A Newer World: Politics, Money, Technology, and What’s Really Being Done to Solve the Climate Crisis

2 | Green Power: Renewable Energy Comes into Its Own

24 2 green power RENEWABLE ENERGY COMES INTO ITS OWN World on Fire The world is on fire. In fact, it has been on fire for over 250 years. Until the Industrial Revolution, we used wood and dung to fuel our cooking and heating fires, just as billions of people in the still-developing world do today. It’s a story that has been well told: James Watt’s steam engine in Scotland facilitated the explosion of heavy industries like steel, ship and railroad building, and coal mining. Western Europe, America, and Japan grew rich and powerful . Colonial powers seized vast tracts of Africa, Asia, and Oceania. And we started polluting our planet in earnest. We have pumped nearly 1.3 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from our fossil fuel use since 1750 (figure 2.1).1 Interestingly, it was not industry that first started to kick the climate into a hyperactive greenhouse effect. It was the cutting down of much of the world’s virgin forests to facilitate the “Manifest Destiny” of America’s inexorable westward expansion and Europe’s urban and agricultural explosion. In fact, it was around 1910 when global fossil fuel emissions of carbon first exceeded those from land-use change, and not until around 1950 that they really started to exceed it greatly.2 (We will look at the reasons for, the impacts from, and the solutions to contemporary deforestation and forest degradation in Chapter 7.) With the advent of the post–World War II economic boom, greenhouse gases from power plants, surface transportation, industrial agriculture, and manufacturing kicked into high gear as the prime driver of climate change. The burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, along with the impact of deforestation , has driven the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from around 260 to 270 parts per million (ppm) in the preindustrial era3 to 388 ppm green power 25 in 2010.4 The burden of CO2 to the climate system has been steadily increasing, with the largest increases coming after 1945 (figure 2.2).5 Coal: A Global Public Enemy Most of the trouble has come from coal. Through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, Britain, Germany, France, the United States, and the rest of the industrialized world came increasingly to rely on coal. Vast deposits in these places made coal easily accessible to fire the hearths of industry and domestic use. As Jeff Goodell says in his excellent 2006 book, Big Coal, referring to the United States, “It is literally the rock that built America.”6 Then, as the genie of electricity swept through the economies of the industrialized nations, coal was most often the fuel of choice for the central generating facilities. As of the end of the last decade, coal fired 41 percent of the world’s electricity. In South Africa, it fueled 93 percent of the electrical power; in China, 79 percent; in India, 69 percent; in Germany, 46 percent.7 In the United States, coal’s use for electrical power has been steadily declin2 .1 Cumulative global fossil-fuel CO2 emissions. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center of the U.S. Department of Energy a newer world 26 ing in recent years and dipped below 40 percent in late 2011, the lowest share it has had since 1978.8 Along with the many remarkable improvements to the quality of life engendered by the Industrial Revolution such as radically improved food production , better freight and human transportation, much-enhanced communication and shelter and heat for hundreds of millions, also came the pollution. Fossil fuels have an amazingly compressed energy potential and an equally astonishing ability to foul the air, water, and land with the waste products of their extraction from the earth, by their passage over land and sea, and particularly in their combustion. In London, England, during four days in December in 1952, four thousand people died and one hundred thousand were sickened by pollution from coal exacerbated by cold and windless conditions. Thousands more died in the months following as a result of a deadly combination of this one air pollution event and influenza.9 This event engendered a milestone in the history of air pollution control: the British Clean Air Act in 1956. A report from Physicians for Social Responsibility enumerates a raft of health impacts at each stage of the coal life cycle—mining, transportation, washing, combustion, and disposing...