What are the legislators thinking?

Yesterday the Senate failed to bring the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner Climate bill to a vote. Now it's dead for the year. The blogosphere is atwitter with analysis. What were those senators thinking? How could they fail to take action on one of the most pressing issues of our time?

My question is a little deeper than that. I want to know why something as pitiful as the B-L-W bill seemed like the bright hope? In other words, what is going on in the heads of the whole lot? From those who actually understand just how pathetic the bill was relative to the real threat the argument goes that one step in the right direction is better than no step at all. But I hang my head and weep. Is this the best we can do? Is that excuse justifiable? Can we rely on a slippery-slope kind of argument? Or a foot-in-the-door logic?

I'm not going to go into the guts of the bill, that is not within the scope of my interests here. If you want to learn more about the bill and the Senate debate, go to Grist.org, the Gristmill blog for a lot of discussion and analysis.

What I want to say here is that we are in serious trouble when after all the science is pointing to cataclysm the best our leaders can do is believe that capping CO₂ emissions (at an as-yet unknown effective level) and then trading licenses is an adequate response. This whole idea is based on yesterday's (really yesteryear's) understanding of global warming and climate change. Things are heating up a lot faster than even the IPCC report allowed. James Hansen (NASA) recently asserted that the target number for CO₂ concentrations is 350 ppm for a stable, livable climate, not the 450 previously believed to be the magic number. We're already over 380 ppm so this means drawing down CO₂ from the atmosphere, or waiting a thousand years for the natural sinks to do their work. And yet our glorious polity can't comprehend that something far more radical than the L-W bill is going to be needed. Forget the deniers (e.g. Jim Inhofe, R. OK. Open the link to read the profile in stupidity). Even our most avid believers have not yet grasped the significance of our predicament. So the debate goes on. How many angels can dance on this pinhead?

But, to be brutally honest, it isn't just the legislators that are woefully ignorant. It is the vast majority of people who simply haven't got the understanding of how the world really works, the electorate, that perpetuates this miasma. Most people don't grasp that the various challenges that face us are interrelated. They don't grasp the nature of the scale of the problems. They don't grasp the meaning of exponential rates of change. They lack a systems perspective.

Yesterday was also notable for several other reasons. The price of oil hit $138 a barrel, and the unemployment rate in the US topped 5.5%, up 0.5%, which hasn't happened for 22 years (see an article in the New York Times for overview). Prices of everything, everywhere are rising at uncommon rates. And all of these worrisome trends are interconnected in deep ways that apparently the politicians and population don't get. They want cheaper fuel and minimum taxes. They want their lifestyle and not be bothered with the inconvenience of sacrifices. Frankly I think this much ignorance makes matters hopeless, so far as actually starting to take actions needed to minimize the suffering.

The world is a system. Everything is connected to everything else, weakly or strongly. Pull on one string and they all are going to move. The fact is that you cannot separate issues like climate change and peak oil and population. You can't put forth a bill on climate change that doesn't also include strategic thinking about energy and population. It is a tribute to the ignorance of our politicians that they think they can.

In response to a blog by NYT reporter Andrew Revkin (Dot Earth, Next Steps on Climate and Energy, 6/7/08) in which his concluding sentence contained, "...the world, from Capitol Hill to Beijing, had better get busy, and also recognize this is not a free lunch." I posted this comment:

Andy,

Your last line said it all.

There are, in this world, problems that are intractable - there are NO solutions, feasible or otherwise, when the problem is improperly formulated (understood). The energy/climate/economy problem is one such for the reason that real physical work requires the expenditure of energy and our economy (real work) is based on very high energy throughput. That level of energy is dependent on fossil fuels (high density energy content). There is no alternative for humanity right now but to lower the amount of work being done per unit time if we are to lower emissions of carbon. And that means everything gets expensive in monetary terms.

Another valid aphorism: You can't have your cake and eat it too.

This really isn't rocket science, but people just don't have a natural intuition for the consequences of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They actually believe there is such a thing as a free lunch. That is why they are complaining about high gasoline and other fuel costs. And that is why they will continue to look for any political, speculation, weather, or whatever excuse to blame for high prices. The simple truth is that the cost of fossil fuels follows from the increasing amount of energy it takes to get the energy we use. It is so mind-boggling simple yet the vast majority of people don't grasp it. They want someone to blame rather than open up to the reality that it has been their own mindless consumption practices vis-a-vis a finite, hence exhaustible, resource.

All of the proposals, carbon tax, cap-and-trade, cap-and-dividend, and Manhattan-style deployment of technology all suffer from this myopia. They all expect that somehow the technologies (whatever they are) will magically thwart the Second Law; that we will somehow replace tit-for-tat the current energy flow from fossil fuel with sunlight or nuclear or geothermal, you name it. Most imply that some measure of conservation will be adequate. But they all assume that we will just make a transition (possibly with a little sacrifice here and there) and then just get on with our normal lives in a happy low-carbon future.

This is an ignorant belief based on hope rather than reality.

Not only is the lunch not free, it is going to be damned expensive, the most expensive lunch we will have ever eaten. The reason is that while technological progress is essential to increasing the capacity of alternative energy production sources, like solar (thermal and electrical), such improvements will be marginal at best. You don't jump from 15% efficiency to 25% efficiency overnight, which is essentially what will need to happen. And for most of these technologies we are really close to the maximum working efficiency now anyway.

