We can’t successfully tackle climate change without changes to the corporate regime which has been in place in America since the Reagan presidency. That’s the underlying message of Charles Derber in his latest book, Greed to Green: Solving Climate Change and Remaking the Economy. It’s a message he delivers with directness in a book much more readable than I expected from an academic sociologist.

He accepts the position of scientists like James Hansen and others who point to the ominous dangers of tipping points in climate and conclude that we are already above a safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which they consider no more than 350 parts per million. It’s not a happy acceptance. “No sane person would wish it to be the scientific truth,” he writes.

Derber recounts the terrible difficulty he had, after realising with despair the seriousness of climate change, in dealing emotionally with the prospect of mass, collective death — “more difficult than dealing with my own personal death.”

The only good news he discerns is that the scientific truth may be spreading and leading to a tipping point in the world’s social and political awareness. But any realisation of the scientific truth by a majority of the community has not passed beyond cognition to what he calls “gut acceptance.” Derber acknowledges the difficulties of such acceptance, drawing on his own experience. The reality is so serious it intensifies the psychological pressure to deny.

Nevertheless, he identifies some factors that make gut acceptance of climate change tolerable: we have the power to stop or mitigate it, tackling it can also contribute to solving more immediate social problems, and there are benefits in the green lifestyle.

Meanwhile, the denial industry has been powerfully influential, though he notes that it is now moving from Stage 1 denial, that global warming is a hoax, to Stage 2 denial, that human-caused global warming exists but must be solved gradually with a slow phasing out of fossil fuels.

“If the new denial succeeds, civilisation will be destroyed in the name of green incremental reform,” Derber writes.

In sectors of America greening is partly under way, thanks to the actions of long-term thinkers. However, the frontal long-term attack is insufficient to gather wide enough public support. It needs to be accompanied by a second path — what he calls a “time-tricking” strategy that seeks to solve the long-term crisis by hitching a ride on the back of short-term issues worrying the majority of Americans. He sees this as a key strategy for the Obama administration — and one which Obama himself understands and is already employing.

“Socialism by stealth,” I can hear the denialists proclaiming. Certainly Derber associates himself with the welfare of working people and sees the necessity for organised labor to play a significant part in a green regime. He laments the way American jobs have been degraded under the corporate regime, many outsourced and others casualised. One of the important attractions of a green regime is that it will be rich in secure jobs, many of them associated with renewable energy.

He also proposes pragmatic temporary nationalization of some banks and of giant, dysfunctional oil and coal companies — but not on the basis of any socialist ideology. The banks have already required enormous injections of public money to keep them afloat. The fossil fuel energy giants such as Exxon are already effectively on the public dole.

Essentially Derber is urging a transformation of America away from an increasingly unstable economy based on ever-growing consumption of unnecessary goods and ever-expanding suburban housing. Coerced consumerism he calls it, which has locked Americans into a pattern of insecurity and overwork.

In its place he urges an economy solidly based on the production of green energy and its efficient use. Those jobs stay local and secure. And there’s plenty of room for market-inspired innovation within such an economy. The transformation is necessary to fight climate change, and at the same time it works to alleviate America’s current social justice crises.

Derber’s book focuses on the United States “because a green revolution here will be a shot heard around the world.” In discussing the ways in which the green revolution becomes global he points to “a new posthegemonic order of green security and globalization.”

He’s firm on the need for the west to take responsibility for the poverty and environmental degradation it has foisted on the rest of the world. The west must finance massive aid and technology transfers that allow the remaining nations to develop a green strategy without giving up their rights to achieve a decent standard of life.

He offers several suggestions for finding the money for this purpose: cut the bloated American military budget; implement a green Tobin tax on currency movements; cancel dirty debt in exchange for green development; create a new “commons” of clean energy technology. He explains the importance of a global carbon tax.

An interesting take on going local, not to abolish globalization but to reduce its space, sees Derber use the term “glocalism,” favouring local economies wherever possible and reserving global production only for those areas where local production cannot work.

Derber is impressed by much that Obama has said about climate change and much that he has set in place. He particularly welcomes the respect he has accorded to science and scientists who understand the reality of global warming.

But it would be a mistake to think he won’t need a big push from social movements. Derber himself is a lifelong social activist. He considers that today’s social and environmental movements are the best last hope for solving global warming on the urgent time scale required.

It has always been social movements which have awakened America to urgent systemic crises such as slavery, women’s disenfranchisement, or the capitalist exploitation of workers. Derber discusses the ways in which movements can face up to the existential truth of the emergency of climate change and take swift radical action to mobilize the largest number of people including the president.

Derber is a lively writer. He has a go at a short Greek drama in the course of his book, with the Oracle reminding foolish people that time is running out.

He also provides the text of several fireside chats for Obama to have with the American people, in the fashion of Franklin Roosevelt. In an engaging short personal account he answers any who wonder whether he walks his talk — a mixed case, he reports, not a couch potato but not a hero-activist either. His talk made good sense to me, whether he walks it assiduously or not.

Article by Bryan Walker apearing courtesy Celsias.

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This is the second book review of Stewart Brand’s new book “Whole Earth Discipline” posted on CleanTechies. Read the first review by Todd Woody here.

