[There is surprising – even shocking – good news: Our ability to
convert sunshine into usable energy has become much cheaper far more rapidly
than anyone had predicted. The cost of electricity from photovoltaic, or PV,
solar cells is now equal to or less than the cost of electricity from other
sources powering electric grids in at least 79 countries. By 2020 – as the
scale of deployments grows and the costs continue to decline – more than 80
percent of the world's people will live in regions where solar will be
competitive with electricity from other sources.]
It's time to accelerate the shift toward a low-carbon future
By Al Gore
In the struggle to solve the climate crisis, a powerful, largely
unnoticed shift is taking place. The forward journey for human civilization
will be difficult and dangerous, but it is now clear that we will ultimately
prevail. The only question is how quickly we can accelerate and complete the
transition to a low-carbon civilization. There will be many times in the
decades ahead when we will have to take care to guard against despair, lest it
become another form of denial, paralyzing action. It is true that we have
waited too long to avoid some serious damage to the planetary ecosystem – some
of it, unfortunately, irreversible. Yet the truly catastrophic damages that
have the potential for ending civilization as we know it can still – almost
certainly – be avoided. Moreover, the pace of the changes already set in motion
can still be moderated significantly.
There is surprising – even shocking – good news: Our ability to
convert sunshine into usable energy has become much cheaper far more rapidly
than anyone had predicted. The cost of electricity from photovoltaic, or PV,
solar cells is now equal to or less than the cost of electricity from other
sources powering electric grids in at least 79 countries. By 2020 – as the
scale of deployments grows and the costs continue to decline – more than 80
percent of the world's people will live in regions where solar will be
competitive with electricity from other sources.
No matter what the large carbon polluters and their ideological
allies say or do, in markets there is a huge difference between "more
expensive than" and "cheaper than." Not unlike the difference
between 32 degrees and 33 degrees Fahrenheit. It's not just a difference of a
degree, it's the difference between a market that's frozen up and one that's
liquid. As a result, all over the world, the executives of companies selling
electricity generated from the burning of carbon-based fuels (primarily from
coal) are openly discussing their growing fears of a "utility death
spiral."
Germany, Europe's industrial powerhouse, where renewable subsidies
have been especially high, now generates 37 percent of its daily electricity
from wind and solar; and analysts predict that number will rise to 50 percent
by 2020. (Indeed, one day this year, renewables created 74 percent of the
nation's electricity!)
What's more, Germany's two largest coal-burning utilities have
lost 56 percent of their value over the past four years, and the losses have
continued into the first half of 2014. And it's not just Germany. Last year,
the top 20 utilities throughout Europe reported losing half of their value
since 2008. According to the Swiss bank UBS, nine out of 10 European coal and
gas plants are now losing money.
In the United States, where up to 49 percent of the new generating
capacity came from renewables in 2012, 166 coal-fired electricity-generating
plants have either closed or have announced they are closing in the past four
and a half years. An additional 183 proposed new coal plants have been canceled
since 2005.
To be sure, some of these closings have been due to the
substitution of gas for coal, but the transition under way in both the American
and global energy markets is far more significant than one fossil fuel
replacing another. We are witnessing the beginning of a massive shift to a new
energy-distribution model – from the "central station" utility-grid
model that goes back to the 1880s to a "widely distributed" model
with rooftop solar cells, on-site and grid battery storage, and microgrids.
The principal trade group representing U.S. electric utilities,
the Edison Electric Institute, has identified distributed generation as the
"largest near-term threat to the utility model." Last May, Barclays
downgraded the entirety of the U.S. electric sector, warning that "a
confluence of declining cost trends in distributed solarphotovoltaic-power
generation and residentialscale power storage is likely to disrupt the status
quo" and make utility investments less attractive.
This year, Citigroup reported that the widespread belief that
natural gas – the supply of which has ballooned in the U.S. with the fracking
of shale gas – will continue to be the chosen alternative to coal is mistaken,
because it too will fall victim to the continuing decline in the cost of solar
and wind electricity. Significantly, the cost of battery storage, long
considered a barrier to the new electricity system, has also been declining
steadily – even before the introduction of disruptive new battery technologies
that are now in advanced development. Along with the impressive gains of
clean-energy programs in the past decade, there have been similar improvements
in our ability to do more with less. Since 1980, the U.S. has reduced total
energy intensity by 49 percent.
