Billions & Billions

by Carl Sagan

  When anything approaching a fair accounting is attempted, it becomes clear that for many purposes solar energy (and wind, and other renewable resources) is already much cheaper than coal or oil or natural gas. The United States, and the other industrial nations, ought to be making major investments in improving the technology further and installing large arrays of solar-energy converters. But the entire Department of Energy annual budget for this technology has been about the cost of one or two of the high-performance aircraft stationed abroad to protect foreign sources of oil.

  Invest now in fossil fuel efficiency or alternative energy sources, and the payoff comes years in the future. But industry and consumers and politicians, as I’ve mentioned, often seem focused only on the here and now. Meanwhile, pioneering American solar-energy corporations are being sold to overseas firms. Solar-electric systems are currently being demonstrated in Spain, Italy, Germany, and Japan. Even the largest commercial American solar-energy plant, in the Mojave Desert, generates only a few hundred megawatts of electricity, which it sells to Southern California Edison. Worldwide, utility planners are avoiding investments in wind turbines and solar-electric generators.

  Nevertheless, there are some encouraging signs. American-made small-scale solar-electric devices are beginning to dominate the world market. (Of the three largest companies, two are controlled by Germany and Japan; the third, by U.S. fossil fuel corporations.) Tibetan herders are using solar panels to power light bulbs and radios; Somalian physicians erect solar panels on camels to keep precious vaccines cold in their trek across the desert; 50,000 small homes in India are being converted to solar-electric power. Because these systems are within the reach of the lower middle class in developing countries, and because they are nearly maintenance free, the potential market in solar rural electrification is huge.

  We can and should be doing better. There should be massive federal commitment to advance this technology, and incentives offered to scientists and inventors to enter this underpopulated field. Why is “energy independence” mentioned so often as a justification for environmentally risky nuclear power plants or offshore drilling—but so rarely to justify insulation, efficient cars, or wind and solar energy? Many of these new technologies can also be used in the developing world to improve industry and standards of living without making the environmental mistakes of the developed world. If America is looking to lead the world in new basic industries, here’s one on the verge of taking off.

  Perhaps these alternatives can be quickly developed in a real free-market economy. Alternatively, nations might consider a small tax on fossil fuels, dedicated to developing the alternative technologies. Britain established a “Non Fossil Fuel Obligation” in 1991 amounting to 11 percent of the purchase price. In America alone, this would amount to many billions of dollars a year. But President Clinton in 1993–96 was unable to pass legislation even for a five cent per gallon gasoline tax. Perhaps future administrations can do better.

  What I hope will happen is that solar-electric, wind turbine, biomass conversion, and hydrogen fuel technologies will be phased in at a respectable pace, at the same time as we greatly improve the efficiency with which we burn fossil fuels. No one is talking about abandoning fossil fuels altogether. High-intensity industrial power needs—for example, in steel foundries and aluminum smelters—are unlikely to be provided by sunlight or windmills. But if we can cut our dependence on fossil fuels by half or better, we will have done a great thing. Very different technologies are unlikely to be here soon enough to match the pace of greenhouse warming. It may well be, though, that sometime in the next century new technology will be available—cheap, clean, generating no greenhouse gases, something that can be constructed and repaired in small, poor countries around the world.

  But isn’t there any way to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, to undo some of the damage we’ve already done? The only method of cooling down the greenhouse effect which seems both safe and reliable is to plant trees. Growing trees remove CO2 from the air. After they’re fully grown, of course, it would be missing the point to burn them; that would be undoing the very benefit we are seeking. Instead, forests should be planted and the trees, when fully grown, harvested and used, say, for building houses or furniture. Or just buried. But the amount of land worldwide that must be reforested in order for growing trees to make a major contribution is enormous, about the area of the United States. This can only be done as a collaborative enterprise of the human species. Instead, the human species is destroying an acre of forest every second. Everyone can plant trees—individuals, nations, industries. But especially, industry. Applied Energy Services in Arlington, Virginia, has built a coal-fired power plant in Connecticut; it is also planting trees in Guatemala that will remove from the Earth’s atmosphere more carbon dioxide than the company’s new facility will inject into the air over its operational lifetime. Shouldn’t lumber companies plant more forests—of the fast-growing, leafy variety useful for mitigating the greenhouse effect—than they cut down? What about the coal, oil, natural gas, petroleum, and automobile industries? Shouldn’t every company that puts CO2 into the atmosphere be engaged in removing it as well? Shouldn’t every citizen? What about planting trees at Christmastime? Or birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries. Our ancestors came from the trees, and we have a natural affinity for them. It is perfectly appropriate for us to plant more.

