnt: 1000 billion tonnes of CO2 arises from 273 billion tonnes of carbon.

…

Even ignoring all unconventional sources and all other greenhouse gases and taking the most optimistic of the figures in the two Nature papers, we can afford to burn only 61% of known fossil fuel reserves between now and eternity.

Or, using Meinshausen’s figure, we can burn only 33% between now and 2050. Sorry - 33% minus however much we have burnt between 2000 and today.

So the question which arises is this: which fossil fuel reserves will we decide not to extract and burn? There is, as I have argued before(9), no point in seeking to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels unless we also seek to reduce their production. Yet, apart from the members of OPEC (who do it only to shore up the price), no government is attempting to limit the amount of fuel extracted. Far from it; they all pursue the same strategy as the United Kingdom: to “maximise economic recovery”(10).

The test of all governments’ commitment to stopping climate breakdown is this: whether they are prepared to impose a limit on the use of the reserves already discovered, and a permanent moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Otherwise it’s all hot air.

George Monbiot gets his geek on breaks out his calculator. Worth reading.

One thing to keep in mind is how hard it is to pin down world oil reserves, a point Monbiot acknowledges. He uses a figure of 162 billion tons (not, not barrels), which is almost exactly what BP last published in their yearly energy stats compendium. The problem is that as we approach and pass peak oil and see some dramatic and sustained price rises, the incentives to find ways to improve the recovery rate for existing wells (typically about 33% today) or go after very expensive fields (like those in ultra deep water locations) will rise considerably. Oil is probably the most susceptible of the fossil fuels to this effect of resources being a function of market price.

I don’t quite get his point about distinguishing between leaving the evil stuff in the ground instead of not using it. If consumers greatly slow their use of fossil fuels, I guarantee that producers will stop mining or pumping them. (For example, there’s been a lot of talk lately about how there’s 100 million barrels of oil sitting in tankers at sea, waiting for a customer, as if that’s a tremendous amount. It’s about 1.2 days of world consumption, so I’m not impressed.)

FT.com: US carbon cap-and-trade - more data on its effects:

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has become the latest organisation to wade into the murky waters of the Waxman-Markey bill, the proposed legislation that would introduce a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide in the US.

The Pew Center’s analysis suggests that the impact of a cap-and-trade programme on energy-intensive manufacturers would be small. The analysts based their study on an examination of historical trends among energy-intensive manufacturing industries, using 20 years of data on 400 energy-intensive subsectors.

They found that energy-intensive manufacturing industries would on average lose only 1 per cent of their annual production to imports, if a carbon price of $15 per tonne was assumed, and if there was no carbon price in other countries.

(That $15 figure comes from projections of the carbon price under Waxman-Markey produced by the U.S. Energy Information Administration and Environmental Protection Agency.)

Such a small impact could easily be addressed through policies targeted to energy-intensive sectors, the authors of the report said, including straightforward compensation or more complex border adjustment measures (tariffs) for imported energy-intensive goods.

In all candor, I’m not sure where I stand on the issue of the impact of a price of carbon on various parts of the US economy. I’m reasonably sure that $15/ton won’t be nearly enough to trigger the cuts we’ll need by 2050, but it’s probably a good start. The key point, as I’ve argued before, is that no one knows in advance how a given amount of reduction in CO2 emissions maps to a market price, which is one reason why we should control the level of emissions (via a cap) and let the evolving market decide on the price (via trade).

Green Car Congress: Study Finds That Plankton Blooms Do Not Send Atmospheric Carbon to the Deep Ocean; Weakens Iron Fertilization as Geo-Engineering Approach:

Oceanographers Jim Bishop and Todd Wood of the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have measured the fate of carbon particles originating in plankton blooms in the Southern Ocean, using data that deep-diving Carbon Explorer floats collected around the clock for well over a year. Their study reveals that most of the carbon from lush plankton blooms never reaches the deep ocean.

The results weaken the applicability of the simplest version of the Iron Hypothesis as a geo-engineering approach to climate change. Iron Hypothesis adherents suggest global warming can be slowed or even reversed by fertilizing plankton with iron in regions that are iron-poor but rich in other nutrients like nitrogen, silicon, and phosphorus. The Southern Ocean is one of the most important such regions.

Oops.

Translation: This lesson in the hubris of geoengineering was brought to you by reality. Remember–if it’s not Reality, it just ain’t real!

People just now seem to be waking up to the fact that, golly gee, the Intertubes run on electrons, and it uses a lot of them.

Two related articles:

guardian.co.uk: Web providers must limit internet’s carbon footprint, say experts

New Scientist: Unknown web: Is the net hurting the environment?

The one thing to keep in mind is that what matters is not merely the cost of the Internet but what we get for it. For example, how many errands do I have to avoid by doing online banking or shopping before I completely offset the carbon footprint of all the Internet resources I use in the process? I’m guessing it’s a very favorable ratio; even several errands bundled together in a single 20 mile trip in my Scion xA would seem to emit far more CO2 than hours of online activity.

Another issue is that a large portion of the Internet infrastructure was built with little attention to electricity consumption. The benefit of adding Internet capacity is (or is perceived to be) high, while the price of electricity is relatively low, so we’ll only feel pressure to make it more efficient as we run up against limits of electricity supply or funding.

Finally, the big issue with data center electricity consumption is cooling. I’ve seen figures that estimate that for ever watt of power spent on running hardware another 1.5 watts is used in cooling it. This means that lower-temp chips and drives could do a lot to reduce data center energy consumption, far more than just the their own power consumption figures might suggest.

We now seem to have an economist food fight on our hands, regarding The Cost of Climate Change Inaction:

Robert J. Samuelson’s April 27 op-ed, “Selling the Green Economy,” was way off the mark on the economics of tackling climate change. It was a call to bury our collective heads in the sand simply because the future involves uncertainty — exactly the opposite of what we need to do.

