Clearing the Air: Fifty Answers to Our Climate Questions

We discussed Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben earlier this year.  His message is that climate catastrophe is not foreordained, even if the current “weather” is odd and suggests that something in seriously amiss.  I grew up in the American South, where “hot” is the normal state of being from April through October.  One learns to tolerate it.  My first personal inkling that things were changing occurred in the late 1980s when we had an abnormally long run of days in North Georgia during which the temperature exceeded 100°F.  Riding the bicycle on the twelve-mile roundtrip to work became a difficult test.  At about the same time McKibben published The End of Nature, which was the first mainstream book to sound the alarm for what was coming.

In retrospect, the global warming curve reached a value about twice the previous baseline in 1988-1989.  Was that enough of a difference to imply a lasting transition?  Maybe that heatwave of my early-30s was “just the weather,” but maybe not.  Since then, heatwaves have become more frequent over the entire planet and the weather has become less stable during each season.  Storms are larger and more energetic (e.g., Hurricane Helene of 2024, damage from which is still visible and will remain so for a long time).  Sea level is rising and evidence indicates that freshwater melt from the Greenland Ice Sheet is interfering with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the Gulf Stream is slowing.  Ocean temperatures approach that of bathwater in the subtropical United States and coral bleaching crises are more common.  That anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real is now denied only by various Merchants of Doubt, who got their start in the 1950s contesting causes of cancer, lung cancer in particular.  They did not win, but that battle was not for the fate of a livable planet.

So, what are we to do?  What is needed is a thorough grounding in what we know and what we don’t know.  As the saying goes, “It’s not what you don’t know that will hurt you – it’s what you know that isn’t so that is likely to do the most damage.”  Dr. Hannah Ritchie has recently published Clearing the Air: A Hopeful Guide to Solving Climate Change in 50 Questions and Answers (MIT Press, 2016).  As a guidebook that orients the citizen to what we actually know, or should know, Clearing the Air is very good.  We will come back to politics at the end of this discussion, but Dr. Ritchie gets off to a good start:

Faced with a seemingly unwinnable set of options, most of us seem to react in one of three ways.  Some people do make the switch toward more climate-friendly alternatives but feel chronically guilty about it…Others become paralyzed: they want to make a change but feel lost in the noise of conflicting information…and end up sticking with the status qui…And finally, there are the Backlashers: those who feel conned and lied to about the risks of climate change, or the solutions we’d need to fix it.

What’s most heartbreaking is that their vision of the future is so at odds with the opportunity that’s in front of us.  We could have a world run on clean energy stopping (but not entirely reversing) climate change and giving us more breathable cities.  We could build cities out of green cement and low-carbon steel, have comfortable homes…and no one living in energy poverty.  We could feed 10 billion people on a fraction of the land we use today…(italics in original)

Hopeful or optimistic?  I tend to the hopeful side.  Optimism is for those who lack agency – it doesn’t matter what you do, what will be will be, it’s in God’s hands.  One needs to know what can be done.

As in Question 1 (Q1). Isn’t it too late? Aren’t we heading for a 5 or 6°C warmer world?  If we maintain our current trajectory, yes.  This was the take-home message of David Wallace-Wells in The Uninhabitable Earth.  While it remains possible to stop AGW before catastrophe, the previous “limit” of 1.5°C has been passed.  Still, life happens in increments and every increment makes a difference.  The answer to Question 2 is that a large majority in countries as diverse in Ghana, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, the UK, the United States (74%) know that something must be done.  At the individual level, those somethings can add up.  But agency will be required from the grass roots up.

A question I hear often from the many of my acquaintance who are the “Backlashers” is Question 5: Aren’t our efforts pointless if China’s emissions keep growing?  Projection at every level is a common reaction to any question, but Ritchie’s answer is “China is the world’s largest emitter, but it’s rolling out renewables at breakneck speed.”  The Backlashers will scoff, but solar power generation in China dwarfs that in USA and Europe and China has surpassed the rest of the world in the production of long-range electric cars that are inexpensive, reliable, and durable.  Unfortunately, these will probably not be available in the USA for the foreseeable future.

