Earth Matters: No technological miracles needed to address climate; Green New Deal push relaunches

Rod Lamberts wrote a decade ago:  

If there’s one thing decades of advertising, public relations, psychology research and science communication have taught us, it’s that throwing facts at opposing opinions with the hope of changing people’s minds is like playing golf with a pineapple: it’s not just useless, it’s actively counterproductive.

At best, presenting people with facts to counter their beliefs makes them ignore you; at worst, it drives them further away. How much more evidence do you need than the singular failure of scientific facts to convince deniers that humans are buggering up the climate? [...]

There’s no profit in trying to change the position of deniers. Their values and motivations are fundamentally different to those of us who listen to what the weight of scientific evidence tell us. So forget them.

Lambert, who is the deputy director of the Australian National Center for the Public Awareness of Science, was talking about facts vs. opinions and why climate scientists should be expressing opinions as well as presenting facts—because politics are as crucial as technology and computer modeling when it comes to addressing the climate crisis. Whether it was his essay or other urgings that spurred climatologists to start speaking up aggressively in that political way is hard to discern, but several certainly have done so. 

Trying to persuade diehard deniers to give up their science illiteracy is a waste of time. But there are some political leaders who accept the science but have yet to adopt the fierce urgency of now that dealing with the climate crisis requires. Surely, they can be convinced to giddyap in the matter. And facts do matter for that convincing. 

In fact, climate facts are becoming steadily more grim—so much so that even the mainstream media a few years ago finally stopped treating every denier’s claim with the same respect given to scientists who have spent their whole careers studying climate. Now, with some of the worst-case scenarios many scientists had been expecting would only come late in the century seemingly just decades or a decade away, the portents are not favorable, which is putting it mildly. 

As a consequence, on some days, even those of us who have followed the matter for decades and sought to convince others that serious individual and collective action is required to address the dire perils we and our fellow species on the planet face would just like to pull down the shades and binge on a light-weight TV series or try out a month’s worth of new recipes. Like deniers all of the time, we’d like to la-la-la away the awful facts at least some of the time. 

However, as diarist Mokurai proves to us every Tuesday, there are some awesome facts, too. In this vein, let me spotlight a new book showing that, technologically speaking, we have 95% of what we need right now to get to zero emissions. 

Since he was a kid in the 1970s, Mark Z. Jacobson has been focused on solutions to prevent the damage caused by burning fossil fuels, first in relation to lethal air pollution and later on climate change. Fifteen years ago, based on a foundation of research he had begun a decade earlier, Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi developed A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables (2009). Jacobson subsequently co-founded (with financier Marco Krapels and anti-fracking activist Mark Ruffalo) The Solutions Project in 2013. This was followed in 2015 with an article written by Jacobson, Delucchi, and other team members in the peer-reviewed journal Energy & Environmental Science titled “100% clean and renewable wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) all-sector energy roadmaps for the 50 United States.” It outlined a path for all 50 states to be 100% renewable by 2050. In 2017, a Jacobson-led team produced another study, “100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight All-Sector Energy Roadmaps for 139 Countries of the World.”

Early on, Jacobson received much criticism and considerable ridicule from those skeptical of or ideologically and financially opposed to his and his team’s assertions that 100% renewables was even workable in terms of physics. When the matter was first raised, the idea that even 20% renewables could be folded into the grid reliably was widely challenged, particularly by parties with an interest in making sure that the old way of doing things wasn’t squeezed out along with their profits.

Ridicule has pretty much vanished since 23 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico, plus 200 U.S. cities have now committed to 100% renewables by 2050 or earlier. It’s true that public relations often collides with actual policy because committing to and implementing climate-friendly policies aren’t the same thing. And, of course, there are those 27 other states (not to mention 194 other countries. But both the concept and the reality of 100% renewables are making progress.

To reach a wider audience than peer-reviewed journals, last year Jacobson wrote the 400-page No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air. Writing about 100% renewables for lay readers, he addresses how to solve the three problems that have always been associated with burning fossil fuels: health damage, climate damage, and dangers to energy security. Climatologist Michael Mann calls it “an amazing new book.” As someone who in the past 50 years has probably read more than 200 books regarding what we used to call “alternative energy,” I could not agree more. 

Here is an example of the kind of questions Jacobson answers regarding implementing 100% WWS energy (wind, water, solar). He describes the amount of land needed for the actual structures and spacing between them (p. 314):

Together, the new land footprint and spacing areas for 100 percent WWS across all energy sectors sum up to 0.53 percent of the the 145-country land area. This is equivalent to about 1.52 times the land area of California for virtually all world energy. Most of this is multi-purpose spacing land. In fact, solar PV panels can be installed on some of the space between wind turbines. 

In comparison, about 37.4 percent of the world’s land was used for agriculture in 2016, and 2.5 percent was urban land in 2010. Also, the land area required for the fossil fuel instructure in the United States alone is about 1.3 percent of the United States land area. Thus, replacing fossil fuels with 100 percent WWS should reduce land requirements substantially. 

The promise of a climate-friendly, renewables-powered world is encouraging. But, as noted, Jacobson’s blueprint is technological. What can be done depends on a political blueprint as well. Something full-blown but flexible. Like, say, a version of the Green New Deal.