When James Lovelock, Edward O. Wilson and Ian McEwan jostle to praise a book I assume it will be worth attention.  Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto doesn’t disappoint. The title echoes the Whole Earth Catalogue which he founded over forty years ago as an ambitious reference aid for skills, tools and products useful to a self-sustainable lifestyle.

Times have changed and Brand has changed with them.  Climate change has become a clear and present danger.  He has become more of a pragmatist, though no less of an environmentalist.  His pragmatism leads him to regard with favour three factors which put him to some extent at odds with others in the environmental movement. The three are urbanisation, nuclear power and genetic engineering, and part of the purpose of the book is to urge the Green-inclined to consider how the three may now be considered significant contributions to facing up to climate change.

There’s no questioning the seriousness of climate change.  James Lovelock is frequently Brand’s point of reference in this regard. He hopes that things won’t get as bad as Lovelock’s prediction that we are in the process of moving to a stable hot state 5 degrees warmer than now, but recognises that even the 2 degree rise which politicians seem to be regarding as an acceptable limit will mean large species loss, more severe storms, floods and droughts, refugees from sea level rise, and other expensive and inhumane consequences. It’s against the background of this concern that he sets his case.

Urbanisation is proceeding apace, and is to be welcomed.  Brand takes a positive view of what cities mean for the people who are now flooding into them, even if they begin in the squatter settlements which can look so dismal to outside observers.  He points to on-the-spot slum researcher reports which observe that cities are very successful in promoting new forms of income generation, that it is much cheaper to provide services in urban areas and that getting people to move to the city may be the most realistic poverty reduction strategy.

From the environmental perspective, natural systems in the countryside fare better with fewer inhabitants. Subsistence farming on marginal land can give way to more concentrated cash-crop agriculture on prime land. Aquifers recover. Forests recover. Birth rates drop when people move to cities.Women play a more powerful role in city society. Urban societies become greener in their sensibilities, which can lead to increasing protection for the countryside.

This is only a sample of the wide-ranging survey Brand offers of the positives in growing urbanisation.  He acknowledges the negative actualities as well. Cities are far from an unmitigated good. But he is firm that the prospect of 80 percent of humanity living on 3 percent of the land will be a net good for the planet.  Infrastructure efficiency, energy use reduction, less pressure on rural natural systems, and the like, are adduced to support this conclusion.

Brand’s section on nuclear power is prefaced with a variously attributed quote: “With climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened. With nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.” His own stance on nuclear power has flipped from anti to pro for two reasons.

First, he gradually realised that nuclear waste disposal no longer looked like a cosmic-level problem. Second, nuclear power looked like a major solution in the light of growing worries about climate change.  Coal is the enemy. He endorses Hansen’s statement in his open letter to President Obama, “Coal plants are factories of death”, and the accompanying observation “One of the greatest dangers the world faces is the possibility that a vocal minority of anti-nuclear activists could prevent phase-out of coal emissions.”

Brand is all for energy efficiency and for renewables, but impressed by the claim that renewables cannot be relied on for the baseload electricity currently provided by coal in many countries.  The dangers supposed attendant on nuclear power generation are not now serious.  Much work has gone into minimizing the risk of accidents.  The accumulated effects of low-dose radiation are no longer thought significant for human health. Waste storage arrangements are not as hazardous as once thought. There is every reason for it to be part of the energy portfolio we will need to replace fossil fuel sources.

Brand reserves his strongest accusation of the environmental movement for its opposition to genetic engineering (GE). “We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.”  Noting the lack of alarm about genetic engineering among biologists he comments that “they know what a minor event it is amid the standard chaos of evolution and the just-barely-organised chaos of agricultural breeding.”

Taking the example of GE herbicide-tolerant crops he points to the great ecological win they represent in that they encourage no-till agriculture. This offers major climate benefits along with improvements to soil structure because tillage releases carbon from the soil, which holds more carbon than all the living vegetation and the atmosphere put together.  He regrets that organic farmers, whose work he values highly, can’t use GE but must continue to plough.  Some of those farmers also regret it.

There is a great deal more than this example in the chapters which proclaim the green possibilities of GE and his hope that the organic farming and food industries will come to terms with the technologies of “ecology in the seed”.

Having dealt with the three developments which he considers need to be embraced, not rejected, by the environmental movement, Brand moves on to some general considerations as to how not to repeat the mistakes made in those areas. Greens need to be less romantic and more scientific.  “Environmentalists do best when they follow where the science leads, as they did with climate change. They do worst when they get nervous about where science leads, as they did with genetic engineering.”

Ecosystem engineering and niche construction are part of what humans have always done.  Brand makes an emphatic case for tending the wild, for people being densely involved with nature.  “It’s all gardening” is the chapter heading.  Restoration is part of it, but so is agriculture which merges with the practices of tending the wild.

Humanity is now stuck with a planet stewardship role. The trend of the changes we have made lately indicates we are doing a poor job of it.  “We are forced to learn planet craft – in both sense of the word: craft as skill and craft as cunning.” For that we need a better knowledge of how the Earth system works. “We are model-rich and data poor.”

Brand writes with clarity and verve.  He grips reader attention. Whatever one thinks of the positions he holds there is high interest in his explanations of them and no denying their importance in relation to the seriousness of the challenge of climate change.

How in fact the balance between nuclear power and renewables will be worked out remains to be seen, and the whole question of non-fossil fuel energy sources seems still very open. Some who have no objection to nuclear power on principle still consider it unlikely to play a major role.  But Brand’s concern is to establish that there is no reason to exclude it from consideration, or indeed to exclude anything else which science affirms as useful to ecological balance.

Article by Bryan Walker, appearing courtesy of Celsias, via Hot Topic

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand (Viking Adult; 1st edition): October 15, 2009. Buy from Amazon.

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A new book touts energy efficiency as one possible environmentally and economic solution for solving the global energy crisis. In Crossing The Energy Divide,  authors Robert and Edward Ayres argue that we need to reform the way we manage our existing energy systems to double the amount of “energy service” we get from every drop of fossil fuel we use.  They claim the resulting improvements in energy efficiency can bridge the global economy until clean renewables can fully replace fossil fuels.

CleanTechies put three questions to the authors:

CleanTechies: Is the U.S. government listening to you on your energy efficiency/waste-to-energy arguments?  If so, where are we at in terms of implementation of your proposals?

Edward Ayres: Crossing the Energy Divide was released only a few days ago, so its messages to policymakers are just beginning to reach U.S. officials.  The week before publication, we received several e-mails from U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who had read an advance copy of our book on Kindle, and who expressed particular interest in the book’s revelations about the role of thermodynamic efficiency in driving the economy.  Chu (who is a physicist) is pursuing this with his staff, and–given the current state of the U.S. economy–we anticipate that the implications of this argument may soon be shared with other departments and addressed as an interagency priority.

CleanTechies: What do you estimate the cost of implementing these programs to be?  Who should pay for it?

Edward Ayres: Most of our proposals focus on the opportunities for individual businesses or communities to invest in projects that will sharply cut their fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions, in many cases with modest capital cost and fairly rapid returns on investment.  Of course, as we discuss in the chapter or policy priorities, government can prime the pump (and significantly boost the economy at a critical time) by redirecting some of its subsidies, and particularly by passing legislation that frees the electric power sector to fully exploit the benefits of local power production and renewable-energy inputs to the grid.  The main need there is not for more expenditures, so much as for more informed political leadership. The costs will be largely and fairly quickly repaid by the improved bottom lines.

As for the costs of specific projects, and who should pay, the most general and newsworthy answer is that contrary to popular belief and fossil fuel industry PR, many of the proposals we make entail negative costs, thanks to their reducing the costs of the energy inputs.  We have to emphasize that every product and service in the global economy has an energy cost.

Some of the specific cost estimates–and resulting savings or benefits–include:

Combined Heat & Power (CHP): The World Alliance for Decentralized Energy (WADE) estimated in 2008 that if all new electric power capacity in the next 20 years were to come on line in decentralized facilities, which largely stop the loss of energy in the form of waste heat, the capital cost would be $5.8 trillion, as compared with $10.8 trillion if provided by conventional (business-as-usual) facilities.  That would be a net saving of $5 trillion, of which the U.S. share of savings would be about $1 trillion.  This would be a prime case of negative cost.

Waste-energy recycling in industrial facilities:  We cite a study by Lawrence Berkeley Lab, conducted for the U.S.. Department of Energy, that has identified 95GW of still untapped potential (of the kind we describe taking place at two Indiana steel plants, in our Introduction), which could generate as much as 10 percent of all U.S. electricity at capital costs less than for new coal-burning power plants–and, once the facilities are installed, with no fuel costs (because the fuel has already been purchased for its primary (steel-making or coke-making) purpose.

Climate-change mitigation: Probably the most important single observation we can make in response to this question is that when the role of energy costs in economic productivity are considered (as they have not been in standard economic models), it can now be shown that those who say climate mitigation will be a heavy burden to the U.S. economy have it exactly backward.  While economy-wide figures depend on which of our strategies get implemented, etc., the cumulative evidence indicates that the economy will stall or slide into decline if fossil fuel use is not sharply reduced in the coming era of increased global demand.  In short, compared to the do-nothing alternative, climate-change mitigation will be good for business, as well as for society.

As for who pays, the best answer is that whoever wants to reap the benefits will pay. The role of government will be primarily to guide policy, not incur large costs.

CleanTechies: Is energy recovery compatible with recycling?

Robert Ayres: Energy recovery and energy recycling are essentially the same thing, but as a practical matter what we (in the book) mean by “energy recycling” is to use high temperature waste heat (or a pressure gradient) to produce electricity, or to use low temperature waste heat for space-heating or air-conditioning, whereas “energy recovery” generally means burning some kind of combustible waste material in an incinerator, but also also with the objective of producing electricity.  In fact, the differences are not really fundamental.

Crossing The Energy Divide by Robert and Edward Ayres (Wharton School Publishing; 1st edition): December 30, 2009. Buy from Amazon.

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David Archer and Stefan Rahmstorf are notable climate scientists. They are also excellent communicators of the science to the general reader, as is apparent in their new book The Climate Crisis: An Introductory Guide to Climate Change. The authors seek to provide an accessible and readable account of the “treasure trove” of the IPCC reports.

They distinguish their work sharply from the Summaries for Policy Makers officially provided by the IPCC, which are negotiated between government representatives and exclude much of what scientists think and write in the full report.

