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Posted on 7-11-06 How Close to Catastrophe?
Book reviews by Bill McKibben, Nov06, New York Review of Books
James Lovelock by David Levine
The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity
by James Lovelock
Basic Books, 177 pp., $25.00
China Shifts Gears: Automakers, Oil, Pollution, and Development
by Kelly Sims Gallagher
MIT Press, 219 pp., $52.00;$21.00 (paper)
Solar Revolution: The Economic Transformation of the Global Energy Industry
by Travis Bradford
MIT Press, 238 pp., $24.95
WorldChanging:A User's Guide for the 21st Century
edited by Alex Steffen
Abrams, 596 pp., $37.50
Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises
edited by Architecture for Humanity
Metropolis, 336 pp., $35.00 (paper)
James Lovelock is among the planet's most interesting and productive
scientists. His invention of an electron capture device that was able to
detect tiny amounts of chemicals enabled other scientists both to
understand the dangers of DDT to the eggshells of birds and to figure out
the ways in which chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were eroding the ozone layer.
He's best known, though, not for a gadget but for a metaphor: the idea
that the earth might usefully be considered as a single organism (for
which he used the name of the Greek earth goddess Gaia) struggling to keep
itself stable.
In fact, his so-called Gaia hypothesis was at first less clear than that—
"hardly anyone, and that included me for the first ten years after the
concept was born, seems to know what Gaia is," he has written. But the
hypothesis has turned into a theory, still not fully accepted by other
scientists but not scorned either. It holds that the earth is "a
self-regulating system made up from the totality of organisms, the surface
rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere tightly coupled as an evolving system"
and striving to "regulate surface conditions so as always to be as
favourable as possible for contemporary life."
Putting aside questions of planetary consciousness and will (beloved as
they were by an early wave of New Age Gaia acolytes), the theory may help
us understand how the earth has managed to remain hospitable for life over
billions of years even as the sun, because of its own stellar evolution,
has become significantly hotter. Through a series of processes involving,
among others, ice ages, ocean algae, and weathering rock, the earth has
managed to keep the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, and hence the temperature, at a relatively stable level.
This homeostasis is now being disrupted by our brief binge of fossil fuel
consumption, which has released a huge amount of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. Indeed, at one point Lovelock predicts—more gloomily than any
other competent observer I am aware of—that we have already pushed the
planet over the brink, and that we will soon see remarkably rapid rises in
temperature, well beyond those envisioned in most of the computer models
now in use—themselves quite dire. He argues that because the earth is
already struggling to keep itself cool, our extra increment of heat is
particularly dangerous, and he predicts that we will soon see the
confluence of several phenomena: the death of ocean algae in ever-warmer
ocean waters, reducing the rate at which these small plants can remove
carbon from the atmosphere; the death of tropical forests as a result of
higher temperatures and the higher rates of evaporation they cause; sharp
changes in the earth's "albedo," or reflectivity, as white ice that
reflects sunlight back out into space is replaced with the absorptive blue
of seawater or the dark green of high-latitude boreal forests; and the
release of large amounts of methane, itself a greenhouse gas, held in ice
crystals in the frozen north or beneath the sea.
Some or all of these processes will be enough, Lovelock estimates, to tip
the earth into a catastrophically hotter state, perhaps eight degrees
centigrade warmer in temperate regions like ours, over the course of a
very few decades, and that heat will in turn make life as we know it
nearly impossible in many places. Indeed, in the photo section of the book
there is one picture of a red desert captioned simply "Mars now—and what
the earth will look like eventually." Human beings, a hardy species, will
not perish entirely, he says; in interviews during his book tour, Lovelock
has predicted that about 200 million people, or about one thirtieth of the
current world population, will survive if competent leaders make a new
home for us near the present-day Arctic. There may also be other
survivable spots, like the British Isles, though he notes that rising sea
levels will render them more an archipelago. In any event, he predicts
that "teeming billions" will perish.
