Book review: Hell and High Water

A review of Joe Romm's new book

Posted by Gar Lipow (Guest Contributor) at 12:50 PM on 14 Jan 2007

Joseph Romm's Hell and High Water may be the most depressing book on global warming I've ever read.

He writes of a "Planetary Purgatory" [UPDATE - by the 22nd Century], where sea level rises 20 feet, many coastal cities are subject to such frequent hurricanes they are abandoned, and most of the Greenland ice mass melts. What are today considered heat waves become normal summers, with more and more forest and agricultural land lost to fire and drought.

Here's the really bad news: this is not what Romm is trying to avoid, but what he hopes to settle for.

Romm fears worse "purgatory" scenarios than this, but even more, he fears "hell and high water," where we end up with sea level rises of 40 to 80 feet. This, along with mega-hurricanes, would require us to triage coastal cities, abandoning most of them. Inland agricultural areas would end up in a permanent state of drought; fire would be ubiquitous.

He spends little time considering how to reduce losses below the "purgatory" level. Deniers and Delayers, who he compares to Neville Chamberlain and Herbert Hoover, are likely to prevent the U.S. from doing anything about the problem in the near future. Even if politics shifts slightly left in 2009, they are likely to have enough influence to prevent real (as opposed to symbolic) action from taking place. China already uses U.S. inaction as an excuse for greatly increasing its emissions, planning a new a coal plant every week for decades. The U.S., in turn, will use this as further excuse for inaction.

In essence, the U.S. and China have a mutual suicide pact, and look likely to take the rest of world along with them.

To reverse this fully, to produce actual emission cuts, would require a massive program whereby the U.S. and China deployed new infrastructure on a scale comparable to war mobilization -- instituting massive efficiency improvements and shutting down existing power plants to replace them low-carbon electricity generators.

The problem is not just new emissions, but historical emissions. Rich nations, especially the U.S. and Britain, are responsible for the creating the problem, since they produced the most. Even after China catches up with the U.S. in absolute output, they will produce much less per capita than we do. As Romm implies, but does not explicitly state, China is not going to pay to clean up the rich world's mess; neither is the rest of developing world. And worldwide emissions reductions could only happen through a deal where the rich nations cut their own emissions at their own expense and paid the poorer nations to cut theirs as well.

This is what Romm thinks is politically impossible. My fear is that he is right. He was acting assistant secretary for the Department of Energy in the mid-90s, served as special assistant for international security to Peter Goldmark, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and consulted extensively with some of the nation's largest corporations on emissions reductions. He is a physicist, and businessman, and political insider. He is resigned to what he thinks is inevitable and simply hopes to avoid worse. My hope is that a lifetime spent in insider elite politics causes him to underestimate what a bottom-up grassroots movement can accomplish.

What does Romm think politically possible?

Basically he hopes to adapt the Pacala and Socolow wedges (PDF) to keep emissions from rising further than they already have. The wedges he favors include:

A massive performance-based efficiency program for homes, commercial buildings, and new construction.
A massive effort to boost the efficiency of heavy industry and expand the use of cogeneration (combined heat and power).
Capture the CO2 from 800 large new coal plants and store it underground. (He admits this is tricky. We can't do it right away. Among the old wells and mines useful for storage, we would have to identify the ones where CO2 would be absolutely secure, since even 1% per year leakage would eliminate most of the value of sequestration. The success of CO2 injection for gas and oil recovery is not the same thing; in this case, no one cares about 1% per year loss. I suspect depending on sequestration is part of way to keep any deal with China inexpensive. A U.S. subsidy for emissions sequestration in new Chinese coal-based power would cost little.)
Build one million large wind turbines (or the equivalent in renewables like solar power).
Build 700 large new nuclear power plants while shutting down no old ones. (Note: this is not quite as pro-nuclear as it seems. He thinks nuclear power should have to compete with Price-Anderson and a price on carbon as the sole subsidy.)
Require every car to have an average fuel economy of 60 mpg.
Enable every car to run on electricity for short distances (requiring another half-million large wind turbines) before reverting to biofuels (requiring one-twelfth the world's cropland).
Stop all tropical deforestation, while doubling the rate of new tree planting. (Note that there are real questions whether doubling tree planting would accomplish what he thinks it would.)

Politically, even this requires we give up our anti-government fetish. Not only does Romm want to put a price on carbon (via emissions trading), he wants rule- or quantity-based regulations for buildings, industrial infrastructure, and transportation. He sees only two paths to this: Either conservatives begin to understand the seriousness of global warming and give up their prejudices against regulation and government intervention in the economy, or a massive grassroots movement on climate change emerges.

He hopes for a massive single-issue movement. This is where his big political mistake lies -- you can't get as large a grassroots movement around global warming as even the changes Romm thinks possible require. While global warming is already causing a great deal of suffering, the worst consequences (especially in the U.S.) will only start hitting ten to twenty years from now. It is almost impossible to build a grassroots movement on the scale Romm wants to stop changes 20 years away.