Samuelson argued that the cost of moving to a clean-energy economy is higher than advocates expect and that transition can’t happen nearly fast enough to meet the ambitious goals proposed in the climate and energy bill sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.).

But this assumes that all costs involved in mitigating climate change — and there will be costs — represent new costs, without acknowledging the massive error in our market system that equates the price of carbon emissions to zero. This fundamental error skews everything that follows, because if emitting carbon costs nothing on a balance sheet, all steps to reduce pollution count as “new costs.”

The real cost of carbon emissions is far from zero. Each new scientific report brings proof of a changing climate that promises to disrupt agricultural patterns, set off a scramble for dwindling resources, raise sea levels, propel population shifts and require massive emergency spending as we try to react to the growing crises. These are the costs of inaction.

A smart climate policy can create a mechanism to put the right price on carbon, and rapid economic change will follow that firm price signal, along with reduced climate risks. Our work with more than 100 economists nationwide and at RealClimateEconomics.org demonstrates the weight of economic analysis supporting this point.

Please go read the original Samuelson piece, linked in the first graf above, and the response by Sheeran and Lubber that I pull-quoted.

A couple of observations:

First, not accounting for the cost of inaction and letting climate chaos just happen is tantamount to saying that either (1) you don’t think climate chaos is real, or (2) you don’t care or actually want Very Bad Things to happen. I don’t know what the story is with Samuelson, but in this case he’s wrong and the people like Sheeran and Lubber who are pointing to the precipice we’re approaching and sounding the alarm are right.

Second, I have a real problem with this notion that carbon emissions being unpriced is a “market failure”. You can find this meme repeated endlessly online, and I don’t think it’s accurate. This is a philosophical point, but I think it relates to the fact that “the market” and everything that term encompasses is a human invention; it’s not a fundamental characteristic of reality, like the atomic weight of boron or the strength of the gravitational constant. The only reason that the millions of other goods and services we trade with each other have prices is that we’ve inserted them into the market system. You invent a machine that makes widgets, and right away you think, “Hey! I bet I could sell some of these widgets to other people! I bet I could even sell the widget-making machines!” So you start advertising and selling both, which is to say you make an explicit decision to insert these two products into the marketplace.

You charge a positive price for your widgets, of course, but some items have a negative market price–you pay someone to take away your trash or accept your recyclable electronics. But what about that relatively small category of things you can’t sell (no one wants them) but you don’t have to pay to get rid of, the things you can just freely dump into a river or the atmosphere? They never get inserted into the market, so they never have a price associated with them unless we collectively decide to force them into the market through legislation that taxes, trades, or prohibits them.

In other words, the fact that we’ve never had a price on CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions is not a failure of the market, but a failure of society in general to recognize that it was in our best interest for them to have a price that incentivized people to act the way we’d prefer. And our failure is a perversely complex situation; we were emitting large amounts of CO2 for a long time before we really figured out this whole climate change thing. Even in the decades since the light bulb came on over our heads, our response has been slowed by inertia, well financed special interests (cough fossil fuel industries cough), and, most notably in the US, plain old pig-headed stubbornness.

In all thing related to energy and the environment, I think it’s useful to imagine the market as a gigantic, tireless, and remarkably efficient machine for allocating resources according to how we value them. And never forget for an instant that it’s also utterly indifferent to our well being unless we take action and force the issue by putting a price on that, too.

Excuse me for a moment or three while I pull us out of the Big Discussions (like the throw-down brewing between James Hansen and Joe Romm) into a side trip on a topic I think it worth stressing.

The core concept is that we have to differentiate between a design or theory and the actual implementation we get in the real world.

Exhibit A is the cash-for-clunkers law making its way through the US legislative process:

What is the point of the “cash-for-clunkers” plan cooked up in the House of Representatives?

It took a relatively toothless, much-criticized bill to scrap old, inefficient cars and made it even more toothless. Any environmentalists looking to this first round of congressional horse-trading as a harbinger of things to come on the wider climate debate better head for the hills.

The compromise version of “cash-for-clunkers” announced by the House offers prospective car buyers between $3,500 and $4,500 vouchers for trading in old cars to get new ones. But the bar is set really, really low.

For passenger cars, “clunkers” that get less than 18 miles per gallon can be traded in—for cars that get at least 22 miles a gallon. The corporate average fuel economy for new cars is 27.5 miles a gallon

If the new car is 4 mpg more efficient, the consumer will get $3,500. If the new car offers a 10 mile-per-gallon improvement, the payout rises to $4,500.

Things don’t get any more ambitious when it comes to light trucks. Says the House Energy and Commerce Committee plan: “New light trucks or SUVs with mileage of at least 18 mpg are eligible for vouchers.” A similar sliding-scale payout applies.

The problem with all this, as Duke’s Bill Chameides pointed out last month, is that making a new car produces, on average, about 6.7 tons of carbon dioxide. By his calculations, it would take at least five years to “pay off” the environmental impact of building the new car with a 22-mile-per-gallon purchase. That SUV might be even worse—the estimated payback time is almost 20 years.

To use a technical economics term, that sucks. A lot.

Twenty two MPG for a car? Seriously? Who in their right mind (oh, yeah, this is the US House we’re talking about) thinks that’s high enough to earn an incentive worth more than one of those little pine tree air fresheners?

So, cash for clunkers is a Stupid Idea, right? Well, no. The basic concept is very sound–give people a financial incentive to do what we want them to do (i.e. things that will help society in general). So the theory and general design of the program is sound. But the details of the implementation are pathetically bad.

