Saul Griffith, “Climate Change Recalculated”

This post is confusing because it has no links and no context. But it seems this is in regards to a talk given last Friday (1-16-02009):

http://www.instructables.com/community/Climate_Change_Recalculated_Talk_with_Saul_Griffit/

Looks like there might be a video here:

http://blog.wattzon.com/2009/01/19/talk-at-long-now-foundation-jan-16-2009/

Last year, I read a summary of a similar talk Saul gave at ETech 2008 and did a similar set of calculations that convinced me to give up most of my business travel. Months later I found a PDF from that talk:

http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/8/Energy%20Literacy%20Presentation.pdf

And later still, a video:

http://blip.tv/file/1018152

According to Wikipedia (“Automobile industry in China”), over 9 million cars were made in China in 2008 alone. If you could make that many 300-ft wind turbines each year for three years, that would be the whole of your 25-year 11.5-terawatt quota (for the 450 ppm target). The extra 26% required by 350 ppm might require four years, rather than three.

I also note that China made all those cars without a national mobilization for the express purpose of making cars. It’s great to see these calculations, but they should now be compared to the efforts that go into making ordinary consumer items by the hundred million. Maybe “business as usual” can save the planet after all.

The CO2 target is no longer 450 or even 350 (e.g,. http://www.350.org); it is closer to 300! See “350 is the wrong target: put the science first”.

The space, resources and money to do such a thing are not really an issue. As was pointed out earlier, we already spend far more on stuff we already produce. How much land is taken up by roads and carparks? How many tonnes of steel and concrete in skyscrapers being built this year? How many Watts are used by shopping malls and offices at night when nobody’s there? And so on.

The space, resources and money are already there, it’s just a matter of where we choose to put them. That said, it’s a big task. To get an idea of the scale of the task it’s not enough to simply look at what energy we’re using now and then convert it all to renewables. There are after efficiencies available. The other day I was talking with a couple who spend $150 weekly on groceries, are overweight and unhealthy (many minor ailments) and throw away about 1/3 their food uneaten; this compares to us on $60 weekly, fit and eating tasty food, wasting nothing but the peelings. For them to improve their health wouldn’t involve just buying $150 of lentils instead. They need to spend their money better, and make more efficient use of the things they buy.

Likewise with energy. Using a tonne of metal and plastic to move an average of 1.6 people is simply never going to be as energy-efficient as using 7 tonnes to move 25 people, or 25 tonnes to move 150 people. So that we in the West could be using a lot less energy per person while achieving the same things, and actually saving money and improving quality of life. This is a nice coincidence since those in the Third World would also like a decent quality of life, too. How much energy is needed?

I talk about more efficient energy use here, and making sure all get a fair share here. I conclude that about 2,000W of renewable electricity per person would do it. This is bit less than suggested in the article above, but I also mention population growth – since in the 25-50 years we’d take to do it, population would max out at 9-10 billion around 2050. So we’re looking at 18-20TW of delivered energy.

Can we manage it? Technically it’s possible but politically and culturally it’s difficult. I think more plausible is getting about halfway to that goal. The future I most fear is not a Mad Maxian dystopia, but something like our modern gated communities as ecotopias, with 10,000W of renewable energy zipping around in electric cars, surrounded by impoverished slum-dwellers with 0W who are near-slave labour in the sugar cane fields making biofuels and cleaning the ecotopians’ houses.

Saul refers to a site I had a little difficulty finding (listening to the mp3) https://www.wattzon.com/ where you can calculate and compare your own personal power consumption.

“The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.” W. Churchill

It’s uplifting to see that there are people like Saul who have made the connection between their personal actions and global climate change and who are quantifying what’s required to save the environment. While I applaued Saul’s effort I don’t see it amounting to much. To paraphrase Orlov and his comments regarding “Social Collapse” this past Friday, this is Tinkerbell type thinking, yup, wave the fairydust around, close your eyes and start praying.

What we already know is that significantly reducing our country’s collective carbon footprint is a lot like dieting, easy to talk about but really, really hard to do. Even if we can develop and stick to a realistic “carbon” diet we can’t be sure that the rest of the world (India & China) will stick to theirs in which case the problem remains. So unless somebody out there thinks that we’ll be able to borrow a few extra trillion dollars to pay for all of these energy infrastructure initiatives (many of which like new nuclear power plants will take years to construct) then it might be worthwhile to be a wee bit more pragmatic about how soon or how easily we’ll be able to get to the promised land.

Or our global economy can collapse and energy consumption and likely population can plummet. Won’t be fun for anyone but is probably the best scenario for a healthy planet in the future.

To IP Freely: Never mind the politics at the end of your comment. You are not offering any ideas. Not that there are any easy answers. We cannot address environmental issues without addressing the economy. We must create jobs through addressing the environmental issues. We have the perfect opportunity. We did not need to go to the moon. We declared that it was important to demonstrate our technical superiority to the USSR and then created a challenge that in the process of meeting it created a whole new economies and technologies. We have a much graver threat than during the cold war. Mother Nature has proven she remains just as adept as humans at destruction. Yes of course people do need to eat, they will need to eat 100 years from now too.

We need to everyone to put their intellectual/creative back into this. INCLUDING YOU! Stop making people you disagree with wrong and find ways to common goals. If the house is on fire I don’t care who you voted for, we are on the same side. It is just a fact.

I agree that links to the video, podcast and slides should be included in summaries:

The Video:
http://fora.tv/media/rss/Long_Now_Podcasts/video/2009-01-16_griffith_mpg_16x9_LNP_itunes.mp4

The Slides from the Video:
http://www.slideshare.net/raffikrikorian/wattzon-presentation-at-long-now-presentation

the information is very useful.The right is increasingly skeptical even going so far as to question the entire validity of the process of global warming, which is madness as well.

Thanks for sharing. The slides are interesting and after reading it, I have a whole new outlook on how we can save the Earth from us.

Acting on such science as you says requires a governement with guts and an ability to persuade the general populas of the need for urgency. Sadly, this is not the case in Australia

the only evil on the planet is human unconsciousness.. at least we know your ego is big enough to power the world if we do get in trouble