Climate change: we have the power

The technology to reduce emissions in small ways at home is advancing rapidly. Compact fluorescent lamps use up to 80% less power than ordinary bulbs. And LEDs, the tiny lights that flash on electronic equipment and use hardly any energy, can be scaled up for domestic lighting. Widespread adoption of such technologies will bring down prices and, over time, make it more profitable to do the right, green thing.

In addition, Ausubel points out, all the technology is in place for producing effectively zero-emission buildings. These would be covered in solar panels and use natural air flows for heating and cooling. It isn’t difficult and, indeed, it’s financially sensible. All that is needed is the will.

Painting everything white might also be a good idea. White increases the Earth’s albedo – reflectivity – and cools the planet. The polar snow fields have a huge cooling effect. Some big cities like Los Angeles are seriously considering painting their roads and many of their buildings white. This is not just because of global warming but because of urban warming. Cities absorb heat. The differential between city centres and the countryside – the so-called urban heat island – has been growing: summer temperatures in Tokyo have hit 40C, compared with 28.5C in the country. Painting things white and planting many more inner-city trees would help correct this, making city-dwellers happier, while also cooling the planet and capturing carbon.

Transport, of course, is a harder problem. Outside the US, cars have become much more efficient. The next step, however, is far more difficult. The EU has been pressing to get CO2 emissions down to an average 140g per kilometre – for perspective the Toyota Prius hybrid emits 104g and the Land Rover Discovery around 250g – but it’s an enormous task: most middle-range cars are still well into the 150-250g range. Hybrid technology is expensive, adding thousands to the price of a car, and though fully electric cars are on the way, it is not yet clear whether they will be good enough and cheap enough to lure consumers away from petrol.

Commitment is the big problem. People accept the green message – hence all the green rhetoric in politics – but don’t yet seem to let it affect their lives on a large scale. As Lomborg points out, there are hundreds of schemes for offsetting your carbon when you fly, but less than 1% of passengers use them. And they certainly don’t want to swap their high-status wheels for an understated plodder like the Prius. Nevertheless, it is clear we want politicians to do something. But what, after the failures of emission controls and in the face of rapid industrialisation involving a third of the global population, can they do?

Most effectively, they can rethink their energy strategies. Nuclear power is respectable again after its long disgrace following the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters. It’s still expensive – but then we are just waking up to the true cost of coal and oil. Furthermore, nuclear plants are being designed that promise up to 20% gains in efficiency. So-called “pebble bed” reactors also promise much greater safety. And nuclear plants, once built, are more or less emission-free. There are also ZEPPs – zero-emission power plants that use new ways of handling coal and oil. Again, we know how to do this. We just have to find the will.

All these divisions point to a fundamental problem for the green movement that has dogged all its campaigning and drained its political credibility. They squabble among themselves, and, beneath the surface, it’s always about the same thing: what are we trying to achieve?
On the one hand are the greens who advocate “sustainable retreat”. Thinkers like Lovelock and Ausubel believe humanity must step back from nature and allow the wilderness to return, for it is wilderness that preserves the systems of the living planet. This means we must free the land of our presence, and it involves a very high-tech commitment to nuclear power and new ways of producing food – perhaps synthesising our own meat or building the urban “vertical farms” proposed by yet another Columbia professor, Dickson Despommier. These would be 30-storey towers growing fruit, vegetables and cereals. Clean water and energy would be by-products.

The point about such schemes is they reduce the need for vast areas of agricultural land. Agriculture, to sustainable retreaters, is a disaster. It expends vast amounts of energy and resources to produce protein in the most inefficient way – through sheep, cows and pigs. And it reduces large parts of the Earth to barren monocultures, absorbing too little CO2 and destroying many of the natural processes that keep systems in equilibrium. For retreaters, biofuels – petrol and diesel made from plants – are the worst “green” idea yet. They are supposed to be carbon-neutral in that the plants absorb as much carbon as the fuel releases. But, in fact, they commit more land to agriculture and are likely to kill more Africans by raising the price of agricultural land and thus the cost of food.

For similar reasons, sustainers are keen on encouraging people to live in cities. Again this frees land, but it also makes energy generation and supply much more efficient. New power plants can be built on the sites of the old and delivered short distances to more users.

On the other side are the more pastoral greens who focus primarily on renewables. They want to see a landscape dotted with windmills, the sea full of wave farms and the streets full of electric cars. They don’t see people retreating; they see us living in more perfect harmony with nature.

For me the retreaters are more likely to be right for two reasons. First, they are more realistic about human nature. We are rapacious creatures not given to living in harmony with anything. If we can be rapacious in the cities and leave the wilderness alone, so much the better. Secondly, it is clear that we can do nothing to stop the world population rising to almost 10 billion by 2050. A disaster might intervene, but, assuming it doesn’t, we need to generate vast amounts of energy to prevent starvation on an unprecedented scale. Renewables are not up to the task.

Yet renewables and small-scale technologies must be developed. Using wind power, solar panels, LED lights or hybrid cars are baby steps, but they are steps nonetheless, and, cumulatively, they will one day make a difference.

Bryan Appleyard

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