Harder, better, faster, stronger
BILL MCKIBBEN noted last month that the political system is not generating results that are in line with what climate scientists are saying about the rapidity of global warming. And that's true. People have a pretty limited ability to assimilate information and incorporate it into a social consensus, and global economic growth is altering the planet a lot faster than we're altering our politics. Something similar apparently happened on Easter Island a while back.
But on a brighter note, there's something else that's changing a lot faster than people are capable of assimilating: the science and technology of how to slow global warming. People just don't seem to realise how easy it would be to dramatically reduce carbon emissions. Two f'rinstances:
Dave Leonhardt reports in today's New York Times on the Obama administration's growing enthusiasm for a "cash-for-caulkers" programme to subsidise home weatherisation. Two versions of the idea are being promoted by John Doerr, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and Bill Clinton. The Doerr plan would spend $23 billion over two years to subsidise half the cost to homeowners of home weatherisation, which generally costs $2,000 to $4,000 per home. The Clinton plan would use money from the stimulus bill that hasn't been spent yet, and covers commercial buildings as well as homes. Weatherisation puts unemployed construction contractors to work, and generally pays for itself within a decade in lower energy costs. More important, buildings generate more CO2 than the transportation sector does.
A McKinsey report in July concluded America could spend $520 billion on improving buildings' energy efficiency through 2020, reap $1.2 trillion in energy savings, and reduce CO2 emissions by 1.1 gigatonnes per year—the equivalent of taking every car and light truck off America's roads.
If weatherising buildings saves money, why aren't people already doing it? The McKinsey report explains that extremely well:
Energy efficiency measures typically require a substantial upfront investment in exchange for savings that accrue over the lifetime of the deployed measures. Additionally, efficiency potential is highly fragmented, spread across more than 100 million locations and billions of devices used in residential, commercial, and industrial settings... Finally, measuring and verifying energy not consumed is by its nature difficult.
So there you go: lots of potential for saving energy, if you can organise people with the right incentives. Which brings us to our second easier-than-people-realise global-warming fighter: dispersed generation of electricity from solar photovoltaic panels. Todd Woody writes at Grist.org that thin-film solar panels have evolved so fast and dropped so rapidly in price that industry analysts like Black & Veatch are having to rewrite their reports.
In short, solar panel prices have plummeted so much as to make viable the prospect of generating gigawatts of electricity from rooftops and photovoltaic farms built near cities.
“This has pretty significant implications in terms of transmission planning,” Ryan Pletka, Black & Veatch’s renewable energy project manager, told me last week. “What we thought would happen in a five-year time frame has happened in one year.”
California has mandated 60,000 gigawatt hours of renewable-energy electric generation by 2020. Originally, "distributed generation" (ie, photovoltaic cells on homeowners' and businesses' roofs and buildings) wasn't supposed to play much of a role in that goal; instead the state relied on huge new solar projects out in the desert, which in turn required large transmission projects to bring the electricity to cities. But with the drop in price for thin-film solar panels, it may now be cheaper and faster to pay urban homeowners and businesses to deploy solar panels and feed their electricity into the grid than to build giant projects far from cities. Just last year, Black & Veatch estimated distributed generation could meet just 2,000 megawatt hours; Mr Pletka now estimates it could contribute 40,000 gigawatt hours, or two-thirds of the total demand.
So, yeah, things are moving too fast, and we can't keep up. But some of the things that are moving too fast to keep up with are going in the right direction.
(2009)
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democ...aster_stronger