A better answer is for a climate coalition to build itself within a larger progressive movement. The Iraq war is far from the first time our oversized military has had its foot on the world's neck. Nor is it the only way we push other nations around, even today, usually at high cost to our own people. Labor rights, women's rights, and racial equality are on the decline; there's pushback against GLBT and the disabled. Today there are new bipartisan attempts to destroy social security and a lack of serious efforts to establish universal health care.

The same conservatives who oppose doing anything about global warming are on the wrong side on these issues as well. The same "centrists" who either go along with them or oppose them weakly are the same ones who will support symbolic rather than substantive action against climate chaos.

A coalition that supported real action on global warming, as part of movement that supported real solutions on these other issues too, would have a much better chance of winning than a single-issue group. It would have a broader base and could offer more immediate relief from problems; because global warming wouldn't be its only or even main issue, it would produce quicker results in the lives of ordinary people.

Yes, this is low probability. But so is a successful grassroots single-issue campaign that can win even the changes Romm wants. It's as much a "political improbability" as Romm's own plan, and no more an "impractical impossibility." And as he says: "occasionally political realities can change fast."

Technically, Romm is sound. There are problems in two of his wedges -- nuclear power and sequestration -- but he acknowledges them frankly.

The wedges I would propose against Romm's are the following:

A massive performance-based efficiency program for homes, commercial buildings, and new construction. Add some public subsidies, raising taxes and using some of the revenues to encourage meeting the standards.
A massive effort to boost the efficiency of heavy industry. Part of this is lowering the material intensity of consumer goods -- for example, substituting straw board for particle board -- thus reducing embedded energy in manufacturing before the first BTU was saved in any factory. We should also seek to substitute low-carbon electricity for direct fueling whenever possible.
Since electricity can be produced by low-carbon means such as wind turbines, we can't afford to waste scarce biofuels on electricity generation. Thus, it is essential that cogeneration be adopted only to the extent that the fuels would already have been burned for industrial purposes, and that no or few emissions are needed to produce the electricity.
Phase out carbon-emitting power plants over the course of twenty years, replacing them completely with wind, sun, and existing hydropower. China has significant wind resources and significant deserts for solar power. The U.S. will have to subsidize the difference between the cost of these and the cost of new coal plants, plus the cost of shutting existing coal plants down. Since China suffers huge health costs from coal, the cost can probably be kept to $50 to $100 billion per year.
Build no new nuclear power plants, while shutting down old ones as their lifespan ends. Use the money saved to implement more efficiency and renewable energy than nuclear power would have provided.
Require every car to have an average fuel economy of 75 mpg. Make large investments in electrically driven mass transit.
Enable every car to run on electricity for short distances -- at least 60 or 70 miles (requiring more renewable energy) -- before reverting to biofuels (requiring one-twelfth the world's cropland, or possibly some of the worlds rangeland). Note that a great deal of the world's grain is used to raise animals. We could convert some of this to a combination of biofuels and production of vegetable protein for humans, thus not reducing world food production at all.
Convert all major row crops to low-input no-till, and possibly incorporate charcoal fertilizer as well (or allow equivalent or better permaculture improvements that cultivate soil), thus converting agriculture to a minor carbon sink instead of a carbon source.
Replace most freight ton-miles shipped by truck with freight ton-miles shipped by rail, using trucks only for the first and last 50 miles. Also, increase truck fuel efficiency per ton miles with a combination of various existing technologies, and also by allowing large trucks carrying more freight at a time -- to the extent this can be done safely.
Stop all tropical deforestation. Stop deforestation period. Stop logging old-growth and second-growth forests (other than real thinning to prevent fires, as opposed to the clear-cutting we sometimes call thinning). Substitute waste straw from no-till for manufactured woods and alter construction methods to minimize wood use, substituting things like super-adobe and low-carbon cements. (There are forms of cement that can replace Portland cement; also, carbon from Portland cement manufacture can be sequestered right in the concrete made from it. This latter technique requires manufacturing bricks and prefab slabs on the site where the cement is made.)

For story: Book review: Hell and High Water
34 Comments | Post a Comment

Romm

Joseph Romm is a climate extremist who blogs at climateprogress.org. He very frequently miscontrues and exaggerates the science behind climate change to paint the most extreme position possible, and to imply conclusions that are not grounded in legitimate science.

Such extremists, including Romm, are doing as much damage to the legitimate concerns regarding climate change as the right-wingers do: Michaels, Balling, Singer, Idso & Idso, Baliunas, Soon, Spencer, and that crowd. Such extremists need to be stopped--challenged at every turn--before they do so much damage to the climate change problem that no one takes actual climate science seriously.

Romm is dangerous.

by d41295 at 1:44 PM on 14 Jan 2007

Please don't feed the troll

In other words, please don't reply to d41295.

by Gar Lipow at 1:47 PM on 14 Jan 2007

Romm

I should add that I also see Grist and this blog as frequent extremists, one whose financial existence is tied up with its extremism, although I do not view Grist as extremely as I do Romm.

by d41295 at 1:49 PM on 14 Jan 2007

Gar Lipow

Lipow, if you actually read Climateprogress.org you'd see that I am not mere troll.

by d41295 at 1:50 PM on 14 Jan 2007

Lipow

Lipow, you can start by showing me where in the consensus climate change science there is evidence for a sea level rise of "20 feet." The sea level rise predicted by the IPCC for 2100 is less than one meter, and possibly as low as 9 cm.

by d41295 at 1:53 PM on 14 Jan 2007

"big political mistake"

Bravo, Gar, this is magisterial, a terrific amount of work and thought which deserves to be studied far and wide.