But while they draw heavily on the latest IPCC report and feature many of its informative graphs and tables, they also refer to new findings since the 2006 cut-off date for the report, and draw attention to weaknesses they sometimes see in the report.

Most of the book deals with global climate science, the focus of IPCC Working Group I, with subsequent brief attention given to the impacts of climate change (Working Group II) and to mitigation (Working Group III).

After looking back over the development of the science from its slow beginnings in the 19th century with the discoveries of Fourier, Tyndall and Arrhenius to the explosion of research in more recent years, the authors carefully explain the way in which the global temperature responds to the forcings of the various agents, warming in the case of the greenhouse gases, offset by some cooling through the effect of aerosols. There are no natural forcings, such as solar irradiance, that can explain the warming of the past five decades.

The global average warming of 0.8 degrees since the late nineteenth century and 0.6 degrees since the 1970s is unequivocally shown by measurements.  Other observed changes include significant changes in rainfall, both increases and decreases, and some changes in atmospheric circulation patterns.

A chapter on ice and snow acknowledges the uncertain scientific understanding of the behavior of melting ice on the ice sheets of Greenland and the West Antarctic and the unpredictability of ice sheet flow. The faster than expected sea ice melting in the Arctic carries profound climatic implications.  Overall observations of snow and ice provide powerful support for the warming trend.

The oceans receive attention as a major player in the climate pattern. We know that they are heating up, to some degree lessening the warmth in the atmosphere – the authors calculate a temporary effect of 0.4 degrees.  Salinity is being affected – increasing in sub-tropical regions and declining in higher latitudes.  Sea level is rising steadily, albeit with regional natural oscillations. The speed with which the ocean is taking up large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere is making the water more acidic, a worrying trend likely to cause a severe threat to marine life if it continues.

Paleoclimatology studies support a key role for CO2 in regulating climate. They also tell us that Earth’s climate has the potential to flip abruptly from one mode of operation to another. They serve as a reality check for the climate models used to forecast Earth’s response to our CO2 release. The past strengthens the forecast.

The forecast is for warming somewhere between 2 degrees and 7 degrees depending on the IPCC scenario.  The authors regard it as unfortunate that all the IPCC scenarios are non-mitigation scenarios, intended to tell us what might happen if we do not take action to reduce emissions. They consider it a serious shortcoming that mitigation scenarios have not also been systematically assessed, though they are likely to be part of the next IPCC report. Other forecasts include changes in precipitation, which they note will probably have a bigger impact on human society and ecosystems than temperature changes.

Sea level rise is likely to be higher than the limited forecast of the IPCC report, and the authors don’t rule out a rise by over one metre by the end of the century, noting that Hansen fears two metres by that date. Changes in ocean currents are uncertain and the authors at this point comment on the limitations of the use of climate models, also apparent in relation to ice sheet behavior.

The low probability-high impact risks are difficult to assess. There may be a less than 10% risk of a shut-down of the Atlantic overturning circulation, but it would result in a massive change in the operation of the planet’s climate system. Ocean acidification will continue and worsen.

Against the accusation that the outlooks are alarmist they point to earlier IPCC projections which have turned out to be correct in the subsequent 18 years. In fact the faster than expected sea level rise and arctic sea-ice shrinking suggests that the IPCC in the past may have underestimated rather than exaggerated climate change, though they advance that possibility with caution.

In the last third of the book the authors move to discuss the impacts of climate change and how we might avoid it.  The expected impact on the world’s ecosystems is dire. Human society will suffer from water stress, from food insecurity, from coastal zone hazards due to rising sea level and from threats to health.  Adaptation will be necessary and can be very effective, but has no hope of coping with all the projected effects, especially over the long term. Mitigation is essential.

The book runs through some of the mitigation options offered by Working Group III.  However, noting that the consensus view the IPCC represents is regarded by some energy experts and engineers as too limited and conservative, the authors depart from the IPCC material for a time to provide a somewhat more visionary perspective, based on renewables, cogeneration, smart grids, heat pumps and electromobility. They refer to the surprise success story of wind power and look to a time later in the century when solar power could easily provide most of our energy needs.

In a final brief section the authors leave the IPCC to discuss policy matters.  In the course of the discussion they comment on the persistence of arguments against anthropogenic global warming which float around the internet and are repeated by gullible newspaper editors and systematically promoted by lobbyist organisations.

“We would personally be very relieved if anthropogenic global warming were to be disproven by some new scientific findings – we certainly do not “like” global warming. But at this point, the body of scientific evidence is so strong that the hope that this problem will go away by itself looks exceedingly remote…The good news is: we have the technological and economic capacity to meet this challenge.”

My background is teaching English and I appreciated seeing the book end with a lengthy quote from novelist Ian McEwan, known for his concern over climate change. He concludes:

“Are we at the beginning of an unprecedented sera of international cooperation, or are we living in an Edwardian summer of reckless denial? Is this the beginning, or the beginning of the end?”

One hopes for a wide readership for this measured book which clearly and thoughtfully sets out the results of the work of a great many scientists. I’m not sure that rationality stands much of a chance in a world which gives high popularity ranking to the denialism of authors like Booker and Plimer and Singer, but for those readers who retain a desire to understand real science Archer and Rahmstorf are reliable and helpful guides.

Article by Bryan Walker, appearing courtesy of Celsias

The Climate Crisis: An Introductory Guide to Climate Change (Paperback) by David Archer and Stefan Rahmstorf (Cambridge University Press; 1 Original edition): February 28, 2010). Buy from Amazon.

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Al Gore hasn’t been resting on his laurels since An Inconvenient Truth. His substantial new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis has grown out of the more than 30 lengthy and intensive “Solution Summits” he has organised to enable leading experts from round the world to share their knowledge and experience in subjects relevant to solving the crisis, as well as the one-on-one sessions he has had with others.

The expertise shows. The discussions of energy sources are focused and packed with useful information and judgments. Electricity from the sun is the first. Concentrated solar thermal (CST) power and photovoltaic power are both explained and evaluated. Each has a future, photovoltaics perhaps more so than currently recognised as it develops new chemical processes and fabrication technologies. Indeed some conclude that photovoltaics are near a threshold where they will have a cost advantage over CST and soon even over fossil fuel generation.

Wind harvesting in the US is not only the fastest-growing source of renewable energy but also the fastest-growing source of any form of energy, surpassing coal-fired, gas-fired and nuclear power plants combined. Geothermal energy is a vast resource, often misunderstood. It is not limited to natural sources of hot underground water. Gore explains the new and exciting possibilities of enhanced geothermal systems which tap into hot rock by drilling and then pumping pressurized water down to be heated, pumped up again, and used for generation before being returned for repeated processing.

Biomass fuel is canvassed. At this point he admits to the mistake of deriving ethanol from corn in which he participated when in office, but sees more promising possibilities in cellulosic fuels as well as in biomass use for electricity generation. Carbon capture and sequestration receives cautious attention, but its practicability is still uncertain. He thinks that a price put on carbon will allow market forces to work out whether the process is viable or not. Similarly the nuclear option is surveyed with some caution largely on grounds of its cost.

Deforestation produces an estimated 20 to 23 percent of annual global CO2 emissions as well as causing the extinction of species at an alarming level. The placing of a value on carbon will reveal the worth of tropical forests and the vital ecosystem services they perform. Gore quotes one expert on forest economics who considers that, worldwide, a $30 per ton price on CO2 would result in an 80% reduction in deforestation.  Meanwhile afforestation is proceeding in many places and he points up the significance of tree-planting programs such as those in China which achieved planting of 11.7 million acres of forests in 2008.

Carbon sequestration in soil, through better soil management practices, is recognized as holding considerable potential and discussed at length.  Stabilizing world population also receives attention and Gore notes Obama’s reversal of the previous US administration’s refusal to support many international fertility-management programs on grounds of their possible connection with providing access to legal abortions.

He is eloquent on energy efficiency improvements as by far and away the most cost-effective among the solutions to the climate crisis and capable of being implemented faster than any others. He provides numerous examples from this neglected field, including the sequential use of energy for two productive purposes in cogeneration, or combined heat and power systems.

Continent-wide unified smart grids are essential for the new patterns of generation. Gore has an illuminating chapter on the technologies now available for grid modernization, including storage opportunities and progress in the development of batteries. The management of intermittency in solar and wind power features in his discussion. The role of electric cars in doubling as a co-ordinated fleet of batteries to assist storage needs is explored.

From solutions Gore turns to obstacles. Climate change is an unprecedented mortal threat. We clearly have the means to avert it. Why are we still procrastinating? He recognises that massive changes in human behavior and thinking are involved, and that they are not easy to achieve. However in discussing the workings of the human brain he finds evidence that we can make decisions that take account of a long span of time and that once made they produce powerful commitments to change. Our ancestors were capable of common long-term goals as evidenced by medieval cathedrals which could take a century to complete.

Because there is not a price on carbon we are receiving flawed signals in the marketplace. This must be aggressively remedied to internalize the true environmental cost of coal and oil. Gore writes of “subprime carbon assets” which depend for their valuation on the belief that it’s perfectly okay to put millions of tons of CO2 into the earth’s atmosphere every 24 hours –- and on a zero price for carbon that reflects this assumption. His own preference is for a CO2 tax offset by equal reductions in other taxes, but he recognizes that the ascendance of market fundamentalism in the US has meant that only a cap and trade system is currently acceptable. Eventually he believes both will be chosen in the US as they have been in Sweden. Direct regulation also has a part to play in encouraging renewable energy investment. Sustainable capitalism is Gore’s model.

The difficult political decisions needed in combating the climate crisis have been exacerbated by the cloud of confusion generated by a massive political campaign of international deception on the part of many corporate carbon polluters. Gore is unsparing in his exposure of the organized denial movement “aimed at actively misleading the public about what science actually tells us concerning the nature and severity of the climate crisis”.

Based on the same tactics as those employed decades ago by the tobacco companies, large companies joined forces in order to systematically create doubt and confusion about the scientific consensus. “Reposition global warming as theory rather than fact”  are the words from an internal fossil fuel memo that he highlights.

The cynical and well-funded campaign, aided by the news media abandonment of one of their traditional roles of refereeing important arguments in the public domain, has succeeded in frustrating and delaying the world’s efforts to reduce deadly pollution. The companies concerned have meanwhile continued to make record profits.

