Recession should push US businesses to cut their energy use and invest more in renewable energy, a senior US bureaucrat says. But Andy Karsner, assistant secretary in the US Department of Energy, said his country was highly unlikely to follow Australia's example and sign the Kyoto Protocol no matter who went on to win the race for the White House. In an interview with BusinessDay during his Australian tour, Mr Karsner said US businesses were preparing for a recession and looking for ways to cut the cost of their operations as Wall Street had its fourth consecutive day of falls on Friday. "There are always the unintended consequences of an event this macro, but a recession will affect the price signal of carbon and affect the planning," Mr Karsner said.
"If people are wanting to bank on price stability to take away an increasing cost that they have in operation and energy, and to take away the volatile characteristics of energy and the price itself, then they are going to invest more and invest faster in energy efficiency and renewables. That is fuelling our unprecedented growth rates right now," he said.
He said the presidential candidates on both sides of politics had been light on detail in terms of energy policy. "That is probably because of where they are in the primaries," he said. "Having said that, all the candidates are fiercely competing on who loves renewable energy more, who's greener. I try to remind people, no matter what party the candidates come from, to force out a discussion on the more challenging aspects. We need them to rise to the leadership so they can tackle the serious part of the challenge, not just the easy parts."
The Democratic candidates have all committed to repeal billions of dollars in tax breaks for oil companies and require vehicles to be more fuel efficient. Illinois senator Barack Obama has said he is open to the idea of nuclear being part of the energy mix. The frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, New York senator Hillary Clinton, is "agnostic" on the issue.
Senator Obama has angered environmentalists by supporting the development of coal-based liquid fuels, but has been accused of flip-flopping on the issue by softening his stance. He says he would consider banning new coal-fired power stations, while Senator Clinton, by contrast, supports phased-in carbon capture and storage in new coal plants.
On the other side of the political divide the Republicans are not as willing to impose restrictions on the oil and coal industries. Arizona senator John McCain is one of the greener Republican candidates and has broken ranks with some of his colleagues in opposing some oil and gas drilling projects. Senator McCain and Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, are the only Republican candidates to support an US cap on greenhouse gas emissions. Mr Huckabee, who has a large following among the evangelical Christian community, has been quoted as saying action on climate change is a moral issue. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and another frontrunner for the Republican nomination, has been critical of big renewable energy projects.
Mr Karsner said the fact the US was the only developed country not to sign and ratify the Kyoto Protocol had not been made a political issue. "I don't imagine any instance of any party of any candidate whereby the Kyoto treaty would be signed and ratified by the US," he said.
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The Conspiracy to Deny the Poor Mobility - and Opportunity
Mobility is prosperity-a fact that humans have recognized since the dawn of civilization, when population centers arose next to navigable waterways. Yet this simple fact seems to evade many pundits, environmental activists-and even screenwriters. Screenwriters? Yes. One of the most reprehensible hours in TV history occurred on March 18, 2001-the airing of the fourth episode of "The Lone Gunmen," the short-lived "X-Files" spinoff about three conspiracy-mongering oddballs who conduct their own investigations into government skullduggery-usually through sophisticated computer hacking-which they publish in a newsletter titled, of course, The Lone Gunman.
This one episode involves the covering up-by oil companies, who else?-of a car that runs on water. At the end of the episode, the three Gunmen, after much skulking around, find the car's prototype and test it-and find that it works! However, rather than thwart Big Oil's machinations, the Gunmen decide to keep the car's existence under wraps, lest too many people acquire such an easy and inexpensive form of transportation, which would lead to an environmental catastrophe. Of course, this is functionally the exact same thing that the oil companies did, but it was done not for grubby profit, but to save the poor from themselves. Nice.
