How to treat climate change
That’s the subtitle for my book, GLOBAL FEVER, out in February 2008 from U of Chicago Press. I’m more optimistic than most for the long run, say 2100, provided that science and technological creativity stays high and unincumbered. But we’ve got to manage the short run – to 2020 – on a more urgent basis to avoid inflicting catastrophes on today’s students, going with what we’ve got rather than pie in the sky. Just to illustrate, here is a three-part solution using existing technology, mostly with known economics
1. Hybrids with a 33 mile daily range on electric – the average commute – could eliminate foreign oil imports which have grown to be 2/3 of our oil supply, for which we’ve fought two wars in the mideast.
2. We could clone the most modern nuclear reactors to reduce coal use. France gets 78% of its electricity from nuclear, NJ 52%.
3. But developing countries will burn their own coal to modernize, so the developed world has to undercut that with subsidies, running low-loss power transmission lines across half a continent from one of the 31 countries that already has nuclear power.
So it’s an interlocking three-part course of action to stop the growth in fossil fuel use – maybe there are better ones, but it shows that we already have the technology to make a big dent in the problem. It’s only political willpower that is the barrier. Once we turn around emissions growth before 2020, then we turn around CO2 growth itself, then we pump down the CO2 concentrations to the point where climate change reverses. Sea level will continue to rise, and extinct species will remain gone forever, but the extreme weather and desert encroachment ought to reverse.
Because we need something surefire, I think we are stuck with placing orders for five times as many nuclear plants as we now have in the U.S. We can always cancel some if other clean power ramps up quickly enough. But we would have to increase wind-solar-geothermal by 100x to do the same job 5x nuclear would do. Nuclear electric is a 50 year old mature technology that we know will work (as is the DC powerline technology). There are no such guarantees for doing anything 100x in ten years on an industrial scale.
For the long run, we will simultaneously need to stimulate technological innovation for eventually using some form of solar and low-loss transmission lines, to improve energy-wasting architecture and urban planning, and stimulate civic virtue. But neither such things nor the traditional “green” virtues will solve the 2020 problem in time.