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  In systematically digging the corpses of ancient beings out of the Earth and burning them, we have posed a danger to ourselves. We can mitigate the danger by improving the efficiency with which we do this burning; by investing in alternative technologies (such as biomass fuels, and wind and solar energy); and by giving life to some of the same kinds of beings whose remains, ancient and modern, we are burning—the trees. These actions would provide a range of subsidiary benefits: purifying the air; slowing the extinction of species in tropical forests; reducing or eliminating oil spills; providing new technologies, new jobs, and new profits; insuring energy independence; helping the United States and other oil-dependent industrial nations to remove their uniformed sons and daughters from harm’s way; and redirecting more of their military budgets to productive civilian economies.

  Despite continuing resistance from the fossil fuel industries, one business has moved significantly toward taking global warming seriously—insurance companies. Violent storms and other weather extremes that are greenhouse-driven, floods, drought, and so forth might “bankrupt the industry,” says the president of the Reinsurance Association of America. In May 1996, citing the fact that 6 of the 10 worst natural disasters in the history of the country occurred in the previous decade, a consortium of American insurance companies sponsored an investigation of global warming as the potential cause. German and Swiss insurance companies have lobbied for decreases in greenhouse-gas emissions. The Alliance of Small Island States has called upon the industrial nations to reduce their emission of greenhouse gases to 20 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2005. (Between 1990 and 1995 CO2 emissions worldwide have increased 12 percent.) There is a new concern, at least rhetorical, in other industries about environmental responsibility—reflecting overwhelming public preference, in and to some extent beyond the developed world.

  “Global warming is a grave concern likely to pose a serious threat to the very foundation of human life,” said Japan, announcing that it would stabilize emissions of greenhouse gases by the year 2000. Sweden announced that it will phase out the nuclear half of its energy supply by 2010 while decreasing the CO2 emissions of its industries by 30 percent—to be done by improving energy efficiency and by phasing in renewable energy sources; it expects to save money in the process. John Selwyn Gummer, Britain’s Secretary of the Environment, declared in 1996, “We are accepting as a world community that there are to be world rules.” But there is considerable resistance. The OPEC countries are opposed to reducing CO2 emissions, because it would take a bite out of their oil revenues. Russia and many developing cou
ntries oppose it because it would be a major impediment to industrialization. The United States is the only major industrial nation taking no significant measures to counter greenhouse warming. While other nations act, it appoints committees and urges the affected industries to adopt voluntary compliance, against their short-term interest. Acting effectively on this matter, of course, will be more difficult than implementing the Montreal Protocol on CFCs and its amendments. The affected industries are much more powerful, the cost of change is much greater, and there is nothing yet as dramatic for global warming as the hole over Antarctica is in ozone depletion. Citizens will have to educate industries and governments.

  CO2 molecules, being brainless, are unable to understand the profound idea of national sovereignty. They’re just blown by the wind. If they’re produced in one place, they can wind up in any other place. The planet is a unit. Whatever the ideological and cultural differences, the nations of the world must work together; otherwise there will be no solution to greenhouse warming and the other global environmental problems. We are all in this greenhouse together.

  Finally, in April 1993, President Bill Clinton committed the United States to do what the Bush Administration had refused to do: join about 150 other nations in signing the protocols of the Earth Summit meeting held the previous year in Rio de Janeiro. Specifically, the United States pledged that by the year 2000 it would reduce its levels of emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to 1990 levels (1990 levels are bad enough, but at least it’s a step in the right direction). Fulfilling this promise will not be easy. The United States also committed to steps to protect biological diversity in a range of ecosystems on the planet.

  We cannot safely continue mindless growth in technology, and wholesale negligence about the consequences of that technology. It is well within our power to guide technology, to direct it to the benefit of everyone on Earth. Perhaps there is a kind of silver lining to these global environmental problems, because they are forcing us, willy-nilly, no matter how reluctant we may be, into a new kind of thinking—in which in some matters the well-being of the human species takes precedence over national and corporate interests. We are a resourceful species when push comes to shove. We know what to do. Out of the environmental crises of our time should come, unless we are much more foolish than I think we are, a binding up of the nations and the generations, and even the end of our long childhood.

  CHAPTER 13

  RELIGION AND SCIENCE:

  AN ALLIANCE

  The first day or so, we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day, we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth.

  PRINCE SULTAN BIN SALMON AL-SAUD,

  Saudi Arabian astronaut

  Intelligence and tool-making were our strengths from the beginning. We used these talents to compensate for the paucity of the natural gifts—speed, flight, venom, burrowing, and the rest—freely distributed to other animals, so it seemed, and cruelly denied to us. From the time of the domestication of fire and the elaboration of stone tools, it was obvious that our skills could be used for evil as well as for good. But it was not until very recently that it dawned on us that even the benign use of our intelligence and our tools might—because we are not smart enough to foresee all consequences—put us at risk.

