Seite 2: Case for the Prosecution: ‘PESSIMISM OF THE INTELLECT’

1. FAREWELL TO THE HOLOCENE

Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.

Last February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which is now twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest storey to the geological column.

The London Society is the world’s oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1808, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale. Stratigraphers slice up Earth’s history as preserved in sedimentary strata into a hierarchy of eons, eras, periods, and epochs marked by the “golden spikes” of mass extinctions, speciation events, and/or abrupt changes in atmospheric chemistry.

In geology, as in biology and history, periodization is a complex, controversial art, and the most bitter feud in nineteenth-century British science -- still known as the “Great Devonian Controversy” -- was fought over competing interpretations of homely Welsh graywackes and English Old Red Sandstone.

As a result, earth science sets extraordinarily rigorous standards for the beatification of any new geological division. Although the idea of an “Anthropocene” epoch – defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force – has long circulated in the literature, stratigraphers have never acknowledged its warrant.

At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised. To the question, “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?,” the twenty-one members of the Commission unanimously answer “yes.” They marshal robust evidence that the Holocene epoch -- the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization -- has ended and that the Earth has entered “a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years”. In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which “now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude,” the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.

This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that “the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.

2. SPONTANEOUS DECARBONIZATION?

The Commission’s coronation of the Anthropocene coincides with growing scientific controversy over the Fourth Assessment Report issued last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC, of course, is mandated to assess the possible range of climate change and establish appropriate targets for the mitigation of emissions. The most critical baselines include estimates of ‘climate sensitivity’ to increasing accumulations of greenhouse gas, as well as socio-economic tableaux that configure different futures of energy use and thus of emissions. But an impressive number of senior researchers, including key participants in the IPCC’s own working groups, have recently expressed unease or disagreement with the methodology of the Fourth Assessment, which they charge is unwarrantly optimistic in its geophysics and social science.

The most celebrated dissenter, as you might know, is James Hansen from NASA’s Godard Laboratory. The Paul Revere of global warming who first warned Congress of the greenhouse peril in a famous 1988 hearing, he returned to Washington this year with the troubling message that the IPCC, through its failure to parameterize crucial Earth-system feedbacks, has given far too much leeway to further carbon emissions. Instead of the IPCC’s proposed red line of 450 ppm carbon dioxide, his research team found compelling paleoclimatic evidence that the threshold of safety was only 350 ppm or even less. The “stunning corollary” of this recalibration of climate sensitivity, he testified, is that “ the oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation.” Indeed, since the current level is about 385 ppm, we may already be past the notorious ‘tipping point.’ Therefore Hansen has mobilized a Quixotic army of scientists and environmental activists including Al Gore and Bill McKibbin to save the world via an emergency carbon tax that would reverse greenhouse concentrations to pre-Bush levels by 2015.

Although I am an earth-science hobbyist who enjoys browsing the technical literature and occasionally chatting with geophysicist friends at Lamont-Doherty, I have no qualification to express an opinion on the Hansen debate or the proper setting on the planetary thermostat. Anyone, however, who is engaged with the social sciences or simply pays regular attention to macro-trends should feel less shy about joining the debate over the other controversial cornerstone of the Fourth Assessment: its socio-economic projections and what we might term their ‘political unconscious.’

The current scenarios were adopted by the IPCC in 2000 to model future global emissions based on different “storylines” about population growth as well as technological and economic development. The Panel’s major scenarios – the A1 family, the B2, and so on - are well-known to policymakers and greenhouse activists, but few outside the research community have actually read the fine print, particularly the IPCC’s heroic confidence that greater energy efficiency will be an “automatic” by-product of future economic growth. Indeed all the scenarios, even the “business as usual” variants, assume that almost 60 per cent of future carbon reduction will occur independently of explicit greenhouse mitigation measures.

The Panel, in effect, has bet the ranch, or rather the planet, on a market-driven evolution toward a post-carbon world economy: a transition that requires not only international emissions caps and carbon trading, but also voluntary corporate commitments to technologies that hardly exist even in prototype, such as carbon capture, hydrogen and advanced transit systems, and cellulosic biofuels. “In many of the SRES [IPPC] illustrative scenarios,” emphasize the contributors to SCOPE’s recent landmark report on The Global Carbon Cycle (2004), “the deployment of non-carbon-emitting energy supply systems exceeds the size of the global energy system in 1990.”

