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« Responding to Climate Change
Excerpt from In Search of Environmental Excellence:
Moving Beyond Blame
by Bruce Piasecki and Peter Asmus
CHAPTER 3
A Global Greenhouse: Framing the Debate
Page 8 of 14
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This shift away from coal and oil won't be easy. Projections by the World Energy Conference's Conservation Commission say that the amount of fossil fuels used in the year 2060 will be 1.64 times the present volume.12 Since this assumes that hydropower increases by five times and nuclear by eighteen times — the latter assumption being quite debatable — the reliance on fossil fuels could even be greater. Our search for safer and more cost-effective energy substitutes will be hampered.
In addition, the forecasted increase in the use of coal has fostered bizarre and costly options to treat the resulting gases. Many options rely on technologies that profitably exploit one part of the environment to save another. For instance, one proposal calls for the pumping of carbon dioxide into pipelines leading to reservoirs deep in the ocean. Though this option — cross-stitching both American coasts with miles of heavy-duty piping in corrosive salt waters — may be technically possible, it means spending billions of dollars pursuing high-tech glamour instead of reasonable and appropriate answers. Such an effort is the equivalent to our misplaced faith in the onetime promise of "too-cheap-to-meter" nuclear power. America can no longer afford to be distracted by the lure of unneeded13 or damaging14 energy technologies.
The hard-won path toward greater energy efficiency and environmentally sound policies will have greatest impact on the developing nations. With far fewer financial resources than the United States, they are going to have to upgrade their practices faster than the industrialized world.
Promising steps in the recognition of the need for international cooperation is the Declaration of the Hague, which the World Watch Institute has described as "an environmental security council." Countries as diverse as West Germany, Pakistan, and Hungary had signed an agreement by 1990 to finance the transfer of energy-efficient technologies and CFC substitutes to the developing world in exchange for the recipients' reducing carbon dioxide and CFC emissions.
Ironically, the three largest emitters of carbon dioxide — China, the United States, and the Soviet Union — were not invited because of their known reluctance to sign such agreements. Nevertheless, China has, despite some formidable challenges ahead, demonstrated the potential for reducing energy intensity. (Energy intensity is a measurement of the amount of energy consumed per unit of economic output.) Since 1979, China has cut its energy intensity by four percent per year. Another glimmer of hope is that the Soviet Union, by improving efficiency, and by pursuing structural reforms through perestroika, could limit its greenhouse-gas emissions at no extra cost to the Soviet economy.15
Japan could take the lead in helping developing nations tackle environmental problems. While America played the role of the great provider in the twentieth century, Japan, together with the "little dragons" along the Pacific Rim, is today a logical leader in dispersing foreign aid and reaping the benefits of such investments.
Within this larger context of a world market working to promote environmental restoration, the expense of efficiency controls takes on a new aspect — that of a timely, diplomatic investment to improve national and global security.
Who Are the Economic Fools?
Walt Whitman celebrates the cutting down of redwood trees in his poem "Song of the Redwood Tree," and the glory he finds in the sound of saws once again reminds us what is wrong with America's estimate of nature.16 Garrett Hardin takes this point further, sardonically arguing that one would be an economic fool to plant a redwood tree because it takes so long — some two thousand years — for a redwood to reach its full value under today's standard assumptions.
But this belief that "nature is nothing in itself until divinely serviceable by man" makes Whitman's generation the ultimate economic fools. Regrettably, most political and business leaders still glorify the chopping down of natural resources for conversion into quick and easy profits. To level forests is not an adequate celebration of what Whitman called "the rising, teeming stature of humanity," because disappearing forests are now costing all of us. Hardin's calculation of the $14,000 value of a redwood tree after two thousand years also fails to include the environmental benefits inherent in one tree's contribution to mitigating the greenhouse effect.
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Footnotes
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See the Electric Power Research Institute's Global Climate Change and the Electric Power Industry (presented at the Jan. 5, 1988, National Climate Program Office's Strategic Planning Seminar), pp. 8-13. [« back]
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An example of "unneeded" high-tech investments of government research dollars is the Tokomak project at Princeton University. This project studies the principles of magnetic fusion to create little stars on earth. At best, the commercial application of superconducting magnets to create some glow in every basement is decades off. Lavishly funded research projects such as Tokomak are full-employment acts for academia's brightest and best. But we must resist, at times, chasing esoteric dreams and developing research toys that may never leave the laboratory. If Tokomak received only twenty percent less funding, thousands of homes could be made more energy-efficient for seventy years. The choice is tough. Obviously, big science cannot be the only path of reform. [« back]
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An example of a "damaging" use of federal research dollars is our large investments in enhanced oil-recovery techniques, since their success only keeps us on the petrochemical treadmill. Back in 1905, America's discovery of abundant oil at Spindletop made its extraction simple and cost-effective. After World War II, the nation's emphasis shifted to "secondary" oil recovery, whereby steam helped isolate remnant oil in known reserve areas. At present, enhanced or "tertiary" oil recovery entails going back to spent oil-recovery sites and, through the use of surfactants that wash out oil like soap removes grease from dishes, removing the last drips. After this oil is pumped up using steam pressure, another process separates usable oil from surfactants. Some critics, like E.F. Schumacher, claim that the resultant unit of energy is less than the energy consumed to produce, pump, and refine it for commercial applications. In short, another treadmill. [« back]
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See William Chandler, "Views of OECD, The Soviet Union and China." Chandler, a senior scientist for Battelle Memorial Institute, Pacific Northwest Laboratories, prepared this study for submission to the University of California-Davis Panel on Prospects for International Action on Global Climate Change, Sept. 6, 1989. He points out that the most effective method to combat global warming may be to set specified energy-efficient improvement rates, or establish goals for carbon dioxide-release reductions based on a nation's gross national product per-unit ratios. This would be a positive way to go about achieving reforms, since these measures would be perceived as being fair to everybody as they would increase rather than retard economic development. [« back]
- Walt Whitman was one of a number of writers on both sides of the Atlantic who advocated extreme reshaping of the environment during the second half of the nineteenth century. His works present "a new race dominating previous ones," which should, in time, inhabit the entire globe and transform nature into "a new earth." He celebrated his century's great changes — the proliferation of railroads, steamships, cotton gins, and telegraph lines in "Passage to India," and the felling of California's redwoods in "Song of the Redwood Tree" — as symbols of an irresistible and impending succession to a "new earth," and as icons of a longing in modern man for complete transformation of the environment. [« back]
