Climate Disruption – All Too Often, It’s Hard To See a Solution
Sometimes I’m optimistic about the outcome of the climate disruption issue, but other days it’s hard to maintain that sunny outlook. However you slice it, the French fellow quoted in this article is correct: developing countries cannot be denied the right to develop. As he put it: “An agreement that would leave some countries to consider their growth hampered by its provisions will not be accepted.”
Suppose you’re India, the world’s third biggest polluter, with a population more than one-and-one-quarter billion people that’s growing both in raw numbers and in energy consumption per capita. This means burning more coal (currently 59% of their grid mix) that totals 255 gigawatts. Yes, you proudly tell the world that you’re investing in renewables, and that’s true, but at the same time you’re adding 14% to your coal consumption every year.
I’m reminded of a talk I had with an emissary of Germany a couple of years ago. He had been sent to speak with U.S. “energy experts” (I was flattered to have been thought of in that light), and wanted to know what I thought Germany should do vis-à-vis its energy policy, the integration of renewables, etc. During the conversation that lasted about 45 minutes, I told him:
What Germany is doing is exemplary. You take the challenge at least as seriously as any nation on Earth, and you even take risk to advance the cause, which I find astonishing, given that your culture is not known for subjecting itself to risk.
But at the end of the discussion, I left him with this:
Whatever I’ve told you here needs to be viewed in this context: It really doesn’t matter what Germany and its 60 million people do if, together, we can’t help the world’s biggest polluters find a way to follow suit. But another way, we either solve this problem on a global scale, or we fail to solve it at all.
The answer is something that NO-ONE wants to consider: Using first world resources to help modernize third world energy infrastructure.
The good news is that many of the best options happen to be synergistic with good accommodation strategies.
In India, for example, the most critical accommodation will be clean water. The alpine ice in the Himalayan Mountains has been disappearing at a remarkable rate. This has lead to several decades of increased river flow throughout Northern India – which their industrial agriculture has taken advantage of and has dramatically lowered the cost of agriculture for India.
However, in as little as 2 decades that icepack will be gone, leading to severe summer water shortages that will devastate Indian farmland. The solution is to build runoff hydrostorage with thousands of man-made lakes, which can regulate flow and preserve the soon-to-be precious water.
This is necessary. They can build out their water storage or they will die. It’s as simple as that. But by doing so they will open up the potential for literally hundreds of GW of hydropower. That’s obviously the first step. First world investors can invest in thousands of medium-scale hydropower (and of course as much nuclear power in Southern India as their infrastructure can handle. These projects will be critical for farmland, and will help aleviate damage from spring-time flooding. So the investors could expect a reasonable return via dividend payments either from farmers and townships or from the Indian government – however they wish to set it up… and from the sale of power from their rapidly built-out hydropower infrastructure.
I think India would jump at it if it was offered… but the first world only looks at the first world… Hell, they only look at their own driveway.
If we would take the subsidy for 100,000 EV’s – which serves to WORSEN both GHG emissions and PAH’s, CD, AS, PB, HG, black carbon, SO2, soot, and radioactive isotopes… and the subsidies for ~20,000 household solar systems (purchased by some consumers to offset the horrible environmental crime of purchasing those same stupid EV’s).. You’d have ~1.5 billion dollars. With that, you could build ~15 of those water storage/hydropower dams that the Indian people NEED… You’d make more money off of any rational investment contract that you’d come up with than you would ever save in gasoline and electricity costs… And you’d likely mitigate several hundredsfold more GHG’s and several billionsfold more other harmful emissions…
But no-one is interested. The first world cannot see beyond THEIR carbon footprint. It’s not just the countries (the EV buyers could invest in wind farms in the Midwest and magnify their environmental bang for their buck by dozensfold at least)… it’s each individual’s personal footprint. The first world is simply too selfish to see beyond themselves… and so they low-hanging fruit is left to rot as the world starves.