It is worth remembering this key fact about the supply of the basic
"fuel": Enough raw energy reaches the Earth from the sun in one hour
to equal all of the energy used by the entire world in a full year.
In poorer countries, where most of the world's people live and
most of the growth in energy use is occurring, photovoltaic electricity is not
so much displacing carbon-based energy as leapfrogging it altogether. In his
first days in office, the government of the newly elected prime minister of
India, Narendra Modi (who has authored an e-book on global warming), announced
a stunning plan to rely principally upon photovoltaic energy in providing
electricity to 400 million Indians who currently do not have it. One of Modi's
supporters, S.L. Rao, the former utility regulator of India, added that the
industry he once oversaw "has reached a stage where either we change the
whole system quickly, or it will collapse."
Nor is India an outlier. Neighboring Bangladesh is installing
nearly two new rooftop PV systems every minute — making it the most rapidly
growing market for PVs in the world. In West and East Africa,
solar-electric cells are beginning what is widely predicted to be a period of
explosive growth.
At the turn of the 21st century, some scoffed at projections that
the world would be installing one gigawatt of new solar electricity per year by
2010. That goal was exceeded 17 times over; last year it was exceeded 39 times
over; and this year the world is on pace to exceed that benchmark as much as 55
times over. In May, China announced that by 2017, it would have the capacity to
generate 70 gigawatts of photovoltaic electricity. The state with by far the
biggest amount of wind energy is Texas, not historically known for its
progressive energy policies.
The cost of wind energy is also plummeting, having dropped 43
percent in the United States since 2009 – making it now cheaper than coal for
new generating capacity. Though the downward cost curve is not quite as steep
as that for solar, the projections in 2000 for annual worldwide wind
deployments by the end of that decade were exceeded seven times over, and are
now more than 10 times that figure. In the United States alone, nearly
one-third of all new electricity-generating capacity in the past five years has
come from wind, and installed wind capacity in the U.S. has increased more than
fivefold since 2006.
For consumers, this good news may soon get even better. While the
cost of carbonbased energy continues to increase, the cost of solar
electricity has dropped by an average of 20 percent per year since 2010. Some
energy economists, including those who produced an authoritative report this
past spring for Bernstein Research, are now predicting energy-price deflation
as soon as the next decade.
For those (including me) who are surprised at the speed with which
this impending transition has been accelerating, there are precedents that help
explain it. Remember the first mobile-telephone handsets? I do; as an
inveterate "early adopter" of new technologies, I thought those first
huge, clunky cellphones were fun to use and looked cool (they look silly now,
of course). In 1980, a few years before I bought one of the early models,
AT&T conducted a global market study and came to the conclusion that by the
year 2000 there would be a market for 900,000 subscribers. They were not only wrong,
they were way wrong: 109 million contracts were active in 2000. Barely a decade
and a half later, there are 6.8 billion globally.
These parallels have
certainly caught the attention of the fossil-fuel industry and its investors:
Eighteen months ago, the Edison Electric Institute described the floundering
state of the once-proud landline-telephone companies as a grim predictor of
what may soon be their fate.
The utilities are fighting back, of course, by using their wealth
and the entrenched political power they have built up over the past century. In
the United States, brothers Charles and David Koch, who run Koch Industries,
the second-largest privately owned corporation in the U.S., have secretively
donated at least $70 million to a number of opaque political organizations
tasked with spreading disinformation about the climate crisis and intimidating
political candidates who dare to support renewable energy or the pricing of
carbon pollution.
They regularly repeat shopworn complaints about the inadequate,
intermittent and inconsistent subsidies that some governments have used in an
effort to speed up the deployment of renewables, while ignoring the fact that
global subsidies for carbon-based energy are 25 times larger than global
subsidies for renewables.
One of the most effective of the groups financed by the Koch
brothers and other carbon polluters is the American Legislative Exchange
Council, or ALEC, which grooms conservative state legislators throughout the
country to act as their agents in introducing legislation written by utilities
and carbon-fuel lobbyists in a desperate effort to slow, if not stop, the
transition to renewable energy.
The Kochs claim to act on principles of low taxation and minimal
regulation, but in their attempts to choke the development of alternative
energy, they have induced the recipients of their generous campaign
contributions to contradict these supposedly bedrock values, pushing
legislative and regulatory measures in 34 states to discourage solar, or
encourage carbon energy, or both. The most controversial of their initiatives
is focused on persuading state legislatures and public-utility commissions to
tax homeowners who install a PV solar cell on their roofs, and to manipulate
the byzantine utility laws and regulations to penalize renewable energy in a
variety of novel schemes.