Kyoto-type accords and carbon markets are designed -- almost as analogues to Keynesian “pump-priming” -- to bridge the shortfall between spontaneous decarbonization and the emissions targets required by each scenario. Although the IPCC never spells it out, its mitigation targets necessarily presume that windfall profits from higher fossil fuel prices over the next generation will be efficiently recycled into renewable energy technology and not wasted on mile-high-skyscrapers, asset bubbles, and mega-payouts to shareholders. Overall, the International Energy Agency estimates that it will cost about $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas output by 2050. But without the large quotient of ‘automatic’ progress in energy efficiency, the bridge will never be built and IPPC goals will be unachievable; in the worst case (the straightforward extrapolation of current energy use), carbon emissions could easily triple by mid-century.

In a recent issue of Nature, critics cited the dismal carbon record of the last (or should I say, ‘lost’) decade, to demonstrate that the IPPC baseline assumptions about markets and technology are little more than heroic leaps of faith. Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration’s ‘voluntary’ commitment to achieve an 18 per cent reduction in carbon intensity levels by 2012 has turned out to be a bad joke. European carbon emissions, meanwhile, have been rising (dramatically in some sectors) through early 2008 despite the European Union’s much praised adoption of a cap-and-trade system three years earlier.

Likewise there has been scant evidence in recent years of the automatic progress in energy efficiency that is the sine qua non of IPCC scenarios. Much of what the storylines depict as the efficiency of new technology has in fact been the result of the closing down of heavy industries in the United States, Europe and and the ex-Soviet bloc. The relocation of energy-intensive production to East Asia burnishes the carbon balance sheets of some OECD countries but deindustrialization should not be confused with spontaneous decarbonization. Most researchers believe that energy intensity has actually risen since 2000; that is, global carbon dioxide emissions have kept pace with, or even grown marginally faster than, energy use.

Moreover the IPCC carbon budget has already been broken. At end of September, the Global Carbon Project, which keeps the accounts, reported that emissions have been rising faster than projected even in the IPPC’s worst-case scenario. From 2000 to 2007 carbon dioxide rose by 3.5 per cent annually, compared with the 2.7 per cent in IPCC projections, or the .09 per cent recorded during the 1990s. We are already outside the IPCC envelope, in other words, and coal may be largely to blame for this unforseen acceleration of greenhouse emissions.

Coal production has undergone a dramatic renaissance over the last decade, as nightmares of the nineteenth century return to haunt the twenty-first century. In China five million miners toil under Dickensian conditions to extract the dirty mineral that allows Beijing to open an average of one new coal-fueled power station each week. Coal consumption is also booming in Europe (which has 50 new coal-fueled plants scheduled to open over the next five years) and North America (where 200 plants are planned). In Britain, the Kingsnorth coal-fired power-plant will be a leviathan that produces annual CO2 emissions greater than the combined output of thirty developing countries; similarly, the giant New Dominion plant under construction in Virginia will generate the equivalent of the exhausts of one million cars.

Those scientists like Hansen and reformers like Gore who believe that humanity’s survival depends upon drastic, immediate reductions in coal-fueled emissions will find little solace in projected trends. In a commanding study of The Future of Coal published last year, MIT engineers concluded that coal use would increase under any foreseeable scenario, even in the face of high carbon taxes. Investment in carbon-capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, moreover, is “completely inadequate,” and CCS – assuming that it is actually practical - would not become a utility-scale alternative until 2030 or later.

In the United States, the Bush’s administration’s recent ‘green energy’ legislation has only created a “perverse incentive” for utilities to build more coal-fired plants in the “expectation that emissions from these plants would potentially be ‘grandfathered’ by the grant of free CO2 allowances as part of future carbon emissions regulations.” Meanwhile a a consortium of coal producers, coal-burning utilities, and coal-hauling railroads – calling themselves the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity - spent $40 million over the last election cycle to ensure that both presidential candidates sang in unison about the virtues of the dirtiest but cheapest fuel.

Largely because of the seemingly inexorable popularity of coal, a fossil fuel with a proven 200 year supply, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change finds that the “carbon content per unit of energy is likely to rise.” Indeed, the U.S. Energy Department, before the economy collapsed, projected that national energy production would increase at least 20 per cent over the next generation, while globally the total consumption of fossil fuels is predicted to rise 55 per cent, with international oil exports doubling in volume. The United Nations Development Program, which has made its own study of sustainable energy goals, warns that it will require “a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050 against 1990 levels” to keep humanity outside the red zone of runaway warming, usually defined as a greater than two degrees centigrade increase this century. Yet the International Energy Agency predicts that, in all likelihood, such emissions will actually increase over the next half century period by nearly 100 per cent -- enough greenhouse gas to propel us past several critical tipping points. (The IEA also projects that renewable energy, apart from hydropower, will provide only 4 per cent of electricity generation in 2030 – up from 1 per cent today.)