Wow, you never cease to amaze me. This is exactly correct, IMO. Very few of us who are lucky enough to live in the first world even think of what’s happening in places like India. The chickens will soon come home to roost, however, as the effects of those 1.25 billion ripple around the globe.
There is an Indian story about 5 blind men approaching an elephant. Each grabbed a different part and assumed that the elephant was like something completely different from each other. Our world is stressed. We are seeing limits in what once appeared to be a limitless environment. Like the elephant it is a huge problem and when we grab on to any one part we make exclamations like, EV are the problem or nuclear is a hazard, fossil fuels will kill us, the world is facing a shortage of clean water, we are facing mass extinctions, but also as here, we have to grow our economies, 3ed world countries have a right to grow.
Although, many of these things are interconnected, the crisis we see often depends upon the politics we feel. At some point however we may have to begin to give up some of our fixed notions and look at the broad picture. We may have to accept a world without animals, we may have to rethink our growth model of economics and we may have to accept a world where the electric vehicle is a better way forward.
It is great to say that the present crisis for India is clean water, and point to the Himalayan ICE melting. But you can’t ask people to save water when they are using every bit to make a higher population. India is also depleting its fossil aquifirs: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/100505-fossil-water-radioactive-science-environment/ When the the water runs out the ponds are not going to magically survive. As goes the water so goes any hydroelectric developed from it.
We might say that our economies and populations have a right to grow, and we might say that companies have a right to limitless expansion and they have a right to all the resources that they can mine or produce. But we are coming closer to a time when we cannot say all these things together. Rather than stamping our collective feet on the ground about our rights and what someone else should do we may have to consider what we are willing to trade up to find a better way.
I thought you were doing good until (and after) you said “stupid EV’s”. However, I must agree that subsidy for EV’s is just taking money away from more important tech fixes such as the ones you list. A few billion dollars could provide the infrastructure needed to desalinate water, too.
We should, however, subsidize a path to much cheaper batteries (and much cheaper solar, wind and nuclear), as that is the way towards much less FF, so that the global economy can grow untethered by silly FF conservation limits.
Perhaps, but ‘solarizing’ buildings and ‘hybridizing’ the vehicle fleet would help.
Similar to developing countries, in countries regions where minorities live cannot be denied the right to develop by colonial rulers or government controlled by another community in the same country
in some countries, if the colonial rulers as well as the present government controlled by another community(majority) refuses to develop the regions where minorities live why UN don’t impose sanctions on the government,they even create war and delay progress by 30 years. Every country in UN have diplomatic relations with the government.
Craig; If you do believe it really doesn’t matter what Germany and its 60 million people do if, together, we can’t help the world’s biggest polluters find a way to follow suit you will rethink your reluctance to join me and help push my efforts to help this nation find it’s way forward. Need I remind you that the Advanced Alternative Energy Co concept has inherent qualities no other technology has to enable the USA to move forward at warp speed. We will either solve this problem together (on a local and global scale) or we fail to solve it at all.
A global deal to curb carbon emissions must recognize each country’s right to develop, France’s foreign minister said in New Delhi on Thursday, as the host of this year’s U.N. climate change talks seeks to win India’s backing for a global deal. This statement is a statement that embodies a basic right of all nations and I maintain AAEC’s position will absolutely protect that position for every nation, and it is the only position that enable’s national interests of all nations will be protected. Why or how can I hold to such a broad position for a single new concept technology? This is because the AAEC technology is a scalable approach that can apply in all countries where people exist and where energy is required and where jobs and economic development must be maintained for all.
Advanced Alternative Energy Corp. (AAEC) is for those who understand that distributed alternative/renewable energy derived from solar, wind, biomass and waste is a viable pathway to stall global warming and produce a better future for our descendants, our communities and for humanity. AAEC offers a way for environmental organizations and activists to move beyond talk. Utilities on the other hand oppose what AAEC offers and want to maintain their monopoly position as sole utility power providers and pass on unlimited costs in cleaning up their operations even if better options are available.
