Does all this mean that climate change is unstoppable, and that our children are certain to end up in a world not worth living in? No, of course not. Climate change is being caused overwhelmingly by human activities, so all that we have to do in order to reduce climate change is to reduce those human activities. That means burning less fossil fuel, and getting more of our energy from renewable sources such as wind, solar, and nuclear.
The third big set of problems for the future of human societies around the world, besides nuclear weapons and global climate change, is the global depletion of essential natural resources. That’s a formula for trouble, because some resources (especially water and timber) have imposed limits on past societies and caused them to collapse, and other resources (especially fossil fuels, minerals, and productive land) have motivated wars. Resource scarcities are already undermining societies or threatening to cause wars in many parts of the world today. Let’s begin by considering one example in detail: the fossil fuels that we use primarily for energy, and also as starting materials for chemical synthesis of many products. (The term “fossil fuels” means hydrocarbon fuel sources formed long ago in the Earth’s mantle: oil, coal, oil shale, and natural gas.)
Humans require energy for all of our activities, and we require especially large quantities for transporting and lifting things. For millions of years of human evolution, human muscle power was our sole energy source for transporting and lifting. Around 10,000 years ago, we began to domesticate large animals and harness them to pull vehicles, carry packs, and raise weights by systems of pulleys and gears. Then came wind power for driving sailboats and (later) windmills, and water power for driving waterwheels used for lifting, grinding, and spinning. Today, our most widespread energy source by far is fossil fuels because of their apparently low cost (more of that later), their high energy density (i.e., the large amounts of energy that a small quantity of fuel can deliver), and their ability to be transported for use anywhere (unlike animal, wind, and water power, which are available or can be maintained only in certain locations). That’s why fossil fuels have been major recent drivers of wars and foreign policy, as exemplified by oil’s role in motivating the U.S.’s and Britain’s Mideast policies and Japan’s entry into World War Two.
Already in ancient times, humans were using small quantities of oil and coal exposed on the Earth’s surface. However, large-scale use of fossil fuels did not begin until the 1700’s, with the Industrial Revolution. The exploitation of fossil fuels of different types and from different sources has gradually shifted with time. The first fuels used were those most accessible because they were available on or close to the surface, those easiest and cheapest to extract, and those whose extraction caused the least damage. As those first sources became depleted, we shifted to sources that were less accessible, deeper underground, more expensive to extract, or more damaging. Thus, the first industrial-scale fuel use was of coal from shallow mines, used to power steam engines for pumping water and then for powering spinning wheels, and (eventually in the 1800’s) steamships and railroad engines. Industrial exploitation of coal was followed by exploitation of oil, oil shale, and natural gas. For instance, the first oil well that extracted oil from underground was a shallow well drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, followed by progressively deeper wells.
There are debates about whether we have already reached “peak oil”—that is, whether we have consumed so much of the Earth’s accessible oil reserves that oil production will soon start to decline. However, there is no debate about the fact that the cheapest, most accessible, and least damaging sources of oil have already been used up. The U.S. can no longer scrape up surface oil or drill shallow wells in Pennsylvania. Instead, wells have to be dug deeper (a mile deep or more), and not just on land but also under the ocean floor, and not just in shallow ocean waters but in deeper waters, and not just in Pennsylvania in the U.S.’s industrial heartland but far away in New Guinea rainforests and in the Arctic. Those deeper, more remote oil deposits are much more expensive to extract than were Pennsylvania’s shallow deposits. The resulting potential for oil spills producing costly damages is higher. As costs of oil extraction increase, alternative but more damaging fossil fuel sources of oil shale and coal, and non-fossil-fuel sources such as wind and solar, are becoming more economic. Nevertheless, oil prices today still permit big oil companies to continue to be highly profitable.
I just mentioned the apparently low cost of oil. Let’s pause to consider the actual cost of oil (or of coal). Suppose that oil sells for $60 per barrel. If it costs an oil company only $20 per barrel to extract and transport the oil, and if the company doesn’t have to pay for anything else, selling oil at $60 per barrel means that the oil company makes a big profit.
But fossil fuels cause lots of damage. If those damages also got charged to the oil company, then the price of oil would increase. The damages produced by burning of fossil fuels include air pollution, which recently was serious in the U.S. and Europe and now is especially bad in India and China. That air pollution causes millions of deaths and high health costs every year. Other damages caused by fossil fuels are mediated by climate change, which costs us by decreasing agricultural production, raising sea levels, forcing us to expend money on barriers against those rising seas, and contributing to big damage by floods and droughts.
Here’s an example to help you understand those indirect costs of fossil fuels, which fossil fuel producers at present don’t pay. Suppose that you operate a factory that produces a type of doll called Happy Dolls. Suppose that it costs you $20 to make a ton of Happy Dolls, while other dolls cost $30 per ton to make, and that you can sell your Happy Dolls for $60 per ton. That profit margin of $60 minus $20 makes Happy Doll manufacturing very profitable, and lets it outcompete rival doll manufacturers.