The chief battleground in this war between the energy systems of
the past and future is our electrical grid. For more than a century, the grid –
along with the regulatory and legal framework governing it – has been dominated
by electric utilities and their centralized, fossil-fuel-powered
electricity-generation plants. But the rise of distributed alternate energy
sources allows consumers to participate in the production of electricity
through a policy called net metering. In 43 states, homeowners who install
solar PV to systems on their rooftops are permitted to sell electricity back
into the grid when they generate more than they need.
These policies have been crucial to the growth of solar power. But
net metering represents an existential threat to the future of electric
utilities, the so-called utility death spiral: As more consumers install solar
panels on their roofs, utilities will have to raise prices on their remaining
customers to recover the lost revenues. Those higher rates will, in turn, drive
more consumers to leave the utility system, and so on.
But here is more good news: The Koch brothers are losing rather
badly. In Kansas, their home state, a poll by North Star Opinion Research
reported that 91 percent of registered voters support solar and wind.
Three-quarters supported stronger policy encouragement of renewable energy,
even if such policies raised their electricity bills.
In Georgia, the Atlanta Tea Party joined forces with the Sierra Club
to form a new organization called – wait for it – the Green Tea Coalition,
which promptly defeated a Koch-funded scheme to tax rooftop solar panels.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, after the state's largest utility, an ALEC
member, asked the public-utility commission for a tax of up to $150 per month
for solar households, the opposition was fierce and well-organized. A
compromise was worked out – those households would be charged just $5 per month
– but Barry Goldwater Jr., the leader of a newly formed organization called
TUSK (Tell Utilities Solar won't be Killed), is fighting a new attempt to
discourage rooftop solar in Arizona. Characteristically, the Koch brothers and
their allies have been using secretive and deceptive funding in Arizona to run
television advertisements attacking "greedy" owners of rooftop solar
panels – but their effort has thus far backfired, as local journalists have
exposed the funding scam.
Even though the Koch-funded forces recently scored a partial (and
almost certainly temporary) victory in Ohio, where the legislature voted to put
a hold on the state's renewable-portfolio standard and study the issue for two
years, it's clear that the attack on solar energy is too little, too late. Last
year, the Edison Electric Institute warned the utility industry that it had
waited too long to respond to the sharp cost declines and growing popularity of
solar: "At the point when utility investors become focused on these new
risks and start to witness significant customer- and earnings-erosion trends,
they will respond to these challenges. But, by then, it may be too late to
repair the utility business model."
The most seductive argument deployed by the Koch brothers and
their allies is that those who use rooftop solar electricity and benefit from
the net-metering policies are "free riders" – that is, they are
allegedly not paying their share of the maintenance costs for the
infrastructure of the old utility model, including the grid itself. This
deceptive message, especially when coupled with campaign contributions, has
persuaded some legislators to support the proposed new taxes on solar panels.
But the argument ignores two important realities facing the
electric utilities: First, most of the excess solar electricity is supplied by
owners of solar cells during peak-load hours of the day, when the grid's
capacity is most stressed – thereby alleviating the pressure to add expensive
new coal- or gas-fired generating capacity. But here's the rub: What saves
money for their customers cuts into the growth of their profits and depresses
their stock prices. As is often the case, the real conflict is between the
public interest and the special interest.
The second reality ignored by the Koch brothers is the one they
least like to discuss, the one they spend so much money trying to obfuscate
with their hired
"merchants of doubt." You want to talk about the
uncompensated use of infrastructure? What about sewage infrastructure for
98 million tons per day of gaseous, heat-trapping waste that is daily released
into our skies, threatening the future of human civilization? Is it acceptable
to use the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet as an open sewer?
Free of charge? Really?
This, after all, is the reason the climate crisis has become an
existential threat to the future of human civilization. Last April, the average
CO2 concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere exceeded 400 parts-per-million on
a sustained basis for the first time in at least 800,000 years and probably for
the first time in at least 4.5 million years (a period that was considerably
warmer than at present).
