Lord Nicholas Stern, one of the world’s most prominent climate economists, believes that the fight against global warming will lead to the next industrial revolution. Brad Johnson has the story and video.
In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress, Stern describes the scale of the challenge to wean civilization off its dependence of unsustainable fossil fuels. Since the consequences of failure are on the almost unimaginable scale of global war, this challenge is a necessary one. Stern is actually inspired by the scope of action, recognizing that the investment to transform the global economy to be cleaner, safer, and healthier will unleash a new industrial revolution:
We essentially, if we’re to give us say any reasonable chance, call it fifty-fifty, for two degrees centigrade as the limit on the temperature increase “” of course, it’s only a probability. Nothing is certain in risk management. If we were to try to do that “” it’s a bit ambitious from where we are. If we were to try to do that, and I think we should, we would see emissions having to fall from close to fifty billion tons of CO2 equivalent down to below twenty over forty years, between now and 2050. If we manage ourselves sensibly as a world including our climate, of course, in other ways too, you might see world income grow by a factor of three over forty years. So you’ve got to divide emissions per unit of output by three times 2.5: by a factor of seven or eight. Divide by seven or eight.
That, by anybody’s standards, is an industrial revolution.
So, action is to promote an industrial revolution.
So that’s what we’ve got to look at to see what that means. We probably would have to invest as a world one or two percent more for some decades, maybe two, three decades. We’ll find out how many as we work our way through. You’ll probably have to invest one or two percent of GDP extra, which is quite a significant story. But a pretty minor investment to make for the kind of massive risk reduction I’ve just described.
Although there is growing recognition that “leadership in the new clean energy economy” is “a contest that America cannot afford to lose,” too many politicians in Washington are committed to the defense of the oil and coal industries against any change. The belief that the fight against carbon pollution is a threat to the economy is still pervasive, when the very opposite is the reality.
– Brad Johnson, in a WonkRoom cross-post
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Consider your city’s wastewater treatment processes millions of gallons a day, the only issue preventing using this to grow fresh-water plankton, biomass, is that purifying water that way takes days of time instead of hours using flocking chemicals.
The tanks at current wastewater plants are too small for this, but there is a better way to grow & harvest using small units that offer much more lighted surface to footprint to avoid needing way too much land to do this. With that essential unit you can scale up to obtain more than 2-gallons of biodiesel per person per day on a municipal system.
The water is almost pure at the end so treated and recycled, nice feature for desert cities, and the pressed cakes are good soil enhancers adding organics that preserve soil moisture, all this turning the expense of chemical treatement just to pass EPA rules before being released into a revenue stream. Being worked on by over 12 states, doesn’t make FoxSnoozeCNNBC.
Phoenix, AZ, produces 10-million gallons a day of secondary effluent, 83-million pounds of nutrients the biomass must extract before tomorrow and is worth about 3-million gallons of biodiesel daily, nearby Glendale produces the same amount.
This process is also very applicable to pig and dairy farm waste, where a pig produces 3-gallons a day equivalent, a dairy cow 5-gallons of biodiesel a day and the water is recycled, the pressed cakes soil enhancers.
Not really sure how much longer this work can be ignored but like the song goes, “… the revolution will not be televised.”
Not so sure about using the residue as fertiliser. The big problem with sewage is that the systems have always been designed the way an old-fashioned landfill was. Just dump everything in.
Rational use of sewage actually requires investment in keeping industrial wastes separate from human and animal wastes. There are laws, here at least, prohibiting certain items from the general sewage disposal, but those laws are often breached. ‘Twould be far better if the waste connection at industrial operations never had any linkage to the general sewage system.
An industrial waste system that might be ‘contaminated’ by human waste is a much smaller problem than a huge quantity of useful human wastes contaminated by small additions of poisons totally destroying the value for soil improvement or similar uses.
Attitude Change, not Climate Change.
For those who think 1 or 2 percent of GDP will break our backs, just think of how many technological inventions in the last century have each improved our lives by 1 or 2 percent. Is our civilization so desparate, after our parents have done so much, that we can’t spend 1 or 2 percent on environment? It is a very spoiled brat who can’t get everything he wants.
A $50/ton carbon tax could provide $80 billion per year for efficiency, would be only about 0.6% of GDP, but would create new jobs today and pay off in long term fuel savings and energy security.
Tom Mallard, would you please post references to your topic?
You would have thought that after a cataclysmic few years of natural disasters, some of which may not have occurred but for AGW, politicians and the public would have woken up to the idea that it’s sensible to live within ecological limits.
Stern’s suggestions are fairly conservative aiming only for a 50% chance of avoiding > 2 degrees C. I would prefer the world to go for the faster reduction on the trillionth tonne website giving us a 75% chance. As it is I calculate even the EUs target of 30% reduction by 2020 from 1990 is only 1.1% annually and the rest of the world seems paralysed by wishful thinking.
http://trillionthtonne.org/
Only the tortured rhetoric from a conventionally trained economist could claim that conversion to clean energy economics is at cost. This is so even if it is for one or two percent of world GDP. The metric of GDP includes many costs that are not assets but damage and liabilities.
The true value of conversion would include reduction or elimination of many costs, such as those associated with hundreds of billions of dollars of annual nation-state subsidies for fossil and uranium “fuels” and costs associated with health impacts due to pollution, climate crisis and increasing geopolitical and economic instability.
Our present distorted “economy of explosives” is characterized by unsustainable costs. Conversion would be a positive sustainable investment, not a “cost.” Most “classical economists” don’t know the difference between a resource of energy and a hole in the ground (where they find substances used as explosives and which are pervasive in our combustible “civilian economy.”). Furthermore, several new economic studies for clean energy conversion totally off of fossil and uranium fuels show essentially no projected “cost.” Perceived costs are overwhelmed by benefits.
Natural laws of science do not subscribe to our present, tortured, upside-down science of man-made ecological management. In fact, they indicate unfolding multiple disasters.
The London School of Economics and Political Science has financially supported the Libya oil dictator. This is not science of sustainable economics or politics, but theocracy.
Stern still argues for economic growth, in fact for a doubling or more of the size of the global economy. As this economy has already caused the Earth system’s biospheres to begin to collapse under the strain, this is a recipe for disaster. Stern appears to be a typical neo-liberal economist who has donned the fine raiments of the ‘ecologically responsible’ in regard to greenhouse gas emissions, but he is still unable to abjure that neo-plastic religion that is causing myriad other ecological disasters, not to mention resource deletion, economic implosion and burgeoning geo-political tension.