“Climate change compels a massive restructuring of the world’s energy economy.”

That quotation is from the introduction to the September, 2006, Special Edition of Scientific American, entitled “Energy’s Future Beyond Carbon”.The entire issue is devoted to a series of articles devoted to providing previews of what the massive restructuring might look like.

Even before the special edition gets under way, a brief editorial states: “that doesn’t mean we must all live in cardboard boxes. In every plan to tackle warming, Americans will still be better off in 2050 than they are today.”

Scientific American’s first article in the series is a report on the computer model devised by professors Robert H. Socolow and Stephen W. Pacala of Princeton University. They note that present worldwide emissions of carbon amount to seven billions tons per years (multiply carbon tonnage by 3.7 to get the equivalent weight of CO2) . Their model indicates that within 50 years, if present practices were continued, fourteen billion tons of carbon (not CO2) per year would be emitted. They suggest that we simply cannot say with any accuracy what that might entail, but it’s downright scary at the least. As they put it “Today’s notoriously inefficient energy system can be replaced if the world gives unprecedented attention to energy efficiency” There is another quote which I can’t locate, to the effect that somewhere short of those 14 billion tons/year we cross the line between the merely unwise to the truly dangerous.

Socolow and Pacala realize that a single solution in not available. The job requires several approaches. They’ve divided the problem – how to prevent an additional seven billion tons per annum reaching the atmosphere, into sub-groups they call ‘wedges’. A wedge represents a billion tons of carbon annually by 2056. They have identified 15 potential wedges, three in making things more efficient, two in power generation, three in carbon sequestration – catching the stuff before it goes up the smokestack, two from agricultural and forestry practices, and five wedges from alternate energy sources, non-fossil of course. Socolow and Pacala favor pressing forward on all fronts to stave off the possibility of the truly dangerous. They calculate that within a hundred years we could, by cutting present emissions in half, get out of the ‘merely unwise’ category that we are in now.

Socolow and Pacala see strong governmental involvement as necessary everywhere in the world to achieve their goals. That’s worrisome. That level of agreement among nations, and the ability to commit and achieve, is in itself unprecedented. In this country alone, the electorate has shown a distinct preference for Republican administrations since 1952, and that’s the bunch that resists government involvement. Given the unavoidable stresses of the 21st century, it’s hard to say that affection for a more simplistic form of governance will abate. In today’s world, it is some state and community governments making an effort to address the problems instead of pursuing a phantasmal solution (more Persian gulf petroleum).

Another instance of my scepticism is the apparent conviction on the part of the authors of the Special Edition that the present transportation system be maintained. It is hideously expensive, grossly inefficient, and anyone who finds satisfaction in being helplessly embroiled in a traffic jam – a standard rush hour event – is a different sort of person than myself.

We have previously noted strong economic arguments in favor of abandoning the use of internal combustion engines for the transportation of goods and people. The lady in Portland who is keeping $18,000 a year of gas money in her pocket because her employer is subsidizing public transportation does stick relentlessly in the mind

After noting my two concerns, let me finish by saying that the purchase of this issue of Scientific American has given me more satisfaction than I believed possible. The numerous authors are all giants in their fields. They hammer at their subjects with immense authority and zeal. I’ve learned more in the last three days of reading the issue than any comparable situation for a very, very long time.

For instance: solar cells utilizing nano technology are being produced now in a factory near San Francisco. Electricity from wave power is being commercially produced now in Portugal — this stuff moves out of the someday box into the ready box. All the power consumed now in the world equals 0.02% of the energy continuously falling on the earth. The wealth of solid information in that magazine, combined with the wealth of really good ideas, does indeed leave a feeling of great hope.

What these guys are talking about, for all their insistence that there’s no single approach, are solutions for the two greatest problems facing mankind at this point, peak oil and global warming. We can lick those problems, and setting about it has to be the highest public calling for our best and brightest, with the rest of us in full support.

Addendum: The library in which I work just replaced the September issue of S.A. with the October issue. With any luck there will be newsstands that don’t react to the calendar with as much asperity as the library. But should you want a copy, don’t dally. If you want to study it, as I did, it would take multiple trips to a library to do that (my library will let you check out magazines when they are sufficiently aged – maybe a couple weeks from now.) And you can probably write to the publisher and have them send you a copy. Pricey way to do things, though.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 at 7:48 am and is filed under Energy Future, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.