Gore doesn’t leave his subject without a plug for information technologies and the new possibilities and new tools they provide for solving the climate crisis.  His survey of some of them is an example of the buoyant yet realistic optimism which underlies the book. “We can solve the climate crisis. It will be hard, to be sure, but if we can make the choice to solve it, I have no doubt whatsoever that we can and will succeed.”

As he did with the science in An Inconvenient Truth Gore in this book has done a sterling job in bringing to the public a coherent account of the technologies available to take us away from the path of disaster. Obviously a patient learner and gatherer of information from authoritative sources, he’s also a gifted communicator of what he finds. His background makes him also highly aware of the political and economic dimension in which these solutions must be applied.

The book is not only written with intelligence and flair but also contains a great collection of apposite pictures and some commissioned illustrations which aid reader understanding enormously. Its presentation is as attractive as its content. I hope it proves highly influential in informing public resolve to adopt the obvious solutions to the dangers which threaten us.

Article by Bryan Walker appearing courtesy of Celsias; originally posted on Hot Topic

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“This is a story of betrayal, a story of selfishness, greed, and irresponsibility on an epic scale.” That’s how James Hoggan opens his newly published book Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming.

Hoggan initially thought there was a fierce  scientific controversy about climate change. Sensibly he did a lot of reading, only to find to his surprise that there was no such controversy. How did the public confusion arise?  There was nothing accidental about it. As a public relations specialist, Hoggan observed with gathering horror a campaign at work.

“To a trained eye the unsavoury public relations tactics and techniques and the strategic media manipulation became obvious. The more I thought about it, the more deeply offended I became.”

DeSmogBlog was born to research the misinformation campaigns and share the information widely. This book pulls together some of that research in an organised narrative. Richard Littlemore has assisted Hoggan in the writing.

Climate scientists are sometimes blamed for not communicating their message clearly enough to the public. If they tried to match the efforts of the denial campaigners as detailed by Hoggan they wouldn’t have any time to do their science. Those who vociferously claim that anthropogenic global warming is still uncertain and doubtful certainly don’t spend time and money on any science.

That is not what they are interested in. As far back as 1991 a group of coal-related organisations set out, in their own words, “to reposition global warming as a theory (not fact)” and “supply alternative facts to support the suggestion that global warming will be good.” This was the pattern of the work done in succeeding years by a variety of corporations and industry associations who devoted considerable financial resources to influence the public conversation.

They used slogans and messages they had tested for effectiveness but not accuracy.  They hired scientists prepared to say in public things they could not get printed in the peer-reviewed scientific press.

They took advantage of mainstream journalists’ interest in featuring contrarian and controversial science stories. They planned “grassroots” groups to give the  impression that they were not an industry-driven lobby. New Zealand’s Climate “Science” Coalition and the International Coalition it helped to found fit this purpose nicely.

Hoggan describes the work of many individuals and organisations who are available for spreading the doctrine of doubt. Conservative think tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) have played a major part in the task in the new millenium. Their donors are well disguised, but in the case of CEI have certainly in the past included ExxonMobil and probably GM and Ford. Their advocacy, such as the infamous TV commercials portraying the benefits of carbon dioxide, obviously involves heavy expenditure.

Lists of scientists reportedly expressing dissent over anthropogenic global warming have become a staple of the denial crusade. Hoggan discusses some of these lists and comments:

“The beauty of this tactic as a method of keeping the debate alive is that none of these ‘scientists’ ever have to conduct any actual research or put their views forward to be tested in the scientific peer-review process. They don’t even have to be experts in a related field. And they certainly don’t have to win the argument. As long as groups of scientists are seen to be disagreeing, the public continues to assume that the science is uncertain.”

Apparent throughout Hoggan’s book is the lack of substance to the denial campaign. According to them, the Mann hockey stick is a “notorious intellectual swindle”. The impression is sedulously fostered that statistical investigation has shown the graph to be false.

But Hoggan points out that the ideologists are uncurious about whether Mann’s work has been tested by other scientists or confirmed or falsified by the use of other methods or other proxy data sources. He dryly comments that the reason is that the other climate-reconstruction graphs published since Mann produce enough hockey sticks to outfit a whole team and then some.

A significant movement in the campaign in more recent times has been a change of emphasis from denial that anthropogenic warming is occurring to claims that there is no need to rush into measures to mitigate it.

Bjorn Lomborg argues with apparent passion that he also cares about climate change, but that careful economic analysis shows that more pressing problems like AIDS, malnutrition, and the provision of fresh water to people in the developing world are more important matters and unfortunately don’t at this stage leave enough money for climate change mitigation. Frank Maisano specialises in media communication.

He supplies thousands of reporters and important people in industry and politics with useful material on energy issues.  Underlying it though is a consistent argument that climate change, though real, is either impossible or too expensive to fix.

In his chapter on the manipulated media Hoggan acknowledges the complexity issue in relation to global warming. Indeed he extends a lot of understanding to reporters and editors.  They are under pressure and the science takes some understanding. The temptation to fall back on balance has been strong. However he notices that increasingly the balance model is being abandoned, and is insistent that it’s past time for people in the media to check their facts and start sharing them ethically and responsibly with the public.

Hoggan’s book is a thoughtful and sustained exposure of  a movement which has done great harm. I read it with close interest and shared his dismay. I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how denial has had such a charmed run. His presentation is painstaking and reasonable. There’s nothing shrill about it, and his justifiable anger is relatively muted.