Aside from the fact that this will waste money and not accomplish much, a situation that makes all economists go nuts, as we’re trained to always look for the lost opportunity costs in a situation, the worst part is that this program will be used by the anti-government camp and the ideologically driven global warming deniers as “proof” that government can’t do anything effectively, so it shouldn’t even try.

As my wife and I like to say, everything in life is a test. Do your best to pass every one, and things will go much better for you in the long run.

Exhibit B of theory vs. implementation, and the one that makes me most often want to say something sarcastic about a beautiful theory being slain by an ugly fact (or set of facts), is nuclear power.

Nuclear power’s supporters point out that it’s a very low CO2 way to pump electrons, and (all together now) “no one has ever died in a nuclear power plant accident in the US”, both of which are true. But they also love to talk about how economical nuclear power is, which just ain’t so, at least not when you’re looking at building new power plants. One of many such articles about cost overruns appeared on ClimateProgress just yesterday, What do you get when you buy a nuke? You get a lot of delays and rate increases….:

Progress Energy said Friday it has pushed back by 20 months its schedule for bringing on-line two planned new nuclear reactors in Florida, after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said its review of the plant site will take longer than expected.

Progress also said it will spread out over five years certain early–stage costs for the new reactors that it could legally bill to ratepayers entirely in 2010, an apparent bid to tamp down customer anger over rate increases linked to the project that took effect earlier this year.

New nuclear plants are so expensive they are likely to provide electricity at some 15 cents per kilowatt hour (see “Nuclear power, Part 2: The price is not right“) — or possibly more than 20 cents/kWh (see “Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power“). The precise answer — 50% higher than average U.S. electricity prices or more than 100% higher — is hard to know since it is all but impossible to find a utility willing to stand behind a firm price in a rate hearing.

When we last left Progress Energy in 2008, it had said the twin 1,100-megawatt plants it intends to build would cost $14 billion, which “triples estimates the utility offered little more than a year ago.” And that didn’t even count the 200-mile $3 billion transmission system utility needs, which brings the price up to a staggering $7,700 a kilowatt. Under Florida law, to pay for these nuclear power plants, Progress Energy can raise the rates of its customers a $100 a year for years and years and years before they even get one kilowatt-hour from these plants. Sweet deal, no?

Energy Daily (subs. req’d, quoted above) updates the Florida story. Let’s start with the cost to consumers:

As for project costs, Progress said it has filed with the Florida Public Service Commission (PSC) for permission to add to customer bills next year an additional $6.69 per thousand kilowatt-hours (KWH) charge to cover the Levy County reactor costs as well as work to boost output at its existing Crystal River nuclear plant from 900 to 1,080 megawatts.

The costs of the Levy County project have already irked some Florida ratepayers who saw their bills jump 25 percent in January to cover early costs for the new reactors as well as increases in the cost of fuel Progress purchases to generate power.

I suspect that the low costs in cents/kWh nuclear proponents talk about are relatively accurate when you limit the discussion to older, existing plants. But building new plants is proving to be a conspicuous challenge, even with copious government assistance (Google “US nuclear power subsidies insurance guarantees” and see how many analyses you find of how the nuclear industry would be non-existent without subsidies of various forms).

After reading dozens of such reports and articles over the last couple of years, I think it’s fair to say that this isn’t a single failed instance (like a bad first attempt at a cash-for-clunkers program), but a systemic or even fundamental problem. As I’ve said many times before, if someone can show me real world evidence or a compelling case that we can build, fuel, run, and manage new nuclear power plants, and guard their waste forever in a cost competitive way (including all costs, right down to the mining of uranium ore), then sign me up. Until then, nuclear power looks to me like a beautiful theory that got ruined by a whole list of ugly facts.

In the last couple of days, two worthwhile items have come to my attention that somehow escaped me earlier.

The first is a presentation James Hansen gave in March at the Copenhagen climate meeting, Air Pollutant Climate Forcings within the Big Climate Picture [17 page PDF], which begins with the following summary:

We note that it will be exceedingly difficult to determine the aerosol climate forcing relative to pre-industrial climate. However, for policy purposes it may be sufficient to start with the present situation and consider climate forcing changes relative to today. The planet’s present energy imbalance, at least to first order, determines the change of climate forcings needed to stabilize climate. Climate models, using typical presumed scenarios of climate forcings for the past century, suggest that the planet should be out of energy balance by +0.75 ± 0.25 W/m2, but observations of ocean heat content change (averaged over the 11-year solar cycle) suggest an imbalance of only +0.5 ± 0.25 W/m2 (absorbed solar energy exceeding heat radiation to space).

If all other forcings were fixed, a reduction of CO2 amount to 350 ppm would restore the planet’s energy balance, assuming that the present imbalance is 0.5 W/m2. If fossil fuel emissions continue at anything approaching “business-as-usual” scenarios, it is not feasible to restore planetary energy balance and stabilize climate. However, stabilization of climate becomes a realistic objective if coal emissions are phased out and unconventional fossil fuels (such as tar sands and oil shale) are not developed as substitutes for oil and gas as the oil and gas resources decline. With these assumptions, the non-CO2 forcings become an important factor in stabilizing climate.

Of course, all other forcings are not fixed, but with appropriate directed efforts it is realistic to keep the net future change of non-CO2 forcings near zero. N2O will continue to increase, at least in the near future, but its growth could be slowed with improved fertilization techniques. An N2O increase could be compensated by a decrease of CH4. There is a realistic possibility of decreasing the source strength of CH4 emissions, and thus CH4 atmospheric amount. However, if global warming continues, the CH4 source from melting of methane hydrates could increase. Thus there is a coupling between the need to reduce CO2 and the possibility of reducing CH4. Reflective aerosols are likely to decrease, thus adding a warming effect, but that warming effect may be compensated via an emphasis on reducing black soot aerosols.

