Fifty Degrees Below. Kim Stanley Robinson
in installing a new infrastructure, whatever it might be.
‘So. Given this situation, I think we have to identify the two or three most promising options in each big carbon area, energy and transport, and then immediately support these options in a major way. Pilot projects, maybe competitions with prizes, certainly suggested tax structures and incentives to get private enterprise investing in it.’
‘Make carbon credits really expensive,’ Frank said.
‘Make gas really expensive,’ Edgardo said.
‘Yes. These are more purely economic or political fixes. We will run into political resistance on those.’
‘You’ll run into political resistance on all these fronts.’
‘Yes. But we have to work for everything that looks like it will help, political resistance or not. More and more I’m convinced that this will have to be a multi-disciplinary effort, in the largest sense. The front is very broad, and we can’t avoid the awkward parts just because they’ve got difficulties. I was just mentioning them.’
She clicked to her next slide. ‘Cars. It takes about ten years to replace the fleet of cars on the road, so we need to start now if anything is to be done in a relevant time period. Fuel cell cars, electric, hydrogen. Also, there are some things we could do right away with the current models. Increase fuel efficiency, of course. Could be legislated. Also, fuel flexibility. There is a device that could be added to every conventional car that would enable it to burn gas, ethanol or methanol. Adds only a couple hundred dollars per vehicle. It too could be legislated to be a requirement. This would have a national security aspect, which is to say, if we are unexpectedly cut off from foreign oil supplies, everyone could still burn ethanol in their cars, and we wouldn’t be completely crippled.’
‘Ethanol still puts carbon into the atmosphere,’ Frank pointed out.
‘Yes, but it’s made from biological material that has been drawn down from the atmosphere when the plant material grew. On the plant’s death it was going to rot and enter the atmosphere as carbon anyway. If you burn it and put it in the atmosphere, you can then also draw it back down in the plants that you use for later fuel, so that it becomes a closed-loop system where there is no net gain of carbon in the atmosphere, even though you have moved lots of transport. Whereas burning oil and coal adds new carbon to the atmosphere, carbon that was very nicely sequestered before we burned it. So ethanol is better, and it’s available right now, and works in current cars. Most of the other technologies for cleaner power are a decade away in terms of research and development. So it’s nice that we have something we can deploy immediately. A bridge technology. Clearly this should happen right now.’
‘If it weren’t for the political obstructions.’
‘Yes. Maybe this is an issue where we have to try to educate Congress, the administration and the people. Think about how we might do that. But now, on to cleaner energy production.’ Diane clicked slides again. ‘Here again we already have proven options, in the form of all the renewables, many of them working and ready to be expanded. Wind, geothermal, solar, and so on.
‘The one with tremendous potential for growth is of course solar power. The technological difficulties in transferring sunlight to electricity are complicated enough that there are competing designs for improvement, still struggling to show superiority over the other methods. So one thing we can do is to help identify which ones to pursue with a big effort. Photovoltaic research, of course, but also we need to look at these flexible mirror systems, directing light to heatable elements that transform the heat into electricity. Further down the line, there is also the prospect of space solar, gathering the sunlight in space and beaming it down.’
‘Wouldn’t that require help from NASA?’
‘Yes, NASA should be part of this. A really big booster is a prerequisite for any conceivable space solar, naturally.’
‘And what about DOE?’
‘Well, perhaps. We have to acknowledge that some federal agencies have been captured by the industries they are supposed to regulate. Clearly the Department of Energy is one of these. They should have been taking the lead on clean energy, but they began as the Atomic Energy Commission, so for a while they would only look at nuclear, and now they are creatures of the oil industry. So they have been obstructions to innovation for many years. Whether that can change now, I don’t know. I suspect the only good that can come from them is some version of clean coal. If coal can be gasified, it’s possible its carbon and methane could be captured and sequestered before burning. That would be good, if they can pull it off. But beyond that, the unfortunate truth is that DOE is more likely to be one of the impediments to our efforts than a help. We will have to do what we can to engage them, and dance around any obstacles they might set up.’
She clicked again. ‘Now, carbon capture and sequestering. Here, the hope is that ways can be found to draw down some of the CO2 already in the atmosphere. That could be a big help, obviously. There are proven mechanical means to do this, but the scale of anything we could afford to build is much too small. If anything’s going to work, it almost certainly will have to be biological. The first and most obvious method here is to grow more plants. Reforestation projects are thus helpful in more ways than one, as stabilizing soil, restoring habitat, growing energy, and growing building materials, all while drawing down carbon. Poplars are often cited as very fast growers with a significant drawdown possibility.
‘The other biological method suggested would involve some hypothetical engineered biological system taking more carbon out of the atmosphere than it does now. This brings biotech into the game, and it could be a crucial player. It might have the possibility of working fast enough to help us in the short term.’
For a while they discussed the logistics of initiating all the efforts Diane had sketched out so far, and then Anna took over the Power Point screen.
She said, ‘Another carbon sequestration, in effect, would be to not burn oil that we would have using our current practices. Meaning conservation. It could make a huge difference. Since the United States is the only country living at American consumption levels, if we here decided to consume less, it would significantly reduce world consumption levels.’
She clicked to a slide titled Carbon Values. It consisted of a list of phrases:
• conservation, preservation (fuel efficiency, carbon taxes)
• voluntary simplicity
• stewardship, right action (religion)
• sustainability, permaculture
• leaving healthy support system for the subsequent generations
Edgardo was shaking his head. ‘This amishization, as the engineers call it – you know, this voluntary simplicity movement – it is not going to work. Not only are we fond of our comforts and toys, and lazy too, but there is a fifty billion dollar a year industry fighting any such change, called advertising.’
Anna said, ‘Maybe we could hire an advertising firm to design a series of voluntary simplicity ads, to be aired on certain cable channels.’
Edgardo grinned. ‘Yes, I would enjoy to see that, but there is a ten trillion-a-year economy that also wants more consumption. It’s like we’re working within the body of a cancerous tumor. It’s hopeless, really. We will simply charge over the cliff like lemmings.’
‘Real lemmings don’t actually run off cliffs,’ Anna quibbled. ‘People might change. People change all the time. It just depends on what they want.’
She had been looking into this matter, which she jokingly called macrobioinformatics: researching, refining and even inventing various rubrics by which people could evaluate their consumption levels quantitatively, with the idea that if they saw exactly what they were wasting, they would cut back and save money. The best known of these rubrics, as she explained, were the various ‘ecological footprint’ measurements. These had been originally designed for towns and countries, but Anna had worked out methods for households as well, and now she passed around