'This issue is settled.'

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

By Brooke Williams

Bill Blakemore, of ABC News, made the above statement during his talk at last week’s conference on climate change and energy at Teton Village. He was referring to the irrefutable evidence that places the blame for our warming climate on modern humans. What is not yet settled is what we’re going to do about it.

I sensed that there were few, if any, “deniers” - people who acknowledge climate change but insist that the globe is merely in a regular warming period - at the conference, and if there were, they weren’t part of the program. Still, when I asked an ardent and traditional environmentalist friend of mine what he thought of the first night’s session, he answered “it seemed very one-sided.” 

Hearing this shocked me into silence. I am familiar enough with this person to know that his comment had nothing to do with the fact that the deniers weren’t given a voice. Thinking back over the last night’s presentations, I had an epiphany: now that we’ve accepted the fact that we’re responsible for the warming planet, there are no sides to this issue.  Yes, there are many opinions about what can and should be done to slow and reverse the current trends, but no one I heard at the conference believed they had the “silver bullet” that will solve the problem. 

Perhaps my friend was referring to the fact that wind and solar power and other renewable energy technologies didn’t receive the focus that some of the other strategies did, but no one involved seemed to discount renewables as part of the solution.  For me, the idea of ‘sides’ in this issue disappeared last winter during a Jackson event sponsored by Conservation International. This was the first time I heard the term “stabilization wedges.”

The idea comes from Princeton scientists and refers to the graph showing the steep line of increasing carbon emissions over the past 50 years to our current level of eight billion tons per year, which is projected to rise to 16 billion tons by the year 2057. (This is subject of Bill McKibben’s article in this month’s National Geographic). 

Each ‘wedge’ represents one of 15 existing technologies that could flatten the graph by one billion tons of carbon emissions by 2057. Improving the fuel economy of two billion cars is one wedge. Others include increasing the efficiency of buildings by 25 percent, halting all deforestation, and using three times as much nuclear power (one pound of uranium produces as much electricity as 12,000 pounds of coal, without emitting carbon) as we are now.

We need all the wedges.

The most discussed wedges involved coal, which makes sense since Wyoming produces more coal than any other state and that one third of the electricity currently used in America is generated in power plants fueled by Wyoming coal. Best case scenarios regarding renewable energy technology suggest that we’ll be using hydrocarbons to generate electricity for 40-50 more years. 

The conference high points were the discussions of how Wyoming is contributing to the development of ‘wedges’ to capture and store carbon (releasing carbon pollutants underground and not into the air) and to improve the efficiency of coal-fired power plants by 20 percent. If we’re concerned about the more distant future, we should be planning for that day when coal is no longer needed by investing in the technologies that will replace it. Much effort is going toward solving the problem of transporting power generated by Wyoming’s famous wind.

If the climate issue could have become polarized at this conference it would have happened during the last panel discussion. Stephanie Kessler, Wyoming’s representative to the Wilderness Society, sat between the president of an oil company and the head of the mining association. She could have spent her few minutes promoting the virtues of the renewable wedges and criticizing any discussion of nuclear power or solutions involving non-renewable resources.

Instead she reminded us that the huge open spaces and the wild animals are why we’re in Wyoming and she cautioned us to avoid the trap of putting a dollar value on much of what makes this state so attractive.

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'This issue is settled.' | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local

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