Carbon
Call
By Rand Clifford
09 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Not realistic from a political
standpoint, not realistic because the targets are incredibly expensive—that’s
a Yale economist’s take on the multi-trillion dollar strategy
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions unveiled April 4 by the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Others find it hard to even
imagine...the magnitude of changes, the speed needed to reach the report’s
emission peak by 2015, then subsequent reduction of 50%, to level off
at 85% of the emissions of 2000. This could cost up to 3% of the world’s
gross domestic product. Such economic bloodletting will only happen
when imposed by nature, and that could be gruesome.
A persistent problem is the
amount of denial still going around, and the big bucks fomenting belief
that what we now see happening all around us might not really be happening—though
if it is happening, it could be beneficial. With catastrophes that scientists
actually working in the field of climatology say are imminent, who wouldn’t
rather be comforted by industry shills, or rather listen to "experts"
claiming we ought to be glad for global warming. The latter insist that
the planet’s preferred state over the last 40 million years is
ice age. Then about 8 thousand years ago, mankind started planting crops,
clearing trees and burning biomass, darkening the planet’s surface
while emitting greenhouse gases and saving us from freezing. There is
truth in what they say, although if a little is good, billions of times
more is not necessarily better. Has moderation ever been in the civilization
playbook?
Instead of sitting in this
luxurious blue lifeboat and arguing over the size of the hole in the
hull, or arguing about how to slow the leaking—rather than risking
a sinking, perhaps it’s time we started bailing. Tweaking emission
levels at this point are just so much arguing about that hole, because
carbon dioxide we’ve already emitted tends to persist in the atmosphere
about a century. And major systems we’ve already sent into positive
feedback increasingly threaten to make anything we do or don’t
do now virtually irrelevant.
Systems such as the special
type of permafrost called yedoma—so rich in carbon it’s
estimated to contain 100 times the amount released annually by combustion
of fossil fuels. Alaska and Canada have a few hundred square miles of
yedoma, but Siberia is where global warming is thawing the greatest
quantities of this permafrost flash-frozen 40,000 years ago. Carbon
is escaping from the melt margins as carbon dioxide if it is dry, and
methane if it comes from under meltwater, often the case in Siberia.
Methane persists in the atmosphere only about a decade before breaking
down into carbon dioxide, and other chemicals, but as a greenhouse gas
it is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Yedoma is currently
bubbling out methane 5 times faster than what was originally measured.
The Stone Age did not end
because we ran out of stones. The Global Economy lives by fossil fuels,
Peak Oil guaranteeing that the Oil Age will taper off through increasing
scarcity, but it won’t end because we are out of oil. Clean alternative
energies have long suffered at the hands, and pockets, of the mighty
fossil fuel industries, keeping economies of scale from greatly improving
the economics of alternatives while hidden subsidies made fossil energy
horribly expensive. And despite improvements across the alternative
energy spectrum, we remain quite distant from replacing more than a
fraction of the energy we depend on from fossil sources. It’s
crucial that improvements be made in the efficiency of conversion of
fossil fuels, and use of their energy. Also crucial is the decarbonization
of fossil sources, whether it be elemental carbon recovered before combustion,
or C02 recovery after combustion, as with power plants. A variety of
reliable methods are available for sequestering recovered carbon, such
as in depleted oil and gas wells, salt domes, or in ocean sediments.
With oil wars casting their
spells, development of clean, alternative energies is not a top national
priority, though impressive progress still prevails, and technological
innovation promises to keep dazzling. But right now, we need to bail
as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as possible, as fast as we can. Our
best option is photosynthesis, plants absorbing carbon dioxide and exhaling
oxygen while fixing sunlight into myriad useful products—what
a perfect deal! The equation is pure elegance: sunlight falls on photosynthesizing
plants ------> six molecules of water + six molecules of carbon dioxide
produce one molecule of sugar + six molecules of oxygen.
Forests are the biosphere’s
lungs, and they are being razed in a global plague particularly virulent
in Asia and South America; the Amazon basin alone is losing 30 million
acres a year—at a time when we most desperately need the lung
power. But to our incredible good fortune we have a green Superhero,
nature’s single most prolific photosynthesizer in temperate climates.
One of the world’s original cultivated crops, a plant wars have
been fought over, and civilizations grew by. Our most valuable natural
resource for bailing CO2 out of the atmosphere, hemp. We can seed supercharged
lungs—the most robust plant of all, renown for gulping CO2 and
exhaling oxygen while fixing sunlight into more useful products than
any other plant, including biomass fuels. But hemp is behind bars since
the 1930s, convicted of threatening profits of William Randolph Hearst,
and Pierre duPont. Hearst and duPont demonized hemp in a guttural lunge
of political sway, got our hero slammered. One of the worst crimes against
the American People, and it just keeps producing.
Rand Clifford lives
in Spokane, Washington, and welcomes your comments at: [email protected]
His novels CASTLING and TIMING
are published by StarChief Press: http://www.starchiefpress.com
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