Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (19 page)

Burlington’s experience demonstrates how much can, indeed, be accomplished through local action. In the sixteen years since Clavelle became mayor, electricity usage in the state of Vermont has risen by nearly 15 percent. In Burlington, by contrast, it has dropped by one percent. The savings were achieved entirely through voluntary measures, by homeowners and businesses who, presumably, came to see controlling their utility bills as in their own self-interest.

But Burlington’s experience also makes the limits of local action obvious. The biggest reductions were achieved early on, when the city approved a bond issue to fund energy conservation projects. As the most inefficient homes and businesses in the city were upgraded, gains became harder and harder to come by. Since the 10 percent challenge was initiated, in 2002, electricity demand in the city has actually started to creep back up again and is now slightly higher than it was at the campaign’s launch. Meanwhile, whatever savings have been made in electricity usage have been offset by increased CO
₂
emissions from other sources, mostly cars and trucks. As we were heading back to City Hall, I asked Clavelle what more could be done.

“It would be so much easier if we could say, ‘Well, if we approved this one project or this action, the problem would be solved,’ ” he told me. “But there’s no silver bullet. There’s no one thing we can do. There’s no
ten
things we can do. There’s hundreds and hundreds of things that we need to do.

“I’m frustrated,” he said. “But you need to remain hopeful.”

The headquarters of the Natural Resources Defense Council are situated on West Twentieth Street in Manhattan. The offices, which occupy the top three floors of a twelve-story art deco building, were designed in 1989 as a prototype for energy-efficient urban life, with “occupancy sensors” that shut off the lights automatically when no one’s around and special polymer-coated windows that help keep out heat. A large skylight above the staircase is supposed to provide natural light to the reception area, though after fifteen years the glass has been coated with a fine layer of New York grime.

David Hawkins runs NRDC’s climate program. He is tall and thin, with dark, wavy hair and a gentle manner. Hawkins joined the environmental group thirty-five years ago, fresh out of law school, and has worked there ever since, with one break, in the late 1970s, when he served as head of the EPA’s air quality division. These days, he spends a lot of his time in China, meeting with officials at places like the National Development and Reform Commission and the Shanxi Institute of Coal Chemistry.

Over the next fifteen years, the size of China’s economy is expected to more than double. This projected growth, most of which will be fueled by coal, overwhelms not just all conservation projects that are currently being undertaken in the United States, but also any that could be reasonably imagined. Hawkins gave me a copy of a presentation he had prepared on future power plant construction. In it was a graph detailing China’s plans: by 2010, the country is expected to build 150 new one thousand-megawatt coal plants (or their generating equivalent); by 2020, it is expected to construct another 168 new plants. If every single town and city in the United States were to match the efforts that Burlington has made, the aggregate savings would amount—very roughly—to 1.3 billion tons of carbon over the next several decades. Meanwhile, the lifetime emissions just from the new coal plants China is expected to build would amount to some 25 billion tons of carbon. To put this somewhat differently, China’s new plants would burn through all of Burlington’s savings—past, present, and future—in less than two and a half hours.

Despair might seem the logical response to such figures. In this way, the hazard of looking objectively at global warming can be almost as great as refusing to see the problem at all. Hawkins, though, is an optimist—perhaps by professional necessity. “If you’re looking at global warming, you look at what the emissions are from the large industrial and industrializing countries,” he told me. “And it doesn’t take very long to conclude that you can’t solve this problem unless you deal with the United States and China, and if you deal with the United States and China, you can solve this problem.”

“China is in the takeoff stage,” he went on. “So there’s an opportunity to build things there using modern technology rather than to build them using pickup technology. And that’s the challenge for us: to do things that convince the Chinese that that’s the better strategy for them.”