Lovelock, who is in his eighties, concedes that this is a gloomier
forecast than those of scientists more actively engaged in peer-reviewed
climatology; it is, in a sense, a visceral feeling. It should be
approached somewhat skeptically, for Lovelock has been (as he has always
forthrightly admitted) wrong before in his immediate reactions. Though he
invented the machine that helped us understand the dangers of CFCs, he
also blithely dismissed those dangers, arguing that they couldn't do
enough damage to matter. The American chemists Sherry Rowland and Mario
Molina ignored his assurances and performed the groundbreaking work on the
depletion of the ozone layer that won them the Nobel Prize. (And won for
the planet an international agreement on the reduction of CFCs that
allowed the earth a chance to repair the ozone hole before it opened so
wide as to annihilate much of life through excess ultraviolet radiation.)
Lovelock has also failed to identify any clear causal mechanism for his
sudden heating hypothesis, explaining that he differs with more
conventional forecasts mostly because he thinks they have underestimated
both the extent of the self-reinforcing cycles that are causing
temperatures to rise and the vulnerability of the planet, which he sees as
severely stressed and close to losing equilibrium. It also must be said
that parts of his short book read a little oddly—there are digressions
into, say, the safety of nitrates in food that don't serve much purpose
and raise questions about the rigor of the entire enterprise.
That said, there are very few people on earth—maybe none—with the same
kind of intuitive feel for how it behaves as a whole. Lovelock's flashes
of insight about Gaia illuminate many of the interconnections between
systems that more pedestrian scientists have slowly been trying to
identify. Moreover, for the past twenty years, the period during which
greenhouse science emerged, most of the effects of heating on the physical
world have in fact been more dire than originally predicted. The regular
reader of Science and Nature is treated to an almost weekly load of
apocalyptic data, virtually all of it showing results at the very upper
end of the ranges predicted by climate models, or beyond them altogether.
Compared with the original models of a few years ago, ice is melting
faster; forest soils are giving up more carbon as they warm; storms are
increasing much more quickly in number and size. As I'm writing these
words, news comes across the bottom of my computer screen that a new study
shows methane leaking from Siberian permafrost at five times the predicted
rate, which is seriously bad news since methane is an even more potent
greenhouse gas than CO[2] .
In this fast-changing scientific puzzle, the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), which has given the world valuable guidance for a
decade, stands the risk of being outrun by new data. The panel is supposed
to issue a new report in the coming year summarizing the findings made by
climate scientists since its last report. But it's unlikely that its
somewhat unwieldy procedures will allow it to incorporate fears such as
Lovelock's adequately, or even to address fully the far more mainstream
predictions issued during the last twelve months by James Hansen of NASA,
the planet's top climatologist.[1]
Hansen is not quite as gloomy as Lovelock. Although he recently stated
that the Earth is very close to the hottest it has been in a million
years, he said that we still have until 2015 to reverse the flow of carbon
into the atmosphere before we cross a threshold and create a "different
planet." When Hansen gave this warning last December we had ten years to
change course, but soon we'll have only nine years, and since nothing has
happened in the intervening time to suggest that we're gearing up for an
all-out effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the divergence between
Hansen and Lovelock may be academic. (Somehow it's small comfort to be
rooting for the guy who says you've got a decade.)
What's amazing is that even Al Gore's fine and frightening film An
Inconvenient Truth now lags behind the scientific cutting edge on this
issue—the science is moving fast. It's true that the world is beginning
slowly to awaken to the idea that global warming may be a real problem,
and legislatures (though not ours) are starting to nibble at it. But very
few understand with any real depth that a wave large enough to break
civilization is forming, and that the only real question is whether we can
do anything at all to weaken its force.
It's to the question of solutions to mitigate the effects of global
warming that Lovelock eventually turns, which is odd since in other places
he insists that it's too late to do much. His prescriptions are strongly
worded and provocative—he thinks that renewable energy and energy
conservation will come too slowly to ward off damage, and that an enormous
program of building nuclear reactors is our best, indeed our only, real
option. "We cannot turn off our energy-intensive, fossil-fuel-powered
civilization without crashing," he writes. "We need the soft landing of a
powered descent." That power can't come from wind or solar energy soon
enough:
Even now, when the bell has started tolling to mark our ending, we
still talk of sustainable development and renewable energy as if these
feeble offerings would be accepted by Gaia as an appropriate and
affordable sacrifice.
Instead, "new nuclear building should be started immediately."