I am glad there is consensus about tropical deforestation, i.e. it should stop, period. But also, there is benefit in planting trees, even if the counter-GW effect might be exaggerated. The biodiversity crisis is happening, along with the climate crisis, let us not forget.

Your appeal for a progressive movement, advancing on many fronts, is beautiful. Thanks for including race issues, women's rights and GLBT rights.

But of course the Deniers and Delayers can find wedge issues here. E.g., are the evangelicals, newly committed to "creation care," going to stick by their non-fundamentalist and non-religious allies, if the latter insist on gay rights?

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 2:17 PM on 14 Jan 2007

Propaganda vs analysis

What turns me off right away, d41295, is the label "extremist." If you have facts and analysis, please present them. If you are engaging in propaganda games, please go elsewhere. The "extremist" meme is thoroughly discredited.

Note that the NY Times called Arnold Schwarzenegger an "extreme environmentalist," for proposing that California be the first state to limit carbon dioxide emissions from cars.

Bart
Energy Bulletin

by Bart Anderson at 2:31 PM on 14 Jan 2007

Biodiversity, and wedge issues

Caniscandia:

>But also, there is benefit in planting trees, even if the counter-GW effect might be exaggerated. The biodiversity crisis is happening, along with the climate crisis, let us not forget.

Your point is well taken. (I'm assuming as a biodiversity advocate that you are not advocating mono-culture tree plantations, but stuff more along the lines of this

>But of course the Deniers and Delayers can find wedge issues here.

Absolutely. The answer is that grassroots politics is based on building a majority (or sometimes even a passionate minority) not consensus. The civil rights movement was never a consensus movement. Building the kind of multi-issue movement I'm advocating is really tough, and I don't claim to know how do it. As I say, Romm may well be right; holding emissions steady really may be the best we can do politically. But there have been successful large multi-issue movements in the U.S. in the past. And there is hope in the fact that nobody can predict the future, but sometimes we can help to create it.

by Gar Lipow at 2:45 PM on 14 Jan 2007

Trollishness aside ...

... I would like to know where Romm gets those figures on projected damage. I've never heard anyone, scientist or otherwise, project sea level rises of "40 to 80 feet," permanent droughts, or the other Mad Max scenarios you mention. That stuff is way, way above the high end of the most catastrophic scenarios in the IPCC.

I don't have to be convinced of the need for action, but I would like to know on what basis Romm paints his apocalyptic picture.

grist.org

by David Roberts at 2:58 PM on 14 Jan 2007

I am no expert on any of this stuff...

But I have read somewhere that the IPCC does not include the effects of tipping points, like the methane escaping the permafrost.

by sunflower at 3:07 PM on 14 Jan 2007

The Red Tide spreads

"Politically, even this requires we give up our anti-government fetish."

Can I get an amen?

by John McGrath at 3:33 PM on 14 Jan 2007

sea levels

Romm is not talking about 20 foots sea level rises this century. He is talking about 20 foot sea level rises becoming locked in for the 21st century this century. (In terms of trollishness, the post on 20 foot sea level rises is the only post by DTwotshisnumber that I consider non-trollish.

Here is the quote from Romm's book:

Sea- level rise of 20 to 80 feet will be all but unstoppable by midcentury if current emissions trends continue. The first few feet
of sea- level rise alone will displace more than 100 million people worldwide and turn all of our major Gulf and Atlantic coast cities into pre- Katrina New Orleans--below sea level and facing superhurricanes. How fast can seas rise? For the past decade, sea levels have been rising about 1 inch a decade, double the rate of a few decades ago.
[snip]
Since 2001, however, a great many studies using direct observation and satellite monitoring have revealed that both of the two great ice sheets are losing mass at the edges much faster than the models had predicted. We now know a number of physical processes can cause the major ice sheets to disintegrate faster than by simple melting alone. The whole idea of "glacial change" as a metaphor for change too slow to see will vanish in a world where glaciers are shrinking so fast that you can actually watch them retreat.

The factors he cites include: Polar amplification due to albedo changes, and Permafrost melting causing feedback from methane releases.

Now what he worries about in terms of early 22nd century rises is melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the collapse of much of Antarctica.

Current climate models project that the entire ice sheet will melt if Greenland warms only about 4.5°C (8.1°F). Since Greenland is currently warming much faster than the planet as a whole, that is likely to occur when the planet warms more than 3°C compared with levels of the late 1800s.

The point is by mid-21st century we could have huge 22nd century sea level rises locked in; even with a reasonable action starting in 2015 or 2015 Romm thinks we will lock in up to a 20 foot rise.

