The Turning
Point: New Hope for the Climate
It's time to
accelerate the shift toward a low-carbon future
This is
almost sheer plagiarism in that it is a condensation of a 6000+ word column in
the Rolling Stone by Former US Vice President Al Gore on June
18, 2014 9:00 AM ET.
It can be seen in its entirety at
I stole it
because it is a ray of hope that everyone should read but won’t:
primarily because of its length. I chopped out the excess verbiage and shrank
it to 2750 which is still long but a hell of a lot easier to read. Please do so!
It’s an
important analysis of what Global Warming is bringing to this earth in the not
too long different future that he describes in an excellent presentation of
interlocking events to come.
To Begin
In the struggle to solve the climate
crisis, the only question is how quickly we can accelerate and complete the
transition to a low-carbon civilization. Al Gore has come to believe the truly
catastrophic damages that have the potential for ending civilization as we know
it can still – almost certainly – be avoided. Moreover, the pace of the changes
already set in motion can still be moderated significantly. The cost of
electricity from photovoltaic, or PV, solar cells is now equal to or less than
the cost of electricity from other sources. By 2020 more than 80 percent of the
world's people will live in regions where solar will be competitive with
electricity from other sources.
There is a
huge difference between "more expensive than" and "cheaper than.
Germany,
Europe's industrial powerhouse now generates 37 percent of its daily
electricity from wind and solar; Germany's two largest coal-burning utilities
have lost 56 percent of their value over the past four years, and the losses
have continued into the first half of 2014. According to the Swiss bank UBS,
nine out of 10 European coal and gas plants are now losing money
Last May,
Barclays downgraded the entirety of the U.S. electric sector, warning that
"a confluence of declining cost trends in distributed solar photovoltaic-power
generation and residential scale power storage is likely to disrupt the status
quo" and make utility investments less attractive.
The
widespread belief that natural gas will continue to be the chosen alternative
to coal is mistaken, because it too will fall victim to the continuing decline
in the cost of solar and wind electricity and the cost of battery storage has
also been declining
Enough raw energy reaches the Earth
from the sun in one hour
To equal
All of the energy used by the entire
world in a full year.
In poorer
countries, photovoltaic electricity is not so much displacing carbon-based
energy as leapfrogging it altogether. The newly elected prime minister of India announced a stunning plan to rely
principally upon photovoltaic energy in providing electricity to 400 million
Indians who currently do not have it. The former utility regulator of India, added that the industry he once
oversaw "has reached a stage where either we change the whole system
quickly, or it will collapse." Bangladesh is installing nearly two new
rooftop PV systems every minute — making it the most rapidly growing market for
PVs in the world.
Some scoffed at projections
that the world would be installing one gigawatt of new solar electricity per
year by 2010 but this year the world is on pace to exceed that benchmark 17
times and expected to reach as much as
55 times over in the near future. The cost of solar electricity has dropped by
an average of 20 percent per year since 2010. Some energy economists are now
predicting energy-price deflation as soon as the next decade.
The cost of
wind energy is also plummeting, having dropped 43 percent in the United States since 2009 – making it now cheaper
than coal for new generating capacity. In the United States alone, nearly one-third of all new
electricity-generating capacity in the past five years has come from wind, and
installed wind capacity in the U.S. has increased more than fivefold
since 2006.
There is
precedence for the speed with which this impending transition has been
accelerating that help explain it. Remember the first mobile-telephone
handsets?
In 1980, a
AT&T conducted a global market study and came to the conclusion that by the
year 2000 there would be a market for 900,000 subscribers. They were way wrong:
109 million contracts were active in 2000. Barely a decade and a half later,
there are 6.8 billion globally.
The Opposition
The utilities are fighting back, of
course, by using their wealth and the entrenched political power they have
built up over the past century. In the United States, brothers Charles and David Koch,
who run Koch Industries, the second-largest
privately owned corporation in the U.S., have secretively donated at least
$70 million to a number of opaque political organizations tasked with spreading
disinformation about the climate crisis and intimidating political candidates
who dare to support renewable energy or the pricing of carbon pollution. One of
the most effective of the groups financed by the Koch brothers is the American
Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which grooms conservative state
legislators throughout the country to act as their agents in introducing
legislation written by utilities and carbon-fuel lobbyists. The Kochs claim to
act on principles of low taxation and minimal regulation, but in their attempts
to choke the development of alternative energy, they have focused on persuading
state legislatures and public-utility commissions to tax homeowners who install
a PV solar cell on their energy in a variety of novel schemes.
