Warlords, Inc.

by Noah Raford

  How feasible is the latter? An answer has been sketched by Saul Griffith, inventor, polymath, and recent MacArthur Fellowship winner: “Imagine someone said you need 2 terawatts of wind, 2 terawatts of photovoltaic solar, 2 terawatts of thermal solar, 2 terawatts of geothermal, 2 terawatts of biofuels, and 3 terawatts of nuclear to give you 13 new clean terawatts. You add the existing 1.5 terawatts of biofuels and nuclear that we already use. You can also get 3 terawatts from coal and oil. That would give humanity around 17.5 terawatts”—enough to allow “only” a 10 to 20 percent decline in energy consumption per capita over the coming generation.27 “What would it take to do all that in 25 years?” he asks.

  Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells [the best currently available commercially] every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (That’s about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) Two terawatts of solar thermal? If it’s 30 percent efficient all told [again, the best that is currently commercially available], we’ll need 50 square meters of highly reflective mirrors every second. (Some 600 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of biofuels? Something like 4 Olympic swimming pools of genetically engineered algae, installed every second. (About 61,000 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of wind? That’s a 300-foot-diameter wind turbine every 5 minutes. (Install 105,000 turbines a year in good wind locations, times 25.) Two terawatts of geothermal? Build three 100-megawatt steam turbines every day—1,095 a year, times 25. Three terawatts of new nuclear? That’s a 3-reactor, 3-gigawatt plant every week—52 a year, times 25.28

  Griffith argues that, were it built, this new global energy infrastructure would require a space approximately equal to the size of the United States, not counting the space needed for transmission lines, energy storage, materials, or support infrastructure—not to mention the costs of decommissioning coal plants, oil refineries, and all the rest of the infrastructure and detritus of two centuries of hydrocarbon indulgence. This, then, is the brutal physics and engineering of what it will take to make a wholesale conversion of the current global system from hydrocarbons to renewables, without reducing total energy usage.29

  Griffith’s calculations (and our use of them), particularly as to the magnitude of the space requirements of the new energy system, have been challenged by various techno-optimists. For the sake of argument, let us stipulate that the green techno-optimists are correct about the near-term technical feasibility of 100 percent conversion of the world to clean/green energy—the readiness of solar and wind for deployment at scale; the manageable magnitude of the necessary physical plant, transmission infrastructure, and land footprint; and the relatively unproblematic efficiency of operation and maintenance of such massive structures and machinery, once in place. In fact, Griffith has said that he agrees as to technical feasibility in the abstract.30 But as Griffith’s description indicates, the manufacture of the components, the construction of the generation facilities and the storage and transmission infrastructure, and the retrofitting of major urban cores and industrial complexes to mesh with the new system will amount to the most monumental and complex engineering and construction undertaking in human history. Looking just at the societies with very large industrial, urban, and transportation sectors (roughly fifteen to twenty countries), such a project would dwarf the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan, or the U.S. national highway system—or, indeed, all of those combined. A more realistic comparison would be with the transformation of the U.S. industrial and energy systems over the entire half century from World War I through the first fifteen years of the post-WWII boom—with the added burden of dismantling and disposing of the system built over the subsequent half-century (and writing off sunk costs). But as we stand right now, we don’t have half a century to work with.

  Plus, the manufacture and rollout of the machinery and massive structures of this new energy system will themselves be highly energy-intensive, and, at least during the first phase, almost all that energy will have to come from burning hydrocarbons—without much, if any carbon capture and storage (CCS). And that may be true beyond the first phase, because there are real questions as to whether massive CCS will ever be viable.31 So the creation of the new energy system will necessarily be carbon-intensive, meaning we will necessarily make our problems considerably worse—in a long-lasting way—before we start to become effective on the solution end.32 There is simply no way out of this trap, absent something miraculous.

  How much progress in building such systems and getting them up and running is conceivable, under the most optimistic assumptions, over the next ten, twenty, or thirty years? In the United States, major progress over the next ten years appears utterly impossible, even if the Koch brothers drop dead tomorrow. It is hard to believe that there will be much net progress over those years (i.e., increased burning of hydrocarbons—without CCS—will likely match or exceed increased clean power generation).33 But let’s suppose the improbable, that the United States and others attempt to enter upon a huge crash program early in the next decade. Is appreciable success in fulfilling the global conversion project (or even such a project for fifteen to twenty countries) conceivable under anything like existing institutional and decision-making structures?

