(Applause)
Governor Hunt, Mr. Park,
thank you very much for your extremely generous introduction.
My friends, I am very happy to be here with you.
I think
the idea of a state organizing a concentrated look on the critical issues of our day,
involving leaders and ordinary people statewide is extremely important and I’d like to see
this emulated in the other 49 states and maybe 159 other countries.
In general, I think it’s an excellent idea.
In choosing the issue of global change I think is extremely important because here’s an issue
where the risk is very high,
the issue is removed from everyday life,
the solutions cannot take place in the course of the year or two.
It involves scientific issues which are distanced from
the familiar everyday acquaintance of many people
and for this constellation of reasons it poses difficult public policy issues.
My own involvement with the issue of global warming did not begin on this…
Well, I certainly began in this lovely world, but my interest in global warming
began in the study of a different world: Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor.
It’s been my great good fortune
to have not only witness but to have participated in
the historic, first preliminary reconnaissance of the solar system in which we live.
Beginning in 1962,
when the United States launched the first successful interplanetary vehicle,
Mariner 2,
we humans,
mainly Americans and Soviets,
have sent spacecrafts to visit all the planets known to the ancients, to our ancestors,
and many other worlds besides.
We have examined many dozens of other worlds.
A few of them in great detail, having landed on their surfaces,
and most
flying by at great speed but with instruments of enormous capability
taking the data as we speed past.
An enormous amount of important and interesting information has been acquired.
The perspective that we get about those other worlds illuminates a wide range of science.
One of the issues that I’ve been most focused on, concerned about
is the issue of life elsewhere.
And it’s certainly a fair summary to say
that in these dozens of worlds,
while we have many cases of pre-biological organic matter,
the stirrings and intimations of life, if you wish,
nevertheless
there is nothing, not the least hint of anything alive on those other worlds.
I’ve spent over a year in a manner of speaking on the planet Mars,
in 1976-77, after the Viking spacecraft, two of them, landed on mars,
and we had an armory of instrumentation to look for life.
There was nothing.
Not a mouse, not a footprint, not a microbe, not even an organic molecule.
The lesson is,
that you can have dozens of worlds,
some of them breathtaking splendor and beauty
without life on any of them.
Life is something rare and precious.
There is something extraordinary
about the planet that we are privileged to life on,
and in this peculiarly self-congratulatory way, about we ourselves.
Life is rare.
That’s the lesson
from exploring space.
And the lesson from exploring time,
if you look back in the geological record at the history of mass extinctions
is that there is no guaranteed tenure for any species,
no matter how self-confident, on this planet.
Sixty-five (65) million years ago,
an event occurred which not only
wiped out all the dinosaurs but wiped out most of the species of life on earth.
This can happen to anyone.
These explorations in space and time
are a reminder
or a warning to us
that we cannot be guaranteed of our continued, happy existence.
It’s important to understand our world and, I argue, others as well.
When we look at Venus,
we find a world of roughly the same size, mass, density as ours
but a stunning difference.
Two stunning differences.
One is
that there is a massive atmosphere about 90 times the surface pressure of the air right here, down on earth.
And the other is
that the surface temperature is stunningly hot.
The surface of Venus is at 900-degree Fahrenheit (≈482 Celsius).
Hot enough to melt tin or lead.
Hotter than the hottest household oven.
And it’s not because Venus is a little closer to the sun, because the clouds of Venus are brighter
than the earth is
and Venus reflects so much more light back to space relative to the earth,
that it ought to be cooler, not warmer than the earth.
Why is Venus at 900 degrees Fahrenheit?
Because of the greenhouse effect.
That massive atmosphere is made mostly of carbon dioxide
and a large amount of carbon dioxide can trap the heat and warm a planet.
Warm it to certainly very uncomfortable levels.
This is, I claim, a kind of providential warning to us.
I am not for a moment suggesting that
there was once a species of Venusians who refused to drive fuel efficient automobiles
(Laughter)
and this is what happened to their planet.
The story is in fact even more interesting than that, but I won’t go
(Laughter)
go into it here.