The Koch
brothers are losing rather badly. In Kansas, their home state, 91 percent of
registered voters support solar and wind. In Georgia, the Atlanta Tea Party joined
forces with the Sierra Club to form a new organization called – wait for it –
the Green Tea Coalition, which promptly defeated a Koch-funded scheme to tax
rooftop solar panels. Meanwhile, in Arizona, after the state's largest utility asked
for a tax of up to $150 per month for solar households, A compromise was worked
out – those households would be charged just $5 per month. The Koch brothers
and their allies have been using secretive and deceptive funding in Arizona to run television advertisements
attacking "greedy" owners of rooftop solar panels – but their effort
has thus far backfired, as local journalists have exposed the funding scam.
Last year,
the Edison Electric Institute warned the utility industry that it had waited
too long to respond to the sharp cost declines and growing popularity of solar:
"At the point when utility investors become focused on these new risks and
start to witness significant customer- and earnings-erosion trends, they will
respond to these
The most
seductive argument deployed by the Koch brothers and their allies is that those
who use rooftop solar electricity and benefit from the net-metering policies
are "free riders". The second reality ignored by the Koch brothers is
the one they least like to discuss, What about sewage infrastructure for 98 million tons per day of
gaseous, heat-trapping waste that is daily released into our skies, threatening
the future of human civilization? Is it acceptable to use the thin shell of
atmosphere surrounding our planet as an open sewer? Free of charge? Really?
Last April,
the average CO2 concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere exceeded 400
parts-per-million on a sustained basis: the
highest in 4.5 million years (a period that was considerably warmer than at
present). The accumulated man-made global-warming pollution already built up in
the Earth's atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy every day as would
be released by the explosion of 400,000 Hiroshima-class nuclear bombs. It is
that heat energy that is giving the Earth a fever and thirteen of the 14
hottest years ever measured with instruments have occurred in this century.
Many scientists expect the coming year could break all of these records with a boost
from the anticipated El Niño. The past decade was by far the warmest decade
ever measured and it is the heat absorbed by the oceans that is the cause of
the four dangers we now face: Storms, Sea-level rise, Floods, and Droughts.
Kevin Trenberth said,
"The environment in which all storms form has changed owing to human
activities."
Storms
Supertyphoon
Haiyan crossed the Pacific and gained strength across seas that were 5.4
degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they used to be because of greenhouse gas
pollution
Superstorm Sandy traversed the areas of the Atlantic Ocean in 2012, the water temperature was
nine degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal and the sea level was higher than it
used to be, elevated by the melting of ice
Similarly,
the inundation of Miami Beach by rising sea levels has now begun,
and freshwater aquifers in low-lying areas from South Florida to the Nile Delta to Bangladesh to Indochina are being invaded by saltwater
pushed upward by rising oceans. Where will the climate refugees go?
Eighty
percent of the warming in the past 150 years (since the burning of carbon-based
fuels gained momentum) has occurred in the past few decades. The AAAS noted
this year "there is a possibility that temperatures will rise much higher
and impacts will be much worse than expected. Moreover, as global temperature
rises, the risk increases that one or more important parts of the Earth's
climate system will experience changes that may be abrupt, unpredictable and
potentially irreversible, causing large damages and high costs."
Sea-level Rise
The
long-feared "collapse" of a portion of the West Antarctic ice sheet
is not only under way but is also now "irreversible” and some people still
find it hard to accept the fact that human beings have become a sufficiently
powerful force of nature to reshape the ecological system. No matter what we
do, sea levels will rise by at least an additional three feet and the Greenland
ice sheet dissolving will contribute to significantly more sea-level rise than
scientists had previously thought.
The heating of the oceans
also evaporates around 2 trillion gallons of additional water vapor into the
skies: where it is funneled into land-based storms that are releasing record
downpours all over the world.
Floods
Nashville in May 2010.
Torrential
rains in Afghanistan in April triggered mudslides that
killed thousands of people.
An “April
shower" came to Pensacola, Florida, this spring: two feet of rain in
26 hours.
Flooding
swamped large portions of England this winter, Serbia and Bosnia this spring.
Droughts
In the
planet's drier regions, the same extra heat causes record-breaking droughts. As
of this writing, 100 percent of California is in "severe,"
"extreme" or "exceptional" drought. Record fires are
ravaging the desiccated landscape.
Syria- From 2006 to 2010, a historic
drought destroyed 60 percent of the country's farms and 80 percent of its
livestock. Syria warned us the social and economic
impacts of the drought are "beyond our capacity as a country to deal
with."