AAEC has invented, patented, tested and further developed a new concept low-carbon energy technology we’ve designed for serving as the core technology for far cleaner renewable energy production systems and energy efficiency improvements across the North American landscape and around the world. AAEC’s novel new concept technology consists of a biomass, fossil fuel, and/or waste combustion, gasification and pyrolysis conversion technology that can provide scalable heat and power requirements as well as biofuel production for stand-alone use or for backup for other alternative energy systems that depend on solar, wind or other intermittent sources of energy, and in this way it will help double the deployment of alternative energy projects around the world in the coming decades.
We believe we will do better and be much safer in the long run if we can deploy a practical way to power human society on extraction of greenhouse gases that have already been emitted into the atmosphere while also reducing ongoing greenhouse emissions and begin protecting our communities and electric power grids. We are claiming to be the inventor of one of the “tools” needed to enable humanity to overhaul the power delivery system, in the USA and elsewhere, and help get us out of the box fossil fuels and governmental inaction have humanity boxed up in. We propose to do this through deployment of advanced alternative energy projects at the village, community and county scale, and because good paying infrastructure jobs are also needed. Thus AAEC is seeking support from all that may care to support this project.
AAEC’s product lines can be manufactured in the US and in most any locality on any continent for the local and regional market. This we believe will create licensing opportunities and many thousands of good paying jobs, and these are among the things we are offering to an alternative energy hungry world.
For further details please contact:
Les Blevins, President
Advanced Alternative Energy
1207 N 1800 Rd., Lawrence, KS 66049
Phone 785-842-1943 – Email LBlevins@aaecorp.com
For more info see
http://aaecorp.com
http://advancedalternativeenergy.com
https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=45587557
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Advanced-Alternative-Energy/277213435730720
“Humanity has pushed the world’s climate system to the brink, leaving itself only scant time to act. We are at about five minutes before midnight.”
— Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2013
If you’re like me, you are feeling a sense of responsibility to empower a fix for the global warming issue before it is too late. Scientists report that we only have a few years left to transform our society to a renewable energy (zero-carbon) economy to avoid catastrophic climate change. So what should our role be in creating the needed transformation? Just wait and see what happens? – Les Blevins
“Insanity is repeating the same behavior over and over and
expecting different results”
~Albert Einstein
To put it another way; it’s insanity to believe we can solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
~Les Blevins
“There are risks and costs to any program of action, but they can be far less than the long range risks and costs of inaction”
– President John F. Kennedy
“It is in our vital interest to diversify America’s energy supply — and the way forward is through technology.”
– President George W. Bush, 2007 State of the Union Address
“Biofuels will play an important role in America’s clean energy portfolio,” “These projects will allow us to decrease our dependence on foreign oil, support the growth of the biofuels industry and create jobs here at home.”
~ Energy Secretary Steven Chu
I believe Steven Chu had a degree in chemistry, however, biofuels is the least energy dense option. Solar and wind exceeds the potential of biofuels (and nuclear, too – if done right). Politicians can’t really be trusted to cause change to occur (outside of the FF box).
Although I tend to favor the idea of nuclear (look at France), Germany’s approach to “greening just” 60 million people might actually pay off in the way of cheaper RE and storage components. They might make offshore wind and its storage competitive with FF’s taxed with a medium scale carbon fee. They kinda like made China to make PV cheaper and they are using the fear of nuclear to really search for the best RE solutions. Hopefully, they might be part of making pumped hydro cheaper and or more efficient which India could really use to capture the water with.
Each country has a tech to offer and it is definitely technology that we need to fix the excess CO2 challenge with. Chemically fix via olivine extraction, too. Not necessarily new tech, just cheaper ways of implementing the tech we already have.
My solution would be as simple as growing a few billion giant sequoia trees, but I believe accessing the water requirements would be a challenge. I believe Alaska could provide that, though.
Hi Craig, You got some info I can read on the ‘Crime that is EVs’? REG WESSELS
No, and I can’t even find what you’re talking about. Here, however, is a great deal of material on the subject: http://2greenenergy.com/2015/01/10/environmental-benefits-electric-vehicles-been-finally-established/.