Is it time to wean ourselves from fossil fuels?

The Associated Press

Bad for the environment?

Featured Topic | Posted 37 weeks 6 days ago

Is it time to wean ourselves from fossil fuels?

New studies suggest both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by 2050 -- or global warming could dry up water sources across the planet.

"The question is, what if we don't want the Earth to warm anymore?" asked Carnegie Institution senior scientist Ken Caldeira, co-author of a paper published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. "The answer implies a much more radical change to our energy system than people are thinking about."

What can be done to achieve that goal? Is it possible? Or desirable?

Ben likes: Completely objective journalism

Jim Manzi/The American Scene

Naturally, The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin has a “narrative” for why the world seems to resist the manifestly correct course of action so stubbornly. She says that “some climate researchers who back major greenhouse gas reductions said it is unrealistic to expect policymakers to think in terms of such vast time scales.” She then quotes two climate researchers who say nothing about this subject. Finally, we get to a philosophy professor who gives her what she wants, when he says that global warming “is a classic inter-generational debate, where the short-term benefits of emitting carbon accrue mainly to us and where the dangers of them are largely put off until future generations.”

How can we be so selfish? I guess American democracy just can’t handle the complexity of the issue. We need a Leader who can get us past this petty squabbling and Take Action.

Joel likes: First, step up

Bill McKibben/Yes!

Here’s the political reality check, just as sobering as the data about sea ice and drought: China last year passed the United States as the biggest emitter of carbon on Earth. Now, that doesn’t mean the Chinese are as much to blame as we are -- per capita, we pour four times more CO2 into the atmosphere. And we’ve been doing it for a hundred years, which means it will be decades before they match us as a source of the problem. But they are growing so fast that there’s no way to head off this crisis without their participation. And yet they don’t want to participate, because they’re using all that cheap coal not to pimp out an already lavish lifestyle, but to pull people straight out of deep poverty.

Which means that if we want them not to burn their coal, we’re going to need to help them -- we’re going to need to supply the windmills, efficient boilers, and so on that let them build decent lives without building coal-fired power plants.

Which means, in turn, we’re going to need to be generous, on a scale that passes even the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild post-World War II Europe. And it’s not clear if we’re capable of that any more -- so far our politicians have preferred to scapegoat China, not come to its aid.