Forbes - Steve Denning
Climate change is the
crisis of our time.
As the human race sleepwalks its way towards a planetary calamity,
there is a growing recognition of the need for a “moonshot” aimed at
addressing the greatest existential challenge we have ever faced. The
immediate problem is that a solid technical basis for such a moonshot
does not yet exist. There is no audacious U.S. national plan in place to
deal with climate change, quite apart from what other countries must
do.
What we must now do is to create a fully empowered national climate change agency, devoted
exclusively
to climate change, with a mandate to prepare the carefully
thought-through technical basis for an audacious action plan and with
the political clout to make an impact.
How A Moonshot Happens
What is often forgotten in the celebration of America's space triumph
of 1969 is that Kennedy’s speech of 1962, in which he inspired the
nation to “go the moon by the end of the decade”, didn’t come out of the
blue. In fact, the basis for it had already been laid in several
distinct stages.
- Stage 1: Pre-1958: Several competing agencies were
striving for ownership of the American space effort: space: Army, Navy,
Air force; there was no coherent national strategy, game plan or budget.
- Stage 2: Creation of NASA in 1958: President Eisenhower
established organizational clarity as to which agency was in charge of
the space effort, but he didn't create the necessary priority or budget
for the effort to succeed. It did nevertheless create the institutional
and intellectual platform which provided the basis for the next step.
- Stage 3: President Kennedy's 1962 speech articulated a clear national commitment to get to the moon before the end of the decade.
- Stage 4: From 1962 to 1969, there was skillful maintenance and pursuit of the goal, through many difficulties, setbacks.
- Stage 5: In July 1969, as promised, American men landed on the moon—an unparalleled feat of perseverance and ingenuity.
By way of comparison, the U.S. response to climate change is still in
Stage 1: there are many ideas and studies, but no coherent national
strategy, game plan, expert or political consensus or budget. The White
House doesn’t even see that there is an issue. There are organizations
and agencies producing studies and reports, but no mandate or urgency
for action.
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| Stages of launching a moonshot. Steve Denning |
Given the current administration, any major change in the situation
will have to come in the next administration. Nevertheless, it is not
too early to consider the necessary steps, beginning with a decision to
take bold action.
Current Planning Is Inadequate
What’s happening now is sporadic, haphazard, ill-planned and tragically inadequate.
For example, as a sign of its commitment to climate change, Berkeley recently announced with pride that it has banned the use of natural gas in new low-rise buildings; this results in greater use of electricity generated by coal power plants with high pollution consequences.
Similarly, people may feel virtuous if they purchase electric cars,
but the impact on climate change isn't clear if the cars are also using
electricity generated by coal. Flailing away at climate change with
symbolic actions that feel good and sound good but make no impact isn't
going to get the job done.
Wind and solar are often presented as the keys to the future. Yet there is no coherent policy as to their future in the U.S. Wind and solar energy have few downsides per se
but are not available 24 hours every day; Europe has found that dealing
with the ups and downs of production can create practical problems.
A carbon tax is widely advocated by economists, yet the U.S. is one
of the few large and industrialized nations that does not implement one.
The basis for it is simple. Carbon emissions have an "unpriced"
societal cost in terms of their harmful effects on the earth's climate. A
tax on carbon would reflect these costs and send a powerful price
signal that would discourage carbon emissions. Such a tax could have
regressive income effects, but they could be alleviated by the way the
resulting revenues are allocated. Carbon tax has a diverse array of
advocates including Rex Tillerson, when he was CEO of Exxonmobil, the
American Enterprise Institute, the Earth Policy Institute, and the
Sierra Club, and the Washington Environmental Council. Yet no carbon tax
is in place in the U.S. and none is even being seriously discussed.
Having an institution that is capable of thinking through the
multi-sectoral issues involved in assessing the trade-offs, the
inter-connections and the sequencing of different options and pushing
ahead to action is going to be central to having any kind of real
impact. At this point, there is not a single official at the highest
levels of U.S. government who can speak sensibly on the subject.
Drawdown
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| Drawdown by Paul Hawken Penguin |
The technical complexity of the choices facing us were brought home to me in reading Paul Hawken's interesting book,
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (2017).
It examines and prioritizes 80 ready-now climate-changing ideas, and
quantifies their potential impact, along with 20 ideas that might
materialize in the future, including direct air capture, hydrogen-boron
fusion, autonomous vehicles, solid-state wave energy and living
buildings. The ideas are listed in this
summary table, along with their potential impacts from a global perspective.
The analysis contains quite a few surprises. Refrigerant management
comes in at #1 while solar only ranks #8 and #10. Changes in household
appliances doesn’t even make the top 80 options. Nor does natural gas
make the top 80 options, even though the U.S. is leading the world in
the reduction of CO2 through the conversion to natural gas. The question
is not whether Hawken has everything right: his analysis shows the
complex multi-sectoral nature of the issues.
What does it all add up to?
On a “plausible” level of effort, the total amount of carbon dioxide
avoided and sequestered is 1,051 gigatons by 2050, which is only
two-thirds of what is needed to stop the increase of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere.
With a much greater level of effort, “the drawdown scenario,” the increase could be effectively stopped by 2050.
With an even greater level effort, the level of carbon dioxide could be reduced by 170 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050.
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Options for dealing with climate change, from Drawdown by Paul Hawken Penguin
LARGE IMAGE |
The book does not address the possibility that unless substantially
greater progress by 2030, the opportunity for reversing the growth of
greenhouse gases may close.