  The techno-optimists find all this perfectly feasible, because they imagine the availability, assemblage, and on-going management of huge expanses of land and massive material and technological resources, entirely abstracted from the political, legal, governmental, and organizational processes and transactions—and the human capital requirements—that would be integral to actually carrying out such a project in the real world. The problem is not just political feasibility narrowly conceived (winning elections, getting legislation passed, and prevailing in litigation, all in the face of deep-pocket opposition). Accomplishing systems-reconstruction of this magnitude within a time frame of several decades is radically beyond the system-capacities of the actually-existing governing entities of the world. Some vague recognition of this problem has very recently begun to appear among some techno-optimists, but as yet to no great result.34

  Let us give the last word on this issue to Vaclav Smil, the world’s leading expert on the historical development of modern energy systems.

  Installing in 10 years wind—and solar—generating capacity more than twice as large as that of fossil-fueled stations operating today while concurrently incurring write-off and building costs on the order of $4-5 trillion and reducing regulatory approval of generation and transmission megaprojects from many years to mere months would be neither achievable nor affordable at the best of times: At a time when the nation has been adding to its massive national debt at a rate approaching $2 trillion a year, it is nothing but a grand delusion (to say nothing of the fact that solar generation is far from ready to be deployed on a GW scale).

  And as with all technical innovations, a definite judgment regarding long-term capability and reliability of wind-driven or PV generation is still many years ahead. Decades of cumulative experience are needed to assess properly all of the risks and benefits entailed in large-scale operation of these new systems and to quantify satisfactorily their probabilities of catastrophic failures and their true lifetime costs. This means that we will be able to offer it only after very large numbers of large-capacity units will have accumulated at least two decades of operating experience in a wide variety of conditions. This ultimate test of long-term dependence and productivity will be particularly critical for massive offshore wind farms or for extensive PV fields in harsh desert environment.35

  And Smil concludes a later article with this.

  Turning around the world’s fossil-fuel-based energy system is a truly gargantuan task. That system now has an annual throughput of more than 7 billion metric tons of hard coal and lignite, about 4 billion metric tons of crude oil, and more than 3 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. This adds up to 14 trillion watt
s of power. And its infrastructure—coal mines, oil and gas fields, refineries, pipelines, trains, trucks, tankers, filling stations, power plants, transformers, transmission and distribution lines, and hundreds of millions of gasoline, kerosene, diesel, and fuel oil engines—constitutes the costliest and most extensive set of installations, networks, and machines that the world has ever built, one that has taken generations and tens of trillions of dollars to put in place.

  It is impossible to displace this supersystem in a decade or two—or five, for that matter. Replacing it with an equally extensive and reliable alternative based on renewable energy flows is a task that will require decades of expensive commitment. It is the work of generations of engineers.36

  The Political Problem of “Less”:

  Why an Economics of Decline Is So Hard to Imagine

  We hasten to emphasize that our position in this chapter is not to be confused or conflated with the comprehensive rejection of ecological modernization theory cum Third-Way-capitalist/high-modernism characteristic of new age radical environmentalism.37 Like us, such new age radicals recognize the inevitability of the decline and breakdown of existing systems—and the disappearance of high-modern abundance—under the stresses and strains of multiple crises in the context of permanent climate destabilization. And, like us, new age radical environmentalists accept the imperative of the human race as a whole (particularly the upper/upper-middle classes) making do with dramatically lower levels of materialism. But the new age hope of enacting that imperative depends upon the availability and effectiveness of a fix even more demanding than that relied upon by mainstream liberal environmentalists: a virtual spiritual revolution leading to an enlightened humanity voluntarily giving up modern materialism (not just luxury) as a practice or an aspiration. Such green radicals see this spiritual revolution as opposed primarily simply by the ignorant and the terminally greedy and selfish of the world—with the latter’s hold over the thinking of the former (presumed to be the majority) seen as contingent and ultimately tenuous. In our view, this perspective greatly underestimates the character and scale of the opposition to the proposed new age “revolution” and the difficulty of the educational and political tasks at hand.38 Moreover, left out of the picture entirely is the fact that, as things stand, warlord entrepreneurs and their ilk are much better positioned and prepared to benefit from system crisis and breakdown than are new age environmentalists.39

  The optimism of the new age environmentalists is based on the conviction that the shift to a radically less materialistic, less narcissistic culture is, in the end, wholly for the good, because of the humanistic value of the expected spiritual outcome over the present materialistic lifeworld. The spiritual revolution is a winner because more and more people will come to appreciate this human truth. But this is optimistic in the extreme. The reality is that, even were it successful on its own terms (a major unknown), such a transition away from materialism would certainly come as a painful shock to the vast majority of today’s non-poor, most of whom have focused their adult lives on securing and maintaining a modern middle-class standard of living. For many, the result would be, paradoxically, existential crisis and spiritually impoverished, if not corrupted, lives (as is common among the downwardly mobile in the United States today). For those whose level of materialism is well below real affluence, radically scaling back material consumption as part of a program to save the planet would be akin to getting a gangrenous leg amputated—there’s nothing inspiring or ennobling about it, even if it is better than the alternative.