According to a cautious analysis by the influential climate
scientist James Hansen, the accumulated man-made global-warming pollution
already built up in the Earth's atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy
every day as would be released by the explosion of 400,000 Hiroshima-class
nuclear bombs. It's a big planet, but that's a lot of energy.
And it is that heat energy that is giving the Earth a fever.
Denialists hate the "fever" metaphor, but as the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) pointed out this year, "Just as a 1.4degree-fever
change would be seen as significant in a child's body, a similar change in our
Earth's temperature is also a concern for human society."
Thirteen of the 14 hottest years ever measured with instruments
have occurred in this century. This is the 37th year in a row that has been
hotter than the 20th-century average. April was the 350th month in a row hotter
than the average in the preceding century. The past decade was by far the
warmest decade ever measured.
Many scientists expect the coming year could break all of these
records by a fair margin because of the extra boost from the anticipated El
Niño now gathering in the waters of the eastern Pacific. (The effects of
periodic El Niño events are likely to become stronger because of global
warming, and this one is projected by many scientists to be stronger than
average, perhaps on the scale of the epic El Niño of 1997 to 1998.)
The fast-growing number of extreme-weather events, connected to
the climate crisis, has already had a powerful impact on public attitudes
toward global warming. A clear majority of Americans now acknowledge that man-made pollution is responsible. As the storms, floods,
mudslides, droughts, fires and other catastrophes become ever more destructive, the arcane discussions over
how much of their extra-destructive force should be attributed to global
warming have become largely irrelevant. The public at large feels it viscerally
now. As Bob Dylan sang, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the
wind blows."
Besides, there is a simple difference between linear cause and
effect and systemic cause and effect. As one of the world's most-respected
atmospheric scientists, Kevin Trenberth, has said, "The environment in
which all storms form has changed owing to human activities."
For example, when Supertyphoon Haiyan crossed the Pacific toward
the Philippines last fall, the storm gained strength across seas that were 5.4
degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they used to be because of greenhousegas
pollution. As a result, Haiyan went from being merely strong to being the most
powerful and destructive ocean-based storm on record to make landfall. Four
million people were displaced (more than twice as many as by the Indian Ocean
tsunami of 10 years ago), and there are still more than 2 million Haiyan
refugees desperately trying to rebuild their lives.
When Superstorm Sandy traversed the areas of the Atlantic Ocean
windward of New York and New Jersey in 2012, the water temperature was nine
degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. The extra convection energy in those
waters fed the storm and made the winds stronger than they would otherwise have
been. Moreover, the sea level was higher than it used to be, elevated by the
melting of ice in the frozen regions of the Earth and the expanded volume of
warmer ocean waters.
Five years earlier, denialists accused me of demagogic
exaggeration in an animated scene in my documentary An Inconvenient
Truth that showed the waters of the Atlantic Ocean flooding into the
9/11 Ground Zero Memorial site. But in Sandy's wake, the Atlantic did in fact flood
Ground Zero – many years before scientists had expected that to occur.
Similarly, the inundation of Miami Beach by rising sea levels has
now begun, and freshwater aquifers in low-lying areas from South Florida to the
Nile Delta to Bangladesh to Indochina are being invaded by saltwater pushed
upward by rising oceans. And of course, many low-lying islands – not least in
the Bay of Bengal – are in danger of disappearing altogether. Where will the
climate refugees go? Similarly, the continued melting of mountain glaciers and
snowpacks is, according to the best scientists, already "affecting water
supplies for as many as a billion people around the world."
Just as the extreme-weather events we are now experiencing are
exactly the kind that were predicted by scientists decades ago, the scientific
community is now projecting far worse extreme-weather events in the years to
come. Eighty percent of the warming in the past 150 years (since the burning of
carbon-based fuels gained momentum) has occurred in the past few decades. And
it is worth noting that the previous scientific projections consistently
low-balled the extent of the globalwarming consequences that later took place
– for a variety of reasons rooted in the culture of science that favor
conservative estimates of future effects.
In an effort to avoid these cultural biases, the AAAS noted this
year that not only are the impacts of the climate crisis "very likely to
become worse over the next 10 to 20 years and beyond," but "there is
a possibility that temperatures will rise much higher and impacts will be much
worse than expected. Moreover, as global temperature rises, the risk increases
that one or more important parts of the Earth's climate system will experience
changes that may be abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible, causing
large damages and high costs."