  Now we are everywhere on Earth. We have bases in Antarctica. We visit the ocean bottoms. Twelve of us have even walked on the Moon. There are now nearly 6 billion of us, and our numbers grow by the equivalent of the population of China every decade. We have subdued the other animals and the plants (although we have been less successful with the microbes). We have domesticated many organisms and made them do our bidding. We have become, by some standards, the dominant species on Earth.

  And at almost every step, we have emphasized the local over the global, the short-term over the long. We have destroyed the forests, eroded the topsoil, changed the composition of the atmosphere, depleted the protective ozone layer, tampered with the climate, poisoned the air and the waters, and made the poorest people suffer most from the deteriorating environment. We have become predators on the biosphere—full of arrogant entitlement, always taking and never giving back. And so, we are now a danger to ourselves and the other beings with whom we share the planet.

  The wholesale attack on the global environment is not the fault only of profit-hungry industrialists or visionless and corrupt politicians. There is plenty of blame to share.

  The tribe of scientists has played a central role. Many of us didn’t even bother to think about the long-term consequences of our inventions. We have been too ready to put devastating powers into the hands of the highest bidder and the officials of whichever nation we happen to be living in. In too many cases, we have lacked a moral compass. Philosophy and science from their very beginnings have been eager, in the words of René Descartes, “to make us masters and possessors of Nature,” to use science, as Francis Bacon said, to bend all of Nature into “the service of Man.” Bacon talked about “Man” exercising a “right over Nature.” “Nature,” wrote Aristotle, “has made all animals for the sake of man.” “Without man,” asserted Immanuel Kant, “the whole of creation would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain.” Not so long ago we were hearing about “conquering” Nature and the “conquest” of space—as if Nature and the Cosmos were enemies to be vanquished.

  The religious tribe also has played a central role. Western sects held that just as we must submit to God, so the rest of Nature must submit to us. In modern times especially, we seem more dedicated to the second half of this proposition than the first. In the real and palpable world, as revealed by what we do and not what we say, many humans seemingly aspire to be lords of Creation—with an occasional token bow, as required by social convention, to whatever gods may lately be fashionable. Descartes and Bacon were profoundly influenced by religion. The notion of “us against Nature” is a legacy of our religious traditions. In the Book of Genesis, God gives humans “dominion … over every living thing,” and the “fear” and “dread” of us is to be upon “every beast.” Man is urged to “subdue” Nature, and “subdue” is translated from a Hebrew word with strong military connotations. There is much else in the Bible—and in the medieval Christian tradition out of which modern science emerged—along similar lines. Islam, by contrast, is disinclined to declare Nature an enemy.

  Of course, both science and religion are complex and multi-layered structures, embracing many different, even contradictory, opinions. It is scientists who discovered and called the world’s attention to the environmental crises, and there are scientists who, at considerable cost to themselves, refused to work on inventions that might harm their fellows. And it is religion that first articulated the imperative to revere living things.

  True, there is nothing in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition that approaches the cherishing of Nature in the Hindu-Buddhist-Jain tradition or among Native Americans. Indeed, both Western religion and Western science have gone out of their way to assert that Nature is just the setting and not the story, that viewing Nature as sacred is sacrilege.

  Nevertheless, there is a clear religious counterpoint: The natural world is a creation of God, put here for purposes separate from the glorification of “Man” and deserving, therefore, of respect and care in its own right, and not just because of its utility for us. A poignant metaphor of “stewardship” has emerged, especially recently—the idea that humans are the caretakers of the Earth, put here for the purpose and accountable, now and into the indefinite future, to the Landlord.

  Of course, life on Earth got along pretty well for 4 billion years without “stewards.” Trilobites and dinosaurs, who were each around for more than a hundred million years, might be amused at a species here only a thousandth as long deciding to appoint itself the guardian of life on Earth. That species is itself the danger. Human stewards are needed, these religions recognize, to protect the Earth from humans.

  The methods and eth
os of science and religion are profoundly different. Religion frequently asks us to believe without question, even (or especially) in the absence of hard evidence. Indeed, this is the central meaning of faith. Science asks us to take nothing on faith, to be wary of our penchant for self-deception, to reject anecdotal evidence. Science considers deep skepticism a prime virtue. Religion often sees it as a barrier to enlightenment. So, for centuries, there has been a conflict between the two fields—the discoveries of science challenging religious dogmas, and religion attempting to ignore or suppress the disquieting findings.

  But times have changed. Many religions are now comfortable with an Earth that goes around the Sun, with an Earth that’s 4.5 billion years old, with evolution, and with the other discoveries of modern science. Pope John Paul II has said, “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.… Such bridging ministries must be nurtured and encouraged.”

  Nowhere is this more clear than in the current environmental crisis. No matter whose responsibility the crisis mainly is, there’s no way out of it without understanding the dangers and their mechanisms, and without a deep devotion to the long-term well-being of our species and our planet—that is, pretty closely, without the central involvement of both science and religion.