The God Species: How Humans Really Can Save the Planet.... Mark Lynas

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СКАЧАТЬ measured in material consumption – is non-negotiable both politically and socially, especially in developing countries. This may one day need to change, but that is a different debate, and one that needs to be had for different reasons. As the climate scientist Roger Pielke Jnr writes in his 2010 book The Climate Fix, ‘if there is an iron law of climate policy, it is that when policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic growth that will win out every time.’ Greens may despair, but I think Pielke Jnr is right. The implication, however, is not that we are all doomed, but that any successful policy to decarbonise the global economy ‘must be designed such that economic growth and environmental progress go hand in hand’.⁵⁴

      In a related sense, although Greens often insist that energy is too cheap, this too is incorrect. Energy is actually too expensive, certainly for the 1.5 billion poor people in the world who lack access to electricity because they do not have the purchasing power to demand it. Well-fed campaigners in rich countries may fantasise romantically about happy peasants living sustainably in self-reliant African villages, but the fact is that people across the developing world are desperate to increase their economic opportunities, security and wealth. They want to have enough to eat, they want to have clean water and they want their young children not to die of easily treatable diseases – and that is just for starters. They want the benefits of being part of the modern world, in other words, which is why so many young people across the developing world are moving to cities in search of a job and a better way of life. And this better way of life is coming, as the soaring rates of economic growth in China, India, Brazil and many other developing countries demonstrate. The fact is that most of the world needs more growth, not less: China has lifted 300 million people out of poverty in the last couple of decades due to its economic miracle. Hundreds of millions more, in Africa now too as well as Asia and Latin America, are determined to follow, as they have every right to.

      By mid-century, in other words, we will see a world of many more, much richer people. Most Greens view this prospect with dread, for how can the world possibly reduce carbon emissions under such a scenario? The London-based New Economics Foundation (NEF), for example, writes in a recent report: ‘If everyone in the world lived as people do in Europe, we would need three planets to support us.’⁵⁵ This is nonsensical, for everyone in the world is going to live like Europeans within this century (and Europeans too will also get richer) whether NEF likes it or not, and we will still only have one planet. NEF’s ‘Happy Planet Index’ was recently topped by Costa Rica (with the Dominican Republic in second place and Jamaica in third), apparently suggesting that the best country in the world to live is one where 10 per cent of the population still survive on just $2 a day.⁵⁶ Certainly, the fact that GDP does not necessarily equate to happiness is an important point to make. But it won’t cut much ice with the billions of people – a majority of humanity – who are poor, insecure or malnourished in today’s world. For them economic growth is not a choice but a necessity.

      So reducing human population and economic growth is neither possible nor desirable. Luckily there is a third way: we can reduce the carbon intensity of the economy, so that for each unit of GDP produced, less and less carbon needs to be emitted. This means deploying low-carbon technologies across the board so that the energy that is needed to drive economic activity can be generated without additional greenhouse gases. What we need, in other words, is an economy-wide technofix.

      TECHNOLOGIES FOR 350

      My own perspective on tackling climate change has shifted since I was appointed adviser to President Nasheed of the Maldives in 2009. The president, whose country is of course early on the list of those liable to be wiped out by rising sea levels, had just announced his ambition for his nation to become the first carbon-neutral country in the world, by 2020. Suddenly, having spent most of my life as a journalist, I was confronted with the challenges of real energy supply in a real developing country. All my Green ideology – of tackling corporate power, reducing consumption, challenging economic growth and so on – was going to be of little help with this intensely practical challenge. To be carbon-neutral the Maldives would have to stop burning diesel in electric generators on every one of its 300 or so inhabited islands, and shift instead to an energy system entirely based on renewables. It would have to do this in a way that would not raise people’s energy bills, and would provide opportunities for new business. I found myself in a world where discussions of wind and solar hybrids, battery storage options, biomass and waste-to-energy, and electrical grid load-balancing came to the fore. I began to think less like an ideologue and more like an engineer.

      This, on a far grander scale, is the same challenge that confronts the world. To achieve the planetary boundary of 350 ppm, the global economy needs to be carbon-neutral by mid-century and carbon-negative thereafter. Meeting this target means we all – Greens included – need to start thinking like engineers. This is a huge industrial building project, converting the energy basis of civilisation from fossil fuels to a variety of cleaner sources. If we do it right, it will not be a burden or a cost to the world’s economy, but a source of enormous potential future growth, innovation and job creation. The sheer amount of economic activity implied by the transition is staggering: to reduce the emissions of the United States by a third, for example, would (using current technologies) involve constructing 145 nuclear plants, 33,000 solar thermal power stations and 130,000 large wind turbines. In Germany, the same ambition of a 30 per cent emissions cut implies 21 nuclear plants, 4,800 solar stations and 20,000 additional windmills.⁵⁷

      Different technologies can be substituted according to different circumstances or national preferences, of course. The Austrians, for example, despise nuclear power. (The country spent $1 billion building a nuclear plant, and then had a referendum in 1978 that was won by the anti-nuclear lobby. The plant, called Zwentendorf, was never opened, and coal-burning power stations built instead.) For the Maldives I would not suggest any nuclear power stations, because each island operates as a separate independent energy entity and nuclear plants are simply too big to be appropriate. Moreover, the country is drenched in solar radiation for most of the year – its main constraint, in fact, is the land space needed to capture the sun’s energy. But very large, densely populated nations outside the tropics are likely to need substantial nuclear generation. This may be difficult for many Greens to swallow, but as I will show in future chapters, nuclear power is nothing like the environmental threat it has long been made out to be. Instead, by displacing coal from our energy mix, it can be a net win for the biosphere. China, for instance, has 13 operational nuclear plants and 150 more under construction or on the drawing board.⁵⁸ Each 1-gigawatt nuclear plant will displace 6 million tonnes of annual CO₂ emissions, making this one of the best pieces of climate-related news anywhere in the world.⁵⁹ That should be the end of the matter so far as environmentalists are concerned: nuclear is Green.

      To cut global emissions in half by 2050 (with growing energy consumption in the meantime) would require the construction of 12,000 nuclear power stations – with one plant coming online every single day between now and then (assuming we start in 2015). I mention this only as an illustrative exercise, for no one – not even the nuclear industry – suggests that we try to deal with climate change using nuclear power only. Such a level of new-build sounds impossible, but consider that over the last fifty years humans have constructed two large dams per day, half of those in only one country – China.⁶⁰

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