With his extravagant rhetoric, Lovelock does us a favor—it is true that we
should be at least as scared of a new coal plant as of a new nuclear
station. The latter carries certain obvious risks (which Lovelock argues
convincingly loom larger than perhaps they should in our imaginations),
while the coal plants come with the absolute guarantee that their
emissions will unhinge the planet's physical systems. Every potential
source of non-carbon energy should be examined fairly to see what role it
might have in avoiding a disastrous future. But Lovelock also undermines
his own argument with what amounts to special pleading. He is a foe of
wind power because, as he says, he doesn't want his Devon countryside
overrun with windmills, placing him in the same camp as Cape Cod
vacationers resistant to wind farms offshore in Nantucket Sound or
Vermonters reluctant to see some of their high ridgelines dotted with
towering turbines. "Perhaps we are NIMBYs," he writes, referring to the
abbreviation for the phrase "Not In My Back Yard," but
we see those urban politicians [pushing wind power] as like some
unthinking physicians who have forgotten their Hippocratic Oath and
are trying to keep alive a dying civilization by useless and
inappropriate chemotherapy when there is no hope of cure and the
treatment renders the last stages of life unbearable.
This is an understandable aversion, but it would need to rest, as Lovelock
admits, on something more than aesthetics, and in this case the foundation
is all but nonexistent. He quotes a couple of disillusioned Danes to the
effect that wind power hasn't been a panacea in Denmark, and says that
Britain would need 54,000 big wind turbines to meet its needs, as if that
huge number simply ends the argument. (The lack of adequate notes in this
book makes checking sources laborious.) But in fact the Germans are adding
2,000 windmills annually, and nearing 20,000 total. Some object to the
sight of them scattered across the countryside, and others are enchanted.
In any event, whatever one's opinion of wind power, it's not at all clear
that a crash program of building atomic reactors makes sense. Most of the
economic modeling I've seen indicates that if you took the money intended
for building a reactor and invested it instead in an aggressive energy
conservation project (one that provided subsidies to companies to modify
their factories to reduce power use, for instance), the payoff in cutting
back on carbon would be much larger. This doesn't end the argument,
either—we will obviously need new energy sources, and the example of the
French success with nuclear power (it generates three quarters of their
electricity) means it has to be included in the mix of possibilities, as
Jim Hansen recently argued in these pages.[2] But Lovelock's argument
against wind power is remarkably unpersuasive.
Much more deeply researched, and much more hopeful, data come from the
investment banker Travis Bradford. MIT Press has just issued his first
book, Solar Revolution, which argues at great length and in great detail
that we will soon be turning to solar panels for our power, in part for
environmental reasons but more because they will soon be producing power
that's as cheap—and much easier to deploy —than any other source. This is
a fairly astounding claim—the conventional wisdom among environmentalists
is that solar energy lags behind wind power by a decade or more as a
cost-effective source of electricity—but he makes the case in convincing
fashion.
During the last decade (as Janet Sawin of the Worldwatch Institute has
previously described), Japan has heavily subsidized the purchase of
rooftop solar panels by home owners. The Japanese authorities began to do
this, in part, because they wanted to meet the promises they made on their
own soil at the Kyoto conference on global warming, but also, Bradford
suggests, because they sensed that the industry could grow if it were
encouraged by an initial investment. Within a few years, the subsidy had
the desired effect— the volume of demand made both manufacturing and
installation much more efficient, driving down the price. Today, the
government subsidy has almost entirely disappeared, but demand continues
to rise, for the panels now allow homeowners to produce their own power
for the same price charged by the country's big utilities. Japan in some
ways is a special case—blessed with few domestic energy sources, it has
some of the world's most expensive electricity, making solar panels more
competitive. On the other hand, it's not particularly sunny in Japan. In
any event, Bradford says the Japanese demand for solar power (and now an
equally large program in Germany) will be enough to drive the cost of
producing solar panels steadily down. Even without huge technological
breakthroughs, which he says are tantalizingly near, the current hardware
can be made steadily cheaper. He predicts the industry will grow 20 to 30
percent annually for the next forty years, which is akin to what happened
with the last silicon-based revolution, the computer chip. No surprise,
too, about who will own that industry —almost all the solar panel plants
are now in Japan and Germany.
You can see signs of this change already. When I was in Tibet this summer,
I repeatedly stumbled across the yak-skin tents of nomadic herders living
in some of the most remote (and lofty) valleys in the world. They depended
on yak dung, which they burned to cook food and heat their tents, and also
often on a small solar panel hanging off one side of the tent, powering a
lightbulb and perhaps a radio inside. Every small town had a shop selling
solar panels for a price roughly equivalent to that of a single sheep.