3. A GREEN RECESSION

The current world recession – a non-linear event of the kind that IPCC scenarists ignore in their storylines – may provide a temporary respite, particularly as depressed oil prices delay the opening of the Pandora’s box of new mega-carbon reservoirs such as tar sands and oil shales. But the slump is unlikely to slow the destruction of the Amazon rainforest because Brazilian farmers will rationally seek to defend gross incomes by expanding production. And because electricity demand is less elastic than automobile use, the share of coal in carbon emissions will continue to increase. In the United States, in fact, coal production is the only civilian industry or economic sector that is currently hiring rather than laying off workers.

More importantly, falling fossil-fuel prices and frozen credit markets are eroding entrepreneurial incentives to develop capital-intensive wind and solar alternatives On Wall Street, eco-energy stocks have slumped faster than the market as a whole and investment capital has virtually disappeared, leaving some of the most celebrated clean-energy start-ups, like Tesla Motors and Clear Skies Solar, in danger of sudden crib death. Tax credits, as advocated by President-elect Obama, are unlikely to reverse this green depression. As one venture capital manager recently told the New York Times, “natural gas at $6 makes wind look like a questionable idea and solar power unfathomably expensive.”

Thus the economic crisis provides a compelling pretext for the groom once again to leave the bride at the altar, as major companies default on their public commitments to renewable energy. In the United States, mega-utilities like Duke Energy and Public Service Enterprise Group have abandoned highly advertised solar and wind energy projects, while Royal Dutch Shell has dropped its plan to invest in the London Array. In Australia, Chevron has protested the Labour government’s cap-and-trade initiative by canceling the development of Gorgon gas field.

Governments and ruling parties have been equally avid to escape their carbon debts. In Canada’s October’s general election, for example, the Conservative Party, supported by Western oil and coal interests, defeated the Liberal’s ‘Green Shift’ agenda based on a national carbon tax, while in Washington the Bush administration scrapped its major carbon-capture technology initiative. On the supposedly greener side of the Atlantic, the Berlusconi regime - which is in the process of converting Italy’s grid from oil to coal - recently denounced the EU goal of cutting emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 as an “unaffordable sacrifice;” while the German government, in the words of the Financial Times, “dealt a severe blow to the proposal to force companies to pay for the carbon dioxide they emit by backing an almost total exemption for industry.” (“This crisis changes priorities,” explained a sheepish German foreign minister.)

Pessimism now abounds. Even Yvo de Boer, the Director of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, concedes that, as long as the economic crisis persists, “most sensible governments will be reluctant to impose new costs on [industry] in the form of carbon-emissions caps.”

Although the election of Barack Obama (and the parallel rise of a new Washington power-structure identified with the information-technology industries) offers hopes of a ‘Green Keynesian’ response to the economic crisis based on public investment in renewable energy, hybrid cars and green jobs, the new president will almost certainly avoid major confrontations with the powerful coal and utility lobbies. And even if Obama did eventually bring Washington into alignment with the Kyoto signatories, he would be joining a process that is widely acknowledged to have failed and which offers little hope or assistance to those who will have the most urgent need to adapt to climate change.

4. THE NORTH’S ECOLOGICAL DEBT

So even if invisible hands and visionary leaders can restart the engines of economic growth, they are unlikely to be able to turn down the global thermostat in time to prevent runaway climate change. Nor should we expect that the G-7 or the G-30 will be eager to clean up the mess they have made.

Climate diplomacy based upon the Kyoto template assumes that all the major actors, once they have accepted the consensus science in the IPCC reports, will recognize an overriding common interest in gaining control over the greenhouse effect. But global warming is not H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, where invading Martians democratically annihilate humanity without class or ethnic distinction. Climate change, instead, will produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes, inflicting the greatest damage upon poor countries with the fewest resources for meaningful adaptation. This geographical separation of emission source from environmental consequence undermines proactive solidarity.

As the United Nations Development Program emphasized in its report last year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, the “two constituencies with little or no political voice.” Coordinated global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC) or the transmutation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened “solidarity” with little precedent in history.

From a rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential “exit” option; that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key countries; and that greenhouse gas mitigation can be achieved without major sacrifices in Northern Hemispheric standards of living -- none of which seem likely. Moreover, there is no shortage of eminent apologists, like Yale economists William Nordhaus and Robert Mendelsohn, ready to explain that it makes more sense to defer abatement until poorer countries become richer and thus more capable of bearing the costs themselves.

In other words, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, growing environmental and socio-economic turbulence may simply drive elite publics into more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity. Global mitigation, in this unexplored but not improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned (as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth’s first-class passengers. The goal would be the creation of green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet.