He urges his readers not to take him at face value but to do some checking of his material and satisfy themselves that it is reliable. Nevertheless the activity he describes is rightly characterised as betrayal, selfishness, greed and irresponsibility. The people who have launched the highly successful campaign of denial and delay are not attending to the work of a body of outstanding scientists although that work is of utmost import for human life.

They have turned what should have been a public policy dialogue driven by science into a theatre for a cynical public relations exercise of the most dishonest kind. Instead of looking at the seriousness of the warnings they have sensed a threat to their business profitability and made that their motivating factor. They have spread a false complacency and the result has been a twenty year delay in addressing an issue of high urgency.

Hoggan thought at first that David Suzuki was a bit over the top when he wondered out loud whether there was a legal way of throwing Canada’s so-called leaders into jail for criminal action (or inaction) in relation to climate change. But then he recognised Suzuki was right, in the sense that it will indeed be a crime if we do not demand of our leaders that they start fixing this problem, beginning today.

“And the punishment will be visited on our children and on their children through a world that is unrecognisable, perhaps uninhabitable.”

Article by Bryan Walker appearing courtesy of Celsias; originally posted on Hot Topic

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I recently finished reading  a book I strongly recommend to anyone interested in sustainable development and energy. It is packed with figures and findings that I believe will easily start discussions among CleanTechies.

The author, David JC MacKay, is Professor in the Department of Physics at Cambridge University and was recently appointed Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change responsible for the Low Carbon Transition Plan.

One of the main findings of this book is that electrifying our cars and installing heat pumps in our buildings would enable us to cut significantly both our greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption. Both solutions are much more efficient than the current traditional ones and could benefit from massive electrification to answer all our energy needs.

Below is a selection of the book’s key findings:

Sustainable Electricity: MacKay believes that the UK and Europe in general can’t count solely on renewables. He shows that wind, biofuels, hydro, solar PV and other energy sources don’t add up enough energy to answer our current needs and will do so to an even lesser extent in the future, once we have a strong electrified transport sector.

So we need a plan that provides additional resources, for example concentrated solar (like the Desertec project), or nuclear, or a combination of both. Clean coal may also add up enough electricity if proven viable.

North American Energy Consumption: The author notes that the continent should first and foremost decrease energy consumption from 250 kWh per person per day to the current European or Japanese levels of 125 kWh. This could enable the continent to rely solely on renewables with the installation of concentrated solar in its deserts.

European Energy Consumption: With Europeans consuming the equivalent of 125 kWh per day per person, we see a breakdown of transport accounting for 40 kWh per day, and heating for another 40 kWh. Delivered electricity amounts to 18 kWh but due to the inefficiencies of the system, this comes from 45 kWh of energy. With improved efficiency, we could go from the current 125 to around 80 kWh, a figure similar to that of Hong Kong. (This simplification for the sake of the argument doesn’t take into certain factors that are are tackled in detail in the book.)

Future Scenarios: In chapter 27, the author gives five examples for plans that add up enough electricity. The baseline plan is as follow: Clean coal 16 kWh per day per person, nuclear 16, tide and wave 5.7, hydro 0.1, waste 1.1, pumped heat 12, wood 5, solar thermal 1, biofuels 2, solar PV 3 and wind 8. The four other plans give more or less importance to each of these energy sources. In one plan, nuclear accounts for 44 kWh when in another plan, wind energy accounts for 32 kWh.

Transportation: Today, electric cars need as little as 15 kWh for 100 kilometers while models running on oil need 70 to 90 kWh. Hence, electric cars are already five times more efficient than current conventional models. (Side note: SUVs – also called spaceships by the author – need around 120 kWh…) High speed rail and other sustainable alternatives also have to be pushed forward. A full high speed train only consumes as little as 3 kWh per passenger, and biking consumes even less: 1 kWh.

Housing and buildings: The author is an advocate of both retrofitting and reducing the winter thermostat from 20°C to 17°C, which alone brings savings of 30% (page 292). By combining both solutions, David MacKay halved his heating bills. With a coefficient of performance (COP) of 4 to 5, heat pumps retrieve the heat contained in the outside air or soil and distribute it indoors. Another advantage of this solution is that it can bring air conditioning during hotter days.

The book is available for free on the official website. You can download it in one document or read it per chapter. The paper version can be bought for around $32 / €22. Published this year, it is up to date and explains simply but most effectively (and with a good sense of humor) how we can create a low carbon energy economy.

Grade : 20/20. A must read.

Readability: Maximum as it brings a lot of data.

Further information: MacKay in a recent article on the BBC – most interesting.

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A couple of years after former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach founded  ActNow, a sustainable business consultancy, he signed up Walmart as a client. This brought Werbach considerable notoriety in eco-activist circles. Walmart’s record of environmental responsibility had previously been spotty, to put it mildly. Werbach retorted to his critics that Walmart, with almost two million employees and 127 million customer visits per week, had the potential to do far more to save the world than the Sierra Club ever had.

I had the opportunity to visit Werbach’s company (now named Saatchi S) in San Francisco and attend a staff meeting. The participants sat on the floor and passed around a plate of organic banana bread. Yet despite the trappings of informality, the conversation had a focus, drive and ingenuity about it that I had rarely experienced in the non-profit world.  The Saatchi staff certainly looked like the young, idealistic types whom I knew from environmental NGOs. But dropping a profit incentive into the motivational mix seemed to release a different level of creative zing.