The following charts (from the powerpoint presentation) include an accurate status report on climate forcings by greenhouse gases. Unfortunately, such data are not available for aerosols, but the NASA Glory mission, planned for launch late this year, promises to provide the first accurate global aerosol measurements. Comments that accompany the powerpoint charts are included below.

It’s definitely worth your time to read this one, as Hansen talks about not just CO2, but methane and other emissions, and why 350 is the magic number for CO2 level in the atmosphere.

The Bill McKibben piece, Think Again: Climate Change, was in the January/February 2009 issue of Foreign Policy:

“Scientists Are Divided”

No, they’re not. In the early years of the global warming debate, there was great controversy over whether the planet was warming, whether humans were the cause, and whether it would be a significant problem. That debate is long since over. Although the details of future forecasts remain unclear, there’s no serious question about the general shape of what’s to come.

…

“We Have Time”

Wrong. Time might be the toughest part of the equation. That melting Arctic ice is unsettling not only because it proves the planet is warming rapidly, but also because it will help speed up the warming. That old white ice reflected 80 percent of incoming solar radiation back to space; the new blue water left behind absorbs 80 percent of that sunshine. The process amps up. And there are many other such feedback loops. Another occurs as northern permafrost thaws. Huge amounts of methane long trapped below the ice begin to escape into the atmosphere; methane is an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

…

“Climate Change Will Help as Many Places as It Hurts”

Wishful thinking. For a long time, the winners-and-losers calculus was pretty standard: Though climate change will cause some parts of the planet to flood or shrivel up, other frigid, rainy regions would at least get some warmer days every year. Or so the thinking went. But more recently, models have begun to show that after a certain point almost everyone on the planet will suffer. Crops might be easier to grow in some places for a few decades as the danger of frost recedes, but over time the threat of heat stress and drought will almost certainly be stronger.

…

“It’s China’s Fault”

Not so much. China is an easy target to blame for the climate crisis. In the midst of its industrial revolution, China has overtaken the United States as the world’s biggest carbon dioxide producer. And everyone has read about the one-a-week pace of power plant construction there. But those numbers are misleading, and not just because a lot of that carbon dioxide was emitted to build products for the West to consume. Rather, it’s because China has four times the population of the United States, and per capita is really the only way to think about these emissions. And by that standard, each Chinese person now emits just over a quarter of the carbon dioxide that each American does. Not only that, but carbon dioxide lives in the atmosphere for more than a century. China has been at it in a big way less than 20 years, so it will be many, many years before the Chinese are as responsible for global warming as Americans.

…

“Climate Change Is an Environmental Problem”

Not really. Environmentalists were the first to sound the alarm. But carbon dioxide is not like traditional pollution. There’s no Clean Air Act that can solve it. We must make a fundamental transformation in the most important part of our economies, shifting away from fossil fuels and on to something else. That means, for the United States, it’s at least as much a problem for the Commerce and Treasury departments as it is for the Environmental Protection Agency.

…

“Solving It Will Be Painful”

It depends. What’s your definition of painful? On the one hand, you’re talking about transforming the backbone of the world’s industrial and consumer system. That’s certainly expensive. On the other hand, say you manage to convert a lot of it to solar or wind power—think of the money you’d save on fuel.

…

“We Can Reverse Climate Change”

If only. Solving this crisis is no longer an option. Human beings have already raised the temperature of the planet about a degree Fahrenheit. When people first began to focus on global warming (which is, remember, only 20 years ago), the general consensus was that at this point we’d just be standing on the threshold of realizing its consequences—that the big changes would be a degree or two and hence several decades down the road. But scientists seem to have systematically underestimated just how delicate the balance of the planet’s physical systems really is.

I’ve included just the first graf of each section above. Please go read it all.

At one point, McKibben mentions a study by the the Harvard Medical School and the reinsurance company Swiss Re, which you can find here. That page has related material, plus a link to the 142 page, 5.5MB PDF version of the report. While I highly recommend the whole report (even with its focus on the insurance business, which some readers of this site won’t find overly compelling), “Part I: The Climate Change Context Today” provides a very accessible summary of where we stand, climate wise.

No, really, it has been. And I can prove it without all those charts and lists and other mind-numbing hard data that people like me just love to trot out for an audience and then wallow in as we prove our point.

What Earth-shaking turn of events has convinced me? Simple, the smart, mainstream money people are now saying it, as in Peak Oil: Global Oil Production’s Peaked, Analyst Says:

Dust off those survivalist manuals and brush up on your dystopias: Peak oil is back.

Global production of petroleum peaked in the first quarter of last year, says analysts Raymond James, which “represents a paradigm shift of historic proportions. Unfortunately, mankind better get ready to live in a peak oil world because we believe the ‘peak’ is now behind us.”

Raymond James’s notes that non-OPEC oil production apparently peaked in the first quarter of 2007, and given precipitous falls in oil output from Russia to Mexico, there’s not much hope for a recovery. OPEC production—and thus global output—peaked a little later, in the first quarter of 2008, Raymond James says.

The contention rests on a simple argument: OPEC oil production actually fell even as oil prices were above $100 a barrel, a sign of the “tyranny of geology” that limits the easy production of ever-more crude.

“Those declines had to have come for involuntary reasons such as the inherent geological limits of oil fields … We believe that the oil market has already crossed over to the downward sloping side of Hubbert’s Peak,” the analysts write.

If true—and the analysts note that true historical peaks are only visible in the distant rear-view mirror—then expect oil prices to jump back toward triple digits. All the more so if demand recovers—oil has clung to the $50 a mark even as demand cratered everywhere.