But the lesson is
not only that a greenhouse effect can exist
but that a large greenhouse effect can be exceptionally dangerous.
So, for anyone who views our exquisite planet
and hears the warnings of scientists and says:
“All this greenhouse stuff is just some theory,”
I ask them to reflect on the fate of the planet Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor.
By the way, while I am not going to be talking about it, at least not much today,
Mars is an example of what happens when you don’t have an ozone layer.
The reason, we think,
that we could find not only no trace of life, but not even an organic molecule in the surface of mars,
is that mars has a planet wide ozone hole, so to say.
Negligible ozone,
ultraviolet light from the sun strikes the surface unimpeded,
the surface becomes rich in fabulously oxidizing molecules
and they simply gobble up any organic matter that happens to be there.
Mars is also a salutary warning to us.
We who are pushing and pulling and tugging
on a planetary environment which we still insufficiently understand.
Well,
many of you have attended the sessions today. I was
privileged to be able to listen to a few of the extraordinarily interesting papers presented.
You know something of the evidence for greenhouse warming,
the predicted consequences, the disasters for agriculture,
the rise in sea level.
I’ll say a little bit about the evidence later.
But I want to ask you to think about the following general, very practical, political issue.
What happens when a group of scientists makes some predictions of impending disaster?
“Keep doing such and such,” they say,
“and the following catastrophe would result.
And changing that catastrophe,
averting it, mitigating it,
is going to be expensive.
It might require changing the way we think, in which case is politically expensive.
Or it might involve changing the way we do business,
in which case it is fiscally expensive. One way or another, it’s expensive.”
At what point do policy makers have to take this seriously?
This is an issue that is extremely current today
and I’d like to just spend a few minutes
on two examples
from the rich cultural history of our species,
of policy makers and predictions of disasters and I will reach to ancient Greece.
Both of these stories
can be found in the classic Greek literature, the first in Herodotus, the second in Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon.
They both are at least in part based on historical evidence.
The first case that I want to tell you about
is Croesus,
king of Lydia.
Apollo was the god of the sun but, in addition to being in charge of sunlight,
he had another specialty
and that was being in charge of prophecy.
Not just generalized prophecy but systematic prophecy
in human institutions called Oracles, the most famous of which was the oracle at Delphi.
And the way it would work is you would go to Delphi as a supplicant,
you would bring some gifts for the priestess who was called the Pythia,
you would say what your concern is,
and then from the Pythia, usually in a kind of trance,
back would come the advice from the gods, or at least from Apollo.
Now, Croesus
was immensely rich. There is still a phrase: “Rich as Croesus.” It’s almost current, just a little obsolete.
One of the reasons he was so rich is that he was one of the boys who invented money.
(Laughter)
The first metal coins in human history, as far as we know, were coined in Lydia,
in Croesus’ reign.
Lydia is in Anatolia, contemporary Turkey.
Well,
we can speculate on
the reasons, but Croesus’ ambitions were not contained within the boundaries of his small nation.
He had grandeur objectives
and so he thought: “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to conquer Persia?”
Persia was the superpower of the 7th (VII) century BC.
The Persian emperor, Cyrus, forged the mighty empire by
combining two different peoples, the Persians and the Medes.
So, Croesus had some degree of trepidation because of the power
of the Persian empire so naturally, he sent emissaries to the oracle Delphi.
And the question put by his emissaries on Croesus’ behalf was:
“What will happen if Croesus makes war on Persia?”
And without hesitation, the Pythia, the priestess answered:
“He would destroy a mighty empire.”
“The gods are with us,” thought Croesus. “Time to invade.”
So, he assembled a vast mercenary army,
invaded Persia, and was promptly and humiliatingly defeated.
Not only was Lydian power destroyed forever but he,
Croesus, was forced to spend the rest of his life as a, sort of pathetic, minor functionary
in the Persian court.
A hanger-on ex-king.
It’s a little bit like a,
this isn’t a perfect analogy, but it’s a little bit like the emperor Hirohito
living out his days as a consultant on the beltway in Washington, DC.
(Laughter)
Well,
the injustice of it really got to him.
After all, Croesus had played by the rules.