Solar power obviously makes sense in such places, where there's probably
never going to be an electric line. But it also increasingly makes sense
in suburban developments, where new technologies like solar roof tiles are
reducing the cost of outfitting a house to use solar power; in any event,
the cost of such tiles would be a small part of the government-subsidized
mortgage. These systems are usually tied into the existing grid—when the
sun is shining, my Vermont rooftop functions as a small power plant,
sending power down the line. At night, I buy electricity like everyone
else; in the sunny months of the year, the power the house uses and the
power it generates are about the same. All this would make more economic
sense, of course, if the destructive environmental costs of burning, say,
cheap coal were reflected in the price of the resulting electricity. That
seems almost certain to happen once George Bush leaves office. All
plausible presidential candidates for both parties are committed to
imposing some limits on the use of coal. It's already the rule in the rest
of the developed world. But the testimony of Lovelock, Hansen, and the
rest of organized science makes it very clear that it would be a wise
investment, indeed the wisest possible investment, to spend large sums of
government money to hasten this transition to solar power. Where should it
come from? One obvious candidate is the Pentagon budget, now devoted to
defending us against dangers considerably less threatening than climate
change.
But even the widespread adoption of solar power would not put an end to
the threat of global warming. The economic transition that our predicament
demands is larger and more wrenching even than that. Some scientists have
estimated that it would take an immediate 70 percent reduction in fossil
fuel burning simply to stabilize climate change at its current
planet-melting level. And that reduction is made much harder by the fact
that it is needed at just the moment that China and India have begun to
burn serious quantities of fossil fuel as their economies grow. Not, of
course, American quantities—each of us uses on average eight times the
energy that a Chinese citizen does—but relatively serious quantities
nonetheless.
Kelly Sims Gallagher, one of the savviest early analysts of climate
policy, has devoted the last few years to understanding the Chinese energy
transition. Now the director of the Energy Technology Innovation Project
at Harvard's Kennedy School, she has just published a fascinating account
of the rise of the Chinese auto industry. Her research makes it clear that
neither American industry nor the American government did much of anything
to point the Chinese away from our addiction to gas-guzzling technology;
indeed, Detroit (and the Europeans and Japanese to a lesser extent) was
happy to use decades-old designs and processes. "Even though cleaner
alternatives existed in the United States, relatively dirty automotive
technologies were transferred to China," she writes. One result is the
smog that is choking Chinese cities; another is the invisible but growing
cloud of greenhouse gases, which come from tailpipes but even more from
the coal-fired utilities springing up across China. In retrospect,
historians are likely to conclude that the biggest environmental failure
of the Bush administration was not that it did nothing to reduce the use
of fossil fuels in America, but that it did nothing to help or pressure
China to transform its own economy at a time when such intervention might
have been decisive.
It is precisely this question—how we might radically transform our daily
lives—that is addressed by the cheerful proprietors of the WorldChanging
Web site in their new book of the same name. This is one of the most
professional and interesting Web sites that you could possibly bookmark on
your browser; almost every day they describe a new technology or technique
for environmentalists. Their book, a compilation of their work over the
last few years, is nothing less than The Whole Earth Catalog, that hippie
bible, retooled for the iPod generation. There are short features on a
thousand cool ideas: slow food, urban farming, hydrogen cars, messenger
bags made from recycled truck tarps, pop-apart cell phones, and plyboo
(i.e., plywood made from fast-growing bamboo). There are many hundreds of
how-to guides (how to etch your own circuit board, how to break in your
hybrid car so as to maximize mileage, how to organize a "smart mob" (a
brief gathering of strangers in a public place). WorldChanging can tell
you whom to text-message from your phone in order to advocate for
international debt relief, and how to build an iPod speaker from an old
tin of Altoids mints. It's a compendium of everything a younger generation
of environmental activists has to offer: creativity, digital dexterity,
networking ability, an Internet-era optimism about the future, and a deep
concern about not only green issues but related questions of human rights,
poverty, and social justice. The book's pragmatism is refreshing: "We can
do this" is the constant message, and there are enough examples to leave
little doubt that sheer cleverness is not what we're lacking as we
approach our uncertain future. "We need, in the next twenty-five years or
so, to do something never before done. We need to consciously redesign the
en-tire material basis of our civilization," Alex Steffen writes in his
editor's introduction.
