On the Energy Gap and Climate Crisis

It’s worth beginning Dot Earth’s new iteration with a few straightforward points about humans and their planet that I feel are powerfully established. Below, I start with several thoughts on energy and climate. In coming days, along with a regular flow of news-driven posts, I’ll add similar foundation-building pieces on relations between people and Earth’s other inhabitants and on ways to mesh humanity’s infinite aspirations with life on a finite planet.

1) Energy matters. Energy can produce bountiful supplies of drinking water. Energy enables food production, storage and dispersal. Energy enables mobility, connectedness, health and comfort. The late Nobelist in chemistry, Richard Smalley, devoted the last years of his life to delivering an admirable distillation of the benefits of abundant energy, and need for an energy quest.

2) Even with spreading efforts to conserve energy, a world heading toward roughly 9 billion people seeking decent lives will require far more of this resource than today’s supplies and systems can provide. There is already an enormous energy gap on the planet, with some 2 billion people lacking the simple gift of illumination or a clean source of heat for cooking meals.

3) If countries like China and India follow the American pattern in transportation, ballooning demand for oil is bound to be a disruptive influence on world affairs with or without the climate impact of all those additional emissions of greenhouse gases. Think of it this way; the United States, with 307 million (heading toward 400 million) people, now consumes nearly 20 million barrels a day; India, with more than 1.1 billion people, is barely in first gear, currently using 2.67 million barrels of oil but poised for vastly increased demand. Add in projections of car use in China and you see why status-quo fuel choices don’t hold up.

4) If humanity stays stuck on the coal rung of the “heat ladder” for another generation, there’s an unacceptable risk of driving disruptive, long-lasting shifts in climate through the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

5) Nonetheless, if I had to choose one of two bumper stickers for our car — CLIMATE CRISIS or ENERGY QUEST — I’d choose the latter. This doesn’t mean I reject the idea that we face a climate crisis. I just don’t think that phrase is a productive way to frame this challenge, particularly as defined over the last few years in the heated policy debate. The definition I’d choose is much like the one stated by Richard Somerville of the University of California, San Diego, during a climate debate several years ago over the proposition that “Global Warming is Not a Crisis.”

Here’s some of what he said (along with a link to the rest):

The motion before us, global warming is not crisis, means we ought to know what crisis means. The word does not mean catastrophe or alarmism. It means a crucial or decisive moment, a turning point, a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent. We are talking about the future here. The entire world now really does have a critical choice to make.

It is whether to continue on the present path of adding more and more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere or whether to find another path. We‘re speaking of the future. And science tells us that the path we choose will largely determine what kind of earth our children and grandchildren will inherit. Read more…

6) The world is not remotely engaged in the kind of energy quest that would be required to fill the gaps defined above. I’m talking about a sustained quest, from the household light socket to the boardroom, the laboratory to the classroom, the smart post-industrial American city to the struggling, (literally) powerless sub-Saharan village. This is not some onerous task, but an active, positive assertion that the ways we harvest and use energy — an asset long taken for granted and priced in ways that mask its broader costs — really do matter. Dry places do this with water all the time. In Israel, there is no toilet without two flush options. It’s not some goofball green concept; it’s just the way things are done.

You’ve heard a lot about an energy revolution of late, involving a (temporary) burst of spending from the stimulus legislation. But it’s building from a paltry base of both public and private investment in the energy arenas where breakthroughs could really expand the menu of energy options required to sustain a prospering, healthy planet as the human growth spurt crests. I’m not saying that a sustained investment in scientific research is remotely sufficient, on its own, to drive an energy transformation. But I do see levels of investment in such inquiry as a proxy for our overall interest in this issue.

Just look at the graph above, which in essence charts half a century of American investment in basic scientific inquiry. (Graph courtesy of Kei Koizumi, formerly of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and now with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.) You can see the space race (yellow) and our passion for medical research (blue), but the green band representing nearly all energy research has the look of a python that swallowed a softball back during the oil crisis. (Click here to see how all of this research relates to the Pentagon’s research budget.) I’ve posted earlier versions of this graph here periodically as kind of a visual mantra. I’ll probably keep it up.

April 8, 10:16 a.m. | Update: I’ve added a followup piece, “Adding a Price to Blunt Energy Waste,” highlighting one expert’s view of the role, in the United States, of getting serious about using pricing to blunt waste and emissions.