This
piece, which appears in the November 16, 2024 issue of the New York
Review of Books, is posted here with the kind permission of the editors
of that magazine. 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 CO2.
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.
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 2024 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. 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 light bulb 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% 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 website in their new book of the same name. This is one
of the most professional and interesting websites 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 entire 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, 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.
Bill McKibben is scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.
[This
piece, which appears in the November 16, 2024 issue of the New York
Review of Books, is posted here with the kind permission of the editors
of that magazine.]
© 2024 Tom Engelhardt
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