That sanctimonious episode was fiction, but art imitated life last week in a way annoyingly reminiscent of it. On January 8, India's Tata Motors unveiled the Nano, the world's cheapest car, which will retail for about $2,500. A new means of transport may be good news for the poor-but don't tell green activists, some of whom are already complaining. "There is this mad rush towards lowering the prices to achieve mass affordability," Anumita Roychoudhury of the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi, told Britain's Observer newspaper. "If vehicle ownership increases very rapidly, we'll have a time bomb ticking away. When you lower the price that drastically, how will you be able to meet the safety and emissions standards?"
On what universe is "mass affordability" of something useful a bad thing? Well, maybe one as crazy as the one of conspiracy that the Lone Gunmen inhabited. Thankfully, most people don't inhabit worlds like that. As the Observer further notes, "These concerns are of little interest to millions of Indians who aspire to owning a car." However, some green activists and pundits do seem to live in such a world-and nothing's going to keep them from telling Indians what's best for them.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman reacted to the first news of the Nano's planned introduction with a hysterical call of "No, No, No, Don't Follow Us"-us being the industrialized West and the place to not follow into being access to one's own wheels. "We have no right to tell Indians what cars to make or drive," Friedman admits. "But we can urge them to think hard about following our model, without a real mass transit alternative in place." And how might those alternatives come about? India, he says, "should leapfrog us, not copy us. Just as India went from no phones to 250 million cellphones-skipping costly land lines and ending up with, in many ways, a better and cheaper phone system than we have-it should try the same with mass transit."
Friedman can urge away all he wants, but the policy he proposes has little use for moral suasion. Approvingly citing Sunita Narain, direct or New Delhi's Center for Science and Environment, he says that, "India can't ban a $2,500 car, but it can tax it like crazy until it has a mass transit system that can give people another cheap mobility option." Narain told Friedman, apparently with a straight face, "I am not fighting the small car. I am simply asking for many more buses and bus lanes." Taxing something "like crazy" is "not fighting" it? Could even the Lone Gunmen encounter such a conspiracy against simple economic logic as this?
Hopefully people concerned about transport in India-and other developing countries where Tata hopes to eventually export the Nano-will have no truck with such views. Vivek Sharma, a columnist with the Indian business website domain-b.com, says plainly that Friedman and other critics of the Tata Nano are "barking up the wrong tree and some of their arguments are elitist and discriminatory." "The less affluent cannot be denied the safety and comfort of a cheap four-wheeled vehicle, only because the existing infrastructure will come under further strain," says Sharma. "Any move to restrict the number of cars should apply to all vehicles, irrespective of their cost." Regarding safety, Sharma notes that Tata has too much of a reputation to protect cut corners on safety, and that many of the Nano's potential buyers are riding scooters today, which are less safe than any enclosed car.
And, as Barun Mitra of India's Liberty Institute notes, "As more Indians learn to drive, the appreciation of basic road rules and etiquettes will improve, as drivers begin to realize that the purpose of the rules are not to hinder movement, but to facilitate it." Moreover, Mitra notes, greater mobility could help relieve congestion over the long term by allowing lower-density development, and that would encourage the building of new-and upgrading of existing-infrastructure. But that involves building, which the greens hate.
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Geologist Velasco asks: Climate change, is it real?
I never was a cineaste. I watch an average of two or three movies a year, almost never rent DVDs and am dependent on watching cooking shows on TV for mindless entertainment. As a result, while every other person on earth had already seen "An Inconvenient Truth", I was able to see it just last week - and only because it was shown in my PhD class. Talk about living under a rock.
So many thoughts swirled in my head at the unfolding of Al Gore's narrative on the inevitable demise of the planet due to global warming. He presented alarming trends that would supposedly result in the melting of the polar ice caps, cataclysmic weather patterns, drought and floods. He said that by 2025, the brunt of the effects of 21st century carbon dioxide emissions would be felt by the inhabitants of the planet. And that unless we did something now, right now, the Philippines would be buried 20 meters under the sea.
I took it all with (no pun intended) a grain of salt. But I will be straightforward in answering this column's title. Yes, the climate is changing, that is true. I will not deny to feeling disturbed by allegations that the decimation of the human race is being caused by the burning of colossal amounts of fossil fuel. However and contrary to what is being driven in the documentary again and again, we have to be cognizant that climate change is a natural phenomenon.
As a geologist, I know that fluctuations in global temperatures are as old as the earth itself. For the past several million years, the pattern of rising temperatures often heralded the onset of a new ice age. It may seem incomprehensible but you can check the science. If the planet gets hotter, it does not mean that the rise will go on and on and cause the planet to self-destruct. If that were the case, we would have been annihilated millions of years ago.
After some time, rising global temperatures actually instigate the earth to go on a self-conserving mode, causing it to cool down. In four thousand years or less, the planet will be covered by sheets of ice and some tropical countries may experience snow for the first time - it's too bad we won't be around to frolic in a winter wonderland.
Another case in point is the fact that the earth was much, much hotter four hundred years ago than it is now, a time known as the Medieval Heat period. Four hundred years ago, there were no cars, no coal-burning factories and no significant sources of carbon dioxide pollution. If global warming is due to the burning of fossil fuel, how come it was hotter four hundred years ago? And how does one explain the cyclical spikes and lags in earth temperatures ever since the world began if human beings are the instigators of global warming?
I could give you all the facts, and we would never see the end of it. Climate change has been a topic of hot debate between the leading scientific minds ever since Al Gore stopped being vice president and became an environmental activist. He is charming and, in the documentary, comes across as sincere, earnest and knowledgeable.
Heck, he even got a Nobel Peace Prize for giving the same presentation thousands of times. There were moments when I almost got carried away by the tone of his voice, his expressions, the lines on his face. His performance was flawless, and I began to understand why he is a successful politician.
Al Gore and his believers, however, are guilty of something. They are guilty, not of willfully perpetuating the greatest hoax in recent times or of insisting that those who do not believe in their cause believe that the earth is flat. I can forgive them of that. As a scientist, what I find unforgivable is their vanity. Yes, they are guilty of vanity. The coverage given to the phenomenon of global warming is an indicator that man believes he is not just a mere speck in an unfathomably large universe but such a significant part of it, that he holds more power over the earth than all the forces of the cosmos combined.
Last decade, the issue was the ozone layer. What did we do? We banned aerosols and chlorofluorocarbons. The issue has died down and recent studies show that the hole in the ozone has gotten smaller. But really, how many percent of that recovery was because we stopped using aqua net? Not much. It truly is a humbling reality check, but you should know that our ozone layer regenerates itself even if we all just used conditioner.
Am I refusing to accept the fact that the planet is indeed getting warmer? Of course not, because the earth is indeed getting warmer - as it has a few hundred times before. Am I refusing to accept the fact that we need to do something about carbon dioxide emissions? Of course not, because indiscriminately burning fossil fuels lowers the quality of our living environment and causes respiratory sicknesses and mars the beauty of a clear night sky with sickening smog.
But to jump to the conclusion that the planet will drown, the weather will go berserk and the earth will turn against us because we release a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is preposterous, extremely alarmist and borders on lunacy.
Our love for the environment should be anchored on understanding that to love the planet means to love the place we live in and, consequently, increasing the quality of the life that we live on our short stay on earth. But to scare ourselves with doomsday scenarios is not only inconvenient but also very unnecessary.
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Clouds over global warming
I admit that I'm no science guy, and much less a techie. But precisely because of this, the dummies, short for the rest of humanity and me, expect our scientists and intellectuals to get their act together and stop confusing us. Doom-watching is not a favorite pastime for many. What is it really? Are we supposed to be alarmed by an impending calamity? Why this all-of-a-sudden, hysterical blame on man as cause of this coming catastrophe? It's like our emitting carbon is now a sin! Or are you, the brighties, supposed to study more, gathering more data, sifting through them, analyzing, comparing, discussing among your clever selves to come out with more educated and realistic consensus?
It's not good that the scientific debate be selective and tilted to favor the alarmists. We have had enough doomsday seers through the years, and hardly any of them turned out to be prophetic. I still remember the population explosion scare. The only thing that exploded was their wild extrapolations. In fact, in many places, especially in the developed countries, what we have is depopulation.
To date, the global warming doomsayers have made a number of false and inconsistent claims. Some forecasters said that the year 2007 would be the hottest so far. It turned out not to be so. The lowering and rising of ice levels in the Arctic and Antarctica are at best inconclusive. We should not fuss about them. I read somewhere that before Al Gore got his Nobel Peace Prize, the English high court ruled that his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, could not be shown in schools without teachers providing additional materials to correct nine "significant errors."
Among the errors: that Pacific atolls are being evacuated because of rising sea levels and that polar bears are drowning because they have to swim up to 60 miles to find ice. The court found no evidence to support these claims. So far, most findings are largely speculative, derived from computer-simulated models that hardly match with facts.
It would also be interesting to look into the business aspects of this issue. Those peddling doom are generating lots of moolah due to the scare, and are now into heavy venture capital investing. There's reason to suspect that many scientists are colluding with big business. Also, that this scare is to prime and herd us to some kind of global government.
Making things worse are the inflationary factors infused into the issue by some sectors of the media and a few Church figures. They give their two-cents worth without having a good grasp of the matter.
It seems that some people get riveted to this issue because they would have another battle cry against their favorite culprits-the rich, the powerful, the government, the Establishment, Western world, etc.
In our case, for example, since we are still skirmishing about the population issue, rendering the global warming issue in terrorizing tones would favor those who are for population control. It would relieve the tired ploys of population controllers of such guises as reproductive health, freedom of choice, women's rights, etc. It would certainly expose the evil of bearing carbon-producing babies....
But let's really see whether there's rational and scientific basis for the tempest this issue has spawned. Let's avoid "scientific" stretches used to fuel a world terror.
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A Warmist who sees the problems:
Although he abuses George Bush, he too is advocating technological fixes -- such as more use of nukes. He even wants more GM crops!
If there was ever an example of humankind being unable to bear too much reality, it is the current debate on climate change. No reasonable person any longer doubts that the world is heating up or that this change has been triggered by human activity. Aside from a dwindling band that rejects the clear findings of science, everyone accepts that we face an unprecedented challenge. At the same time, there is a pervasive belief that this is a crisis that can be solved by feelgood gestures such as eating organic foods and refusing to fly or installing a wind turbine on the roof
When it comes to deciding what should be done, most people, including the majority of environmentalists, shrink from the discomfort that goes with realistic thinking. George W Bush seems to have been persuaded that climate science is not a left-wing conspiracy to destroy the American economy. Along with the rest of our political leaders, however, he continues to insist there are no limits to growth. As long as we adopt new technologies that are supposedly environment-friendly, such as biofuels, economic expansion can go on as before.
At the other end of the spectrum, greens put their faith in sustainable growth and renewable energy. The root of the environmental crisis, they say - and here they agree with Bush - is our addiction to fossil fuels. If only we switch to wind, wave and solar power, all will be well.
In political terms, Bush and the greens could not be further apart, but they are as one in resisting the most fundamental fact about the environmental crisis, which is that it cannot be resolved without a major reduction in our impact on the Earth. This means curbing the production of greenhouse gases, but here fashionable policies can be self-defeating. The shift to biofuels, led by Bush but which is also underway in other parts of the world involves further destruction of rainforest, a key natural regulator of the climate. Reducing emissions while destroying the planet's natural mechanisms for soaking them up is not a solution. It is a recipe for disaster.