Just weeks after that report, there was shock and, for some, a
temptation to despair when the startling news was released in May by scientists
at both NASA and the University of Washington that the long-feared
"collapse" of a portion of the West Antarctic ice sheet is not only
under way but is also now "irreversible." Even as some labored to
understand what the word "collapse" implied about the suddenness with
which this catastrophe will ultimately unfold, it was the word
"irreversible" that had a deeper impact on the collective psyche.
Just as scientists 200 years ago could not comprehend the idea
that species had once lived on Earth and had subsequently become extinct, and
just as some people still find it hard to accept the fact that human beings
have become a sufficiently powerful force of nature to reshape the ecological
system of our planet, many – including some who had long since accepted the
truth about global warming – had difficulty coming to grips with the stark new
reality that one of the long-feared "tipping points" had been
crossed. And that, as a result, no matter what we do, sea levels will rise by
at least an additional three feet.
The uncertainty about how long the process will take (some of the
best ice scientists warn that a rise of 10 feet in this century cannot be ruled
out) did not change the irreversibility of the forces that we have set in
motion. But as Eric Rignot, the lead author of the NASA study, pointed out in The
Guardian, it's still imperative that we take action: "Controlling
climate warming may ultimately make a difference not only about how fast West
Antarctic ice will melt to sea, but also whether other parts of Antarctica will
take their turn."
The news about the irreversible collapse in West Antarctica caused
some to almost forget that only two months earlier, a similar startling
announcement had been made about the Greenland ice sheet. Scientists found that
the northeastern part of Greenland – long thought to be resistant to melting –
has in fact been losing more than 10 billion tons of ice per year for the past
decade, making 100 percent of Greenland unstable and likely, as with West
Antarctica, to contribute to significantly more sea-level rise than scientists
had previously thought.
The heating of the oceans not only melts the ice and makes
hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons more intense, it also evaporates around 2
trillion gallons of additional water vapor into the skies above the U.S. The
warmer air holds more of this water vapor and carries it over the landmasses,
where it is funneled into land-based storms that are releasing record downpours
all over the world.
For example, an "April shower" came to Pensacola,
Florida, this spring, but it was a freak – another rainstorm on steroids: two
feet of rain in 26 hours. It broke all the records in the region, but as usual,
virtually no media outlets made the connection to global warming. Similar
"once in a thousand years" storms have been occurring regularly in
recent years all over the world, including in my hometown of Nashville in May
2010.
All-time record flooding swamped large portions of England this
winter, submerging thousands of homes for more than six weeks. Massive
downpours hit Serbia and Bosnia this spring, causing flooding of "biblical
proportions" (a phrase now used so frequently in the Western world that it
has become almost a cliché) and thousands of landslides. Torrential rains in
Afghanistan in April triggered mudslides that killed thousands of people –
almost as many, according to relief organizations, as all of the Afghans killed
in the war there the previous year.
In March, persistent rains triggered an unusually large mudslide
in Oso, Washington, killing more than 40 people. There are literally hundreds
of other examples of extreme rainfall occurring in recent years in the
Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania.
In the planet's drier regions, the same extra heat trapped in the
atmosphere by man-made global-warming pollution has also been driving faster
evaporation of soil moisture and causing record-breaking droughts. As of this
writing, 100 percent of California is in "severe,"
"extreme" or "exceptional" drought. Record fires are
ravaging the desiccated landscape. Experts now project that an increase of one
degree Celsius over pre-industrial temperatures will lead to as much as a 600-percent
increase in the median area burned by forest fires in some areas of the
American West – including large portions of Colorado. The National Research
Council has reported that fire season is two and a half months longer than it
was 30 years ago, and in California, firefighters are saying that the season is
now effectively year-round.
Drought has been intensifying in many other dry regions around the
world this year: Brazil, Indonesia, central and northwest Africa and
Madagascar, central and western Europe, the Middle East up to the Caspian Sea
and north of the Black Sea, Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, Western Australia
and New Zealand.
Syria is one of the countries that has been in the bull's-eye of climate change. From 2006 to 2010, a
historic drought destroyed 60 percent of the country's farms and 80 percent of
its livestock – driving a million refugees from rural agricultural areas into
cities already crowded with the million refugees who had taken shelter there
from the Iraq War. As early as 2008, U.S. State Department cables quoted Syrian
government officials warning that the social and economic impacts of the
drought are "beyond our capacity as a country to deal with." Though
the hellish and ongoing civil war in Syria has multiple causes – including the
perfidy of the Assad government and the brutality on all sides – their
climate-related drought may have been the biggest underlying trigger for the
horror.