A common trope among the technocracy is that technology will bail us out of our climate mess.  A favorite of theirs is carbon capture, which addressed in Question 7: Can’t we just keep burning fossil fuels and capture the CO₂?  No  As Dr. Ritchie puts it:

Industrial carbon capture and storage (CCS) is already happening in 45 facilities across the world.  The problem?  It captures just 50 million tons of CO₂ each year…0.1% of emissions…another 50 plants operating by 2030…would bring…the total to 0.4%…Even if we were capturing 1 billion tons per year – which is included in many “net-zero” scenarios for 2030 – this would be only 2% of the world’s emissions.  We still need to handle the other 98%.

As noted by Bill McKibben in Here Comes the Sun, the large technical marvel that is a CCS facility in Iceland emits more CO₂ during its operation than it captures.  This won’t do.  But CCS could matter at the margin after the energy transition that will be required to maintain a livable planet Earth.

Question 10 gets to the heart of the matter: Will we even be able to produce enough clean energy to replace fossil fuels?  The short answer is no, for the time being.  Although Richard Branson’s airline flew one of his jets across the Atlantic Ocean using waste fats as the feedstock for jet fuel, that was nothing more than a publicity stunt.  But for most energy requirements, electrification can work.  This is thermodynamically simple if technically demanding.  The only thing we must do is use free energy from the sun in the form of wind, hydroelectric, and solar voltaics to generate electricity that can be used for transportation, heating, cooling, and industrial manufacturing, while burning carbon only where necessary at the margin.

Question 13: Won’t a lot of energy workers lose their jobs?  Answer: Jobs in fossil fuels will decline, but clean energy is creating even more of them.  Across the world, from 2019 until 2023 fossil fuel workers have averaged about 32 million.  During that time the lines crossed and clean energy workers went from about 30 million to 36 million.  The workers in the “wind farms” of the American Midwest are proud of their work and proud they are doing to preserve the ecosphere.  In this they are no different from any worker who knows his or her job is good for others and planet Earth, which is and will remain our only home in this universe.

Energy costs are always a concern, especially now, during the early days of the Ramadan War in West Asia.  Question 16: Aren’t renewables too expensive? Answer: The costs of solar and wind have plummeted and are not cost-competitive or even cheaper than fossil fuels, which is illustrated by the following dueling quotations:

Solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions…Wind is the most expensive.

• The Economist, 2014

Solar power is now “the cheapest electricity in history.”

• Report from the International Energy Agency, 2020

What The Economist “knew” twelve years ago is no longer true.  There is not much to add to this, except that the answer to Question 16: Don’t solar panels and wind turbines generate huge amounts of waste? is “No.”  Waste generated in kilograms per megawatt hour generated:

Coal:               89

Solar PV            2

Wind               0.2

Or to put another way, Solar PV generates 2.2% of the waste produced by burning coal while wind energy generates 0.22% of the waste produced by burning coal.  There is no contest here.  Moreover, in 25 years the typical person would generate 28,300 kg of waste if all his or her energy were derived from coal.  For Solar PV, that would amount to 530 kg.  For wind, the waste would be 50 kg, or 2 kg per year (about 4.4 pounds).  That typical person would also generate 20,000 kg of municipal waste and 3000 kg of plastic waste in those 25 years.  Neither of these sins against planet Earth is sustainable, either.

Sadly, wind farms are a hazard to birds and bats.  Even President Trump has expressed his discomfort at this.  The answer to Question 20, is that wind turbines kill 1.2 wild million birds a year in the United States.  That is a lot of birds.  At the same time, wild birds are also killed by other things:

Domestic cats:            2400 million

Buildings                      600 million

Automobiles                 200 million

Pesticides                        67 million

Comms towers               6.6 million

To reduce the avian death toll from wind turbines, we should turn them off when windspeed is low, keep them out of flyways, build fewer and larger turbines than many small ones, paint the blades black, and play alert noises to deter bats and birds.  Simple.  And if we do these things, the number of dead birds due to wind farms will decrease from the 0.05% of birds that are killed by cats.  Of course, these numbers are only estimates, but wind farms can be made safer for our avian friends.  Probably the best thing we can do for birds is keeping our domesticated feline friends indoors.

