This afternoon I played a recent PBS airing, Lester Brown's "Plan B: Mobilizing To Save Civilization. Already I see Al Gore ("I am Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States of America") & Thomas L Freedman (author of countless New York Times articles, and two books I own, _The World Is Flat_, in my job I see that every work-day, and _Hot, Flat, and Crowded_) as prophets crying in the wilderness, trying to warn us of the future that our global civilization is striding into, that we really, really aren't going to like. And now I'm going to add Lester Brown to this, a Triumverate of Doom.
Note that there are several points I want to draw:
- We the Living, aren't going to be living long enough to feel the full impact of our actions. The fruits of our stewardship of the planet will go to the unborn, who will never know our world except vicariously, perhaps longingly.
- And the Earth..., is in no danger. Our planet has suffered far worse than anything humanity can do. There have been a number of mass extinctions already (by any reasonable definition, we're in the midst of a mass extinction right now, only this one's "home-made", the fault of us humans). The planet, and sufficient life to totally restock, no issue there.
- What's at stake is our presence here, on this globe. And forget about emigration to another world. I already said "We already and only live on the best of all possible worlds." (previous post "Three hundred better men than himself").
Mars looks terraformable, but over millenia, not even centuries. Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" trilogy posited enhancing the water supply by dumping Khyber Belt snowballs onto the Mars equator (an added benefit is control of angular momentum, easy to increase or decrease the length of the day). That may require a solar-system-wide technology, but certainly looks doable, in millenia.
Europa is cold. And it's a long ways away.
O'Neill-style space habitation may be the more immediate "life raft", but planets are a lot more reliable. Solar flares threaten our communications satelllites, but not our bodies; that's because we have core-generated magnetic fields, and a thick atmosphere. A "can in space" won't have either, will be highly vulnerable.
By the time we can terraform even one other planet, we may discover it's easier to rewrite ourselves to fit other environments. And that's certainly a goal of centuries for a technologically advanced civilization. So to move out into space, we need to last for those centuries and millenia, with a high-tech civilization, and that brings us back to Problem One, how to sustainably live right here.
So we've circled back to Macbeth & Banquo (you and me), their three witches, and the prophesy. What I especially liked about Brown's arguments was that his Plan B was simple, and glorious. But it wasn't easy. Here's my take, from memory:
- Cut carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2020.
- Constrain global population to eight billion.
- Eliminate poverty (I remember education as being the primary tool)
- Restore Earth's natural ecologies (possible only if we don't expand indefinitely, don't eat everything as if the Earth belonged to us, personally).
Everything there is possible if we break population growth. We could make a heaven of this earth, for all humans. How many would be ideal? Do we really need even eight billion minds at the same time? Perhaps one billion could live much, much better. Once we learn to control our population, then the collective wisdom of all, through individual actions, will lead to an optimal choice (no dictators, no "population councils" needed, this is democracy at its most basic level).
However, we may not have the time to stabilize population if we "choke up, heat up and smoke up this planet" first (Friedman's quotation). So the immediate goal is a drastic reduction in planetary greenhouse gas emissions. And primarily, for now, that's CO2. That's where my ambiguous title comes from.
The burning of carbon is a great draw for us all. The stored solar energy from hundreds of millions of years ago is in your tank, just step on the accelerator. But if it were possible to burn up all of the fossil fuels that we can lay our hands on, we'd boost the CO2 to the levels of hundreds of millions of years ago, and we'd have their climate too. "Hot and muggy" doesn't even come close. We'd be gone, headed for fossilization ourselves, archaeological puzzles for our distant successors to ponder.
So it's going to be the first of several great wrenchings of lifestyle to accommodate lowered CO2. Like many, I don't know how we are going to manage it. But I know how we'll try.
Those who think that mere carbon trading will suffice are fools. That's an arcane system that's easy to manipulate, easy for businesses to "back-door" their way into the chambers of government, and "get by". Don't we already see that happening in our govenment? Remember Mark Twain's "the best congress money can buy" (also attributed to Will Rogers).
