Living Off the Sun in Real Time

Posted by Jeffrey St. Clair on September 15th, 2008 | Link

Sustainability Redefined
By Peter Montague

Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) is the weekly voice of the
American Chemical Society, which is the professional association for
academic and industrial chemists. This high-quality magazine lies near
the heart of the establishment and — like the Wall Street Journal –
it hires some of the top writers in the business because many of its
readers are elite decison-makers who need the best information
available, whether it be good news or bad.

The August 18 issues of C&EN was devoted to “sustainability.” In it,
editor-in-chief Rudy M. Baum pointed out that a sea change has
occurred just in the past two years. He says humans passed a “tipping
point” in about 2006. A “tipping point” occurs when something
fundamental changes in a way that speeds up further change and/or
makes change permanent.[1]

Baum writes, “In the case of humanity’s relationship to Earth, a
tipping point appears to have occurred in 2006. In what seems to have
been the blink of an eye, a shift in attitude occurred. On one side of
the divide, people in general expressed concern, but not alarm, over
the state of the environment. On the other side of the divide, past
the tipping point, a consensus emerged that human actions were having
a serious negative impact on the global environment. The consensus was
embraced by scientists and nonscientists and, remarkably, by a large
swath of corporate America.”

Community activists who struggle against toxic corporate behavior may
doubt that “a large swath of corporate America” really accepts that
“human actions are having a serious negative impact on the
environment” — but it does seem true that important segments
of the public have become convinced. This is new. This is big.

Baum continues: “What is clear is that humans need to change their
relationship to Earth. No resource is infinite. There are enough of
us, more than 6 billion, and we are clever enough that our activities
are impacting the global environment. How is it that we can ever have
imagined otherwise?”

It is as if Baum has just awakened from a pleasant dream and is
realizing for the first time that we are all facing a harsh reality.

He then repeats the original definition of “sustainable development”
from the 1987 “Brundtland Report,” formally titled “Our Common
Future:”

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet
their own needs.” And, he says, “That is as good a definition of
sustainable development as one will find.”

And he his own interesting new definition of sustainability: “Learning
to live off the sun in real time.” He says, “Although sustainability
is not only about energy, it is largely about energy.”

Then he dives into a brief history of humankind and of civilization.
He points out that for aeons humans lived off the sun in real time.
Then the discovery of coal, and later oil, powered the development of
industrial society: “The extraordinary productivity of the past 150
years has largely been fueled by fossilized sunshine.” Then he says,
“This has to change for two reasons.”

Reason No. 1: Fossil fuels are finite: “One can argue,” Baum writes,
“whether we have already reached ‘peak oil’ — the point at which half
of all the oil that ever will be discovered has been discovered and
supply, while far from exhausted, will inevitably begin to decline –
or whether we will reach it in 10, 20, or 30 years. The point is, we
will reach peak oil. (Certainly,” Baum continues, “the current
remarkable run-up in crude oil prices is consistent with what will
occur when peak oil is reached.) Yes, there are vast reserves of
petroleum locked in oil shale and tar sands, and yes, there’s enough
coal out there to power society for 200 years, but extracting these
resources will take a terrible toll on the landscape of Earth. At what
point are we going to say, enough?”

Reason No. 2: Global warming. “The gigatons of carbon dioxide humans
are pumping into the atmosphere as if it were a giant sewer are
causing the climate to change. That’s no longer in dispute,” Baum
writes.

But then suddenly Mr. Baum seems to slip back into the pleasant dream
of yesteryear: his solution to our energy (and sustainability)
problems — which he still calls “living off the sun in real time” –
is nuclear power.

This is jarring because both U.S. and world supplies of uranium are
finite and limited. Baum backhandledly acknowledges this by saying,
“Energy efficiency and conservation will play important roles, but so
will vastly expanded use of nuclear energy, including breeder reactors
to enormously expand the supply of nuclear fuel.” So, uranium by
itself will run out — most likely sooner than coal will run out –
but we can “enormously expand the supply” of atomic fuel with breeder
reactors. Mr. Baum doesn’t say so, but breeder reactors don’t breed
uranium, they breed plutonium, the preferred raw material for rogue A-
bombs.