The U.S. military has taken notice of the strategic dangers
inherent in the climate crisis. Last March, a Pentagon advisory committee
described the climate crisis as a "catalyst for conflict" that may
well cause failures of governance and societal collapse. "In the past, the
thinking was that climate change multiplied the significance of a
situation," said retired Air Force Gen. Charles F. Wald. "Now we're
saying it's going to be a direct cause of instability."
Pentagon spokesman Mark Wright told the press, "For DOD, this
is a mission reality, not a political debate. The scientific forecast is for
more Arctic ice melt, more sea-level rise, more intense storms, more flooding
from storm surge and more drought." And in yet another forecast difficult
for congressional climate denialists to rebut, climate experts advising the
military have also warned that the world's largest naval base, in Norfolk,
Virginia, is likely to be inundated by rising sea levels in the future.
And how did the Republican-dominated House of Representatives
respond to these grim warnings? By passing legislation seeking to prohibit the
Department of Defense from taking any action to prepare for the effects of
climate disruption.
There are so many knock-on consequences of the climate crisis that
listing them can be depressing – diseases spreading, crop yields declining,
more heat waves affecting vulnerable and elderly populations, the disappearance
of summer-ice cover in the Arctic Ocean, the potential extinction of up to half
of all the living species, and so much more. And that in itself is a growing
problem too, because when you add it all up, it's no wonder that many feel a
new inclination to despair.
So, clearly, we will just have to gird ourselves for the difficult
challenges ahead. There is indeed, literally, light at the end of the tunnel,
but there is a tunnel, and we are well into it.
In November 1936, Winston Churchill stood before the United
Kingdom's House of Commons and placed a period at the end of the misguided
debate over the nature of the "gathering storm" on the other side of
the English Channel: "Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest
warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. . . . The era of
procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of
delays is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of
consequences. . . . We cannot avoid this period; we are in it now."
Our civilization is confronting this existential challenge at a
moment in our historical development when our dominant global ideology –
democratic capitalism – has been failing us in important respects.
Democracy is accepted in theory by more people than ever before as
the best form of political organization, but it has been "hacked" by
large corporations (defined as "persons" by the Supreme Court) and
special interests corrupting the political system with obscene amounts of money
(defined as "speech" by the same court).
Capitalism, for its part, is accepted by more people than ever
before as a superior form of economic organization, but is – in its current
form – failing to measure and include the categories of "value" that
are most relevant to the solutions we need in order to respond to this
threatening crisis (clean air and water, safe food, a benign climate balance,
public goods like education and a greener infrastructure, etc.).
Pressure for meaningful reform in democratic capitalism is
beginning to build powerfully. The progressive introduction of Internet-based
communication – social media, blogs, digital journalism – is laying the
foundation for the renewal of individual participation in democracy, and the
re-elevation of reason over wealth and power as the basis for collective
decisionmaking. And the growing levels of inequality worldwide, combined with
growing structural unemployment and more frequent market disruptions (like the
Great Recession), are building support for reforms in capitalism.
Both waves of reform are still at an early stage, but once again,
Churchill's words inspire: "If you're going through hell, keep
going." And that is why it is all the more important to fully appreciate
the incredible opportunity for salvation that is now within our grasp. As the
satirical newspaper The Onion recently noted in one of its
trademark headlines: "Scientists Politely Remind World That Clean Energy
Technology Ready to Go Whenever."
We have the policy tools that can dramatically accelerate the
transition to clean energy that market forces will eventually produce at a
slower pace. The most important has long since been identified: We have to put
a price on carbon in our markets, and we need to eliminate the massive
subsidies that fuel the profligate emissions of global-warming pollution.
We need to establish "green banks" that provide access
to capital investment necessary to develop renewable energy, sustainable
agriculture and forestry, an electrified transportation fleet, the retrofitting
of buildings to reduce wasteful energy consumption, and the full integration of
sustainability in the design and architecture of cities and towns. While the
burning of fossil fuels is the largest cause of the climate crisis,
deforestation and "factory farming" also play an important role.
Financial and technological approaches to addressing these challenges are
emerging, but we must continue to make progress in converting to sustainable
forestry and agriculture.
