Surviving Climate Change: Is a Green Energy Revolution on the Global Agenda?

[kristopher]

Surviving Climate Change: Is a Green Energy Revolution on the Global Agenda?
Monday, 18 November 2013 09:14
By Michael T. Klare

A week after the most powerful “super typhoon” ever recorded pummeled the Philippines, killing thousands in a single province, and three weeks after the northern Chinese city of Harbin suffered a devastating “airpocalypse,” suffocating the city with coal-plant pollution, government leaders beware! Although individual events like these cannot be attributed with absolute certainty to increased fossil fuel use and climate change, they are the type of disasters that, scientists tell us, will become a pervasive part of life on a planet being transformed by the massive consumption of carbon-based fuels. If, as is now the case, governments across the planet back an extension of the carbon age and ever increasing reliance on “unconventional” fossil fuels like tar sands and shale gas, we should all expect trouble. In fact, we should expect mass upheavals leading to a green energy revolution.

None of us can predict the future, but when it comes to a mass rebellion against the perpetrators of global destruction, we can see a glimmer of the coming upheaval in events of the present moment. Take a look and you will see that the assorted environmental protests that have long bedeviled politicians are gaining in strength and support. With an awareness of climate change growing and as intensifying floods, fires, droughts, and storms become an inescapable feature of daily life across the planet, more people are joining environmental groups and engaging in increasingly bold protest actions. Sooner or later, government leaders are likely to face multiple eruptions of mass public anger and may, in the end, be forced to make radical adjustments in energy policy or risk being swept aside.

In fact, it is possible to imagine such a green energy revolution erupting in one part of the world and spreading like wildfire to others. Because climate change is going to inflict increasingly severe harm on human populations, the impulse to rebel is only likely to gain in strength across the planet. While circumstances may vary, the ultimate goal of these uprisings will be to terminate the reign of fossil fuels while emphasizing investment in and reliance upon renewable forms of energy. And a success in any one location is bound to invite imitation in others.

A wave of serial eruptions of this sort would not be without precedent. In the early years of twentieth-first century, for example, one government after another in disparate parts of the former Soviet Union was swept away in what were called the “color revolutions” -- populist upheavals against old-style authoritarian regimes. These included the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia (2003), the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine (2004), and the “Pink” or “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan (2005). In 2011, a similar wave of protests erupted in North Africa, culminating in what we call the Arab Spring.

Like these earlier upheavals, a “green revolution” is unlikely to arise from a highly structured political campaign with clearly identified leaders...

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20097-surviving-climate-change-is-a-green-energy-revolution-on-the-global-agenda

[hatrack]

1. " . . . cannot be attributed with absolute certainty to increased fossil fuel use . . . "

Huh?

Call me crazy, but I would say that recent events in Harbin can be attributed directly and definitively to increased fossil fuel use.

[NickB79]

2. I've always had concerns about the idea of a "green energy wildfire"

It sounds wonderful, and if it happened would be a global gamechanger.

But my primary concern with that idea has always been timing and resources. In my nightmare scenario, by the time climate change is actually inflicting enough physical and economic damage to the world's nations to make them agree to act in a substantial manner, we'll be devoting so much of our resources and capital to damage control that there won't be enough left to fully fund a massive roll-out of the green tech needed globally to make a dent in climate change. And let's be clear: the roll-out would need to be truly massive, on a scale we haven't seen since WWII's war mobilization. We've gone so far past the danger line, we need to not only stop carbon emissions from rising, but enact plans to rapidly sequester atmospheric carbon as well by century's end. And sequestering billions of tons of carbon will require far more energy than I've seen most proposals budget for, which means we have to overbuild the renewables grid enough to handle the needs of society and the needs of whatever sequestration tech we can figure out.

I envision it like trying to build a new dam, when you have 90% of your construction crew busy just trying to patch together the old one for fear it could fail any minute and wipe out the town in the valley below, and most of your budget is locked up with maintanance, preventing you from hiring more workers.

A form of the Red Queen's Race, if you will: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race

We've squandered so much time that could have been spent fighting climate change, that we're really cutting it close at this point.