This item–carried on the blog Environmental capital (a.k.a. The Wall Street Journal)–not only quotes Raymond James as giving the latest stamp of legitimacy to what so many of us have believed (that peak oil was real and imminent and a humongous problem), but they even hang some dates on it, as seen above.

So, what’s the point? Simple: This is the only way we’ll get the Serious Money People to pay attention to peak oil–by having the message spread by Other Serious Money People they respect.

Any sort of grass roots effort, particularly one based on the (ugh!) Internet, is doomed to being ignored, and thus to failure, as I pointed out in my comment on Kurt Cobb’s essay,The Oil Drum: Peak Oil and Mass Communication (please go read the whole thing; I’m quoting just my response here):

I agree wholeheartedly that “what we have here, is a failure to communicate” to borrow a phrase.

I’ve run into the same problems of describing the issues involved with peak oil and climate chaos to a wide range of audiences, in size, age, and general science background. It ain’t easy, especially when they’ve heard just a little about the topic–mostly from ads financed by the fossil fuel lobby–and they think they know things that just ain’t so, a condition far worse than simple ignorance.

But I think the proposed solution has some non-trivial problems, as well. Even if you limit participation in the declaration to just those you mentioned (conviction about the situation’s urgency and the lack of a silver bullet), you’ve still set the stage for some huge battles within the group. I’m as convinced as anyone here that peak oil is “real, imminent, and an enormous problem”, as I’ve said over on my site (The Cost of Energy) countless times, but that would still leave me at odds with many other people who share those beliefs. There’s a heck of a lot of real estate between “yes, it’s a real and very serious problem and we can’t squander any more time” and “we’re cooked and should forget about fixing anything and learn how to make needles from rat ribs”. How do you get everyone under that enormous umbrella to play along?

Based on my roughly five years of writing and speaking about this topic, such an effort can only succeed via a push–as in advertising. Relying on a pulled message, meaning things people have to take action to find online, just won’t cut it. First of all, very few people (relative to the overall adult population) will bother looking, no matter what the message is and how well it’s portrayed. Second, those that do find it online are all too happy to dismiss it as just another example of Internet idiocy. They know what a bust Y2k was (see below), and they know that the Internet is loaded with ridiculous stories of alien abduction, Dick Cheney still running the world from hidden bunker, Illuminati, 300 MPG fuel injectors, Area 51 technology, etc. Why the heck should they believe this wild story about “the world running out of oil”, when it’s never happened before?

Still, I think it’s an idea worth pursuing. Right now, the peak oil message sounds to an outsider like a room full of zealots all trying to out-scream each other. I have to believe we can find a way to do better than that.

(On Y2k: I know for a fact thanks to many industry contacts with first-hand information that it was a very real and very serious problem. The only reason it didn’t turn into a disaster is that a huge number of very smart people fixed it. All the scare mongers on the ‘net didn’t know squat about what was really going on, and their displayed lack of understanding of how humanity responds to at least some crises is nothing less than pathetic.)

Just to be clear: Things like this Raymond James proclamation are very welcome (if overdue) and key to getting the Serious Money People (and therefore many elected representatives) to pay attention to and “get” the basic peak oil message, but even that’s not enough. We need to reach mainstream consumers and get them to do two key things:

• Take action in their own consumption decisions to minimize their oil use and therefore help insulate themselves and society as a whole, at least a bit, from future oil price shocks.
• Pressure their elected representatives to make more rational public policy decisions. Having the Serious Money People influence politicians is good, but far better would be the addition of pressure from the rank and file voters. Between political contributions and actual votes from their constituents, no shift would change politicians’ minds quicker.

(As an aside, I would love to know what kind of conversations the US government’s auto task force has had behind closed doors with GM and Chrysler (and possibly other companies) about their product mixes and the impact of oil prices and public policy shifts just a few years from now.)

It would be easy to get our smug on and roll our eyes at the Raymond James report, but I think it’s far more useful to accept it and then use it–e-mail the above story to your Senators, House Members, mayor, etc. It might not seem like this one report provides us with much of a fulcrum, but remember what Archimedes once said, “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world.”

The flood of coverage of the Nature papers I mentioned yesterday (It’s Crunch Time) continues.

Of most interest, by far, is a longish historical look at how the climate science arrived at its current state of understanding, Climate crunch: A burden beyond bearing. The article details how we went from thinking 550ppm was the “magic number” for CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to 450ppm to (possibly) 350ppm. It also describes the areas some researchers are working on now, which I suspect will lead to some unsettling conclusions. I won’t even try to provide pull quotes for this article, and will simply ask (read: beg) you to find a few minutes to go read it all.

With just a little luck I should have copies of the two main articles soon. When that happens, I will post my own impressions of them.

A few other related news stories:

• Deep emission cuts needed to limit global warming: scientists
• Science News: A Limit For Carbon Emissions: 1 Trillion Metric Tons
• SciDev.Net: Scientists put carbon ceiling at a trillion tonnes
• Telegraph: World ‘unlikely to stop global warming reaching critical levels’
• CLIMATE CHANGE: Two-Degree Rise Ever More Likely, Scientists Warn
• guardian.co.uk: It’s not unreasonable for us to ask how today’s sacrifices will meet tomorrow’s climate change goals, says Myles Allen

Updated: See additional related story links at the end of this post.

It seems we now have a new way of measuring the urgency of the climate chaos situation.

Green Car Congress: Study Concludes That to Limit Global Warming to 2 °C, Less Than 25% of Proven Fossil Fuel Reserves Can be Burnt Between Now and 2050 (emphasis added):

Less than a quarter of the proven fossil fuel reserves can be burnt and emitted between now and 2050, if global warming is to be limited to two degrees Celsius (2 °C), according to a new study published in the journal Nature today. This issue of Nature—themed “The Climate Crunch”—features a number of related papers and commentary on greenhouse gas emissions and the difficulty of cutting back, as well as an editorial calling on commitment from “the highest levels” to make the needed changes.

