Why the Cornucopia of False Solutions to Climate Change?

Painting: Cornelis van Haarlem - The Hesperides Filling the Cornucopia - oil on canvas, 1622

For some decades now, a steady stream of marvelous solutions to climate change have paraded past, to great fanfare…most of them false. Some of them have come by twice, like the glorious Hydrogen Economy, which now comes in several colors, and CCS—Carbon Capture and Sequestration. CCS wore the shiny black dress of “Clean Coal” last time and is now calling itself CCUS, with the U standing for Usage. Mostly this means using captured carbon dioxide to push more oil out of old depleted wells. Even if the CO2 stays in the old well, the oil it pushes out will release more emissions than are sequestered—yet there are fat subsidies for doing this, in the name of climate action.

Then there’s nuclear power—that one has popped up again just lately, now in the guise of Small Modular Reactors. Being small and modular won’t change the many reasons nuclear power is a very bad idea, from the lack of safe ways to dispose of the waste—still, after half a century of piling it up—to its vulnerability to terrorism and accidents, to its being the most expensive of all energy sources.

There are various flavors of schemes to burn biomass to produce power, from wood-fired electricity to generating liquid fuels from corn or other crops. So far none of these looks to be sustainable or effective (effective at reducing emissions, that is—they may be very effective at garnering subsidies). As deforestation is a leading cause of climate change, burning wood to make electricity is senseless. Burning agricultural waste removes needed organic matter from soils. An occasional small biomass project may make sense, but this is not a significant way of replacing fossil fuels.

Then there are the paper games—the carbon taxes and carbon trading markets, where corporations polluting towns in the North, along with the global atmosphere, can pay money to buy absolution for the crime of continuing to pollute while the money is used, supposedly, to reduce emissions elsewhere. Like by kicking indigenous people out of forests they’ve stewarded for a thousand years, on the grounds that they might harm the forests that are busily sequestering carbon. Or collecting the cow dung needed to fertilize fields in India to power a digester, on the grounds that this relatively low-carbon power is displacing some higher-carbon power. So this somehow justifies luxury flights by British people.

Expanding solar, wind and small hydropower are ways to produce electricity that are fairly low-carbon—but even these are not truly sustainable, when you consider the need for more unjust mining, lots of burning of fossil fuel to power the factories producing the components, and the questions around eventual disposal. It’s a matter of scale; we can afford to create some more renewable energy infrastructure, but not enough to replace our current wasteful grid. 

Then there’s that reckless, Hail-Mary-pass solution that still dares not speak its name—geoengineering. The problems with proposed methods of reaching in our godlike hand to directly tinker with climate are legion, and frightening.

The hard truth is that none of these is a way to reduce climate change. What they all are actually intended to do is allow us to maintain our high-energy-use, high-consumption way of life, some by adding supposedly clean energy to the grid and some by justifying the continued burning of fossil fuels.

The reality is that the significant addition of renewable energy to the global grid has not displaced any fossil fuel—it has simply added more power. We have also made considerable strides in the past half century in improving the efficiency of our appliances and vehicles—yet this has not reduced consumption at all. As vehicles’ miles-per-gallon increased, car manufacturers increased the size and horsepower of vehicles—to meet demand. This is known as Jevon’s Paradox, where improved efficiency doesn’t reduce use because it reduces price, and people use the savings to buy more of whatever. Any serious solution must include major reductions in energy use and waste in the “developed” world, and degrowth of economies—along with a major move toward equality.

It has become clear that most of the well-hyped schemes to respond to the threat of climate change are evasions. We need to use Command and Control tactics, to directly reduce the emissions that cause climate change—by phasing out the burning of fossil fuels, and ending deforestation. We also need to convert our agricultural systems from monocultural megafarms funneling most profits to monopolistic entities like Monsanto, John Deere, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill—to, instead, a system of a great many more, much smaller, polycultural farms using regenerative practices to mostly feed their own localities. 

