The Climate Change Report: Danger or Opportunity?

Last Friday, a day when many Americans are thinking of shopping rather than climate change, the Fourth National Climate Assessment was released by the U. S. government.  A massive 1600-page document, it reportedly goes into great detail about how projected increases in average temperatures are going to affect the U. S., especially the economy.  I have read only the twelve summary statements at the beginning of the report, but those are pessimistic enough.  Floods, storms, and rising temperatures will threaten to overwhelm our already crumbling infrastructure of drainage systems, water supplies, power grids, and roads.  Agricultural policies and practices that have worked in the past will fail to keep up with changes in crop viabilities worldwide.  The "trillion-dollar coastal property market" will be threatened with collapse, and, well, things are going to go you-know-where in a handbasket, generally speaking.

This is not an alarmist tome.  A lot of serious professionals have done a lot of work to compile evidence-based predictions that have focused not just on gee-whiz sentimental issues such as polar bears (not that I have anything against polar bears), but on bread-and-butter issues like economic and infrastructure problems that will probably get worse.  Given the present climate (so to speak) in Washington, this was a clever strategy on the part of the report's organizers.  If money men are in power, talk about money to get their attention.  Whether the report will inspire the results the writers want to get is another question.

Most people admit there is more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than there used to be, and that this increase will lead to some amount of rise in the average global temperature.  The hard part of this topic is to decide what to do about it.  From my superficial skimming of the report's summary, I glean that its recommendations fall into two categories.

One is to cut down greenhouse-gas emissions.  This is the hardest bullet to bite.  The global economy presently runs largely on fossil fuels, and the green fantasy of a zero-carbon-emission economy is just that—a fantasy.  I'm not saying it will never happen, but to achieve it even in a long lifetime from now would require a global dictatorship that would make Cambodia's Pol Pot look like Mr. Rogers.  Add to that the fact that greenhouse gases don't stay where they are emitted, but eagerly mix into the global atmosphere, and you have the world's largest tragedy of the commons—it's in every nation's general interest to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it's in every nation's specific interest to get everybody else to do it while you yourself keep burning coal, oil, and gas.  Given the practical realities of international politics, it begins to look like the wisest course for an individual country is to plan for the worst-case warming scenario defensively, while doing no more than your fair share to cut back emissions.

And that's where another word, "adaptation," becomes prominent in the report's twelve summaries of findings, in the second category of recommendations.  Here's where engineers can make a difference that is pretty uncontroversial.  Are floods going to be predictably more severe?  Improve flood-abatement planning and design so that even the new worst-case flood doesn't kill as many people or damage as much property.  Are tides going to be higher on the coasts?  There are millions of opportunities to do something about that in every stretch of coastline, and most of them involve spending money on engineering projects.  I'm not saying that engineering firms and engineers should profit by the harm that global warming might otherwise cause.  But most large-scale public engineering works—utility and transportation networks, for instance—already involve forecasting and planning.  Climate change, to the extent that it is predictable, must factor into those plans, and can even motivate new or replacement construction as an added incentive to do something, rather than just letting the old infrastructure continue to crumble while fighting crisis fires as they arise.

Broadly speaking, the profession of engineering bears some responsibility for all that carbon dioxide in the air.  Modern society as a whole made the decision to use first steam power, then electricity and fossil-fueled transportation, but none of that could have happened without engineers.  It is only fitting that engineers will help us deal with the consequences of higher levels of greenhouse gases, whatever those consequences may be. 

The chief danger I see in all the rush to do something about climate change is not technical, but political.  As the English philosopher and political scientist Edmund Burke noted in his 1790 work Reflections on the Revolution in France, institutions are complicated and delicate things.  No one completely understands how a national economy or a national government works.  So it is the better part of wisdom to go slowly when attempting to remedy an ill.  Radical and untried measures such as draconian carbon taxes could trigger a global economic depression that could be more harmful than the climate change it was intended to fight. 

There are those who seem to think that the world's worst existential threat is climate change, and who have the revolutionary attitude that any action is justified by such a threat, including moving toward a global type of European-Union-style government that would systematically implement controls on fossil fuels and energy use.  Burke would caution against any such move.  While it might achieve its intended technical goal of reducing climate change, the price in loss of national sovereignty and the evils that a truly effective world government might do would not be worth paying, in my estimation.

So if you have nothing better to do over the Christmas holidays, curl up with your tablet and the 1600-page Fourth National Climate Assessment and become the best-informed person you know about climate change.  As for me, I've got some Christmas shopping to do instead.

Sources:  I referred to a BBC report carried on Nov. 24, 2018 at  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46325168, and one at Science Magazine at  https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/climate-change-poses-major-threat-us-new-government-report-concludes.  The report itself can be accessed at https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/.