The study, led by Malte Meinshausen at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), calculated how much greenhouse gas emissions can be pumped into the atmosphere between now and 2050 to have a reasonable chance of keeping warming lower than 2 °C (above pre-industrial levels)—a goal supported by more than 100 countries to prevent dangerous climate change.

The researchers, involving scientists from Germany, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, concluded that the limit is 1,000 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between the years 2000 and 2050. The world has already emitted one third of that in just nine years.

…

The study used a single, efficient computer model which incorporated the effects of all greenhouse gases, aerosols and air pollutants, and the range of possible responses of the carbon cycle and earth’s climate system. This was combined with about a thousand emission pathways.

The study explicitly takes into account the uncertainties related to modeling climate change. Throughout the study, probability statements were used to summarize the current level of knowledge based on observational data. It also used a huge number of different simulation results from the latest assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In taking this comprehensive approach the researchers went a step further than previous work.

Unfortunately, I can’t access the series of articles without paying $32 for each one (and I honestly can’t afford to buy access to even a small portion of the paid-access articles that come across my screen), so I can’t read them or give you a link. (See the end of the GCC article above for DOI links to the articles’ abstracts.)

You can, however, read an editorial from that issue, Time to act:

It is not too late yet — but we may be very close. The 500 billion tonnes of carbon that humans have added to the atmosphere lie heavily on the world, and the burden swells by at least 9 billion tonnes a year (see page 1117). If present trends continue, humankind will have emitted a trillion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere well before 2050, and that could be enough to push the planet into the danger zone. And there is no reason to think that the pressure will stop then. The coal seams and tar sands of the world hold enough carbon for humankind to emit another trillion tonnes — and the apocalyptic scenarios extend from there (see page 1104).

Nations urgently need to cut their output of carbon dioxide. The difficulty of that task is manifest: emissions have continued to rise despite almost two decades of rhetoric, diplomacy and action on the matter. But that unhappy fact should not be taken as a licence for fatalism. Governments have a wide range of pollution-cutting tools at their command, most notably tradable permit regimes, taxes on fuels, regulations on power generation and energy efficiency, and subsidies for renewable energy and improved technologies. These tools can work if applied seriously — so citizens around the world must demand that seriousness from their leaders, both within their individual nations and in the international framework that will be discussed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December.

…

The latest scientific research suggests that even a complete halt to carbon pollution would not bring the world’s temperatures down substantially for several centuries. If further research reveals that a prolonged period of elevated temperatures would endanger the polar ice sheets, or otherwise destabilize the Earth system, nations may have to contemplate actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Indeed, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is already developing scenarios for the idea that long-term safety may require sucking up carbon, and various innovators and entrepreneurs are developing technologies that might be able to accomplish that feat (see page 1094). At the moment, those technologies seem ruinously expensive and technically difficult. But if the very steep learning curve can be climbed, then the benefits will be great.

…

More radical still is the possibility of cooling the planet through some kind of ‘geoengineering’ that would dim the incoming sunlight (see page 1097). The effects of such approaches are much more worrying than those of capturing carbon from the air, however. The cooling from geoengineering would not exactly balance the warming from greenhouse gases, which would cause complications even if the technology itself was feasible — something for which the evidence has been circumstantial, at best.

But discussions about the possibilities offered by geoengineering could also lull the world’s leaders into complacency — if they lead them to believe that the technology will provide an escape hatch if the climate ever does reach a tipping point. This does not mean that the discussions should be avoided, but rather that the speculations need to be backed up with a solid body of research. Moreover, geoengineering research should be framed not as a hope for deus ex machina fixes to sudden global deterioration, but as a palliative cushion for the worst excesses of the peak years that are inevitable even after emissions start to be cut. A world slightly shaded from the Sun while its carbon levels are brought down by means of active capture would be a strangely unnatural place — but not necessarily a bad one, compared with the alternatives.

A few thoughts here:

• We need more than a 50% reduction from 1990 levels by 2050? The number I’ve heard repeated (and repeated myself) endlessly is that we need 80% by 2050, so this conclusion is not a raising of the bar.
• Casting the situation as a limit on how much of the remaining fossil fuels we can burn in a given time window strikes me as extremely useful. I don’t mean to suggest that legislators and deniers around the world will suddenly slap themselves in the forehead and exclaim, “Oh! Now I get it! Let’s get to work!” But it does seem like a much more approachable way to frame the limits to our behavior than is talking about parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. (I’m assuming that the math all works out, and that the authors used reasonable, mainstream estimates for the recoverable reserves of fossil fuels.)
• I’m glad to see the notable hesitance over geo-engineering, as expressed in the editorial quoted above. On a related note, see Alex Steffen’s post on ClimateProgress about geo-engineering.
• Also worth a read is RealClimate: Hit the Brakes Hard; a couple of the authors appearing that issue of Nature are RealClimate authors.
• I would love to know more detail about how the climate model handled positive feedbacks. As I’ve pointed out countless times here in recent months, we keep finding new ones or making unpleasant discoveries about the ones we already knew about. I think there’s a better than 50/50 chance that in just a couple of years we’ll have accumulated enough new examples of of these nasty surprises to conclude that these studies were too optimistic.
• As I’ve said before, I have very little confidence that we both have and will wisely use the time before we’re at the point of a runaway climate change. In other words, I think the most likely scenario is that we’ll have no choice but to resort to one or more geo-engineering options in addition to very aggressive cuts in carbon emissions.