One last quote:

Scientists have given us more than enough serious and credible warnings of the consequences of our current path. The IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report this year (2007) will present a much stronger
consensus and a much clearer and darker picture of our likely future than the Third Assessment--but it will almost certainly still underestimate the likely impacts. The Fifth Assessment, due around
2013, should include many of the omitted feedbacks, like that of the defrosting tundra, and validate the scenarios described on these pages, especially if we haven't yet sharply reversed our current energy policies. At that point, exceeding a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in our air will be a near certainty, and a tripling will
be quite likely. The IPCC process tends to produce an underestimation of worst- case scenarios for two reasons--because it is consensus based and because it encompasses many greenhouse gas scenarios that assume far stronger action on emissions reduction than the United States or the world seems prepared to embrace.

by Gar Lipow at 3:49 PM on 14 Jan 2007

oops

should be: locked in for the 22nd century in this century

by Gar Lipow at 3:50 PM on 14 Jan 2007

The Red Tide spreads

AMEN!

by truffula at 5:15 PM on 14 Jan 2007
[ Parent ]

Sea level and isostasy

Actually, even if all of the polar ice sheets were to melt, we would not see a dramatic rise in sea level. The reason is isostasy. (A term from geology and geodesy.)

In short, when the ice sheets formed, the earth's crust sank. As the ice sheets melt, the crust will rebound.

The formation of ice-sheets can cause the Earth's surface to sink. Conversely, isostatic post-glacial rebound is observed in areas once covered by ice-sheets which have now melted, such as around the Baltic Sea and Hudson Bay. As the ice retreats, the load on the lithosphere and asthenosphere is reduced and they rebound back towards their equilibrium levels. In this way, it is possible to find former sea-cliffs and associated wave-cut platforms hundreds of metres above present-day sea-level. The rebound movements are so slow that the uplift caused by the ending of the last Ice Age is still continuing.

by Gary Dikkers at 8:13 PM on 14 Jan 2007

Speaking of risk perception

http://www.uoregon.edu/~ecotone/pubs.html

The 5% Project

by JMG at 8:19 PM on 14 Jan 2007

JMG,

I've called Leiserowitz and begged him to write something for Gristmill before, but he's concentrating on his academic career (doesn't he know blogs are The Future?). Great link, though -- I love that stuff.

grist.org

by David Roberts at 11:02 PM on 14 Jan 2007

Alarmism

One of the problems with Global Warming is the snowball rolling downhill effect. Once it begins to take off seriously, then it creates momentum.

I suspect that this is what Joseph Romm is really talking about. No one can predict the exact future. For instance, if you stand in front of an avalance, you may very well survive. It happens.

The deniers are encouraged to test out this hypothesis, since it fits in with their approach to science.

One of the things to note, is that scientists are now noticing that some things that they predicted due to global warming are happening FASTER THAN they predicted. This should scare the living heck out of everyone. Sigh. But apparently it doesn't.

Strange days indeed...

patrick

by bookerly at 12:22 AM on 15 Jan 2007

My favorite

Gar, I particularly like your #7. I currently get all my protein from plant sources, and couldn't be happier, or healthier.

Have you considered the impact of the methane reductions if this were to happen? (The downside, of course, is that we'd live longer, thus taking up more resources.)

Number 9 is also something I've been advocating, ever since driving the M25 near the Chunnel and seeing the endless line of lorries bringing goods from other EU countries. Unfortunately thousands of miles of rail have been dug up here in the UK in favor of motorways.

Let me know when that global movement starts, I want in.

by KathyF at 5:39 AM on 15 Jan 2007

"vegetable protein"

Yes, KathyF, I join you in endorsing trains.

The other subject is complicated. I am not competent to express an opinion on biofuels. But "vegetable protein" ought to mean: in a healthy vegetarian diet, a combination of legumes and whole grains, two rather different kinds of crops. And neither should be grown as monocrops.

Hopefully, if ever that is done right, flesh-eating will come to seem less normal, less something that so many people feel entitled to. It is after all a relatively recent phenomenon, historically, in most of Europe and the Mediterranean region, that one can eat meat daily.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 5:58 AM on 15 Jan 2007

Re: The Red Tide spreads

>> "Politically, even this requires we give up our >> anti-government fetish."

> Can I get an amen?

This is about the scariest thing I've read on a blog in a long time. Look around you--the US is slowly but steadily becoming a police state. The tactics and practices of the Bush administration are taking away civil liberties at every turn and subjecting us to increased surveillance, and you want to give government MORE power? And this trend has been going on in the US since about WW2. Are you all so desperate to solve global warming, and so unwilling to take responsibility and action on your own, that you must wait for governments to act, that you will trade your liberty for a couple less degrees of warming? There is nothing more important than our liberty, and without it it doesn't even matter if the sea level rises 80 feet or 800 feet--we will be essentially dead anyway.

You liberals really scare me.

by d41295 at 6:36 AM on 15 Jan 2007

Charcoal Fertilizer

I'm halfway through the book, and I've come to the conclusion that it's the very best general-interest GW book I've read so far. The tone is strong and uncompromising, but the book itself isn't depressing. What is depressing is watching the American administration stick its collective head in the sand (or somewhere more scatological, if you prefer).