That's why I see that a carbon tax is the infinitely better choice. "Fudging" that will be more open to public scrutiny (I hope, yes, I'm being optomistic here). But what will really make a difference, is the more radical solution I've seen proposed by others:
- Eliminate income tax. Completely. And eliminate the sales tax as well.
- Raise the money instead with a carbon tax.
- Make it big enough to cover the larger of the money formerly collected in tax, or the calculated value of the true cost of all that CO2 (think of the health costs to dirty air, or the lost water for Asian populations, drinking and crops, that no longer flows from tropical glaciers to the oceans, or any number of other "hits" to the economy).
- And do it now.
Think about how you'd reconsider your lifestyle if all of the money you currently pay in taxes were instead in your wallet, and fossil fuels and their derivatives (think "plastics", think "food", think of things that indirectly connect) all cost like blazes. You'd quickly reconsider how you live your life, accommodate new rules, and without doing anything except acting in your own self-interest, you'd bring down CO2.
Self-interest is very powerful, it just needs to be harnessed.
One final piece to this thread, then I'll move on. Several paragraphs back I referred to greenhouse gases, and said "for now, that's CO2". The phrase "tipping point" gets thrown around like so much verbal judo, has come to mean little because it means anything; perhaps there's soon be a local restaurant with that name. But there's a true tipping point that scares me, an unrecoverable state that we don't know how close we're to forcing.
Methane (CH4) is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and there's literally tons of it in hydrates on the oceanic continental shelves, and in the (now potentially misnamed) permafrost. We heat these up enough with CO2, get a significant release of CH4, and what's released will heat up and release even more CH4, a positive feedback loop with truly ugly implications.
So can we a a global civilization turn around CO2, dramatically reduce its release by 2020? Brown's "Plan B" had a nice analogy to President Roosevelt's turning around of the USA economy at the start of WWII. There was no compromise. He didn't say "guns and some butter too". It was war machinery all, tanks, planes, whatever, and no other industry. It took a strong leader, and a direct threat to our (USA) way of life, and suddenly we were off in a new direction, no looking back.
In the summer of 1970 my Twin Cities Love, her sister, perhaps others I don't remember, and I were hiking Isle Royale. It's a long and narrow island in Lake Superior that has steep ridges with correspondingly plunging valleys; they all run parallel to the major axis, and we were traversing the middle, from SE to NW. So we were climbing to the heights and plunging to the depths, over and over. Further, the day was hot and muggy.
I had a significant lead over the others when I reached the highest ridge. I also had a significant bead of sweat, and that heavy pack on my back. Suddenly the world opened from dusty trail into a 180_degree panorama with a channel of Lake Superior in the foreground, and Canada to the horizon. And there was a wind ahead of me. So I hurried to the edge in order to fully take in this heavenly state.
Late in this excursion I discovered that I was on the edge of a ledge, a deadly drop right before me. Worse, it wasn't a right-angle edge I was on, but a curving surface going from horizontal to vertical in a very few feet (certainly not as much as a meter, we're talking _close_). And much worse, this was crumbly rock, I could hear sand-grain-sized stuff under my boots.
I couldn't just *STOP*, that would have pitched me forward, The Big Goodbye. I'm not sure that I've ever thought as fast as I did there, not in words but in momentum calculations, in muscle control, bringing myself to tip-toe verticality with zero margin left. And I backed away from death.
My fellow climbers joined me on the ledge, and no one even knew, only I was the infinitely wiser.
That..., is what I mean by suddenly taking a dramatic new direction, Roosevelt's example and mine. One day you're driving out to the beach for fun, the next day you understand the true cost of gasoline because you're paying it all at the pump, and you are finding a new way of life, new ways to have "fun".
Me? Much of my fun is in my friends. Many are virtual, text on screen or noises coming out of my phones. But the love, that's real. It's a whole lot "real-er" than having a big car, or jetting to Europe on vacation. You don't have to have a big carbon footprint in order to have fun.
And the planet, it will be just fine regardless, it's in no danger. Perhaps our descendants will still be here also, and not extinct, not headed for fossildom; perhaps they'll remember us as a "Greatest Generation" like we think of the WWII cohort, and for similar reasons. We can make a difference. And isn't that what counts, what all of us want?
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