In order to accomplish these policy shifts, we must not only put a
price on carbon in markets, but also find a way to put a price on climate
denial in our politics. We already know the reforms that are needed – and the
political will to enact them is a renewable resource. Yet the necessary renewal
can only come from an awakened citizenry empowered by a sense of urgency and
emboldened with the courage to reject despair and become active. Most
importantly, now is the time to support candidates who accept the reality of
the climate crisis and are genuinely working hard to solve it – and to bluntly
tell candidates who are not on board how much this issue matters to you. If you
are willing to summon the resolve to communicate that blunt message forcefully
– with dignity and absolute sincerity – you will be amazed at the political
power an individual can still wield in America's diminished democracy.
Something else is also new this summer. Three years ago,
in these pages, I criticized the seeming diffidence of President
Obama toward the great task of solving the climate crisis; this summer, it is
abundantly evident that he has taken hold of the challenge with determination
and seriousness of purpose.
He has empowered his Environmental Protection Agency to enforce
limits on CO2 emissions for both new and, as of this June, existing sources of
CO2. He has enforced bold new standards for the fuel economy of the U.S.
transportation fleet. He has signaled that he is likely to reject the absurdly
reckless Keystone XL-pipeline proposal for the transport of oil from carbonintensive
tar sands to be taken to market through the United States on its way to China,
thus effectively limiting their exploitation. And he is even now preparing to
impose new limits on the release of methane pollution.
All of these welcome steps forward have to be seen, of course, in
the context of Obama's continued advocacy of a so-called all-of-the-above
energy policy – which is the prevailing code for aggressively pushing more
drilling and fracking for oil and gas. And to put the good news in perspective,
it is important to remember that U.S. emissions – after declining for five
years during the slow recovery from the Great Recession – actually increased by
2.4 percent in 2013.
Nevertheless, the president is clearly changing his overall policy
emphasis to make CO2 reductions a much higher priority now and has made a
series of inspiring speeches about the challenges posed by climate change and
the exciting opportunities available as we solve it. As a result, Obama will go
to the United Nations this fall and to Paris at the end of 2015 with the
credibility and moral authority that he lacked during the disastrous meeting in
Copenhagen four and a half years ago.
The international treaty process has been so fraught with
seemingly intractable disagreements that some parties have all but given up on
the possibility of ever reaching a meaningful treaty.
Ultimately, there must be one if we are to succeed. And there are
signs that a way forward may be opening up. In May, I attended a preparatory
session in Abu Dhabi, UAE, organized by United Nations Secretary General Ban
Ki-moon to bolster commitments from governments, businesses and nongovernmental
organizations ahead of this September's U.N. Climate Summit. The two-day
meeting was different from many of the others I have attended. There were
welcome changes in rhetoric, and it was clear that the reality of the climate
crisis is now weighing on almost every nation. Moreover, there were encouraging
reports from around the world that many of the policy changes necessary to
solve the crisis are being adopted piecemeal by a growing number of regional,
state and city governments.
For these and other reasons, I believe there is a realistic hope
that momentum toward a global agreement will continue to build in September and
carry through to the Paris negotiations in late 2015.
The American poet Wallace Stevens once wrote, "After the
final 'no' there comes a 'yes'/And on that 'yes' the future world
depends." There were many no's before the emergence of a global consensus
to abolish chattel slavery, before the consensus that women must have the right
to vote, before the fever of the nucleararms race was broken, before the
quickening global recognition of gay and lesbian equality, and indeed before
every forward advance toward social progress. Though a great many obstacles
remain in the path of this essential agreement, I am among the growing number
of people who are allowing themselves to become more optimistic than ever that
a bold and comprehensive pact may well emerge from the Paris negotiations late
next year, which many regard as the last chance to avoid civilizational
catastrophe while there is still time.
It will be essential for the United States and other major
historical emitters to commit to strong action. The U.S. is, finally, now
beginning to shift its stance. And the European Union has announced its
commitment to achieve a 40-percent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030. Some
individual European nations are acting even more aggressively, including
Finland's pledge to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050.
It will also be crucial for the larger developing and emerging
nations – particularly China and India – to play a strong leadership role.