My major concern is in the imminent convergence of Climate Change, Peak Oil and Food Scarcity. Researching those three aspects of the Global Problematique, keeping an eye out for ways they intersect and amplify each other, as well as how solutions to one may be incompatible with (or even prevent) solutions to the others - now that's depressing.

I'm thinking of putting together a two-book package on this convergence to give to people who Need To Know. It would consist of Hell and High Water and Richard Heinberg's The Party's Over - one of the better general books on Peak Oil.

Anyhow, on to charcoal fertilizer. I recently had my eyes opened to the general subject of Terra Preta do Indio in the Amazon. This led me to the discovery of the commercialization of the idea by a company called Eprida, and also to the academic work of Johannes Lehmann.

This research points the way to a very low-level technology that has mind-boggling promise: it sequesters carbon, it enhances soil fertility, and it can produce biofuels - both directly by growing fuel crops and indirectly during the charcoal-making process. As a result it addresses in one mechanism the three main converging crises: liquid fuels, CO2 emissions and imminent food scarcity.

It's also one of the few mitigation proposals that might actually scale up enough to do some good:

Actually, the scalability seems to be extremely good, as reported in this article:

Claims for biochar's capacity to capture carbon sound almost audacious. Johannes Lehmann, soil scientist and author of Amazonian Dark Earths: Origin, Properties, Management, believes that a strategy combining biochar with biofuels could ultimately offset 9.5 billion tons of carbon per year-an amount equal to the total current fossil fuel emissions!

As a result, I'm convinced that this technology deserves mention, an possibly even pride of place, in analyses such as Dr. Romm's. I have yet to see it mentioned in any general-interest overview of the topic, and I believe this is an egregious oversight. It's certainly as doable as a million wind turbines, less technologically problematic than CO2 sequestration in old gas fields, and much more politically acceptable than 700 nukes.

by GliderGuider at 9:21 AM on 15 Jan 2007

Liberty

OK - a strongly worded but non-trollish post so I will reply.

>The tactics and practices of the Bush administration are taking away civil liberties at every turn and subjecting us to increased surveillance, and you want to give government MORE power? And this trend has been going on in the US since about WW2. Are you all so desperate to solve global warming, and so unwilling to take responsibility and action on your own, that you must wait for governments to act, that you will trade your liberty for a couple less degrees of warming?

Can glibertarians really not tell the diffrence between a building codes and a police state? Man cutting fossil fuel use instead of constant wars for oil is part of the reversal of our increasing militarization - one of things that can save our liberty. As to solving everything ourselves; can't build my own trains, can't even build my own car. Sorry - we are way past the "wish upon a star" stage.

by Gar Lipow at 9:29 AM on 15 Jan 2007

Re: Charcoal Fertilizer

GliderGuider wrote:
> My major concern is in the imminent convergence
> of Climate Change, Peak Oil and Food Scarcity.

This is what I mean when I referred to climate extremism above. Some on the left seem to have an obsession with apocalyptic thinking, even, it seems, a wish that it will happen. (The blog Past Peak is especially guilty of this.)

Of course, people have been predicting the apocalypse for millenia, and yet life has only gotten better and better for more and more people. I don't see any real reason why that trend should not continue. That's not to say it will be easy. But life has never been easy. Climate change could well add a couple-to-three degrees to the planet, which will benefit some areas and harm some others. We will develop alternative sources of energy as oil peaks and then declines, the inevitable result of free market forces. Science and technology will continue to provide enough food for the masses -- for so many of us the major problem is now a food surplus -- and we will continue to overcome the major food problems on the planet, which lie in distribution and not quantity.

There is absolutely no justification for apocalyptic thinking, and worse, it is anathema to the spirit which has driven the best of mankind to find solutions to its problems. But some people like to predict an apocalypse. It justifies their world views and, I think, their worries about spiritual impotence. But some people have always had what it takes to press ahead and make progress, and that spirit is as alive today as it has ever been.

by d41295 at 10:58 AM on 15 Jan 2007

Food scarcity

For six of the last seven years, the world has consumed more grain than it has grown. Global grain reserves are down from 130 days at their peak in 1986 to a mere 57 days today. Global per capita grain production has declined since then as well, down 10% from 1986 to today. While there are indeed distribution inequities, these raw facts imply that they are not the only effects at work.

It's interesting that in a post filled with positive references to a promising multi-faceted technology you choose to take the ad-hominem route of attacking my concerns rather than the substance of my post.

I'm satisfied that my concerns are grounded on an objective reading of the underlying science. While the conclusions may seem florid and objectionable to you, the fact that overshoots and population collapses are a common feature of all ecologies tells me that these concerns are eminently supportable.

Your dualist worldview and cornucopian fantasies cut no ice with me, I'm afraid.

by GliderGuider at 11:25 AM on 15 Jan 2007
[ Parent ]

It all sounds really nice

But am I the only one who notices a depressing similarity in 98% of these sorts of books? Detailed, rigorous explanations of just what is going wrong followed by a tacked-on solutions chapter that utterly fails to measure up to everything that went before?

