Delay and Fail
Last week, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York, Al Gore suggested that young people should engage in civil disobedience to stop the building of new coal power plants “that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.”
I sympathize with Gore’s intent. Coal is the most polluting of the fossil fuels, and if we burn more of it there is little hope of averting catastrophic climate change.
But is carbon capture and storage (CCS) a solution? The technology exists only in the sense that its components have been demonstrated on a small scale. Deploying it broadly would require the development of an infrastructure that would require trillions of dollars of investment and decades of work. According to Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba, in a recent letter to Nature, we would need to handle a volume of CO2 twice as large as the world’s crude oil flows just to sequester one quarter of carbon dioxide emitted in 2005 by large stationary sources.
CCS is essentially a “delay and fail” strategy by the coal industry. By selling the idea of “clean coal,” the industry delays an energy transition away from fossil fuels, while setting itself up for an eventual failure of the entire CCS project. By the time that the failure is clear and obvious, there will be no alternative: the coal plants will have been built, the money invested. We’ll burn more coal, and to hell with the climate.
Mr. Gore would do well not to play along with this industry ploy by touting CCS as a solution.
The aspect of Mr. Gore’s statement that generated more public controversy was of course his advocacy of civil disobedience in shutting down new coal plant construction. Presumably he envisions young people sitting in front of bulldozers and other construction equipment, thus paralyzing the coal plant builders.
Unfortunately, with regard to direct action we are moving into a new era: high-tech surveillance technologies, anti-activist police tactics, and “sub-lethal” crowd control weapons ensure that the kinds of efforts that worked in the 1950s, ’60, and ’70s against segregation and the Vietnam War will be far more difficult to mount in the future, and far more costly to the lives and health of protesters. If Mr. Gore is going to encourage young people in this direction, I would expect to see him at the front of the barricades.
Realistically, solving the climate crisis will require international cooperation to phase out all fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Protests might speed the process somewhat in some countries, but until world leaders really understand the dead end that fossil fuels represent from both an environmental AND AN ECONOMIC perspective, little headway is likely to be made.
The economic argument for leaving fossil fuels behind is of course tied to the phenomena of depletion, dependency, and supply vulnerability. Once these are understood, alternatives to fossil fuels begin to appear far more attractive and practical even to policy makers who have no care whatever for the fate of future generations.
image credit: jeffreyd00 (creative commons)
Hi Everyone
I hail from Buderim, Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia and I am concerned about all the issues of Sustainability for the occupants of our planet. What concerns me the most is the issue of real estate occupancy by middle class people through out the Western World and it is still accelerating. The issue of the financial collapse is only to protect the financial product issuers and the subsequent upholding of that product to make profits for them by indoctrinating the Western slaves that they need ownership and more and more occupancy of arable land to gain a bigger portfolio. The issue on the planet is too many people on too little space to produce enough to eat and enough water to grow the food for sustenance. When are we in the West going to realise that the our occupancy of the planet is the issue that is the underlying cause for the biodiversity to reach the tipping point because with this occupancy we consume more.
The loneliest most unhappy people on this planet are from the West because they think and are not aware that we are all one the planet and all its occupants from the virus/bacteria upwards to the Universe. When are we going to realise that we can start by sharing first with our immediate family, our children, our extended family and others close by. We have the space for them, we just need to have the willingness to share.
I like both Gore and Heinberg, but I have to agree with the latter that carbon sequestration, by conventional means, isn't energy cost effective, though I'd like to see the details of what he means by conventional. But some celebrities, especially Nobel prize winners, on the front lines of energy and environment protests, enduring 'non-lethal' force, might make a big difference.
I feel 'the elephant in the room' isn't necessarily about simply too many people, and more about the constantly increasing numbers, the cause of also most of our social problems. These run from unemployment to the 'need' for rigid government controls, leading to elitism, fascism and collapse.
I'm not sure it's true that today's protesters have worse to put up with than protesters in the past. Look at Ghandi's salt marchers, getting their heads bashed in with billy clubs--or the Selma (?) marchers attacked by dogs--or the many civil rights activists who were killed.
I agree with Heinberg that we should forget the CCS distraction/boondoggle, and that Gore himself should join us. But I have one more quibble--he needs to yank that word "young". If you look at the people getting arrested for civil disobedience these days, many ARE young--and what a welcome sight they are! But half of us are grey-haired. We may see Granny D out there on the front lines--I think she's 97 now. Young people have extra reason to protest, as they're more likely to see the ruined world we're creating with out inability to make the rapid changes we desperately need. But older people also have an extra reason--many of us have reached the age where responsibility for younger generations, not just our own children, is strong within us. And we tend to be less squeezed financially than the young. Direct action may or may not work--but one thing is clear, going through the "proper channels" will not deliver action before hell boils over.
I am deeply saddened that the Green Party won no seats(as of the last look at the charts). PM Harper has a plan for the environment that allows more polution not less. He is run by the big businesses( mainly Oil interests) and it is OK with him that an entire lake and surrounding countryside are being turned into a large dump for the crap coming from the oilsands.He does not listen to protesters. He does listen to huge amounts of people if they are all behind an idea. He did give in to pressure to allow Elizabeth May to debate at the Leader's table. He was seen as weak and afraid by many who made it known what they thought, so he bowed to pressure. If he had not, I am sure there would be more Greens voted for just out of anger at him. The Greens actually got 2% more votes than they had before which is close to a 50% increase from the last election.Canada is in meltdown mode and only a fractured government is going to be able to pass any laws by passing what is agreeable to all since it is a minority government. The opposition party is going to be split again when the question of leadership comes up in May. When that happens, I pray the PM does not call yet another election. He called is one to stop a Green party member one day away from a by-election from a very good chance of winning the first Green seat. Harper is Anti-Environment. The US government is just as bad.Then we have Mexico, who is not known for it's environmental policies. That makes North America a prime dumping ground and major poluter of the world. I don't know the exact numbers bout China, but if the coal stations go up that just means ton's more polutants in our air. We will die choking on our own wastes. The solution is to have a renewable, sustainable energy source. We have it right now with wind and solar power. I want to focus on the solutions. Fighting the problems is not going to work like it once had. Good luck folks, we are going to need it.
Michael J. Kaer, Author of "What Money Can't Buy"
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