See also:

• Climate Progress: Must have PPT in disappointing issue of Nature devoted to “The Coming Climate Crunch”
• BBC: ‘Safe’ climate means ‘no to coal’
• New Scientist: Humanity’s carbon budget set at one trillion tonnes
• AP: To keep warming low, deeper pollution cuts needed
• Reuters: World can burn 25 percent of oil, coal safely: study
• AFP: To meet climate goal, cut fossil fuels use: study
• Scientific American: How Much Is Too Much?: Estimating Greenhouse Gas Emissions

ClimateProgress has an interesting and thoughtful piece by Bill Becker, The Age of (small) Tradeoffs:

Are green energy industries about to ruin the environment and undermine national security? Are they engaged in the ecological equivalent of mountaintop removal? Are they the new Big Oil, making us dangerously dependent on imported strategic resources?

Those questions are implied in “Clean Energy’s Dirty Little Secret”, a provocative article in the current issue of The Atlantic. Author Lisa Margonelli points out that wind turbines, hybrid cars and some other green technologies carry “their own hefty environmental price tag”, including the use of rare-earth minerals extracted from open-pit mines or imported from places like China.

…

But a larger question lurks between the lines: Should green technologies and products be held to the same environmental standards as other industries? Is a company that mines neodymium for Prius motors any less responsible than Peabody Coal for good environmental stewardship?

And behind that question lies another: When does a green end justify not-so-green means? When if ever do the multiple benefits of solar, wind, biomass or geothermal energy, for example, justify some environmental damage during their life cycles?

…

We are experiencing a gradually expanding circle of acceptability as we become more desperate for solutions to global climate change. Nuclear power, “clean coal” and geo-engineering research are supported today by environmental leaders who would not have given any of those options serious consideration a few short years ago. Today’s crazy idea becomes tomorrow’s salvation as we continue pumping gases into the atmosphere.

The Age of (small) Tradeoffs has been made much more difficult by its immediate and still evident predecessor, the Age of Stupid (apologies to the new movie of that title). Despite decades of warnings about global warming, despite our rich tradition of energy crises, we have not even begun to tap the full potential of energy efficiency and renewable energy. We haven’t even really tried. We paid far more attention to Jimmy Carter’s cardigan sweater than his insight that our energy problems were the moral equivalent of war.

We humans, with the possible exception of certain members of Congress, are endowed with the unique ability to see consequences and to learn from mistakes — the intellectual equivalent of opposable thumbs. It’s time to use that ability before it atrophies. Let’s make the necessary trade-offs; reject the really bad ones; recognize stupidity as the real weapon of mass destruction; pass a game-changing climate bill; completely rewire national energy policy; stop the taxpayer subsidies that have us paying one another to produce greenhouse gases; trade in our carbon-spewing national transportation policy before it’s as obsolete as General Motors; assemble a rescue package for our children; and get on with the job of building a new economy before we become Darwin’s biggest dropouts – the species that had all the tools to survive a changing world but made itself extinct by refusing to use them.

It’s a longish piece, very much worth your time to read it full.

I think what Becker is talking about here is something I’ve mentioned before, that we’re entering a time of living a “measured life on a managed planet”. Let me expand a bit on what I meant when I coined that phrase.

Imagine a world exactly like present-day Earth in every regard, with one exception: Humanity had never existed. All the naturally occurring flora and fauna we would recognize are present, the land masses, weather patterns, geologic history, etc. are all what we would expect for an Earth that never saw billions of human beings and their greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts.

Now, introduce a small number of human beings, perhaps a few thousand. Unless you want to assume they have a level of technology and ability to modify the environment on a level with Star Trek, there’s virtually no chance our merry band of settlers can affect the planet substantially. There’s simply far too few of them.

As they increase in numbers, whether through our initial assumption or the natural way, they can still do pretty much what they want–cut down forests, burn fossil fuels, dump nasty things into rivers, pull all of the fish out of rivers and ocean they could possibly use, etc. Again, for a very long time they have no meaningful impact on the planet; their actions are minuscule compared to the scale of their new home.

Eventually, their numbers and their accumulated changes to the planet grow large enough that they start to have not just discernible, but distinctly negative, impacts on the environment and their own well being. They exhaust some non-renewable resources and put the supply of others in peril, CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere until it provides an upwards pressure on temperatures, fresh water becomes much less plentiful in some areas, and the air, land, and water is polluted by their discharges. In other words, the fundamental, foundational assumptions of almost everything they did for thousands of years–the world is too large for them to influence, and local conditions will always be essentially what they are today–are demonstrably wrong. This situation is caused by one delay (the time it took to understand that those fundamental assumptions were wrong), and greatly exacerbated by another delay (the time lag between when the scientists and some policymakers understood the situation and when mass action could be taken) until the civilization is on the brink of disaster.

What does this world look like? Look out the nearest window.

Back to our Earth, how do we address this? We have to modify our behavior extensively, obviously, but exactly how should we change? Which actions or resource use should be curtailed, which ones traded off for others? The only rational answer is to do a cost/benefit analysis. Converting X kW of coal-fired electricity generation to concentrating solar power with thermal storage has costs Y and benefits Z. If Z is substantially larger than Y, then this option then goes into competition with other projects with net positive benefits, and we allocate things like public and private expenditures in a way that maximizes the return to society.

This is the classic economics view, of course, which means it glosses over some very substantial issues.

A critical step in the process is measuring those things that are “easily” quantifiable. How many parts per million of CO2 is in the atmosphere and how much do we add every year? How much recoverable coal or oil or natural gas is in the ground, and how quickly are we using each? What is the economic impact of sea levels rising by X cm over the next 50 years? How many people are on the planet, and how quickly is that number growing? You can add your own long list of data we’d either need or very much like to have.

