I was excited tonight to see that Justin Gillis has launched a monthly column on climate change, the energy challenge and related issues in Science Times (his new home) . The column, taking the "By Degrees" name from the paper's 2009 series on responses to global warming, won't capture everything that the closed Green blog covered, but demonstrates the paper's (and of course Justin's) commitment to this super wicked issue.
Here are two excerpts from his first piece, "In Search of Energy Miracles":
The core:
A lot of smart people are coming to see the energy problem as the defining challenge of the 21st century. We have to supply power and transportation to an eventual population of 10 billion people who deserve decent lives, and we have to do it while limiting the emissions that threaten our collective future.
Yet we have already poured so much carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere that huge, threatening changes to the world's climate appear to be inevitable. And instead of slowing down, emissions are speeding up as billions of once-destitute people claw their way out of poverty, powered by fossil fuels.
Many environmentalists believe that wind and solar power can be scaled to meet the rising demand, especially if coupled with aggressive efforts to cut waste. But a lot of energy analysts have crunched the numbers and concluded that today's renewables, important as they are, cannot get us even halfway there.
A section on a variety of approaches to expanded use of nuclear power is followed by this coda:
Yet not even the speedy Chinese are likely to get a sizable reactor built before the 2020s, and that is true for the other nuclear projects as well. So even if these technologies prove to work, it would not be surprising to see the timeline for widespread deployment slip to the 2030s or the 2040s. And climate scientists tell us it would be folly to wait that long to start tackling the emissions problem.
Two approaches to the issue — spending money on the technologies we have now, or investing in future breakthroughs — are sometimes portrayed as conflicting. In reality, that is a false dichotomy. The smartest experts say we have to pursue both tracks at once, and much more aggressively than we have been doing.
In effect, our national policy now is to sit on our hands hoping for energy miracles, without doing much to call them forth.
While we dawdle, maybe the Chinese will develop a nice business selling us thorium reactors based on our old designs. For communists, they do have an entrepreneurial bent.
But surely we would all feel better about the future if the full creative power of American capitalism were unleashed on the climate problem.
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