Up until now I have been somewhat casual about Climate Change, at least compared with the immediate direct causes of Mass Extinction. It seemed to me that the truly irrevocable consequences of climate were 50 to 100 years away and because climate change is so directly threatening to humanity, we would deal with it eventually.
On May 3, in Terrigal Australia, my reality was totally rearranged. I had just finished a conference on Bio-Char, or as the Australians call it Agri-char, using charcoal to remove carbon from the atmosphere by improving the soil. The steady stream of giant ships carrying coal to China that we could see out of the mouth of the bay was disconcerting, but the conclusions of the conference were generally encouraging. Even as everyone there, including me, had acknowledged that for the time being energy would dominate until the price of carbon would be bid up sometime in the future.
I was at the train station on the way to Sydney airport to fly to San Francisco when another participant brought me the news. The Arctic ice is disappearing three times faster than predicted. Instead of 2050, there will be no ice in 2020. We have 12 years. It is hopeless.
As we already knew from Tim Flannery’s keynote at the conference the day before, if the ice cover disappears from the Arctic, the ocean there will no longer reflect, but instead absorb heat, and rise 6 degrees centigrade within a few years. From then on, the entire weather pattern with which humanity, and indeed most mammals, had evolved, would be gone. Even before that point we now know that, while warming brings more rain that rain comes in torrential storms, and increased transpiration and soil drying more than makes up for the overall dryer conditions for agriculture.
The night before, I had heard about this firsthand from a farmer who had just lost his water. Irrigated agriculture was essentially finished in large, growing parts of south eastern Australia. It is one thing to give up on agriculture in Australia, but what about the central US, Europe and Asia? It's hard for us to imagine global famine, but many, indeed most civilizations have collapsed due to similar conditions on a local scale.
I spent the first day in despair, shock and the delirium of jetlag in fevered dreams. My mind reeled, unable to take on the magnitude of what appeared to be the reality of the situation. Twelve years or less – given the momentum of the system, of industrial technology, of coal – how could we do anything in the face of it?
But, gradually I regrouped and quickly took a more creative stance. What would it look like for humanity to have a future? To overcome this challenge? There are two precedents I can think of: WWII when we transformed our entire industrial infrastructure in little over a year in response to an enormous perceived threat, and the Apollo program, when we went to the Moon and back in ten years with strong decisive leadership.
If we have 12 years instead of fifty, what will it take for us to meet this emergency challenge now?
First, no matter what, it will probably take/waste another 1-2 years to get sufficient consensus to act decisively. In the US, this will be the next election cycle, but in all cases it will be a huge leap, even from where we are now.
Second, come the tangible measures:
1. No more coal! It’s history, over, done. There is no such thing as clean coal. The energy is in the carbon bonds. Even if you make natural gas out of coal there are still two CO2’s for each methane you make and another CO2 when you burn that. Pumping CO2 into oil fields is more about producing oil than sequestering CO2.
2. Protection and re-growth of the tropical forests. This will capture and remove net CO2 from the atmosphere. The forests in northern latitudes do not directly contribute to the short term climate, but the tropical forests are key. We are at a dangerous tipping point where drought could cause these forests to burn, but intact they make their own rain, and we may need to help frogs sing for their rain.
3. Making agricultural charcoal while also making energy out of biomass. This is the new breakthrough inspired by the ancient civilizations in the Amazon. If we gasify/pyrolyze biomass (agricultural waste, energy crops, forest waste and die-off) we can make a combination of energy and charcoal which, when buried in the ground, improves soil fertility and water retaining properties, while storing a large portion of the carbon there, preventing it from returning to the atmosphere.
According to my initial back-of-the-envelop calculations, when fully deployed, we could remove on the order of 1 billion tons of carbon per year from the atmosphere, while producing on the order of 1 billion kWh of electricity or, very roughly, 1 Quad (1 quadrillion BTU) of energy. This is, in a sense, something like retooling the automobile and truck manufacturing capacity, but still assumes 6 million units at 1MW capacity each.
To put this in perspective, we are currently emitting on the order of 7 billion tons per year of carbon from fossil energy (e.g. coal, oil and gas). The greatest immediate reduction from this would be conservation, both technological and elective. For example, California realized a 15% reduction in electrical consumption in one year due to the electricity rate fraud perpetrated by Enron and other Texas based companies under deregulation.
4. Given sufficient motivation, we might realize a 50% increase in efficiency in a few years, and another 50% of that in a few more years. Efficiency is the low hanging fruit, as we in the US are so inefficient that we could make huge strides very quickly.
5. Crash program to increase renewables, wind, biomass, solar, geothermal (especially heat pumps), tidal, wave, ocean thermal. But to be honest, all renewables excluding biomass, which is currently co-firing coal plants, accounts for less than 1% of global energy production. Solar now is analogous to where automobiles were in 1900. There is enormous potential by 2100, but what we can achieve in 10 years will be a tremendous challenge.
6. Thorium nuclear might displace coal in existing centralized grids. There is a new Thorium nuclear technology that apparently has the potential to consume the existing stockpiles of uranium and plutonium, using it to seed a thorium breeder reactor that produces reaction products with a much shorter half-life than conventional reactor technology. This may be one of the miracles we need to make a bridge to truly renewable energy, while effectively cleaning up the nuclear mess we already have.
7. The end of feed lot beef production and industrial agriculture. The nitrogen emissions of American beef consumption may be worse than our SUV’s. Both for our own security and for reversing the problem, the path is the same: Slow down water, soak it into the soil, store it away as much as possible. Grow food locally, in your community, on your property. Harvest or grow your own energy, from the sun wind and biomass. Stabilize local security and reduce your CO2 equivalent emissions. This is the new spiritual imperative.
8. The American Dream is not only negotiable, but defunct, no matter what we do. If we do not address catastrophic climate change within a few years of the loss of the arctic, the whole world will rapidly degenerate into violent anarchy, starting in the USA.
On the other hand, we have achieved a society with the highest standard of material consumption and the lowest levels of self-reported happiness of any culture in the history of the planet. The perpetuation of this system for a few more years is no reason to foreclose the future of all future generations of life on Earth. When united in a meaningful shared struggle, people report high levels of meaning and satisfaction, even in the face of extreme material deprivation. A UN study seeking to identify the core root of the problems of the world ultimately arrived at one word: meaninglessness. We have a unique opportunity to rise to the greatest challenge in the history of humanity, to deliver to all future generations of life a vital and abundant planet with fully deployed truly sustainable technology for all. Nothing could be more meaningful. But now it seems that we must do it in an unimaginable short time.
When I arrived back in Boulder, Colorado today, after a weekend at my community home at Solstice Grove, California, building a new shrine for the temple and saying prayers, I discovered that that primary source of the story I had heard was NCAR, based here in Boulder, intentionally published in the American Geophysical Union journal on May 1st just before the official report from the IPCC, which was itself more political than scientific.
In this report, the NCAR scientists challenge the IPCC status quo report, claiming that the Arctic ice is disappearing three times faster than the models used by the IPCC predict. The official line is that that ice may disappear in 2050-2100. So, three times faster, or 30 years earlier, would mean 2020-2033. Instead of 12 years we may have as much as 25 years. A reprieve, maybe, but my initial reaction holds. We are now, “In a Climate Emergency!”
There is no time to waste. Let us rise to the challenge and get on with the work to save the world. Never has there been such an opportunity for a heroic struggle. The transformation of the system required for survival will necessarily employ everyone in the world in the most meaningful work imaginable. And when we succeed, the world will be reborn within our lifetime.
Edited and reprinted with the author's permission from planetwork.net.