Nuclear power is addressed in Questions 21-24.  It is generally recognized as safe by Dr. Ritchie.  Based on the history of accidents at nuclear power plants, she is correct.  Coal kills more people per year than all other forms of energy sources put together, including nuclear.  Nuclear power plants can be built faster and cheaper.  Given the history of Plant Vogtle (7 years late, $17B over budget, expensive for local ratepayers) in Georgia, this is undoubtedly true.  But the promise from the 1950s of nuclear “electricity too cheap to meter” was never true.  The enduring problem of nuclear waste has not been addressed materially yet, and it is glossed over in Clearing the Air.

Reprocessing waste into new fuel is essential since we have so much of it stored “temporarily,” often on the site of the plant.  But the recommendation by Dr. Ritchie  that we must “Hurry up and prove that we can store (nuclear waste) underground” is unfortunate.  Assuming in advance that something can be proven is not good science or good policy by any definition.  It is fairly common, though.  Moreover, even if it could be proven that underground storage of nuclear waste is safe and effective indefinitely, the experimental analysis simply cannot be completed on a human timescale. [1]  The half-life of Uranium-238 (4.5 billion years) is longer than the age of the earth.  The half-life of plutonium-239 is 24,100 years, longer than human civilization has existed (Gobekli Tepe, whatever it was, is less than 12,000 years old).  The “winners” of our Late Neoliberal Dispensation get rich by discounting the future, but these cold hard facts should have stopped the use of nuclear power, for anything, in its tracks.  We have no right of dominion to contaminate planet Earth permanently for those who come after us.

Other topics covered include Electric Cars (Questions 25-32), Minerals (Questions 33-37), Heating and Cooling (Questions 38-40).  Electric cars are a solution to personal transportation but not necessarily the solution, especially in cities small, medium, and large where public transportation has been and still can be used.  China has shown electric cars can be reliable, durable, and inexpensive while the West has lagged.  Mineral supply chains are a problem, but mining and smelting can be made more efficient, if production is for use instead of largely for profit, ecological consequences be damned.  Heating and cooling can be much cheaper and efficient than in the past, but this will take both public and private efforts.

Food is addressed as it should be in Clearing the Air (Questions 41-44).  The overarching point, however, is that “the biggest change we can make is to cut back on meat and dairy” to reduce the carbon footprint of our diet.  At one level this is assuredly true, but that is predicated on the assumption that industrial agriculture is the only way to feed the planet.  The industrialization of agriculture has certainly produced a lot of calories, but only because of fossil capital.  In this section Dr. Ritchie addresses, albeit indirectly, the fundamental problem of industrial agriculture: It is a category mistake in which large farms do not produce food.  Instead, they produce (highly subsidized) industrial commodity inputs for the production of ultra-processed food-like substances that make up a distressing proportion of our diet plus feed for animals.  The solution to agriculture is to go back to the future and use the free energy of the sun instead of the expensive and exhaustible fossil capital to produce food.  But that would require a complete rethinking of the Farm Bill in the United States.  Meat substitutes and microbial sludge are a solution to nothing, despite the fever dreams of the tech cheerleaders such as George Monbiot of The Guardian.  We have discussed this before as “Science versus Scientism” here and here.

Questions 45-47 address “Cement, Steel, and other “Hard-to-Abate Industries.”  Can we be more carbon neutral in construction?  Yes.  But one also must remember that the “goal of the economy” must change from growth to development and reduce throughput through the system if the ecosphere is to continue to provide a hospitable climate for life as we know it, including human life.

The book ends with Part X, Carbon Removal and Solar Engineering.  Carbon dioxide capture and storage will never be anything more than marginal.  Over the past few hundred years we have released carbon into the atmosphere that was sequestered over several hundred million years.  Those numbers simply do not compute, if the computation involves processes that occur on the human timescale relevant to us.

The final Question 50 of Clearing the Air is “Isn’t solar geoengineering too risky?”  Good question, and anyone who has thought about our current trajectory has wondered a runaway hothouse climate will make this necessary.  We should remember that climate engineering will be a one-way experiment into the unknown, much as the Industrial Revolution has been a “natural” geoengineering experiment for more than 200 years:

When we burn fossil fuels, we don’t only emit CO₂.  We also emit local air pollutants that are damaging to our health and ecosystems.  But these local air pollutants reflect sunlight back to space and cool the planet too.  Air pollution has been masking or offsetting some of the warming that we’ve had from emitting greenhouse gases.