He had asked for advice from Pythia, she gave it to him, he acted on it and
look what happened. She had done him wrong.
So,
after mulling this over for some years,
he sent another emissary to Delphi.
This one with very much less opulent gifts
as was appropriate to his now greatly diminished station
and he asked, “How could you do this to me?”
And here from Herodotus’ history
is the answer from the god.
Quote,
“The prophecy given by Apollo ran that if Croesus made war upon Persia,
he would destroy a mighty empire.
Now in the face of that…”
said the priestess,
“…if he had been well-advised,
he should have sent and inquired again,
whether it was his own empire or that of Cyrus that was spoken of.
But Croesus did not understand what was said,
nor did he asked questions again,
and so he has no one to blame but himself.”
So much for Croesus.
Now,
if the Delphi oracle was just a
kind of institutionalized scam to fleece credulous kings,
then of course it would’ve needed excuses to explain away the inevitable, you know, mistakes.
Disguised ambiguities are the stocking trade of oracles.
Nevertheless,
the lesson of the Pythia is germane:
even of oracles we must ask intelligent questions.
Even, or specially,
when they tell us what we want to hear.
The policy makers must not blindly accept. They have to understand, they have to ask questions.
they must not let their own ambitions stand in the way of understanding.
The conversion of prophecy into policy must be done with care.
And it seems to me this advice is fully applicable to the modern oracles,
the scientists, think tanks and universities.
Sometimes the policymakers ask them and
the prophecy comes back.
More often these days the oracles
voluntarily submit
even to those who never asked them.
(Laughter)
Then the policymakers have to figure out, “What do I do now?”
And since the modern oracles are deeply emerged in science and technology,
it’s very important for the policymakers
and the people who determine who the policymakers are,
to understand science and technology.
So, this is on the one hand.
Now I want to tell you a, on the other hand, story
also from the classical Greece.
This is also about Apollo and also about oracles.
This is the story of Cassandra,
princess of Troy.
The event occurs just before the trojan war begins.
You know,
the one that Homer wrote about.
She was the smartest and the most beautiful of the daughters of king Priam.
And Apollo who, like all the Greek gods, was constantly on the prowl for attractive humans,
fell in love with her, at least that’s the way the story is described.
Oddly,
this almost never happens in Greek myth,
she resisted his advances.
She was smart, she was beautiful, she was happy.
Who needed Apollo?
(Laughter)
So he tried to bribe her.
But what could he give her? She was already a princess, she had everything that she wanted.
Apollo thought of something she didn’t have.
He promised her the gift of prophecy.
The offer was
irresistible.
She agreed.
Quid pro quo.
Apollo did whatever it is that gods do to create seers, oracles and prophets out of mere mortals.
And then, after he had done that, scandalously
Cassandra reneged.
She changed her mind.
She refused the overtures of a god.
Apollo was not amused
(Laughter)
But he couldn’t withdraw the gift of prophesy because, whatever else you want to say about Greek gods,
they keep their promises.
So instead, he condemned her to an ingenious
and cruel fate.
That no one would believe her prophesies.
So
So, Cassandra predicts the invasion by the Greeks headed by Agamemnon.
Nobody pays attention. She predicts the fall of Troy.
Nobody pays attention. She predicts to the Greeks the death of Agamemnon. They pay no attention.
She predicts her own death.
Nobody pays attention to any of that.
(Laughter)
Instead, they make fun of her.
They call her,
“The lady of many sorrows.”
Today, it would be something like: “Prophet of Gloom and Doom.”
Just minor translational difference, same sentiment.
“I prophesied to my countrymen” she says,
“all their disasters.”
But they ignored her prophesies. They were destroyed, Agamemnon was destroyed, and soon, so was she.
Well,
this resistance to dire prediction
is very human and we can certainly see it today.
I mean, if we are faced with some
very heavy, ominous prediction,
things you never saw happen are going to happen
and
it’s going to be expensive to mitigate it, we have a natural tendency to reject or ignore the prophesy.
And, after all,
there are no prophets, not even the scientific community, who are right all the time. And you can find
competent scientists who have made predictions,
supersonic transport will destroy the ozone layer, for example,
that are just wrong.