Of course, there would still be treaties, carbon credits, famine relief, humanitarian acrobatics, and perhaps the full-scale conversion of some European cities and small countries to alternative energy. But worldwide adaptation to climate change, which presupposes trillions of dollars of investment in the urban and rural infrastructures of poor and medium-income countries, as well as the assisted migration of tens of millions of people from Africa and Asia, would necessarily command a revolution of almost mythic magnitude in the redistribution of income and power. Meanwhile we are speeding, faster than we dare imagine, toward a fateful rendezvous around 2030, or even earlier, when the convergent impacts of climate change, peak oil, peak water, and an additional 1.5 billion people on the planet will produce negatives synergies probably beyond our imagination.

Let me repeat this fundamental question: Will rich counties ever mobilize the political will and economic resources to actually achieve IPCC targets or, for that matter, to help poorer countries adapt to the inevitable, already “committed” quotient of warming now working its way through the slow circulation of the world ocean?

More vividly: Will the electorates of the wealthy nations shed their current bigotry and walled borders to admit refugees from predicted epicenters of drought and desertification like the Maghreb, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Pakistan? Will Americans, the most miserly people when measured by per capita foreign aid, be willing to tax themselves to help relocate the millions likely to be flooded out of densely settled, mega-delta regions like Bangladesh? And will North American agribusiness, the likely beneficiary of global warming, voluntarily make world food security, not profit-taking in a seller’s market, its highest priority?

Market-oriented optimists, of course, will point to demonstration-scale carbon-offset programs like the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) which, they claim, will ensure green investment in the Third World. But the impact of CDM is thus far negligible; it subsidizes small-scale reforestation and the scrubbing of industrial emissions, rather than fundamental investment in domestic and urban use of fossil fuels.

Moreover, most the developing world undoubtedly prefers for the North to acknowledge the environmental disaster it has created and take responsibility for cleaning it up. Poor countries rightly rail against the notion that the greatest burden of adjustment to the Anthropocene epoch should fall on those who have contributed least to carbon emissions and drawn the slightest benefits from two centuries of industrial revolution.

In a sobering study recently published in the Proceedings of the [U.S.] National Academy of Science, a research team attempted to calculate the environmental costs of economic globalization since 1961 as expressed in deforestation, climate change, overfishing, ozone depletion, mangrove conversion, and agricultural expansion. After making adjustments for relative cost burdens, they found that the richest countries by their activities had generated 42 per cent of environmental degradation across the world, while shouldering only 3 per cent of the resulting costs.

The radicals of the South will rightly point to another debt as well. For thirty years, cities in the developing world have grown at breakneck speed without counterpart public investments in infrastructure, housing, or public health. In lpart this has been the result of foreign debts contracted by dictators, with payments enforced by the International Monetary Fund, and public spending downsized or redistributed by the World Bank’s “structural adjustment” agreements.

This planetary deficit of opportunity and social justice is summarized by the fact that more than one billion people, according to UN Habitat, currently live in slums and that their number is expected to double by 2030. An equal number, or more, forage in the so-called informal sector (a first-world euphemism for mass unemployment). Sheer demographic momentum, meanwhile, will increase the world’s urban population by 3 billion people over the next 40 years (90 per cent of them in poor cities), and no one -- absolutely no one -- has a clue how a planet of slums, with growing food and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival, much less their aspirations to basic happiness and dignity.

If this seems unduly apocalyptic, consider the likely impacts of global warming upon tropical and semi-tropical agriculture. One of the pioneer analysts of the economics of global warming, Petersen Institute fellow William R. Cline, recently published a country-by-country study of the likely effects of climate change on crop production by the later decades of this century. Coupling climate models to crop process and neo-Ricardian farm output models, and allowing for various levels of carbon-dioxide fertilization, he offers the most sophisticated look so far at the possible futures of human nutrition.

The view is grim. Even in Cline’s most optimistic simulations, the agricultural systems of Pakistan (minus 20 per cent of current farm output) and Northwestern India (minus 30 per cent) are likely devastated, along with much of the Middle East, the Maghreb, the Sahel belt, parts of Southern Africa, and the Caribbean and Mexico. Twenty-nine developing countries, according to Cline, stand to lose 20 per cent or more of their current farm output to global warming, while agriculture in the already rich North is likely to receive, on average, an 8 per cent boost.

This potential loss of agricultural capacity in the developing world is even more ominous in the context of the United Nations’ warning that a doubling of food production will be necessary to sustain the earth’s mid-century population. The current food affordability crisis, aggravated by the biofuel boom, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger exists that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards.