The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century
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Last annotated on May 11, 2016
A LITTLE OVER TWO DECADES AGO, I WROTE a book, Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse, in which I looked closely at prevalent and generally accepted predictions of imminent planetary-scale environmental dooms. I analyzed the psychological appeal of doom,Read more at location 38
Spring by Rachel Carson, The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich, and The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind—Read more at location 43
Synthetic chemicals were poisoning the natural world and human bodies. Overpopulation would soon outstrip the ability of farmers to grow enough food, and hundreds of millions would die in massive famines in the 1970s. And the world would shortly run out of oil and other nonrenewable resources, thus crashing modern civilization well before the year 2000.Read more at location 45
people were actually living longer and healthier lives, famine had been held at bay, and the world was becoming more prosperous, not less.Read more at location 49
I would write a series of articles after I interviewed their authors to see what they had to say about their prognostications.Read more at location 52
Ehrlich and the folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who had devised the computer program at the heart of the resource projections in The Limits to Growth were still around.Read more at location 53
I spoke with Ehrlich and he assured me that he had simply gotten his timing wrong.Read more at location 55
Globe-spanning famines would break out some time between 2000 and 2010. I also talked with Jay Forrester, the MIT systems dynamics professor who was the developer of the computer model used to make the forecasts in The Limits to Growth. He told me, “I think in retrospect that Limits to Growth overemphasized the material resources side.”Read more at location 56
it became increasingly apparent that the doomsters were not making scientific predictions, but instead were promoting a world view, an ideology—Read more at location 59
Chief among the doctrines in the ideology espoused by environmentalist doomsters is that nature is innocent and good and humanity evil.Read more at location 61
Jeremy Rifkin explained the creed this way: “To end our long, self-imposed exile; to rejoin the community of life. This is the task before us. It will require that we renounce our drive for sovereignty over everything that lives; that we restore the rest of creation to a place of dignity and respect.”Read more at location 62
In other words, a secularized version of the myth of the Garden of EdenRead more at location 65
Human beings are not like a herd of deer that simply starves to death when it overgrazes its meadow. Instead we seek out new ways to produce more food and do it ever more efficiently.Read more at location 67
I discovered that it is almost always the case that wherever someone sees an environmental predicament in the world, it is a commons problem.Read more at location 72
The problem is occurring in an open-access commons, an area no one owns and for whose stewardship no one is responsible.Read more at location 73
Similarly, pollutants are pumped into rivers and into the air and tropical forests are chopped down because all too often anyone can use those resources without paying for the costs of the harm they cause.Read more at location 76
One such commons problem I considered in my 1992 book was the “ozone hole” over Antarctica that was produced by chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerants floating up into the stratosphere.Read more at location 78
agree that an international treaty was needed to phase out and replace the harmful refrigerants.Read more at location 82
in 2013, Earth Policy Institute founder Lester Brown asserted, “The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity.”Read more at location 85
The German think tank Energy Watch Group declared that global oil production had peaked in 2006 and that supplies would be cut in half by 2030, triggering the “meltdown of society.”Read more at location 87
Richard Heinberg, stated: “The world is at, nearing, or past the points of peak production of a number of critical nonrenewable resources—including oil, natural gas, and coal,Read more at location 89
in 2014, the Center for Biological Diversity warned, “It could be a scary future indeed, with as many as 30 to 50 percent of all species possibly heading toward extinctionRead more at location 91
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change affirmed, “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.”Read more at location 92
World population growth is slowing; and the number of human beings on the planet will likely peak and begin to fall toward the middle of this century. Pollution levels are falling in rich countries and will begin to drop in poor countries as they become wealthier. Similarly, forests are regrowing in many parts of the world.Read more at location 95
As this present volume will make clear, I have changed my mind since 1992 about how big a problem man-made global warming might become. On the other hand, more than twenty years of reporting on United Nations climate change negotiations has convinced me that the ongoing attempt to hammer out a global treaty imposing hard, legally binding limits on the emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that contribute to man-made warming is doomed to failure. Instead, I show how human ingenuity will likely solve this problem just as it did those that provoked earlier (and incorrect) predictions of environmental apocalypse. In this case, promising research suggests that it will be possible to lower the price of clean energy below that of fossil fuelsRead more at location 99
I want to tell you that if you’d brought me a book predicting the end of the world, I could have made you a rich man.” Human beings do have a psychological bias toward believing bad news and discounting good news.Read more at location 106
the sciences surrounding environmental issues have been politicized from top to bottom.Read more at location 108
As the researchers at the Yale Cultural Cognition Project have shown time and again, what people believe about scientific issues is chiefly determined by their cultural values.Read more at location 108
individuals can be expected to form perceptions of risk that reflect and reinforce values that they share with others.”Read more at location 111
The Yale researchers report that people whose values are located in Individualist/Hierarchy space “can be expected to be skeptical of claims of environmental and technological risks. Such people, according to the theory, intuitively perceive that widespread acceptance of such claims would license restrictions on commerce and industry, forms of behavior that Hierarchical/Individualists value.”Read more at location 115
On the other hand, Egalitarian/Communitarians “tend to be morally suspicious of commerce and industry, which they see as the source of unjust disparities in wealth and power. They therefore find it congenial, the theory posits, to see those forms of behavior as dangerous and thus worthy of restriction.”Read more at location 118
However, history shows that our energy and creativity will surmount whatever difficulties we encounter.Read more at location 128
I aim in this new book to again remind the public, the media, and policymakers that the foretellers of ruin have consistently been wrong, whereas the advocates of human resourcefulness have nearly always been right.Read more at location 131
IN 2005, I PUBLICLY CHANGED MY MIND ABOUT climate change. I concluded that the balance of the scientific evidence indicated that man-made global warming likely posed a significant problem for humanity.Read more at location 2786
On the catastrophe side stands former U.S. vice president Al Gore, who has warned Congress that man-made global warming is “a true planetary emergency.Read more at location 2799
Joining Gore is environmentalist Bill McKibben, founder of the 350.org activist group, who promotes the goal of reducing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxideRead more at location 2800
McKibben sees future climate change as portending “an endless chain of disasters that will turn civilization into a never-ending emergency response drill.” McKibben’s prescription is a turn away from global consumerism toward the organic and local, to “a nation of careful, small-scale farmersRead more at location 2802
Fierce progressive activist Naomi Klein in her newest screed, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, declares, “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.”Read more at location 2805
Climate science, she further claims, has given progressives “the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism” ever.Read more at location 2808
One leading voice challenging climate doom is Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), who is now the chairman of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Inhofe declared in 2003 that “man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”Read more at location 2811
Marc Morano, the publisher of the influential Climate Depot website. “The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim—from A-Z—the claims of the promoters of man-made climate fears are failing, and in many instances the claims are moving in the opposite direction,” asserted Morano in congressional testimony.Read more at location 2813
Fred Singer, former director of the US National Weather Service’s Satellite Service Center and now head of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, asserts, “There would be very little public interest in funding climate science, were it not for an assertion by alarmists in the political and environmental communities that a human-caused global warming crisis exists.”Read more at location 2816
