Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [109]
Consider these factors in tandem.
Technology
Is there enough technology for mitigation or making the transition to a carbon-neutral economy? Yes, technologies to create large amounts of carbon-neutral energy already exist. You know what they are: wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal kinetic power all feeding an efficient smart grid that, in turn, feeds electric vehicles and radically more energy-efficient buildings. Clean tech is not without its problems, but it is here now, already available, and it works at an industrial scale. Can citizens of the Global North, particularly Americans, be as wasteful as they are currently? No. We will have to use energy and resources carefully.
Some see mitigation as hinging on a high-technology breakthrough. Billionaire software mogul Bill Gates, environmental scientist James Lovelock, and even NASA’s James Hansen pin their hopes on pie-in-the-sky fourth-generation nukes (known as IV Gen in the industry). Such technology would surely be safer than today’s rickety old plants and could be feasible given several decades and hundreds of billions of dollars of investment. But industrial-scale application of IV Gen nukes would arrive too late to stave off climate tipping points. The US Department of Energy, a major booster of all things atomic, gives 2021 as the earliest possible date for a IV Gen nuclear plant to open.1 And keep in mind no atomic plant has yet been built on time or within budget, so the DOE’s forecast is very optimistic.
Science tells us that aggressive emissions reductions need to start immediately. Emissions need to peak by 2015, then decline precipitously, if we are to avoid dangerous climate change. Such a time frame means we must scale up actually existing clean technology. That will take massive investments and serious planning—but that project has already begun. The United States remains as a laggard, but other leading economies are beginning the transformation.
What about the technological aspects of adaptation? All over the world, one can find small-scale, often grassroots projects that point the way forward. My colleague, environmental journalist Mark Hertsgaard, has reported on the “quiet green miracle” of a tree-based approach to farming that is transforming the western Sahel. The farm communities he visited in Burkina Faso had been in slow-motion crisis since “the terrible drought of 1972–84, when a 20 percent decline in average annual rainfall slashed food production throughout the Sahel, turned vast stretches of savanna into desert and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths from hunger.” But widespread adaptation of the new “agroforestry” or “farmer-managed natural regeneration” (FMNR)—essentially the same sort of methods we saw in Brazil’s Nordeste but developed for an African context—have led to the mass regeneration of tree coverage across parts of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. And with that, despite a locally growing population, water tables have actually risen between five and seventeen meters.2 That is truly amazing.
Other examples of positive change are found in the portfolio of the UN Development Program’s Global Environmental Facility, which distributes small grants to community-proposed adaptation and mitigation projects. The UNDP GEF has work going in 29 countries. Its projects include community-based forestry projects and energy-efficiency projects in Kenya; wind- and solar-based electrification and solar-power electricity generation to displace charcoal and diesel; improved watershed management, fighting desertification, protecting biodiversity. In Bolivia this UN program is establishing 22 rural clean-tech electrification projects, providing power to 200,000 rural households and, in so doing, it will prevent 21,000 million tons of CO2 emissions over the next 25 years.3
But, as with the agroforestry projects we