And so, it’s very easy to dismiss.
Also,
if the factors precipitating the anticipated catastrophe are longstanding,
then the predictions kind of rebuke to us.
How do we permit this peril to develop? Why don’t we see it beforehand? Why don’t we take political steps to prevent it?
So, these are uncomfortable ruminations that through our own inattention or inaction,
some catastrophe is coming.
“Put it out of our mind.
So this... Or find a reason to reject it.”
This temptation to minimize, to dismiss,
is something that psychiatrists know very well about.
They have a technical name for it.
It’s called Denial.
Denial.
The rock group Dire Straits, I am sure many of you know their repertoire,
has a line in one of their songs that goes,
“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”
(Laughter)
These two cases, I claim,
are the opposite poles
of policy response to predictions of disaster.
Croesus representing the pole of sort of
credulous, uncritical acceptance propelled a little bit by greed or other character flaws.
And Cassandra
representing, I mean the response to her,
representing the pole of stolid, immobile rejection of the possibility of danger.
Well,
today
we have a set of such prophecies.
And for all the average person understands they could just as well have emanated from
from the Delphic oracle
for all the fundamental understanding of the underpinnings there is. So, it gets to be a kind of
challenge, a battle between two arguments from authority.
There is one bunch. They are sort of nice looking. They say it's worrisome.
There’s this other bunch. They are sort of nice looking. They say it’s not worrisome.
"What’ll I choose? Well, I’ll choose the one that’s most comfortable."
I think we are much closer to the danger of Cassandra than of the danger of Croesus.
Now,
let me give a very brief statement of
why I take greenhouse warming so seriously.
Those of you who have attended the sessions
this morning, this afternoon,
have heard a much more detailed
expert summary of these reasons.
First of all, there is no question that such a thing as a greenhouse effect exists.
I talked about Venus.
This
benign planet,
looking exactly as it does here,
but with no greenhouse effect,
would be 20 degrees centigrade, that’s what, 36 Fahrenheit,
below the freezing point of water.
With no greenhouse effect, this planet would be frozen. Solid.
The oceans would be 3 kilometers (≈1.86 miles) of ice.
A little greenhouse effect is a good thing. We owe our lives to the greenhouse effect. No greenhouse effect, we would never have come into being.
The principal greenhouse gases are water vapor and carbon dioxide.
Now,
there are some minor constituents,
methane, oxides of nitrogen and chlorofluorocarbons, which go by the brand name
Freons.
And they are an especially interesting aspect of this because they are wholly man-made.
You see,
astronauts,
many of them,
in earth’s orbit
seen to the naked, unaided eye, this beautiful vista
can make out, as perhaps is hard to do in this picture,
the very thin, blue aura that surrounds the bright, illuminated hemisphere of the earth.
That’s just a thin atmosphere seen (inaudible)
This phrase, "This ocean of air”
is a kind of misnomer.
Ocean suggests
massive,
impervious.
But instead, that thin line, that you can barely make out in this picture,
is very fragile.
Vulnerable to the depredations of human beings.
Our technology
and our numbers
have both reached a state
where inadvertently
we can pose a danger
to the global environment, especially through the atmosphere.
The abundance of greenhouse gases is increasing.
Greenhouse gases act as a kind of blanket holding the heat in.
There is no question
that all the gases I just mentioned
are steadily increasing in abundance.
In addition,
it seems very clear
that the average temperature of the earth has been increasing through the 20th century.
It’s a noisy record.
There are hot years and cold years always,
so the curve of temperature versus time has jagged aspect to it,
but the slow increase with time
is becoming increasingly clear and one indication of that
is that the 5 hottest years of the 20th century were on the decade of the 1980’s.
That is also the decade which had the highest abundance of all those greenhouse gases.
In addition,
there is most interesting evidence from an Antarctic ice core taken by a Soviet team
in which the past temperature history of the earth for tens of thousands of years
and the past abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can both be measured.
There are little bubbles of air that are trapped in the ice, laminated between successive snowfalls.