after years of reporting on the subject, attending scientific conferences, talking with scientists, and extensively reading the research literature, I have concluded that the balance of the evidence indicates that climate change could become a significant problem for humanity as the twenty-first century unfolds.Read more at location 2823
future temperature increases, sea level rise, shifts in the amounts of snow and rain, and ocean acidification.Read more at location 2826
2014 was either the hottest year or close to the hottest year since fairly accurate instrumental temperature records started being kept in the mid-nineteenth century.Read more at location 2832
Berkeley Earth also concluded that 2014 was nominally the warmest since the global instrumental record began in 1850Read more at location 2834
The UK Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit at University of East Anglia ranked 2014 as tied with 2010 for the warmest yearRead more at location 2836
Climatologists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville have been tracking global temperatures for the past thirty-six years using satellite data that measure the bottom five miles of the atmosphere. They reported that 2014 was the third warmest year in that record.Read more at location 2838
As analyzed by Remote Sensing Systems, 2014 was only the sixth warmest year in the satellite record.Read more at location 2840
All data sets agree that the last ten years or so have been the warmest period during the instrumental record.Read more at location 2841
The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is increasing; the world has warmed; glaciers are melting; and the seas are rising. These facts are not scientifically in dispute.Read more at location 2843
“Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850.”Read more at location 2846
The vast majority of climate researchers agree that man-made global warming is now under way.Read more at location 2848
The amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, gases that tend to warm the atmosphere (greenhouse gases or GHG), are at levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years.Read more at location 2849
Carbon dioxide concentrations are 40 percent higher than during preindustrial times back in 1750.Read more at location 2852
Thirty percent of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities has dissolved into the oceans, where it has increased the acidity of the water by 26 percent.Read more at location 2853
Since the 1880s, the planet has warmed by an average of 0.85°C (1.5°F).Read more at location 2854
The IPCC report notes that since 1951 average global temperature has been increasing at a rate of 0.12°C (0.22°F) per decade.Read more at location 2855
“It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause ofRead more at location 2856
In addition, most mountain glaciers and the ice sheets that cover Antarctica and Greenland are melting,Read more at location 2860
The area of Arctic Ocean summer sea ice has been falling at a rate of between 9.4 and 13.6 percent per decade since 1979.Read more at location 2861
Between 1901 and 2010, sea level rose at a rate of 1.7 millimeters (0.7 inch) per year, increasing average sea level by 0.19 metersRead more at location 2862
In trying to discern how future climate change will play out over the remainder of this century, the IPCC scientists rely on the outputs from computer climate models.Read more at location 2865
As part of the process of computer modeling, they have set up scenarios called Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). Each RCP more or less corresponds to certain specified levels of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere that might be reached by 2100.Read more at location 2866
and more likely than not to exceed 2°C [3.6°F] for RCP4.5.”Read more at location 2872
keep the future average global temperature increase below that threshold. Read more at location 2874
More generally, the computer models on which the IPCC relies project by 2100 that the average increase in global temperature above the 1850–1900 average will be 1°C, 1.8°C, 2.2°C, and 3.7°C, for the RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6, and RCP8.5 scenarios, respectively.Read more at location 2875
The IPCC reports that computer models forecast that average sea level rise by 2100 will range from 0.26 to 0.98 metersRead more at location 2877
The IPCC Physical Science report also sets out essentially a “carbon budget” that delineates what quantity of additional greenhouse gases can be emitted without exceeding the 2°CRead more at location 2886
“Scenarios that are likely to maintain warming at below 2°C are characterized by a 40% to 70% reduction in GHG emissions by 2050, relative to 2010 levels, and an emissions level near zero or below in 2100.”Read more at location 2892
Al Gore sought to summarize the consensus view of climate scientists by declaring, “The science is settled.”Read more at location 2895
Assume global warming. There are two ways to address concerns about warming: adaptation and mitigation.Read more at location 3117