Also the scale of replacement is beyond what most people realize. Ramping up a massive effort to replace electricity generation with solar and nuclear, for example, will take decades and cost far more than most people realize. Who will pay for it? It for sure won't be done on debt. WWII-style sacrifices combined with depression-style loss of wealth will look tame by comparison.

Moreover, and this is the other hidden cost issue, production of all of these new systems is based on using fossil fuels to do the work. There is, in fact, a whole pyramid of fossil fuel inputs to the production of all alternative energy capital equipment. Alternative energy is subsidized by fossil fuel! Thus as fossil fuel costs increase, the cost of production of the alternative equipment increases too. There will never be a time when the alternatives become cost competitive with fossil fuels because their costs are predicated on fossil fuels! If we have in fact reached the peak of oil production, and I strongly suspect we have, then unless the alternative energy sources produce enough excess energy to support themselves, in other words become truly sustainable, we find ourselves in a steep decline in economic production. A solar panel will have to produce another solar panel sometime during its productive life, or the whole thing grinds to a halt. Such is the result of the Second Law.

Bringing us back to the cost of this lunch. The only way out of this quagmire is to recognize that our lifestyle and consumption habits have got to radically change. We have to redirect a significant proportion of what fossil fuels we have left into a truly massive development of alternative energy capital equipment. We have to come to grips with population size vs. consumption level. There is some balance point between what we have to consume per individual and how many are doing the consuming. There is no avoiding this issue. The revamping of society as a result of a contracting energy supply will be much greater than most people are ready to comprehend. This is not a crystal-ball prediction. Viewed from the perspective of thermodynamics, energy-in/work accomplished/biomass supported/waste heat-out, it is a realistic constraint on the world.

For anyone interested in better understanding of these claims, I recommend works in the field of ecological economics. Google Herman Daly or Robert Costanza (c.f. "An Introduction to Ecological Economics")

As formulated now: We need to switch to carbonless energy generation so that we can get on with our consumptive lifestyle -- the problem is intractable. Formulated as: We need to drop everything else and focus our dwindling energy reserves to bootstrapping a sustainable (and reasonably sized) renewable energy infrastructure that will support a reasonably sized population -- there is a chance (no guarantees) that we might be able to solve that one. Solutions start when people actually grasp the nature of the problem and resolve to do whatever it takes. Denial doesn't generally work.

George (channel to Cassandra)
http://questioneverything.typepad.com/

[Edited out a comment meant strictly for a few Dot Earth readers of days gone by! Thanks to Gar Lipow from Grist for pointing out an incongruity between said comment and my intent!]

There is a way. There are solutions but only if we try to solve the right problem.

Comments

[larry shultz]

great post. just like the people who deny the theory of evolution have come up with the intelligent design theory, so some one will deny thermodynamic theory and have a field day with it, abundance for all with a free supper and lunch electricity too cheap to meter...

[Danny Bloom]

Geroge.
As usual, a very good post, insightful and to the point.

Give what is going down, I mean given how the leaders of the world are clueless and unable to move on this, I am beginning to think more and more that we need to start pointing people to the fire exits and lifeboats, rather than continue criticizing Congress and the White House. You and i know we are in big trouble, and the Great Interruption is on our doorsteps now. Well, not this year, and maybe not even in our lifetimes, we'll get through this okay, until our end. But future generations are going to be in deep doo doo because those in power now refused to take action. So I do think we need to start thinking more and more about "where are the fire exits" and "where are the lifeboats" and let's point future generations in that direction, even now. This is going to take psychological transformation of the human species of enormous proportions. We're gonna fry in the far distant future. Population will be reduced to 200,000 souls. 10 billion will die in the great die-off. Maybe this is how Earth takes care of herself, and maybe some of our descendants of the DNA human order will survive.

But the handwriting is on the wall, quite plain to see, isn't it?

Then again, I might be delusional....

[George Mobus]

Danny,

Delusional is when you see fairies.

Indeed things are going to have to change radically. I don't think the future of the world looks like the past only more so! I do think that your statement, "This is going to take psychological transformation of the human species of enormous proportions." is the operative one.

But how to get there with the least suffering is my concern. It seems to me a given that people today are unable to respond to the multiple interlinked global challenges in a way that could mitigate the problems and let people get on with their lives. It seems too late even if we did everything exactly right from this point on. And as the Senate actions show, that isn't likely.

People of some distant tomorrow might be better suited to make wiser choices that would prevent any future catastrophes of this magnitude. But who knows? That is the future and we have to get through the present.

My feeling is it has to do with asking the right questions about what is wrong and characterizing the "real" problem in order to find a "real" solution. As the questions are currently posed, and as the problems are currently characterized I think we will fail and the suffering will be massive. I hope to get out another posting soon to revisit the issue of what is the real problem and why what we think of today as the problems are only symptoms.

George

[Florifulgurator]

Luckily we got that world food crisis now. An obvious fire exit/lifeboat is food sovereingty, i.e. localized small scale individual sustainable agriCULTURE.

{Forget your SUV, you'll love the horse. Forget your job, gardening is work enough. If done right (sustainable, non-fossil) carbon sequestration comes in as a bonus.}

Problem is, we don't got enough land for all.