It feels a lot like a forced optimism, the kind of thing the makers of the British zombie movie "28 Days Later" felt they had to cater to when writing a happy ending specifically for the American market. Of course, others can be susceptible to this, too - George Monbiot's "Heat", again, was interesting, but his proposals showed the political and social acumen of a 5-year-old (a World Parliament? Yeah, we'll get right on that). The mere act of noticing this forced optimism will get you screamed at by devotees of the "Great Turning" (because, of course, once "Empire" collapses, the world will inevitably and immediately rush towards "Earth Community" for the first time in human history). You'll be denounced as a Kunstlerian doomsayer.

But maybe there's some room between wishing for the End and "everything's gonna be okay - wait, it'll all be better, even!". Maybe we need to look at things with clearer eyes.

Just some thoughts...

by JackH at 6:26 AM on 16 Jan 2007

The Unified Vanguard Strikes Again!

"Labor rights, women's rights, and racial equality are on the decline; there's pushback against GLBT and the disabled." Yep - exactly like how Down's Syndrome babies are disappearing in affluent parts of the U.S.. Marketplace eugenics. And don't think for a minute that the day after the first test for a "gay gene", there won't be the first abortion of a potentially gay child. Which'll lead to more "disappearances".

"Today there are new bipartisan attempts to destroy social security and a lack of serious efforts to establish universal health care." What on earth does universal health care have to do with global warming? I support it, but come on! Please, please, PLEASE get over the "unified revolutionary vanguard" fetish. Again, you're going right into that old leftist trap, of ever-increasing purity and every-increasing jihads against other factions, until you're like the Trotskyites.

by JackH at 6:32 AM on 16 Jan 2007

The disconnect

This disconnect between the problem set and the solution set is evident in every Global Warming or Peak Oil book I've read that takes the time to do a halfway rigorous assessment of the problem. Look at any of the works by Tim Flannery, George Monbiot, Ken Deffeyes, Richard Heinberg - if you want to see a tryly naive proposal, read Heinberg's new book "The Oil Depletion Protocol".

The difficulty is obviously the scale of the problems and the fact that any significant mitigation is going to require international cooperation in making ourselves voluntarily poorer. That will be a hard sell even as the effects of the problems become obvious.

Garret Hardin observed in "The Tragedy of the Commons" that not every problem has a technical solution. He was talking about population growth, but the observation applies equally to the GW/PO domains - especially inasmuch as these problems are merely manifestations of the actual underlying problem of too many people doing too much.

However, as you observe, it's considered unseemly to point this out. The human spirit must be thought triumphant in all matters, or it raises uncomfortable suspicions that we may in fact be merely part of nature, running by pretty much the same rules as reindeer or yeast. This notion is profoundly distressing to the well-conditioned dualist world view upon which our continued comfort depends. As a result, all the authors described above are forced to take refuge in puerile proposals, or risk not being published at all.

I personally don't think there is a technical solution to the problems of Global Warming or Peak Oil, at least in the sense of a solution that would somehow permit 6.5 billion people to keep on living this lifestyle in perpetuity. My readings on ecology convince me that in such an overshoot as we are currently in the pressure is ultimately resolved through a modification of both quality of life and population numbers. I see no reason to believe we are any more exempt than other species from this iron law of nature.

by GliderGuider at 8:16 AM on 16 Jan 2007
[ Parent ]

Solutions deniers with worm tongues.

Not all books describe the cause sans solutions. Some document solutions with scant descriptors of global heating.

Amory Lovins

Winning the Oil Endgame

http://www.oilendgame.com/ReadTheBook.html

There are many technical solutions to global warming (that do not require population contractions).

Deniers of solutions are out in force, linger, persistent, likely from the same funders of the deniers of anthropogenic global warming.

by sunflower at 8:47 AM on 16 Jan 2007

Pessimism

>Deniers of solutions are out in force, linger, persistent, likely from the same funders of the deniers of anthropogenic global warming.

I think a lot this is also ideological. A lot of people who are very far from deniers of the problem take this viewpoint. I think it comes from a nostalgia for an imaginary better time, a wish that we will somehow be forced to live poorer, more virtuous lives. The larger point here is that we have technical solutions; what we lack are political solutions.

Which feeds nicely into:

>Not all books describe the cause sans solutions. Some document solutions with scant descriptors of global heating.

>Amory Lovins

>Winning the Oil Endgame

>http://www.oilendgame.com/ReadTheBook.html

This my major beef with Amory Lovins. He is brilliant technically, but ignores the politics. He is anti-political, believing that progressive business people can do an end-run around any need for politics, or at any rate he acts as though he believes it. I will note also that the title is not inaccurate; he does not pay much attention to winning the coal end game.

Which feed naturally into:

>What on earth does universal health care have to do with global warming? I support it, but come on! Please, please, PLEASE get over the "unified revolutionary vanguard" fetish.