Once we have those basic numbers nailed down, how do we measure the costs and benefits of a large energy project? Materials (some of them rare) are used, land is used, jobs are created during construction and possibly in the long run, CO2 emissions are reduced, water consumption patterns are changed, etc. That’s one heck of a large spreadsheet we have to fill in, and every cell is packed with assumptions, even before we deal with converting all those pluses and minuses to monetary units and the discounting issue, e.g. what is the value of an environmental benefit thirty or fifty or one hundred years from now? Making and then acting on those assumptions is where politics and the profit motive get involved, which only makes the process that much murkier and at times downright perverse, whether we’re talking about action taken by governments or corporations or other large concentrations of power.

It sounds very unpleasant, and it is. We’ve transformed our world into one in which we increasingly have to forgo the luxury of mindless consumption, as experienced by the intrepid settlers in our mind experiment. We have to instead turn to a much more rigorous process of mindful consumption. That entails far more work to keep measuring everything relevant, even as we work hard to improve our understanding how things as disparate as the climate and human psychology work. A further danger and cost is that we won’t always make the right decisions. We’ll make measurement errors and the models we base our actions on will be flawed at times, and that’s before politicians and those with financial or ideological interests get into the act.[1]

But what choice do we have? If we adopt a position of lazy, willful ignorance and reject the whole process–”let people do what they want”, “the market will sort it out”, “government (or corporations) can’t be trusted to do anything”–the problems of greenhouse gases triggering climate chaos, peak oil, peak natural gas, all the environmental horrors of coal use (beyond the CO2 emissions), fresh water scarcity, ocean acidification, overfishing, and on and on won’t go away. They will continue to get worse until enough of us decide via “the market” to do something about them, which in many cases–CO2 level of the atmosphere being a prime example–will be far too late. If we willingly live a life in which we only fix problems after we begin to feel pain, then we’re signing up for, at best, a life of rushing from one painful emergency to the next. At worst we’re surrendering our children and theirs to a catastrophic level of climate chaos and crushing resource constraints.

So, this is the only viable option we’ve left ourselves thanks to our population and how we’ve done everything from the dawn of mankind right up to today: A measured life on a managed planet.

[1] I’m among those convinced that the number one way to weaken the grip corn ethanol has in the US would be to move Iowa to about 20th in the presidential primary order.

The Brisbane Times has published a piece by Martin Flanagan that raises a very uncomfortable point.

Future generations will ask why we ignored climate change:

Last month, the chief scientific adviser to the British Government, Professor John Beddington, predicted a global catastrophe by 2030 on the simple premise that while global demand for food, water and energy is escalating, the supply of these three essentials is diminishing.

He predicted civil unrest and international conflict.

If this scenario was to come true, I can imagine a voice in the future asking us — particularly those of us who had the privilege and responsibility of a public voice — the following questions.

…

Two weeks ago, four CSIRO scientists — while stressing they did not speak for the CSIRO — appeared before the Senate inquiry into carbon emissions.

Not only did they say the Australian response was inadequate, one of their number, Dr Michael Raupach, said: “Well, I think that the scientific community as a whole, including every climate scientist that I know in CSIRO, is of the view that first, climate change is a very serious problem, and second, that global strategies at the moment are inadequate.”

And so, says the voice from a future that has seen Professor Beddington’s prediction come true, what did you do? The answer, for most of us, is pretty much nothing.

…

British law is ultimately based on the notion of the reasonable man. I think a reasonable man would conclude from the data now appearing before him from around the globe that he has serious cause for concern about the environment.

Most people, in my experience, now admit that something is “going on” with the weather. Asked if they think dramatic changes are on the way, they say: “Maybe, but not in my lifetime.”

But what sort of an attitude is that? I have a granddaughter who will be 21 in 2030. What am I going to give her for her 21st? Only this, perhaps. Before I speak on the climate change, I will remind myself that this is not a media game, that there is a high seriousness to this debate now, that I am — we all are — answerable to the future.

The first inconvenient question I have in mind is not “what will we tell the children?”, but “why do so few of us care about peak oil and climate chaos unless it’s linked to our own children or grandchildren?”

I think the answer is twofold:

First, it’s genetics. Every human being is genetically wired to protect our DNA, in the form of our descendants. The old line that a human being is DNA’s way of making more DNA is largely true, even if too cute by half. Therefore we have compassion for other people and their children, but many, perhaps the large majority of us, only get truly worked up and take action when it’s our loved ones who will suffer, when we have blood in the game. It’s far too easy for us to look the other way, dismiss the threat entirely, make an excuse for inaction, value money more than the environment, etc. right up to the instant when, as the voice-over on action film trailers says, “This time it’s personal.”

Second, we have a stunning lack of ability to visualize massive change. How many times do we hear about politicians traveling to the Arctic region and coming back aflame with commitment to Do Something about climate chaos? And why do these people have to fly thousands of miles and stand next to a melt water lake that’s disappearing into a gigantic hole in a ice sheet, or see houses that have been destroyed by melting permafrost? Can they not read about these events, talk to experts, watch a bloody documentary? If anything, I would contend that seeing it up close and personal carries far less information content than would a lunch meeting with James Hansen or Mark Serreze, just to name two experts I would want my elected representatives speaking with on a regular basis.

Part of this traveling to see it in person is simply opportunity. If I had a chance to make one of those trips on someone else’s dime, I would be very tempted. And part of it is a crash education process for a legislator who doesn’t live, eat, and breathe this stuff the way most of the people who read this site do. They’re substituting visceral impact for a whole lot of reading. Is it a good trade off? I seriously doubt it. Again, people in power typically have access to experts that you and I can only dream about, and they should use exercise that option more and make fewer trips from Washington DC to Greenland or Northern Alaska or Antarctica.

All of which leads us inexorably to the second inconvenient question: How do we get more people to give a dam?