Fortunately, there are encouraging signs. China's new president, Xi Jinping,
has launched a pilot cap-and-trade system in two cities and five provinces as a
model for a nationwide cap-and-trade program in the next few years. He has
banned all new coal burning in several cities and required the reporting of CO2
emissions by all major industrial sources. China and the U.S. have jointly reached
an important agreement to limit another potent source of global-warming
pollution – the chemical compounds known as hydro-fluorocarbons, or HFCs. And
the new prime minister of India, as noted earlier, has launched the world's
most ambitious plan to accelerate the transition to solar electricity.
Underlying this new breaking of logjams in international politics,
there are momentous changes in the marketplace that are exercising enormous
influence on the perceptions by political leaders of the new possibilities for
historic breakthroughs. More and more, investors are diversifying their
portfolios to include significant investments in renewables. In June, Warren
Buffett announced he was ready to double Berkshire Hathaway's existing $15
billion investment in wind and solar energy.
A growing number of large investors – including pension funds,
university endowments (Stanford announced its decision in May), family offices
and others – have announced decisions to divest themselves from carbonintensive
assets. Activist and "impact" investors are pushing for divestment
from carbonrich assets and new investments in renewable and sustainable
assets.
Several large banks and asset managers around the world (full
disclosure: Generation Investment Management, which I co-founded with David
Blood and for which I serve as chairman, is in this group) have advised their
clients of the danger that carbon assets will become "stranded." A
"stranded asset" is one whose price is vulnerable to a sudden decline
when markets belatedly recognize the truth about their underlying value – just
as the infamous "subprime mortgages" suddenly lost their value in
2007 to 2008 once investors came to grips with the fact that the borrowers had
absolutely no ability to pay off their mortgages.
Shareholder activists and public campaigners have pressed
carbon-dependent corporations to deal with these growing concerns. But the
biggest ones are still behaving as if they are in denial. In May 2013,
ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson responded to those pointing out the need to stop
using the Earth's atmosphere as a sewer by asking, "What good is it to
save the planet if humanity suffers?"
I don't even know where to start in responding to that statement,
but here is a clue: Pope Francis said in May, "If we destroy creation,
creation will destroy us. Never forget this."
Exxonmobil, Shell and many other holders of carbon-intensive
assets have argued, in essence, that they simply do not believe that elected
national leaders around the world will ever reach an agreement to put a price
on carbon pollution.
But a prospective global treaty (however likely or unlikely you
think that might be) is only one of several routes to overturning the
fossil-fuel economy. Rapid technological advances in renewable energy are
stranding carbon investments; grassroots movements are building opposition to
the holding of such assets; and new legal restrictions on collateral flows of
pollution – like particulate air pollution in China and mercury pollution in
the U.S. – are further reducing the value of coal, tar sands, and oil and gas
assets.
In its series of reports to energy investors this spring,
Citigroup questioned the feasibility of new coal plants not only in Europe and
North America, but in China as well. Although there is clearly a political
struggle under way in China between regional governments closely linked to
carbon-energy generators, suppliers and users and the central government in
Beijing – which is under growing pressure from citizens angry about pollution –
the nation's new leadership appears to be determined to engineer a transition
toward renewable energy. Only time will tell how successful they will be.
The stock exchanges in Johannesburg and São Paulo have decided to
require the full integration of sustainability from all listed companies.
Standard & Poor's announced this spring that some nations vulnerable to the
impacts of the climate crisis may soon have their bonds downgraded because of
the enhanced risk to holders of those assets.
A growing number of businesses around the world are implementing
sustainability plans, as more and more consumers demand a more responsible
approach from businesses they patronize. Significantly, many have been
pleasantly surprised to find that adopting efficient, low-carbon approaches can
lead to major cost savings.
And all the while, the surprising and relentless ongoing decline
in the cost of renewable energy and efficiency improvements are driving the
transition to a low-carbon economy.
Is there enough time? Yes. Damage has been done, and the period of
consequences will continue for some time to come, but there is still time to
avoid the catastrophes that most threaten our future. Each of the trends
described above – in technology, business, economics and politics – represents
a break from the past. Taken together, they add up to genuine and realistic
hope that we are finally putting ourselves on a path to solve the climate crisis.
How long will it take? When Martin Luther King Jr. was asked that
question during some of the bleakest hours of the U.S. civil rights revolution,
he responded, "How long? Not long. Because no lie can live
forever. . . . How long? Not long. Because the arc of the moral universe is
long, but it bends toward justice."
And so it is today: How long? Not long.
This story is from the July 3rd-17th, 2014 issue of Rolling Stone.