  Continuing the metaphor, our problem is that, most of the time, this materialist gangrene actually feels good—and a variety of powerful forces assure us that the infection is not dangerous and urge us to enjoy it (here “legitimate” economic actors and deviant entrepreneurs are in full partnership). So how can people be convinced to accept amputation before it’s too late? It would be one thing if entire populations could leap from where they are straight into a fully formed world of universal rights, reliable public goods, and rich social capital. That would be the equivalent of immediately being fitted with a state-of-the-art prosthetic. But, of course, the world does not work that way—not least because of the shared vested interests of “legitimate” economic actors and deviant entrepreneurs in precluding it from doing so.40

  Realistically, the difficulty of making “less” work politically can hardly be overstated. “Less” is something that present-day political classes literally do not know how to think about, much less how to sell to a mass public raised on “more.” Just look what happened to Jimmy Carter when he made a modest gesture in that direction—his sensible cardigans are still a political laughingstock, and not just on the Right. What would it take for politicians to champion—and publics to accept—levels of consumption well below those they have either become accustomed to or been taught to long for? Not “less” in the form of a one-time cut to material goods and energy consumption, but a steadily diminishing less, as the necessary changes are phased in over the course of a generation—less, then less, then even less, until, if we are lucky, we reach some kind of a safe plateau, as clean/green technology matures and population growth ceases planetwide.

  For rich democracies, the prospect of such systemic change is politically intransigent. What elected politician can hope to sell diminishment to a population that for generations has been taught to consider a rising standard of living a birthright and has internalized the myth that “each generation does better than its parents” (where “better” means more material consumption)? From the eighteenth century on, Western visions of progress and national development have treated ever-increasing material abundance as table stakes in any definition of political or societal success. Modern and modernizing governments (of whatever ideological stripe, from Teddy Roosevelt and Lenin, through Thatcher and Gorbachev, down to the present American and Chinese leaderships) have staked their claims to legitimacy on the premise and promise of delivering MORE.41 With a few frightening exceptions, such as Kim’s North Korea or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, all governments of the postwar period have promised a rising standard of living to most if not all of their people. Social compromises and political hegemonies have been brokered on the assumption that continually increasing economic productivity would neutralize distributional conflict.

  To get a sense for how profoundly politics will have to change in order to fit an age of diminishment, consider how effectively the U.S. Republican Party was able to use the word “rationing” as political kryptonite in the 2009–2010 debate over health-care reform. Here was a case in which private insurers are already imposing rationing, and the government was not planning to impose any additional rationing, and still the charge was politically poisonous.42 Now imagine the government trying to actually impose rationing—and rationing of a stringent sort—across every aspect of material production and consumption, in exchange for an uncertain outcome—amounting, at best, only to a reduction of secular trends from catastrophic to difficult. American conservatives are, in this respect, relatively clear-eyed about the political-economic implications of serious climate-change mitigation efforts. That they respond by mendaciously denying the climate science itself—and depicting environmentalism as nothing but a Trojan Horse for authoritarian statism—should not distract us from the fundamental political truth they are putting their finger on, namely, that any serious effort to restrain greenhouse gases must necessarily mean a full-scale assault on what they (and many others) mean by “the American way of life”; in other words, a dismantling of a way of life defined, to quote modernization theorist Walt Rostow’s famous phrase, in terms of “the age of high mass consumption.”43

  As difficult as it may be to imagine American or European or Japanese publics accepting “less” rather than “more” as their national mantra, it is even harder to imagine the emergent middle classes of the Global South willingly leaving the promised land of consumerism just at the moment when they have finally arrived. Even in aut
horitarian systems such as China and Russia, elites seek to employ their populations in carbon-intensive modernizing projects for the nation, and coercion by itself does not work to keep those populations dutifully on-task; some degree of social contract, some substantial payoff, must be offered and at least partially honored. A decline in China’s astounding growth rate is often cited as the single factor most likely to destabilize the political system of the world’s most populous country.44

  Ultimately, it is impossible to predict what confluence of environmental and political events could sufficiently galvanize political elites and wider publics to break this intellectual and political deadlock. The environmental changes associated with GHG emissions (as typical of major system shocks in general) are likely to be nonlinear, and the political reactions to any climate-related disasters are equally unpredictable, thus piling one radical uncertainty on top of another. Two things, however, are clear: the first is that decisive political leadership, rooted in a fundamentally different conception of the economy, is absolutely required in order to take the necessary steps; and the second is that denying the magnitude of the necessary economic and cultural change—as most of our elites and policy intellectuals continue to do—makes the emergence of such political leadership all but impossible. In this latter respect, it must be pointed out that even the most politically hardheaded portions of the contemporary environmental movement are still not admitting the magnitude of the required industrial changes and the consequent political challenges.45