On 7/27/06, Eugene Coyle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Gar,You've put in a lot of work on this but I hate your sub-title. "Hey, we've got global warming, the Greenland ice cap is melting, but don't worry, we can take care of it with no cost or inconvenience to people, and business profits will go UP!" Well, it is not persuasive to me -- because the claim hasn't moved people worried about business profits. It sounds like the Amory Lovins/Ralph Cavanagh idea that we dare not ask the public to face "sacrifice." Their idea is that we can live just as well or better than before if we just switch to stuff that doesn't cost more or inconvenience us in the least. I don't believe that is possible and fifteen or twenty years of people pushing it has gotten very little of the good stuff adopted. It is like telling energy corporations -- with examples and calculations -- that their profits will go up if they do this, this, or this. And after Lovins has told them, and told them, and told them, they don't do anything. Makes you wonder why they are so stupid, or, just maybe, the pitch is wrong.
Lovin's pitch is wrong because he is trying to tell business they don't have to sacrifice. Solving global warming will require a lot of things that business doesn not like - higher taxes, more regulations, more public works. There are various reasons, covered briefly in this first book, and in more detail in my second that market oriented solutions cannot solve this problem. But it is a social problem not a technical one. We don't have to all ride bicycles to work. We can drive electric cars or take electric trains. I think your approach is the flip side of the mistake Lovins makes. Lovins thinks that we can solve the energy problem without burdening the capitalist class. You think we have to burden not only the capitalist class but the working class. Amory is right on much of what he says about available technology and costs. (I think he is dead on wrong on hydrogen and fuel cells.) But his economics are nonsense because he thinks business is only about profits and ignores market and political power. Minus technical breakthroughs that look increasingly unlikely you cannot phase out fossil fuels by simply plugging magic solution x in their place. But you can provide the same goods and services through a variety of alternatives - a mixture of greater technical efficiency and renewable energy. And I think there a number of reasons the environmental movement has had so little success in making global warming a priority, not only among policy makers, but among ordinary people. One aspect of it is the attempt to depoliticize the issue as Amory and some of the big money enviromental organizations have done - to reduce it to a technical problem that requires little poltiical action, or only enough political action to get large corporations to recognize their own self interest. But you also have environmetnalists in very comfortable circumstances trying to tell working people that they live too high off the hog, that they have to cut down their standard of living. Not a politically useful message, and not a true message either. What the hey: I'll quote from my own book on this: "Cooling It! No Hair Shirt Solutions to Global Warming" says:
This is an optimistic book about a gloomy subject - the need to
reduce fossil fuel use to fight global warming. It argues that we have technological substitutes available for oil, gas and coal now - at market prices comparable to those we currently pay. Neither cost nor technical barriers prevent drastic and speedy reductions in greenhouse emissions; slowing global warming is no longer a technical problem (if it ever was). It is structural, institutional, social, and political.
Why cover this particular topic? The carbon lobby has mostly (not
entirely) given up disputing that global warming is occurring. They know that they won't be able to confuse the public on its human-caused nature much longer. ( ~75% of the U.S. public understands human caused global warming is a real problem . If you are one of the remaining ~25%, please read the appendix Hot Lies and Cold Facts. ) But a final stalling tactic is open to deniers - to pretend that nothing can be done, or at least nothing that most people are willing to live with. There is an old engineering saying: "no solution, no problem".
Converging with this, there is a small, but unfortunately influential
primitivist movement. In their belief that technology itself is totalitarian, they also contribute to the idea that the only solution to global warming is a drastic reduction in the technical level of civilization - perhaps down to the hunter-gatherer level. Many well-meaning, intelligent people promote a less extreme version of this trope - the conviction that we need to impoverish working people in rich nations to solve our environmental crisis, and deal justly with the poorer countries.
The primary purpose of this book is to ensure that energy efficiency
and renewable energy technologies become known as inexpensive fossil fuel substitutes available today, rather than a high priced vision of tomorrow. The U.S. needs to understand that continued use of fossil fuel is a political decision, rather than a technical one. It argues against the belief that the only choices are destructive, expensive, continued burning of fossil fuels, or dramatic cuts in the standard of living. It tries to accomplish this by gathering in one place information that has been widely scattered; it also tries to organize the information and clearly separate what we can do cheaply now, what we can do expensively now, and what we may be able to do in the future.
The argument that more and more global warming deniers will rely on
is that it is too expensive to phase out fossil fuel use.
There is a certain absurdity to spending the bulk of a book refuting
the idea that saving the world is too expensive. But this absurd task is also a necessary one. If the methods offered to stop global warming are too costly or too unpleasant, many people will prefer to wait and hope that technology provides some magical painless solution.
Other popularizers have written about efficiency and renewables. This
book differs in not assuming technical breakthroughs, or drastic price drops in prices of existing technology; while these are both likely and desirable, we have cost-effective solutions available now.
Also what if the breakthroughs that are only six months away are
still only six months away twenty years from now? It is not exactly unknown in the renewable energy field. This book will not argue against any of the "Gosh! Wow!" stuff; more serious R&D would probably produce exactly what many predict. But it seems urgent, absolutely essential to show that we can phase out fossil fuels at an equal or lower cost than continuing to use them – even if there is no hydrogen path, no cheap solar cells, and no inexpensive carbon fiber.
Once that is done, the book will deal with R&D agendas - near term,
long term and blue sky, but in the form of a sample research program, rather than a core requirement of the transition to a carbon neutral future. This introduction and more samples of the writing are available on the site: http://www.nohairshirts.com