The book is helpful in mapping the territory of the options. “The
overwhelming majority are no-regrets solutions, initiatives we would
want to achieve regardless of their ultimate impact on emissions and
climate, as they are practices that benefit society and the environment
in multiple ways.”
It also notes several options for which we might have serious regrets if they were widely adopted, such as nuclear fission:
Nuclear [fission] is a regrets solution, and regrets have already
occurred at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Rocky Flats, Kyshtym, Browns
Ferry, Idaho Falls, Mihama, Lucens, Fukushima Daiichi, Tokaimura,
Marcoule, Windscale, Bohunice, and Church Rock. Regrets include tritium
releases, abandoned uranium mines, mine-tailings pollution, spent
nuclear waste disposal, illicit plutonium trafficking, thefts of fissile
material, destruction of aquatic organisms sucked into cooling systems,
and the need to heavily guard nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands
of years.
The book only paints the global picture: each country, region and
community will have to make its own set of choices from the larger menu.
Not all countries have tropical forests; sunlight and wind vary
considerably. Obviously, some options would have greater impact sooner,
if there was a greater level of effort.
The Issue Is Political And Technical
In one sense, the central issue is political. Summoning up the
political willpower to do whatever is necessary to redress the
situation, aggressively implementing the solutions that are ready for
implementation, while exploring a whole slew of promising new
technologies.
The U.S. needs to rediscover its pioneer spirit and once again become
an international leader rather than a laggard. The fact that the
current U.S. administration sleeps at the wheel and allows the country
to careen towards an avoidable calamity need not prevent us from getting
ready to take the necessary next step—the creation of a federal agency
to lay the basis for a national effort to fight climate change, while
also inspiring other nations to do likewise.
Thus in another sense the questions are also technical. Politicians
are not climate scientists. They are not going to be the ones to sort
out the massive complexities described by Paul Hawken in
Drawdown.
Nor should they be. The role of politicians is to endorse and
communicate carefully thought-through technical policies and plans
developed by a wide array of climate scientists, economists,
sociologists and management experts, working together as outlined
here.
A Different Kind Of War
Make no mistake, we are caught in a deadly war. Nothing will happen
unless and until we grasp the magnitude of the challenge we face and
share the belief that we have the technology, the smarts, the innovative
capability, in effect the will to win the war.
The problem with this war is that the enemy is ourselves. As I described
here, the core of the problem is that the burning of hydrocarbons is the foundation of many of the
huge improvements in the material well-being of the human race over
the last century. As a species, our brains have been created to ignore
risks that appear distant in time and place. Countering human nature is
hard. There are also many vested interests in maintaining the status
quo.
Winning The War
Winning the war will require deep changes in consumption, technology,
behavior, attitudes and education as well as radically increasing
efforts institutional and social innovation. That’s why we need a
moonshot.
A moonshot implies a change in mindset. It means a shift from
accepting our fate as defined by events and taking things into our own
hands, believing that we can and will change the future. It’s about
looking beyond what we currently see and envisioning answers that may
seem unreasonable—and pursuing them anyway. It’s about doing things that
sound undoable but if done will redefine everything.
We don’t want or need a climate scientist as president. Nor do we
need a candidate with a personally crafted, detailed climate plan. What
we need is a leader who has the smarts to grasp the nature and magnitude
of the challenge and mobilize action to deal with it. We need a leader
who is able to inspire and lead us to win this war. The first and most
urgent action is the creation of a fully empowered national climate
change agency.
We have done monumental things before, whether it was the actual
moonshot with NASA, the Internet with DARPA and the nuclear fission with
the Manhattan Project. In each case through a coordinated national
effort, we were able solve huge problems through innovation that led to
radically new technical solutions that changed everything. As
Astro Teller said, we were able replace apathy with audacity:
The seemingly impossible can happen when passionate and talented
people come together with urgency and determination. The secret? It’s
easier to get people to work on making something 10X better than to get
them to help make it 10% better. Huge problems fire up our hearts as
well as our minds. When you’re aiming for a 10X gain, you have to find
whole new ways of doing things, and lean on bravery and creativity — the
kind that, literally and metaphorically, can put a person on the moon.
The space race was valuable far beyond its original goal: NASA’s work has led to dozens of technology breakthroughs with many everyday uses,
and inspired generations of kids like me to fall in love with science
and engineering. When the world’s problems make us feel small and
helpless, we should reflect on the lessons the Apollo missions hold
about human nature, and our ability to choose bravery over fear and set
aside apathy in favor of audacity.
The State Of The Current Political Debate
Listening to the debate among politicians about climate change
today—or more often, the absence of debate—can be dispiriting. It brings
to mind the
poem written by W.H. Auden in 1939 at a time when a different kind of global crisis was in the offing.
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Creating another federal agency may not seem like a big deal. The day
that we create such an agency the world will go on as before. It will
be seen as something plodding, mundane, even boring. Only a few that
think of it as day as one in which we did something unusual: a day that
lays the basis for securing the future of the human race. Nor should
there be any beating of drums or great celebration. The real work will
still be in front of us. But something will have begun.
Having an agency in place won’t solve the problem by itself. Periods
of blistering heat and extreme weather events will continue to afflict
us for years to come. But something significant will have begun. We will
have created the basis for unlocking the hidden talents and aspirations
of the human race to preserve the beauty of our world for our children
and our grandchildren. As Auden said:
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start.
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