By Brian Beutler
Bob Samuelson writes:
From 2003 to 2050, the world's population is projected to grow from 6.4billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use perperson and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhousegas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in2050. But that's too low, because societies that grow richer use moreenergy. Unless we condemn the world's poor to their present poverty --and freeze everyone else's living standards -- we need economic growth.With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more thandouble by 2050.
Which is basically correct. To follow it up, Andrew Sullivan notes:
Even the most drastic measures from Western nations will not make muchmore than a dent in this. Only an energy technological breakthroughcan. I'd ratchet up gas taxes to see what the market will throw up ininnovation (and for national security reasons). But then I'd channelresources into adjusting to global warming, rather than trying toprevent it. If the technology comes through and we can really dosomething to heal the planet in time, I'm all for it. Until then, a lotof this debate is, as Samuelson says, posturing. Or have I andSamuelson missed something?
I don't have a terribly big gripe with this except that the physical nature of global warming makes ours a really difficult future to plan for. It's not really worth going into the fine technical details, but the cartoon version is that each additional unit of carbon released into the atmosphere takes plenty of time to manifest itself as an increased unit of temperature. Right now--as anybody who's seen An Inconvenient Truth is all too aware--atmospheric carbon is at higher levels than at any point in human history, and at any legitimately knowable point before that. That's bad news, because it means that, even if carbon emissions dropped to zero tomorrow, the climatic effect of the carbon released yesterday would take years to show up. If we could legitimately turn the switch off, we could take a guess at where and when and if equilibrium might be reached and "adjust" for it.
But THAT is fantasy. And it begs the question: What arbitrary timepoint on the warming continuum--that is to say, what average atmospheric temperature--does Andrew think we should prepare (or 'adjust') for? The temperature 20 years from now? The temperature 50 years after that? Whatever he picks, he'd better pick right, because, even if we keep emissions at their current levels, the impact keeps on coming, and each decade becomes hotter, and more unliveable than the decade before it. And if we pick wrong, then suddenly--when the changes we make preparing for the hot years of, say, the 2050s prove themselves useless for the hotter years of, say, the 2100s--all that money will seem misspent and we'll wish we'd wasted neither a single penny nor a single moment's time on any project other than making our energy clean and sustainable. And, by then, it might be too late.