All true.  Volcanic eruptions can do the same thing. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 reduced global average temperature by 0.5°C.  Our experiment has been intentional but mostly unwitting in the beginning (Charles Babbage did note in the 1830s that we did not know what spewing poisonous gases into the atmosphere would do, however).  Regarding an intentional and witting geoengineering experiment, it has been estimated that stratospheric aerosol injection could cost as little as $2.5 billion.  That is less than the cost of a couple of days of the current War in West Asia.  If the cost were ten times as much it would still not amount to a rounding error in global GDP.  But as Dr. Ritchie puts it:

I say that it’s cheap “in principle” because the downside to geoengineering is that we don’t know how it could change other parts of our climate system, like rainfall patterns.  If it changes them in unexpected and damaging ways, it would be an extremely expensive bet.  Do it irresponsibly, and it could cause more harm than climate change, not less.

Dr. Ritchie recommends against geoengineering, and it is impossible to conceive how it could be done responsibly.  We have already irresponsibly changed weather patterns (Hurricane Helene, for example) and aggravated other facts of the ecosphere such as sea level rise, where so-called “king tides” inundate streets in Miami Beach and other less noticeable places.  And if geoengineering were the “quick and dirty” solution to AGW and its attendant climate disruption in the absence of fossil fuel reductions, the oceans would still acidify and the benefits of the replacement of fossil fuels with other energy sources described in the book would not accrue to the Earth and its living things.

Clearing the Air is a succinct, well written guide that explains where we are and what we can do regarding climate change.  The sources used are solid and the anonymous reviewers for MIT Press were effective.  Dr. Ritchie makes the case that there are still actions that we, as a sentient and sapient species, can take to prevent the runaway hothouse Earth that has resulted in previous mass extinctions.  But the necessary transition to a lower-carbon political economy will require a transformation of our politics that is difficult to imagine, especially in the post-Citizens United world of one dollar-one vote. [2]

Dr. Ritchie begins by pointing out that “both sides of the aisle” cloud the discussion of climate change.  There is certainly NIMBYism on both sides.  Both the current president and the late, long-term US Senator from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy, disliked wind turbines basically because they “spoil their view.”  The key thing to remember, however, is the aisle down the middle of the House or Senate floor is not a dividing line.  Rather, it is the common path that members of the Uniparty take to get to their seats.  And members of the Uniparty, especially in the United States, are beholden to their donors instead of their constituents, who have essentially no influence on their legislators’ behavior. [3]  This is both unfortunate and unnecessary, because even in the United States 74% of the people view anthropogenic climate change as one of the most important and pressing issues of our time.  The truth sinks in, eventually, but political donors’ concerns guide action or more likely, inaction, essentially forever.  So far.

So, can we avert climate catastrophe?  Clearing the Air shows us that we can in 50 questions and 50 answers.  Dr. Ritchie is not selling hopium, but in the absence of an essential political transformation that facilitates the essential energy transition, nothing good is likely to happen.  We as a people must reclaim our agency.  There is room for differences in tactics, but the strategy exemplified by these 50 questions is straightforward, if not always simple.  And this strategy is the only conceivable path that can preserve a livable world.

Notes

[1] Yucca Mountain in Nevada was the preferred storage site for high-level (transuranic) radioactive waste in the United States.  But even in perhaps the most arid region of North America it has been shown that water moves through the mountain at measurable rates (pdf).  Water is persistent and “indefinite” is a very long time.

[2] Big Oil knew exactly what their products would do to climate more than fifty years ago, when our trajectory could have been much different had their scientists and engineers been disinterested scientists and engineers.  Cue Upton Sinclair.  This is also why the first thing to read in a scientific paper is the Acknowledgments.  Who funded the research is as important as the reported results and interpretations.

[3] From the Abstract of Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, Martin Gillens and Benjamin I. Page.  Perspectives on Politics 12 (3), 2014.

Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.

A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.