Name calling without evidence. Universal Health Care may have little to do TECHNICALLY with global warming, but everything POLITICALLY. The Fossil Fool Industry (not a typo) is not the only obstacle to implementing solutions; the conservative movement as whole is too. (Not all conservatives, but the movement.) Everyone who has looked seriously at what policy will be required moves beyond "putting a price on carbon" to need for rule based regulation and public initiatives. Romm, Monbiot, the center right Stern report. If solving global warming requires regulations and public initiatives, then your base of support will be the groups I mentioned, not the movement conservatives, or the glibertarians. In short the solutions to global warming are fundamentally liberal and left solutions. So if you seriously want to solve the problems you need to get liberals and the left on board - which requires paying attention to more than global warming issues.

Even on the most primitive level - where are the boots on the ground? Well we environmentalists have a high share. But labor unions, various civil rights movements (yes including gays and feminists- if you think you can win without them, get over it) have more. The organized anti-war and peace movements are probably smaller; but more new activists begin working on these issues than begin with any other.

I'm not opposed to single issue groups. There is a reason for specialization. But single issue groups are going to have to work together and support one another's issue in some sort of network or coalition if any of use are going to win. And I've got news for you. Single issue groups opposed to global warming, or even environmental groups in general will never be the largest groups out there.

In short advocating some sort of unity among various liberal, left and progressive causes is basic political realism.

by Gar Lipow at 9:18 AM on 16 Jan 2007

Lovins does have some good ideas.

I find his approach too technological (which limits its applicability to less-developed nations) and too optimistic in some areas like biofuels and the willingness of people to embrace wholesale change absent a demonstrated need. That said, he has a lot of interesting proposals (as do Monbiot, Romm, Heinberg and the others) that should be acted on.

I have one fundamental objection to all the solution proposals I've seen, and that is that they each treat only one symptom of a multi-factorial problematique, while ignoring both the interactions of different problem domains and the root cause of population. To give people an idea of the enormity of the "Global Problematique" I usually lay it out as follows.

The Problematique consists of the following problem areas:

Air, water and soil pollution. This is how we became aware of environmental problems. Acid rain, Silesia, Love Canal etc.

Climate Change. This is the one we've all been watching. Every time a new report comes out, it turns out that its getting worse faster than we thought.

Deforestation and desertification. The world is losing 130,000 sq km of forest every year. Over a billion people in 110 countries are now affected by desertification.

Depletion of ocean fish stocks. Big-fish stocks have fallen 90% since 1950. 90% of all fish species could collapse before 2050.

Depletion of soil fertility and fresh water reserves. Soil fertility on the Great Plains is half what it was a a hundred years ago. The Ogallala aquifer is being drained at 100 times the replacement rate.

Decline of the global grain supply. The world has eaten more grain than it has consumed in six of the last seven years. Global grain reserves have fallen from 130 days in 1986 to 57 days today.

Massive rates of extinction and biodiversity loss. Species are going extinct at 1000 times the expected natural rate.

Social, economic and geopolitical instability. The US national debt, cultural clashes, resource wars, terrorism...

Oil and natural gas depletion. We have burned up about half the world's recoverable oil, the supply rate is about to start declining, and the second half of the oil is going to be more expensive in both monetary and energy terms.

All of these problems intersect, amplify and interfere with each other. Mitigating one might be possible. Mitigating all of them is exponentially more difficult, and the case can be made that a full solution is not findable due to the complexity of the full problem set.

We live in a finite world. We have a global impact on every aspect of the ecosphere. We must continue to make what efforts we can to reduce those impacts, to make room for other species and to maximize the opportunities for our own. However, we must do this with our eyes open to the full extent of the challenge.

I take a lot of comfort from the recent work of a group of ecologists who are investigating complex system theory. They use the concepts of adaptive loops and resilience, borrowed from the study of forest ecologies, to describe how complex systems grow, decline, adapt and reconstitute into new growth cycles. I firmly believe that this better describes the progress of human societies better than the two-dimensional growth/overshoot/collapse usually put forward.

On the other hand, the idea that another civilization will eventually rise to replace your own is cold comfort if your own starts to disintegrate.

by GliderGuider at 10:08 AM on 16 Jan 2007

Wait, am I reindeer or yeast? :)

JackH, GliderGuider,
One thing about the simplistic solutions offered by otherwise thought-provoking environmental authors: authors in every other field have this problem too. It doesn't help, of course--it's still a problem--but at least it's not just environmentalists. I noticed this most recently when I read Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she provides an insightful critique of the problems in 1960s American cities, including spending rather a lot of time beating to a pulp every "garden city" or "city of tomorrow" theory out there, especially as those theories were used in "slum clearance"/housing projects of that era. She then proceeds, at the end of the book, to come up with a series of suggestions every bit as ridiculous as the existing housing-project model.

Point being, it's astonishingly much easier to modify existing ideas--ie, to criticise, even if the modifications you suggest will never be put into effect--than it is to come up with new ones out of whole cloth.

The types of change people tend to propose in the last chapters of books that critique widespread political/social phenomena are perforce the work of a single mind (albeit influenced broadly by many others), while the actual solutions tend to be more general trends started by many, many people acting together, which is far too complex an occurrence for any one author to be able to accurately predict or model.