Right now, he pointed out, China is industrializing according to a model set in the United States forty or fifty years ago: its factories rely on obsolete and highly inefficient motors; its electricity transmission system is antiquated; and although it is the world’s primary manufacturer of compact fluorescent bulbs, it barely uses any. (Per unit of gross domestic product, China consumes two and a half times as much energy as the United States and nearly nine times as much as Japan.) Were China to bring its factories up to date and fill even a modest amount of its projected energy demand from renewable sources, it is estimated that the number of new coal-fired plants it would need to build could be cut by nearly a third.

At this point, China is building only conventional coal-fired plants. For technical reasons, “carbon capture and storage,” or CCS, isn’t feasible with this type of plant. But if China were to shift to a method known as coal gasification, then—potentially at least—the CO
₂
emissions from the new plants could be captured and sequestered. In that case, their carbon emissions would be substantially lower—possibly zero. It is estimated that together, coal gasification technology and carbon capture and storage would add 40 percent to the costs of a new plant. (This is an imprecise figure, since CCS has never actually been tried at a commercial power plant.) Hawkins has calculated that even assuming such a high differential cost, the added expense of carbon capture and storage for all the new coal plants expected to be built in all of the world’s developing nations could be paid for through a one percent tax on the electricity bills of consumers in developed nations. “So it is affordable,” he told me.

China’s growth is often cited as a justification for U.S. inaction. What’s the point of going to a lot of trouble if, in the end, your efforts won’t make a difference? Hawkins maintains that this argument gets things completely backward. What America does, China in the long run will do too. “This isn’t theory,” he said. “We saw it with automobile pollution controls. We adopted those in the seventies and those modern pollution controls are being required around the world today. Sulfur dioxide scrubbers on power plants—we applied them; China is now applying them. There’s a very practical reason why this works, and that is if a country like the United States embraces a cleanup technology, then the market starts to drive the price down, and other countries start to see that it is doable.” Although no new coal-fired power plants have been built in the United States in recent years, many analysts expect this to change in the coming decade. Hawkins argues that American utilities should be prohibited from constructing any new plants without CCS capability.

“If we can get policies adopted that prevent the U.S. from building new coal plants that don’t capture their emissions and create incentives for the Chinese to build new coal plants that will capture their emissions, then it doesn’t matter if there’s an international treaty or not,” he said. “If we get the facts on the ground right, we’ve bought time.”

Chapter 10

Man in the Anthropocene

A few years ago, in an essay in
Nature
, the Nobel Prize–winning Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen coined a term. No longer, he wrote, should we think of ourselves as living in the Holocene. Instead, an epoch unlike any of those which preceded it had begun. This new age was defined by one creature—man—who had become so dominant that he was capable of altering the planet on a geological scale. Crutzen dubbed this age the “Anthropocene.”

Crutzen’s was not the first such neologism. Already in the 1870s, the Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani argued that human influence was ushering in a new age, which he called the “anthropozoic era.” A few decades later, the Russian geochemist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky proposed that the earth was entering a new stage—the “noosphere”—dominated by human thought. But while these earlier terms had had a positive slant—“I look forward with great optimism … We live in a transition to the noosphere,” Vernadsky wrote—the connotations of the Anthropocene were distinctly cautionary. Humans had become the driving agents on the planet, yet it wasn’t at all clear they knew where they were going.

Crutzen won the Nobel for his work on the chemistry of ozone depletion, a phenomenon that offers many parallels, both scientific and social, to global warming. The most prevalent ozone-destroying chemicals—chlorofluorocarbons—are odorless, colorless, nonreactive, and, much like CO
₂
, apparently benign. (To demonstrate their safety, their inventor once inhaled some CFCs and then used the vapors to blow out a set of birthday candles.) Starting in the 1930s, the “wonder gas” was employed as a refrigerant and in the 1940s as an ingredient in Styrofoam. The first indication that chlorofluorocarbons were anything to worry about didn’t come until the 1970s, when research chemists began to consider—purely as an academic exercise—what would happen to CFCs in the upper atmosphere. They determined that although the chemicals were stable near the earth’s surface, in the stratosphere they wouldn’t be. Once CFCs started to break down, the result would be free chlorine, which, they hypothesized, would work as a catalyst to convert ozone, O
₃
, into ordinary oxygen, O
₂
. Because stratospheric ozone shields the earth from ultraviolet radiation, the researchers warned that continued use of CFCs could have disastrous consequences. F. Sherwood Rowland, who shared the Nobel Prize with Crutzen, came home one night and told his wife, “The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.”

