Climate Change Is the Moonshot of Our Times
- 2015-10-06
- Nautilus
Consider this scenario: Suppose astronomers had tracked an asteroid, and calculated that it would hit the Earth in 2080, 65 years from now—not with certainty, but with, say, 10 percent probability. Would we relax, saying that this is a problem that can be set aside for 50 years, since people will by then be richer, and it may turn out that it misses the Earth anyway? I do not think we would. There would surely be a consensus that we should start straight away and do our damndest to find ways to deflect it, or mitigate its effects.
Why do our governments, in contrast, respond with torpor to the climate threat? It’s because concerns about future generations (and about people in poorer parts of the world) tend to slip down the agenda. And of course because the hardest challenges get parked in the “too-difficult box” rather than reacted to. The task of weaning the world away from dependence on fossil fuels is indeed a daunting one. I’m rather pessimistic about “top-down” attempts to constrain emissions, like the UN conference in Paris this year. It’s far more realistic to push forward with new technologies so that they can compete economically with fossil fuels.
The impediment to “decarbonizing” our economy is that renewable energy is still expensive to generate. Moreover, power from the sun and wind is intermittent so we need cheap ways to store it on a large scale. Fortunately, technology in solar energy and batteries is proceeding apace. Along with a group of colleagues, I have been promoting a campaign to accelerate it further.
When the Americans embarked on the Apollo project to land people on the moon, they succeeded within a decade because they devoted huge resources to it. We need a similar commitment to develop ways of generating and storing “clean energy,” and bringing down its costs. Unlike the original Apollo program (which was fueled by superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union) this should be a cooperative venture where all major countries step up their efforts. Research on energy is currently on a far smaller scale than medical research—but it’s just as crucial for the world. The faster research proceeds, the sooner will the power from “renewables” become as cheap as coal-fired power stations.