And we find that when carbon dioxide is higher,
the temperatures are higher. When carbon dioxide is lower, the temperatures are lower.
There is a virtually one to one correlation.
Now,
nobody pretends to understand everything about the global climate.
There are feedbacks,
some of which, you warm the earth a little bit
and the tendency would be to further increase the temperature, so called positive feedback.
And others in which you warm the earth a little
and the situation is self-correcting, like a thermostat,
and it cools the earth a little.
And there is a push and pull, a tug
between these competing feedbacks.
Doubtlessly, we have not identified all of them.
The present consensus, I believe, is that
the bad kind of feedback, the ones that makes things worst, the so-called positive feedback, dominate.
I would think it would be an astonishing coincidence
if the balance of all these feedbacks just exactly corrected
the problem that we are generating through human technology. A kind of deus ex machina, to go back to the Greek
to the Greek analogy, you know, in the Greek plays
when the playwright had gotten himself into a plot pickle and couldn’t figure out how to resolve it.
Then, there was an actor on wires
representing a God who flew into the set and put everything right.
It was called Deus ex machina. The god from the machine.
The machine being the device that plot them down on the stage.
It’s asking a lot to believe that the problem is going to fixed itself.
If we look at the prognostications,
the three-dimensional general circulation computer models, of which there are some six independent models working right now,
mainly in the United States in the UK,
they all predict
temperature increases of a few degrees centigrade
between now and the middle of the next century.
And the difference between them is only a factor of two in temperature rise.
None of the models predict that the earth climate is going to get cooler.
None of them predict that is going to be tens or hundreds of degrees increase.
The agreement, considering the state of our knowledge, is quite good.
If you then look at the output of these computer models, which
purport to give a sense of how the temperature’s changed on regional basis as you go through time,
you begin to see some very worrisome things.
Yes, there are places that get cooler, some places that get warmer, but the overall trend is warmer
and by the middle of the 21st century there is no winner.
Every place has gotten warmer and to give you an idea of how much warmer,
a few degrees centigrade global change doesn’t sound like so much.
Let me point out that a 1-degree temperature change,
in this case decrease, following a massive volcanic explosion
is enough to produce widespread suffering and famine worldwide,
as happened following the Tambora volcanic explosion in 1815 and other cases which are still more serious.
Several degrees is a very major temperature increase
and some of these predictions, make, prognosticate
that the American Midwest would be converted into something approaching scrub desert
by the second half of the 21st century.
And likewise, the Soviet Ukraine and so on. But the American Midwest is the breadbasket of the world.
If the green and cereal food stuffs for most places are unavailable,
we are in serious trouble.
In addition to the volume expansion of sea water and the melting of glacial and polar ice,
sea levels rise.
And, again, there is an uncertainty.
Average prediction for the middle of the next century is a meter (3 feet)
but it might be as little as one and it might be as much as many meters.
And then take a look at the low-line coastlines all around the world
and ask what happens
when the sea level rises.
"OK, the Dutch.
They are very good at building dikes and levees.
They’ll build more dikes and levees."
That is not going to destroy Holland.
But take a look at Bangladesh,
where 1 to 3-meter sea level rise
will flood an area
which is inhabited by tens of millions of people. Where are those guys going to go?
Environmental refugees.
It’s a new prospect.
For these reasons,
I take very seriously
the prediction of greenhouse warming.
Now, there are policymakers
who would like to respond as follows and
you have, perhaps, seen this sort of opinion in the pages of,
naturally,
the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. That’s the first place to expect a complaint
about having to change anything.
(Laughter)
“It’s too uncertain,” they say.
“This is serious stuff.
You have a few scientists,
computer models and
who can be sure they know what they’re talking about and you want us to turn everything upside down because
some scientists say
that
that things are going to get a few degrees warmer?
It’s a few degrees warmer on this stage than it is in the audience.
You don’t see any catastrophe up here, do you?”
I’d like to
pose the following question:
Imagine this kind of thinking
back in the height of the cold war.
You know,
the United States... so, let me ask the question.
How much money
do you think the US has spent since 1945 on the cold war?