Subsequent encounters with other leaders of cutting edge green companies strengthened this sense of the potency in marrying idealism with the scale and dynamism of the business world. Jonathan Rose, CEO of a large US sustainable urban development consultancy, Arnold Goldman founder of Brightsource Energy and Yosef Abramowitz of the Arava Power Company all combine strong ethical vision with a rigorous ambition to build successful businesses that will help solve large, real-world challenges.

Two valuable recent books have helped expand and sharpen my understanding of the potential for green business to do good while doing well, and also its limitations.

First, the Harvard Business Review on Green Business Strategy brings together the best articles on the subject from HBR’s archives over the past decade. They cover areas such as “What Every Executive Needs to Know About Global Warming,” through analyses of developments in green building and international sustainable business strategy, and “How to Maintain Competitive Advantage on a Warming Planet.”

The essays concisely survey the main areas of impact and opportunity with which climate change confronts business, including dealing with regulatory policies frameworks (e.g. cap and trade), developing climate friendly products and technologies, reputational factors, impacts on the company’s supply chain and liability to litigation or to direct physical damage.

Several of the authors confront the issue of greenwashing versus real change, coming down unanimously in favor of the business benefits of moving towards genuine, long term sustainability.

The book includes Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken’s seminal 1999 essay “A Roadmap for Natural Capitalism,” and is worth buying for that article alone.

The authors lay out four guiding principles for transforming our modes of economic production that are both visionary and practical: dramatically improve the productivity of natural resources; shift to biologically inspired modes of production; move to a solutions based business model (as opposed to an product ownership based model, e.g. provide floor-covering services rather than sell carpets) and reinvest in natural capital.

They persuasively show the huge energy and resource saving potential in innovative design across large areas of today’s economy (“Only 1 percent of the energy consumed by today’s cars in actually used to move the driver: only 15 to 20 percent of the power generated by burning gasoline reaches the wheels and 95 percent of the resulting propulsion moves the car, not the driver.” Good morning Detroit.) The article is a powerful argument on grounds of ethics, aesthetics, efficiency and profitability for embedding industrial production into the naturally sustainable systems of the physical world.

The book International Business and Global Climate Change has a narrower focus.

Pinkse and Kolk, both professors at Amsterdam Business School, give an impressively detailed account of the dilemmas and opportunities that climate change poses for large companies.

They focus on two areas: compliance with national and international regulatory frameworks and developing innovative technologies and capabilities. On the way Pinkse and Kolk cover the economics of carbon mitigation, a comprehensive history of carbon emission regulation and an unsparing analysis of the strengths and failures of the frameworks currently in place.

They show, for example, how the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme over-allocated emissions permits which utilities then sold for huge profits. And they show how the United Nation’s Clean Development Mechanism’s credits ended up going overwhelmingly to projects reducing emissions from an obscure, but highly potent greenhouse gas called HFC-23 that could be mitigated using a cheap, readily available end-of-pipe technology. The scheme therefore did almost nothing to stimulate clean technology innovation as its creators had envisioned it would.

Pinske and Kokse’s book, though scholarly and comprehensive is written in the impeccable but lifeless English prose at which Northern European academics seem to excel.

If you are either a policy maker designing a greenhouse gas regulatory framework, or a senior business executive figuring out how to comply with (or exploit) such a system, the book is a must-read. If you are anyone else, you’ll probably find the style and density off-putting.

The Harvard Business Review work, though less detailed, is a much racier read, employing that business school’s trademark case-study approach to illustrate the messy real-world complexity of transitioning toward sustainable business methods.

A common message that emerges from both works is that business needs a coherent, credible, predictable and global framework for carbon emissions mitigation if it is going to go green on a large scale.

The current chaotic patchwork of voluntary and mandatory, short and medium term, local and international schemes inhibits many companies from making major long-range investments in clean technologies.

Business cannot create this framework; it is a task for governments and intergovernmental bodies, chivied along by civil society: NGO’s, the media, religious groups and businesses themselves. December’s climate summit in Copenhagen is expected to take a crucial step down this road.

As Arnold Goldman of Brightsource has written, green business is not a new invention. He points out that according to the Talmud, the first question each of us will each be asked on judgment day (before any enquiries about our “religious” life) is “Did you do business b’emunah” – faithfully or honestly (Shabbat, 31a.) Business b’emunah surely requires not raping the planet, not profiting from fleeting and destructive wants, but creating products that add real value to people’s life and to the life of the biosphere.

Author Rav Julian (Yedidya) Sinclair is co-founder of Jewish Climate Initiative. Article appearing courtesy of Green Prophet.

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The CleanTechies website is taking shape, and new content is added almost every day. The latest feature on the site is the CleanTechies Bookstore. It provides a selection of CleanTech books that have been recommended by fellow CleanTechies. Visitors to the bookstore can find detailed descriptions of the books and read editorial and customer reviews. The bookstore allows users to buy books directly online – often times at discounted prices.

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If you want to discuss your favorite (or least favorite) book with fellow CleanTechies, send us your book review. We will post your article on the CleanTechies Blog, allowing others to comment on it.

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