Yet standard green prescriptions are not much better. Many renewables are not as efficient or as eco-friendly as they are made out to be. Unsightly and inefficient wind farms will not enable us to give up fossil fuels, while large-scale hydroelectric power has major environmental costs. Moving over to organic methods of food production can have significant benefits in terms of animal welfare and reducing fuel costs, but it does nothing to stop the devastation of wilderness that goes with expanding farming to feed a swelling human population.
So conventional green nostrums are not all that different from Bush's business-as-usual policies. In each case, the end-result can only be a planet gutted of biodiversity, with humanity exposed to an increasingly hostile environment. To some extent, technology may be able to replace the biosphere that has been destroyed, but, like an obese patient hooked up to an artificial life-support system, we will be living on borrowed time. One day, the machine will stop.
The uncomfortable fact, which is ignored or denied by both ends of the environmental debate, is that an energy-intensive lifestyle of the kind enjoyed in the rich parts of the world cannot be extended to a human population of nine or 10 billion, the level forecast in UN studies for the middle of this century. In terms of resources, human numbers are already unsustainable. Global warming is the flipside of worldwide industrialisation, a side-effect of the dash for growth, and the reserves of oil and natural gas on which industry depends are peaking at just the point when demand for them is rising fast.
Contrary to the greens, there is not the remotest prospect that the world will renounce the use of fossil fuels. Ask any competent energy economist and you will discover that no expansion of renewables can satisfy the demand for energy that is being generated in China and India. Anyway, does anyone really expect the countries getting rich from hydrocarbons - Russia, Iran, Venezuela and the Gulf States - to give them up? As long as there is enough demand, these countries will continue extracting fossil fuels.
The only way forward is to curb the need for fossil fuels, while at the same time, since there is no way of giving them up altogether, making them cleaner. This means making full use of technologies many environmentalists view with superstitious horror. Nuclear energy has well-known problems of security and waste disposal and it is nothing like a universal panacea. Even so, demonising it is conventional green thinking at its delusional worst. Though solar power has potential, no type of renewable energy can replace the dirty fuels of the industrial past.
If we reject the nuclear option, we will inevitably end up going back to coal. There are emerging technologies that can make coal cleaner. That is no reason for turning our back on nuclear, which is already virtually emission-free. A similar reasoning applies to GM crops. Genetic engineering involves a type of human intervention in natural processes whose risks are not yet fully known. But the practical alternative is to carry on with industrial-style agriculture, whose destructive impact is all too clear.
Any feasible remedy for the environmental crisis involves high-tech solutions. The aim should not be to master nature or turn it into a mere resource for humans to exploit, as Bush and the greens, in their different ways, end up doing. Given the legitimate aspirations of people in developing countries, only a high-tech strategy has any chance of reducing the human footprint. But it will also be necessary to breach what has become the ultimate taboo and face up to the reality of population pressure.
Green activists, free-market economists and religious fundamentalists may not seem to have much in common, but they are all agreed there can be no such thing as overpopulation, or at any rate, nothing that can't be solved by better distribution, faster growth or a change in human values.
Actually, the perennially unpopular Rev Thomas Malthus was closer to the truth when, at the end of the 18th century, he argued that population growth would finally overtake food production. Industrial farming was supposed to make famine impossible. But it turns out to have been heavily dependent on cheap oil, and with farmland being lost as a result of the switch to biofuels, limits on food production are re-emerging. Far more than fantastical schemes for renewable energy, we need to ensure that contraception and abortion are freely available everywhere. A world of fewer people would be far better placed to deal with climate change than the heavily overpopulated one we are heading for now.
Despite unstoppable global warming, a humanly liveable world is still worth striving for. But it requires a sustained capacity for realistic thinking, which is not the strong point of the environmental movement. Along with the political classes, greens are in denial. While there is no technical fix for the human condition, intelligent use of technology is indispensable in coping with environmental disruption that is now unavoidable. It would be ironic if, because of their irrational hostility to high-tech solutions, the greens were to end up as much a threat to the environment as George W Bush.
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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