Unfortunately, your manufacturing process to make Happy Dolls yields as a by-product lots of black sludge, which isn’t a by-product of the manufacturing processes of rival dolls. You dump the black sludge onto the wheat fields of all of your neighbors, thereby decreasing their wheat production. Every ton of Happy Dolls that you produce costs your neighbors $70 of lost wheat income because of your black sludge.
As a result, your neighbors sue you and insist that you pay them $70 for the lost wheat income caused by each ton of your Happy Dolls. You object to your neighbors’ demand, making many excuses: you deny that Happy Doll manufacturing produces black sludge, although your company’s own scientists have been warning you of that by-product for decades; you say that black sludge hasn’t been proven to be harmful; black sludge has been arising naturally for millions of years; more research is needed before we can judge how much of the black sludge on your neighbors’ fields arises from your Happy Doll manufacturing plant; and Happy Dolls are essential to civilization and our high standard of living, so victims of black sludge should just shut up and stop complaining.
But when the lawsuit goes to trial, the judge and jury say that this case is a no-brainer: of course you have to pay $70 for every ton of your Happy Dolls, in order to compensate your neighbors for their diminished wheat production. The result is that your Happy Dolls have a true cost not of $20 per ton, but of $20 plus $70 = $90 per ton to manufacture. Happy Dolls are no longer a great profit machine: it isn’t economical for you to manufacture them at $90 per ton if you can sell them for only $60 per ton. Now, your competitors’ dolls costing $30 per ton to produce outcompete Happy Dolls, rather than vice versa.
Fossil fuels, like Happy Dolls in our hypothetical example, cause damages as well as yield benefits. The difference is that the CO2 from fossil fuel burning is much less visible than is black sludge; and that fossil fuel producers and users don’t yet have to pay the costs of the harm that they cause to other people, whereas our hypothetical doll manufacturers do. But there is increasing insistence that fossil fuel producers or users should be forced to pay up just like Happy Doll makers, e.g., by a tax on carbon emissions or by another method. That insistence is one factor behind
the current search for alternative energy sources other than fossil fuels.
Some alternative sources appear to be virtually inexhaustible, such as wind, solar, tidal, hydroelectrical, and geothermal energy. All of those sources except for tidal are already “proven”: i.e., they have been in use on a large scale for a long time. For instance, Denmark already gets much of its electricity from windmills in the North Sea, and Iceland’s capital city of Reykjavík gets its heating from geothermal energy, while dams on rivers for hydroelectric energy generation have been in widespread use for more than a century.
Of course, each of these alternative energy sources is associated with its own particular problems. Large-scale solar energy generation here in my homeland of Southern California often involves converting areas of sunny desert habitat to solar panels, and that’s bad for our already endangered population of desert tortoises. Windmills kill birds and bats and are resented by land-owners who complain that windmills spoil their view. Hydroelectric dams across rivers are obstacles to migratory fish. If we had other methods of energy generation that were cheap and that caused no problems, surely we wouldn’t destroy desert tortoise habitat, kill birds and bats, spoil people’s views, or block fish migration. But, as we’ve discussed, the alternative of fossil fuels is associated with its own big problems of global climate change, respiratory illnesses, and damages caused by oil and coal extraction. Since we thus don’t have the option of choosing between a good solution and a bad solution, we have to ask: which of all of those bad alternatives is the least bad?
As an example of this debate, consider windmills. In the U.S. they have been estimated to kill at least 45,000 birds and bats each year. That sounds like a lot of birds and bats. To place that number in perspective, consider that pet cats that are allowed to wander in and out of their owners’ houses have been measured to kill an average of more than 300 birds per year per cat. (Yes, more than three hundred: that’s not a misprint.) If the U.S. population of outdoor cats is estimated at about 100 million, then cats can be calculated to kill at least 30 billion birds per year in the U.S., compared to the mere 45,000 birds and bats killed per year by windmills. That windmill toll is equivalent to the work of just 150 cats. One could thus argue that, if we are seriously concerned about U.S. birds and bats, we should focus our attention first on cats, rather than on windmills. In further defense of windmills over cats, please reflect that cats don’t repay us for the damage they do to our birds by providing us with energy, unpolluted air, and relief from global warming, while windmills do provide all of those things.
This example illustrates how one can make a case for windmills, desert solar panels, and dams, despite the undoubted harm that they cause. They inflict less serious damage than do fossil fuels. Hence they could be considered to offer an acceptable compromise method for replacing fossil fuels as an energy source. One still often hears the objection that windmills and solar energy are not yet competitive with fossil fuels. But in some circumstances they already are, and the apparent economic advantage of fossil fuels is misleading; again the alternative methods would be much cheaper if we considered the big indirect costs (the Happy Doll costs) of fossil fuels.