Mitigation basically means cutting the emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and/or figuring out how to suck carbon dioxideRead more at location 3122
Most climate researchers believe that some additional warming is inevitable, so people will have to engage in both activities.Read more at location 3124
The 2014 Adaptation report reckons, assuming that the world takes no steps to deal with climate change, that “global annual economic losses for additional temperature increases of around 2°C are between 0.2 and 2.0 percent of income.”Read more at location 3126
William Nordhaus assumed that humanity does nothing to cut greenhouse gas emissions.Read more at location 3129
His RICE-2010 integrated assessment model found that “of the estimated damages in the uncontrolled (baseline) case, those damages in 2095 are $12 trillion, or 2.8% of global output, for a global temperature increase of 3.4°C above 1900 levels.” Nordhaus’s estimate evidently assumes that the world’s economy will grow at about 2.5 percent annually, reaching a total GDP of roughly $450 trillion in 2095.Read more at location 3131
What might the world’s economy look like by 2100 if no policies are adopted with the aim of mitigating or adapting to climate change?Read more at location 3134
The SSP2 scenario is described as the “middle of the road”Read more at location 3140
The world’s economy will have grown more than eightfold, from $67 trillion to $577 trillion (2005 dollars). Average income per person globally will have increased from around $10,000 today to $60,000 by 2100.Read more at location 3144
In the SSP5 “conventional development” scenario, the world economy grows flat out, which “leads to an energy system dominated by fossil fuels, resulting in high GHG emissions and challenges to mitigation.”Read more at location 3146
by 2100. The world’s economy will grow fifteenfold to just over $1 quadrillion, and the average person in 2100 will be earning about $138,000 per year.Read more at location 3148
It is of more than passing interest that people living in the warmer world of SSP5 are much better off than people in the cooler SSP2 world.Read more at location 3150
In other words, greater wealth and advanced technologies will significantly enhance the capabilities of people to deal with whatever the deleterious consequences of climate change turn out to be.Read more at location 3154
As noted above, the IPCC estimates that failure to adapt to climate change will reduce future incomes by between 0.2 to 2 percent for temperatures exceeding 2°C.Read more at location 3155
survey of studies that try to estimate the aggregated damages that climate change might inflict at 2.5°C warming comes in at an average of about 1.5 percent of global output. The highest climate damage estimate Nordhaus cites is a 5 percent reduction in income.Read more at location 3158
transient climate response temperatures over the remainder of the century are likely to be close to the 2.5°C benchmark cited by the IPCC. In the scenarios sketched out above, a 2 percent loss of income would mean that the $60,000 and $138,000 per capita income averages would fall to $58,800 and $135,240, respectively.Read more at location 3162
Stern’s more apocalyptic estimate would cut 2100 per capita incomes to $48,000 and $110,400,Read more at location 3164
How much should people living now on incomes averaging $10,000 per year spend to make sure that people whose incomes will likely be 6 to 14 times higher aren’t reduced by a couple of percentage points?Read more at location 3165
“Most philosophers and economists hold that rich generations have a lower ethical claimRead more at location 3167
The Costs and Benefits of Trying to Stop WarmingRead more at location 3168
The IPCC Mitigation report notes that the optimal scenario that it sketches out for keeping greenhouse gas concentrations below 450 ppm would cut future incomes by 2100 by between 3 and 11 percent.Read more at location 3174
projected IPCC income losses that would result from doing nothing to adapt to climate change appear to be roughly comparable to the losses in income that would occur following efforts to slow climate change. In other words, it appears that doing nothing about climate change now will cost future generations about the same as doing something now.Read more at location 3182
Climate Change Is Not Increasing Damage—YetRead more at location 3184
“This is climate change. We were warned about extreme weather. Not just hot weather, but extreme weather,”Read more at location 3186
The activists over at Greenpeace did not put too fine a point on the destruction caused by Superstorm Sandy hitting New York and New Jersey in the fall of 2013: “Hurricane Sandy = Climate Change.”Read more at location 3189
One problem: Researchers can find no such trends with respect to the damage caused by tornadoes and hurricanes.Read more at location 3190