If we face an unprecedented planetary crisis, we also find ourselves
in a moment of innovation unlike any that has come before.... We live
in an era when the number of people working to make the world better
is exploding.
He's right.
If there's one flaw in the WorldChanging method, I think it might be a
general distrust of the idea that government could help make things
happen. There's a Silicon Valley air to the WorldChanging enterprise—over
the years it's been closely connected with Wired magazine, the bible of
the digerati and a publication almost as paranoid about government
interference and regulation as The Wall Street Journal. Like Internet
entrepreneurs, they distrust both government intentions and
abilities—bureaucrats tend, after all, to come from the ranks of those
neither bold nor smart enough to innovate. A libertarian streak shines
through: "When we redesign our personal lives in such a way that we're
doing the right thing and having a hell of a good time," Steffen writes,
"we act as one-person beacons to the idea that green can be bright, that
worldchanging can be lifechanging." I'm sympathetic to this strain of
thinking; I believe we're going to need more local and more nimble
decision-making in the future to build strong, survivable communities. But
it also makes it a little harder to be as optimistic as you'd like to be
when reading these pages, which are filled with good ideas that, chances
are, won't come to all that much without the support of government and a
system of incentives for investment.
You can see a close-up of some of that futility in the new book Design
Like You Give a Damn from the nonprofit Architecture for Humanity,[3] a
book that is lovely in every sense of the word. The group started by
sponsoring a competition for new shelters for refugees, and the range of
replacements that people thought up for canvas tents makes clear just how
much talent is currently going to waste designing McMansions. There are
inflatable hemp bubbles and cardboard outhouses and dozens of other
designs and prototypes for the world's poorest people and biggest
disasters. As time went on the group also collected photos and plans for
attractive buildings around the world: health clinics that generate their
own power, schools cheap enough for communities to construct. Still,
there's something sad about the entire project—most of these designs have
never been carried out, because the architects lacked the political savvy
or influence to get them adopted by relief agencies or national
governments. When there's a disaster, relief agencies still haul out the
canvas tents.
There's another way of saying what is missing here. Almost every idea that
might bring us a better future would be made much easier if the cost of
fossil fuel was higher—if there was some kind of a tax on carbon emissions
that made the price of coal and oil and gas reflect its true environmental
cost. (Gore, in an important speech at New York University last month,
proposed scrapping all payroll taxes and replacing them with a levy on
carbon.) If that day came—and it's the day at least envisioned by efforts
like the Kyoto Treaty—then everything from solar panels to windmills to
safe nuclear reactors (if they can be built) would spread much more
easily: the invisible hand would be free to do more interesting work than
it's accomplishing at the moment. Perhaps it would actually begin to
operate with the speed necessary to head off Lovelock's nightmares. But
that will only happen if local, national, and international officials can
come together to make it happen, which in turn requires political action.
The recent election-driven decision by California governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger to embrace a comprehensive set of climate change measures
shows that such political action is possible; on the other side of the
continent, a Labor Day march across Vermont helped to persuade even the
most right-wing of the state's federal candidates to endorse an ambitious
program against global warming. The march's final rally drew a thousand
people, which makes it possibly the largest global warming protest in the
country's history. That's a pathetic fact, but it goes to show how few
people are actually needed to begin working toward real change.
The technology we need most badly is the technology of community—the
knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done. Our sense of
community is in disrepair at least in part because the prosperity that
flowed from cheap fossil fuel has allowed us all to become extremely
individualized, even hyperindividualized, in ways that, as we only now
begin to understand, represent a truly Faustian bargain. We Americans
haven't needed our neighbors for anything important, and hence
neighborliness—local solidarity—has disappeared. Our problem now is that
there is no way forward, at least if we're serious about preventing the
worst ecological nightmares, that doesn't involve working together
politically to make changes deep enough and rapid enough to matter. A
carbon tax would be a very good place to start.
Notes
[1] See Jim Hansen, "The Threat to the Planet," The New York Review, July
13, 2006.
[2] "'The Threat to the Planet': An Exchange," The New York Review,
September 21, 2006.
[3] A short essay of mine, which describes the Brazilian city of Curitiba
and its efforts to integrate design and architecture into citywide
planning and development, is appended to the end of the book.
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