Mr. Baum does acknowledge that his plan entails some difficulties –
he calls them “complexities” — like “building safe breeder reactors,
secure handling of plutonium, [and] responsible disposal of the
remaining waste.” Complexities indeed.

Leaving aside the morally indefensible plan to bequeath tons of highly
radioactive waste to our children to manage forever, humans haven’t
devised a solution for the slow march of nuclear weapons across the
globe — except of course to ban the manufacture of all raw materials
for such weapons. This would require ending nuclear power globally,
forever.

Item: Pakistan has nuclear weapons (which it developed from nuclear
power reactors) and is supposedly a strong ally of the U.S. But Dexter
Filkins reported this week in the New York Times Magazine that
Pakistani soldiers sometimes shoot at American soldiers who are
hunting fundamentalist Muslims along Pakistan’s border with
Afghanistan. Filkins says “one of the more fundamental questions of
the long war against Islamic militancy, and one that looms larger as
the American position inside Afghanistan deteriorates [is]: Whose side
is Pakistan really on?” Read the Filkins piece — an amazing feat of
reporting — and you’ll see it’s a fair question.

Item: Last month President Bush authorized U.S. troops to begin
military raids onto Pakistani soil — without asking Pakistan’s
permission — to try to kill Taliban fundamentalists there. Announcing
the President’s decision, the N.Y. Times wrote, “The new orders for
the military’s Special Operations forces relax firm restrictions on
conducting raids on the soil of an important ally without its
permission.” The next paragraph in the Times story says, “Pakistan’s
top army officer said Wednesday that his forces would not tolerate
American incursions like the one that took place last week and that
the army would defend the country’s sovereignty ‘at all costs.’” This
is sounding more and more like the beginning of a new war — one with
a nuclear-armed “ally” who also seems to be an ally of the Taliban.

The Taliban would like nothing better than to get their hands on a
Pakistani A-bomb, deliver it to us on a cargo ship, and detonate it
near the Statue of Liberty or beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. It
would end the American experiment in democracy, almost certainly.

Item: This same week President Bush won approval from 45 nations for
his plan to allow India — Pakistan’s blood enemy — to buy and sell
nuclear materials on the global market, thus negating the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty that had been in force for decades but which
India has steadfastly refused to sign. Nuclear experts warn that Mr.
Bush’s decision could lead to a nuclear arms race in Asia. Congress
has yet to approve the deal, but Mr. Bush is now working to get their
“fast track” approval.

Item: And this week, too, a writer in the New York Times pointed out
that, “Many proliferation experts I have spoken to judge the chance of
a detonation [of an A-bomb by Al Qaeda, or a Qaeda imitator on U.S.
soil] to be as high as 50 percent in the next 10 years. I am an
optimist, so I put the chance at 10 percent to 20 percent. Only
technical complications prevent Al Qaeda from executing a nuclear
attack today. The hard part is acquiring fissile material; an easier
part is the smuggling itself (as the saying goes, one way to bring
nuclear weapon components into America would be to hide them inside
shipments of cocaine).”

Even if the optimistic view is correct — that the chance of a rogue
A-bomb explosion in New York Harbor, or beneath the Golden Gate
Bridge, is “only” 10% or 20% per decade — how many decades does that
give us before the probability approaches 100%?

No, if humans are to survive, then “Learning to live off the sun in
real time” cannot mean powering global civilization with plutonium-
breeding nuclear reactors. It must mean really living off the
sun in real time.

Luckily, that goal is seeming more realistic each passing week. Scientific American
Magazine estimates we could derive 35% of our total energy (and
69% of our electricity) from sunlight by 2050 — and 90% of our total
energy from the sun by 2100. And it would require a federal subsidy
far smaller than we have so far committed to the Iraq war. Of course,
if we felt the need were really urgent, we could get there even
faster. That’s a new “tipping point” we can all work together to
achieve.

==============

[1] Baum says “a tipping point occurs when some parameter reaches a
value where various feedback loops come into play and further change
in the parameter becomes radically more rapid and/or permanent.” He
gives the example of carbon locked in the arctic permafrost. At some
point, rising temperatures in the arctic will thaw the permafrost,
releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thus
creating warmer conditions, in turn releasing more carbon from the
permafrost… until?