The IPCC’s Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report noted that there is low confidence that climate change has so far affected any global trends toward increased flooding, hurricanes and typhoons, or droughts.Read more at location 3194
The Abject Failure of UN Climate Change NegotiationsRead more at location 3273
Windfall Profits for Corporations—Higher Prices for ConsumersRead more at location 3379
For instance, economists such as Harvard University’s Gregory Mankiw and Yale University’s William Nordhaus advocate imposing a tax on all kinds of carbon-based fuels at the wholesale stage, at the point where they emerge from under the ground.Read more at location 3404
utilities and refiners who take raw coal, oil, and natural gas as inputs would pay a tax on these fuels. The extra cost would get passed downstream to all subsequent consumers.Read more at location 3405
encourage conservation and low-carbon energy innovation.Read more at location 3407
Internationally, one of the big advantages of a carbon tax is that it avoids the baseline quandary that bedevils carbon markets.Read more at location 3410
Another advantage is that the tax could be phased in as the average incomes of poor countries reach a certain threshold.Read more at location 3420
For example, carbon taxes might start to kick in when national income reaches $10,000 per capita, which is slightly higher than China’s current level.Read more at location 3421
A tax avoids the messy and contentious process of allocating allowances to countries internationally and among companies domestically.Read more at location 3424
Nordhaus further argues that carbon markets are “much more susceptible to corruption” than are tax schemes.Read more at location 3428
So a carbon tax offers less opportunity for corruption because it does not create artificial scarcities and monopolies.Read more at location 3432
Nordhaus analogizes carbon allowances to quotas in international trade and carbon taxes to tariffs: overall, it’s been a lot easier to manage tariffs than quotas.Read more at location 3433
it’s crazy to pay people to burn more fossil fuels if one is concerned about man-made global warming.Read more at location 3436
Two-thirds of human nitrous oxide emissions come from agricultural activities—for example, using nitrogen fertilizer or livestock waste management.Read more at location 3445
How Much to Insure Against Low Probability Catastrophic Warming?Read more at location 3521
How much should we pay to prevent the tiny probability of human civilization collapsing?Read more at location 3522
Harvard University economist Martin Weitzman raised the issue by putting forth a Dismal Theorem arguing that some consequences, however unlikely, would be so disastrous that cost-benefit analysis should not apply.Read more at location 3523
the IPCC Physical Science report finds that climate sensitivity is likely to be in the range of 1.5° to 4.5°C and very unlikely to be greater than 6°C. But very unlikely is not impossible.Read more at location 3528
Weitzman spins out scenarios in which there could be a 5 percent chance that global average temperature rises by 10°C (17°F) by 2200 and a 1 percent chance that it rises by 20°C (34°F).Read more at location 3530
Nordhaus notes that Weitzman assumes that societies are so risk averse that they would be willing to spend unlimited amounts of money to avert the infinitesimal probability that civilization will be destroyed.Read more at location 3535
Nordhaus then shows that Weitzman’s Dismal Theorem implies that the world would be willing to spend $10 trillion to prevent a one-in-100-billion chance of being hit by an asteroid.Read more at location 3536
humanity spends perhaps $4 million annually to find and track possibly dangerous asteroids.Read more at location 3538
Nordhaus also notes that catastrophic climate change is not the only thing we might worry about. Other low-probability civilization-destroying risks include “biotechnology, strangelets, runaway computer systems, nuclear proliferation, rogue weeds and bugs, nanotechnology, emerging tropical diseases, alien invaders, asteroids, enslavement by advanced robots, and so on.”Read more at location 3539
So, if we accept the Dismal Theorem, we would probably dissolve in a sea of anxiety at the prospect of the infinity of infinitely bad outcomes.”Read more at location 3543
Weitzman’s analysis also assumes that humanity will not have the time to learn about any impending catastrophic impacts from global warming.Read more at location 3546
Other low-probability calamities, such as the entire Earth being transformed into strange matter by strangelets produced in high energy physics experiments, don’t allow for learning.Read more at location 3548
Finally, the question must be asked: Why has no one ever applied a Dismal Theorem analysis to evaluate the nonzero probability that bad government policy will cause a civilization-wrecking catastrophe?Read more at location 3560
Parsing the Poisonous Politics of Climate ChangeRead more at location 3562
Dan Kahan explains that climate change is not chiefly a fight over science, but is instead one involving a clash of strongly held values.Read more at location 3567
Yale Cultural Cognition Project find in a 2011 study that the more scientifically literate you are, the more certain you are that climate change is either a catastrophe or a hoax.Read more at location 3568
“then skepticism about climate change could be traced to poor public comprehension about science” and the solution would be more science education. In fact, the findings of the Yale researchers suggest more education is unlikely to help build consensus; it may even intensify the debate.Read more at location 3571
The group uses a theory of cultural commitments devised by Aaron Wildavsky, which “holds that individuals can be expected to form perceptions of risk that reflect and reinforce values that they share with others.”Read more at location 3575
The researchers note that people who hold Individualist/Hierarchical values highly esteem technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.Read more at location 3581
“among Hierarchical/Individualists science/numeracy is negatively [emphasis theirs] correlated with such concern. Hence, cultural polarization actually gets bigger, not smaller as science literacy and numeracy increase.”Read more at location 3590
“As ordinary members of the public learn more about science and develop a greater facility with numerical information, they become more skillful in seeking out and making sense of—or if necessary explaining away—empirical evidence relating to their groups’ positions on climate change and other issues,” observe the researchers.Read more at location 3592
The Cultural Contradiction of Environmentalist Opposition to Nuclear PowerRead more at location 3620
Why Not Deploy Current Renewable Power Technologies Now?Read more at location 3679
“We have the tools—the technologies, the resources, the economic models—to deliver cost-effective climate solutions at scale,”Read more at location 3680
Tove Maria Ryding, coordinator for climate policy at Greenpeace International, sounded the same note in 2012: “We have all the technology we need to solve the [climate] problem while creating new green jobs.”Read more at location 3683
The implication is that humanity could deploy a suite of currently available zero-carbon energy production technologiesRead more at location 3685
Al Gore urged America “to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energyRead more at location 3686
In 2014, solar, geothermal, and wind energy generated 0.46, 0.39, and 4.28 percent, respectively, of electric power in the United States.Read more at location 3690
Such plans, the study argues, “are akin to attempting large-scale moon colonization using Apollo-age spacecraft technology.” Such a feat may be technically feasible, but only at vast expense.Read more at location 3694
Think of the issue this way: Would you rather drive a 1913 Model T Ford or a 2013 Ford Fiesta? They cost about the same amount of money in inflation-adjusted dollars. One way to interpret the ITIF report is that the advocates of immediately deploying current zero-carbon energy production technologies are essentially arguing that we should now all be driving Model T Fords.Read more at location 3696
Note: ALTRA ANALOGIA: POTREMMO SOSTITUIRE LA MACCHINA SÌ MA SOSTITUIREMMO UNA GOLF CON UNA BALILLA Edit
In a 2011 paper, the Stanford engineer Mark Jacobson and the University of California at Davis transportation researcher Mark Delucchi calculated what it would take to produce all the energy (not just electric power generation) to fuel the entire world using zero-carbon sources by 2030. They also calculate what renewable sources of energy would be needed to power just the United States.Read more at location 3700
$7 trillion. That’s just to build enough rated zero-carbon generation capacity to replace what we have now.Read more at location 3718
The deploy-now crowd hopes that somebody will invent some way to store electricity so that it could make up for shortfalls when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind fails to blow.Read more at location 3720
The ITIF analysis alternatively adds up all of the costs in the Jacobson/Delucchi paper to estimate that weaning Americans off fossil fuels entirely by 2030 would add up to a total of $13 trillion—that is to say, 5 percent of each year’s GDP over the next sixteen years.Read more at location 3728
The upshot is that this repowering would cost each American household an additional $5,664 per year until 2030.Read more at location 3730
Taking the Jacobson and Delucchi figures for the world, the total cost to completely eliminate fossil fuels by 2030 would amount to $100 trillion—that is to say, 8 percent of global annual GDP. The global cost per household per year would amount to $3,571. The nearly 3 billion people who live on less than $2,000 per year simply cannot pay the pricesRead more at location 3735
Despite the foregoing analysis, technological innovation and competitive markets may yet come to the rescue during the coming decades.Read more at location 3738
the Stanford technology maven Vivek Wadhwa declared in The Washington Post in September 2014. The technology that most inspires his enthusiasm is solar energyRead more at location 3742
The prices of solar photovoltaic (PV) modules have fallen steeply by more than 80 percent since 2008.Read more at location 3744
But how plausible is Wadhwa’s prediction that solar power will be unlimited and nearly free?Read more at location 3748
levelized cost of energy. This takes into account the capital costs, fuel costs, operations and maintenance costs, debt and equity costs, and plant utilization rates for each type of electric power generation.Read more at location 3749
To judge from these estimates, the era of unlimited, nearly free solar power has certainly not yet arrived. But things are moving quickly.Read more at location 3770
Of course, this rough projection does not take into account the huge issue of intermittency (the sun doesn’t always shine) that makes solar power problematic as a baseload source of electricity.Read more at location 3778
Will Wadhwa’s prophecy come true? Perhaps not, but wagering against human ingenuity has always been a bad bet.Read more at location 3783
“The Kyoto Protocol is dead. There will be no further global treaties that set binding limits on the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) after Kyoto runs out in 2012.” That’s what I wrote back in 2004Read more at location 3786
Make Clean Energy Cheaper Than Fossil FuelsRead more at location 3818
“The paramount goal of climate policy should be to make the unsubsidized cost of clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels so that all countries deploy clean energy because it makes economic sense,” is how the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation sums up the new consensus.Read more at location 3818
The first plank of the new consensus is that it is wrong to try to restrain the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by denying adequate access to modern fuels to the poor.Read more at location 3826
Second, activist opposition to safe hydraulic fracturing to release vast quantities of natural gas trapped in deep underground shale formations is counterproductive. Burning natural gas releases about half the carbon dioxide that burning coal does.Read more at location 3831
Third, environmentalist hostility to all forms of nuclear power is similarly perverse.Read more at location 3837
“While it may be theoretically possible to stabilize the climate without nuclear power, in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.”Read more at location 3843
The fourth and most provocative plank of the new energy technology consensus is that government research and development spending on zero-carbon forms of energy supply must be dramatically ramped up.Read more at location 3845
The better course would be to establish a level playing field by eliminating all energy subsidies and incentives and letting the cheapest technologies developed by innovators win in the marketplace. Proponents of markets must continue to push policy in this direction, but given the history of pervasive government intervention in energy markets, it is unlikely that governments will suddenly step back and allow markets to decide how to innovate and produce energy in the future.Read more at location 3860
Note: LO SCENARIO OTTIMO: CT PIÙ MERCATO. IL LIVELLO OTTIMO DEUI SUSSIDI STATALI ALL INNOVAZIONE È IMPOSSIBILE DA DETERMINARE Edit
Despite the current pause in global warming and the real failings in climate computer model projections, the balance of the scientific evidence suggests that man-made climate change could become a significantRead more at location 3871
progressives and environmentalists like Naomi Klein fervently promote the “climate crisis” as a pretext for radically transforming the world’s economy in ways that ratify their own ideological predilections.Read more at location 3873
As a response, lots of supporters of free markets and economic growth tend to underplay the scienceRead more at location 3876
they have fallen for the false dilemma posed by progressive environmentalists of supposedly having to choose between economic growth and averting the possibility of disruptive climate change.Read more at location 3878
advocate policies that further enable market-driven advances in science and technology to cut through the climate/energy conundrum.Read more at location 3880
Among other things, this would include eliminating all energy subsidies, most especially those to fossil fuels.Read more at location 3881
if one wants to help future generations deal with climate change, the best policies are those that encourage rapid economic growth.Read more at location 3882
in order to truly address the problem of climate change, responsible policymakers should select courses of action that move humanity from a slow-growth trajectory to a high-growthRead more at location 3884
Note: FAR CRESCERE L ECONOMIA È IL MIGLIOR MODO X COMBATTERE GW