Being Green Takes Green: Europe Rethinks Renewable Energy Standards

For the past decade or more, as Al Gore and the majority of climate-change scientists have insisted that the world is speeding headlong toward an environmental catastrophe of epic proportions, European countries have adhered to stringent emission controls in order to lessen their dependence on fossil fuels and replace them with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.  And the strictures have been in place long enough to have a significant effect;  Germany, for example, now routinely gets a quarter of its electricity from renewable sources.  But as economist Stephen Moore points out in a recent article in National Review, treading so lightly on one's carbon footprint has a price:  higher energy costs.  A kilowatt-hour in Europe currently costs up to twice as much as it does in the U. S., and European manufacturers who use lots of electricity are starting to take notice.  Companies such as the chemical giant BASF are planning new operations in the U. S. rather than Europe.  As a result, the European Union recently announced that it was dropping its mandatory emissions standards for its member nations, letting them burn more coal and oil, if they can find it.  And one of the places they are most likely to start looking is—you guessed it—the U. S.  New exploration technologies, primarily fracking (hydraulic fracturing), have put the U. S. on track to be a net exporter of energy in the near future, and it looks like Europe will now be a prime customer, their disdain for old-fashioned carbon-based fuels notwithstanding.

Engineers made it possible for Germany to achieve the impressive feat of running a quarter of a modern economy on renewable energy alone.  Engineers also have made it possible for the U. S. to increase its oil and gas production in recent years beyond the wildest dreams of everyone but a few farsighted oil-exploration entrepreneurs.  In the absence of government controls or restrictions, customers for energy will buy the cheapest convenient fuel available.  Everyone agrees that except for a few isolated localities, there are no strictly economic reasons to build lots of renewable-energy sources into a large-scale power grid.  A fossil-fuel power plant is much cheaper to build, its output is more reliable, and the continuing cost of the fuel is often more than offset by the construction, maintenance, and other costs associated with the relative unreliability of wind and solar energy. 

But such a strictly economic analysis ignores a cultural and political factor:  the perceived virtue of using renewable energy as opposed to the use of fossil fuels.  In the moral universe in which many government and science leaders live, burning fossil fuels is as close as you can get to a mortal sin against future generations, and against those living now who may be harmed by the consequences of anthropogenic global warming.  The desire to avoid this sin is so great that, at least in Europe, it led to the European Union's mandatory emissions standards which effectively imposed renewable-energy quotas on its member nations.  But even the bureaucrats of the EU can recognize impending economic disaster when they see it, and as the costs of living with a renewable-energy grid began to pile up, they and their constituents saw the consequences of idealism in their power bills.  And it got to be too much.

This is not the place to debate the truth, falsity, or somewhere-in-betweenness of the connection between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming.  What is of more immediate concern is the public's perception of the issue, and how that perception (or rather, spectrum of perceptions) influences governmental policies and laws.  For whatever reason, the EU, with its relatively opaque governing structure and increasingly centralized power over its member nations, responded promptly and vigorously to the perceived threat of global warming with practical measures that had significant negative economic effects.  The fact that the same leaders are now backing off on these measures in the face of rising energy costs says volumes about their real priorities, which turn out to be similar to those of politicians in other parts of the globe.  The slogan "The economy, stupid" was part of Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign that brought down George H. W. Bush's presidency, and while Brussels bureaucrats do not face the same sorts of political pressures that U. S. presidential contenders do, they appear to have more sense than they sometimes get credit for. 

In a free society, individual members can try to live off the grid entirely, or buy three Hummers and take cross-continental trips in them, or anything in between.  But things like national power grids are, by necessity, creatures of politics, policies, and law.  And any society which wants to pay the price for eschewing fossil fuels may do so. 

The problems come when an elite leadership that is persuaded of the evils of fossil fuels tries to implement its expensive energy tastes, however virtuous, on the backs of a populace that has to pay for it.  That experiment has been tried in Europe, and we are witnessing its failure, to a great extent, although Europe will probably continue to rely on renewables to a greater degree than the U. S. does for some time to come. 

It may come as a surprise to some of my readers that in good old "ahl-bidness" Texas, where much of the technology of hydraulic fracturing was developed, and where petroleum is regarded roughly in the same light as mother's milk, we lead the nation in wind-power generation.  In fact, on a particularly windy day in 2013, for a short time Texas surpassed Germany in renewables use,  because for a short time more than a fourth of the total electricity being consumed was supplied by wind power.  As in other parts of the world, the growth of renewables didn't happen without a substantial government incentive, namely a guaranteed purchase price for wind-generated electricity that encouraged the construction of huge wind farms in West Texas.  But this shift to wind was achieved without the penalty-laden restrictions on the construction of conventional fossil-fuel plants that the EU emissions standards imposed.

Decades, if not centuries, will elapse before the whole story of fossil fuels, global warming, and all that can be written.  In the meantime, billions of people on this planet want and need, the advantages that cheap, reliable electric power can provide.  Other things being equal, most of them would probably want to save the planet rather than cook it for breakfast, but things are not equal—not economically, not politically, and not culturally.  And in this inequality lies the complexity of the ethics of energy policy today.

Sources:  Stephen Moore's article "Europe's Green Collapse" appeared in the Feb. 24, 2014 issue of National Review.  The record 28% of electric power generated by wind in Texas occurred at 7:08 PM, Feb. 9, 2013, and was reported in the Abilene Reporter News at http://www.reporternews.com/news/2013/mar/01/texas-wind-energy-sets-record-grid-expansion-in/.  The report that Texas leads the nation in installed wind-power generation capacity is taken from the website of the American Council on Renewable Energy at http://www.acore.org/files/pdfs/states/Texas.pdf.