The damaging effects of CFCs were confirmed—rather more dramatically than researchers had anticipated—in the 1980s by the discovery that a “hole” had opened up in the ozone layer over Antarctica. (Confirmation might have come earlier had NASA computers not been programmed to reject as erroneous any data on ozone levels that seemed too low.) Even as evidence of chlorofluorocarbons’ effects accumulated, American chemical manufacturers, who supplied more than a third of the world’s CFCs, continued to resist regulation, arguing on the one hand that more study of the problem was needed and on the other that only unified global action could address it. At one point, President Reagan’s interior secretary, Donald Hodel, suggested that if CFCs were indeed destroying the ozone layer, then people should simply wear sunglasses and buy hats. “People who don’t stand out in the sun—it doesn’t affect them,” he asserted. Finally, in 1987, the Montreal Protocol was agreed to, and the process of phasing out CFCs began. (Chlorofluorocarbons, it should be noted, are also a greenhouse gas.) It is expected that sometime in the next several years, ozone levels will bottom out and then begin to creep back up again. Depending on how you look at things, this resolution represents either a triumph of science, or just the reverse. As Crutzen himself has observed, if chlorine had turned out to behave just slightly differently in the upper atmosphere, or if its chemical cousin bromine had been used in its stead, then by the time anyone had thought to look into the state of the ozone layer, the “ozone hole” would have stretched from one pole to the other.

“More by luck than by wisdom this catastrophic situation did not develop,”he has written.

In the case of global warming, a much longer interval separates theory and observation. According to Crutzen, the Anthropocene began all the way back in the 1780s, the decade in which James Watt perfected his steam engine. Arrhenius undertook his pen and paper calculations in the 1890s. The retreat of the Arctic sea ice, the warming of the oceans, the rapid shrinking of the glaciers, the redistribution of species, the thawing of the permafrost—these are all new phenomena. It is only in the last five or ten years that global warming has finally emerged from the background “noise” of climate variability. And even so, the changes that can be seen lag behind the changes that have been set in motion. The warming that has been observed so far is probably only about half the amount required to bring the planet back into energy balance. This means that even if carbon dioxide were to remain stable at today’s levels, temperatures would still continue to rise, glaciers to melt, and weather patterns to change for decades to come.

But CO
₂
levels are
not
going to remain stable. Just to slow the growth, as Socolow and Pacala’s “wedge” scheme illustrates, is a hugely ambitious undertaking, one that would require new patterns of consumption, new technologies, and new politics. Whether the threshold for “dangerous anthropogenic interference” is 450 parts per million of CO
₂
or 500, or even 550 or 600, the world is rapidly approaching the point at which, for all practical purposes, the crossing of that threshold will become impossible to prevent. To refuse to act, on the grounds that still more study is needed or that meaningful efforts are too costly or that they impose an unfair burden on industrialized nations, is not to put off the consequences, but to rush toward them. The British magazine
New Scientist
recently ran a global warming Q&A, which ended with the question, “How worried should we be?” The answer was another question: “How lucky do you feel?”

Luck and resourcefulness are, of course, essential human qualities. People are always imagining new ways to live, and then figuring out ways to remake the world to suit what they’ve imagined. This capacity has allowed us, collectively, to overcome any number of threats in the past, some imposed by nature and some by ourselves. It could be argued, taking this long view, that global warming will turn out to be just one more test in a sequence that already stretches from plague and pestilence to the prospect of nuclear annihilation. If, at this moment, the bind that we’re in seems insoluble, once we’ve thought long and hard enough about it we’ll find—or perhaps, float—our way clear.