Sometimes I ask this question and
from the back of the audience comes an answer, “Billions and billions.”
(Laughter)
A huge underestimate, billions and billions.
(Laughter)
The amount of money that the United States has spent on the cold war since 1945 is approximately
10...
Trillion...
Dollars.
Trillion.
That’s the big one, with a T.
(Laughter)
What could you buy
for ten
trillion
dollars?
The answer is:
you could buy everything in the United States, except the land.
Everything.
Every building, truck, bus, car, boat, plane, pencil, babies’ diaper.
Everything in the United States, except the land. That’s what we spent on the cold war.
So now let me ask:
How certain was it
that the Russians were going to invade?
Was it 100% certain?
Guess not, since they never invaded.
(Laughter)
What if it was only 10% certain?
What would advocates of big military buildup have said?
They would've said, “We must be prudent.
It’s not enough
to count on only the most likely circumstance.
If the worst happens,
and is really extremely dangerous for us,
we have to prepare for that.
Remote contingencies, if they are serious enough, have to be prepared for.”
It’s classic military thinking.
You prepare for the worst case.
And so now I ask
my friends who are comfortable with that argument, including the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal:
Why doesn’t that same argument apply to global warming?
You don’t think that it’s 100% likely?
Fine, you are entitled to think that.
If it’s only a small probability of it happening,
since the consequences are so serious,
don’t you have to make some serious investment to prevent it or mitigate it?
I think there’s a double standard of argument working
and I don’t think we should permit it.
Now,
let me indicate
what is it you would do if you take greenhouse warming seriously.
And what I am going to try to argue
is that virtually every one of the things that you would do
to ameliorate greenhouse warming
make sense on completely separate grounds.
They are worth doing apart from greenhouse warming.
Unlike the defense buildup,
which made no sense whatever,
except if you were confident that there was a real danger
Soviet troops pouring across the Elbe,
there was no other mitigating circumstances.
The least efficient way to spend the money if you want to pump the national economy.
It drew all sorts of
scientific as well as fiscal resources out of the civilian economy.
It is largely responsible for the economic chaos of the United States.
Whereas,
I would argue, spending money on mitigating greenhouse warming
makes an enormous amount of sense for other reasons.
What are the mitigating steps?
First,
the greenhouse gas that is increasing most steeply
is the CFCs, the chlorofluorocarbons.
It would make a great deal of sense to simply
wipe them out, prevent any more production of CFCs.
Well, because CFCs also imperil the ozone layer,
there is already
not just a commitment from major manufacturers
of CFCs to stop producing them
but there is an international agreement
called the Montreal protocol,
which most of the major industrial nations have signed,
committing themselves to phase out CFC production by the turn of the millennium,
by the year 2000.
That is an example of what can be done on these global environmental issues and,
since CFCs are doubly dangerous ozone depletion and greenhouse effect,
the first step that you would take is in fact being done.
So, that’s a bit of an encouragement.
We are not as in mobile and resistant to these arguments as you might otherwise expect.
Second:
Energy efficiency.
If you can get more power to a house
from a given power plant,
then, for a given amount of energy expenditure, you’d put less carbon dioxide up into the atmosphere.
Obviously you’re doing something important for greenhouse warming.
One third (⅓) of the carbon dioxide
that is generated in the United States,
the worst CO2 polluter on the planet by the way,
comes from automobiles.
Why do we permit automobiles
that get 15 to 20 miles a gallon
when did technology exists for automobiles that get 60 to 100 miles a gallon?
That’s not a step
which will bother anybody except possibly
adolescent, young men
who need to have extremely rapid acceleration for psychological reasons of their own.
(Laughter)
For all practical purposes,
much greater fuel efficiency in automobiles is perfectly possible.
And likewise, across the entire spectrum
of fossil fuel energy use in our society, fossil fuels being coal, oil, gas, wood
and so on. The stuff that when you burn it CO2 comes out.
The third thing you might want to do
is to seek alternative energy sources, alternatives to fossil fuels.
Why not have an energy source that doesn’t put carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere?
Is that wholly beyond our
technological ability?
I don’t think so.