By now, you are probably wondering about the obvious, and much-feared, alternative of nuclear energy generation. That’s a subject to which most Americans, and many citizens of other countries as well, immediately close their ears. They do so for three reasons besides economic ones: fear of accidents, fear of diversion of nuclear reactor fuel to making nuclear bombs, and the unsolved problem of where to store spent fuels.
Our memories of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs lead many people instinctively to associate nuclear reactors with death, not with energy. In fact, since 1945 there have been two known events in which accidents at nuclear power stations did kill people: the 32 people killed immediately, and the large but uncertain number who died subsequently from radiation, as a result of the Chernobyl reactor accident in the former Soviet Union; and the Fukushima reactor accident in Japan. An equipment accident and human error damaged the Three Mile Island reactor in the U.S. in 1979, but no one was killed or injured, and escape of radioactive materials was minimal. However, the psychological effects of Three Mile Island were enormous: they led to a long suspension of ordering any new reactor for energy generation anywhere in the U.S. for many years.
The remaining fear associated with nuclear generation is the unsolved problem of where to dispose of the spent reactor fuel. Ideally, it should be stored forever, in a remote and geologically very stable area, deep underground and not at risk of fuel escape due to earthquakes or water penetration. The best candidate identified so far in the U.S. is a Nevada site that seems to fit the physical requirements. However, complete certainty about safety is impossible, and so the objections of Nevada citizens have succeeded in blocking the proposed site’s adoption. As a result, the U.S. still doesn’t have a site for the disposal of waste nuclear fuel.
Thus, just as we discussed for the problem of birds and bats killed by windmills, nuclear energy generation is not free of downsides. Even without those downsides, it wouldn’t meet all of our major energy needs: e.g., one can’t use nuclear reactors to power cars and airplanes. Our memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—reinforced by Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—have paralyzed the thinking of most Americans and other peoples about nuclear energy generation. Again, though, we have to ask: what are the risks of nuclear power, and what are the risks of the alternatives? France has generated most of its national electricity requirements from nuclear reactors for many decades without an accident. It seems implausible to object that the French may really have had accidents and not admitted them: the experience of Chernobyl demonstrates that the release of any radioactivity into the atmosphere from a damaged reactor is easily detected by other countries. South Korea, Taiwan, Finland, and many other countries have also generated much electricity from nuclear reactors without any significant accidents. Hence we should weigh our fear of the possibility of a nuclear reactor accident against the certainty of the millions of deaths caused every year by air pollution resulting from burning fossil fuels, and the enormous and possibly ruinous consequences of global climate change caused by fossil fuels.
For the U.S., the solution to these dilemmas will have to involve two components. One is to reduce energy consumption per person in the U.S.: ours is approximately double that of Europeans, despite Europeans enjoying a higher standard of living than Americans. Among the contributing factors are different government policies in Europe and the U.S. influencing car purchases. Europeans are discouraged from buying expensive big cars with high fuel consumption and low gas mileage, because the purchase tax on cars in some European countries is set at 100%, doubling the cost of the car. Also, European government taxes on gasoline drive gas prices to more than $9 per gallon, another disincentive to buying a fuel-inefficient car. Tax policies in the U.S. could similarly be used to discourage Americans from buying gas-guzzling cars.
The second component of the solution to energy dilemmas for the U.S., besides lowering overall energy consumption, will be to get more of our energy from sources other than fossil fuels—i.e., from wind, solar, tidal, hydroelectric, geothermal, and perhaps nuclear. After the 1973 Gulf oil crisis, the U.S. government offered subsidies to developers of alternative energy generation, and U.S. companies used those subsidies to develop efficient wind generators. Unfortunately, around 1980 the U.S. government ended those subsidies for alternative energy, so the U.S. market for our efficient windmills declined precipitously. Instead, Denmark, Germany, Spain, and other European countries improved on our windmill designs and now use them to generate much of their electricity needs. Similarly, China has developed long-distance power lines to transmit electricity from wind-generating sites in far western China to densely populated areas of eastern China; the U.S. hasn’t developed such long-distance electricity transmission systems.
Those are the problems associated with the depleti
on of one natural resource: fossil fuels, viewed in the broader context of the problem of our energy needs. Let’s now discuss briefly the other major categories of natural resources, and their potential to pose difficulties for our future. Two of those categories were already introduced in Chapter 8, in connection with the problems that they cause specifically for Japan: forests, which provide our timber, paper, and crucial biological agents such as pollinators; and fisheries (mainly fish and shellfish from the ocean, also from fresh-water lakes and rivers), which provide a large fraction of the world’s human need for dietary protein. The other categories are: many different elements and minerals used in industry (iron, aluminum, copper, nickel, lead, and others); fertile soil, essential for agriculture and for forestry; fresh water for drinking, washing, agriculture, forestry, and industry; and the atmosphere, in which all of us live. These various resources differ in four respects important for understanding their potential for creating problems for us: their renewability, and the resulting management problems; their potential for limiting human societies; their international dimensions; and the international competition that they provoke, including wars.
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Page 39