Making a massive transition now, so late in the game, means reducing our “standard of living.” It’s too late to massively ramp up production of the relatively clean and renewable technologies like solar power, windmills and small hydro. Doing so now would require an utterly unsustainable surge in fossil fuel burning, and the unjust mining of a great deal of materials, some of them now in short supply.

We should, nonetheless, ramp up production of renewable slightly, because it’s clear that we are leaving future generations a ravaged world. It’s not only climate change—we are also driving many species into extinction and causing massive population loss in most others. Future generations will be forced to attempt to grow their own food in a world where floods and droughts and other crop hazards are much more common, and unpredictable. Thus there will be famine. Together with the reality that many places have much higher populations than can possibly be supported given the lack of water or other things, this means we can expect climate refugees in the hundreds of millions. This in turn means we will see a great deal of conflict as people decide that killing would-be immigrants is the only way to ensure that their own children can be fed. All of this means the breakdown of civilization, probably quite variably in different locations—which in turn means the end of the global economy, and much modern technology. It also means pandemics will be more common.

Leaving some low-impact energy sources like solar panels for our children will make their difficult lives a little easier.

This is the dystopian world, the Planet Hell to which we are condemning our children by our failure to deal honestly with the crisis of overshoot—of which climate change is only one symptom. Collectively we are insisting that “the American way of life is not negotiable.” That no one has the right to limit the number of children we have or the size of vehicle we drive or the amount of cheap plastic junk we buy, stuff ripped from the soil of the global South, manufactured in China, shipped on enormous container ships to the U.S. and then briefly sojourning in our homes before taking the final trip to the dump.

Well, our grandchildren will also have the right to as many children as they desire—or perhaps more, as modern birth control won’t be available. Which will be fine since likely, modern death control won’t be available either, so many more women will die in childbirth, many more babies will die, many more children. They will also have the right to as much electric power as they want—if they have access to a few solar panels or a windmill—most won’t. They will have candles. They will have horses, if they can fence enough pasture to keep horses. They may be able to keep bicycles going.

Because much of the public and all of our politicians and media insist that there can be no belt-tightening—and yet the pressure to “do something about climate change” keeps increasing—we can expect the parade of false solutions to continue. The price is that our grandchildren will live on Planet Hell with no access to the amenities that could make their lives a little easier. If we spent the last subsidies, and the last fossil-fueled power, to build solar panels, batteries, turbines and windmills, they could use perhaps 2 to 5% of the energy we take for granted--to have light on winter evenings, to have a small fan on baking hot summer days, and nights. Perhaps they could even have refrigeration, in some cases. But not if we insist on using up the last drops of oil and gas, the last lump of coal, on a lifestyle of luxury and hyper consumption.

It's time to grow up, to get past the adolescent notion that it’s heroic to refuse to accept limits. It’s time to reject the narcissistic delusion that we are entitled to lives of luxury—including the luxury of not knowing what our indulgences are costing people in the places our goods are mined, drilled, fracked, dumped. And it’s time we rejected the propaganda that convinces us to allow hundreds of billions of dollars to support a gargantuan military steadily killing people all over the world and blocking progress, a military dedicated to preserving US hegemony. Similarly, we need to buck up to the necessity of telling the billionaires we just can’t afford their wealth anymore. We can refrain from using the guillotine, this time, but we need to redistribute their wealth so more people can survive the coming waterfalls just around the bend in the river of time, whose roar is already audible.

The question is—will we buck up, or will we keep pretending that some technological magic wand will make it unnecessary?

Change is coming, soon. We’ve been told for decades that humanity is living in an unsustainable way. What is unsustainable cannot be sustained; what can’t be sustained won’t be sustained; this means it will STOP. How this plays out is entirely unpredictable. But the more proactive we are in making sensible change now, rather than passively accepting the false solutions paraded by the fossil fuel industry and other corporate actors to perpetuate Business As Usual, the less difficulty our children will face as they make their way between the floods, famines, wildfires and wars of the rest of this century.