And,
while there are a number of alternatives,
some of which work in some places, some geographical locales and not on others,
the mix looks very promising.
I am talking about
tidal,
geothermal,
wind,
and especially solar power.
You know, the solar power issue
is very interesting and has a strong political point.
Maybe you remember Jimmy Carter
when he was in the White House.
for the young at heart in the audience, this was an early American president,
(Laughter)
who preached energy efficiency
and one of the
largely symbolic
gestures which he did was to install a solar thermal heater in the roof of the White House to
make some warm water for presidential showers.
And I forgot what the fraction of the White House’s own energy
budget it accounts for, maybe it was 15 to 20% or something like that,
but it was a kind of step in a direction which
certainly, from what we have learned subsequently, we need to go.
The next President of the United States
was Ronald Reagan and one of the first
acts upon entering office
was to rip the solar thermal converter out of the roof of the White House
and one of the early steps
taken in his administration was to enormously reduce funding for solar and other alternative energy sources.
We lost ten years. Despite that,
the progress in solar energy technology
has been steady and impressive
and if you were to levy
an environmental tax on the burning of fossil fuels,
to pay for the additional burden on the society from the increases of greenhouse effect,
even today
solar energy would be economically competitive with fossil fuels.
And if we were to spend some significant amount of research money
on solar energy the price per kilowatt hour would certainly go down.
There is a natural issue about... what about solar?
Sorry, what about nuclear energy?
Fusion power,
which maybe we will have in another few decades,
is in principle clean, as far as
as far as greenhouse gases go,
but there is a variety of radioactive waste and other problems which have to be dealt with.
Fission power, the kind of power plants we have today,
some people believe are a suitable stopgap
between fossil fuels and whatever it is that we’re going to have as the alternative later on.
In my view,
there are some conditions which have to be satisfied by fission power plants.
They have to be safe.
Chernobyl certainly reminds us of that.
They have to be cost effective and the prices have soared through the roof.
Their radioactive waste has to be safely disposable,
not for 10 years into the future, but for hundreds or thousands because that’s the half-lives of radioactive waste.
And,
the fourth criterion I would use is that they must not produce weapons-grade uranium or plutonium,
for a separate topic, so as not to encourage a nuclear arms race.
The burden of proof
that fission power plants satisfy those criteria is on the shoulders of those who advocate it.
I am not convinced that there is any fission power plants that satisfy those criteria.
If there is, then maybe it makes sense as a stopgap. If not,
we are in a tighter squeeze
and it is even more important that we spend money on the development of alternative energy sources.
Now,
another thing you could do is plant trees.
A tree is an engine for taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
And it does it.
Is not the only thing a tree does but
that’s one of the things the trees are good for and it is especially relevant to this issue.
Plant forests.
That seems to be good advice to mitigate greenhouse warming. Instead,
the human species is destroying forests and we are doing it at a rate
of 1 acre of forest
every
second.
Think of that.
(Snaps fingers)
There goes an acre.
(Snaps fingers)
There goes an acre.
(Snaps fingers)
There goes an acre.
(Snaps fingers)
There goes an acre.
We are doing something immensely stupid.
And then finally,
and maybe the most important of all,
of the ways of medicating the greenhouse warming,
is to deal with the world population crisis.
Every human being has
a right and a wish to
a certain
minimum
way of life and that involves
cooking food (carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere)
and all the other things that you do in your job, many of which involve
more greenhouse warming.
If we continue exponential population growth it would overwhelm
any of the other measures that I’ve been talking about, no matter how seriously they are approached.
Now, what does it take to
to make some dent
in population growth?
Some people have the idea that all you have to do is just make
birth-control
apparatus, device, pharmaceuticals available
and that’s the issue. But that’s not the issue.
It’s not that the billion poorest people in the planet are too dumb to understand that they shouldn’t have more children.
That's not the issue.
The issue is they are so poor
that more children is a kind of social security
to provide for their old age.
More children as a way to have cheap labor to help with whatever dismal task on the little plot of land they work or whatever it is they are doing
that otherwise they couldn’t afford.
