Lance and DeChristopher Star Hall Friday
Lance Christie
Hall this Friday, February 6, starting at 6:30 p.m. Julianne asked
me to give a ten-minute overview of the global warming crisis that
confronts us, necessitating an activist response including civil
disobedience and mass demonstrations to change our national energy
policy course, for a variety of moral reasons, to prevent civic and
economic collapse, and to bequeath a liveable planet to our
children. Michael Mielke asked me to write an Executive Summary onto
the top of my 56-page treatise on global warming so he can post it on
one of the ManyOne Network portals and use it as a handout at events;
my presentation at Star Hall will be a summary of that summary.
The "bottom line" on the Renewable Deal's Energy Plank One is that
constructing the renewables-based national energy system by 2050 is
grossly overdetermined as to necessity. First, as demonstrated in
Chapter One, the renewables-based energy system is more reliable,
lower risk, and less expensive than attempting to keep the current
portfolio of energy sources (in the U.S., 50% coal, ~20% nuclear, and
all but 8% of the rest natural gas or oil) going. In other words, it
is Best Available Technology which should, for perfectly
straightforward actuarial reasons, replace the current energy
generation portfolio. No other investment decision makes economic
sense by standard criteria for investment risk. The Post-Carbon
Institute's newly-published "The Real New Deal" article by Richard
Heinberg quotes an International Energy Agency report which the cost
of new exploration and extraction technology investment for
production of the world's remaining fossil fuel resources to be $26
trillion in 2007 constant dollars during the period 2007-2030. Which
makes economic sense: to invest $26 trillion in a dead-end energy
source that will fry the planet with greenhouse gases if we burn the
carbon fuels, or invest the same $26 trillion in building a new
energy production system which will last as long as the sun shines,
has feedstock far greater than anything we can use or will ever use
to meet our power needs, and produces no net greenhouse gases?
Second, no matter whose projections you use, we are either past, at,
or close to the Hubbert peak for world petroleum production (my 2004
projection was November 2006, which was confirmed by the German
group's examination of world production data they published in the
spring of 2008), natural gas production, coal production (my
projection is 2012 for the peak, measured in Btu content rather than
volume), and even uranium production for nuclear (different dates
depending on annual consumption, which depends on the number of
nuclear power plants built and operating each year). Analysts say we
need ten years' overlap between shortages in fossil fuels and the
beginning of construction of the replacement energy grid system to
prevent gross economic disruptions from having to spend the capital
to build the replacement, next-generation energy system (this case is
reviewed in Chapter One of Plank One of the Renewable Deal). So,
building the new system starting now is necessary to avoid economic
disruption and possible collapses from shortages, fluctuating
supplies, and rising and unstable costs of fossil fuel resources.
Third, as the global warming treatise demonstrates, we need to abate
our emissions of greenhouse gases so that lowering the atmospheric
load of carbon dioxide from the 387 parts per million we achieved at
the end of 2008 down to the 350 ppm "safe limit" prescribed by James
Hansen and colleagues based on their paleo-climatological research
(which is reviewed in detail in my global warming article) becomes
possible through application of a variety of accelerated carbon
sequestration techniques in agriculture and silviculture which are
described in detail in the Renewable Deal Aspect Two, Plank Two, on
agriculture, which can sequester massive amounts of atmospheric
carbon in biomass and in soil structure mostly using biological
"solar power" (photosynthesis).
Only a terminally stupid species would not choose this "three-fer:"
you get a more stable, less expensive, energy system the base
feedstock for which is delivered free every year as long as the sun
continues to operate, which permits you to escape the risks of fossil
fuel exhaustion to economic and social stability, and permits you to
abate global warming. Such a deal. Actually, such a "Renewable
Deal," which tells you where I came up with the name besides doing a
play on FDR's "New Deal." -Lance