There are so many knock-on
consequences of the climate crisis that listing them can be depressing –
diseases spreading, crop yields declining, more heat waves affecting vulnerable
and elderly populations, the disappearance of summer-ice cover in the Arctic Ocean, the potential extinction of up to
half of all the living species, and so much more. And that in itself is a
growing problem too, because when you add it all up, it's no wonder that many
feel a new inclination to despair.
Last March, a Pentagon advisory committee
described the climate crisis as a "catalyst for conflict" that may
well cause failures of governance and societal collapse. Air Force Gen. Charles
F. Wald. "Now we're saying it's going to be a direct cause of
instability." Pentagon spokesman Mark Wright told the press, "For
DOD, this is a mission reality, not a political debate. The scientific forecast
is for more Arctic ice melt, more sea-level rise, more intense storms, more
flooding from storm surge and more drought."
In November
1936, Winston Churchill in the face of disaster said: "Owing to past
neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of
danger. . . . The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and
baffling expedience of delays is coming to its close. In its place, we are
entering a period of consequences. . . . We cannot avoid this period; we are in
it now."
The Capitalization of Democracy
Democracy is accepted in
theory by more people than ever before as the best form of political
organization, but it has been "hacked" by large corporations (defined
as "persons" by the Supreme Court) and special interests corrupting
the political system with obscene amounts of money (defined as
"speech" by the same court).
Capitalism, for its part,
is accepted by more people than ever before as a superior form of economic
organization, but is – in its current form – failing to measure and include the
categories of "value" that are most relevant to the solutions we need
in order to respond to this threatening crisis (clean air and water, safe food,
a benign climate balance, public goods like education and a greener
infrastructure, etc.).
Pressure for meaningful
reform in democratic capitalism is beginning to build powerfully. The
progressive introduction of Internet-based communication is laying the foundation for the renewal of
individual participation in democracy, and the re-elevation of reason over
wealth and power as the basis for collective decision making. And the growing
levels of inequality worldwide, combined with growing structural unemployment
and more frequent market disruptions (like the Great Recession), are building
support for reforms in capitalism.
We need to establish
"green banks" that provide access to capital investment necessary to
develop: renewable energy, an electrified transportation fleet, the
retrofitting of buildings to reduce wasteful energy consumption, and the full
integration of sustainability in the design and architecture of cities and
towns. While the burning of fossil fuels is the largest cause of the climate
crisis, deforestation and "factory farming" also play an important
role. Financial and technological approaches to addressing these challenges are
emerging, but we must continue to make progress in converting to sustainable
forestry and agriculture.
The Politics of It All
In order to
accomplish these policy shifts, we must not only put a price on carbon in
markets, but also find a way to put a price on climate denial in our politics.
We already know the reforms that are needed – and the political will to enact
them is a renewable resource. Yet the necessary renewal can only come from an
awakened citizenry
Three years ago, in these
pages, I criticized President Obama for his hesitation at the disastrous
meeting in Copenhagen four and a half years ago, but now it is abundantly
evident that he has taken hold of the challenge with determination and seriousness
of purpose. The president is clearly changing his overall policy emphasis to
make CO2 reductions a much higher priority now and has made a series of
inspiring speeches that should guarantee a good reception at the meeting in Paris at the end of 2015
And there are signs that a
way forward may be opening up. In May, I attended a preparatory session in Abu Dhabi, UAE, to bolster commitments from
governments, businesses and nongovernmental organizations ahead of this
September's U.N. Climate Summit. There were welcome changes in rhetoric, and it
was clear that the reality of the climate crisis is now weighing on almost
every nation. Moreover, there were encouraging reports from around the world
that many of the policy changes necessary to solve the crisis are being adopted
piecemeal by a growing number of regional, state and city governments.
I believe there is a
realistic hope that momentum toward a global agreement will continue to build
in September and carry through to the Paris negotiations in late 2015. I am
among the growing number of people who are allowing themselves to become more
optimistic than ever that a bold and comprehensive pact may well emerge from
the Paris negotiations late next year, which many regard as the last chance to
avoid our civilization’s catastrophe while there is still time.
It will be
essential for the United States and other major historical emitters
cooperate and that is a beginning:
1. European Union has announced its
commitment to achieve a 40-percent reduction
2. Finland has pledged to reduce emissions 80
percent by 2050
3. China's new president, Xi Jinping is
changing things and China and the U.S. have jointly reached an important
agreement to limit another potential threat.
4. The prime minister of India announced the world's most
ambitious plan to accelerate the transition to solar electricity.
There is
indeed, literally, light at the end of the tunnel, but there is a tunnel, and
we are well into it.
The End
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Blaine Barrett