Having children,
having lots of children is not the cause of poverty, it is the consequence of poverty, although
the causality arrow goes both ways.
And the clear indication of how this works
is what has been documented all over the planet
called “the demographic transition.”
It works in Christian countries,
in Buddhist countries,
capitalist countries,
communist countries, of which there are hardly any left, but when there were
it worked there,
east and west,
and it’s absolutely striking.
When the per capita income is very low,
people have lots of children.
When the per capita income rises,
to a pathetically lower level by affluent American standards,
but still
higher than a lot of people have,
the population growth rate automatically decreases.
People then see
that they can provide in a minimal way for their future.
They have some discretionary capital, which they then want to spend on something
and
and their cost benefit analysis then works out
so that they have fewer children.
And maybe we can think back to our great grandparents
and remember what size families were common then.
And think of how much larger it was than today.
Is that because they were too stupid?
It’s not. They made another kind of choice.
Now,
let me quickly run through
again
this list and just remind you of why each of these steps make sense
by themselves,
even apart from greenhouse warming.
Cut out the CFCs, we already talked about that.
That protects the very fragile ozone later.
Greater fuel efficiency.
If, for a given amount of fuel,
you get more power out
that’s obviously good economics.
And
you know, we hear about
the danger of being dependent upon foreign sources of oil.
And this is used as an argument by this administration, for example,
to permit ecologically dangerous offshore oil drilling,
because we have to have domestic sources.
We don’t want to be dependent on foreigners.
But,
if we make much more efficient use
of the oil we already have,
then that’s the same as discovering new sources of oil, right?
And on finding alternative energy sources,
clearly that works in the same direction.
If we have vast solar arrays that were
absorbing sunlight and converting them into electricity,
then that would be an alternative to importing
tankers worth of oil from some foreign country.
And in addition,
it’s a good technology to have
against the day when the oil runs out.
The sun doesn’t run out.
Or at least for 5 billion years and
I figured that’s good enough.
Planting forests
or
at the least, stopping destroying forests
makes enormous sense in terms of species diversity. All of those organisms, mainly plants, that we're
we're knocking off without knowing anything about them,
including their possible pharmacological and other benefits for human beings.
And also, we grew up in forests.
We, primates.
We have a natural affinity to forests.
We feel better, at least I’ll speak for myself. I like being in forests.
And then, finally, on the population growth rate.
It’s very clear, I don’t have to go through it for this audience,
how important that is to the future stability, political,
economic, and foodstuffs, and everything else,
of the planet, even apart from the ecological issue. So,
what I say to those who complain, “It’s too uncertain,”
beyond pointing out that
the standards that were applied to the cold war ought to be applied here,
I say: "Look,
every one of these steps makes good sense, makes good economic sense.
And think of all the industries that are implied by what I just said, especially alternative energy sources.
There is money to be made
in developing a technology which would appropriately address greenhouse warming.
Well, I want to
stop in a moment
just want to make one or two
summary remarks.
If you burn a lump of coal
somewhere,
the carbon dioxide
goes up into the atmosphere and the carbon dioxide molecules are exceptionally stupid.
They don’t know anything about National boundaries.
They don’t have passports.
They are wholly innocent of the important concept of national sovereignty.
They just casually crossed over national boundaries,
one after the other.
There is a lesson: =
the world is a unity.
The national boundaries have no bearing on these global environmental issues.
No one nation can solve this problem by itself.
It has to be all the nations working together.
What is more,
there is no way to mitigate these problems
so that we would introduce the mitigating technology, whatever it is today,
and in two, or three, or four years or something comparable to a political term of office,
the problem would be solved.
Instead,
you introduce the mitigating circumstances now
and
decades hence,
when somebody you don’t even know will be holding your political office,
the benefits would come.
Solving these problems requires
a transnational
and a transgenerational perspective.
To my mind,
that is a very grown up kind of perspective.
Deprovincializing.
Dechauvinizing.
An awareness of one species,
on one exquisite, fragile planet.
And that’s why
I think that
these very serious global environmental issues may have a deep silver-lining.
The binding of the planet.
The end of our adolescence.
The approach to the maturity of our species.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