It'd be nice if someone could propose a solution and have it actually work, but I'm afraid that's not the nature of the beast.

by willa at 12:34 PM on 16 Jan 2007

willa, your point is well taken.

It is indeed much easier to snipe than to come up with workable suggestions of one's own. As well, what finally gets implemented after several bruising encounters with reality will probably bear little resemblance to any of the original plans (that reminds me of the quote, "In war no plan survives its first contact with the enemy.")

The problem is that all these plans are the best I've seen, and they all have holes you could drive a Humvee through. Given the strength of the "enemy" we face in the Problematique, it's very easy to lose faith...

by GliderGuider at 1:15 PM on 16 Jan 2007
[ Parent ]

Time to Master the Carbon Cycle

Right-ON Guilder, Charcoal is no minor sequestration method!

Time to Master the Carbon Cycle

Man has been controlling the carbon cycle , and there for the weather, since the invention of agriculture, all be it was as unintentional as our current airliner contrails are in affecting global dimming. This unintentional warm stability in climate, has over 10,000 years, allowed us to develop to the point that now we know what we did and that now we are over doing it.

The prehistoric and historic records gives a logical thrust for soil carbon sequestration.
I wonder what the soil biome carbon concentration was REALLY like before the cutting and burning of the world's virgin forest, my guess is that now we see a severely diminished community, and that only very recent Ag practices like no-till and reforestation have started to help rebuild it. It makes implementing Terra Preta soil technology like an act of penitence, a returning of the misplaced carbon.

Energy, the carbon cycle and greenhouse gas management
http://www.computare.org/Support%20documents/Fora%20Input...

On the Scale of CO2 remediation:

It is my understanding that atmospheric CO2 stands at 379 PPM, to stabilize the climate we need to reduce it to 350 PPM by the removal of 230 Billion tons.

The best estimates I've found are that the total loss of forest and soil carbon (combined
pre-industrial and industrial) has been about 200-240 billion tons. Of
that, the soils are estimated to account for about 1/3, and the vegetation
the other 2/3.

Since man controls 24 billion tons in his agriculture then it seems we have plenty to work with in sequestering our fossil fuel co2 emissions as charcoal.

As Dr. Lehmann at Cornell points out, "Closed-Loop Pyrolysis systems such as Day's are the only way to make a fuel that is actually carbon negative". and that " a strategy combining biochar with biofuels could ultimately offset 9.5 billion tons of carbon per year-an amount equal to the total current fossil fuel emissions! "
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/l...ochar_home.htm... (subscription needed)

Here's the Cornell page for an over view:
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/biochar/Biocha...

This Earth Science Forum thread on these soils contains further links, and has been viewed by 13,000 folks. ( I post everything I find on Amazon Dark Soils, ADS here):
http://forums.hypography.com/earth-science/3451-terra-pre...

The Georgia Inst. of Technology page:
http://www.energy.gatech.edu/presentations/dday.pdf <... ) which could use existing infrastructure to provide Charcoal sustainable Agriculture , Syn-Fuels, and a variation of this process would also work as well for H2 , Charcoal-Fertilizer, while sequestering CO2 from Coal fired plants to build soils at large scales , be sure to read the "See an initial analysis NEW" link of this technology to clean up Coal fired power plants.
Soil erosion, energy scarcity, excess greenhouse gas all answered through regenerative carbon management http://www.newfarm.org/columns/research_paul/2006/0106/ch...

All the Bio-Char Companies and equipment manufactures I've found:

Carbon Diversion
http://www.carbondiversion.com/

Eprida: Sustainabl...

BEST Pyrolysis, Inc. | Slow Pyrolysis - Biomass - Clean Energy - Renewable Ene
http://www.bestenergies.com/companies/bestpyrolysis.html<...

Ensyn - Environmentally Friendly Energy and Chemicals
http://www.ensyn.com/who/ensyn.htm

Agri-Therm, dev...

Advanced BioRefinery Inc.
http://www.advbiorefineryinc.ca/

Technology Review...

Korea:
International K&K Enterprise Others
http://www.alibaba.com/company/10406050.html#companyprofi...

The upcoming International Agrichar Initiative (IAI) conference to be held at Terrigal, NSW, Australia in 2007. ( http://iaiconference.org/home.html )
.

If pre-Columbian Indians could produce these soils up to 6 feet deep over 20% of the Amazon basin it seems that our energy and agricultural industries could also product them at scale.

Harnessing the work of this vast number of microbes and fungi changes the whole equation of EROEI for food and Bio fuels. I see this as the only sustainable agricultural strategy if we no longer have cheap fossil fuels for fertilizer.

We need this super community of wee beasties to work in concert with us by populating them into their proper Soil horizon Carbon Condos.

I feel Terra Preta soil technology is the greatest of Ironies.
That is: an invention of pre-Columbian American culture, destroyed by western disease, may well be the savior of industrial western society.

Thanks,
Erich

Erich J. Knight
Shenandoah Gardens
E-mail: shengar at aol.com
(540) 289-9750

by erich at 6:34 PM on 16 Jan 2007

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